Hear
She is histrionic, just like her dad. She loves to sing – she had a blues group called Psicoflor – as much or more than he does. And she faces everything with optimism and good humor, as she did Roberto Galan. Almost twenty-four years after the death of the creator of Si lo saber cante, his daughter, Florencia Galan (51), evokes him with love and emotion, recalls his greatest successes on screen and shares his most cherished memories. Daughter of the legendary television host and Inés “Galleta” Miguens, Florencia has two children, Sol (31) and Pablo (29) – the result of her first marriage with Pety Peltenburg – and for several years she has been living in Uruguay with her couple, Sergio Levenzon, in Pueblo Edén, a paradise 45 kilometers from Punta del Este in the middle of the mountains, where they live among cows, horses, sheep, donkeys and chickens with their own names, working the fields and in contact with nature. While passing through Buenos Aires, Florencia spoke with HELLO! Argentina of his famous father and what it was like to go through life hand in hand with him.
–How do you look similar to him?
–I think I have a sense of humor similar to dad’s. The same things make me laugh and I laugh at the same things he laughed at. You tell me a joke or I see something that I find funny and I don’t laugh out loud, but inside I’m bursting with laughter. And I can’t laugh at others, ever. Yes, I laugh with others. Dad was the same.
–What was the thing that marked you the most about your father?
–That he showed me with his example that in life you can be straight and that there are no excuses not to be. Is it the most difficult? Yes of course! It is the best teaching he left me. I am loyal to my friends, I don’t criticize anyone, he wasn’t critical either, and I am righteous, even when the tough ones come. His example is very strong in that sense: dad always lived like this, despite the waves that hit him many times, he never compromised, they could never corrupt him. From him I learned that there is no better path than the path of truth, even if sometimes it hurts and you have to take charge.
–That gives you peace of mind…
–Of course, that leaves me calm when I put my head on the pillow. I go to sleep and obviously I think: “Oops, I was wrong about this or that”, of course I make mistakes, but my conscience is clear because they were not malicious, they were not with double intentions, they were not for convenience. This is what, to me, my dad represented.
–When your parents separated you went to live in Miami with your mother. What was your bond with him like at that time?
–The time I was in Miami separated us a little. They were four years, but they were exactly the four years of my adolescence, from 13 to 17. They are years in which very big changes occur in a boy who is growing and we did not experience that entire period together. Although I came to Buenos Aires a couple of times and we saw each other, we did not live together. So by the time I came back at 17, I was already a young adult. Think that I left at 13, being a girl, and returned at 17, almost converted into a woman. We kind of had to get to know each other again.
–Was it awkward getting to know each other again?
–And, at first a little yes, but then we settled in. He was always very affectionate with me, he was always very attentive to me and he spoiled me. Sometimes, he would tell him things and he would look at me in silence, whether he agreed or not with what I said, he listened to me, understood me and did not criticize my decisions.
–Did he give you advice?
–Yes, if I asked him, he gave me advice. If not, it was enough to stay out of it, to let myself do it.
–In family privacy were you as flirtatious as in your public life?
–He was neat and always well dressed, at home too, although in private he was much more relaxed. On weekends, for example, he would come to a country house that we had rented in Escobar when the boys were little. He arrived in the morning, wearing white joggers, a white sweatshirt and white sneakers. We made the barbecue, we ate, we spent the afternoon and when he went into the night, he was spotless white. And I was thinking, “I can’t believe he doesn’t get dirty!” For me, a white t-shirt doesn’t last even fifteen minutes clean. [Se ríe]. But dad was like that: always dressed up, dressed up, flirtatious and perfumed.
–Were you always very close friends?
-Completely. I remember that I skipped school to go to the channel, because at that time the programs were recorded. Up to two or three a day. So I spent the whole day with him, from eight in the morning until eleven at night. We were together all day and he spoiled me.
– Did he set limits for you?
–No, the one who set the limits for me was mom, dad couldn’t. [Se ríe].
–Was he jealous of your boyfriends?
–The part about my first boyfriend and all that typical adolescence was lost, because I didn’t live here. And when I returned to Argentina a year later I got married.
–How did he take it when you told him you were getting married?
–I didn’t give him much room to give his opinion, because I thought I was super adult. Today I look back and realize that she was a girl. She was 18 years old! I grew up with dad and mom more than with kids my age, and on top of that in an artistic environment, maybe that’s why she had a different maturity. And well, nothing, one day I caught up with him and said: “Dad, meet my boyfriend, we’re going to get married.” She opened her eyes huge and said to me: “Are you sure? Did you think about it carefully?” “Yes, obviously daddy,” I answered. And since he could never say no to anything, he told me yes, to get married.
–Well, I wasn’t going to tell you no, just him, who spent his life making people get married…
-Clear! Plus, I was very in love and I think he saw it in my eyes.
–What was it like to walk down the street with a television star of that magnitude?
–It was the most normal thing. People recognized him, stopped him to greet him, some asked him for autographs, the ladies asked him for a kiss: “Can I have a kiss, Galán?”, but he walked calmly down the street. Now, at the entrance and exit of the channel, or when he went inside to do shows, it was something else there. He was what a DJ would be today or what a rockstar was a few years ago. We talked about going to a dance at a town club and there being a hundred thousand people waiting for him. If they even had to put up a police cordon, it was enormous. We would go to one town from eight at night until twelve, for example, and from there to another from twelve until two in the morning. With the musicians, the secretaries, we were a battalion.
–Did you have a relationship with his secretaries?
-Clear! And with his children, we grew up together. Obviously, later life took us on different paths, but at that time we were like a big family. We little ones, crossing each other all the time in the canal. Jorgelina Aranda, Dorita Delgado, Gladys Mancini, Stella Maris Muñoz… They did my makeup, they put gloss on my lips, they took care of me. At the dances I went out on stage hand in hand with them, who were like my aunts. There was a lot of love there, I loved them very much. And to this day I remember them all the time with great affection.
–Were you jealous of Roberto’s girlfriends?
–No, not at all, I was always very free for that. Both with my dad and my mom. I had and have a very open mind, I was raised that way.
–What was he like as a grandfather?
–He died when the boys were little, but the time he enjoyed them he was crazy, I couldn’t believe it. He adored them and looked at them dazedly, as if to say: “Are they my grandchildren?” Think that he had me great, so his grandchildren were almost his great-grandchildren. He was always very affectionate with my boys, he was with them as he had been with me when I was a girl.
–Do you feel that it was not valued enough?
–At the time he was the first, I think, to put the people in a television studio. And they criticized him a lot for that: that he was fat, how was he going to do that, how was he going to use the television space to bring in people who weren’t from TV… But he didn’t move a hair, because he knew what he wanted to do: he wanted to provide a service to people, apart from it being entertainment and bringing joy. Their programs were a space for many people to reach a place that they could not otherwise reach, as in the case of Si lo know cante, and for people to get to know each other, in the case of Yo me Quiero Casar, ¿y tú ? Needless to say, it meant at that time that there were no social networks, no dating apps, or anything. It was a public service in a way, which he loved to do. All of his ideas were based on helping people, with more or less laughter.
