The Rise and Fall of Campitos, Forgotten Colombian Humorist
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Towards the end of his life, Carlos Emilio Campos spent his days in a small apartment in Queens, New York. This modest setup was at odds with someone like Campos, who, for decades, had packed theaters all over Colombia. The comedies about politicians and intellectuals by “Campitos,” as he was known within the world of entertainment, had sold out shows near and far throughout the country.
But after radio, television, and film became popular, Colombians stopped being interested in the comedic genres that “Campitos” had specialized in. This prolific playwright and show business entrepreneur ended up exiled in the United States, not due to the political violence in his country nor censorship against his art, but by neglect.
Colombians hadn’t only forgotten about one of their most famous performers, in his humid New York basement, poorly furnished for a living space, they had also forgotten about some of the country’s most popular theatrical genres during the first half of the 20th century. And although “Campitos” would end up returning, his fame would never reach the same peak as during his youth.
Campos’s Early Years
Carlos Emilio Campos Torres was born in 1906 in Chaparral, Tolima, a town in central Colombia, in a modest Catholic home. As a child, he dreamed of becoming an engineer, according to Carlos Emilio Campos Prignone, the youngest of his children.
Carlos Emilio says that, eight days after his father’s birth, his grandmother Carlina Torres died suddenly. His grandfather, Emilio Campos, could not take care of him since he was only a [administrador de fincas] and entrusted the care of his infant son to his “happy and pious” aunts, Eva and Isabelita Campos. After teaching him his first letters, his aunts sent him to the Girardot municipality (Department of Cundinamarca), to the Efrasio Páramo Boarding School to enroll in elementary school. There, he became friends with Darío Echandía, a fellow compatriot who would become President of the Republic.
According to the journalist Alberto Yepes in his article “Political Comedy Made Campitos,” published in Cromos magazine on May 23, 1960, Campos Torres moved to the municipality of Facatativá to begin his secondary studies in the Antonio Ramírez school. He then completed his studies in the Christian Brothers’ Normal School for Teachers in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia.
“Little by little I was getting closer to Bogotá … and was being civilized by doses,” said Campos in that interview.
In Bogotá, he began an engineering career at the Central Technical Institute, but a severe injury he suffered in his right leg during a soccer match (when he was entering the pitch, a disc thrown by an athlete beyond the track hit him accidentally and fractured the extremity in several places) kept him away from the field for two years and made it hard for him to continue his studies, which he eventually abandoned.
With his professional dreams dashed, Campos called upon his other passion: words and literature. Thanks to his personal relationship with its owner, he began working as a judicial commentator for Enrique Olaya Herrera’s Diario Nacional. In 1930, Olaya Herrera would become the President of the Republic of Colombia. Campos worked there until 1924 and, according to Yepes in his article, earned 12 pesos each month.
Around that same time, the literary soirees attended by politicians and journalists that he led in cafes in the center of Bogotá started becoming famous. During these events, which often lasted until dawn, the young Carlos Emilio would demonstrate his love for poetry, literature, and art. Already as a child, Campos would devour classic authors like Alejandro Dumas, Julio Verne, Victor Jugo, Shakespeare, Zorrilla, Calderón de la Barca, and was a consummate admirer of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, León De Greiff (who was also his personal friend), Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, Rubén Darío and Porfirio Barba Jacob, whose verses he could recite by memory, in Spanish and French.
Thanks to the connections he made during these gatherings, Campos obtained work as a cashier in the Banco de Colombia branch of Girardot, which was led at the time by Ernesto Michelsen. Fernando Mazuera (a famous politician and urbanist who was mayor of Bogotá four times), Jorge Zalamea (writer and journalist), and Carlos Villaveces (politician) also worked there.
From Banco de Colombia, Campos was transferred to the Banco Royal in the city of Bogotá, where he worked as assistant cashier. His path through the banks allowed him to later work as accountant for the boat “Canal de Dique” until 1929 when, according to the Cromos article, navigation by steam was halted in the Magdalena river.
When he returned to dry land, Campos obtained work as a spokesperson for the political movement of his friend, the presidential candidate Enrique Olaya Herrera. This work led him to travel the country proselytizing, selling emblems of the candidate’s face to cover his expenses, and even appeared in a campaign film made by the Acevedo brothers, who were pioneers in cinematography in Colombia.
After the successful campaign through which Olaya was elected, Campos Torres returned to his hometown and to accounting. While he worked for Don Andrés Rocha’s threshing company, he began to flirt with humor and published a series of satirical sonnets in the local newspaper La Mañana, according to Leovigildo Bernal Andrade in his book Chaparral, A City with a History.
From accounting, he jumped to civil service, according to Yepes. He worked as an accountant in road projects between Bogotá and Villavicencio, then was appointed as secretary for a regional court in Villavicencio, Meta, headed by Francisco Hornos. Later he returned to Chaparral to work as the Secretary for the Tolima Assembly; then, he was named as special legal representative for magistrate Manuel Moreno Medina in Ibagué; and from Ibagué he traveled to the city of Cali to be secretary for their sanitary unit. Finally, he took roles in the secretariat of the railways union in La Dorada, Caldas, and for the aerial cable in Mariquita, Tolima for two years.
Although he could rely on stable and well-paying jobs, Campos felt that he didn’t have what it took to be a politician and he continued traveling, searching. “I retired from politics when I saw that my temperament wasn’t made for compromises,” declared “Campitos” in an interview with the newspaper El Tiempo on March 22, 1971.
“Campitos” is Born
At the end of the 1930s, Campos settled in Bogotá. He decided to try his luck in the world of business and opened a small cafe in the center of town, the Cafe Stalingrado, which would become a renowned meeting place. Shortly after, he opened a second establishment, El Trocadero. There he began again to host his political and intellectual soirees, in which he took advantage of having an audience to unleash his quick and sharp humor and to show off to his friends his impressions of ruling politicians.
Those ingenious, but pointed remarks about politics and current events by the host, with his spontaneous impressions and natural grace, captured the attention of influential individuals from the theater world and the national radio who were part of his exclusive clientele.
Hernando Vega Escobar, poet, director and playwright, and Bernando Romero Lozano, actor, director and pioneer of radio theater and television in Colombia, saw in Campos the potential to be a solid actor. And like that, in between drinks and cigarette smoke, they convinced their friend to try his luck in the world of entertainment.
“One night in the year 1942, while I was at my business, the Cafe Stalingrado, Hernando Vega Escobar and Bernardo Romero Lozano awakened my dormant theatrical aspirations with flattering visions of artistic triumphs, convincing me to join the Grupo Escénico de la Radiodifusora Nacional,” wrote Campos in an unpublished autobiographical text titled “My Birth in Theater.”
Campos’ first stop was the Radiodifusora Nacional which, at that time and led by Director Rafael Guizado, broadcasted universal culture and theater on one hand, and new national authors on the other. This was crucial for the artistic development of Colombia, since, as Diego Beltrán Esguerra points out in his research in “The Birth of Radiotheater in Colombia During the 1930s and 50s,” the country did not have a national school for formal drama training until the 1950s.
The tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the stories by Dickens, Tagore, Saroyán, and the adventures of Chan Li Po, Captain Silver and Sandokán burst into the magnetic specter of the voices of national actors who, on top of staging these universal classic, began working with Colombian playwrights to create their own stories, pertinent to their realities.
Campos’ debut in 1942 was a small part in a piece titled “The Madness of Don Mendo” under the artistic direction of Vega Escobar and Romero Lozano. After his performance, the ex-bureaucrat Campos became part of the formal team of the institution.
Fully involved with the theater group, Campos had the opportunity to participate in the radio theater piece “Sand Moon” in the role of Sabino. The piece was such a success that it was broadcasted several times and soon it was discussed to take it to the stage. The preparations for presenting the piece in the Teatro Colón began on March 14, 1942 (a date that Carlo Emilio identifies in his short autobiography as his entry “through the main doors” of the theater world). Vega Escobar was tasked with the production and for that purpose founded that same year the Vega de Vásquez Colombian Company for Drama and Comedy.
The piece was so warmly received that they were forced to organize a full season with a national tour and several additional plays, where Campos was able to showcase his outstanding talent as a genre actor. However, Robert Allaz, a Swiss diplomat, trailblazer in culture and theater, convinced Campos that the ease and talent to imitate politicians that he exhibited in gatherings and informal conversations should be taken to the stage, and invited him to join his musical theatre company.
“Under the direction of Vega Escobar and Guizado in theater, as well as with Romero Lozano on the radio, I added to my acting repertoire and I believe I did not betray the faith and hope they put in my temperament and my abilities. But I have the firm conviction that they never imagined the dramatic actor that they shaped with so much effort and patience, would turn from one day to the next into a comic actor, and on top of that, a humorist. The blame is on a Swiss gentleman who arrived one night to my dressing room in Teatro Colón to tempt me, like Satan did to Jesus in the desert, with a flattering proposition, which I had the mischief of accepting, forgetting the example of the Teacher,” writes Campos in his unpublished theatrical autobiography.
In the Swiss man’s company, Carlos Emilio became the master of ceremony and the animator of the theater pieces of a theater genre known as revue. There, at the beginning of the show and during the interludes, Campos would tell jokes and imitate public figures.
The revue, illegitimate child and heir of French vaudeville and cabaret theater, a widespread genre in Mexico, Cuba, and Argentina, was beginning to gain ground in Colombia as an entertainment option for the masses, thanks to how it merged acting on stage with music, dance and varied performances like magic, conjuring, imitating public figures and scene of political satire. Ensueño Tropical was the first successful revue, and it was popular enough to consolidate this new genre in Colombia. In this format, Campos was able to showcase his elaborate imitations and give free reign to his humor and innate talent, which captured the attention of the public and national media. It did not take long to label him as the only actor in Colombia capable of imitating presidents and the powerful shamelessly and with the most impeccable mannerisms.
Campos himself described this artistic baptism in his theatrical autobiography, saying: “journalist friends baptized me ‘Campitos,’ and that is how it was, on some random day. The comic ‘Campitos’ killed the method actor Carlos Emilio Campos. A tremendous transformation and a horrible crime for someone who, in his internal ego, is a Quijote more adept to drama than to farce.”
The Art of Imitating
“Campitos”, at first glance, looked very average, without strong or particular features that would give him an innate presence on stage like that of on-screen leading actors. He measured 1.70 meters, had an oval-shaped head, a round face, and little hair.
But his stage presence was based on his unique and expressive facial expressions that allowed him to adopt the gestures and mannerisms of any person he chose. This ability extended to the rest of his body, transforming his posture, his walking style, how he sat and moved.
The first person he imitated was President Alfonso López Pumarejo (who was in office from 1934 to 1938 and from 1942 to 1945), who he studied for months. This was the character that gave Campitos public recognition at the beginning of his career as a comic and parody-maker. Afterwards, the character would be followed by a parade of the most important and influential leaders in Colombian and Latin American politics of the mid-twentieth century.
“I imitated political characters of that time. Far from being upset, they would laugh and these imitations were a surprising hit. With them I became popular,” commented Campitos in an interview with El Tiempo on March 22, 1971. The newly famous actor would take advantage of invitations to dinners and cocktail receptions to see beyond the fine clothing of the rich and powerful, and carefully study their movements, mannerisms, gestures, their way of thinking. It was thanks to this ability to imitate and mock politicians that he won over audiences.
His imitation abilities were praised by the media and the public. To such an extent that the journalist Humberto Diez, in an article published in the newspaper El Tiempo on October 1, 1983, described how, in one of his shows, the person he was imitating (a president, but he doesn’t say which one) entered the theater in disguise to see the Campitos show. The excitement that the man experienced seeing himself imitated with such dexterity, made him rattle in applause and cheers for the comedian. The episode, according to Diez, ended with the president, now unmasked, carried out of the theater along with Campitos on peoples’ shoulders.
In addition to his talent for melodrama, Campitos’ success was aided by his proximity to regular people, remembers Carlos Campos Prigione, the youngest of his children. His father was not the man interviewed by newspapers, the influential entrepreneur, but rather a simple man who understood the needs and frustrations of the masses, the average citizen, and in this same way made himself understood, because he spoke the same language, cared about the same things, and shared the same worries.
Thanks to this, and despite having never received a formal education in drama, he was the author of more than 25 plays, among them comedies, musical revues, parodies, and political satire.
For seasoned investigators of Colombian theater like Marina Lamus Obregón and Fernando González Cajíao, the greatest achievement that history can attribute to Campitos is his crucial contribution to the consolidation of “commercial theater” in the mid-twentieth century in Colombia, a genre of immense importance to the dramaturgist and scenic tradition of the country for two fundamental reasons. The first one: he brought to the stage characters and situations from everyday national life, routine stories, themes and expressions of regular people. The second one: he consolidated an audience and created in regular citizens the habit of attending theater productions.
Campitos, “in his immense modesty, came to tell me one day in his New York apartment, that his only merit was to have taught the Colombian people to pay to see a national show. It’s true that at that time he was the only Colombian artist that would fill theaters time and time again,” commented Campos Prigione in an interview.
Campos, through simple comedy and theater formulas, offered audiences the opportunity to see their own day to day tragedies, while being free of snobbism or universalist pretensions. Therein lies his importance as a public personality and as a theater person; his work focused on bringing visibility to routine challenges for regular citizens, to those from the provinces who arrived to a distant and hostile urban setting, and for that he used a clear and straightforward language.
In Campitos’ works, for the first time, everyday national archetypes were taken to the theater stages: the gossipy cobbler, the neighborhood flirt, the town idiot, characters that had no place in the traditional artistic and theater representations.
Campitos dedicated his efforts to this “commercial theater” that brought together aesthetic and narrative forms from the traditional Spanish theater like farse, sainete (a comic opera piece) and situational comedy, with revues, carnaval, magic, dance and other popular forms of expression. Titles like Romeo Neira and Julieta Valderrama, Don Juan Tenorio Jarami...myself, The Barber of Seville...Valle, The Three Musketeers, Cristóbal Colón in Medical School, among others, are parodies of the classics of universal theater in which Campitos would insert his commentaries and takes on the current political situation.
The fact was that Campitos’ theater was one of high improvisation, immediate and sudden. It was an unpretentious theater, but full of non-theatrical elements that the author made central in the productions, since he saw them as aesthetic elements that captivated and captured a growing public that sought to entertain itself.
Light shows, war tanks in the background, Roman carriages pulled by prop cows, helicopters that descended from the light grills, shows of conjuring and divination, they all were savored by the audience members who waited with bated breath the famous “party end,” moment at the end of the show where all the actors, along with the orchestra and guests, came out to dance and sing freely, and during which Campitos would do his famous parody sketches or imitations of the politicians of the time.
Precisely, it was the political critique that was slid in the middle of the acts that was the main attraction of the pieces by “Campitos.” The imitations he did of politicians and his sarcastic takes on the turbulent political situation of the nation, positioned Campos as one of the pioneers of political humor. At the same time that he offered entertainment options to the middle and working classes of the country, he dispensed a sharp and conscientious critique against the political establishment. With his shows, between jokes and farce, he would put in the spotlight themes that were forbidden or censored. His commentaries and imitations highlighted the vices of those in power, the corrupt circles, and he delineated the political panorama, saying what everyone knew, but did not dare to say.
Photo of Angela Prigione, “Any.”
Photo of Campitos.
Any
After one year of dabbling in the musical revue genre, Campitos decided to become his own boss. He called on actors and friends and in 1945, he formed the National Company of Musical Revues, or Campitos Musical Revue Company, with which he toured the country.
Traveling around the country with his company, Campitos’ destiny crossed paths with that of Angela Prigione. “Any” was an Argentine dancer and member of the AN RO YE trio which, around the mid-40s, had already earned international fame and recognition. After a United States and Central American tour, the trio stayed at a hotel in Bogotá while they waited for a contract in Venezuela to be confirmed. While there, they received a call from Carlos Emilio Campos, who wanted to bring them to his company.
However, the group’s director didn’t like the idea of performing alongside a Colombian comic theater group, and much less so after learning that Campitos’ orchestra had fewer than 10 musicians, a far reach from the 30- to 40-member bands they were used to. Faced with the insistence of the playwright, the group’s director asked for an exaggerated sum for their services with the hope that this would end the negotiation. Surprisingly, Campitos agreed to the amount and the Argentines reluctantly joined the company. Despite the inauspicious start, the collaboration between both companies would last 16 years.
A victim of love at first sight, Any married Campitos in Venezuela in 1948. Two years later, Carlos Emilio, the couple’s first and only child and the fourth of Campos, was born. Campos already had three children from his first marriage (he had married young in Tolima, and at this point, he had already been separated from his first wife for about 15 years, according to Campos Priogione).
From this moment on, “Campitos” and Any became inseparable. They were work partners for over 25 years and life companions for a little over 35.
Campitos and The General
In the 50s, Campitos would start a completely different relationship, which would also define his life: one with the figure of President Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who he would make fun of nonstop through an imitation that would become imprinted in the memory of Colombians during that time.
Rojas Pinilla, a politician and soldier, commanded the destiny of Colombia from 1953 to 1957 after overthrowing the government through a coup d’etat. Rojas Pinilla brought television to the country, built the first international airport, and established the vote for women; his dictatorship was generally seen through a positive lens by both traditional political parties (Liberal and Conservative) and as a solution to the violent partisanship of the last decade that, through its cruelty and intensity, came to be known in the historiography of Colombia simply as “The Violence.”
But his government also created a favorable atmosphere for totalitarianism, censorship, and repression in Colombia, which didn’t make Campitos’ intention to make fun of the “Supreme Leader” any easier.
Those who remember Campitos, primarily remember him for his imitations and plays about General Rojas Pinilla. The immediate and ever-present association is due to the undeniable physical likeness shared by the clown and the clowned. The detailed characterization of the humorist created the illusion among fans of being in front of the actual General. Most stories told about Campitos also have to do with the General.
In his chronicle for Cromos, Yepes recounted an anecdote that took place during a performance of Don Próspero Baquero in Popayán.
When Campitos left the scene disguised as Rojas Pinillas in his military uniform with his insignias and brass medals, several police officers guarding the theater’s door stood at attention, thinking it was the actual president. They gave him a military salute with such seriousness that it unleashed the laughter of attendees who with their raucous laughs made the agents realize their mistake.
In his article, Yepes tells another anecdote. It happened in the city of Cali, when Campitos, playing the general, prepared to climb up to the stage’s orchestra pit, which gave out under his weight. The artist, hanging onto the stage, in an exemplary showing of his swift thinking, took advantage of the impasse to improvise the phrase: “How bad must my government be, that I fell before taking power?”
In addition to the many sketches lost in time that Campitos created to make fun of the General, the playwright authored four complete works in which he parodied and satirized the dictator and his government: Mi familia presidencial, in 1953; Don Próspero, also in 1953; Los Tres Reyes Vagos (starring Malhechor, Melgar and Malgastar, in reference to Juan Domingo Perón of Argentina, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla of Colombia, and Marcos Pérez Jiménez of Venezuela), in 1959; and Marcelino vino y...Pum, in 1960.
La familia presidencial (1953), the first in a series, was a national success. It was performed on every important stage of the country and became a necessary topic of conversation in restaurants and cafes all around the nation; a legitimate opinion coup that awakened the ire of the most impassioned supporters of the regime and was censored, although not exactly by the government.
During the year of the play’s premiere, Jesús Rincón, singer, cultural producer, and close friend of Campos Torres, remembers that Campitos’ theater company performed the show along the Magdalena River, which cuts through the country from the center to the north. The tour eventually made its way to Barranquilla, the country’s main port to the Atlantic and the place where the Magdalena empties out. They settled in a hotel and prepared to rest ahead of their performance the next day at the Paradise Theater.
The city was covered in posters for La familia presidencial and the public waited anxiously for the comedian’s arrival. While Campitos finalized the last details for the next day’s show, anonymous messages arrived at the hotel’s door threatening to blow up the theater with grenades if the play was performed.
Although Campitos wasn’t the type to be intimidated by anonymous threats, he had been accustomed to the regime’s supporters trying to put a stop to his shows from the outset of the tour. This time he decided to consult Rodrigo Carbonell, mayor of the city at the time, since this part of the country was characterized by the aggressiveness of General Rojas’ followers.
The Mayor confirmed the rumors about the frightful reach of the narrow-minded and told him that under no circumstances would they be able to show up and put at risk the lives of the 5,000 attendees that had sold out tickets to the performance. Campitos responded that, with the tickets already sold, he couldn’t let his public or the promoters down. The Mayor therefore suggested that they didn’t cancel the performance, but rather changed the play to be less controversial.
On the way back to the hotel, Campitos looked for a way to not to let down his faithful audience while not sacrificing his art. He arrived late in the afternoon and met with the company on the central patio of the mansion. He explained the situation and told them that they weren’t going to cancel, but that they would change the play.
“Who here knows how to use a typewriter?” asked Campitos in the strict tone and firm attitude that characterized his working style.
The affirmative response came from Jesús Rincón, a slight, skinny boy who hadn’t reached 15 and who had joined the company to sing in the parting celebration.
“Sit down because I’m going to dictate a comedy to you,” was the only thing the playwright said.
From 7 at night to 4 in the morning, Campitos dictated to the young man, line by line, a complete work in two acts, with an intermission and a parting celebration. Standing up with his hands on his waist and his brow furrowed, Campitos dictated speeches, plots, and theater directions to the boy who tirelessly hammered the machine with his fingers; a privileged witness to the genius of the comedian, his skillful prose, his endless dramaturgy that allowed him to dictate without any visual or written support, act after act, speech after speech.
“Don’t laugh, it’s a serious thing, Jesús,” said the teacher when the young man laughed at what he had just written.
“And why don’t you laugh…” he inquired when the young man didn’t smile at the joke he had just finished writing down.
That’s how Don Próspero was born, a two-act satire where the protagonist of the play (Rojas Pinilla) descended upon the hundreds of cattle on his private ranch in a helicopter prop, making fun of the General’s excessive fondness for the cattle industry.
But Campitos didn’t always get his way. Campos Prigione remembers that while he was on tour on the Atlantic coast in 1953, Campitos was detained by military personnel sympathetic to the regime and was forcibly interrogated. Through the intervention of one of his cousins, the Admiral Torres of the frigate Gloria, he was freed and the episode ended there.
Venezuela, Pots & Prison
Although “Campitos” had grown used to constantly receiving anonymous insults and threats, his backers were worried about this situation because many theater owners would rather cancel the shows than put their venue at risk. Meanwhile, Any as a good “courageous pampeana” would carry a revolver calibre .38 in her purse to protect her husband and company, remembers Campos Prigione.
After the incident on the Coast, the couple decided that it would be better to leave the country for a while so the situation could calm down. They packed their suitcases and left for Caracas, Venezuela, with their young son, some time between 1953 and 1954.
There, relying on the contacts and the fame that the artist had earned during a short stay in this country in the 40s, Campitos put together a show. But according to Yepes, while the artist was giving a press statement ahead of the premiere, Venezuelan security agents broke into his hotel room and closely searched his belongings. In one of his suitcases, they found a photo of the comedian posing next to Rómulo Betancourt, who had received him during the first tours he did through Venezuela, and who was a known dissident of the Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez’s regime.
The artist was jailed after being charged for his supposed dangerous associations. If it hadn’t been for the efforts by the diplomatic service in Colombia to negotiate a solution to the incident and the release of Campitos from prison, he would have made good on his intention to form a theater group with political prisoners opposed to Pérez Jiménez. He would later get his payback by converting him into one of the characters for his comedy, Los Tres Reyes Vagos (1959).
After getting out of prison, Campitos did some television work, but quickly gave up on the idea “because the same thing that happens in politics happens in television. It’s always the same people. And besides that, I only feel attached to performances in which I am in direct contact with an audience.” That’s how Campitos responded to Gilma Jiménez de Niño when she asked him why he hadn’t gone on to television like many of his colleagues, in an interview for El Tiempo on March 22, 1971.
Promotional poster for Campitos, Public Servant.
Outside of the artistic scene, Campos relied on his talent as a salesman, and for a time, he worked selling high-quality stainless steel pots made by a North American company called WearEver, according to Yepes.
In the beginning, it went very well for him, the sale of pots gave him enough to live off and even buy himself a car. The same car that got him imprisoned for a second time in Caracas. It happened when Campitos parked his automobile in the Plaza de Bolívar and went to do an errand. When he returned, a police officer was looking over his car: Campitos had accidentally put a Colombian coin in the parking meter and that was a crime. He went to prison a second time, this time for fraud. Thanks again to his wife’s efforts, the artist was freed.
When there weren’t any more compatriots to sell the pots to, Campitos moved from Caracas to the city of Valencia, and there, he dedicated himself to making cardboard boxes to sell to jewelry stores, according to Campos Priogione. He did this until he got a radio contract, which he used to create Don Tufí, a show about the adventures of a Turkish merchant, sponsored by Sal de Frutas Lúa, a medication for stomach ailments.
One day, missing his home and his fanbase, Campitos decided to come back. He arrived in Bogotá in 1956 and was received by a group of journalists and fans. Upon seeing that they hadn’t forgotten about him, the comedian started to think about his return to the stage, which would take place that same year with El Barbero de Sevilla...Valle (in reference to the Colombian municipality of Sevilla, Valle del Cauca), a piece which was written and performed before the fall of General Rojas (1957). During this period the censorship apparatus had intensified their attacks, so the play didn’t feature as much political commentary. Although it was well received by the public, the piece didn’t compare to his previous box office success.
Nevertheless, the comedian hadn’t lost his edge, which he proved during a 1959 tour of Los Tres Reyes Vagos. The piece reaffirmed his status as the number one humorist in the country, and made him known to the entire continent.
In 1960, Marcelino Vino y Pum (the last in the series about General Rojas Pinilla) premiered, and also did well at the box office and among critics. The next year, he put on a piece titled, Qué hubo de la encarnación mi señora Anunciación, a straightforward and sensible criticism of the National Front (an agreement reached by the two political parties in Colombia to take turns with the presidency in order to stop partisan acts of violence).
The Quijote of Sainete in Vanguard Times
By the start of the 60s, the comedian’s health and vitality began to deteriorate. The old injury to his leg, which had never fully healed, along with his diabetes, forced the actor, under medical prescription, to slow down his frenetic rate of performances. Qué hubo de la encarnación…(1961) was followed by shows like Ayúdame a encaramarme (1962), Las Hijos de Ana Arkos (1962), El Minutos de Dos (1963), and other pieces that reached some audiences, but that didn’t achieve the same overwhelming success he had enjoyed in the past.
After 1964, Campitos started to reduce his stage performances due to the lack of audience turnout. The local spots where he performed didn’t have enough seats for the price of admission to be accessible. That same year, he made a last minute decision to decline an opportunity to act in a Colombian movie and left for Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he was received by the President Arturo Umberto Illia.
It’s important to note that although Campitos had previously appeared in film (in 1929, in the campaign film of Enrique Olaya Herrera and in 1944, when he took on the role of Pablo Morillo, the pacifist, in the lost feature length film Antonia Santos from Patria Films), he never liked film.
In 1964, Campos made an extended journey by car with his wife to Perú, Bolivia, and Argentina, where he became involved with radio once again and appeared on La Hora Phillips, a very popular show where international stars like Pedro Vargas, Libertad Lamarque, Felipe Pirela were guests. In 1965, he appeared on the same show, but broadcast from Bolivia, and later, he shared children stories over the radio from Lima, Peru.
That year, he returned to Colombia and put on Llegó la Transformación. In 1969, La Feria de los Candidatos premiered, which attracted large audiences and provided Campitos with enough money to live off for a time.
In 1971, he presented his last play in Colombia, Y después de tanta jarana, la silla fue de Pastrana, in reference to then President, Misael Pastrana (1970-1974). The play was received poorly and represented the closest thing to a failure in the artistic life of Campitos, who ultimately decided to end his tour due to the lack of audience turnout.
Weighed down by resignation, Campitos decided to move to the city of Cali, Valle del Cauca, that year. The weather was better for his health and he had some friends and family there. In October of 1971, he published the only book he would write in his lifetime: 30 sonetos anticipados de gentes de mi Tolima, a compilation of sonnets and illustrations of renowned figures from the area where he was born, published by Editorial Fariva with a prologue by the writer Lino Gil Jaramillo.
At that point, it was evident that audiences and the style of entertainment in Colombia had started to shift. Scholars and those who specialized in artistic movements like Fernando González Cajiao and Carlos José Reyes agree that the demolition of the Municipal Theater of Bogotá in 1952 and soon afterwards of the Colón Theater (the two biggest venues in the capital that not only had the capacity to house large crowds, but which were also essential to social life and functioned as meeting spaces for citizens) would mark the end of the age of “commercial theater,” the genre Campitos had pioneered and championed. With that, the golden age of popular theater attended by the masses also ended.
The specialized critics who had supported Campitos since his early days, and who had invited the public to fill venues at the beginning of the 40s, had now turned their backs on him and claimed that the popular genre had become mediocre and complacent. “Oswaldo Diaz Diaz, in 1950, introduced the latest international theater trends, especially to college students. In this way, contributing to the fall from grace of certain provincialist forms of sainetes that had become evident; particularly with theater companies like the one of [Luis Enrique] Osorio, and of Campitos in particular,” wrote González Cajiao in his book Historia del Teatro en Colombia (1986).
Moreover, the seed of experimental theater had started to germinate in Colombia with authors like Bertolt Brecht, Seki Sano, Ionesco, Arrabal, Stanislavski, Samuel Beckett, writers and vanguard trends that started to take over the thoughts and obsessions of new playwrights and national directors.
New mediums and technologies that made their way to the country in that decade also worsened the critical state of commercial theater.
Television started to lure away actors and directors from the theater to a new medium that offered more opportunities and better salaries, and that captured the attention of audiences left dazzled by the new device that provided them with free entertainment without having to leave the house.
In addition to this, North American theater had begun to make waves in Colombia and the rest of Latin America. A furor had developed with the arrival of the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood and the Star System, a system in which actors signed exclusive contracts with the biggest movie studios, where movie stars were worshipped by fanclubs, and tabloids specialized in spreading gossip about their personal lives and lavish lifestyles.
This situation profoundly impacted the entertainment business in Colombia. Venue owners saw how much more profitable and sensible it was to show films that came in a reel, than to put on a stage production that involved movement, staging, dressing rooms, and a series of expenditures that cut into profits.
With the closing of old theaters, the age in which people attended stage productions en masse ended. The new theater (more experimental and avant-garde in nature) was sophisticated and required a certain level of education to enjoy it. The absurdist theater had certain tropes and meanings that didn’t appeal to the general population. Audiences migrated to smaller spaces, to exclusive venues, and the audience for theater arts, as a result, shrank.
In the following decades, Colombian theater became a political tool, a vehicle for ideas and theories for students and activists, and stopped being the entertainment for the masses that it had been during its commercial heyday.
Stuck in between these social and cultural transformations was Campitos, the “Quijote of Sainete,” champion of the costumbrista theater that depicted Colombian society and culture. A precursor to pop culture, his flame was being extinguished as his audiences and name, which once graced the venue marquees, newspaper headlines, and promotional advertisements, were disappearing from the collective memory.
A Quijote in New York
A small apartment in Queens, thousands of kilometers from the stages where Campitos had earned fame and fortune, is where the playwright arrived in 1973, along with Any, a couple of suitcases, and some savings. He had the energy to start a new life after being abandoned by his audience, submerged in debt, and being told by promoters that he should try switching to television or cinema because Colombian theater was dead.
It was not an easy fit. With renewed energies, the desire for adventure, the remainder of savings from his last show, and a few suitcases full of fine suits that Campos had tailored in Argentina for his theater company, the artist couple sailed off in 1972 from the port of Barranquilla to begin their journey across Central America.
His first destination was Panama. From there they went to Costa Rica, and afterwards to Nicaragua, where they visited Metapa, the hometown of Rubén Darío (today known as Cuidad Darío). They then went to Honduras, where they walked among their famous pinewoods. Everywhere he went, Campitos was received by artists, politicians, ambassadors, and other characters with whom he maintained fiery conversations until sunrise.
The first stage of their trip ended in Guatemala, when his luck began to change, and Any, his savings bank, had no more jewelry nor dresses left to pawn. Looking for help and patronage from Dr. Humberto Campos (the eldest child from his first marriage) and from Campos Prigione, the couple headed for the United States.
There, he settled down in Queens, where Campitos found a job at a restaurant seating guests and cleaning tables after closing. Although he was a simple and humble man, who did not avoid work, the diabetes that had weighed him down for years started to make a dent in his health and his physical strength no longer matched his tireless will.
His stay in New York extended to almost 10 years. During this time, he joined the board of directors for the Liberal Party of Colombia (the oldest social democratic political party in Colombia) and actively participated in the activities of the Colombian enclave. He performed small shows like Masato Claro, mi país político in the Teatro Plaza (1975) and participated in the play Toque de Queda (written by Luis Enrique Osorio), which was performed at the Thomas Mann Theater at Columbia University, also in 1975, as part of a tribute that the institution had prepared to commemorate the playwright’s death.
Perhaps the most memorable episode from his time in the United States was a tribute in early 1975 that the Colombian consulate gave the comedian for his 35 years of work in the arts. The Consul Cepero Samper awarded him a gold medal and a commemorative plaque in Carnegie Hall for his laudable work of bringing art and culture to the masses of Colombia. The marquee of this mythic site for the arts was one of the last to carry the name of the artist as a testament to lost glory.
Campitos is given a tremendous homage for his 35 years of artistic labor. In Carnegie Hall, the Colombian consul Cepero Samper awards him a medal.
A Final Comeback
In 1976, famed Argentine businessman Fanny Mikey, who would later cofound and direct Bogotá’s Iberian-American Theater Festival, invited Campitos to attempt a return to the Colombian stage. Campitos was the main attraction of Café-Concierto, which the Argentine put on in Bogotá, but he only made it on stage on two occasions; the rest of the shows were cancelled because of his health setbacks.
From that point on, the artist and his wife fell off the public radar until 1983, the year that Luis Carlos Giraldo, a New York-based correspondent for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, wrote an article in which he narrated the difficult economic conditions and poor health of the exiled artist.
This report fell into the hands of Jesús Rincón, a young singer that had helped Campitos with the writing of Don Próspero Baquero some time around 1953. Rincón was now a consummate baritone and assistant director of culture at Bogotá’s District Institute of Culture and Tourism. Rincón says that the last time he had spoken with Campitos was in ‘76, in New York, when he was part of the Amato Opera Company and visited his mentor at his old basement in Queens.
In reading the news report and the tough conditions in which Campitos found himself, Rincón offered to repatriate him in order to pay him homage and give back some of what he had given to the country from the stage. In this role, Rincón had already obtained 25 houses for artists in need through the Institute of Territorial Loans, meaning he could have easily helped “Campitos.” The difficulty was to find the whereabouts of the wandering artist.
The first thing he did was contact Giralgo, who told him that one of Campos’ children had said to him that the couple had left New York in 1982 and had moved to Mendoza, Argentina.
Both followed Campitos’ trail to No. 1026 Lavalle St. in the town of Godoy Cruz, postal code 5501, Mendoza, Argentina. Rincón immediately sent a letter to the artist sharing his intention of repatriating him. In a letter dated July 6th, 1983, Campitos thanks Rincón for facilitating his return and tells him that the most suitable place for his stay in the country would be in the city of Cali, due to the climate and its proximity to his land.
On Sunday, October 16, 1983, at 3:50pm, Carlos Emilio Campos and his wife Any landed in Bogota, on Avianca flight 080 coming from Buenos Aires.
Fire trucks, television cameras, and around 200 musicians went to receive Campitos at the airport to remind him of the forgotten glory. From there, tributes, awards, applause, and recognition from the government and the public followed, which would soon make way, yet again, for inexorable abandonment.
After a short stay at the Hotel Tequendama in Bogotá, the couple moved to Cali to await receiving the home that the government had promised them. After sorting out a few bureaucratic difficulties, the delivery of the home was finally authorized by the Institute of Territorial Loans. For a few months, Campitos and Any dedicated themselves to looking at buildings, while searching for the home that best met their needs. The search was fruitless. The couple could not decide on a home and tired of waiting on favors from the government, Campitos and his wife moved to Ibagué, Tolima in order to get for themselves what they needed. Their benefactor, Jesús Rincón, was removed from his post 10 days after the arrival of Campos and Prigione to Colombia and could not help them.
Going forward from this point, little is known about the artist. In the middle of October in 1984, Rincón was contacted by one of Campitos’ granddaughters who told him that her grandfather had been admitted to the the hospital due to his delicate state of health, a state which deteriorated even more after the untimely death of his beloved Any, at 68 years old, as a result of pancreatic cancer towards the end of November in 1984. Only a few days later, on December 17, it would be the 78-year-old comedian’s turn.
The death occurred in the midday hours at the El Rosario clinic in the city of Ibagué, as a consequence of “multifunctional failures with underlying complications due to diabetes” according to the report of doctor Aníbal Ramos.
“He made millions laugh, but died alone,” was the headline of the newspaper El Espacio that announced his death on September 18, 1984. “Campitos died abandoned,” is how the newspaper El Tiempo described it, yet another testament to the neglect that the artist was subjected to during his final years, and the final blow to the embers of his fame that, at one time, was among the brightest in the country.
Nicolás Rodríguez Chaparro is Colombian, a mercenary for journalism and a hunter of untold stories and untold characters.
Photos: Courtesy of Press Archives and the Personal Archive of Carlos Emilio Campos (son)