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Jorge Martínez and Raffaella Carrá, chronicle of a unique crush: a pact in Buenos Aires and an end in Rome

2021-07-25T12:59:37.314Z


At 74, the actor relives in detail that intense relationship with the Italian, four decades ago. Planes, reunions, crying and even Diego Maradona in the middle of history.


Marina Zucchi

07/25/2021 6:00 AM

  • Clarín.com

  • stories

Updated 07/25/2021 6:00 AM

The psychedelic lights of the Elsiland nightclub, in Quilmes, the mateo rides through the Palermo woods, Raffaella's shimmering lycra like a second skin.

The flickering memories of the movie they filmed together are mixed with the others, with the secret nights of the Bauen.

If you pass through Callao 360 the memory is reactivated.

In one of those 220 rooms they rehearsed kisses that were not stipulated in the scripts.

The concrete giant today is an abandoned, bricked-up skeleton.

Love, on the other hand, resists like a sleeping sensation that, when evoked, passes through the body again, like an old electric current, a force that helps Jorge Martínez to remember what it was like to be so alive.

A plane that lands in the south and causes a desperate crush;

another plane that is leaving, as if taking their hearts to Rome.

This is the story of a love that was and was not.

Of a romance as brief as it is endless. 

It all begins with the figure of Raffaella as a European divinity that is "Argentinizing".

The Opera, Tucumán, Córdoba, catamaran rides on Victoria Island in Bariloche.

Jorge - who sees her on posters at every step - is getting closer to her without knowing it.

At Luna Park, in 1979, she would end up crowning herself queen: an hour and a half of serial shows, very deep bathing suits, songs in Spanish, English, and Italian.

The public enjoys her daring, seeing her transformed into Mary Poppins singing "supercalifragilisticoespialidoso" and after a while riding a bicycle upside down.

The military is confused: the lustful ragazza dives into different levels of innocence and ends up suitable for all audiences.

Raffaella Carrá and Jorge Martínez in the movie "Bárbara".

Ovidio García and Héctor Marrone sell the Raffaella magnet throughout the country.

The

raffamanía

flows well in films. The production company Crea Zodíaco is planning a musical (

Bárbara

) to be premiered in 1980, dictatorship through. Without casting, Martínez is chosen as the leading man, the actor who in history will act as a prince sponsored by the Yves Saint Laurent brand. The film, kitsch, directed by the Milanese Gino Landi, will remain in popular oblivion, but it will serve as a document of that era of rotary telephones and will be the nest of a romance that goes beyond the screen.

Jorge Horacio is then just over 30 years old, four years older than her. Atlético, a former athlete, has as a precedent having been Argentine table tennis champion and having been part of the Davis Cup team in 1967

. He is popular for being the "lion" of Durax advertising (the unbreakable tableware) and is - so far - a father of two. He is married in a second nuptials with the model Titi Rodríguez, but "a marital crisis" ensues. They meet him at the Bauen to meet his co-star and it happens: he is traversed by what Raffa calls

"la freccia di Cupido" or (a lightning strike) "un colpo di fulmine". 

"The first time we saw each other in one of the hotel rooms, I was very nervous. I was fascinated. Twenty minutes later I had relaxed, I saw her healthy, humble, delicate and happy," Martínez says today, moved by that flashback . A hunch and an invitation. "The next day I called her at Bauen, and I said:

Do you want to go to know some Argentine places?".

What followed was sheer amazement.

He invited her to eat at Los años locos, at La Costanera, and the dish was meat.

Then, Edelweiss, La Boca, Caminito, el Riachuelo.

The filming was intermingled with reality, flirtations on the bridge of the Law School, on the terrace of ATC, the Rose Garden, the Planetarium.

"I already felt that she had touched my heart and the first kiss came, but all in secret, the press did not reach us."

Jorge Martínez and Raffaella Carrá on a walk through La Boca

Jorge was driving a black Mercedes Benz that scuttled all over Buenos Aires

.

It accelerated and both felt like in the Samba of the Italpark.

"What happens in Baires, stays in Baires", was the implicit pact.

Carrá did not want to think about the future.

He was on a break from his relationship with Gianni Boncompagni and in Argentina he sang it and checked it: "To make love well, you have to come to the south."

Passion or tenderness?

The physical or the soul?

A recess or a shelter?

"With her, everything was a tutti frutti smoothie, love, joy, sex, sweetness. That feeling that everything happened there. I fell in love with her happiness."

Six months of intensity and a liar ending.

The after was all "downhill".

The farewell in Ezeiza, the Entel devices trying to make a connection with Rome, the tireless operator who explained "the characteristic it is trying to achieve is momentarily congested."

Zero three, zero three, four, five, six.

The Barbara Movie Poster

Diego Maradona enters this "rebound" story.

In the middle of the roller coaster of feelings, Jorge drowned his love sorrows with journalism.

His family edited a small newspaper and together with actor Gianni Lunadei they had come up with a special supplement dedicated to Ten.

In this task,

Martínez is encouraged to act as a crack-chasing reporter for Channel 13. He embarks on a tour to cover each step of Pelusa in a couple of friendlies that he plays for the Argentine National Team of César Luis Menotti.

Micro-interviews in Vienna and London, frantic rise and fall of planes and a romantic getaway to Rome seal this story tale: "I took advantage of the proximity and took a flight to Fiumicino airport to visit Raffaella. It was three days, but we were already feeling the final".

Despite the Maradona "trophies" that Martínez sent euphoric to Buenos Aires via Airlines and in the form of a hulk (cassettes with international recordings that were journalistic pearls), he was afflicted by the feeling of losing something.

"The worst separation is the slow one. We started talking to Raffaella from time to time, the distance was diluting everything.

I suffered a lot. I was very sad

.

"

Top gallant.

Martínez, cover of Clarín's magazine four decades ago.

-What did she teach you?

-Humility.

Joy.

He radiated joy all day.

We gave each other honesty.

-How do you know, from a distance, that it was love?

-Because it was seeing her and throbbing.

For the way I give myself.

And for the peace that we gave each other.

You realize that the other improves your life.

There are relationships of years that do not leave you so much.

I didn't measure time with her, I measured intensity.

Raffaella Carrá and Jorge Martínez in a scene from "Bárbara"

A reunion and a prize

In the early nineties, Martínez was the sought-after heartthrob who

drank tea at Silvio Berlusconi's mansion

.

Carrá was then the memory of adrenaline, the prelude to the third marriage (with Alejandra Gavilanes, then there would be a fourth, in 2001, with the Venezuelan Elluz Peraza).

With the soap operas

The Strange Lady

and

Manuela,

his fame had taken on an international tinge.

Even the Vatican would paralyze at siesta time to see him kiss Luisa Kuliok or Grecia Colmenares

.

Raffaella also saw it on TV, dubbed into Italian.

He ended up giving him the 1991 Telegatto award in Milan, a European award in the shape of a golden cat that was also received on that occasion by Robert De Niro himself.

"We hugged each other like friends hug each other. Each one was already in their own history and we were united by the strength of what they had experienced," recalls Jorge, who

after that statuette never saw her again

, despite the fact that in 2005 she returned to Argentina for

La noche del 10

, after 23 years.

On July 5, his phone jumped through the air from so much vibration.

Journalists machine-gunned messages.

The queen of the carré court had just died.

Very close in youth, very far in adulthood.

-Why do you think neither of them ended up playing at the time?

-I had my children in Argentina, my mother.

Going to live in Italy was not an option, and she would not have left her career there for me.

It was to marry Raffaella.

I would have proposed it if we had followed ...

Weekly therapy sessions with two psychoanalysts, friendship with Pablo Alarcón, Germán Kraus and Alberto Martin, three grandchildren and a lighthouse support the "León" these days: he prepares an autobiographical book that will tell his way from his childhood neighborhood, Constitución, to his move to the United States and his return to Argentina.

"At the end of the year I will decide whether to retire from acting or continue. I don't really want to anymore."


Jorge's life today is in the antipodes.

"I no longer want to have a partner. Now I want to live for myself. I understood that there is no such thing as a better half, one is all alone. I am a lonely guy, I hardly go out at night

, but I keep the ritual of having lunch outside every day "

says the man who loved too much, the one who learned that without lovers this life is hellish.

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2021-07-25

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