"Eet ees Deesgosting!"

Ever since 1875 when Emperor Franz Josef shook his royal britches to the tune of the Afro-Cuban habanera, the world has imported a remarkably large part of its popular music from Cuba. But only in recent years has this import business mushroomed into a sizable industry. Captain of that industry today is a black-haired, rather chinless band leader, Xavier Cugat (rhymes with glue pot), who gets an annual gross of $500,000 purveying the Cuban rumba and other Latin-American rhythms to the U.S. public. Last week Importer Cugat was at the peak of his career.

He was finishing off his eleventh annual engagement at Manhattan's swank Waldorf-Astoria. His latest Hollywood musical, You Were Never Lovelier (starring onetime Cugat Dancer Rita Cansino, now known as Rita Hayworth), had just finished its second hit week on Broadway. The rumba business was booming loudly.

Stocky, shrewd Xavier Cugat's secret lies not so much in the importing as in the processing of his hip-cajoling products. A master showman, on state occasions he waves a baton three times as long as Toscanini's. He dresses his men in lustrous Cuban silks and colored lights. His music, tinted to the romantic debutante's taste, features Latin violins rather than brasses. It contains just enough subtle tropical pounding and gourd rattling to give it pith, not enough to ruffle the polite suavity of an expensive hot spot. Four weeks ago Cugat added a mixed chorus of twelve singers to his ensemble, let them breathe discreet wordless harmonies over the throbbing of the band.

So successful has Xavier Cugat become as a salesman of their music that Latin Americans regard him as one of their most important cultural ambassadors. The gratified Cuban Government has awarded him the Order of Honor & Merit of the Cuban Red Cross, with the rank of Commander.

This promoter of Pan-American good will was born, 42 years ago, in Barcelona, Spain, where he started as a conventional, long-haired concert violinist. After fiddling for five years as a concert side show to the late, great Enrico Caruso, Cugat settled in Los Angeles, where he made a high-toned debut as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. When the critics failed to rave, Cugat gave up the violin in disgust, took a job as a cartoonist on the Los Angeles Times.

The regular hours of newspaper work soon got on Cugat's nerves. That was in 1928 when Paul Whiteman was still King of Jazz. No jazzman, Cugat realized that he could not compete with Afro-Saxons on their own ground. So he bravely cultivated a little Afro-Latin plot of his own. With a rumba orchestra of six, he opened at Los Angeles' Cocoanut Grove.

It took a long time before rumbas caught on with Los Angeles' dancing public. Professional Cuban dancers, featured on Cugat's programs, frightened the average nightclubber with the intricacy and speed of their steps. Shrewd Xavier Cugat gradually slowed up the professionals, lured the amateurs to try a step or two. After five years of spade work, he had made Los Angeles the most rumbatic of U.S. cities, and Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria beckoned with a fat contract.

Today "Coogie," as his musicians call him, is one of the busiest men in the U.S. Between Waldorf-Astoria performances he broadcasts on CBS's Camel Caravan hour and over short wave to South America. Between musical performances he keeps up his cartooning, adding steadily to a file of some 15,000 sketches. He has a contract for cover cartoons for the American Weekly, another with King Features Syndicate for caricatures of celebrities. Says he: "I 'ave time to do all zees because I hate tennis, golf, cards, and, at the moment, I own only one dog."

Like many another busy man, Coogie fondly hopes some day to get away from it all. He likes to pretend that his home is Mexico City, where he owns a handsome house. But Coogie's real home is a crowded suite in the Waldorf-Astoria, where he lives with his wife, Carmen Castillo, who sometimes sings with the band, and his niece, Dancer and Cinemactress Margo, who has also appeared with her uncle. Coogie has not been near his Mexican Shangri-La in two years. Says he: "Eet ees deesgosting!"

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