Lovers' Lamenter

Every seat in Mexico City's ornate Bellas Artes palace was filled, and outside hundreds waited vainly to get in. On the stage, the country's top entertainers trooped to the microphone to sing and play in a two-hour broadcast over Mexico's 254 radio stations. All of the 50-odd songs they sang were the work of a gaunt, sad-eyed, scar-faced wisp of a man who watched from the wings. His name: Agustin Lara, who was celebrating the 25th anniversary of his career as Mexico's and Latin America's favorite composer.

Agustin Lara has been called Mexico's Irving Berlin, though the parallel is more in output and popularity than in mood.* Inimitably latino, Lara is a composer of melancholy love songs who now single-mindedly says: "Woman is the reason for my existence." Since, like Berlin, he can neither read nor write music, he pecks out his tunes on a piano and lets others set them down. In this fashion he has written some 600 songs of love, of whispered reproach and moaning despair.

For Pesos, for Passion. Revolutionary adventure attracted Lara briefly; at 16, he left home to campaign with Pancho Villa. Back in the capital after a year of it, and hungry, he got a job playing the piano in a brothel, was soon steeped in the smoky atmosphere of the dives of the Barrio de San Miguel--Mexico's Montmartre. The secrets the girls told him in idle hours he phrased in songs. One night, as he broke off playing his new song Rosa, a buxom beauty named Yoland pulled a knife from her garter, slashed his face from mouth to ear, then knelt at his feet shrieking for forgiveness. Soon after, Lara wrote Woman ("You have in your look the passion that fascinates"), a smash hit that lifted him from the brothels to the best bistros of Mexico and South America.

He wrote music for revues at the Teatro Lirico, and in 1932 began croaking his own songs in an immensely popular radio program. Lara became a kind of musical version of Rudolph Valentino. Touring neighboring republics, he was mobbed by women in the streets. After quarreling with his actress-wife, Carmen Zozoya, Lara met Movie Star Maria Felix just before a party in honor of her first big picture. "Please come, Senor Lara," cooed Maria. "But I warn you that we have no piano. Just a guitar." Next day he sent her a snow-white piano and a card inscribed: "With all my respect to beauty, Agustin Lara." They were married in 1946.

For Tears, for Tributes. Their honeymoon in Acapulco inspired Maria Bonita ("Remember those nights in Acapulco, Maria of my soul?"). She called him "My Skinny" (Lara says he weighs 120 Ibs. "with an overcoat on"). He rained minks, Cadillacs and diamonds on Maria. But the rising young star was hard to hold, and they were divorced in 1947, leaving Lara heartbroken. He told friends: "I love Maria too much . . . Rather than kill her I prefer to divorce her."

The hollow-cheeked Lara still lives his legend, tapping out tunes,for arrangers to orchestrate, keeping up his floor show at the Capri nightclub and his Lirico revues. His soft piano-playing in a darkened room with a single soft light playing on his pinched face is still the most irresistible thing in Mexican entertainment. The royalties roll in, and he spends them expertly.

Few men have ever heard such tributes to themselves as Lara did through his week-long anniversary. Five ex-Presidents of Mexico sent messages of congratulation. President Ruiz Cortines embraced the troubador, 53 this week, and said: "Work for Mexico, Agustin." Lara went from Mexico City to Veracruz and then on to Cordoba, traveling along whole blocks of flower-covered streets lined with schoolchildren while factory whistles blew and bells tolled. Last week, overflowing with Mexico's adulation, he pursued his lovelorn triumphal path to Havana.

* In the U.S., outside of a few Spanish-American centers, Lara's songs are little known. Two exceptions: You Belong to My Heart (1943) and Granada, recorded by Bing Crosby and Mario Lanza.

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