A Ballad for the Children

Never expected Julio Iglesias to be microphone-shy. Ever.

The international singing star certainly was when it came time to talk about his charity work with children. For the last 11 years, the Grammy winner has served as a cultural ambassador for UNICEF, putting on benefit concerts and traveling around the world to visit with children.

In fact, Iglesias recently participated in “Grammy Sessions,” a program sponsored by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, by visiting Fremont High School in Los Angeles. Iglesias talked with the students about his career during a question-and-answer session.

The next day, we were seated on a patio behind his suite at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood, chatting about his hometown, Madrid (he now lives in Miami), his singing career (his recently released double CD is titled “My Life: The Greatest Hits”) and the singing careers of his sons, Julio and Enrique. (Iglesias and Isabel Preisler, married from 1971 to 1979, also have a daughter, Chaveli, and he and his girlfriend, Miranda, parents of a toddler, are expecting their second child.)

Iglesias talks about his family and career with ease. In fact, on all topics, he’s is as easy to talk to as he is to look at--except for one: giving.

“You surprised me,” Iglesias admitted, as he studied the microphone placed on the patio table. When asked why he is reluctant to talk about philanthropy, he simply said, “To talk about charity, it’d be very difficult for me because I feel guilty. You want to make me feel guilty.”

Question: Me? No. I just don’t understand why you’re not comfortable talking about your charity efforts.

Answer: Because I’m too obvious. I’m too lucky. I’ve had too many things. I’m singing for 30 years, and I have made a lot of money, so I have to give. It’s an opportunity to help.

Q: When you visited the classroom at Fremont High, what was the most important part of your talk--the message you try to get across to students?

A: The most important thing is the example. It is not difficult, by the way, to talk to the kids--don’t take drugs. I don’t take drugs. I can go in and tell them without cynicism. If you are able to be free in that way to talk to the kids about that subject, the kids believe it. That’s a very important subject today for me in front of the kids, and also they ask you about your career. They ask you why you make it like this. Not easy to answer them.

Q: What do you tell them?

A: What I try to tell them--it is very important also for me today and I’m 55 years old, and unfortunately I learned about me too late--is how important it is to learn everything.

When I’m with the minorities, which is normally the kids who come to those seminars, what I try to tell them because they are minorities is to learn, be strong, because they have to teach the others. At Fremont, for example, where the school was completely Latino kids, the biggest sell for me is to tell them how important it is to learn because they have more opportunities than the others and to help their cultures and their own people in this country. That would have been the main subject but I’m trying to be better with myself.

Q: Explain what you mean by “better with myself.”

A: I’ve felt guilty for everything because I had a lot of opportunities in my life that I took for granted. That was many times in my life when I was very young. And I want to survive healthy and stronger. Basically, if you could go back to your past and know that you shouldn’t do certain things, you would feel better. You know, your bones are not so strong, your body’s not as strong, and that’s the consequence, many times, of crazy things or a crazy situation, and I’m paying for that.

It’s very important to have charity for the others but also for yourself sometimes, you know, to think about how you can be stronger in every sense, to make a good example in front of the others.

Q: When it comes to charity, you don’t feel as if you have much impact even when you donate your time. Is that correct?

A: It’s a good moment for them--the time that I spend with children--but it’s not enough. When we visit a “campus” [UNICEF builds sites, including schools, to harbor children without homes or families because of turmoil], I see the eyes of the kids trying to reach us, to sit in my car and come back with me to another world. I think that it’s much more a government thing, and we can help, but it has to be much more. One visit doesn’t change any deep situation in the minds, in the hearts, of the school, of kids.

Q: Which memory stands out the most?

A: The most special time is when you go to the really deep reality, when you go to the 2-, 3-year-old kids in the Philippines or in so many countries. I was married to a Filipino lady, and so I have three kids who are Filipino, so their faces remind me very much of my kids.

And I remember being in the campus and to see thousands of little kids, the same faces as my kids even sitting in the same way my sons used to sit, you know. And trying to get inside our car--that was the most difficult thing for me. And they wanted to come inside that car and leave that place, of course. The lady who was with me said, “Mr. Iglesias, that’s impossible because you would have to take all of them with you.”

In a way, the world doesn’t understand that there are 30,000 kids every single day--and that’s the statistics of UNICEF United Nations--30,000 kids normally they die because there is not any medical assistance. If you have a suite in a hotel and . . . you have a beautiful life, you feel guilty.

Q: What would it take for you to do charity work and not feel guilty?

A: I should say, knowing what happens in the world, I should go, like a monk priest, there into hell, where the kids are. That would be the perfect charity--to give your all, complete life. But I will never do that because it’s impossible for me. I will not be able to do it. No way. No way. The only thing I can say to your column is that charity starts always with our conscience.