"Americans don't have the guts to be bullfighters." This remark, tossed off in a Mexico City café, infuriated a young poster artist with flaming red hair and a temper to match. He flared back: "Americans have more guts in their little fingers than the rest of the world put together!" To make good his boast, Brooklyn-born Sidney Franklin had to learn enough about bullfight technique to get through a face-saving appearance with yearling bulls at a rancho in the country. That was back in 1922, and with time off for wars, revolutions and surgical operations, Franklin, the only American ever to become a topflight matador, has been in or around bull rings ever since.
Tedious, backbreaking cape and sword lessons with Rodolfo Gaona, "Mexico's best and one of the three greatest matadors* of all time," taught Franklin that bullfighting was grinding work. He learned to respect the brave bulls, too. "But what enthralled me most," says frank Sidney Franklin, "was the absolute idolatry in which the crowd held the fighters." Extroverted, extravagant, foolish and flamboyant, Franklin surf boarded through the '20s on this idolatrous wave, bathing himself in a thunderous surf of resounding Olés.
"Cold Valor." Franklin hobnobbed with royalty and other big-name people —Mary Garden, Fritz Kreisler, Pablo Casals, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. At another extreme, he once engaged in a memorable ten-day spree with a tribe of back-jungle Mexican Indians who were fascinated by his red hair, and took steps to see that the next batch of children all had it.
As a reporter for the North American News Alliance, he covered the Spanish Civil War with his good friend Ernest Hemingway, who wrote, in 1932, in Death in the Afternoon: "Franklin is brave with a cold, serene and intelligent valor . . . He is one of the most skillful, graceful, and slow manipulators of cape fighting today . . . No history of bullfighting that is ever written can be complete unless it gives him the space he is entitled to."
Last week, characteristically sparing no superlatives, Franklin published his autobiography* for armchair aficionados. And, characteristically, Franklin was far away from the literary tea set. He was in Spain making his debut as a teacher of young bullfighters, in the small (pop. 18,000) Andalusian city of Alcalá de Guadaira, eight miles from the famed bullfight center of Seville. Franklin had patched up the local bull ring, unused for 25 years, with $6,000 of his own money to provide an arena for his school.
Warm Reception. Now 49, his body scarred by repeated gorings and 20-odd corrective operations, Franklin knows that his career as a top matador is finished. But like all good fighters, he hates to call it quits. His first practice corrida at Alcalá was quite a comedown for a matador once the toast of two continents, but Franklin did not seem to mind. In fact, he was delighted with his pupils, even though some of them reacted to the tension of their first appearance by lapsing into a series of low-comedy antics.