The Improbable Charisma of Walter Mercado (2024)

When Walter Mercado was a boy, in Puerto Rico, a dying bird fell into his yard. He held it and prayed for it, and the bird flapped its wings and started to fly. A neighbor who was watching concluded that Mercado had been given healing powers by the grace of God. Word spread through the village, and people began showing up at his door, begging his mother, “Please, let me see Walter!” She sat the enchanted boy on a special chair, and visitors would line up to touch him. “Then,” Mercado recalled many years later, “I turned into Walter of the Miracles.”

Apocryphal? Perhaps. But the origin story, down to the makeshift throne, befits Mercado, who went on to become Latin America’s preëminent celebrity psychic and an international phenomenon. At his height, in the nineties, he delivered daily horoscopes to a hundred and twenty million viewers on the Univision show “Primer Impacto.” His audiences (“my people,” he called them, Pope-like) anxiously awaited his end-of-year forecasts, and his empire extended to books, radio, and a syndicated newspaper column. But you didn’t have to believe in astrology to see his appeal, which lay mostly in his opulence. With his bejewelled robes, puffy helmet of hair, and taut sorcerer’s face, he was the Latin answer to Liberace: an androgynous peaco*ck who turned campy excess into a form of pop mysticism.

Mercado, who died last November, in his late eighties, is the subject of a new Netflix documentary, “Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado,” directed by Cristina Costantini and Kareem Tabsch. (The title is taken from his trademark sign-off, which came with a kiss blown to the camera.) We find Mercado at his home in San Juan—festooned with candelabra and statuary, but hardly palatial—along with his longtime assistant, Willie Acosta. The obvious question is raised, and then answered: Acosta is “family,” according to Mercado, and Acosta insists, “I have never touched Walter with a finger.” Mercado claims not to have any earthbound sexuality, explaining, “I have sexuality with the wind!” When the filmmakers press him on whether he’s a virgin, he smirks and answers, “The only one in town.”

It’s remarkable that a figure as flamboyant as Mercado permeated a culture so steeped in machismo and Catholicism. His more-is-more aesthetic, like that of Liberace, Little Richard, and Siegfried and Roy, was so outrageous as to inoculate him against traditional gender constraints: he was just Walter, the one and only. He must have known, on some level, that his means of survival was to be less a human and more of an oracle. Gay men who grew up following him on television saw him as a lifeline, someone they could watch alongside closed-minded relatives who just wanted to hear their horoscopes. In “Mucho Mucho Amor,”one interviewee, identified as “Mireya Lucio, Witch,” aptly sums up his singular image: “He has an augmented face that defies gender and maybe even age, and his hair is a hybrid between really good male hair from the seventies and really good, glamorous grandma hair.”

Growing up in Ponce, Mercado had a mother who taught him to embrace his difference. “I decided at that time I’m going to fabricate, to create a famous person in me,” he recalls. He studied dance at the University of Puerto Rico (his flamenco training is evident in his gestural flair) and acted in telenovelas. To promote a play that he was in, he went on television costumed as a Hindu prince and talked astrology. The appearance was so popular—a shock to the senses, one imagines—that in 1969 he was given his own recurring segment, “Walter, Las Estrellas y Usted” (“Walter, the Stars, and You”). A manager named Bill Bakula took him to the big time, turning him into “the prophet of the New Age,” as Mercado says. Bakula, in his telling, helped Mercado cross over into the general market in Europe and then the United States, thanks to well-placed appearances with the likes of Howard Stern (“You’re bigger than Jesus Christ, aren’t you?”) and Sally Jessy Raphael. “I was in the eye of the eagle,” Mercardo says.

But Bakula was also his Judas. In 1995, Mercado signed a contract that gave Bakula’s company full rights to his name, image, likeness, and work, plunging Mercado into a six-year court battle. (One line of the agreement read “The territory shall be the universe,” which presumably included the astral plane.) Two days after Mercado finally won back his brand, he had a heart attack and almost died. He vanished from television in 2006, leaving behind generations of viewers who considered him a touchstone. Among them was Lin-Manuel Miranda, who, when he visited the hurricane-battered Puerto Rico, in January, 2019, to reprise his role in “Hamilton,” sneaked in a meeting with Mercado. “You’re such a light in all of our lives,” he tells Mercado, starstruck. “Increíble.” Millennials, who have led a resurgence in astrology, embraced him as a meme.

The filmmakers must have had a crystal ball, because they managed to capture Mercado in what turned out to be his final year. In the documentary’s sweet climax, the aging oracle, recovering from a fall, travels to Miami in a wheelchair, to be fêted at a museum retrospective of his life. “I’m ready for my closeup,” he says, en route to the opening (he’s too much of a showman to miss the “Sunset Boulevard” of it all), where he emerges on a gold throne, in a matching suit, to a literal fanfare. He left the corporeal realm three months later. The film, enamored of its outré subject, gives only passing consideration to hucksterism—after all, Mercado gave millions of people “hope,” to say nothing of sheer entertainment. Did his astrology come from any sort of expertise? Does any of it? So deep in his own spiritual goop and alive in his Houdini-like ability to mesmerize, Mercado was difficult not to love, in the way that improbable people often are. Like Mister Rogers, another television shaman, he created a kind of alternative church, one he had to build himself so that it could house someone as anomalous as he was.