JAVIER CID
@javierrcid
Madrid
Updated Saturday,4November2023 - 23:59
- Share on facebook
- Share on twitter
- Send by email
See 6 reviews
So much literature has been vomited out about Lola Flores – "they will continue to talk about me after I die", she herself announced like a prophecy – that it is almost impossible to clear her biography of rompe y rasga, her genius of thunder, her singing and her dancing like a bonfire that burns and at the same time illuminates the History of Spain, from the hunger of the sewer of the Civil War to the hangover of the socialist miracle of the 90s. when the AVE, the Expo there in Seville and the tangana with the Treasury. On the centenary of her birth, Doña Lola is more alive than ever, resurrected as a postmodern icon, pure millennial marketing, a sociology master class or a waterfall of trending topics wherever her famous phrases come to the fore. Four decades have passed since the "if you love me, leave" in the heat of Marbella's most disastrous wedding of all time, that of his daughter Lolita; and it seems like yesterday when she frightened the crowds like the matriarch of an entire country, with brushstrokes of Liberty leading the people, at the doors of the church.
She arrived in Madrid at the age of 17, with the nickname La Niña de Fuego tattooed on the woodworm-laden tablaos of her native Jerez – she was born on Calle Sol, the second pharaonic prophecy. Fernando Mignoni was looking for an actress for his film Martingale, and there she was. He was paid 12,000 pesetas, which vanished like a fever in the misery of the capital; in those difficult debuts, they say that it was not uncommon to see her begging with her mother on the affluent sidewalks of the Salamanca neighborhood. But fate had eternal fame in store for her, which Lola would squeeze like a volcano until her death. "She was killed by a mole that appeared in her armpit, like a roasted chickpea. Many mornings she would say to me, showing me the armpit where the cancer that took her was: 'Look what I have here.' He was like John Wayne. John Wayne in a bata de cola."
The speaker is Raúl del Pozo, a journalist and friend of the artist, whom he directed in the television program Sabor a Lolas, back in the Antena 3 spotlight in the early 90s.
Lola, in 1958.EFE
"And what was Lola like?"
-What I remember most are his hands, prodigious Egyptian hands with which he embroidered the tanguillos and the rumbas. His haunting eyes, his chocolate skin. She wasn't a gypsy but a half-forty-year-old, although she always boasted: "I feel like a core gypsy, I've been able to do it from head to toe."
The famous Sabor a Lolas may well be used to trace the Madrid atlas of Lola Flores. It was filmed in different locations in the capital: in the old Teatriz, a theatre later converted into a restaurant with a thousand forks, and in the Casino de Madrid. "Working with her at the Casino was like taking a fox to a chicken coop, because she had a very close relationship with gambling," explains Javier Rioyo, journalist, filmmaker and eventual deputy director of the program. "In addition to carrying the artistic weight with their performances, Lola and Lolita also interviewed the most influential figures of the time, from pedigree politicians to the great popes of culture. When Vázquez Montalbán presented a book, he told me: 'Where I want to go is to Lola's.' And I went, of course. I remember one morning Lola asked me about the guest of the day. It was Javier Sádaba. 'Who is that?' she insisted. 'A philosopher,' I said. Lola would have already drunk her whiskey bars, she would be talkative, and in front of the whole team she blurted out 'you've got me up to the pussy of so many intellectuals, I don't interview it and that's it'. After a while he wanted to know who this Sádaba was. 'It's that gentleman over there,' I replied. 'Oh, it does look like the thorn bird. Let him come, let him come.' That's what Lola was like."
Del Pozo points out that the scripts were useless when Lola stood in front of the camera: "I wasn't a director, I was just another one at her service. She was over-talented and did whatever she wanted, but the truth is that she was always right."
Much has been theorized about the political sympathies of La Faraona, who was placed more to the right than to the left. "She married Antonio El Pescaílla in the basilica of El Escorial, in front of the tomb of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, whose remains were there before being transferred to the Valley of the Fallen," says Raúl del Pozo. "But to say that Lola was a Francoist is stupid. At that time, except for the Communists, everyone was sympathetic to the regime."
Rioyo spins even more finely: "She was always closer to Fraga than to Carrillo, because she considered that those of the past [Franco and his followers] had not stolen from her and among those of today [the socialists and the progressives] there was a kind of conspiracy, with everything from the Treasury. But when he had them in front of him, he talked about each other's lives and ideologies as if it were a thing, defending what he thought without any hostility. Although it is true that he always had a special weakness for the aristocracy and for power."
Carmen Sevilla, Paquita Rico, Lola, Estrellita Castro and Antonio El Bailarín.GUETTY IMAGES
Lola Flores knew how to transfer this duality to her mythical parties, wherethe most dazzling stars of Hollywood gathered with ragged people of all kinds. First in her flat on María de Molina street, which she had to sell after being sentenced by the Treasury to pay a fine of 28 million pesetas for tax fraud. ("I don't deserve this because I'm a myth, if every Spaniard gave me a peseta...", he lamented at the time while promoting the first crowdfunding in the history of Spain). After the hurricane, Lola's epicenter of life moved to the chalet El Lerele, in La Moraleja, where she lived until her death in 1995. "At his parties he was very resistant, you didn't retire after two whiskeys," Rioyo recalls. "They were people who held up very well underwater. He once told me that a very famous Mexican actor had put all the cocaine in front of a fan, huge amounts, so that the room would be filled with white powder. And in the 50s, watch out. From there, just imagine."
Rosario Flores, the youngest of the clan, was just a child when her mother pulled her out of bed in the early morning throne to dance in front of the guests. And what guests. "Charlton Heston, Frank Sinatra, Gina Lollobrigida, Sofia Loren, Kirk Douglas...", lists Juan El Golosina, the singer's close squire, as if he were taking a roll call on Olympus. They all dropped by his house and by the Caripén, the flamenco tablao he bought. At six o'clock in the morning, when people started saying goodbye, she would always protest: 'Are you going now that I'm starting to feel comfortable?'" Of those endless revelries, Rosario remembers "a lot of joy, a lot of sound, a lot of guitars, a lot of artists."
As if it were an expressionist painting of that fantastic and calé Spain, the little daughter of the Pharaoh dusts off for GRAN MADRID more details of those early mornings of which, given the indomitable character of the hostess, many secrets of what was cooked in the singer's headquarters will never come to light: "When the atmosphere was down, I would pull out a pot of collard greens to cheer people up." A restorative stew that became a classic in Lola's life; he also served it, very warm and at the very beginning, at Lolita's famous wedding. But Lola also worked the night in Madrid outside her domain. "His favorite restaurant was Lucio, and whenever he could, he would take the whole family out for dinner," Rosario confirms. "As domestic affairs were not his forte, he was also very fond of the restaurant La Dorada, on Calle Orense. And to go out, he always got together with the gypsies of Madrid at the Sala Caracol or at the Corral de la Morería, where he was in his element."
Very fond of gambling and randomness – "we went to bingo and the casino together a lot, where we had a few sablazos...", recalls Del Pozo – she never recovered from the blow of the Treasury. His is this phrase that sums up his philosophy of life with scalpel precision: "We artists live like rich people, but we are not". Juan el Golosina remembers Lola's detached character: "She won all the money in the world, but the more she earned, the better off all of us who were around her lived. She could have had half of Madrid, but she was a bad administrator. It was a broken hole... There were no sorrows by his side."
With her daughter Lolita, shopping in Madrid.GUETTY IMAGES
It is precisely episodes such as the one at the Treasury that cast a shadow over Lola's career. Alberto Romero is dedicated to the study of Spanish theater, which includes the lyrical fantasies of Quintero, León and Quiroga. "She took flamenco out of the tavern and the party of the gentlemen to take it to the format of the great theater. He popularized it and gave it prestige," says Romero, who is also one of the curators of the retrospective exhibition Si me queréis, venirse, which until January reviews the myth of La Faraona and its cultural influence in the National Library. "But she built a character herself that overshadowed her artistic quality. In the end, Lolita's wedding, her debt to the Treasury, that episode of the lost earring on José María Iñigo's program have transcended... It's very funny, but it overshadows his dancing, his Lorca recitals and his neorealist interpretation of the copla».
The communicator Valeria Vegas, who also owns the largest collection of copies of the magazine Interviú in Spain, knows very well her dalliances with the gossip press. "In those publications, she found an ally that sometimes got out of hand, especially in the second half of her life, when many covers made jokes about her," he explains. "And although Lola never stopped being a myth, the businessmen they wanted to hire were Mecano, Radio Futura, Alaska... Lola understood this, and when the concept of exclusives became popular in the 70s, she saw a very important source of income and played that game better than anyone else. He sold a drama, a surgical operation, he taught his granddaughter... She was very intelligent, even pioneering. There's no doubt that Lola Fores' best marketing director was Lola Fores."
And so, he built a character where he combined art and show business, the most cane reality and the unattainable myth of the bata de cola, the unrepeatable genius and the closeness of walking around the house. Although life snuffed out too soon, at the age of 72, dynamiting plans that he had shared with those closest to him. John the Treat concludes: "She always dreamed of growing old with her white hair, her corals, a cigar at the corner of her mouth, and an army of grandchildren fluttering around her." It was not to be.