Ramón LLull Award 2018.
The true American dream was the one that between the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries led multitudes of European citizens from any country: Irish, Italians, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese, English to the new and prosperous North American land.
Among all of them, this book presents the case of Ceferino Carrión, a Spanish stowaway like any other who marched from France to the United States in the late 40s and who in 1950, with his residence already established in Hollywood, became the renowned citizen Jean Leon whose identity he had already adopted some time before in New York itself.
With little more than twenty years, Ceferino had managed to escape the stale and grayish Spanish panorama to carve out one of those destinies only at the height of people with ambition and courage.
This book narrates the sum of strokes of luck that led Jean Leon to rub shoulders with the most select of the celluloid world of those years, the same one that dazzled everyone with his film productions. But in reality, as has always been said, luck is more of a repetition in the dice rolls, a play in which whoever bets something loses and whoever does not bet loses everything.
Falling in grace is not a matter of inertia either ... Jean Leon knew how to adopt the forms and unfold like so many of those idolized characters of the most splendid Hollywood. His friendship with James Dean, until the fatal outcome of the legendary actor, takes on special relevance in the life story of Jean Leon.
The La Scala joint restaurant project began without that illustrious partner. But Jean knew how to give the business prestige and the glory that his own great friend would have deserved. Almost all the great actors and many other personalities of the moment passed through its premises.
I suppose that at times, the remote Ceferino Carrión would remember the cold nights locked in any dark space of a ship, with hardly anything and the only hope of staying alive to set foot on American soil.
He succeeded ... and he only had to cause the magic of luck to accompany him on his fantastic adventure. Jean Leon passed away in 1996 in Los Angeles. His wines continue to evoke the memory of his great life journey ...
You can buy the book The force of a destiny, biography of Jean Leon, written by Marti Gironell, here: