TWO SPANISH MAGAZINES
By Mahnuel Muñoz
Today I would like to talk to you about a couple of old Spanish magazines dedicated to Frank Sinatra, published in the 1950s. For all those who are not Spanish and perhaps do not know our history in depth, I will tell you that in those years in Spain there was a dictatorship that, among other things, filtered all information coming from abroad through a dense censorship system. This censorship included everything related to the world of culture and entertainment. These two magazines are an eloquent example of this, reaching grotesque levels.
“A LIFE, A NOVEL” and “MOVIE IDOLS COLLECTION” are serials very much in keeping with the taste of the time, with their pertinent load of implausible drama and emotion, with minimal psychological and artistic elaboration and with a marked whiff of moralism. The first of them, as the title indicates, is a fictionalized biography, and the second is in essay format.
When you open its pages, inventions spill out that, far from embellishing history, turn them into childish and unhealthy hodgepodges mainly destined to satiate the gossipy and morbid tendency of the common people. From the first pages the story is desecrated by telling that Frank was born in 1917 or that he was four years old when he arrived in the United States.
The ensuing parade of canards is overwhelming: that The Hoboken Four is a group made up of classmates from their school; that Nancy was the one who convinced a Frank who wanted to be a journalist to take up singing; who accepted a job as a vocalist with Harry James in 1940 after becoming a father… and a long and grotesque etcetera that I am not going to go into detail so as not to make this text too long.
All of the above is justifiable to a certain extent due to the political and cultural situation of the country. The sad thing, after having read many articles published on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Frank’s departure, is that from those dusts of almost seventy years ago perhaps come the informational sludge that continues to stain us, something completely incomprehensible given the infinity of the Internet within our reach be documented with a basic dose of rigor.
Disconcerting errors and omissions continue to be made regarding his work and his more positive human streak, and instead the “information” media salivate over his love life, the mafia, Frank’s volcanic character, the revelry…the sauce that gives flavor to the putrid stew that unfortunately is to the taste of the majority.
This reality is an incentive for our tiny group to continue every day highlighting Frank’s enormous and invaluable artistic production and the most unknown and exciting facets of his complex personality.
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