Charo was born María del Rosario Mercedes Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza in Murcia, Region of Murcia, Spain. Her father was reportedly a lawyer who fled to Casablanca during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, while her homemaker mother stayed behind in Murcia, raising their children.[citation needed] Charo has occasionally claimed that she was enrolled in a convent as a young child and remained there until she was 15, when a nun stated that she belonged in show business. In the most colorful version of this childhood, Charo's grandmother hired a music professor to give her weekly classical guitar lessons, and he became the first man to enter the convent.Most sources indicate that she studied classical and flamenco guitar in a school in Madrid founded by Andrés Segovia for underprivileged children.[citation needed] In a 2005 interview, she reminisced: "The institution had great young teachers and students. Everything was a charity. Mr. Segovia, between concerts that's when he'd come, and if you'd been there a year and you weren't good, you'd go out and they would give your place to another young kid." Charo has stated in several interviews that she graduated with honors from the Madrid school at the age of 16 in 1967 (the year in which she would have been 16 if her later claims were correct), Charo was well-established in the United States and had made four appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Charo was discovered as a young performer by famous bandleader Xavier Cugat, whom she later wed on August 7, 1966. When they married, Cugat was 66 and had already been married four times (Rita Montaner, Carmen Castillo, Lorraine Allen, and Abbe Lane) although reports sometimes listed fewer marriages. An April 1966 column by Earl Wilson on the couple's wedding plans announced, "Sixty-year-old [sic] Xavier Cugat and his 20-year-old Spanish girlfriend and singing star Charo hope to marry in San Cugat, Spain, in a few days if Cugat can convince church authorities his two divorces should not be counted against him since he wasn't married in church."The couple was the first to have their nuptials in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. She later claimed that her marriage to Cugat had been merely a business contract, a way for him to legally bring her over to the United States where he was based. She moved to West 257th Street in The Bronx, New York with her mother and aunt, and was regularly featured in shows with Cugat's orchestra in New York and Las Vegas, as well as in overseas engagements in Latin America and Europe. She claims he was confident in her eventual success from early on, and that she gave him a Rolls-Royce as a parting gift once she legally came of majority age.
