Whether or not Vargas’s positive response to the list of military supplies helped to grease the wheels in Washington, Souza Costa’s mission went much more smoothly thereafter. Souza Costa succeeded in accomplishing almost all of the economic objectives Vargas had assigned him. The United States offered funds of up to $100 million to help develop raw materials in Brazil, while agreeing that the price of Brazilian rubber would be increased and production would also expand in the Amazon region of Brazil. The United States also provided assurances that Brazil would still be paid for the export of its coffee and cacao, even if these commodities could not be shipped. Furthermore, the Americans would provide research and development money, as well as expertise, to help the Brazilians produce aircraft engines.9
These agreements, which were collectively known as the Washington Accords, were signed on March 3, 1942, and represented every bit as significant a gain for Brazil’s economy as the armaments deal had been for the country’s military. The accords did advance the two countries’ military relationship, as well; the United States also went some way to providing Brazil with more of the armaments that it needed for the defense of northeastern Brazil. The new lend-lease agreement was also raised to $200 million, granting Brazil additional credit with which to pay for the increased shipments of armaments.10
In Rio the following morning, with Alzira busy transcribing Souza Costa’s long and detailed encrypted telegrams, President Vargas declared himself satisfied with the final details of the accords.11 In return for the American concessions, and after first consulting with Dutra, Vargas agreed to the stationing of US personnel in northeastern Brazil, with the understanding that their main task was to transform the region’s airfields into modern, fully functioning airports in order to allow the unrestricted use of the airspace by the United States.12 He also finished dealing with the problem of Brazil’s pro-Axis aviation industry, an issue that had long concerned the Americans and British. By 1942, the Italian airline LATI no longer flew routes to Brazil, and the Brazilian airline Condor—which previously had strong German links—was being taken over by the Brazilian government.13 The process of taking control of local airlines had been a complex one, but Vargas had been determined to succeed.14
The Brazilian press warmly welcomed the Washington Accords of March 3, 1942. One American in particular was singled out for his work in Latin America: Nelson Rockefeller. Central to Rockefeller’s vision was the development of cultural and media ties between the two countries—ties that were aimed at countering Nazi efforts to covertly export its brand of racial culture into Brazil. The tightening of a British naval blockade in the region had already made direct German attempts to do this all the more difficult. So too, for that matter, had a recent turn of events in the Atlantic.
In February and March 1942, the German navy sank four Brazilian vessels off the coast of the United States.15 Germany, while wishing to punish Brazil for the breaking of relations, also had geostrategic motives for attacking Brazilian shipping. The Germans believed that Brazil remained highly dependent on supplies from the United States to keep its economy going. The most vulnerable area was fuel, which was already in short supply in Brazil and for which Brazil was almost totally dependent on the United States. Fuel was brought to Brazil in large Brazilian tankers, and the Germans believed that the more Brazilian shipping its submarines sank, the more likely it was that the United States would have to organize an escort convoy, which would distract the US navy from maintaining the South Atlantic route from the United States to Great Britain. Some fifty-three Brazilian seamen were lost in one incident alone when, on March 10, 1942, seven days after the signing of the Washington Accords, a German U-boat torpedoed the SS Cairu between Norfolk and New York.16
When news of the sinking of the Cairu reached Brazil, serious rioting took place in Rio and the country’s south. In the capital, rioters stampeded through the streets, attacking German-owned businesses. The local police were slow to restore order, and chose to intervene only as a last resort. German shopkeepers attempted to save their businesses by dropping their metal shutters and putting up signs that read “closed until further notice.” The wave of anti-German feeling took many Brazilian leaders by surprise, but in the American and British embassies in Rio, it was viewed as confirmation that Brazilians were very much on the side of the Allied cause. Certainly, it would be difficult for Vargas to switch sides now that so much of the Brazilian populace had turned decisively against the Axis.
Rockefeller’s main goal, however, was even more ambitious than preventing German ideology from infecting America’s southerly neighbor. He aimed both to lay the groundwork in Rio for Brazilian participation in the war, and to illustrate to America that Brazil was a trusted ally. Rockefeller understood that in order to succeed in the latter effort, he would need to demystify Brazil for the American public and attempt to build Rio’s credibility. He was busily waging a charm offensive in the American press; in April 1942, Life magazine, the periodical with the largest circulation of the era, put Rockefeller on its cover and the New Yorker published a detailed feature on the youthful American. Rockefeller proclaimed in the New Yorker, “I am optimistic about South America, but you have to qualify that by saying that I am optimistic about everything.”17 The articles in both magazines were full of praise for Rockefeller and the work of the office of the coordinator of inter-American affairs. He was seen as a man who could cut through Washington’s red tape, a man who could get things done. Rockefeller’s profile was growing in Rio, as well, with many Brazilians curious as to why this superwealthy, young, handsome man did not simply become a playboy.
During the first part of 1942, Rockefeller was keen to increase the pace and scale of his cultural program in Brazil. He regarded the success of Walt Disney’s visit to Rio the previous year and the good reception Brazilian artists were enjoying in America as indications that the time was right for him to plan a project on a far greater scale. Naturally, such lofty aims did not come without due risk.
Without knowing it, Rockefeller would unleash a force on Rio de Janeiro that, for better or worse, would come to play a leading role in the American Good Neighbor Program. Even as Rockefeller’s nominal boss, Sumner Welles, was preparing to depart Rio, thousands of miles away another Mr. Welles was getting ready to board the very same aircraft that was earmarked to bring the undersecretary of state back to the United States. The acclaimed actor-director Orson Welles was in Hollywood at the time, frantically trying to wrap up his latest film in order to catch the Pan Am clipper down to Rio. As Sumner Welles spent his last few days in Rio taking meetings in the Copacabana Palace Hotel and gently unwinding from two weeks of frantic diplomatic activity, he had no idea of the difficulties that lay ahead when this other Mr. Welles—and his film crew—arrived in Rio.
The project Rockefeller had in mind for Welles was sure to be hugely expensive. But Hollywood executives remained keen to participate in the Good Neighbor Program; they understood that there was a lot of money to be made in producing wartime propaganda movies, which drew large audiences across the United States. These executives’ eagerness—and the fact that Nelson Rockefeller was a shareholder in RKO Pictures—made it relatively easy for him to find the necessary funding for a full-scale Hollywood film to be shot in Rio de Janeiro during the first part of 1942.
Rockefeller’s selection of Orson Welles to make the film was not a universally popular decision. The twenty-six-year-old filmmaker was flush from the success of his landmark work Citizen Kane, which had been released the previous year to tremendous acclaim, having been nominated for nine Academy Awards. Welles’s genius was widely acknowledged by film critics, and also by fellow filmmakers in Hollywood. The trouble was that Welles’s genius was fueled by alcohol and, as Welles put it, “skirt chasing.”18 He was not, perhaps, the best man to unleash in a city where both vices were widely available. By 1942, Welles was also starting to reveal something of a persecution complex. He claimed that he was
an outsider, that Hollywood didn’t understand him, and that the big studio bosses were out to ruin his career. On top of all this, he was hopelessly overworked, not only making films but also acting in them.
Much was at stake, and in retrospect, Rockefeller might have been wise to take more caution in choosing a filmmaker. Certainly there were other leading directors who would have been able to make the film he had in mind. Caution, however, was not Rockefeller’s style. He wanted genius, and so he dispatched Orson Welles to Rio to shoot a big-budget film that was supposed to be the icing on the newly baked cake of US-Brazilian relations.
Orson Welles had his own doubts about taking on the project. He resented being dragged out of the edit suite (where he was working on another film, The Magnificent Ambersons, which he felt was going to be even better than Citizen Kane) and dispatched without salary to Rio.19 Welles simply could not turn the Brazil film down, however. As he put it later:
You know why I went? I went because it was put to me in the very strongest terms by Jock Whitney and Nelson Rockefeller that this would represent a sorely needed contribution to inter-American affairs. This sounds today quite unbelievably silly, but in the first year of the war the defense of the hemisphere seemed crucially important. I was told that the value of this project would lie not in the film itself but in the fact of making it. It was put to me that my contribution as a kind of ambassador extraordinaire would be truly meaningful. Normally, I had doubts about this, but Roosevelt himself helped to persuade me that I really had no choice.20
With the president himself imploring Welles to use his creative genius to help shore up ties between the United States and Brazil, the filmmaker could not very well have said no. And whether or not the legendarily festive city beckoned to Welles, as well, it would soon have him in its grip.
Welles had been told that he and his crew were to be on the Pan Am clipper service to Rio at the start of February. “Rio: at the end of civilization as we know it,” claimed Welles on newsreel footage as he set out for the Brazilian capital. The timing of his departure was dictated by the end of the conference of foreign ministers in Rio, since the Brazilian government did not feel it could receive Welles properly with so many other foreign dignitaries in town.21
During the flight down to Rio, Welles went over the initial, vague plans for the movie. The Brazilian department of press and propaganda (DIP) had decided that the film’s subject was to be Carnaval in Rio. From the outset, Welles suspected that the Brazilian government wanted a film that would be of use to it both during wartime and in the postwar era:
They were a little drunk with the potency of the motion picture medium. It is not too hard to see how their DIP would conceive luring one of the world’s most creative filmmakers to make a fantastic tourist come-on (effective after hostilities ended, to be sure) centered upon their fabulous Carnaval. So they beckoned the gullible Yankees. I suggest that the record is made even clearer when it is noted that the Brazilian official put in charge of working with us on the film was the head of the department of tourism.22
Welles argued that the real trouble with the film, however, was that neither he nor his crew knew anything about Carnaval. Welles claimed not to even like the yearly events. “I associated them with fancy dress, which bores me silly, and the tourist banalities of the New Orleans Mardi Gras.”23
What interested Welles much more than Carnaval itself was the samba music that accompanied the festival. In 1942, samba music was not well known outside of Brazil, and Welles wanted to bring the music to the masses back in the United States by making a film centered on the samba clubs in the poor areas of Rio known as the favelas.24 This intention was not entirely realistic, given how dangerous the favelas were, and a cinematic tour of the city’s slums was certainly not what the Brazilian government was expecting Welles and his team to produce for the war effort.
President Vargas and the Brazilian government were initially extremely flattered that a director of Welles’s stature was in Rio to make a film about Brazil. Vargas was impressed by Welles’s energy and his seemingly strong commitment to Brazilian culture. Osvaldo Aranha, too, was quickly won over by Welles. Aranha shepherded Welles around at official functions, making sure he was meeting the right people.
The sheer scale of Welles’s movie project, moreover, staggered the Brazilians. Welles wanted to re-create the vast processions and samba parties of Carnaval, even though many of these rituals had recently been done away with. Praça Onze, the historic square in downtown Rio and traditionally the focus of Carnaval, had been knocked down in 1940 by the Vargas government as part of their attempt to exert more government control over the parade and to build a new boulevard. This was no problem for Welles, who rebuilt an exact replica of the praça in a movie studio, where he also re-created the dancing and music of the samba parade. It was on this film stage that photographers from Life captured the famous pictures of Welles dressed in a white tuxedo, brandishing a handheld camera—a filming technique that was little used at the time—and looking slightly crazed.
Early on, it was clear that Welles and his film, which he gave the working title It’s All True, were in deep trouble. Studio executives, worried about the spiraling costs, threatened to withhold payment for Welles’s expenses. One man drowned during the filming of a scene depicting Brazilian revolutionaries arriving in Rio by raft.25 Compounding these problems was the fact that Welles was drinking too much and chasing skirts all over Rio. He was not content to remain in “white” Rio, the areas by the coastline, and instead traveled further afield. His one attempt to go to one of the city’s favelas, however, ended when men throwing beer bottles attacked his party. Even a country as diverse as Brazil had racial strictures in the 1940s, and Rockefeller had to smooth things over with Vargas, who was increasingly worried about the “black” nature of Welles’s film.
Dealing with Hollywood movie bosses proved to be a much more difficult task, even for Rockefeller, and eventually Welles was forced to abandon the film. The executives had become fed up with Welles’s antics, and had taken issue with the project’s producers, finally deciding to cut off Welles’s funds. While a “finished”—or at least viewable—version of the film would surface in the 1980s, Rockefeller’s grand ambitions for the project were never realized.
The great project had ended in failure and ruin for Welles, who would never work for a major Hollywood studio again. His usefulness to Rockefeller, however, did not end with the film. Welles, who had already gained infamy as a radio personality for his 1938 narration of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, enjoyed something of a second career as a radio broadcaster while in Brazil, hosting joint radio programs with Brazilian broadcasters and even speaking some broken Portuguese during the shows.
Welles took part in two important radio broadcasts while in Rio, one to mark Pan-American Day on April 15, 1942, and the other one to mark Brazilian President’s Day on April 19, 1942. Welles’s joint radio address with Osvaldo Aranha on April 15 was an important event in helping to introduce Aranha to a wider audience in the United States. When the two men came together to conduct the broadcast, the differences between them could not have been more striking. Welles looked like a trendy but slightly mad professor, dressed in a crumpled double-breasted pin-striped suit with a white shirt and no tie. Aranha, by contrast, appeared more conservative, in a crisp suit and tie with perfectly combed hair. Prior to the broadcast the minister of foreign affairs had an attack of nerves, wondering if his heavily accented English would be understood by an American audience. Welles reassured him, suggesting that many Americans struggled to follow Welles’s own lyrical style of English. Indeed, prior to, during, and after the joint broadcast, it was clear that—despite all the difficulties surrounding It’s All True—Aranha and Welles remained on excellent terms.
During the program, which was broadcast on NBC, Aranha made the pitch that Brazil was a reliable ally and could be trusted:
I
know well that the heart of Brazil is all with the United States. Our interests have been mutual always, our affections mutually profound. Today, as history itself enters upon a new epoch, our very aims are so identical that I feel justified in speaking now for the people of both our countries, for your people as well as mine, when I say that in all that family of nations of which you have made mention, we are the closest, the United States and Brazil—we are each other’s favorite . . . The products of our industry, the great wealth of our natural resources, are yours—all yours, for your fight against our common enemies. Brazilian ships give first preference to your war needs. They carry little else. Our effort is more than just a supplement to yours. I need a stronger word than cooperation.26
True to form, the foreign minister came off as strongly pro-American, and while his assurance—“the heart of Brazil is all with the United States”—may have not been entirely grounded in reality—ignoring, for instance, the military’s ongoing frustration with America’s conduct toward Brazil—it did convey exactly the sort of resolute camaraderie that had become the policy of the Vargas administration, while also making clear that the war was still America’s to fight, and not Brazil’s.
The conversation then moved to the serious topic of the first attacks against Brazilian shipping by German U-boats, which at the time of the broadcast in April 1942 were starting to increase in frequency. Here Welles revealed his true professionalism. It would be easy to dismiss Welles simply as a drunk, perspiring party animal, whose interest in Rio was purely to stroke his own ego and pursue the thrill of sexual conquest. He had another side, however, which shone through whenever the fog of booze lifted long enough. Welles was capable of being a first-rate diplomat, and although he would have regarded the labels themselves as insulting, he was also something of a good politician and statesman who took his responsibilities seriously.
Brazil : The Fortunes of War (9780465080700) Page 18
