Suave professional Latin lover-type Cesar Romero would have been 100 years old today; he died in 1994, after a very long and prolific career which began in his hometown of New York City.  In the 1920s Romero, the child of Cuban parents, parlayed his exotic good looks and natural grace on the dance floor – especially in vogue thanks to Rudolph Valentino’s torrid tangoing on silent movie screens – into a career as a ballroom dancer and later a Broadway hoofer.  He transitioned to films early in the 1930s, and never looked back.

Playing everything and everyone from Indian Rajahs, to Doc Holiday, to a Richelieu crony, to gangsters, to gigolos, to nightclub owners, to a famous run as the cinematic Cisco Kid, and then as a second lead in Technicolor musicals, Romero was an amiable on-screen presence as well as one of Hollywood’s premiere partygoers.  Famously seen on the arm on nearly every female star and starlet from the minute he came to town until his death, Cesar Romero was also famously gay, skillfully, cheerfully and convincingly managing to juggle a necessarily publicly-closeted private life with his reputation as one of the most debonair confirmed bachelors around.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course…Romero seems to have been relatively untouched by the need to deceive to the point of making a fake marriage, which he never did. (Probably one of the most visually-stunning-to-imagine liaisons he was supposed to have had was with his Captain from Castile co-star and longtime friend Tyrone Power; Romero also gave the eulogy at Power’s funeral when the well-liked star died of a heart attack in his early forties.)

Obviously Romero’s charm wasn’t limited to actresses; in the photo here he’s seen with two lady celebrities from the sports world.  On Cesar’s left is Nancy Chaffee, a professional tennis player who famously played on the USC men’s tennis team because there was no ladies’ team at the time, and who made quite a splash on the women’s tennis circuit before retiring after marrying baseball player Ralph Kiner.  On Romero’s right is Shirley May France, a high school sophomore from Massachusetts who had a go at swimming the English Channel, amid much publicity (a lot of it commenting on her bustiness) here and in Britain, in 1950.  Despite her looks, determination, and promises to swim the Channel nude (though she ended up wearing a suit emblazoned with Black Magic, the name of a movie she’d been paid to advertise on her bosom), Shirley May had a bad day of it and was pulled out of the Channel just short of drowning.  Well, at least she got to meet Cesar Romero….

We all fondly recall Cesar Romero’s delightful portrayal of The Joker in the 1960s TV series Batman, the standard by which all Jokers will be forever judged.  In addition to the dozens and dozens of feature films Romero made over his long career, he was a constant figure on TV, starring in his own program for a time as well as guest-starring on every imaginable series, from Zorro to Wagon Train to Pete and Gladys to Alias Smith and Jones, and everything in between.  His suave presence on the nighttime soap Falcon Crest brought a touch of class to the nearly fifty episodes he made of that show.  He also set menopausal hearts a’fluttering on an episode of Golden Girls, and hosted movies on the AMC cable network at a time when most of his contemporaries were either gone or retired. 

Cesar Romero epitomized the grace, charm and manners of another time, perhaps, but his cordiality and generous work ethic, along with the enormous body of work he left behind, are a timeless legacy we can all appreciate.    All hail Cesar!