Marina Zucchi
04/12/2021 6:01 AM
Clarín.com
stories
Updated 04/12/2021 8:20 AM
A green Mercedes Benz 608 bus rattles on the asphalt.
The machine returns to the Buenos Aires capital from the Buenos Aires district of Necochea, with Luis Miguel as a child on board.
The Mendoza friend Ángel Leopoldo Martínez, for all "Polo", escorts with his Falcon and suddenly sees "that coffee maker" parked on the edge of Provincial Route 88. The musicians signal for help.
Polo opens the door of his car and more than half a dozen people squeeze in to continue on the road like contortionists.
It is 1982, Argentina on the stick,
the group ran out of diesel.
Pergamino (220 kilometers from the city of Buenos Aires), weeks later.
Luismi has a fever, he huddles in the bus, but Luis Rey, his father, warns him that the word malaise does not exist for an artist.
The boy with the wide teeth seems to stagger, warns that he is nauseous, but arrives and takes the stage.
Touring companion Polo looks and can't believe the art of the blond gurrumín to hide his indisposition.
"A bestial show" that leaves the tyrant father happy.
There was a time when the diminutive Luis Miguel Gallego Basteri
ate at Fechoría, received corridor advice from the clerk Prato Murphy, harangued students who were trying to open the chest of happiness, and
did TV duets with Diana María.
Times when he received a flood of invitations to ItalPark and said "no" to the "madness" that Alejandro Romay was proposing to him from the dove channel: a series about his life.
Luis Miguen enl Necochea with a small Argentine fan.
The purest Micky returns us a photo of Argentina:
shows on the ATC terrace with the newly born Alfonsinist democracy, walks through Tucumán aboard a Fiat 600, camouflaged getaways to Pumper Nic.
Meanwhile, his father seemed to push him to sexual awakening by bringing him the magazines of the moment, with Adriana Brodsky and Noemí Alan as the goddesses of Argentine uncovering.
The fans gave him Tubby 3 and Tubby 4. The costumes forced him to shoulder pads.
The producers of
Saturdays of Goodness
advised him to repeat that he was looking for an "Argentine girlfriend."
The construction of the empire also had its national leg, with the producers Marcelo Serantoni and Roberto Fontana at the head.
"It all started in 1982, when my father met and ended up becoming friends with Luis Rey. At that time, my father produced
Sábado de todos,
on Channel 7, with Leonardo Simons conducting. He was a partner of Roberto Fontana, and
Luis Rey takes him to my father had a cassette for him to listen to. The cassette would have been in a drawer for a few months in my house in Villa Urquiza, my old man had singers' material rained on him "
, says Pablo Serantoni, son of the late Marcelo Serantoni.
Luis Miguel with Argentine producer Marcelo Serantoni (in the middle) and Luis Rey.
(Photo: Gentle Serantoni family)
"One day they take him to a rehearsal to meet him, and they make him debut in the program. His first presentation.
From there he continues to Saturdays of Goodness and later to Finalísima. At the same time, they organize tours of Villa Gesell clubs, San Bernardo and Mardel
. I was a boy and I remember that tour, he in a group and us behind, in a golden Taunus Ghia ", continues Serantoni, current producer of the
Saturday Passion
cycle
.
"The band, three or four local musicians, would go down, but he stayed on the bus eating alone, he was lonely and hermetic like today. Impossible not to see that he was going to be what he is: he had a voice, charisma, magic, he looks."
One hundred people in the seaside resort of Mar Chiquita, a few closer to that radius of action.
The prehistory of success was a craft.
He charged in pesos.
Lean cows, fat aspirations.
Every kilometer was his mutual fund to the top.
Like a piggy bank of future fame, no city was thrown away.
Protecting Luis Miguel
"I saved Luis Miguel from the gangs in Mar del Plata in the early eighties
.
This is how our friendship was born
,
" says
Polo, the Argentine friend of El Sol de México.
The same one who would later help him when the group was stranded, was managing the Riviera de La Feliz hotel when Luismi stayed for the first time in that city, in the Provincial.
"At that time the gangs that attacked the galancitos were famous. Violent boys who for sport went out to hit. I saw him leave the hotel, so small, and I asked the group that accompanied him where they were going: 'We took him to the plaza to make a note. 'I warned them not to do it, they walked a few meters and what I said happened.
They brought him running, I managed to cover him, they beat me a little and I put him protected by the Provincial. So we started a bond. "
Polo's photos certify the different stages of that friendship.
Radiolandia 2000, TV Guía, Semanario
, are some of the publications that have them together on airplanes, on landings, at parties.
Polo remembers the promotional strategies of the beginning: they made Luis Miguel get on a fire truck to enter some cities
and attract the attention of the neighbors.
At the Fechoría restaurant: the representative Ricardo Berbari, Luis Miguel and Polo Martínez.
Born on February 23, 1948, today the Press Secretary for Commercial Employees, Polo took the Luismi in training to see Les Luthiers at the Coliseum.
Or accompanied him in minimal presentations such as in the Plaza de Cosquín, Córdoba.
They are also seen in photos in Fechoría toasting with the first manager, Ricardo Berbari.
"His father had a deep fear of the change of voice when he grew up.
They got along badly, he was jealous of me and others. Until once Luis got fed up and told me:
'When I'm 16 I'm going to separate from my dad and I'm going to come find you to help me
. '
What place did your mother occupy by then (she later disappeared, in 1986)?
"She did not intervene in the artistic life, she traveled little, she stayed in Mexico taking care of the other children. Luis Miguel missed her horrors. I had little contact with her, I sent her a bouquet of flowers to Luna Park in that famous show in which her son He sings to him. He thanked me and we spoke little in the previous one. Later,
when Luismi referred to his mother he repeated 'may God have her in glory'. He
said that his father had taken the secret to the grave ".
Exchanges and adventures
"I was managing the promotion of Parchís in Argentina when the director of Emi Odeón came and told me:
'You have to give a handle to a little Mexican who sang at the wedding of the daughter of the President of Mexico, José López-Portillo'
I refused, but the story ended as nobody imagined, "boasts the journalist Cacho Rubio, a witness to those first years of innocence.
"I was fine with Parcheesi, I was earning more than I was spending, and the executive told me: 'Let's have lunch at the Costanera, tell the father about it.' There I meet Luisito Rey and he asks me,
'Don't you like money? ? 'I answered yes, but that I was not a supermarket that sold everything. Until he convinced me:' I'm going to pay you double '"
.
Luis MIguel in "Everyone's Saturday".
Cacho - "godson" of Pepe Parada and Gerardo Sofovich-, an iconic character with more than half a century linked to show business, ended up glued to "Los Luises" and Uncle Mario (Luis Rey's brother) trying to install the promise in his head of the Argentines.
"I put together the radio program Micky's Club, by Splendid. It lasted about two months.
We lived in the Bauen, in the Elevage. And I dressed it in leather, I got a trade with a store that no longer exists, called Mimo. Because he had told me that he liked Sandro. "
Little Luismi
loved the sunsets in the port of Olivos.
Cacho says that he took him to clear his head in his Peugeot 405. He also says that he then followed the clan through Brazil and Ecuador and settled for a time in Mexico, as a regular at the Las Lomas de Chapultepec house.
The initial Argentinian pilgrimage included dinners with full entertainment, meals also in Los años locos and Edelweiss, and even outings to clubs with Luis Rey.
"We left Micky playing pool because he was a minor," warns the Aptra member.
Luis Miguel and his side the journalist Cacho Rubio.
"In confidence, once Luis Rey told me that his son had been sired in Mar del Plata and had been born in Puerto Rico, at that time no one knew he was Puerto Rican. And
Marcela asked me please not to spread the information that I had. the husband had given it, because it was an atomic bomb.
I kept quiet and years later the issue exploded, the Mexicans felt disappointed, but I never broke the pact. "
What were Basteri and Rey doing in Mar del Plata in 1970?
The couple's connection to Argentina was permanent.
The Italian Sergio Basteri, Luis Miguel's grandfather, had arrived in Buenos Aires in 1947. He had left his daughter Marcela and his wife Vanda in Italy.
Vanda got tired of waiting for him and established a bond with another man. Little Marcela ended up living in a children's home, but years later her father brought her to Buenos Aires.
The beaches of Mar del Plata were the usual paradise for her.
Diana María, link between father and son
The Argentine singer and songwriter Diana María treasures the video in which she makes a duet with this little boy who is just over a meter and a half tall and wearing white boots.
He was singing on
Everyone's Saturday,
presented by Simons
,
when Luismi joined him one afternoon to sing
Feelings.
As a singing teacher, she was perplexed: "He was an impressive artist at 13 years old. I couldn't believe that he was at an age that mastery of the body, that voice, that tuning, that security. And that in what is called 'descending intervals 'had extraordinary precision. "
Diana had met Luis Rey in the late 1960s, on Channel 9, in a musical program produced by the son of the poet Homero Manzi, Acho Manzi
.
Both part of the stable cast, they became great companions while he tried to make his artistic path on the Argentine screen.
"He had conditions, he was seductive, he had a great figure and perhaps later he projected, he wanted to crystallize his dream of success in his son"
, deduces Diana.
Luis Miguel presented by Leonado Simons.
For 1986, Diana met "Micky" again, in Viña del Mar. Jury of the contest, she saw the vertiginous growth of the artist, who on that occasion was no longer supervised by his father.
For 1991, there was a third crossing.
It was in
Finalísima,
again on channel 9. Luis Miguel was hiding a pain at that time (the search for his mother).
"He woke me up that feeling of wanting to be his mother, to protect him.
From a distance, I think he was too small to be so dazzling."
First times and censorship
When the boy born in Puerto Rico but promoted as Mexican (the great secret that ended up being revealed years later) tried his luck in the country, democracy had not yet returned.
I had just recorded
1 + 1 = 2 lovers
.
That was the debut studio album, which had been released by EMI Music in January 1982.
Two years after that Buenos Aires ant job (and after the infallible release of
Directo al corazón
), Luismi had the turn of Luna Park, and then Opera.
The show on Saturday March 16, 1985 at the temple of the box marked the last time her mother was seen in public.
The video, repeated ad nauseam in Latin America, shows him inviting her to come up on stage for the tribute.
With an almost adult voice, he sings the song
Marcela.
The attention of the Argentine media at that time was all on another matter: President Raúl Alfonsín was meeting in Washington with Ronald Reagan.
Cacho Rubio, the journalist who negotiated with Luis Miguel's father, Luis Rey, to promote him in Argentina.
Another pearl of Argentine video library is the video that shows Silvio Soldán asking a secretary from
Feliz Domingo
to sing the theme
Decide
for "Micky"
.
The teenager tries to refine, but is ashamed of what they ask her to sing:
the song had been censored in some corners of Mexico for sexualizing minors.
In other countries the original lyrics were changed, referring to a first sexual encounter.
We were left alone / They all left / And in my room there was hardly any light in one corner / I took off your dress / I kissed you on the mouth / But you didn't want to / Give me everything one more time
.
Make up your mind, I know well that it is the first time / For me it is also new and I want it to be with you.
Luis was just 13 years old when he popularized that song.
Some parents called the radios to ask to remove "the indecency" of those curtains.
Luis Miguel with Silvio Soldán in "Happy Sunday"
When did that little boy study who got off airplanes to get on the buses and got off the stage to continue getting on airplanes?
"There was no teacher in sight in Argentina,"
admits Rubio.
Luis Miguel had already dropped out of school to have a private teacher.
First a certain Tomás (later replaced by Professor Lourdes Servín).
The books were not intended as "first necessity" in that chaotic scheme that was his childhood / youth life.
By 1985, when he achieved his first Grammy and shared a gala with Michael Jackson, the relationship with Argentina was already fluid.
Channel 9 was like his home.
Hours after that event, Romay interviews him for Nuevediario.
"Welcome Luisito Miguel. I feel you like a son
", is heard in that lost tape on YouTube.
"Luismi" arriving in Argentina in 1983.
The nineties had a less romantic tinge, far from the suburban bodies, from the modesty, from the problematic communications of Entel.
Luismi was already driving by private plane, he enjoyed caviar with champagne, luxury dinners in Puerto Madero with Zulemita Menem, tennis matches with Gabriela Sabatini.
The crowds were beginning to be his enemies.
Polo Martínez says that
a LM expedition through the Bombonera left him "trembling": They took him camouflaged to a game, but he didn't like football and I didn't want to accompany him because I'm from River.
He couldn't believe all the screaming and he came out half scared. "
"I would prepare 40 kilos of meat for her and take them on the plane so she could have Argentine meat, which she liked so much. We had a very close time,
she introduced me to Mariah Carey in Aspen, then she walked her through Quilmes when she did a show in 1999 . I got to buy the Evatest for Aracely Arámbula
. We lived together in her old house in Acapulco. "
Why is such a close bond severed sharply?
"Then I sponsored Alejandro Sanz, whom he generously asked me to help. Maybe he got jealous."
For Polo, a resident of Saavedra, not everything was fun.
The relationship peppered him with bitter trances.
"They came to believe
the myth that their mother was hiding in my house. A few years ago they took photos of the front, of the employee, and I had to make the police report.
It turned out that it was a foreign medium who believed that Basteri was hidden in my home, "adds the man who misses that blondie in the photos who smiles unapologetically in Necochea, hours before his bus runs out of gas.
