Puig, Manuel

(1932–1990)

   Argentine novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, and assistant director. Born in the town of General Villegas, in the province of Buenos Aires, a town often described as a remote backwater in the arid pampas. His lifelong fascination with movies began early, when the young Puig and his mother attended the cinema to escape the boredom of provincial life under the early regime of Juan Perón, a period he would later satirize in his first novel, La traición de Rita Hayworth (1965, translated as Betrayed by Rita Hayworth in 1971). In 1946 Puig moved to Buenos Aires to attend an American boarding school. He enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires in 1951, first as a student of architecture and later as a philosophy major. In 1955 he was awarded a scholarship to study movie directing with Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. Puig would later describe himself as disenchanted with the filmmaking process at Cinecitta and would abandon his studies. Between 1957 and 1961 he worked as an assistant film director and translator of subtitles in Rome, Paris, and Buenos Aires, with a brief stay in Stockholm. He later moved to New York City, where he worked for Air France.

   In 1967 Puig returned to his native Argentina. His novel La traición de Rita Hayworth had been panned by Argentine critics and had problems with local censors but was later acclaimed by literary critics in the United States and France. Upon his return, the openly gay Puig soon came under attack by a hostile press as an enemy of “family, religion and class structure,” according to his biographer and translator, Suzanne Jill Levine. The hostility against the author continued with the publication of his second novel, Boquitas pintadas (1969, translated as Heartbreak Tango: A Serial in 1973), which became an instant best seller in Argentina and culminated with the publication in 1973 of The Buenos Aires Affair. Repeated telephone threats and the return of Juan Perón to power in 1973—Isabel Perón, Perón’s third wife and successor, was, according to some accounts, an implacable foe of the writer—sent Puig into exile, where he finished El beso de la mujer araña in 1976 (translated as Kiss of the Spider Woman in 1979).

   This novel, Puig’s best-known work, tells the story of two cellmates, the gay window dresser Molina and the young Marxist revolutionary Valentín in an unnamed Latin American country, clearly identifiable as Argentina. In the story, cast as a series of dialogues overheard by an unseen and anonymous listener, Molina attempts to distract the young Valentín, suffering from the effects of torture, by retelling and sometimes inventing improbable Hollywood plots, all featuring enigmatic heroines, including the Spider Woman of the title. A story of love, loss, and redemption through the artificiality of the movies, the novel was filmed in 1985 under the direction of Hector Babenco, with a screenplay by Leonard Schrader and the participation of William Hurt, Raul Julia, and Sonia Braga. The movie won a Best Actor Oscar for William Hurt. The novel was later adapted for the stage with a libretto by Terrence McNally, score by John Kander and Fred Ebb. After an initial debut off Broadway, where it was met by lukewarm reviews, the play opened in London, where it was awarded the London Evening Standard Drama Award. Finally, in 1993 it made its Broadway debut, where it ran for over 900 performances and garnered seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Actor, and Best Actress.

   Manuel Puig spent his remaining years in exile in New York City, Rio de Janeiro, and Cuernavaca, Mexico. His novel La traición de Rita Hayworth was named the best novel of 1968–1969 by the French newspaper Le Monde; earlier, it had been a finalist in the Seix Barral Editorial Biblioteca Breve award. He received the Curzio Malaparte Film Prize in 1966 and the San Sebastian Festival Jury Prize in 1978. Puig died in Cuernavaca in 1990.