The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  Blair was tall and blonde and stood out for her appearance wherever she went on the Latin America tour, wearing wide-brimmed hats against the sun and fashionable skirts and jackets she sewed herself. Yet she was able to blend in, too, in a way, exhibiting unhurried interest in people around her. The proof is in the intimacy of the images she captured—local people carrying baskets of chickens and flowers on their heads, or waiting for customers in timeless patience before a selection of fruit spread on the ground in a village market. The new light in South America and rush of fresh impressions transformed Mary Blair’s art forever, marking future Disney movies from Cinderella to Peter Pan. Intense, often dissonant colors—the kind seen in native Latin American costume—now came together vividly to tell the Studios’ stories, beginning with the films that would come from the Latin America trip, Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros.

  “Disney saw it happen before his eyes and instinctively understood that Blair’s assertive art was in sync with the changing times and future projects,” a commentator wrote. Her work was “modern.” After the South America journey, the kind of softer-hued, fairy-tale art that inspired Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was “out.” Instead, “bold graphics, stylization and surrealism were in.” The continent’s color and vivacity would imprint the look of Disney images carried in the minds of generations.

  * * *

  For Rockefeller, Goodwill Ambassador Walt Disney left a good personal impression. He drew huge crowds when he opened Fantasia in Montevideo and Rio; he talked to hundreds of schoolchildren. Radio and the printed press had only good things to say, except for the Buenos Aires Nazi newspaper El Pampero, which groused that Jewish names were on the roster of El Grupo and editorialized against an alien “invasion.” Now Rockefeller must wait for the films, but they would not come quickly. Within days of El Grupo’s return to its Burbank studio, Pearl Harbor was bombed.

  In Burbank, artists and writers worked on the first Latin American opus, Saludos Amigos, while frenetically producing films for the war effort. On December 8, 1941, Disney flew to Washington with storyboards for the first of hundreds of public-service animation products ranging from encouragement to pay taxes to collecting kitchen fat—in one short, Pluto patriotically gives up his beloved bacon grease for use in glycerine-powered torpedoes and depth charges. A 1943 Academy Award winner, Der Fuerher’s Face, created to sell war bonds, showed how brainwashing worked: a frazzled Donald Duck is a reluctant Nazi, overwhelmed by demands of jobs for the Reich and by the effort of constantly saluting Heil Hitler! A cutaway of his skull shows his brain changing. In the end, Donald awakes from his totalitarian nightmare to hug the Statue of Liberty.

  As the Walt Disney studios worked on Saludos Amigos and a documentary called South of the Border with Disney—perhaps the first of the now-familiar “making of” genre of documentaries—teams were also producing training films for U.S. civilians and the military. They carried titles as dry as Four Methods of Flush Riveting or as exciting as Stop That Tank!, about how to use the Boys brand antitank rifle. (Soldiers fire at Nazi tanks that blow up in a frenzy of noise and bright color; Hitler’s tank ends in Hell, where he blusters to Satan about the unfairness of the new weapon.) At a time when U.S. companies like U.S. Steel and the Ford Motor Company reaped windfalls from war business, Disney declined to make a profit from the government films, which amounted to 93 percent of the Studios’ production from 1942 to 1945.

  In February 1943, Disney finally saw the U.S. release of the film made from the journey for Rockefeller, Saludos Amigos, a paean to Pan-Americanism that quickly became a box office hit. The forty-two-minute travelogue engaged viewers not only with its images and storytelling but also for its new combination of documentary live action and animation, a technique the studio would later use for films such as Song of the South and Mary Poppins. Disney had wanted to do a story for each country on the Latin American trip, but Rockefeller insisted instead on a single sweeping film, so Saludos Amigos takes its storyline from El Grupo’s journey: artists and writers go off to tour corners of South America, their impressions on sketch pads melding into animations. In the first of four segments, Donald Duck is a stereotypical tourist who dons native dress and tries to charm a llama with a flute as he has seen a boy in a market do, with hilarious results; in the second, a small airplane with an ebullient personality crosses the Andes by marshaling all the gumption of The Little Engine That Could, braving a ferocious storm and monstrous mountain to deliver the mail; in the third sequence, Goofy, a cowboy of the American West, is transported over a map to the Argentine pampas, where he becomes a gaucho, proving in the Pan-American spirit how much alike we are north and south.

  In the grand finale of Saludos Amigos, Donald Duck meets his match in a cigar-chomping parrot named José (Joe) Carioca—a carioca is a Rio native—who demonstrates the sights and sounds of his hometown with Brazilian panache. A famous samba song, “Brazil” by Ary Barroso, forms the soundtrack, sensuous and lively. Called “Aquarela do Brasil” in Portuguese (“Watercolor of Brazil”), the music drives images of magical quality: as a paintbrush sweeps the screen, blue watercolor drips luxuriously to become a waterfall, flowers turn into flamingos, palm trees into green-feathered parrots. The brush drips black and a huge bunch of bananas is transformed into a flying flock of yellow-billed toucans. In a bow of respect to the continent, Saludos Amigos was the first Hollywood film to open in Latin America before it opened in the United States. In a review, James Agee called the film a shameful attempt at “self-interested, belated integration,” but audiences north and south loved it. Countries that were not featured, such as Venezuela and Cuba, howled in complaint to the State Department.

  In February 1945, Disney released his second major film from the trip, a musical called The Three Caballeros, in which animated characters—Donald Duck, Joe Carioca from Brazil, and Pancho Pistoles of Mexico—interact with live dancers. The formidable birds—Pancho is a red rooster—get along famously, a metaphor for Good Neighbors. “We’re three caballeros, three gay caballeros,” they sing. “They say we’re birds of a feather.” Donald receives birthday gifts from “friends in Latin America”— a film projector, a book that opens to a sojourn in Brazil, and a piñata—sparking travels to Bahia in Brazil rendered in Mary Blair’s strong magenta and gold, and to Patzcuaro, Veracruz, and Tehuantepec in Mexico, where the caballeros watch traditional dances. Donald falls for gorgeous Latin women, but his approaches are charmingly dissuaded, recalling the phrase Agee once used to typify a Disney trademark: “sexless sexiness.” American audiences hear, many probably for the first time, stellar musical talent from south of the border: the Mexican Dora Luz sings an English version (“You Belong to My Heart”) of the classic “Solamente una vez” by the legendary composer Agustin Lara, and Aurora Miranda, sister of Carmen, lights up the screen in a production number singing “Você já foi à Bahia?” (“Have You Been to Bahia?”).

  Stereotypes do not disappear in The Three Caballeros—they are presented as silly and harmless. Pancho Pistoles is not the “greaser” Latino of pre–Good Neighbor Hollywood, but he does pack two revolvers that he shoots off for effect. Jose Carioca is not an exotic Brazilian familiar with dark arts, but he does show Donald how to use “black magic”—some fancy finger moves—to restore Donald’s stature after he shrinks to enter the birthday book. Far from a continent of danger and superstition, Latin America in Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros is a stunningly beautiful region whose inhabitants have much in common with each other and with the United States. The films’ documentary images, animated characters, and captivating sounds made the Good Neighbor policy attractive and enticing.

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  Walt Disney’s teams never pointed cameras at the poverty of people whose beauty and culture they exalted; it was not the side of the region Rockefeller wanted to show. That does not mean Disney or Rockefeller, or groups such as the American Red Cross, ignored the power of film to educate people about how to better their lo
t—even though the education did not challenge the political and economic structures that caused the poverty in the first place.

  The CIAA’s Health and Medical Unit enlisted Disney in its campaign to reach residents of inner-city neighborhoods and the countryside with messages about improving nutrition, sanitation, and efficient farming. The division drew from multiple producers to distribute films on behalf of Latin American governments and service organizations, but Disney’s contributions, with titles such as How Disease Travels, Cleanliness Brings Health, and The Winged Scourge (how mosquitoes spread malaria), were especially effective because they reached viewers while entertaining. In The Winged Scourge, the mosquitoes’ wings beat with the music in the style of Fantasia. Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs put up window screens in an example of collective action. The CIAA’s teams forded streams and braved dust storms to reach remote villages where they played the films in public squares, employing the same kind of sound trucks that the Bayer Company was using to exhibit German propaganda films in Brazil. They showed the films in police stations and hospitals, sometimes up to eight thousand times a month. Some spectators had never seen a film before. They might comment aloud as the picture ran, and applaud enthusiastically at the end.

  The American public was happy to see the Disney full-length features at theaters, but questions arose among members of Congress about why U.S. taxpayers should be paying for other movies to improve the well-being of indigent people a continent away. Vague allusions to the Good Neighbor policy were not a sufficient, or candid, answer. The chief of the CIAA Medical and Health Unit, Maurice Feuerlicht, explained to one important constituency, U.S. educators, that “for strategic reasons the other American republics are important to our security.” Films about improving health and agriculture were not just about their Latin audiences but “helping our selves in a justifiably selfish way.” The Allies depended on Latin America for rubber, quartz crystal, quinine, bismuth, iodine, and foods that sustained and healed the troops, Feuerlicht wrote in a teachers’ journal, the Educational Screen, in 1943. “Hence, the health of our southern neighbors is a powerful weapon in our own behalf.” He called the films “our modern medicine show.” Over the course of the war, they played to four million Latin Americans.

  If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

  —ORSON WELLES, SCRIPT, The Brass Ring

  The propaganda mandate of the CIAA was to contrast the Allies’ democracies with the totalitarianism exemplified by the Reich. In recruiting Orson Welles, Rockefeller’s original idea was to use the radio star’s deep baritone voice and significant oratorical skills to give speeches about individual freedom—radio reached wide in Latin America, even to the illiterate who were beyond the draw of the written press. The host of the Mercury Theatre on the Air seemed a perfect choice.

  Orson Welles had taken to the stage at age nineteen, a strapping six-footer with jet-black hair and a talent for miming accents and dialects. At barely twenty, he was playing the mysterious radio serial hero “The Shadow,” who possessed the “power to cloud men’s minds so they could not see him.”

  To maintain the show’s mystery, Welles played The Shadow anonymously, but he became a household name when he produced the radio series called The Mercury Theatre on the Air. He chose dramas for their effectiveness on the airwaves—the first was Bram Stoker’s Dracula—and in 1938 he ran the most notorious Halloween radio program in history, his adaptation of the 1897 novel War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. The show drew so much attention that the program attracted the commercial sponsorship of the Campbell’s Soup Company, and Welles brought in stars whose names read like a who’s who of the era’s most celebrated performers: Katharine Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, Helen Hayes, Margaret Sullivan, Burgess Meredith, Joan Bennett, Lionel Barrymore.

  President Roosevelt and Rockefeller wanted the propaganda of the CIAA to flow north and south, underscoring the concept of common ideals throughout the Americas. In Orson Welles, Rockefeller saw an orator who would give not only public lectures but also radio addresses heard in Latin America and the United States. His words would carry far, and they would be irresistible.

  By the time Welles was packing to board the Pan Am Clipper to South America in early 1942, however, something had changed in his public profile. He was still the most recognizable voice on radio, but now he was also a famous, innovative cinema director. His first major film, Citizen Kane, was being hailed as the greatest ever made. Kane’s central character, a barely disguised version of yellow-journalism mogul William Randolph Hearst, played by Welles, was unforgettable. Welles’s treatment of the Hearst character was unremittingly scathing; Hearst tried to have the film’s negative destroyed, forbade his chain of newspapers from giving it reviews or ad space, threatened blackmail. Meanwhile, word of mouth celebrated Citizen Kane all the way to Latin America.

  After the film opened in New York in May 1941, Jock Whitney met among the warm breezes of Rio de Janeiro with Lourival Fontes, the powerful and Machiavellian chief of Brazil’s Department of Press and Propaganda. The wily Fontes saw a way to get some propaganda of his own from the CIAA’s operation. Yes, the speeches and radio performances of Mr. Orson Welles would be welcome. But why not have the famous director make a film for all the world to see featuring Rio’s legendary Mardi Gras carnival, the city’s annual extravaganza of dance, song, and wild costumes, a production that would serve the purpose of introducing Brazil to Americans? And not incidentally, bring tourists to Brazil? Fine, said Whitney. Rockefeller agreed.

  Welles stalled because he didn’t want to leave the editing of his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, in the hands of others, and also because he was developing a new project, The Story of Jazz, with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. But Rockefeller and Whitney both owned chunks of Welles’s studio, RKO, so in a way they were his bosses. And since Welles was under contract to RKO, Rockefeller strong-armed the studio into backing a South American film by the director to the tune of $300,000, another point of pressure. On December 20, 1941, with Americans still in shock over Pearl Harbor, Whitney sent Welles a pointed telegram. “Personally believe you would make great contribution to hemisphere solidarity with this project. Regards.”

  Years later Welles drolly told filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich: “I had been given to understand it was my duty.” In fact, Welles was a patriot, and he considered the assignment a wartime contribution. He was also a personal friend of President Roosevelt, who once told Welles that he considered him “the second greatest actor in America”—after himself. In his farewell speech as host of The Mercury Theatre on the Air, Welles informed his listeners that he was going “to the ends of the earth as we know it.”

  * * *

  What happened next has been the subject of controversy by film buffs and scholars for more than seventy years. Either the much-expected Pan-American film, which Welles titled It’s All True, was never completed because Orson Welles self-destructed, drank too much, worked in disorganized fashion. Or it was never finished because he delved too deeply into his subject, was too true to his ideals, and found himself sabotaged by Rockefeller and RKO.

  What is certain is that even as he worked on the would-be opus, Orson Welles embraced his mission as a roving ambassador for Pan-Americanism. “I come to Brazil hoping to reveal it both to those who judge it badly and to those who do not yet know it,” he told reporters on arrival in Rio.

  In a series called “Hello Americans,” Welles shared the microphone with Brazilian celebrity entertainers like Carmen Miranda and Sebastião Bernardes de Souza Prata, a beloved actor, comedian, singer, and composer popularly known as Grande Otelo. “Hello Americans” went out over shortwave to the United States on the NBC Blue Network, predecessor of ABC and home of popular broadcasters such as Lowell Thomas and Walter Winchell. On April 18, 1942, Welles played master of ceremonies at a gala birthday celebration for President Vargas hosted by U.S. ambassador Jefferson Caffery at the glamorous Urca Casino.


  “This is Orson Welles, speaking from South America, from Rio de Janeiro, in the United States of Brazil,” he intoned for the U.S. radio audience and distinguished local guests, standing handsome and vigorous at the microphone in a white tuxedo. He suggested that borders were fluid, addressing “friends from Maine to Manaus, from São Paulo to Chicago, Rio to San Francisco … over a hundred stations in North America and most of the stations in Brazil.” When he arrived in Rio, Welles had proudly told news reporters that he had been conceived in Brazil when his parents were on their honeymoon. Now on the radio, after the orchestra played “Tudo É Brasil” in fox-trot rhythm, Welles translated the title. “All is Brazil,” he said, then added in a voice laced with emotion, “Oh! My Brazil.”

  Welles also sent the message that Americans had much to learn from southern neighbors. On a show with Carmen Miranda, he delivered a discussion of native instruments, demonstrating the rasping and percussive sounds of shells and drums. On the Vargas birthday party show, he sprinkled in Portuguese words and introduced audiences north of the equator to the new music that was driving the film he was shooting. “If you mix two words, ‘music’ and ‘Brazil,’ and stir well, you will get samba,” he said. “And if you mix in some Brazilians, you will get the samba dance.”

  Welles had not been keen on the Mardi Gras movie idea hatched by Jock Whitney and the Brazilian minister of press and propaganda. But music changed his mind. “I went groaning with horror at the thought of making a film about carnival,” Welles told Bogdanovich. “As it turned out I became fascinated with samba.”