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1920-2009  RICARDO MONTALBAN of "FANTASY ISLAND" |
He was a friend to many,
including this columnist
of TheColumnists.com
Whenever I think of Ricardo Montalban, who died Jan. 14 at age 88, I'll always remember him as a man of immense dignity and impeccable style. He believed, I'm sure, that it was about time that Americans started thinking of most Mexicans in such terms.
You will be reading a lot about the legacy of Montalban as a versatile and impressive actor now that he's gone. But I think the people who actually knew him will consider his legacy to be much more important than just the performances he left behind. I knew Montalban as a quiet and forceful crusader for Latino causes, as the founder of the influential organization Nosotros and as a tireless fighter for better images of Latinos in American movies and television programs.
Lots of jokes were made about Montalban's
TV commercials for those classy automobiles with their fine Corinthian
leather upholstery. Sure, he made it sound like planting your
bottom on one of those car seats was the equivalent of making
love to a supermodel. But consider the real value of those ads:
They showed us a handsome, debonair Latino man, obviously rich
and successful and quite comfortable in the classiest of surroundings.
If Montalban could have summed up in plain words what those famous
commercials were saying between the lines, he might have put
it like this: Don't think all Mexicans are dope-dealing punks
from the barrio or lazy, fat Gordo-types asleep in the
sun with flies buzzing around them. That's just what Hollywood
shows you. I'm here to show you most of us don't look like that.
In short, Ricardo Montalban was a role model in contemporary America, not just for his Latino people, but for all young Americans who aspired to be better and to live the American dream. He knew from personal experience what it was like to live the American dream.
In 1946, MGM brought Ricardo up from Mexico, where he was already a popular young leading man in Mexican movies, and put him into a musical called "Fiesta," playing a wealthy Mexican torn between his love of music and a career he didn't want o pursue as a matador. His co-star was one of MGM's reigning screen goddesses, Esther Williams.
Montalban started out with his name above the title as a star of American movies, which automatically made him a global attraction. Though he occasionally took a dramatic character part in movies or television, Ricardo really remained a star all through his long career.
My first real close contact with Ricardo came in 1978, just my second year as a syndicated television columnist for The San Jose Mercury News and the Knight Ridder Newspaper Syndicate. He had flown up to San Francisco to do some TV and radio spots for a Spanish language TV station in the Bay Area. I'd always liked his work on screen, so I wangled an interview with him at the station. Just a few minutes before I headed for San Francisco, I took a phone call from my friend Joe Maggio, the ABC network publicist who handled syndicated columnists.
"I hear you're going to see Ricardo Montalban this morning," Joe said. "When you see him, you might want to tell him a bit of good news: The network has picked up his 'Fantasy Island' for a weekly series."
Ricardo had done a couple of "Fantasy Island" movies for ABC, which were "backdoor pilots" for a possible series. They had done so well that ABC had just informed producer Aaron Spelling that he had a series commitment. With Ricardo out of town, the network hadn't been able to notify him, so I broke the news to him when I turned up for my interview.
To put it mildly, he was ecstatic. I think it put such a rosy glow over me that he gave me an extraordinarily cheerful and candid interview. That glow apparently lasted for the rest of my career because Ricardo probably always connected me with the good news that made him an enduring TV star. He did a lot of favors for me over the years that followed and always made himself available whenever I needed to talk with him about anything.
I'd like to think it would have happened anyway because the two of us really hit it off, especially when I learned he was a great boxing fan and we'd been rooting for some of the same Mexican prizefighters for years. I'm sure he also was keen on the fact that I was vitally interested in seeing American television open up to more ethnic minorities, expecially Latinos. He often enlisted my help in publicizing the awards given out by Nosotros to Latino performers or to promote some of their causes. I would have done these things anyway, but it gave me yet another excuse to chat with a man I deeply admired and considered a valuable show business contact.
Landing the starring role in a weekly series was a great achievement for Montalban. From a personal standpoint, it assured him of steady work at high pay for as many years as the series might run. "Fantasy Island" ran for seven seasons, making Montalban a very rich man in the process.
But Ricardo also considered the series a great achievement because the mysterious character he played--Mr. Roarke--was clearly a Latino man who always dressed like a gentleman and lived a luxurious life. This made Montalban proud because he felt it corrected a lot of the unsavory images of Latino men that Hollywood churned out on a regular basis.
Because he's chiefly remembered for "Fantasy Island," millions of Americans may think Ricardo Montalban was more like a host than an actor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Before he ever did "Fantasy Island," Montalban already had earned a superb reputation as a resourceful character actor who could play heroes and villains equally well and was especially good at playing all kinds of ethnic characters.
Trekkies will never forget Montalban because of his great scenery-chewing performance as the villainous Khan in the "Space Seed" episode of the original "Star Trek" TV series on NBC in the 1960s. He became such an iconic part of the "Star Trek" mythology that Paramount brought him back to star in "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan" (1982), the feature film that became a huge hit and saved the "Star Trek" movie franchise after the disappointing returns for the first film, "Star Trek: The Movie" (1979).
Two other offbeat performances worth looking at in hit movies now in home video release--his performance as a Japanese kabuki performer in "Sayonara" (1957) and as a plains Indian in John Ford's "Cheyenne Autumn" (1964).
To see Ricardo as the young, sexy musical star in his first MGM days, try "Fiesta" and "Sombrero" (1953). For his best early dramatic work, try Anthony Mann's "Border Incident" (1949), William Wellman's "My Man and I" (1952) or John Sturges' 1950 "Right Cross," in which Ricardo played a prizefighter.
I've already written on this website about the time Ricardo invited me to the "Fantasy Island" set one day when he and Cyd Charisse were being reunited for a dance sequence--she danced with him in "Fiesta"--that turned into an afternoon of pure MGM nostalgia. Ricardo by then was suffering from a serious back injury that had given him a bad limp and made it difficult for him to stand for any length of time. That resulting lack of mobility seriously hampered his post-"Fantasy Island" career.
The last time I saw Ricardo in person was at a dinner party in Los Angeles. My wife and I were seated at the same table with Sam Elliott and Katharine Ross, Ricardo and Ricardo's wife, Georgiana, who was the youngest sister of Loretta Young and had played Loretta's sister in "The Story of Alexander Graham Bell" (1939). Ricardo seemed strangely subdued that evening and his wife seemed unhappy being there. By all accounts, though, they had a strong marriage that lasted from 1944, before he became an American movie star, until 2007, when Georgiana died.
I was troubled to learn that Montalban's later years found him in considerable discomfort from his old injury and surgery he had undergone in the 1990s in an effort to correct the problem. He was confined to a wheelchair in recent years and was doing little work except some occasioinal voice-over dubbing for animation.
I will always remember Ricardo as a very vital and good-natured man, a very classy gentleman who worked long and hard to help forge a better screen image for Latinos and to get more work for Latino actors. He will be remembered and loved by many, many people who benefitted from his efforts as well as his millions of movie and television fans.
©2009 by Ron Miller. This column first posted Jan. 19, 2009.
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