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Desi Arnaz on playing a character after Ricky Ricardo: ''I wanted to get as far away as possible from I Love Lucy.''
It was the series that made him a star, but why did he want to get away?
One of life's more bittersweet lessons is that sometimes, the final destination is less important than the journey it took to get there. We all long for the day we become successful under the assumption that we'll finally feel fulfilled, not realizing that the growth we made to become successful was the joy that we should have been chasing after in the first place.
Desi Arnaz climbed the corporate ladder of the entertainment industry in a seemingly record-breaking time. As the star of I Love Lucy and co-creator of Desilu Productions, Arnaz had found his way to the top both on and off-screen.
But once Arnaz had ascended to the higher, corporate level, he found that there was less time for activities like writing and directing, the sort of work that made him fall in love with the business in the first place. "I quit because I find that the things that got me where I was were the things I couldn't do when I got there," he said in an interview with the Evening News.
It was a lesson that Arnaz never forgot, even when he returned to television after I Love Lucy had ended. Arnaz appeared in an episode of Ironside, starring Raymond Burr. Originally, the episode was meant to serve as a launchpad for a new series starring Arnaz's character, Dr. Domingo.
While that never came to fruition, Arnaz was confident that this time, he had no interest in undertaking various roles. "I chose this idea because I wanted to get as far away as possible from I Love Lucy," he said. "I will have nothing to do with finances, operations, or administration. I will stay with the creative things," he said. "If I'm not good in the title role, then I'll fire myself and hire someone else."
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