Franklin was nineteen when he saw his first bullfight. He was in Mexico, having recently run away from home after a quarrel with his father. As he recalls this particular bullfight, he was bored. In Brooklyn, he had belonged, as a charter member, to the Eagle’s Aunt Jean’s Humane Club and to the old New York Globe’s Bedtime Stories Club, which devoted itself to the glorification of Peter Rabbit. “At that time, the life to me of both man and beast was the most precious thing on this planet,” he says. “I failed to grasp the point.” The following year, he fought his first bull—a twelve-hundred-pound, four-year-old beast with horns a foot and a half long—and was on his way to becoming a professional. In the quarter of a century since then, Franklin has come to feel that the act of dominating and killing a bull is the most important and satisfying act a human being can perform. “It gives me a feeling of sensual well-being,” he has said. “It’s so deep it catches my breath. It fills me so completely I tingle all over. It’s something I want to do morning, noon, and night. It’s something food can’t give me. It’s something rest can’t give me. It’s something money can’t buy.” He is certain that bullfighting is the noblest and most rewarding of all pursuits. He often delivers eloquent discourses on his art to men who are more interested in power, money, love, sex, marriage, dollar diplomacy, atomic energy, animal breeding, religion, Marxism, capitalism, or the Marshall Plan. When his listener has been reduced to acquiescence, or at least bewilderment, Franklin will smile tolerantly and give him a pat on the back. “It’s all a matter of first things first,” he will say. “I was destined to taste the first, and the best, on the list of walks of life.” The triumph of man over bull is not just the first walk on Franklin’s own list; it is the only one. There are no other walks to clutter him up. “I was destined to shine,” he adds. “It was a matter of noblesse oblige.”
The expression “noblesse oblige” is one Franklin is fond of using to describe his attitude toward most of his activities in and out of the bull ring, including the giving of advice to people. He is an unbridled advice-giver. He likes to counsel friends, acquaintances, and even strangers to live in a sensible, homespun, conventional, well-tested manner, in line with the principles of saving nine by a stitch in time, of finding life great if one does not weaken, of gathering moss by not rolling, of trying and trying again if success is slow in arriving, and of distinguishing between what is gold and what merely glitters. He is convinced that he thought up all these adages himself. In order to show how seriously he takes them, he often pitches in and helps a friend follow them. He takes credit for having helped at least a half-dozen other bullfighters make hay while the sun shone; for having proved to habitués of saloons and night clubs that there is no place like home; for having taught a number of ladies how to drive automobiles, after telling them emphatically that anything a man can do a woman can do; for having encouraged young lovers to get married, because the longer they waited, the more difficult their adjustment to each other would be; and for having persuaded couples to have babies while they were still young, so that they might be pals with their children while they were growing up. “I was destined to lead,” Franklin states. “It was always noblesse oblige with me.” Some Americans who have watched Franklin dispose of bulls on hot Sunday afternoons in Spain believe that he is right. “Sidney is part of a race of strange, fated men,” says Gerald Murphy, head of Mark Cross and a lover of the arts. Franklin has a special category of advice for himself. “I never let myself get obese or slow,” he says. “I make it a point never to imbibe before a fight. I never take more than a snifter, even when socializing with the select of all the professions. I am always able to explain to myself the whys and wherefores. I believe in earning a penny by saving it. By following the straight and narrow path, I became the toast of two continents. My horizon is my own creation.”
· · ·
Franklin, who has never married, is tall—five feet, eleven and a half inches—thin, fair-skinned, and bald except for a few wavy bits of sandy-colored hair at the base of his skull. The backs of his hands and the top of his head are spotted with large tan freckles. His eyebrows are heavy and the color of straw. His ears are long. His eyes are brown, narrow, and lacking in depth, and there are a good many lines around them. There is a small scar at the tip of his nose. His build is considered good for bullfighting, because a tall bullfighter can more easily reach over a bull’s horns with his sword for the kill. Franklin’s only physical handicap is his posterior, which sticks out. “Sidney has no grace because he has a terrific behind,” Hemingway says. “I used to make him do special exercises to reduce his behind.” When Franklin walks down a street, he seems to dance along on his toes, and he has a harsh, fast way of talking. He sounds like a boxing promoter or a cop, but he has many of the gestures and mannerisms of the Spanish bullfighter. “Americans are taught to speak with their mouths,” he likes to say. “We speak with our bodies.” When the parade preceding the bullfight comes to a halt, he stands, as do the Mexicans and Spaniards, with the waist pushed forward and the shoulders back. When he becomes angry, he rages, but he can transform himself in a moment into a jolly companion again. In the company of other bullfighters or of aficionados, he glows and bubbles. Last winter, at a hotel in Acapulco, he discovered that the headwaiter, D’Amaso Lopez, had been a matador in Seville between 1905 and 1910. “Ah, Maestro!” cried Franklin, embracing Lopez, who grabbed a tablecloth and started doing verónicas. “He is overjoyed to see me,” Franklin told his host at dinner. “I’m a kindred spirit.” At parties, he likes to replace small talk or other pastimes with parlor bullfighting, using a guest as the bull. (Rita Hayworth is considered by some experts to make his best bull.) Claude Bowers, former United States Ambassador to Spain, used to invite Franklin to his soirées in Madrid. “Sidney loved to perform,” an Embassy man who was usually Franklin’s onrushing bull has said. “He’d give the most fascinating running commentary as he demonstrated with the cape, and then he’d spend hours answering the silliest questions, as long as they were about bullfighting. He was like a preacher spreading the gospel.”
Franklin gets along well with Mexicans and Spaniards. “On the streets of Seville, everybody talks to him,” a friend who has seen a good deal of him there says. “He knows all the taxi-drivers and lottery venders, and even the mayor bows to him.” Franklin claims that he has made himself over into an entirely Spanish bullfighter. “I know Spain like I know the palm of my hand,” he says. “I happen to be much more lucid in Spanish than in English. I even think in Spanish.” Franklin’s lucidity in Spanish has been a help to other Americans. Rex Smith, former chief of the Associated Press bureau in Madrid, occasionally used him as a reporter. During a rebellion in 1932, he commissioned Franklin to look into a riot near his office. “Suddenly, I heard a great hullabaloo outside my window,” Smith says in describing the incident. “I looked out, and there was Sidney telling the crowd, in Spanish, where to get off.” “Sidney is fabulous on language,” Hemingway has said. “He speaks Spanish so grammatically good and so classically perfect and so complete, with all the slang and damn accents and twenty-seven dialects, nobody would believe he is an American. He is as good in Spanish as T. E. Lawrence was in Arabic.” Franklin speaks Castilian, caló (or gypsy talk), and Andalusian. The favorite conversational medium of bullfighters in Spain is a mixture of caló and Andalusian. Instead of saying “nada” for “nothing” to other bullfighters, he says “na’, na’, na’,” and he says “leña,” which is bullfight slang, instead of the classical “cuerno,” in talking of an especially large horn of a bull. In conversing with a lisping Spanish duke, Franklin assumes a lisp that is far better than his companion’s, and he is equally at home in the earthy language of the cafés frequented by bullfighters. The Spanish maintain that Franklin never makes a mistake in their tongue. One day, he went sailing in a two-masted schooner. A Spanish companion called a sail yard a palo. “You ought to know better than that,” Franklin told him, and went on to explain that the sail yard
he had spoken of was a verga, that palo meant mast, and that there were three terms for mast—one used by fishermen, another by yachtsmen, and the third by landlubbers.
When Franklin first went to Mexico, in 1922, he did not know any Spanish. A few years later, while he was training for bullfighting on a ranch north of Mexico City, he started a class in reading and writing for forty illiterate peons, of all ages. After three months, sixteen of Franklin’s pupils could read and write. “They idolized me for it,” he says. In any restaurant—even a Schrafft’s, back home—he follows the Spanish custom of calling a waiter by saying “Psst!” or clapping the hands. His Christmas cards say, “Feliz Navidad y Próspero Año Nuevo.” Conversation with bulls being customary during a fight, he speaks to them in Spanish. “Toma, toro! Toma, toro!” he says, when urging a bull to charge. “Ah-ah, toro! Ah-ah-ah, toro!” he mutters, telling a bull to come closer.
In putting on his coat, Franklin handles it as though it were a bullfighter’s cape, and his entire wardrobe is designed to express his idea of a bullfighter’s personality. “Sidney always took a long time to dress in the morning,” says Hemingway, who often sleeps in his underwear and takes a half minute to put on his trousers and shirt. “I always had to wait for him. I don’t like a man who takes a long time to dress in the morning.” Most of Franklin’s suits were tailored in Seville. “Genuine English stuff—nothing but the best,” he tells people. His wardrobe includes a transparent white raincoat, several turtleneck sweaters, some Basque berets, a number of sombreros, and a purple gabardine jacket without lapels. His bullfighting costumes are more elegant and more expensive than those of any other matador in the business. He has three wigs—two parted on the left side, one parted on the right—which are the envy of bald bullfighters who have never been to Hollywood or heard of Max Factor. A bullfighter’s looks have a lot to do with his popularity, especially in Mexico, where a bald bullfighter is not esteemed. A Spanish matador named Cayetano Ordóñez, professionally called Niño de la Palma, who was the prototype of Hemingway’s young bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises, lost a good part of his Mexican public when he lost his hair. In 1927, when he appeared in Mexico City and dedicated one of the bulls he was about to kill to Charles A. Lindbergh, he was young, slender, and graceful, with dark, curly hair. “An Adonis,” Franklin says. “Niño had a marvellous figure. All the sexes were wild about him.” Eight years later, Niño, who had been fighting in Spain, returned to Mexico heavier and partially bald. The moment he took off his matador’s hat in the ring, the ladies in the audience transferred their affections to a slimmer and handsomer matador, and the men turned to the bulls. One day, Franklin showed his wigs to Niño. “Poor Niño was flabbergasted,” says a witness. “He put on a wig and stood in front of the mirror for an hour, tears in his eyes. My God, what a scene when Sidney tried to take the wig away from him!” Franklin used to wear his wigs whenever he appeared in public, but lately he has worn them only in the bull ring, at the theatre, and when having his picture taken. He says that someday, if the action in the ring gets dull, he is going to hang his wig on the horn of a bull.
In accordance with his belief in noblesse oblige, Franklin feels that he can afford to be generous toward his fellow-man. “Sidney doesn’t envy his neighbors a thing,” says a friend. “He is the extreme of what most men like to think of themselves, so much so that he never thinks about it. He doesn’t want things. He thinks he has everything.” Although Franklin does not carry noblesse oblige so far as to forgive enemies, he is tolerant of those whose friendship for him has cooled. He has rarely seen Hemingway, whom he had come to know in 1929, since leaving him in Madrid in 1937, in the middle of the civil war. Franklin had been doing odd jobs for Hemingway, then a war correspondent.
“I weighed Ernest in the balance and found him wanting,” Franklin remarks. “When he began coloring his dispatches about the war, I felt it was time for me to back out on the deal.”
“Obscenity!” says Hemingway in reply.
“Ernest got to the point where I knew his mind better than he did himself. It began to annoy him,” Franklin says.
“Obscenity!” says Hemingway.
“I may disagree with Ernest, but I’ll always give him the benefit of the doubt, because he is a genius,” Franklin says.
“Obscenity obscenity!” says Hemingway.
Franklin is highly critical of most of his confreres, but there are a few he praises when he feels they deserve it. After a bullfight in Mexico City a year ago, a friend commented to him that one of the matadors looked good only because he had been given a good bull to kill—a good bull being one that has perfect vision and is aggressive, high-spirited, and, from a human point of view, brave. Franklin said no—that the bull was a bad bull. “The fellow had the guts to stand there and take it and make a good bull out of a lemon,” he said. “You can’t understand that, because you have no grasp of noblesse oblige.” Because of his own grasp of noblesse oblige, Franklin is determined to go on fighting bulls as long as his legs hold out, and he would like to see Brooklyn continue to be represented in the bull ring after he retires. To this end, he took under his wing for a while a twenty-six-year-old Brooklyn neighbor of his named Julian Faria, nicknamed Chaval, meaning “the Kid.” Chaval, whose parents are of English, Spanish, and Portuguese descent and whose face resembles a gentle, sad-eyed calf’s, made his début as a matador in Mexico in the fall of 1947, fighting with Franklin in some of the smaller rings. On the posters announcing the fights, Chaval’s name appeared in letters an inch high, beneath Franklin’s name in letters two inches high, along with the proclamation that Franklin was “El Único Matador Norteamericano.”
· · ·
“There are two kinds of people,” Franklin repeatedly says. “Those who live for themselves and those who live for others. I’m the kind that likes to serve mankind.” He believes that he would have made a wonderful doctor, and he acts as a general practitioner whenever he gets a chance. One afternoon, a bull ripped open one of his ankles. “I took a tea saucer and put some sand in it and mixed it up with tea leaves and manure and applied it to the injured member,” Franklin says, with a look of sublime satisfaction. “I was then ready to get right back in the ring, functioning perfectly to a T.” Once, when he was working on the ranch in Mexico, a peon accidentally chopped off two of his, the peon’s, toes. Franklin claims that he sewed them back on with an ordinary needle and thread. “I put a splint underneath the foot, bandaged it, and told him to stay off it for a few days,” he says. “In no time at all, the man was as good as new.” In Mexico a few years ago, Franklin stood by as an appendectomy was performed upon his protégé, Chaval, advising Chaval, who had been given a local anesthetic, not to show any fear or sign of pain, not even to grunt, because other bullfighters would hear about it. Chaval didn’t make a sound. “I saw to it that the appendectomy was performed according to Hoyle,” Franklin says.
Franklin considers himself an expert on mental as well as physical health. At a bullfight in Mexico City, last winter, he sat next to a British psychiatrist, a mannerly fellow who was attending the Unesco conference. While a dead bull was being dragged out of the ring, Franklin turned to the psychiatrist. “Say, Doc, did you ever go into the immortality of the crab?” he asked. The psychiatrist admitted that he had not, and Franklin said that nobody knew the answer to that one. He then asked the psychiatrist what kind of doctor he was. Mental and physiological, the psychiatrist said.
“I say the brain directs everything in the body,” Franklin said. “It’s all a matter of what’s in your mind.”
“You’re something of a psychosomaticist,” said the psychiatrist.
“Nah, all I say is if you control your brain, your brain controls the whole works,” said Franklin.
The psychiatrist asked if the theory applied to bullfighting.
“You’ve got something there, Doc,” said Franklin. “Bullfighting is basic. It’s a matter of life and death. People come to see you take long chances. It’s
life’s biggest gambling game. Tragedy and comedy are so close together they’re part of each other. It’s all a matter of noblesse oblige.”
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 56
