LAWRENCE — Think for a moment of the relationship between Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe — he a celebrated playwright and she a younger actress. That’s the rough equivalent of the union between Spain’s Raquel Meller and Enrique Gómez Carrillo in the early 20th century.
The sparks of synergy — and conflict — generated by the (mis)match of two such strong personalities are the subject of a new scholarly journal article by Margot Versteeg, professor in the University of Kansas Department of Spanish & Portuguese.
In “Myths of Stardom: Raquel Meller through the Eyes of Enrique Gómez Carrillo,” in the journal Anales de Literatura Española Contemporánea (ALEC), Versteeg sketches Gómez Carrillo’s contributions to Meller’s early career on the “variety stage” before her film and recording work that made her an international star.
Versteeg said it’s part of a larger book project she’s working on about late 19th and early 20th century women performance artists in Spain.
“That is a period that is obsessed with female artists,” Versteeg said. “A little earlier, the focus was mostly on prostitutes. Now it’s on performers. In literature, in poetry, in plays, there are so many dancers, singers and variety artists … I read a lot of books with and about singers, dancers, opera stars, etc., and I came to the conclusion that these women were often used to address emergent societal questions. They were kind of a crucible for other issues that were going around, related to discussions about art and commerce, body and nation, because they represented modernity and change. They crossed borders like the private and the public sphere.”
Meller was certainly a border-crosser, Versteeg said.
She started off singing bawdy songs in small theaters, then changed her style to a more demure, serious one, but always with a sense of drama to which audiences responded, Versteeg said.
Contemporaries believed Meller could have been a great stage actress, but she preferred to be a popular performer, Versteeg said, not least for the money — more than she would ever earn on the serious stage.
“Star performers like Meller had an independent lifestyle, and they brought it to celebrity culture,” Versteeg said. “They endorsed products like perfumes and promoted all kinds of fake stories about their lives. Many such stars engaged in celebrity marriages. It’s just like today.”
Meller was already a star when she married Carrillo, 10 years her senior.
“Carrillo did not really make it into the literary canon,” Versteeg said, “but he was a famous literary critic and journalist who promoted a great many of his fellow writers. He was smart and very well connected. He came from Guatemala. He lived in Paris. He lived in Madrid. When Carrillo married Meller, his literary career had already peaked. The marriage got him back in the spotlight.”
Carrillo extolled his wife’s virtues in a book about her (he probably also ghost-wrote her autobiography, Versteeg said) and helped Meller gain important bookings in big theaters in Paris and London.
And yet something about his prose rings false to Versteeg’s ear today.
“Instead of saying that she’s embodying everything that she’s thinking about, how she … carefully stages her songs, in his books he makes her like she is more than a woman. She’s ethereal … divine. He doesn’t present her as a flesh-and-blood person who knows exactly what she does, but he makes her like a force of nature. This doesn’t give her the credit she deserves,” Versteeg said.
In the autobiographical text, on the other hand, Carrillo took another route and portrayed his rather uneducated wife as far more erudite than she actually was, according to the KU professor.
Perhaps it’s no surprise the marriage lasted less than five years (1919-1922).
“He was an interesting person, and she certainly was, too,” Versteeg said. “But they were both very complicated. They were mismatched. That’s what I read over and over again. That’s also what people said about them.”
Nevertheless, by the time they split, Meller’s career had been energized and elevated to a new level, setting the stage for even greater fame to come.