On The Brady Brunch Hour, 1976, via YouTube

January 15, 1951 – Charo:

“Cuchi-Cuchi has taken me all the way to the bank.”

If for some reason you’re not familiar with her, Charo is a pop culture oddity who appeared on television talk shows and variety hours seemingly all the time in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The host would snicker at her mangled English, she would do some sort of high-octane dance number or musical performance, and the audience would roar and leave her with thunderous applause. Throughout each segment, she would repeat her catchphrase: Cuchi-cuchi!

Yet, Charo is so much more than just her double cuchi, she has one of the weirdest and coolest backstories ever. Born in Spain as María del Rosario Mercedes Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza (I am typing that for the last time), as a kid she studied classical guitar and was mentored by one of the greatest musicians, Andres Segovia. She also may or may not have gotten married when she was 13 years old.

Today, Charo is better known for her amazing wigs and crazy behavior, and most people probably don’t know that she is an insanely talented flamenco guitarist. Because she became famous primarily as a Latin sex bomb, I suppose it’s not surprising that her musical talents were overlooked in favor of her other talents.

Gay people loved her right away and she became a Camp Icon. She made an appearance on Pee Wee Herman‘s 1988 Christmas show, the best holiday special of all time. She has even been “done” on RuPaul’s Drag Race, where she has also appeared as a guest twice.

She gyrated her first cuchi-cuchi in the 1960s, thrusting her considerable bosom forward like a demented chicken. Today, many women of her age, whatever it is (her birth year is unclear), couldn’t manage it, but Charo’s amazing physique and stamina just doesn’t stop.

Like so many other Gay Icons in showbiz, including Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford, Charo knew what she wanted, and she went out and grabbed it (and not by the pussy).

As a young convent girl and guitar student from a farm in Murcia, Spain, she somehow managed to get herself to America, and, in 1966, to become the fifth wife of fabled Latin bandleader Xavier Cugat, despite their 40-year age difference. Charo claimed that Cugat was “a mentor”, and that their marriage was a business arrangement, with separate apartments, that allowed her to work in clubs even though she was underage. They divorced in 1978, when, she said: “I reached an age when I started dating.”

With Cugat in 1966, photograph via Wikimedia Commons

She appeared with him and alone on The Ed Sullivan Show several times in the late 1960s. In Las Vegas, Charo initially performed with her husband and later developed her own nightclub act. At one point in the 1970s, she was out-earning Frank Sinatra in Vegas.

She is a versatile performer, but she was always most in demand as the sassy Latina with the bubbly personality and bombshell looks.

She continues to tour with her act, still plays Vegas, and performs with symphony orchestras around the USA.

She had a dance hit in 2008 with her single España Cañi, and performed an amazing version of Rihanna‘s Don’t Stop The Music at the 2009 Muscular Dystrophy Association Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon. In April 2010, she made a special guest appearance on Dancing With The Stars, and in 2011, she made an appearance on Watch What Happens: Live promoting a new song, Sexy! Sexy! Summer 2017, Charo played “The Queen of England” in the film Sharknado 5: Global Swarming.

Charo also teamed up with World of Wonder to produce the video for España Cañí: Dance, Don’t Bullfight. The video is her protest against bullfighting, which is still practiced across Spain and Latin America. Charo, like Pamela Anderson, Paul McCartney, Stephen Rutledge, and Pink, is a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and speaks out against animal cruelty.

So, here is the thing with her age. It doesn’t matter because she is ageless, but official documents from Spain say she was born in 1941. Later on, she claimed she was born in 1947, then 1949. In 1977, following the divorce from Cugat, Charo claimed the age on her passport was wrong and she was born in 1951. A U.S. judge supported her claim. Who knows? Do we care?

PBS via YouTube

Charo has long been an ally of the LGBTQ community, openly embracing her LGBTQ fan base. She was the Grand Marshal of the San Francisco Pride Parade in 2008, and rode on a pink float surrounded by lovely Charo drag queens. She enjoyed a close friendship with both Paul Lynde and Liberace. She stayed with Liberace during the mid-1980s, when his other “friends” fled when they learned he had AIDS.

“To me, a gay actually is a greater person because they have an extra sense that a straight person doesn’t. Look into history. For centuries, the greatest painters, composers, historians are gay! And the reason must be because they’re extra sensitive. When I am composing music, I swear to you I hold the guitar close to my heart and close my eyes because I put all my senses into each note. I think gays have an extra sense. Heterosexuals have five. Gays have six. I admire that. When I need an opinion I call my gay friends and ask what do you think of this? If they say, ‘Charo, it sucks’, I drop it. If they love it, I go ahead.”

She has been voted Best Classical Flamenco Guitarist in the World by Guitar Player magazine, winner of a Billboard International Latin Music Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, and honored with the proclamation of “Charo Week” from the City of San Francisco.

Glamorous, goofy, talented, fearless, and all-out fun, Charo is our kind of Gay Icon. Watch her below with World Of Wonder’s own James St. James: