What you need to know
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz are best remembered as the characters of the same name made famous by I Love Lucy, but a new book offers an intimate look at their very human marriage through their own words.
At the beginning of their 20-year marriage, the couple was romantically involved but wrote letters to each other while Desi was serving in the U.S. Army.
These letters were then compiled by her daughter Lucy Arnaz and published in a new book, Lucy and Desi: Love Letters, on November 4, 2025.
The letters were written primarily during World War II (the couple married in November 1940, and Desi was drafted into the military in 1943) and range from the frivolous to the mundane. Some detail Lucy’s frantic search for a new refrigerator for her mother-in-law at the height of the war, while others depict the torments of jealousy that accompany a new relationship.
In one letter written in 1940, Lucy wrote: “I think of you as soon as I wake up. All day and all night until I go back to sleep. Maybe that’s why you looked so sad and bored with me last night.”
Lucy and Desi: Love Letter
The powerful duo’s first child, Lucy, was born in 1951, a few months before their sitcom “I Love Lucy” debuted. In an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, she said it wasn’t the contents of the letter that surprised her that much.
“It wasn’t unusual for them to have letters they had written to each other and she kept both of them,” Lucy says. “That’s what’s so incredible to me…and they were so beautifully preserved.”
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Lucy and Desi had a well-documented tumultuous relationship, marked by his struggles with alcohol and his reported infidelity. They once divorced so quickly that their divorce was invalidated by a judge. Eventually, they officially ended their relationship in 1960.
But for many, the relationship continues through reruns of the iconic show, which revolved around a middle-class New York City housewife who often gets sucked into intrigue and shenanigans in an attempt to rub shoulders with the show business types in her husband Ricky’s (played by Arnaz) circles.
The show was so familiar that even years later, fans often have a hard time distinguishing between the characters and the actors who made them famous. Behind the scenes, the couple’s romance was much more real – “youthful, passionate, intense, vulnerable” and “complex”, as Lucy describes it in the foreword to her new book.
“Maybe the last 10 or eight years of our marriage were uncomfortable and very difficult for both of us, but after we separated, everything calmed down,” Lucy tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview. “They weren’t apart. They were in each other’s lives forever and ever. They just weren’t married.”
Both men went on to remarry, Ball to comedian Gary Morton in 1961, and Arnaz and Edith Mac Hirsch in 1963.
Still, Lucy and Desi’s marriage continued in a strange way, Lucy says.
“They were married to other people, but they were still a couple in a weird way. You know, they respected each other’s marriages and each other’s partners as being more meaningful. Maybe those people were better for them at this particular time in their lives. But I don’t think they were ever as passionate as they were when it was just the two of them.”
