Lucie Arnaz Says Her ‘Greatest Memory’ of Dad Desi Was When He Admitted He Was an Alcoholic in AA Meeting

Lucie Arnaz recently got candid about her father’s struggles with sobriety, saying the most proud she ever was of Desi Arnaz was when he admitted publicly he was an alcoholic.

Lucie, 73, is the daughter of Arnaz and Lucille Ball. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, which aired Sunday, June 15, she spoke about how her father came to sobriety later in life.

Saying her dad was not a person who was very “changeable,” Lucie added, “but later on, way later on, almost when it was too late, he really made some amazing progress on himself.”

“He committed to AA meetings, treatment programs,” she said, noting, “It was fantastic. My greatest memory of him to this day was him standing up [in a treatment center] in La Jolla. The guy who said, ‘I don’t air my dirty laundry in front of other people.’ …. he got up and said, ‘My name is Desi and I’m an alcoholic.’ And that’s my proudest moment, that he stood up next to me and I watched him do that.”

She continued: “To take responsibility and try to solve it. It’s a disease and he finally wrapped his head around that and I was so very proud of him. Unfortunately, it happened about three years too late. Because by that time, he figured out about a later, that he had lung cancer … and he only lasted a year.”

Still, she added, “It doesn’t matter when you get there, as long as you get there.”

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Her father got there later, she told CBS, because pride got in the way.

“He didn’t even show up when Desi [Jr.] went through recovery,” she said of her brother’s own struggles with alcoholism. But it was the 1985 death of his second wife, Edie Hirsch, that put things in perspective for him.

That was when, Lucie said, “he finally he said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ And he asked my brother to help him.”

Desi’s struggles are also written about in the new book Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television, by biographer Todd S. Purdum.

In the book, Desi Jr. recounts how he helped his father seek treatment, four years after he sought treatment himself, in 1981 at the Scripps Clinic near San Diego.

In 1985, Desi himself entered an alcohol rehabilitation program at the Scripps McDonald Center in La Jolla, where he registered under the name “Bill Sanchez” to protect his privacy.

“It was really nice,” Desi Jr. said in the book, “because whatever I was going through, it was paying off. I said, ‘I can’t do anything for you, but there’s a place that can.’ He understood that.”

As Desi Jr. explained to the author, it was in fame where his father felt the most lonely: “That’s when he realized the emptiness — at the crest of his success. He didn’t stop drinking. He didn’t know what the real poison was. This is a temporary life.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, please contact the SAMHSA helpline at 1-800-662-HELP.