IC:  You are often called “Oprah with salsa.”  Oprah is considered as having taken talk shows to a different level.  Do you agree?
CS:  Yes. She’s incredible.  Oprah has worked for her people in the same way that I feel I am working for my people.  But we are different [laughs] because she’s still dating Stedman, and the second time around I married the love of my life.

IC:  Speaking of your marriage, you are very honest about your unhappy first marriage.
CS:  Yes. I made a mistake. I married him for all the wrong reasons, without being in love with him.  At that time I thought love was for Barbara Carland romances. I didn’t understand it.  I was very ambitious and I think he was actually relieved when I left, because he could not keep up.

IC:  Do you think he felt emasculated by you?
CS:  Yes, absolutely.  But my second husband, he is so sure of himself he is not threatened by me at all. He cooks, he is Mr. Mom.  I needed a wife-we joke about this-and I found one.  I am very masculine in my approach to life, and he is very nurturing and feminine. It is a perfect balance, and that is why we are so in love.

IC:  Getting back to your book, why did you choose the subtitle My Life as a Blonde?
CS:  People tell blonde jokes-we are supposed to be slow or something-and this book is a vindication.

IC:  Listen, I know a lot of blondes who aren’t slow, so I don’t know where that notion came from.
CS:  Are you SURE they’re blondes? [Laughter]

LATIN STYLE Venice, CA
June, 1998

     One factor of this book, Cristina! My Life as a Blonde, is not that it is written by one of the most successful women talk-show hosts in Latin America, airing daily for over nine years, including a radio show and national magazine, Cristina La Revista, —not to mention her successful spokesperson celebrity status for AT&T commercials, but the fact that this book is an honest and sincere look at an (American or Cuban or both) success story.
     Not many women will happily accept facing the big FIVE O, let alone share menopause with the world, but then Cristina is not just any woman.  Her book reveals her trials, tribulations, and the company she keeps.  It’s a must-read book, especially when you know that other successful women applaud her work, such as Gloria Estefan, stating, “For more than twenty years I’ve had the privilege of saying that Cristina is my friend.  She is a living testimony of what one can accomplish with tallent, determination and persistence.  Isabel Allende remarks, “Cristina writes about her life with the same grace, honesty and intelligence that she conducts her popular TV program.  This book is entertaining. It is like having an intimate conversation with her.”
     This is good reading for women of any age to be encouraged to face life with hard work and sharing success with one’s children, and know that true love can be part of the whole picture.  More important, this is great reading for men to understand the obstacles that women face in their careers.”



MODERNA Austin, TX
JUN-JUL  1998


BLONDE AMBITION
Cristina Saralegi reveals her true self in a new autobiography

BY VALERIE MENARD

     Fifty years is a benchmark worthy of some kind of recognition.  For her fiftieth birthday, Cristina Saralegui, host of El Show de Cristina, chose to recognize this date by writing her autobiography, My Life as a Blonde (New York: Warner Books, 1998).  “Nothing I’ve ever done in my life has been normal, so there’s no reason this book should be,” she writes in the introduction.  “Maybe if I had waited until I was seventy to write my memoirs, it would have been a different book.  I believe I chose the ideal, the culminating moment in my life, the months before my fiftieth birthday.”
     Univision viewers recognize the super-blonde Latina immediately, but the majority of Hispanics who watch English-language television are more likely to ask, “Who is this rubia?”  She did attempt to cross over to an English format with the Cristina Show in 1992, but it was short–lived–only–eleven episodes.  Contrary to reports in the trades, the show was not canceled.  According to Saralegui, it had very strong ratings for a start-up show, but CBS offered Saralegui and her husband less money to produce the show in English than she was getting from Univision to do the show in Spanish, so she declined the offer.  As she explains in the book, “We weren’t inclined to climb into the center of the ring with the lions without so much as a slingshot to defend ourselves.”
     For the most part, El Show de Cristina has flourished in Spanish, holding the number one position in its time slot almost since the first show aired in 1989.  As the host of her show, Saralegui charms her guests and her audience into responding to questions and to each other.  She accomplishes this using surprise, sincerity, and humor, but what sets her apart from her mainstream network colleagues is that she’s never rude and rarely sensational.  There will never be a video of out-takes from El Show de Cristina featuring flying chairs and bloody guests.  When things get out of hand on her show, “I stop taping,” she says.
     Celebrating her birthday was one reason Saralegui decided to write the story of her life, but there was another one—he wanted to set the record straight.  “So much had been written about the show,” she says.  “There was a lot of misinformation out there.  I wanted to dispel misconceptions and expose who I am as a person, not just as a talk show host.”  She also wanted to set the record straight about her second husband, Marcos Avila, one of the founders of the Miami Sound Machine.  Much of the book, which is dedicated to Avila, discusses Saralegui’s relationship with her husband, who is ten years her junior.
     She says her husband rather than her children received the honored spot on the dedication page because “my children did not choose this profession.  Marcos was the one who encouraged me to go into television, and he was the one that encouraged me to start my magazine, Cristina.  He is directly responsible for getting me to where I am today. He knew what I could do before I did.”  Chapter 7, “My Love...My Life,” discusses their romance.  Saralegui even offers advice for a successful relationship, beginning with finding a man who loves your body.”  “My husband loves big buttocks!  Look for someone who likes you for who you are and who you believe will love you for the rest of your life, even when you are no longer young and fresh.”  But before there was Marcos, there were other people and events that shaped Cristina into the woman she is today.
     The first chapter of the book is more like a foreword in which she revelas how, as a little girl who never watched TV, she never imagined herself in her current position.  She begins her life history in the second chapter, opening sardonically with the line, “It isn’t easy to be rich.”  Saralegui’s grandfather, Francisco Saralegui y Arrizubieta, known in Cuba as “the Paper Czar because he co-owned three magazines-Bohemia, Carteles, and Vanidades-and a paper monopoly on the island-was a millionaire.  An heiress to the family’s publishing dynasty, Cristina was born with ink in her veins.  But it was the family’s destiny not to stay in Cuba.  One night in 1960, her father, Bebo, instructed the family to pack for a vacation, but somehow, Saralegui says, she knew they would never return home.
     “The last image I have of my country, at the age of twelve, is stepping outside on my grandfather’s second-floor balcony in my bathrobe, to stare across the ocean toward the horizon, crying as I said good-bye to what I sensed I would never see again.”
     The Saralegui family would survive what seemed like a disaster at the time, but not without a tremendous sacrifice.  With a note of bitterness, Cristina swears she will not go to Cuba or support “that government” with a penny of tourism dollars, “until Castro is out of office or dead, whichever comes first.”  For the first time, the family experienced financial difficulty.  The only magazine that they were able to save, Vanidades, was sold.
     Cristina pursued a journalism degree at the University of Miami, but financial difficulty and her father’s chauvinism ended her studies one semester short of graduation. Her father spent the family’s limited funds on a boarding school for her brother rather than on Saralegui’s education because, after all, she would eventually marry and then become her husband’s responsibility.  “I’ve forgiven my father, but it still hurts,” she says.
     Her mother, Cristina Santamarina, considered independent and therefore unconventional in Cuba, planted the seed of feminism in her daughter by her example.  Her father’s unequal treatment of the girls and boys in the family added fuel to Cristina’s desire for independence.  But Saralegui’s defining moment was meeting Helen Gurley Brown, publisher of Cosmopolitan.  Brown showed her that a successful woman did not have to lose her femininity.  “Through Cosmopolitan en Español we brought the sexual revolution to Latin America,” she says.  Saralegui had two stints at the magazine.  The first was in 1973 when she was hired as a staff writer working with editor Frank Calderon.  The magazine’s format at the time was basically a Spanish version of Cosmopolitan.  She quit in 1976 to get married and have a baby, but three years later she returned as editor-in-chief, and though daunted by the task, was determined that Cosmopolitan en Espanol would no longer mimic the English version but become a magazine for the Latin American woman.
     According to Saralegui, “When I decided to grab Cosmopolitan by the horns, I began to formulate a definition of what liberation was for Latin women:  ‘We Latin women are liberated from the neck up, not the neck down.  Our most important organ is located between our ears, not our legs.’ That language was a little strong for those days, but the readers, the women who had to understand, understood.”  In the ten years that followed, Saralegui established Cosmopolitan en Espanol as one of the most important magazines in Latin America, even surpassing Buenhogar (Good Housekeeping).
     She left her magazine career, however, for a new one in television.  Much of her work on television may be familiar to her viewers, but in the book Saralegui does have some juicy behind-the scenes tidbits for her readers.  One such revelations is an in-depth look at her face-lift.  Even though she is a self-proclaimed feminist, Saralegui is much more a Cosmo girl than a disciple of Gloria Steinem.  She’s a strong advocate of Latina self-empowerment and maintains a network of influential Latina friends such as Gloria Estefan, Celia Cruz, and Isabel Allende.  But all this is still tempered by Old World mores, of which getting a face-lift appears to be one manifestation.  Saralegui discusses her face-lift straightforwardly and with a sense of humor.  Tired of hearing technicians on the show comment about how they had to adjust the lighting to hide her wrinkles, she cuatiously decided to have the surgery done.  “If I looked down or to the side, I got so many wrinkles Iin my face that I looked like a Thanksgiving Day turkey,” she says.  Written in journal form, her account is appealing in its sincerity.
     In "My Life as a Blonde", Saralegui intends to set the record straight about the woman behind El Show de Cristina, and she certainly succeeds.  What the reader discovers is that Saralegui is a woman with tremendous inner strength and resolve, but one who has suffered bouts of low self-esteem and insecurity.  She’s not perfect, but she doesn’t pretend to be.  She’s funny, smart, and the kind of woman you’d like to have as a friend.



PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Dec. 22, 1997

CRISTINA! My Life as a Blonde

     Cuban-born Saralegui hosts El Show de Cristina, a Miami-based Spanish-language talk show with an audience estimated at 100 million throughout Latin America.  She also hosts a daily radio show, Cristina Opina, and co–publishes the magazine, Cristina La Revista.  In this chatty, good-natured autobiography, she tells about her privileged childhood in Havana’s Miramar suburb (her father’s family owned Cuba’s premier magazines) and the family’s post-Castro move to Florida in 1960.  Her career as a writer and editor of Spanish-language women’s magazines culminated in a decade as editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan en Espanol, after which she was tapped for the talk show on the Spanish network Univision.  Throughout her career, she has proclaimed the importance of informing Hispanic women about sex and other once taboo topics.  Her shows have focused on such subjects as gay marriage, sex addiction, AIDS and her own facelift, photos of which she broadcast.  Saralegui also profiles her two marriages and three children, passes along tips for success (e.g., set goals and work hard)and present an inside look at both the North American-based Hispanic media and the U.S. Cuban community in Miami.

WOMAN’S OWN
NEW YORK, NY
MAY 1998

Cristina: The TV Talk Show Host Who Could Write a Book on Doing It All...And Now She Has

     Spanish TV’s Cristina Saralegui (Called by some, “Oprah with salsa”) jokes that her new autobiography, "My Life as a Bolnde" (Warner, $22), is a guide “on what not to do” to successfully manage marriage, kids and work.  But Cristina certainly has managed to stay happily married to her second husband, Marcos Avila, whom she met when the two were both married to others.  “He was 24 years old and I was 35,” says Cristina, who at the time was the editor-in-chief of the Spanish Cosmo.  “Love hit me over the head with a baseball bat,” she says.
     Up until then, she says, “I did not believe in love.  I was married to a real estate man–and not in love.  My decision to marry him was a practical one.”  But her decision to get involved with Marcos, a founding member of Miami Sound Machine, was anything but.  Today Cristina and Marcos have been married for 13 years and have a 12-year-old son.
     Cuban-born Cristina credits Marcos, who is also her manager, as the catalyst for where she is today.  Which is everywhere: on TV–her nine-year old program, El Show de Cristina, is broadcast in 17 countries; on the radio a daily segment called “Cristina Opina” airs on 50 Latin American stations; at the newsstands-she co–publishes a monthly magazine, Cristina La Revista; and in the stores the Cristina Saralegui collection of fashion eyewear is sold in Pearl Vision and other eyecare centers nationwide.
   “When I started the TV show in 1989,” says Cristina, “the Hispanic community was dying to talk.  There was an explosion...and we became a success.”

MIDTOWN RESIDENT
NEW YORK, NY

Blonde Ambition

Cristina Saralegui Proves You Can Spell Success in Any Language
By Miguel Garcia-Sanchez

     While some say blondes have more fun, Cristina Saralegui will probably answer differently.  "My Life as a Blonde" is Cristina’s latest bet.  With her talk show El Show de Cristina, her magazine Cristina La Revista, her radio show Cristina Opina, the release of her autobiography and the promotion which brought her to New York last week, she doesn’t seem to have much time for fun.
     But Cristina begs to differ.  “This is how I enjoy myself,” she says.  “I always search for a manner of growing as an individual that also allows me to continue enjoying myself.  Since I was 16, I have spent my life working and I can’t live any other way.  I can’t stop dreaming.  I need to dream things that will help me to see the future with hope.  I’d better be buried the day I stop dreaming.”
     Published in Spanish and English simultaneously, the autobiography follows the rise of one of the most popular media personalities in the Latin world.  It is the story of a woman who has gathered an average of 100 million viewers worldwide in front of the television every weekday for the last nine years, and also finds time to publish her own magazine throughout the United States and Latin America, and to host a daily radio show broadcast in more than 90 countries.
     With book signings at the Rockefeller Center Barnes & Noble and at Lectorum (137 W. 14th St.), Cristina showed her vitality.  Now 50, she is ready to share the story of her rise to the top and how she has remained there.
    “ I have published it at 50, at the half mark of my career and life, because I think there already are too many false things published about me that can seem true.  Now I offer all the facts as they happen with my point of view.”
     Broadcast on Univision, El Show de Cristina is the main pillar of her popularity, reaching more than 90 percent of Hispanic households in the United States.  The program is packed with entertaining sketches about her famous and not-so-famous guests.  “In an interview, one of the most important things is to listen,” Cristina maintains.  “A good communicator must know how to talk, but that doesn’t mean doing a monologue.”
     Although there is a place for polemic matters on her program, discussions are much softer than the ones on talk shows like Jerry Springer.
     “When the temperature rises on my program and people begin to insult each other, we stop the shooting until they calm down,” she says.  “I don’t agree with displaying these things.  In the nine years I’ve been doing this show, I haven’t needed it.  But this is a free country where everybody can do what they want.  I don’t care if others prefer to display these moments.”
     Cristina’s story is one of overcoming the odds, of beginning at the bottom and climbing to the top of her profession.
     Despite the influential business developed by her grandfather, Francisco Saralegui y Arrizubieta, who founded the three leading Spanish-language magazines in Cuba, Cristina’s family fled Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1960.  At 12, she had to start anew in Miami’s Cuban exile community.  “I’ve never gone back to Cuba.  I don’t have relatives there and I’m not going to give one dollar to a political system with which I’m in opposition,” Cristina says.
     She continues to live in Miami with her husband and three children.  It was there that she studied communications at the University of Miami, and began her successful journalism career: first as an intern at Vanidades, the most popular women’s magazine in Latin America, and later at Cosmopolitan en Espanol, the Spanish-language version of Hearst’s popular women’s magazine.
     She became executive producer and host of El Show de Cristina in 1989.  When the show began to air every weekday in 1989, she also tried an English version on CBS, but it ran for only 13 weeks.  Still, Cristina hasn’t given up on that goal. “That’s my highest dream.  I wanted to be a bilingual journalist to tell our stories to everybody.  But I don’t want an empire.  What I want is a modest and bilingual company where we can print more magazines, publish books from young authors and produce new talent in radio and television.”
     Perhaps that’s the key to her success: the ability to dream while keeping her feet on the ground.
     “To realize the American dream, the most important thing to understand is that it belongs to everybody,” says Cristina.  “It’s a human dream. If you understand this and work very hard, it is possible.”



SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE
SAN DIEGO, CA
APR 13  1998

THERE’S NO COMPARISON
Taboo-busting talk-show host is on a mission to educate, liberate Latina women

By Alisa Valdes
THE BOSTON GLOBE

Miami-Every weekday afternoon, untold millions worldwide watch Oprah Winfrey’s talk show; thus, the moniker: “Queen of Talk.”
     But-surprise!-there is an American talk-show host with as many viewers, if not more, at any given moment.  And it ain’t Geraldo, Jerry, Ricki or Jenny.
     It’s Cristina.
     Each day, 100 million people tune in to receive the gospel according to the Univision Network’s “Cristina.”  From Chile to the South Bronx, Cristina Saralegui, with her platinum bob and rapid-fire Miami Spanish, claims to be the most-watched talk-show host on Earth.
     Add to the mix Saralegui’s magazine, Cristina la Revista, with a circulation of 150.000, her daily talk radio show, “Cristina Opina,” aired in 90 countries; and her new autobiography, “Cristina! My Life as a Blonde” (Warner Books, $22, published in both English and Spanish, and you get a woman The Washington Post dubbed a “cross-cultural Martha Stewart.”
     But Saralegui, 50, is tired of the comparisons.
     “I am not, as they used to call me, the Spanish Helen Gurley Brown,” says Saralegui, spooning salmon mousse onto a cracker in her Palm Island mansion’s sitting room.  “I am not Oprah with salsa. I am not Phil Donahue in drag.” She pauses for drama, sips dry white wine, then concludes: “I am Cristina Saralegui.”
     What does Oprah have to say about all this?
    “Cristina is not the Hispanic me,” Winfrey said on a recent show with Saralegui as her guest.  “I am the black Cristina.”
     Evening comes to the mansion, whose palm trees are patrolled by a band of four restless dachsunds.  Saralegui, fresh from a nap, hops into the two-door Mercedes driven by her husband manager, Marcos Avila.  She wears a baggy blue sweat suit and no make up.
     In 20 minutes, she arrives at the Univision studios, is coiffed by her makeover militia and prepped by producers.  Then she is ready for her job as she sees it:  to educate the world.
    The pulpit is a modest three-level TV studio, seating 180.  The pastel sets and faux-brick walls are lighted by dozens of hot white lights, hanging as if from meat hooks on high.
     This is where the teaching is done.
About the serious: condoms and AIDS, spousal rape, child abuse.  About the freaky: alien abductions, vampires, goat-sucking monsters.  Nationally, she is seen in 2 million homes, compared with Oprah’s 8 million.
     “Not bad, for a Spanish show, right?” she asks. “Americans have to understand that we are here, and we are Americans.”
     Univision, the Spanish-language television network based in Los Angeles, is now the United States fifth-largest network in terms of viewers, outranking WB, UPN, HBO and ESPN.  In San Diego, it is carried by Cox, Daniels, Southwestern, Coronado, Chula Vista/National City and County cable systems.  (Univision airs the show weekdays at 4 pm., and at 2 am.)
     It has been said that Saralegui has done more to dismantle certain Latino cultural norms in her nine years as talk-show host than anyone in history-in essence, she is Americanizing Latino culture, and Latino-izing American culture.  By repeatedly tackling traditional taboos-machismo, faked virginity, domestic violence, AIDS, homosexuality, and menopause-Saralegui has begun to influence many long-held attitude.
     Having spent 10 years as editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan en Espanol, where her mission was to “teach Latin women that our most valuable organ is between our ears, not our legs.”  Saralegui is no stranger to controversy.
     While millions obviously love her, Saralegui has also made some enemies.  Afrr airing a homosexual marriage ceremony on Jan. 4, 1996, she became the target of a widely publicized hate campaign, led by an Episcopal minister named Oscar Aguero.
     She got an award from the National Gay and Lesbian Alliance for that show.  Many similarly contentious shows have netted dozens of awards, all on display in the cozy family room, near the big-screen TV.
     Saralegui is also the national Hispanic spokeswoman for American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR).  She blames machismo and illiteracy for the soaring rate of Latino AIDS.
     “I think the controversial shows are the most important ones we do,” she says.  “I have to teach Latinos it’s OK to talk about this stuff.  If not, we are killing ourselves.”
     Saralegui, the mother of two and stepmother of one, says that from the age of 7 she knew she wanted to be a communicator, a natural calling for a girl born into Cuba’s premier print media family.  The oldest of five children, Cristina was a millionaire from the start.
     During her years at Cosmopolitan, Saralegui’s professional life blossomed.  But her personal life fell apart.  She lost all her friends and divorced her husband, Tony Menendez, a firefighter who wanted a stay-at-home wife.
     Saralegui slipped into a depression after the divorce.  In the early ‘80s her longtime friends Gloria and Emilio Estefan invited her to tour with their little-known bandk, the Miami Sound Machine, to cheer her up. Before the trip was over, she had found her soul mate in the group’s ponytailed bass player, Marcos Avila.
     “When Marcos and I made love for the first time,” she writes in her autobiography,” “it was as if we had been together through hundreds of thousands of lives...I was left stupefied because that had never happened to me and I was 35 years old.”
     Avila was 24.
     They married soon after, in their home, with Gloria Estefan as the “best man.”  They have been together for 15 years and are Miami royalty.  He left his lucrative music career to manage his wife career.
     “I’m a little wacky,” says Saralegui, holding hands with Avila as they stroll through their garden.  “As you can see, I rarely take the usual route to anywhere.”
     Last year, Saralegui made $7 million.  Soon, she says, she will launch a bilingual multimedia empire.  She plans to write many more books, including her next project, a Latina guide to menopause.
     “I could not ask for a better life than what I have now,” she says.  “All I would ask for is that more people know who we are, and what we are about.  Everybody knows about Martha Stewart. But how many people know about Cristina?  Just because Cristina happens to work in Spanish?”
     Answer?  About 100 million.  And growing.



The Week
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
NEW YORK, NY

MAY 1  1998

CRISTINA!  MY LIFE AS A BLONDE  Cristina Saralegui (Warner, $22)

     “Success has very little to do with luck,” swears the industrious star of El Show de Cristina, reportedly the most-watched TV talk show in the world (shown on Univision in the U.S.).  In this warm, energetic, no-nonsense book -part memoir, part motivational treatise-the “Oprah with salsa” tells the impressive saga of her rise from Cuban refugee to editor in chief of the Spanish Cosmopolitan to tireless media queen.  Full of amusing anecdotes, including a pricesless one about Helen Gurley Brown not wearing any panties at a major corporate powwow, Cristina! Reads like a long, savvy letter from the best big sister in the world.  A    —Charles Winecoff

ASBURY PARK
SUNDAY PRESS SECTION
March 22, 1998

Having more fun
Hispanic powerhouse describes her ‘life as a blonde’

By ANN OLDENBURG
USA TODAY

She’s been called “Oprah with salsa.”
     She’s Cristina Saralegui, the 5-foot-4-host of “El Show de Cristina,” the Spanish-language Univision talk show that draws 100 million viewers worldwide and regularly beats Winfrey in the ratings.
     Over the last several decades, the 50-year-old wife, mother and career woman-known to fans as just “Cristina”-has steadily built herself a small empire and even a line of eyewear.
     Now, she’s written her autobiography, released Thursday, “Cristina! My Life as a Blonde.”
     “You know what?” Saralegui asks, referring to her trademark hair tint.  “It’s not natural!”
     She laughs.
     Her book paints a life that’s always gone against the norm:  from her wealthy upbringing in pre-Castro Cuba to her immigration to the USA as a young girl, to a failed early marriage.  More recently she’s found a “crazy in love” second marriage to a man 11 years her junior, had plastic surgery by a California doctor now under investigation and needed therapy because some of her talk-show guests were just too depressing.
     After three years of dictating on the fly, Saralegui says she originally turned in 800 pages.  Her editor told her to save half for her next book, which will focus on celebrities.  Tis one offers advice for young career women as it chronicles her rise as a $6-million-a-year Hispanic superstar.
     She was 12 when her fther told his wife and five kids they’d be leaving Cuba the next day.  Once in Miami, he got into the magazine business, and Saralegui (pronounced Sara-LEG-ee) grerw up in the world of writing.  Eventually, she assumed the reins of Cosmopolitan en Espanol, where Helen Gurley Brown became her mentor.
     “She always had good instincts,” Brown says.  “She’s my No. 1 protegee.”
     After 10 years as editor, Saralegui created and launched her talk show.  “None of your dreams come true unelss you work hard,” she says.
     The hard work paid off in a lifestyle that now includes a home on a private island, a pool and a daily massage.
     At 5 each evening she leaves for the studio to tape her show.  Her partner, manager and husband, Marcos Avila, drives with her.  Avila was part of the original Miami Sound Machine.  Saralegui believes that God “put Marc in my life.”
     In the book, she urges that no one marry without being wildly in love.
     “When Marcos and I made love for the first time, it was as if we had been together through hundreds of thousands of lives,” she writes.
     “I fell in love with him because I have always been a rather conservative woman when it comes to intimacy, and Marcos was an adventurer in love, who liked to suck my toes one by one.  For a woman who grew up in a convent school and who spent all her adult life working in an office, to have someone suck your toes is a most amazing sezual experience... Marcos liberated me!”
     He is with her every day.  But he wasn’t able to help her when she began to be upset by her guests’ tales of woe.  “I would take it to my heart. I couldn’t sleep.”  She went to a psychologist, who taught her to separate her now famous alter-ego from “Mati,” as she is fondly called at home and by her friends.
     Six yeas ago, Saralegui overheard cameramen talking about adjusting lighting to erase her wrinkles.  She called Steven Hoefllin, a Santa Monica plastic surgeon, and had a face lift and chink implant.  She remembers being “terrified,” but says she still counts Hoefflin among her friends, despite a subsequent investigation into his practices.
     “He’s an excellent surgeon,” she says.  She chalks up the negative stories to “disgruntled” competitors.
     Whetehr it is her looks or her easy familiarity with guests, Saralegui’s show is such a hit with Hispanics that CBS tried her in an English-language morning show in 1992.  The deal and the show fizzled.  She says she was told the ratings for the first 11 weeks “nearly guaranteed success.”  But without a big enough budget, “Marcos and I decided not to renew.”
     Now she hints that she may try again. “Our Hispanic market right now is very hot.  Everyone is trying to figure it out.  We have been approached to do everything from a sitcom to an interview show.”  She won’t say where she’s leaning except that she’d love to do a voice-over for a Disney animated movie.
     “I will take whatever comes to my plate that will make me grow,” she says.

LATINA MAGAZINE
January, 1998

By Michelle Longo

The pampered upbringing of a yong Latina came to an abrupt end when her family fled Cuba one morning in 1960.  Years later, this same uprooted child, who favored writing in her diary over watching TV, would grow up to host Cristina, a talk show watched by millions every day on Univision, the largest Spanish-language TV network in the United States.

     Now at age 50, Cristina Saralegui shares her memories in an autobiography entitled Cristina! My Life as a Blonde (Warner Books, $22) to be published simultaneously in English and Spanish in March.  As the grand-daughter of a man who made millions in publishing (he was co-owner of the Spanish-language magazine Vanidades), Saralegui serves as an inadvertent reminder that the well-to-do don’t often share their recipes for success.  In this autobiography-cum-self-improvement guide, she tells us how she reached the top and invites readers to follow her path.  But will Latinas relate to the advice of, and the opportunities afforded to, the daughter of one of Cuba’s wealthier families? Not likely.
     However, reality checks do appear throughout the book and make for engaging reading.  Those who recall the passage to a new country may identify with her bittersweet adjustment to the United States at age 12, when she learned her first lessons in prejudice and watched her family try to recreate their homeland in exile.
     Readers will also identify with the part of her life that was least star-studded and surreal.  She held a series of jobs, editing and writing for Vanidades, Cosmopolitan en Espanol, and El Miami Herald (now El Nuevo Herald).  At times she struggled-pulling one bill out of a hat full of them to pay each month.  After walking into her first marriage for the wrong reasons (not for love but to settle down and have kids), she found herself anorexic and on the brink of depression.  Through all her difficulties, she trudged on with self-determination and the support of loved ones.
    But more than a survivor, Saralegui has always been a rebel.  As a kid she was often kicked out of class at Miami’’ exclusive convent school, Assumption Academy.   Described as “hopelessly undisciplined,” she would intentionally embarrass the priests with detailed questions about sin.
    As a woman, she defied convention, opting to cohabitate with her younger musician beau, Marcos Avila-founding member and former bassist of Miami Sound Machine-along with Cristina Amalia, her five-year-old daughter.  It’s hard not to laugh aloud at some of her antics and marvel at how she shrugged off the traditional expectations of her country club upbringing.
     Candidly, she shares her blunders; caught submitting her father’s old fashioned translation she was supposed to write for Vanidades; or practicing a speech at home with an ironing board as her podium-only to forget the words before an actual audience.  Peppered throughout are hilarious moments with friends and family: discovering that her friend Gloria Estefan was guilty of inebriating Saralegui’s dog during her wedding to Avila; attempting to wash her first husband’s”good” shirts and turning them all a lovely shade of pink.
     She explains what went on behind the scenes, during her first naÔve break into television, with Don Francisco (host of Univision’s variety show Sabado Gigante), whom she calls “the big bad wolf.”  When they hosted a series of programs together, Don Francisco would ask to see Saralegui’s handwritten notes before they went on the air.  Then he would proceed to discuss them on camera, leaving her with nothing to say.
    Of course, she is speechless no more.  In the frank, no-nonsense voice that is trademark Saralegui, she boasts about the success of her 13-time Emmy Award-winning talk show. (How does she feel about being called “Oprah with salsa?”  “It’s better than being called Donahue in drag,” she writes.
     She comes off as the self-absorbed queen one might expect a megastar to be: focusing minutely on her career; even dedicating several pages to her plastic surgery, including a day-by-day account of the process.  Yet readers can’t help but appreciate her candor and humor in this book, as they would on her splashy, tabloid TV show.  After all, in both arenas, she insists on being herself-the former debutante gone wacko-with great results.  And besides, behind that brassy impulsiveness lie humanistic goals.  Her strongest impulse? “To improve life for Hispanic Americans,” she writes.  “To help them raise their economic level, better their personal situations, and help them be more productive in their communities.”