Walter Mercado was in the business of psychic energy before it was a co-optable millennial trend. Shit, even before Miss Cleo made it to TV. No, long before everyone cashed in on the craze of the cosmos, there was Walter Mercado. Like everything that is predetermined, Mercado’s foray into the rarely held profession of TV psychic was a product of seeming “happenstance”–being at the right place at the right time. Of course, it took getting on the trajectory of theater and acting (appearing in telenovelas for a time) for Mercado to find himself in the position to be deemed worthy of being given an entire segment on the subject of astrology.
Seeing him in the present (the documentary was shot during his final year in 2019), Mercado is mostly a shut-in, relying on his longtime assistant, Willie Acosta, to help him with general tasks, like setting up a filming time with documentarians Cristina Costantini and Kareem Tabsch, both of whom have nothing but respect for Walter thanks not only to their abuelitas (to which the film is dedicated) always watching him when they were younger, but also for the message of love and peace he was constantly preaching–not to mention his non-binary, asexual vibe. To that end, another documentary about a subject that calls to mind a similar description (albeit much more white bread and subdued) was Richard Press’ 2010 film Bill Cunningham New York. Yet another cult figure who evoked the tacit assumption, “What you can see, you don’t ask about, (as it is said in Walter’s documentary by gay rights activist Karlo Karlo), it wasn’t just that Bill, like Walter, was of the homosexual bent, it was that his work was so much more important to him than exploring that sexuality that his upbringing had forced him to suppress anyway.
“Are you heterosexual or no?” a Spanish interviewer demands of Mercado during one of the old talk show clips dug up by Constantini and Tabsch. Walter, ever the sidestepper, returns, “For me sex is spiritual. I am married to my public, to my people.” Even in 2019, with all the “progress” that’s occurred, Walter remained hesitant to be direct with the filmmakers, making more cryptic statements like, “When I saw other boys, I know that I have another way of life. My brother was all the time riding horses, planting the sugarcane, leaving with my father. And I stay with my mother, playing the piano and reading books.” Guess we can all surmise what that’s code for.
His inherent androgyne quality made him almost Bowie-like before there even was a Bowie (whether persona-wise or in the David Jones sense–for Mercado was brought to this planet in ‘32, compared to Bowie’s ‘47)–a born star, that much was written in the constellations it seemed; he just didn’t know how it would manifest. Over time, his aesthetic became as much a part of his fame as his “psychic abilities.” Mireya Lucio, “Witch,” notes, “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 70s and really good, glamorous grandma hair.” With that kind of flamboyance, Walter was simultaneously accepted and ostracized amid a culture that held up something as bombastic as Catholicism on a pedestal. “He was embraced and othered at the same time,” as Lucio puts it, for his peacock appeal.
In addition to his sexuality, age is something else Walter is consistently evasive about, noting, “I’m just like Dorian Gray. My picture’s growing old, but I’m growing young” and “I’m somewhere between fifty and death” (his vanity decidedly Taurean, and also something Madonna has seemingly studied under). Beneath the veneer of superficiality, “I suffered a lot. I lost a lot,” Walter voices over the image of himself watching old VHS tapes of his various segments while holed up in his San Juan abode. There is more than just a tinge of the Norma Desmond aura to him, and it’s a wonder that Costantini and Tabsch were able to get him to agree to be filmed at all. Yet something about the entire project was ostensibly, not to get all Walter-y, destined. For Tabsch managed to get in touch with one of Walter’s relatives while the latter was having an estate sale in Miami (the man needed his funds for all those vitamins, after all). When Constantini expressed an interest in making a film about him at that precise moment when he was going to get in touch with him, Tabsch decided it was kismet. Compared to a hybrid of Liberace and Tammy Faye Bakker, Walter’s beneficence radiates even at the age of eighty-seven, as though, no matter what happened to him, he could never know the ugliness of being embittered–even in the face of his mid-90s and onward woes.
All woes which stemmed from something he noted of himself at an early age: “When I was a child, I was very shy, very insecure. My mother was very overprotective of me. And I was a dreamer. I was always dreaming.” Oh Walter, such a Pisces. This head in the clouds nature of his was not only part and parcel of being the quintessential artist, but also a connection to something in the otherworldly. While other psychics that would follow Walter tried to emulate his brand with their own more overt hooey, it was Mercado’s authenticness that could not be replicated. The fact that he went to school for the study of psychology further speaks to the purity of his heart in wanting to help people on a mass scale (what’s more, who can deny a certain amount of viable psychic aptitude when considering Walter dipped out of this planet right before COVID-19 popped off?). His connection to the spiritual and its realm seemed to crystallize in his youth, when a dying bird fell to the ground and he picked it up, started speaking his positive messages to it and, all at once, the bird could fly again. Witnessed by a neighbor, word quickly spread around the area about Walter’s “abilities.” He was a healer, a miracle worker–dubbed “Walter of the Miracles,” as neighbors started to come over and beg him to touch them for luck and fortune.
Back in the present, we’re given a glimpse of Walter’s daily regimen. From collagen peptides to cod liver oil, his “vitamin cabinet” could serve as a pharmacy unto itself, again making one wonder if there wasn’t a touch of Taurus somewhere inside a person so concerned with his looks (Taureans being ruled by Venus and all–as Walter says, “No matter how much money it costs, I always say you have to be radiant”). His attention to his appearance paid off in the early days when a fellow actor, Elin Ortiz, who had a show on Telemundo, invited Walter on to promote the play he was doing at the time, which required him to dress as a Hindu prince for the character (who knows if that would fly now…). Ortiz told him to do the promo later and instead to talk about astrology, well-aware of Mercado’s passion for it. What happened over the course of the next fifteen minutes determined the rest of Mercado’s life as audiences were so taken with what he had to say and how he said it that the demand was great enough to warrant a regular segment.
Because every epic tale starring a hero of Walter’s whimsical magnitude inevitably needs a villain, we have Bill Bakula (more like Bill Asshula), the former manager of our great astrologer who ended up sidelining his career in a very damaging way circa 1995 (speaking of that year, you could say Bill was sort of like Walter’s version of Yolanda Saldívar). A self-styled “prophet of the New Age,” Walter admits that Bill was responsible for taking his stardom to greater heights. Making a slew of cameos in the States–from Howard Stern to Regis and Kathy Lee to Sally Jessy Raphael (billed on the show as “Walter Mercado, the world’s greatest astrologer!”)–Mercado quickly took over U.S. airwaves via radio and TV. As Lin-Manuel Miranda remarks of his translatable appeal, “He’s literally sending positive vibes through the television at you, one astrological sign at a time.”
After becoming part of the Psychic Friends Network–Miss Cleo’s league–things for Walter took a turn for the less credible, with Walter blithely unaware of the shady business dealings side of things (or at least not as aware of them as Bill Bakula). Walter briefly addresses that period of potential fraud and scamming with, “But always they receive some kind of words of inspiration or motivation” (one can’t help but think of Winona Ryder as Lelaina Pierce in Reality Bites when she racks up a $400 phone bill getting some of that inspiration and motivation). When he frivolously signed a contract he was asked to, Walter, in all of his doe-eyed trust, did not understand that he was signing his name and rights away entirely to Bill and his company. The result was a six-year long legal battle that kept Walter from performing on TV using his signature name.
Yet, despite all of the strife, Bill could not erase Mercado’s impact, nor could he, in the end, keep him from using his name–though it still didn’t change the financial and emotional damage. The silver lining at the end of the film is an exhibit honoring Walter’s fifty years of astrological brilliance at the HistoryMiami Museum. Indeed, Miami, with its Latino population is just as much of a fan as Walter’s native Puerto Rico. Which is why our filmmakers show Matt Kuscher, the owner of Stephen’s Deli, and the establishment’s famed bathroom motif devoted to Walter (in respect to Mercado being from the same hometown as his family: Ponce). There’s also Bobby Gilardi, the beverage director of Ariete, another Miami business, who has a cocktail devoted to the beloved astrologer as well (the Hanged Man, tragically, is the card affixed to the drink in the scene we see). In so many facets of culture, Latino and beyond, Walter has left some sort of imprint. Whether or not his message was “real,” it was delivered with genuineness. Not unlike Jesus’–for Walter just wants to spread the doctrine of love and light, wearing a jeweled cape to brighten your day in the process.
With each section of the film, detailing a certain ascent in Walter’s career, we have the divide of different tarot cards that include The Magician, The Star, The Cloaked Man, The Wheel of Fortune, The Tower and The Chariot. It is in this last portion that Walter, as though reading his own obituary in the final scene, assures, “Walter Mercado is a force of nature without beginnings or endings. He used to be a star, but now Walter is a constellation.” One has the faith to believe him, so mystical and ethereal was he. And this, undeniably, was augmented by his abstinence; whether he wanted to or not, this created an underlying stratum of innocence. Just as it did for Bill Cunningham, who Anna Wintour said of, “We all get dressed for Bill.” In contrast, Walter got dressed for us.
