The brilliance of Charo
After long wrapping her talents in over-the-top persona, musician still going strong, but on her own terms
Charo got her start in America on the casino circuit, and more than 50 years later, she still radiates a neon glow. She remains on a club schedule: Most nights she plays guitar until 2 or 3 in the morning, practicing for her next live gig. Charo’s comedy is very blue, and many of her jokes only become printable when the curse words are shaken into one of her fizzy malapropisms, like “the sheep is going to hit the fence.”
Truthfully, she is tired of that “cuchi-cuchi” sheep — the catchphrase that, paired with a vigorous shimmy, made her famous in the 1960s but also made way for a persistent public underestimation of her talents.
But the real punchline to Charo’s career is that, no matter how hard people try to peg her as “a stupid cuchi-cuchi,” as she put it, she is a virtuosic flamenco and classical guitarist with a singular talent. At her shows, after she sings and gyrates to a set of disco numbers, she slips backstage, emerges in the tuxedo, picks up the guitar and blows everybody’s mind. For years, Charo would diligently practice her guitar every night, even though she was seldom given the opportunity to play.
Charo was born — wait. When was Charo born? Charo’s age is the subject of intense speculation.
Charo says that she was born in 1951, and that she recently celebrated her
71st birthday. But when she first surfaced in America
in the 1960s, on the arm of bandleader Xavier Cugat, the press reported a birth date as far back as 1941. For years, this made Charo the butt of a running joke, where she was cast as a vain celebrity desperate to fool audiences into thinking she was younger than she really was. Charo knows that some people do not believe her so she has rolled the whole thing into her act. “I know what you’re thinking: I saw Charo 257 years ago!” she jokes on-stage. “My secret is that I came to America when my cuchi-cuchi was just a kichi-kichi.”
So: Charo was born in Francoist Spain, in a town called Murcia, as Maria Rosario Pilar Martinez Molina Baeza, though her grandmother instantly dubbed her “Charo,” short for Rosario.
When Charo was 7 years old, the Franco dictatorship terrorized her family, seizing its assets; her father, an attorney and business professor, was run out of the country, and she did not see him for 10 years. Charo found psychological and sometimes literal refuge in music, and at age 9, her family scrounged together the funds for an overnight train to Madrid, where she auditioned to study at a school overseen by guitar legend Andres Segovia.
Charo was the only girl accepted into her class, and “so cocky” that she showed off for Segovia when he was in town; he gave her the Manuel Ramirez guitar that she plays to this day.
As a teen, Charo landed on a children’s television program, a kind of Spanish “Sesame Street.” She was 15 when she caught the eye of the 65-year-old Cugat, who was seeking a new muse and impressed by the girl singing “La Bamba.”
Cugat brought Charo and her sister Carmen Lesher to New York, installed them in a Manhattan apartment with a Cuban chaperone named Maria and brought Charo into his act and onto his arm, a move that generated the desired media spectacle. Charo says she inflated her age on her naturalization papers and her marriage license (she and Cugat tied the knot at Caesars Palace in 1966) to live in America and pass as an adult in casinos. She has since described their marriage as a business arrangement, but it was a business that chiefly enriched Cugat — Charo felt too indebted to him to ask for money of her own.
Charo spoke almost no English when she came to America. She found an English instructor in comedian Buddy Hackett and a publicity coach in Maria, who advised her to flatter male egos, especially Johnny Carson’s. So when she landed on “The Tonight Show,” and she could only guess at the sexual innuendo in Carson’s questions, she nevertheless stood and affirmed him with a resounding “cuchi, cuchi, cuchi!”
“I didn’t understand what he was asking me,” Charo said. But from that day on, “there was no more Charo. People started calling me ‘the cuchi-cuchi girl.’ ”
Charo was a quick study. Cuchi-cuchi worked, so she repeated it until it became a mantra that defined a persona that could not be ignored. Even as “cuchicuchi” reduced her to a catchphrase, it expanded her prospects for an independent entertainment career. She grew into a casino fixture, a pop singer and a television regular, appearing on series like “Chico and the Man” and “The Love Boat,” and was a frequent talk show guest through the ’80s.
And yet there was always something sneaky about Charo’s performances, even as the culture labored to box her in. Her double-entendre malapropisms — “don’t misconscrewme” — suggested a sophisticated command of the English language, and as she worked to build her career, she resisted assimilating to American expectations. When she released “Cuchi-Cuchi,” a 1977 album of dance and pop songs, she fought with the producer to integrate Spanish lyrics throughout the record, which she was told would alienate American pop audiences. She won, and “that was the beginning of Spanglish,” Charo said. “I was a pioneer.” That same year, she divorced Cugat and petitioned a judge to officially recognize her legal birthday as Jan. 15, 1951. She won that battle, too.
When Charo tells the story of her career, it plays like a caper. The uncomfortable details about trauma, displacement, the power imbalance in her marriage, being celebrated as a spectacle — and that for years her rare and precious talent would be persistently overlooked in favor of this image — she dispenses all of this with a forgiving lightness. Never has Charo allowed any of it to weigh her down.
In 1978, Charo married the love of her life, Swedish music producer Kjell Rasten, and in 1981, they had a son, Shel. (Rasten died by suicide in 2019, after suffering from the rare skin disease bullous pemphigoid.) The experience transformed her, as if having a child of her own rekindled her own childhood dream. She looked at herself and said, “What are you doing? You sold out.”
She started booking gigs on her own terms: “I said to everybody, ‘No more cuchi-cuchi. If you invite me, I will play my guitar.’ ” She released her first guitar album, “Guitar Passion,” in 1994, and she has since been twice voted the greatest flamenco guitarist by the readers of Guitar Player magazine.
On a March night, Charo took the stage for the first time in two years, at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. Charo executed a disco-infused routine, singing “Hot, Hot, Hot,” “Chiquitita” and “Fernando,” twirling her arms like an articulated Barbie doll and offering workout tips in between deep squats.
“Now that you know me very well, I will sit down and play my guitar,” Charo announced. She began with “Caliente,” a track from “Guitar Passion,” then transitioned into “Recuerdos de la Alhambra,” a notoriously difficult classical guitar solo piece that creates the illusory sound of falling water. It was an intensely personal song that, she said later, “nobody with a brain would play in a gambling place,” but that she, after decades of practice, was finally ready to perform live, with zero accompaniment. As she played it, she was also playing the story of her career, from the flashy hustle to the sublime payoff.