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As Walter Mercado was never famous in Spain, the first thing viewers will think when they watch Mucho mucho amor, the documentary Netflix has just released about the life of the Puerto Rican astrologer, will be something of the type, 'but it is like Rappel!'. Certainly, there is an iconographic pattern full of correspondences between both seers: ostentatious layers embroidered with rhinestones, words of astral affection and seductive prosody, intense gaze and golden fur. The only thing Mercado didn't have was a collection of Elton John-style glasses, but he had plenty of charisma. So the question, in the style of the chicken and the egg, should be asked: who was there before? Did he rappel Walter Mercado, or was it the other way around?

"It may seem that I copied the image of this man," Rappel tells us kindly, "but I had done that before . Since the year 62 I had my fashion workshop and my store, where I also read my hands and cast letters. The word was spreading among the ladies of high society: oops, Rappel, don't see what he guesses. " In those years, our number one seer maintains , he was already making robes to attend galas and began to experiment with the image that has made him popular. A few years later, it began to appear on TVE, "when it was still in black and white and on Paseo de La Habana", before 1964.

Walter Mercado, meanwhile, premiered on Univisión - the main television channel in the United States in Spanish - starting in 1970. " I met him in 1977," recalls Rappel. "He told me that he had been an actor. He was wearing a caftan and a robe like the ones I used to wear for the holidays, he had dressed like this since he went to a program and improvised a performance in which he explained the horoscope. and they asked him to come more often. "

Indeed, in the documentary Netflix -made during the last months of the seer, when he had many years away from television, bunkerizado at his mansion in Puerto Rico, surrounded by tables and figures with religious - symbols is explained in detail that sudden transformation. Mercado had the power to communicate, the magnetic image, and the flamboyant Liberace, the kitsch pianist from Las Vegas, and he kept people glued to the television until he reached his zodiac sign.

Abseiling in a stock image

"He told me that until 70 he did not have a tarot deck in his hands, but then he began to study astrology and learn divination methods," says Rappel. The first time they met was through the intermediation of Jacobo Zabludovsky, one of the managers of Televisa. "His wife, Sara, was fond of astrology. Jacobo wanted to take me to Mexico to do television, but I did not want to. I have always felt loved in Spain, I have done well here."

Walter Mercado accumulated a huge fortune thanks to his monopoly of the television horoscope in the Spanish-speaking world - his programs, his books and his telephone consultation lines were unstoppable successes - although his wealth could have been infinitely greater if his representative Bill Bakula had not He had a draconian contract signed in 1995 in which he renounced the property rights over his brand and name, which forced him to present himself as Shanti Ananda since 2010. In 2012 he recovered his rights, but he was already out of circulation and in poor health. After her death in late 2019, her assets were valued at $ 10 million net, various real estate, and her lavish collection of objects inherited by her four nieces.

Obviously, Mercado was a great showman and a lousy seer, not even anticipating his own decline. "I know that Fernando Esteso was at his house in Puerto Rico, because his wife, Mari, liked to have the letters thrown at him," Rappel explains. "They told me that everything was very bad, that it was very expensive and did not explain anything ." He also remembers that Mercado had tried to penetrate Spanish television twice since the late 1980s. "We met at a cocktail at the Ritz in Barcelona organized by Xavier Cugat. He told me 'start shaking, I'm coming to Spain', and I told him "Look, honey, Spain is very big, there is room for everyone." But it did not appear on any TV . And then he tried to place himself on Channel 9 when we were doing Tombola. I saw him in Valencia, in the bullfights, around 2002. But it didn't come out either. " So Mercado returned to Miami to perform his latest act as a pop astrologer, already on the decline of a fascinating career as a whole.

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