Mexican Meistersinger

"Since I shave every blessed day," Agustin Lara once remarked, "I have long ago learned from my mirror that my face has no business before a camera. But since people have a morbid curiosity about things that do not concern them, a film on my life--no matter how wretchedly done--would be sure to fill the movie houses."

In Mexico City last week movie houses were packed by a wretched distortion of the life of Agustin Lara. Called Noches de Ronda ("Nights of Revelry"), it was a pale, sentimental story of a cafe musician's rise to radio fame. The face in the film was not the pinched, knife-scarred face of Lara, Mexico's most popular songwriter. The producers had taken one look at that and decided to give the role to the handsome singer Ramon Armengod. But what drew throngs to the box office was Lara's fantastic personal reputation and that of his 800 fevered, insinuating songs.

Lara's real life would make a movie to remember. Brought up in Coyoacan by a spinster aunt, he spent a rather solitary childhood writing poetry and tinkling at the piano. He attended a military school and, before he was 19, fought with Pancho Villa. Mustered out, he went to Mexico City and began his musical career as a whorehouse pianist. Today many of his songs reveal an intimate knowledge of bordello sentiment. Another permanent acquisition was a deep knife gash running upward from the left corner of his mouth. After witnessing a shooting affair which left one woman dead and several wounded, Lara decided to move up the social scale.

Intimate Hour. He got four pesos a day in a cafe, where he married the cashier. His playing attracted a well-known singer named Maruca Perez, and Lara moved on to the famous El Retiro restaurant near the bull ring. He began writing music for revues at the Teatro Lirico, in 1932 was signed by Mexico's leading radio station for a program well named the Hora Intima, This has become Mexico's most popular radio feature.

"Some of my songs," says Lara, "are the fruit of inspiration, some of hunger." Only a few of the 800 are top-notch Lara. But these combine a distinctive Latin melodic gift with true poetic quality. With a kind of soft, confessional stridency, little hollow-eyed Lara whispers his songs to the women of Mexico. He pictures them in brothels, on their knees beside confessionals, in the arms of lovers, in frustrated spinsterdom. He is by turns caressing and despondent, lunar and neurotic.

In actuality, 43-year-old Lara takes a rather objective view of women. He divorced his wife a decade ago and has since lived alone in a luxurious rented house in Mexico City's suburb of Chapultepec. He affects Byronic collars, horn rimmed harlequin spectacles, and usually looks fatigued. He is proud of a sumptuous gold hand-carved wrist watch given him last New Year's by President Avila Camacho. Its twin was presented to President Roosevelt.

When Lara visited the pre-Olympic meets in San Salvador in 1935, the head lines declared: "Agustin Lara arrived, accompanied by Mexico's Minister of the Interior." Last week Agustin Lara was hard at work on a job which seemed a natural for him -- a theme song for Lupe Velez' Mexican film appearance as Emile Zola's celebrated prostitute, Nana.

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