Will ‘Cristina’ Play as Well in Mainstream? : Television: Cristina Saralegui hosts a popular Spanish- language talk show that is the first to ‘cross over’ to English-language U.S. TV. Her CBS show premieres today.

Cristina Saralegui wants to have it all.

With the premiere today of her CBS talk show, the Cuban-born star of “Cristina”--the afternoon show on KMEX-TV Channel 34 that has brought the station some of its highest ratings--becomes the first Spanish-language talk show host to “cross over” to mainstream U.S. television.

Although no one has successfully managed such a leap before, if there ever were a likely candidate it is the vivacious, outspoken and very blond Saralegui.

With her Spanish television show on 581 U.S. broadcast and cable stations and seen in 15 countries, a daily radio show heard on 50 stations, a magazine that bears her name and now her 9 a.m. show that will air on 25 CBS-owned stations around the country, including KCBS Channel 2, the 44-year-old Saralegui is more than a show business personality.

Call her a thriving enterprise.

In the 25 years since she began her career writing for the Spanish version of Cosmopolitan magazine, Saralegui has evolved into a formidable commodity.

“Cristina is a major talent,” said Karen Miller, vice president of programming for CBS stations. “It doesn’t matter what language she speaks. She can fill a screen. She’s a star. That goes beyond drawing any lines about who she is or where she came from. And what she brings to television is life experiences that are very recognizable to a television audience. She’s a mother; she’s been divorced. She’s a working woman. She worked very hard to get where she is. She does come from a different background, but that’s not any different than Oprah Winfrey building on her experiences as a black woman.”

The Winfrey comparisons have been a recurring theme in Saralegui’s career.

When “Cristina” debuted on Univision in April, 1989, Saralegui was labeled “Oprah con salsa,” having segued from “the Latin Helen Gurley Brown” moniker acquired during her magazine days.

“They’re comparing me to the best,” Saralegui said in a telephone interview from Miami, where she tapes both shows. “How proud I am to be compared to Oprah. I really admire her. She’s a minority woman and she’s done all this by herself. . . . I’m very happy to be Oprah with salsa and not Donahue in drag.”

Executives at CBS and Columbia Pictures Television, which is distributing the program, are pretty happy too, banking on Saralegui’s runaway success in Spanish translating to English. In fact, they are so happy to be launching a show with an already established talent that they dismiss any concerns that her style may not appeal to English-speaking audiences.

“I certainly don’t think that her accent or her command of the language is going to be a negative at all,” said Barry Thurston, president of Columbia Pictures Television Distribution. “The accent hasn’t hurt Arnold Schwarzenegger, it (didn’t) hurt Benny Hill. It didn’t hurt Desi Arnaz. What we look for is talent, personality and charisma. The worst thing you could do is to expect her to start to look like and sound like and act like someone that she isn’t. . . . If you start to look at all the talk shows out there it becomes a blur. She becomes distinctive and maybe a little bit refreshing.”

“Cristina” is the top-rated talk show on Spanish-language television and one of the top six shows on the Univision network, which owns KMEX. (Saralegui will continue hosting her Spanish-language show, which airs on KMEX at 4 p.m.)

In the last ratings “sweeps” in May, Saralegui’s show ranked higher in the Nielsen ratings than the talk shows of Maury Povich and Geraldo Rivera and higher than Phil Donahue in the target audience of women 18-49 years old. She drew 101,000 women viewers between the ages of 18 and 49, while Donahue drew 55,000 women viewers in the same age group. However, she trailed Winfrey’s show, which drew 228,000 18-to-49-year-old women in the same time period.

And while her ratings lagged behind both “Oprah” and “Sally Jessy Raphael” among female viewers, the size of her male audience was larger than those of either show.

The 18- to 49-year-olds who comprise the bulk of her audience are a particularly appealing group to KCBS, which tends to draw more older viewers than the other local network-owned stations, according to a local programming research executive. KCBS also generally has fewer Latinos among its audience than KABC or Fox.

Research shows that 70% of Saralegui’s audience speaks English, said Columbia’s Thurston, and the goal is to draw those people to her show.

However, those figures differ from those of KMEX, which show that only 15% of Saralegui’s audience call themselves “predominantly bilingual,” according to Maureen Schultz, KMEX research and marketing director.

Uncertainties such as these have convinced network executives to adopt the cautious “slow roll out” plan for Saralegui’s English program. The talk show will initially air on only 25 stations (which make up 66% of Latino households), including Miami, New York, Chicago, Dallas and others with sizable Latino populations. If its 11-week run is a success, the show will likely pick up additional markets, said Steve Gigliotti, KCBS general manager.

But success is by no means guaranteed.

The show’s 9 a.m. time slot is a notoriously difficult one, with that hour dominated locally by another talk show, hosted by Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford. The new show will also be up against reruns of “Donahue,” which have done well in the ratings. And, to make matters worse, the lead-in for “Cristina” will be “CBS This Morning,” which has the lowest ratings of the three network morning news programs.

And there is also the touchy matter brought up by some members of the local Latino community about CBS’ choice of a Cuban-American to reach Latinos in cities such as Los Angeles, Sacramento and Dallas, which are made up mostly of Mexican-Americans.

“She is Cuban-American, very blond and may not be attractive to a Mexican-American audience,” said Esther Renteria, chair of the National Hispanic Media Coalition.

Saralegui is weary of such objections.

“At the beginning they said, ‘It won’t work. You’re a Cuban woman. You have a Cuban accent,’ ” she said. “They used to say, ‘How dare you represent us because you’re so white?’ They said, ‘Please wear more blush.’ I made them understand that they were being just as racist. I understand that brown is beautiful, but so is white, pink or whatever you are. We’re a cultural minority. We go from (the darker skin tones of) Celia Cruz to me, and everything in the middle.”

And what about Saralegui’s personal style. Could it be lost in the translation?

Saralegui said she is not certain. But she has no plans to alter her style to appeal to an English-speaking audience.

“I come across on TV exactly like I really am,” Saralegui said. “My shows are basically unscripted. Sometimes I feel I have no connection between my brain and mouth. . . . I don’t know if it’s going to work in English or not, but I’m sure going to try.

“I’m expecting a lot of people not to like me,” she continued. “That’s not my goal. My goal is to try to inform the general market about what all of us are about, to get people’s tolerance level going so we can stop beating each other over the head with clubs. I want to do a show for all the people that live in the United States, not just for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle-class people. I’d like to do a show where everybody can come talk, to take away the fear that we all have of each other.”

Marcos Avila, one of three executive producers on CBS’ “Cristina” (and her husband of seven years), predicts that Saralegui’s style will remain essentially the same in English, though enlivened by a generous dose of “high energy.”

“It’s going to have a little faster pace than the Spanish-language show, to reflect the market,” Avila said. “I think this market is in a different place. They’ve been exposed to ‘Donahue’ for some 20 years, so we have to make a show that appeals to a market that is used to seeing this type of show. In Spanish, the format is practically new, so you have to take that into consideration.”

In Spanish, her highest rated shows have been those dealing with such sensational issues as sexually incompatible couples, cheating on one’s spouse and, “Should you throw your child out of your house?”

Some of Saralegui’s upcoming CBS shows include mixed cultural couples, child abuse in schools, men’s views on breast implants, “Superfat/Supersexy” and “I Married a TV Hunk.”

Despite her enthusiasm about expanding her audience, Saralegui gets testy when people imply that she has finally arrived. “Just because you’re doing something in English, it doesn’t mean it’s better than doing it in Spanish,” she said. “I’m not coming up in life. It’s insulting.”

Although she likes the role of being a pioneer among talk show hosts, she quickly points out that she is not the first entertainer to make the switch from Spanish-speaking entertainment to English-language media.

“There are a lot of people in the arts that have done it: music, acting.” she said. “I’m not so concerned about making a crossover as I am with keeping up my energy to do both shows at the same time.”