Playing It Straight

On the screen, Cantinflas is Latin America's perpetual Poor Soul, who stumbles from woe to woe in a series of pratfalls. As Phileas Fogg's spirited gentleman's gentleman, he blundered merrily Around the World in 80 Days. Mario Moreno, as Cantinflas is known in private life, bears little resemblance to the helpless clown with the split mustache. He is one of the richest men in Mexico, with an income of something like $350,000 a year, lives like a potentate in five homes attended by a staff of 18 servants. He flies his own DC-3, has a private bull ring, and collects the rent from three Mexico City office buildings. Yet Cantinflas never quite forgets the character he plays. He is the softest touch in Mexico, dispensing thick wads of bills to practically everyone who comes his way.

Maternity Clinic. Cantinflas will not say, but friends estimate that he doles out nearly $175,000 a year. Each morning, when he is in Mexico City, long lines of people queue up at his door. He reads some 500 letters a month asking for help, and often replies with a check. He is one of Mexico's biggest contributors to the Roman Catholic Church and its charities, and when hurricane, flood or pestilence hits any part of the country, Cantinflas is always one of the first contributors.

Three years ago, he bought a 1,000-acre ranch called La Purisima, 70 miles northwest of Mexico City, and decided to raise fighting bulls for Mexico's bull rings. The ranch has cost Cantinflas $1,200,000 to date, and a good bit of it has gone to make life easier for the ranch hands and peasants in the surrounding countryside. He tripled the wages of his workers (to 12 pesos daily), built a church and model homes for his 50-man ranch crew, added a maternity clinic. Treatment is free to all local campesinos. Abuilding at La Purisima are a 70-pupil school and a drugstore where his workers will get medicines free of charge and local peasants can buy at wholesale prices.

And Free Meat. Worried about the peasants' sparse diet, Cantinflas recently opened a butcher shop to which he donates free meat. "When I heard that the campesinos of the region and my own workers eat meat maybe once a year, I decided to have this service at the ranch.

One head of cattle doesn't mean anything to me. But it is life for these people." Cantinflas doggedly insists that one day La Purisima will turn a profit, but it will be four years before his first fighting bull is ready for a test in some small provincial arena. Meantime, the ranch's only income is a paltry $160 a day from tne milk of 168 Swiss and Holstein cows.

The losses do not bother Cantinflas. "I have lots of money," he says. "I was born in the slums, and I lived in the slums until I was practically a man. I know what poverty is."

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