Paco Miller

Paco Miller and Don Roque, backstage and dressed for the house. Photo: Ventriloquist Central Blog.

Nobody in Mexico called him Edmundo. He was born Edmundo Jijón Serrano in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 1909, and by the time he'd made his name across the Spanish-speaking world, almost nobody remembered that either.^[3] He was Paco Miller: ventriloquist, impresario, and the man attached at the elbow to a wooden figure named Don Roque. Pull up a chair. This one takes you from Guayaquil to Mexico City by way of the Dominican Republic, and it ends with a figure Miller wouldn't sell to David Copperfield.

A figure from a cartoonist and a carpenter

Don Roque didn't come from a figure-making shop. He came from a comic strip. A cartoonist named Miguel Ángel Gómez drew him first, and a carpenter named N. Cruz carved him second, and between the two of them Miller had a partner built the way a great deal of Mexican ventriloquism apparently got built: by people who weren't figure makers by trade, doing the job because somebody needed a figure and knew how to use a knife.^[1][2]

Here's the detail that matters if you care about the craft, not just the act. Don Roque's only two movements were the jaw and raised eyebrows, and that pairing turns out to be a Mexican standard, not an accident.^[1] American and British figures of the era paired the jaw with the eyes or a winker. Mexico, going by the record this corpus has found so far, standardized on eyebrows instead. That's a whole national school of figure mechanics sitting inside one offhand sentence in an old tribute page, and as far as I know nobody's written the fuller history yet. Somebody should.

One more thing while we're on names. Valentine Vox's own ventriloquism history book prints the figure's name as "Don Rogue." It's wrong. Ask any serious collector of the Mexican material and they'll tell you straight: it's Don Roque, no "g."^[2] And the figure was good enough that David Copperfield reportedly tried to buy him off Miller for what's described as amazing money. Miller said no. He loved that figure too much to sell him at any price.^[2] I respect a man who knows what isn't for sale.

The Million Dollar Theatre, 1959

We don't have to guess what Miller's act looked like, because a fellow ventriloquist named Fred Ketch caught it live at the Million Dollar Theatre in Los Angeles in 1959 and wrote it up for the Oracle, the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists' own magazine. Ketch didn't speak Spanish and he still knew what he was watching: "Perfect lip control without looking stone faced. Works relaxed and easy."^[4]

Miller had two spots on the bill that night. He opened with a small figure, singing a couple of songs, and closed the whole show fifth, with Don Roque parked on his knee: "a mature character with short cropped whiskers and somewhat exaggerated head. He works aggressively with Paco, and at the same time can soften up."^[4] The whole act ran in Spanish. The MC made the mistake of introducing him as "the old Don Roque," and Don Roque spent the top of the routine bawling the man out for it, right there in front of the house.^[4] Then Miller closed the night singing "Laugh Clown Laugh" translated straight into Spanish, and Ketch, who didn't understand a word of the language the act was performed in, still caught every bit of the feeling in it.^[4] That's not a small thing. A ventriloquist who can move an audience that doesn't share his language is a ventriloquist who has the fundamentals down cold.

Don Roque himself had a stock line he'd throw at anybody who crossed him: "¡Le rajo la cara a cualquiera!" A tough-guy threat, played for laughs: roughly, "I'll slash anyone's face!"^[8] A blustering little wooden man who talks tough and means none of it. That's most of this art in one catchphrase.

The impresario

Here's where Miller stops being just a working ventriloquist and starts being something rarer: a man who could spot talent in other people and hand it to them. In 1943 he took a young performer named Germán Valdés into his touring company and gave him a new name: Tin Tán.^[3][7] Valdés went on to become one of the biggest comedy stars in the history of Mexican film. It's a genuinely remarkable thing for a ventriloquist to have his name attached to, and near as this corpus can tell, it's one of the strongest single connections between the ventriloquism world and mainstream Latin American entertainment on record.

Miller wasn't done. Touring the Dominican Republic for La Voz Dominicana's anniversary celebrations, he discovered a young Mexican singer named Imelda Mézquita Pérez and put her onstage as Imelda Miller. She took his surname professionally at around eighteen years old. The two were partners for a stretch, never married, and eventually went their separate ways, but she kept performing under the Miller name for the rest of her career.^[7]

And on that same Dominican tour, a law student named Luis Rafael "Lilín" Díaz was working as a radio announcer at La Voz Dominicana and got handed the job of introducing Miller and Don Roque on air, the kind of assignment nobody fought over. It turned into steady work as Don Roque's on-air sparring partner, and Miller himself said Díaz was one of the best interlocutors the figure ever worked with. Díaz later became a well-known sports broadcaster alongside Billy Berroa.^[7] A ventriloquist needs a foil as much as a figure. Miller kept finding good ones and kept sending them off to their own careers.

A cousin figure, not Don Roque himself

Ventriloquist Central's Dan Willinger found this figure decades later and believed, cautiously, that it came from the same maker pair as Don Roque: the same cartoonist-and-carpenter arrangement, the same paper mache and wood construction, the same jaw-and-eyebrows movement. He can't prove it's the same shop. It's the best surviving picture we have of what that whole Mexican school of figure-making looked like.

Photo: Ventriloquist Central

Passed down, and kept working

Miller's son, Edmundo Miller, took up the family trade, and here's the part that gives me chills: there's film of him doing it. In one clip Edmundo works his own figure, Don Lencho. In another, he sits down with Don Roque himself, his father's own partner, and works him.^[5] A named figure, documented on camera in two generations' hands. That's about as good as provenance gets for an object that only means anything when somebody's other hand is inside it.

The man who wouldn't sell his partner

Paco Miller died in Mexico City on December 9, 1997, eighty-eight years old, after very nearly half a century of never being seen without a wooden man on his arm.^[3] He'd worked stages from Guayaquil to Los Angeles to Santo Domingo, launched a couple of careers bigger than his own, and turned down a magician's fortune rather than part with Don Roque. This corpus has almost nothing else on Latin American ventriloquism, and Miller is most of the reason that's starting to change. A cartoonist drew the face, a carpenter cut the wood, and a Mexican ventriloquist spent fifty years proving that in this business, the country doesn't matter. The partnership does.

Two moves, jaw and eyebrows, and Don Roque still out-negotiated David Copperfield. Get his name right too: it's Roque, no g, no matter what Valentine Vox printed. A wooden man with better manners than most contracts.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy