Members of Congress kidnapped on February 23, 1981 were awaiting the arrival of the “white elephant”, the “competent authority, military of course” who would assume command once the coup was complete, as announced by the US government’s Civil Guard under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Tejero. The “white elephant”, whose identity has since been speculated about, never arrived. Juan Carlos I, disguised as the Captain General, appeared on television to order the troops back to barracks, destroying the alibi of those who wanted to act on his behalf. That day he won the crown that Franco gave him before the Spaniards.
Three decades later, in April 2012, another elephant, this time in a present body, would bring about the end of his reign. The image of the king posing in front of a pachyderm shot dead in an African reserve was the icing on the cake for Spanish society: the fact that their head of state secretly went on a luxury safari with his beloved and came back with a broken hip came to mind Bombshell in a country facing the cuts of a harsh adjustment.
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Since then, despite his abdication in 2014 and naturalization to Abu Dhabi in 2020, the trickle of news about the king emeritus (his love affairs or fortune abroad) continues to undermine the image of the monarchy now embodied in his son. As much as the Casa del Rey tries to ignore it, Juan Carlos I is the elephant in the room, leaving no room for the measures taken by Felipe VI. wants to modernize and moralize the institution.
The King Emeritus has long jumped from newspaper and news covers to television series, real or fictional. The latest installment is Juan Carlos: The King’s Fall, a four-part documentary that premieres this Monday on Skyshowtime, a platform that landed in Europe earlier this year with the catalog of major Hollywood studios such as Paramount, Universal, Dreamworks or even Nickelodeon. Your producer is Christian Beetz, winner of the Grimme Prize of German television. As one of the series’ interviewees says, the story of Juan Carlos I has the ingredients of a Shakespearean tragedy: sex, infidelity, power, money and corruption, spiced with the dark entanglements of the secret services.
A Shakespearean thriller
As on previous occasions, La Zarzuela declined to be involved in the production, but this did not prevent the sequel, and the result is a series with an impeccable technical execution, which is devoured like a thriller and in which the music matches a photograph in the twilight that gives the viewer the feeling of immersing themselves in the world of unspeakable state secrets.
The first chapter begins with the ill-fated Botswana hunt, to then go back to the glory years of Juan Carlos I when he posed as the savior of democracy against 23-F and as a symbol of a Spain rapidly modernized with European funds. which made him feel immune, not only legally but also morally.
Statements such as that of journalist Selina Scott, who interviewed him in 1992, portray a womanizer king who courts any ladies who come within his reach, including Lady Di, who spent summers in Mallorca with the Spanish royal family. At the end of his career, Don Juan meets Corinna Larsen, whose first husband, the British Philip Adkins, calls him on camera to demonstrate his friendship with the emeritus king.
At the beginning of the second episode, journalist Ana Romero warns that in this story “nothing is as it seems, everyone has a part of the truth and a part of the lie, and the viewer must find their own.” Not taking the testimonies underlying the story—there is no narrator, nor the person asking the questions—but that doesn’t absolve them of responsibility. They selected the respondents and there is less information about who each individual is because in many criminal cases the public does not need to know their background.
Former Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, at a point in the documentary.
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For example, Mario Conde is portrayed as “the king’s friend” without any reference to his prison time as Banesto’s manager; and retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo as a “former intelligence operative” without mentioning the causes he amasses as an alleged leader of a police mafia. And Javier Bleda, former director of the newspaper Ya at the time when its editor was José Emilio Rodríguez Menéndez, receives a speaker based only on rumors and suspects that the actress Sandra Mozarowsky was conceived by the king and the secret service was at his death involved. Bleda and her former boss were convicted over the sex tape of then-El Mundo director Pedro J. Ramírez.
But where the series becomes more of an insinuation of the role is in the interview with Corinna Larsen, who is portrayed as Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, despite the German businesswoman losing her second and princely husband’s surname years ago.
Faced with La Zarzuela’s inhibitions, the former lover of the king emeritus actively participated in the production, not only through her reactions, but also by making herself available to shoot several scenes. And it shows, along with the fact that she’s one of the few to speak English, the language of the show. The script seems to adjust to support her story, to reconstruct episodes according to the version she told, or to illustrate her statement that the CNI director was terrifying and misogynistic with an image of General Félix Sanz intended to be frightening. Although the biggest accusation that can be made, at least in the first two chapters, is to conceal the fact that during the filming of the series (the last interviews will take place in December 2022), Corina was sued in a London court against the King Emeritus in the one who gambles millions of pounds.
One of the documents featured in the series. The “thriller” tone helps keep the viewer on their toes.
A master of the art of showing and hiding, the former lover of the king emeritus presents to the camera one of the eight black boxes she is said to be hiding containing hundreds of Juan Carlos I’s personal letters and documents, some of which are “highly confidential”. on political or foreign policy issues”, such as the Middle East, Russia or terrorism. If so, it would justify the CNI breaking into her apartment in Monaco, as she claims, to take her away. This is counterpointed by the testimony of her first husband, who describes her as “overambitious” and says that she longed to “be part of the aristocracy”. She was about to achieve it and married the King of Spain, but an elephant stood in her way.
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