- Cinema. The hidden side of Paco Martínez Soria: "He was more a millionaire than his son can remember"
25 years ago, when Miguel Gila published his memoir And then I was born: memoirs for the forgetful (Today's Issues), one of the most commented episodes, and perhaps the most recurrent of his biography aside from the humor that made him popular and millionaire , was the one of his participation in the Civil War. In July 1936 Gila was in Madrid, and shortly after the conflict began he decided to enlist in the Republic army. He was 17, a member of the Unified Socialist Youth, and a mixture of adolescent excitement and a sense of duty would take hold of him. Soon, according to the book, he was captured, sentenced to death, and was saved. because they "shot him badly": the platoon riflemen were drunk, the salutes failed, he played dead, and slipped away when there were no more Moors on the coast.
However, this famous episode is also the most discussed in Gila's biography. His daughter Carmen, who was born out of wedlock and was never fully recognized by the father - was born in 1959, the fruit of the humorist's love affairs with a dancer with whom he had a long and fruitful affair -, he explained a year ago in the Chronicle supplement that this execution never existed, that Gila privately admitted that she had made up the story in order to exhibit the greatest anti-Franco pedigree if possible, and that it was not a specific lie, since a good part of her private behavior was based on deception, duplicity and inattention to whom I should have professed love.
This portrait of Gila, which is the one that in recent years has been making its way little by little in the biographical studies of the best humorist in the country - and possibly the greatest of the 20th century in Spain, or at least the most popular and loved for the longest time - for many decades it was inconceivable. Gila has always radiated the halo of the competing humor star who, having been able to settle for what there was and get an unquantifiable return, decided to flee from Spain on time, to go to the Americas full time, and finally "exile" belatedly from 1962, establishing his residence in Buenos Aires. He returned to Spain regularly from 1977, with Franco already buried in the Valley, and returned fully in 1985, now 35 years ago.
In this context, the figure of Gila has two important dimensions: the public, as a humorist in the press in publications such as La Codorniz or Por Favor - and, therefore, one of the biggest names in graphic and written humor of the second half of the century XX, along with Mingote, Tono, Mihura and other colleagues from the magazine-, to which he later added the one of punctual actor in cinema and monologue player in theaters, but also the private one, which is that of the enriched man whom money partially made happy, and it didn't make him a responsible person.
Throughout his many years he had three main women, but also many secondary ones. The first was Ricarda , a teacher from Zamora with whom she married, and with whom she spent seven years, leaving no children. Gila was 25 at the time, it was the post-war leaden times, and he was not yet the popular comedian who would begin to forge a legend from the 50's. Then he was for almost 10 years with Carmen Visuerte, the bailaora mentioned above, with whom he had two children -Miguel and Carmen- that he did not recognize, nor with whom he practically took care of.
At that time, when she was already starting to earn money - tens of thousands of pesetas of the time, even millions, according to her daughter - Gila thought more about her career overseas and her departure from Spain. As it was not in her plans to take Carmen, the children, she says, were a burden that she did not want to deal with. There was never a wedding, despite the false promises she was giving Carmen; One day, when he went to the Civil Registry to try to speed up the procedures for a link he had, he discovered that the marriage with Ricarda was still in force. And Gila had no intention of being bigamous.
Carmen's story draws an opposite version of Gila from the one the public had: far from being funny and generous, he was a distant father, apparently weary of his sentimental misfortune, and who did not financially support either his partner or his children. , which he ended up leaving. The money stayed in the bank account or was spent on her amusements, but it was not deposited at the kitchen table: Carmen the bailaora had a poorly paid job, and with that she supported her family, without the help of Gila. And she could well have done it, because she was slowly forging her legend as a great humorist and with a deep individual stamp.
Regardless of those chiaroscuro personals - to which the bad temper could be added , and his tendency to squander the fortune he amassed by working in the monologues -, Gila continues to maintain an aura of a beloved, original character who, with his jokes, appeased the harshness of the time of the dictatorship and the transition. For people it was an excuse to escape; his humor had a white and harmless side, thanks to his wise use of the resources of the absurd, but he also had an underground political edge that has made him endure, although he has sometimes been misinterpreted. Her gag about the man who confesses to having murdered her wife, with a butcher knife in hand and her apron stained with blood, was intended to be used as a blatant case of macho humor, without the offended groups having taken the trouble to see the end of the joke -it's on YouTube-.
He popularized phrases like "¡que se put!", Always with the phone at the ready and asking about the enemy, who was an allegory of the neighbor, with whom we get along badly, but with whom we must get along, just like with the lifetime. In his maturity he remarried, this time with his third and last wife, María Dolores Cobo, with whom he had a third daughter named Malena Isabel. Towards the end of his life he settled in Barcelona -where he passed away in 2001, soon 20 years ago-, but these were not happy years, since his income had decreased and he died in bankruptcy.
He had spent everything on small and constant luxuries: whims, dinners, gifts, trips. He was an educated man , a reader, a music lover, an athlete: lesser-known details of a thorny, polyhedral personality with dark areas and obvious professional virtues. And, if, as they say, you have to know how to differentiate the personality of the artist from the grandeur of his work -as in the case, for example, of Woody Allen-, with Miguel Gila it could not be less.
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