At the cutters’ circles she was the Little Miss who put on a show for the lowliest workers on the plantation, making them feel as if she was in their power and not the other way around. At Little Tony’s, she was the Nymphette not because of a silly costume and pigtails, but because of her nervous smile and the ardent innocence of her voice. As a samba singer in Lapa she was the gum-chewing, street-smart schoolgirl whom all others copied. As Sofia Salvador, she sensed that Rio craved the idea of difference and danger but not the reality, so she became the risqué Baiana with her jewels and off-the-shoulder blouses, flashing her legs and singing with a snarl about heartbreak. And in Hollywood during the war years she became the Brazilian Bombshell—not a woman or a child but a combination of both, like a fairy or an imp, who was naughty and funny and from another, Technicolor world.
I’ll put it this way, for those of you who have never seen her films: if Rio’s Sofia Salvador was like a shot of sugarcane liquor—sweet but heart-stoppingly strong, enjoyed by rich and poor alike, and the most Brazilian of all drinks—then Hollywood’s wartime Sofia Salvador was a glass of champagne.
No. That’s not right. She was not the champagne. She was the fizz.
During the war, North Americans went to the movies to forget the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the vicious fighting in Europe and Japan. For ninety minutes in the movie theater, they could stop worrying over food rations and if they would have enough meat and sugar to last the month. They could bask in the glow of that giant movie screen and forget that Los Angeles’s beaches were blocked by barbed wire and patrolled relentlessly by the Coast Guard on the lookout for Japanese submarines. Surrounded by death and uncertainty, North Americans wanted an escape. Who better to give it to them than Sofia Salvador and the Blue Moon Band?
After our first picture, Zanuck ordered that Graça and the Blue Moon boys be subjected to teeth cleanings and bleachings, haircuts, eyebrow pluckings, and facials. At Fox’s clinic, a dermatologist performed what they called a “violet ray treatment” on Graça to burn away a layer of skin and make freckles disappear. They performed a painful treatment on her hairline, to make her brow higher. For a full week, Graça hid inside the hotel room she shared with Vinicius, her face red and scabbed. A studio doctor provided a hearty supply of painkillers, along with bottles of “Blue Angels” and bennies. The former knocked you out at night, the latter pepped you up for long shoots and the endless, hours-long screen tests to make sure every stitch of every costume looked perfect to the camera’s eye.
Sofia Salvador and Blue Moon worked a punishing schedule, making a movie musical every three months: Private Shirley Goes to Rio, She’s a Doll, G.I. Love Ya, and Mexican Tango, among many others. It was hard to keep track of which picture we were working on because the plots were always the same: North Americans venture south of the border, or travel to an army base to entertain the troops, and chaos ensues. The war’s rationing of electricity made daylight valuable, so filming lasted from six a.m. to sundown every day of the week. Time dissolved into a series of early calls, fourteen-hour shoots, rehearsals and fittings and promotional appearances fueled by a steady stream of Blue Angels and bennies, until five years passed and we could count on one hand the number of rodas we’d had together, as a band.
Sofia Salvador’s image on posters grew bigger with each consecutive film, and so did her speaking parts, but she was never the official star; she was a musical act with two or three numbers at most. We all got better at speaking and understanding English, but Graça was pitiful at memorizing scripts. She often got her lines wrong.
“I just spilled the cat out of the beans,” she said in one film. “Scratch my heart and hope two thighs,” she said in another.
When she tried to correct herself, the directors stopped her. “Keep going,” they pleaded.
Zanuck visited each movie set and ordered Sofia Salvador’s directors to film her musical and dance numbers in one continuous take.
“Never cut away from Salvador once she starts to sing!” Zanuck demanded. “No audience shots. No reactions. No close-ups. Have the camera on her whole body for the entire damn number, I don’t care if it’s ten minutes long.”
Some of her musical numbers grew to be fifteen minutes long, and because of Zanuck’s orders never to cut away from her, if Graça or the boys made a single mistake, they would have to stop shooting and begin all over again. Because of this, they practiced each number so many times they could perform them blindfolded as a gag for the crew and cameramen. Graça could sense by the heat of the lights on her face where the camera was and whether she had to turn her head even a few centimeters to get a better shot.
Blue Moon wore their own black tuxedos in our first film, but afterward Fox commissioned more colorful tuxes: bright yellow, aqua, purple, and orange to complement Sofia Salvador’s dresses. With each film, there were more eye-watering colors and glittering stones, until the Baiana we’d created in Rio became nothing more than a shadow, a ghost in the costumes’ ruffles and off-the-shoulder tops. A wide strip of Sofia Salvador’s stomach was always exposed. The slit in her skirts grew so long and wide she had to wear colorful swim bottoms. She kept her hair black and in its pixie cut, a style so avant-garde that it was a full three decades before women on the street cut their hair this way. And clipped to Sofia Salvador’s ears were those huge, dangling jewels in fantastic shapes: dolphins, hummingbirds and butterflies, apples, strawberries.
She became the face of Lux soap and Pond’s cold cream. The Brazilian Bombshell never rests, the ads exclaimed, but even this go-go-go girl stops to use Pond’s! Reporters from Photoplay and Silver Screen fought for interviews with Sofia Salvador. In each magazine, she appeared in pullout poster spreads that could be taped to walls or above bunk beds in troops’ barracks. In one spread, she wore a bikini with two massive sequined pineapples covering her bosoms. In another, she sprawled across a bed of bananas. When Sofia Salvador and the Blue Moon Band appeared at the Hollywood Canteen to entertain troops on leave in L.A., the soldiers gave them standing ovations.
Despite the fact that Graça and Vinicius were still a couple—caught in their fervent cycle of arguing and making up—Fox staged “candid” shots of Sofia Salvador flirting with stars like Ramon Romero and Tyrone Power for the gossip pages. The studio loaned Sofia Salvador clothes, shoes, and costume jewels. During lunch and dinner breaks, Graça demanded buttered lobster tails and French fries delivered to our trailers and Fox obliged. We were not allowed, after all, to sit together—all of us, at the same table—at Fox’s Paris cafeteria. And because the Brazilian Bombshell could not be photographed coming and going in a taxicab, Fox gave her and Blue Moon a red convertible DeSoto for daily use. This was common practice in the studio system, where starlets were like prized racehorses—pampered, fed, groomed, and expected to perform until they expired.
I speak of our “punishing schedule” knowing that as we endured costume fittings and dance rehearsals, men fought and died across the ocean, and, there in Los Angeles, legions of women, Mexicans, and citizens with skin darker than was acceptable for the times built planes, filled bombs, and mixed vats of synthetic rubber. And as these workers poured into the city, so did sailors from small towns across the USA. By the summer of 1943, the city’s heat and the factories’ fumes settled over L.A. like a lid on a boiling pot. All of us were trapped inside.
When the Zoot Suit Riots erupted and mobs of white sailors stalked downtown L.A. searching for boys who looked Mexican to beat to a pulp, a studio PA warned the Blue Moon boys to avoid downtown music clubs for a while. By then we’d moved into a house on a deserted road where only a handful of slow, sad cars from the San Fernando trolley passed. There was a pool the size of an opera stage, and enough bedrooms to house a soccer team. We had few neighbors, so no one noticed or cared that the likes of Kitchen, Tiny, Banana, Bonito, and me came and went as we pleased; plenty of homes in L.A. had live-in staff, after all. By then Brazil itself seemed
like a place in the movies: a homeland that remained pristine and unchanging in our memories. Home was our talisman to ward off frustration and fatigue. It was the card we kept in our back pockets. It was our escape hatch, reassuring us that Hollywood was a temporary adventure and its rules, riots, hierarchies, and the indignities it made us suffer would have no lasting effect. We’d become so used to acting out lies in the movies that we began to believe them.
Hollywood, it turned out, was not a roda that we’d ever be allowed to join. It was a vast Great House. Within it, we were granted—temporarily—tolerance and luxury, but the house was not ours and we were not its guests. We were not its servants, either, for those roles were reserved for natives. No, we’d been purchased and shipped in for the sole purpose of entertaining the residents—like a record player, or a radio, or a piano in a parlor—put there to amuse, to lighten the mood, to work tirelessly and without complaint and then, when not in use, to remain perfectly quiet and still until it seemed as if we’d disappeared entirely.
TURNED INTO A GRINGA
The only Sofia Salvador costume I didn’t keep sits in a glass case in Rio’s city museum. It is a gold-sequined number that wasn’t from her films but was worn at a ceremony at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. In the glass case, behind the costume, is a picture of Sofia Salvador on her knees, her hands pressed into wet concrete, while a gang of men laugh around her. In the concrete, Graça’s hands are as small as a child’s, her feet barely a size six. The Rio museum calls that day a triumph—Sofia Salvador remains the only Brazilian with her handprints and footprints enshrined at Hollywood’s landmark theater, alongside the likes of Clark Gable and Ginger Rogers. When I think of that ceremony, I don’t see triumph. I see only the beginning of our unraveling.
It was 1945 and the war was winding down, though we didn’t know it yet. Fans and photographers jockeyed for positions outside Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. (I’d later learn that Fox had hired fans to appear at the ceremony, knowing turnout would be low. Lavish musicals were losing steam to detective dramas, which were cheaper to film. The Walk of Fame ceremony was a way to publicize Sofia’s latest movie without paying for ads.) Beyond the fans’ area was seating for honored guests and a small stage with a microphone, and at the center of the festivities, cordoned off with velvet ropes, were two slabs of wet concrete.
A band played a fast-paced rendition of “Ai Ai Ai Love You,” a song from her latest film. Afterward, Sofia Salvador appeared onstage, flanked by Ramon Romero and Sid Grauman, like two police officers herding their suspect. She wore a chiffon skirt and a padded top covered in so many gold sequins it looked like armor. Sofia Salvador smiled. Flashbulbs popped and hissed. From the front row of chairs, I shielded my eyes. When the bursts of light died and left only smoke, Graça wobbled. Sid Grauman caught her arm, stopping her from toppling onto the wet concrete.
“Cool it with the flashes!” Grauman barked to the reporters.
Graça had just gotten off her tenth stint in Palm Springs, where Fox sent her to a so-called health resort. Graça’s L.A. diet of booze, lobster, and French fries made it difficult for Fox’s costume department to keep her in midriff tops and pillar skirts. Each of Graça’s stays at the resort lasted two weeks, and left her gaunt and vacant-eyed when she returned. The spa’s nurses bullied her into eating only soup, drinking only grapefruit juice, and wearing a rubber suit to sweat off her extra fifteen pounds. I suppose she could have dug in her heels and refused to go, but Graça’s stubbornness won out over her good sense; she saw each visit as a challenge. “Those bitch nurses!” Graça said. “They didn’t think I could do it. But by the end of the week I told them to go fuck themselves—I lost twenty pounds.”
Sid Grauman moved to the podium and spoke of Sofia Salvador, reading an approved script from Fox studios that was filled with words like pep and zing and va-va-voom. Next to me, Vinicius sighed. Kitchen looked at his watch. Banana snapped his gum.
After Sid Grauman’s speech, Sofia Salvador stepped forward and pressed her platform shoes into the wet concrete. Next, she bent and did the same with her tiny hands. Finally, Grauman handed her what looked like a golden wand. Graça signed the concrete:
To Sid,
Viva Hollywood!
Love,
The Brazilian Bombshell, Sofia Salvador
The crowds cheered obediently. Then there were interviews with at least a dozen reporters.
“Miss Salvador!” a reporter shouted. “Remind the troops: What are your favorite things about the USA?”
Sofia Salvador’s eyes lit up. “Ah, hot dogs. Mash-ed pow-tay-toos. And mens mens mens of course!”
There was a wave of laughter from the crowd. Next to me, Vinicius shifted in his seat. Then another shouted question: “How does it feel to be a part of Hollywood history today?”
Sofia placed a hand on her sequined bosom. “How do I say? It is an honor very great. What am I? A little girl from Brazil. And you hold me into your arms here, make me feel special. Very loved.” Graça’s voice broke. She swallowed hard, then began again. “It is all I have dreamed of.”
“Sofia!” a voice called from the huddle of reporters. “Do you have any words today for Brazil?”
The reporter’s accent mirrored my own, and that of the Blue Moon boys, and of the handful of other Brazilians we’d met in the States.
“Who is that?” Sofia Salvador asked, searching the crowd of reporters.
A hand went up. I did not recognize the young man’s face. He couldn’t have been over twenty. “I’m from Rádio Mayrink!” he called out in Portuguese.
“With pleasure I answer your question,” Sofia Salvador said, and switched to Portuguese. “My dearest brothers and sisters in all of Brazil. I am speaking to you from the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, where I just put my humble hands and feet into cement. It’s one of the happiest moments of my life. In this moment, all I can think of are my fans and friends back home, and my dearest city of Rio. You are always in my heart. May God protect you, and may He bring me and the Blue Moon boys back to you someday soon.”
Tiny bowed his head as if in prayer. Little Noel nodded.
The young Mayrink reporter smiled. “Will you actually return to Brazil?”
“Of course, why wouldn’t I?” Graça asked.
“Because you’ve become Americanized,” the reporter replied.
Graça’s smile disappeared. “We are all Americans: North and South Americans.”
“Why do you allow the American press to say you are an Argentine or a Mexican? Are you ashamed of telling them you’re Brazilian?”
“Of course not! I am Brazilian through and through. It’s not my fault these U.S. reporters don’t know how to read a map.”
“So you’re saying the Americans are ignorant about Brazil, even though we’re one of their greatest allies in the war? You’re saying the USA doesn’t appreciate Brazil’s existence and sacrifice?”
Graça’s mouth opened but no sound came. She took a deep breath and tried again: “No,” Graça said. “I didn’t mean it like that . . .”
“What do you say to those in Brazil who are boycotting your movies?”
“Boycotting?”
The reporter nodded. “They say you’ve turned into a gringa.”
Graça’s eyes moved wildly from the reporter to Sid Grauman, but the theater’s owner did not understand what was being asked.
“What’s that boy saying?” Chuck Lindsay, our agent, pressed me.
“Do you think you’re representing Brazil nobly,” the reporter continued, “or are you and your band, as some newspaper critics claim, puppets to the U.S. imperialists?”
“I . . . I don’t know what you mean,” Graça sputtered.
I found myself standing. The guests seated around me seemed very far away, as if I was looking down from a great height.
“You son of a bitch,” I yelled in Portu
guese. “Get out of here.”
Beside me, Vinicius and the Blue Moon boys stood. Tiny cracked his knuckles.
“I have a right to be here,” the Mayrink boy said coolly. “I have a right to my questions.”
“He is upsetting her,” I whispered to Chuck Lindsay in English, but this was already obvious. Sofia Salvador’s face had gone pale. She covered her mouth with her hand. Flashbulbs popped. A Fox representative escorted Sofia offstage.
“Where’s Miss Salvador going?” an American entertainment reporter called out.
“To the powder room,” Sid Grauman replied. “She gets emotional hearing her mother tongue. You know how women are.” Then he nodded at the theater’s band, who began to play so loudly that they drowned out the Mayrink reporter, who was swiftly removed by security.
* * *
—
The Blue Moon boys left Grauman’s from the front entrance in a Fox studios car to distract reporters from our exit out the back. Kitchen, the best driver among us, took the wheel of our bright red DeSoto while I sat beside him. In the backseat, Vinicius stared at Graça, who huddled near the door, as quiet and wary as a wounded animal.
“I’m not going back to the house,” she announced, her voice steely, the skin around her eyes ringed gray from the mascara and tears she’d wiped away.
I glanced at Kitchen. “Should we get a drink somewhere?”
“I don’t want to be around people,” Graça replied. “Just drive.”
We wound through pre-freeway L.A. on a clear night, past the tawdry themed restaurants in the shapes of giant sombreros and Swiss chalets; past the pharmacies and soda shops with their neon lights. Past the empty lot at the end of Sunset Boulevard where a field of poppies grew, the flowers swaying each time a car passed. Then the streetlights practically disappeared as we made our way into the hills. Los Angeles appeared in the valley beneath us, her lights winking and beckoning like a gorgeous girl laid out in front of us.
The Air You Breathe Page 33
