Television: The New Tycoon

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Battered old movie posters still flapped in the Hollywood breezes on the high walls of the old RKO lot last week. But towering above the lot, in huge black letters on the freshly painted silver water tower, loomed a new hallmark: Desilu Studios. Below it, cameramen were already shooting TV films on five of the lot's 14 stages, while an army of wreckers, carpenters, painters and plasterers exorcised the past for the arrival of the new owners: onetime Bongo Drummer Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y De Acha III, 41, and his round-eyed, henna-crested wife, Comedienne Lucille Ball, 46.

For Desi and Lucy, the trip to the RKO lot was at once a sentimental journey and an ironic triumph. It is where they met, fell in love—and left in the early '40s under the shadow of Desi's dropped option. Since then, babyfaced. Cuban-born Desi has become not only half of TV's most popular comedy team, but the self-made boss of a company that produces, or takes a hand in producing, 27 TV shows.* This year on three different lots Desilu will grind out 270 hours of filmed television entertainment—more than twice the footage of any movie studio—rivaling TV's Revue Productions as the biggest film producer in the new Hollywood.

Pile & Putter. While Lucy moves into the dressing room that Ginger Rogers once occupied as queen of RKO and keeps an eye on the commissary (she hates "bad studio food"), Desi will reign in an oak-and-leather throne room, surrounded by deep pile, a disappearing bar, and a putter alongside the desk. The new Hollywood tycoon is already awakening echoes of older ones. As workmen remodeled buildings for directors, producers and writers, he said: "Those cubbyholes were no good. Our offices are going to be twice that size. These are creative people, and creative people gotta have room to think." Madelyn Pugh Martin, one of the company's favorite writers, will even get a built-in nursery for her new baby.

Desi has begun buying galley proofs of novels directly from publishers, "the same way major studios do," and is looking for fresh writing talent in colleges. He hopes to set up a studio workshop for acting tyros and a system of talent scouts. And he does not stop there in emulating the lost grandeur of the big studios. Says he: "If we get a good story that just won't fit on that small screen, then we'll do it as a movie feature."

Back in 1951, when Arnaz and his wife started I Love Lucy on a shoestring, they knew so little about the business that they sent their cameraman to Manhattan to pick up pointers from live shows. Today even the janitors on his payroll of 2,500 still call him by his first name, but Desi is equally authoritative behind the cameras directing a pilot film or rattling off shrewd decisions in long-distance calls with network brass, sponsors and ad agencies.