In 1962, Marilyn Monroe visited Mexico for 10 days, a trip during which she met a young 26-year-old screenwriter linked to the Communist Party.
Marilyn Monroe has many ties that unite her to Mexico, but one of the least known chapters of this union is her romance with the young Aztec screenwriter and film director, José Bolaños Prado, who became moderately recognized in the media for their relationship. with artists linked to the Mexican Communist Party and other followers of this ideology, mainly Spanish.
In the 2012 book "The Last Lover of Marilyn Monroe", the Spanish writer Xavier Navaza conducted an investigation in which he revealed details about this fleeting relationship that lasted 14 days, but which was enough for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began an investigation into Bolaños, since it was not the first time that the artist was linked to communist sympathizers, such as her ex-husband Arthur Miller.
The couple met on February 22, 1962 in a store in Mexico City where Monroe was looking for colonial furniture. She was 35 years old and he was 26, but the age difference was not a problem so they later fled together to Acapulco and from there to California, where the young man was her official partner at the Golden Globe Awards.
Bolaños was born in Mexico in 1935 but his grandfather was from Burela, in Galicia. Therefore, the filmmaker grew up in a family of Spanish tradition, thanks to this origin he always belonged to a group of Galician intellectuals exiled in Aztec land that was made up of the filmmakers Carlos Velo and the writer Elixio Villaverde, among others.
As Navaza describes in his book, Bolaños had no talent for cinema but he was attractive, educated, communist, insolent and friendly. He had been a student at the Mexican Film School founded and directed by Carlos Velo.
The filmmaker assured Navaza that the young man's ambitions were very great and he also had "irresistible charms to seduce."
"Velo told me that in those days Marilyn went out every night to have fun in Mexico and drank a lot. Velo said: 'poor Marilyn Monroe, she had the world at her feet and she was Peneque (drunk) every day', and, in fact , she dies months later, because she was sunk, and it is in that phase of abyss where that stay in Mexico and her romance with Bolaños develops," Navaza says.
Bolaños and communism
The romance put the US intelligence services on alert when Marilyn Monroe arrived with the young man at the Golden Globe awards ceremony on March 2, days after having been in Mexico.
The criticism against the actress in the American press was brutal, since that year the missile crisis occurred between Cuba, the United States and the then Soviet Union after the United States discovered Soviet medium-range nuclear missile bases in Cuban territory.
When they both arrived in Hollywood between cuddling and affectionate gestures, one of the comments in American newspapers was "what Marilyn was doing with that screenwriter who was blamed for militancy in the Mexican, communist and pro-Soviet left."
Velo confirmed to Navaza that Bolaños was related to Mexican and Spanish communist groups, as FBI files on the actress later revealed.
"The majority were Spaniards who came from the Communist Party of Spain, and all were pro-Soviet, so the suspicions of the FBI, which was in Mexico investigating Bolaños' ties, were true when talking about Marilyn's companion," Navaza points out in his book.
Bolaños' career as filmmakers never took off with his relationship with the actress, whose reason it ended is unknown, it is only known that hours before she died, on August 5, 1962, one of the last calls Marilyn Monroe made was to her Mexican lover who died in 1994 and never gave details or interviews about her relationship with the film goddess.
"That crazy romance, saturated with alcohol and cocaine, set in a spiral of madness and self-destruction, was a dark nightmare that accompanied José Bolaños until the end," Navaza wrote.
