An icon of glamour and luxury when it was completed in midtown Manhattan in 1931, the Waldorf Astoria’s Starlight Roof supper club attracted performers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Glenn Miller.
Located on the 19th floor, the roof of the club could retract on warm summer evenings, allowing the elegantly dressed socialites who dined there to view the stars.
The Starlight’s bandleader on opening night was the multi-talented Xavier Cugat (1900 -1990), a Spanish-born musician and artist who spent his formative years in Cuba and who helped popularize Latin music in the US.
Cugat started his bandleading career at the Coconut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel in the 1920s and first introduced audiences to the wildly popular dance called the tango.
This was followed by the conga, the cha cha cha and the mambo. One of his trademark gestures was to conduct his orchestra with one hand while holding his pet chihuahua in his other hand as his band of dancers called the Gigolos performed.
The five times-married Cugat was also an accomplished artist and was employed by the LA Times, who syndicated his clever caricatures of celebrities and politicians nationally.
Up until the 1960s, Cugat was bi-coastal and split his time between the Starlight club, where he became resident bandleader, and the Coconut Grove. He also remained in demand for his artwork.
This elegant 1930s menu cover was created and signed by Cugat, who also owned an eponymous Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood.
After his death in Barcelona, Spain, at the age of 90, Cugat was posthumously inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame.