By clothing-bag, 14/07/2022

In the hermit's shell, five years without Frank Ramírez

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In February 1964, New York was shocked by the arrival of The Beatles. The country came from a Christmas afflicted by the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas and since the beginning of the year the stations programmed the songs of the group from Liverpool 24 hours a day. At the J.F. Kennedy a crowd packed the waiting places and the screeching of scores of young girls made it impossible to hear any sound or engage in conversation. Despite all this scenario, the air terminal continued with its activities without major trauma. And one of the passengers who landed that day at the New York airport was a resident of the unknown and parochial Republic of Colombia.

Although the truth is this man did not look like he was Colombian; He had long hair, then black as coal, a bristly beard, thick-framed glasses, and a fur coat because the cold of that winter of 1964 seeped into his bones. Also, because the plane in which he arrived did not come from Bogotá but from France. That man was called Frank Augusto Ramírez, he was born in the Eastern Plains, he was 20 years old and he came to study theater. This actor, whom I will confidently call Frank from now on, because I know he wouldn't get angry, is a calm, slow-paced man, and, moreover, single. For some time now, she has let her hair grow, not for a role on television or to captivate her friends, but because she paints naked women every night and the cold at dawn makes her quite uncomfortable.

In The Big Apple he studied at Gene Frankel's theater academy and impersonated Macbeth and Romeo a few nights, however this was not a career triumph for Frank, but an accident. "Because the teachers told me that despite my age, I had the tricks of an old actor", he spoke, gestured and did all the work as if he were a seasoned actor with one significant detail: lousy English. From that audition with Frankel, he began his process as an observer at the Actors Studio and challenged himself to learn English until he understood what the disc jockeys on youth stations were saying, such as Cousin Brucie.

But Frank didn't despair. And that can be confirmed by the US Army Sergeant who attended him in his recruiting office in a small Portuguese fishing village near the city, since a few weeks before he had received a letter congratulating him on being part of a contingent of soldiers who soon they would ship to Vietnam. “I got there and filled out the form. In the question you said, do you have any objections? I answered yes." Surprised, the Sergeant made him enter his office to seek explanations for his refusal. Frank, with the right clarity and frank and direct character, told him that he was incapable of receiving orders, "they tell me to sit down and I'll stop." What's more, in an extreme case I would leave the country, period. It was an honest, calm conversation, there was no shouting or arguing. Days later, when he received his discharge from the US Army, he was the first to be surprised.

*

“I always had conflicts at home,” Frank emphasizes as he pours himself a shot of Jack Daniel's, his favorite whiskey and in fact the only drink he has. From the beginning it was said that "there must be something more than this". The feeling of confinement made him see that he was missing something very good or at least different from the heavy family habit. He ran away from home at the age of thirteen or fourteen. Don Ismael, who in those years had set up a drugstore in the Belén neighborhood of Bogotá, had no choice but to wish him good wind and good seas.

Leaving home so young had its privileges and its lessons: he learned to be responsible for himself, (“the money for the parties and for the accounts”, he remembers smiling). Since he spent his time drawing and scribbling on the yellow pages of notebooks or on napkins at home since he was a child, he went to work as a designer at Publicidad Toro. His first order was some pennants for soccer teams, then he worked in the workshop, until one day, at the age of 18, his boss, Guillermo Toro, appointed him as art director of his agency regardless of his lack of academic preparation, which he made up for it with an all-encompassing curiosity and a concern to keep up with new trends.

The experience gained in advertising allowed him to be a kind of "artistic representative" and thus be able to travel to Europe and the United States with the peace of mind of not having to wash bathrooms or clean kitchens to survive and indulge in some luxuries, such as eating lobsters that the fishing boats discarded at reasonable prices or travel to Arizona and Los Angeles in search of the hippie wave of the "summer of love." "I lived on what I painted," he says as he shows me some paintings he is working on, sketches of pen and ink resembling Toulouse-Lautrec cabaret posters, nude women.

“You earn less than on TV,” he said, “but it's a lot more fun.

Never plan for more than a few hours. "My life is like this: drifting, aimlessly, only now that I have put down roots and stayed here." His desire was always to make a Vaugrant movie (a film actor in several languages ​​and different places simultaneously) like his admired Klaus Kinski, who performed on five continents and had a strange and explosive relationship with Werner Herzog. Frank could spend hours talking about the two of them, or about Akira Kurosawa. In fact, he knows so many anecdotes about Fitzcarraldo or Rashomon that he could be mistaken for an idle movie buff with no more concern than knowing one more detail, such as that the famous Japanese director dyed the water with black ink to achieve the effect of intense rain or his perfectionism that bordered on manic. "Kurosawa and Picasso are the last gods I have believed in." Three common aspects of them stand out: their ambition, rigor and discipline.

And partly also this adoration and his life on the run is explained by the reflection of his counterpart. “Television in Colombia was disgusting, incipient…it was radio with faces,” he said. The first actors on national television had come from Radio Nacional, they limited themselves to putting a circumstantial face on the dialogues, that is, a radio soap opera seen and heard, whose narration blurred the magic of each one and impoverished the final result. “I left for that, for a personal thing, because I needed to compare myself with actors from another place”, he assures while he prolongs the wait for a drink of whiskey.

In that going and coming back to Colombia, acting and public life, his life has passed. In episodes that leave the feeling that the story still has one more chapter. His decision not to participate in any telenovela or national production again is the result of fatigue, of the tremendous apathy he felt when he was recording 'Los talones de Eva', a little over five years ago, together with his great friend Jorge Enrique Abello.

"I finished that soap opera, it's about discipline, professionalism," he said. Then I said never again...

*

Those who know Frank, who have closely followed his life and his studies, understand his voluntary retirement as a well-deserved rest, "for that he worked hard for years... so that he can do whatever he wants," says his friend Víctor Gaviria; For his part, Rosalba, the woman who organizes her life, a kind of "ambassador of reality", limits herself to saying "Don Frank knows how he does his things". They are not surprised when they realize that more than a month has gone by without him leaving his house, or when he feels anxious and almost terrified of going out into the street because he bumps into the university students who walk along the "Calle de la Agonia", where he is his apartment in La Candelaria.

Frank unceremoniously clarifies: “I grew up alone, I became alone and I like to be alone”. Loneliness doesn't scare or intimidate him, what's more, he looks for it and needs it. "I'm absolutely comfortable with myself." He enjoys not having to get up at five in the morning to record or go to an audition, as he judiciously did since that trip to New York. "Because of me, a scene was never delayed or an hour was stopped recording", such was his punctuality that he arrived half an hour before the recordings so that no one would bother him. But today the opposite happens: he goes to bed at five in the morning: "I love the night... I have the feeling that if I go to bed early I am missing something."

The acquaintances he meets ask him if he isn't bored when he's locked up in his house. But that doesn't happen, “I travel”, says Frank, “I take a book and I get lost”. He tells this when the cell phone rings and he talks animatedly, he ends the call and without blurring tells me that he just called him "a love waiting who arrived from New Zealand", he opens his eyes and bursts out laughing: "And I just I wanted to invite her to Chía!”

Frank is currently reviewing scripts and honing ideas for potential feature films. When I visited him for the first time, he was reading 'Chronicles of improper lives' by his friend Fernando Laverde, to whom he gave his approval and advice for filming. “It is that what is not on paper will not appear on the screen, it is that simple”. Remember the unsuccessful experience when I worked on the film 'María Cano' in 1987, in which María Eugenia Dávila starred and which, due to excess expectations, poorly made calculations and a script made in fits and starts, ruined the story of the labor leader antioquena

Víctor Gaviria says that Frank can be known more for the films he didn't make than for the ones he did. One of these was 'The Wrath of God', filmed in Guanajuato, which had Rita Hayworth and its director Ralph Nelson as stars. "That was a rumba sponsored by Metro Goldwyn Mayer," he says that its director was very sick and could hardly shout Action!, to the point that the cinematographer, Alex Philips Jr., would wake him up when he had to and then I covered it again with a cover so that it could rest without being disturbed. Meanwhile, the red-haired diva presented the first symptoms of Alzheimer's.

“She was a tiny, short woman, very different from that goddess called Gilda,” he said. Although I saw her from afar and she still had that spectacular red hair.

He found her out there deprogrammed in the hotel and invited her to eat ice cream, to show her the town, to eat Mexican food, since she had lived there in her childhood. "But she was a person who only talked about herself." In the end, the film was a brick and the only good memory was the plaque that is still inscribed today in the hotel where the entire recording team stayed.

*

Two years after such a mess, Frank returned to Colombia invited by his friend Lisandro Duque to record 'Miracle in Rome', the adaptation of one of García Márquez's stories in his book 'Twelve Pilgrim Tales'. Although he was hesitating about continuing with the project, a lucky meeting ended his hesitation.

—I saw that absolutely beautiful chinita and I told Lisandro that if he wanted me to be in the movie he should record a scene with her.

Thirty years earlier, a friend at the Actors Studio invited him to meet a master swordsman. “There I fell in love with the magnificent aura of this old man”, he immersed himself so much in Japanese culture that he ended up living in a Japanese neighborhood and walking up and down with Japanese friends, “I was the only stranger among a crowd of Chinese… ”. He didn't know much about the master swordsman, but he told me about his teaching with a kind of guide: "a Japanese would never give you a bouquet of roses, but rather a rose."

That precept followed him throughout his career as an actor and screenwriter: act (or play, as he prefers to call it) for that person on the other side of the screen. Not the general public but the ordinary spectator who goes to the functions with his friends or accompanied by his family. I worked for him or her, and later time and life were completely mine. He gets up from his seat and invites me to visit his painting workshop, he shows me a whole series of female nudes that are an obsession that he takes off every night. "Look at this one, the colors are brought to me directly from a warehouse in New York, and they return there with my gallery owner."

They are beauties, art has its own reality. That's partly what television is for Frank. "Dreams, and dreams are made with beautiful people", I simply served as a foil for a few years.

On Twitter @Sal_Fercho

A little over seven years ago I met Frank Ramírez at his home, in the center of Bogotá, this is the result of weeks of conversations and days of accompanying him, observing him and sharing his life. The photographs are Lina Rozo, her Instagram is linarozo

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