Charo is much more than a punch line
We have to go up to the pink room, Charo insists. “Right now! Let’s go!”
It’s pink, all right, with a little round platform perfect for Charo to strike pose after pose, thrusting her hips, shaking that famous mane of cascading curls and bangs, and squealing the catchphrase she has taken all the way to the bank: “Cuchi cuchi!”
That’s how Charo welcomed a reporter and photographer into her stately Beverly Hills, Calif., home recently. It turns out the pink room is Charo’s playground. Sparkling with sequins from candy-colored dresses with billowing skirts and short hemlines, it’s the Technicolor background to the Spanish entertainer’s long and surprisingly durable career.
Throughout four decades, Charo has evolved from fixture on Johnny Carson and other talk shows and Las Vegas headliner to featured actress on “The Love Boat” and, more recently, a guest star in movies and on reality shows. At 66 (some reports suggest she’s older), she occupies an odd place in pop culture: legend and punchline.
Charo is no dumb blonde — she just plays one, and it’s not a stretch to say that as a woman who first charmed American audiences in the 1970s, she opened doors for Latina actresses such as Sofia Vergara, Salma Hayek and Eva Longoria.
She has returned to TV in recent years, including “Celebrity Wife Swap,” and this year she appeared on “Dancing With the Stars” and portrayed the Queen of England in “Sharknado 5: Global Swarming.”
Charo doesn’t know when she became the caricature that she has been keen to play up, nor does she care. She’d rather talk about her music. As a young girl, Charo studied guitar in Spain under Andres Segovia, a giant of modern classical guitar. She has released several albums since the ’70s and plays guitar for at least three hours every day. Charo has a new album, “Guitar on Fire,” coming out soon.
Born in Spain (her full name is Maria del Rosario Mercedes Pilar Martinez Molina Baeza), she came to the United States in the mid-1960s on a temporary student visa but was a minor and couldn’t work. She went back to Spain and returned with a work visa. While still in her teens, she was discovered by Xavier Cugat, the Spanish-born bandleader who was pivotal in popularizing Latin music in the U.S. in the 1950s. Cugat was in his 60s when he married a teenaged Charo. She maintains the marriage was a business arrangement, a way for her to enter this country legally. “Whatever you read about him, he was a gentleman and a half and a best friend,” she says.
Charo lives with Kjell Rasten, her Swedish husband of nearly 40 years.
Charo opened doors for Latina actresses such as Sofia Vergara, Salma Hayek and Eva Longoria.