by Castro, Ruy
“‘Rio de Janeiro, that I have always loved / Rio de Janeiro, the mountain, sun and sea.’” Tom, write this down before I forget it! I’m on my way there!”
And thus, without much ado, the first few chords of the beautiful “Sinfonia do Rio de Janeiro” by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Billy Blanco were created.
Regardless of where it was conceived, on board a bus or on a piano in Rua Nascimento Silva, “Sinfonia do Rio de Janeiro” was completed at the beginning of 1954, but was not recorded until the end of that year. Paulo Serrano, of Sinter, managed to get Billy and Jobim to sign a contract giving priority to his record label. But the record was expensive to produce; after being orchestrated and arranged for the several voices that Tom and Billy had in mind, “Sinfonia” ended up being at least fifteen minutes long and had to be recorded on a long-play. Long-plays (people had not yet become familiar enough with them to call them LPs), even the small ten-inch ones, were luxury items in Brazil, so much so that only music that was guaranteed a good return was recorded on them. And nothing guaranteed that “Sinfonia” would be a huge success with the masses. Serrano left the musical scores in a drawer, waiting for better days, and it was likely that they would have stayed there for a good long while if João de Barro (the eclectic composer of “Copacabana” and “Chiquita bacana” and at the time the A&R man of Continental) had not heard it played by Tom—who was, by the way, his employee at the recording company.
The cast of Continental was also eclectic. It included radio idols, like Emilinha Borba and Jorge Goulart, and even classy acts like Dick Farney, Lúcio Alves, Gilberto Milfont, Nora Ney, Doris Monteiro, and Os Cariocas. With a team like that and Radamés Gnatalli’s arrangements, it was possible to make “Sinfonia” a great record, one that would even be profitable. João de Barro negotiated with Serrano to be awarded the project. Serrano said it wouldn’t be a problem, if Continental would loan them Lúcio Alves for one record with Sinter. João de Barro agreed, “Sinfonia” was recorded at Continental, and Lúcio Alves made a record at Sinter, without knowing that he had been used as the bargaining chip in a transaction.
The original ten-inch LP of “Sinfonia do Rio de Janeiro” is today an almost priceless collector’s item, mainly because it was a resounding failure. Continental only cut one thousand copies and still had to face the annoyance of a surplus. The entire symphony, with the vocals from that cast, took up the whole of side A; side B bore an instrumental version of the piece, with Gnatalli’s quintet. It was truly a great record, but none of the songs (“Arpoador,” “Noites do Rio” [Rio Nights], “O samba de amanhã” [Tomorrow’s Samba], “Hino ao sol” [Ode to the Sun] and “Descendo o morro” [Descending the Hill]) were successes or even survived independently, except in local gatherings, where small amateur groups (like that of the Castro-Neves brothers, in Laranjeiras) used them as jazz themes.
OK, it wasn’t an easy record, but nobody could have anticipated such a huge fiasco because in July of that same year, 1954, while “Sinfonia” was still being put together, Jobim and Billy had just entered the history books—or rather, the fan club history books—with a song entitled “Teresa da praia” (Teresa of the Beach).
The Sinatra-Farney Fan Club and the Dick Haymes–Lúcio Alves Fan Clubs had already closed their doors four years earlier, but it appeared as if Dick and Lúcio’s fans were not aware of this. The rivalry continued in the same spirit as the competition between Flamengo and Fluminense, the two most famous soccer teams in Rio. Each time either one had a hit record, the respective groups would threaten to smash the 78s over one another’s heads, and there was genuine concern that this would actually happen one day in the middle of the Murray store. Pretexts for provocation abounded. Farney’s fans could tout the superiority of their favorite singer because within a few years, Dick had recorded “Nick Bar,” “Uma loura” (A Blonde), “Alguém como tu” (Someone Like You), “Sem esse céu” (Without This Sky), and “Ranchinho de palha” (Little Straw Hut) and Dave Brubeck himself had announced that he admired him.
But Lúcio’s fans also had equally, if not more, valid arguments, because during the same era, he released “Sábado em Copacabana” (Saturday in Copacabana), “Manias” (Whims), “Valsa de uma cidade” (City Waltz), “Se o tempo entendesse” (If Time Understood), and “Na paz do Senhor” (In the Lord’s Peace). They were all successful songs, and if that weren’t enough, Dick Farney himself professed to be a fan of his. Dick’s fans were certainly not pleased about the fact that Lúcio had been the first to sing “Copacabana” on Rádio Nacional’s program, Um milhão de melodies, before Dick recorded it and made it a hit.
During that same July of 1954, the two of them were at the height of their fame. And although the fans did not want to believe it, they were also at the peak of their friendship. Lúcio lived in Posto 6 and Dick in Urca, which didn’t exactly make them neighbors, but they had common ground: the nightlife in which they worked and continually bumped into one another. Their friendship wasn’t exactly a secret, but since the gathering at the Sinatra-Farney Fan Club headquarters four years earlier, neither one had made renewed efforts to end the ridiculous rivalry between their fans.
Then Dick had the idea of making a record with Lúcio—the two of them singing a duet—at Continental. It was a risky idea, because the record could just as well have enormous commercial appeal for the two stars, as have none whatsoever for either of them, due to the presence of one or the other. What was irresistible was that all of the recipe’s ingredients were already at hand: Dick and Lúcio both recorded for Continental; the recording company had a young “in-house composer,” Tom Jobim, who knew how to write music in the style they liked; besides, Dick had just recorded a sam-bacanção by Tom, “Outra vez” (One More Time); and Billy Blanco, who had surfaced a few months before with “Estatutos de gafieira” (Honky-Tonk Rules), seemed to be an expert at writing lyrics with an amusing story line. It couldn’t fail.
And it didn’t. Tom and Billy took the rivalry between the two singers and wove it into a dispute over a brunette named Teresa (“with slanting green eyes”) that they had both met at Leblon beach. The aforementioned beach was not only included in the song to rhyme with the line amar é tão bom (loving is so good) but also because, in the fifties, referring to Leblon carried an inevitably risqué connotation. The neighborhood had not been completely built up, and at night, Leblon beach became the Rio paradise for rather sandy sex.
“Teresa da praia,” released during that particularly sinister month of August in Brazil, was one of the most surprising successes of 1954, because the only news of the moment seemed to be journalist Carlos Lacerda’s personal war against president Getúlio Vargas’s “sea of dirt.” Be that as it may, the battle ended with Vargas’s suicide on August 24, and with a tie between Dick and Lúcio on the record, because each of them had toned down their vocal capabilities so as not to overshadow the other.
A few years later, when bossa nova came onto the scene, there was no reason for the rivalry to continue. Dick and Lúcio could not know it at the moment, but they had reached the zenith of their popularity with “Teresa da praia.” From that point on, there would be a new musical order, largely inspired by them, but in which they would have no place.
5
Torchy Copacabana
Portrait of the artist as a young man: Poet-lyricist Vinícius de Moraes
Manchete Press
For the Brazilian “respectable” families of the 1950s, singing and playing the guitar were activities they associated with the decadent carousing lifestyle of the old Lapa neighborhood, knife fights between delinquents in filthy bars, cachaça, poverty, and prostitution. The passport to this underworld was, in the opinion of these families, the radio, something to keep well-brought-up young women like Sylvinha Telles as far away from as possible. But for other families, who didn’t care for the surrounding stigma, singing and playing guitar were activities reminiscent of former elegant soireés, at which relatives and friends would gather, in homes
surrounded by high walls, around liqueurs and appetizers and a particularly talented daughter, who would entertain the assembled company with her own compositions and the occasional rendition in English or French—like Maysa. And for yet other families, singing and playing the guitar, when remunerated, was a way out of poverty—like it was for Dolores Duran.
Dolores Duran, Maysa, and Sylvinha Telles were the most influential female singers of the fifties, and their lovesick songs were the closest thing to a kind of Brazilian blues or torch songs. The three of them came from completely different backgrounds and ultimately met at night in Copacabana, where they forgot their upbringing and threw themselves into the demands of their huge talents and personalities. All three believed in the lyrics that they sang and, in the case of Dolores and Maysa, were perhaps a little too sincere, given that they wrote them. They all got into tremendous romantic entanglements, suffered “for love” far more than they should have, drank as if the planet’s alcohol reserves would be depleted the following day, and died very young: Dolores at twenty-nine, in 1959; Sylvinha at thirty-two, in 1966; and Maysa at forty-one, in 1977.
Dolores Duran made the longest journey; she came from Irajá, a remote suburb of Rio. Her father was a Navy sergeant, which meant that she and her three brothers had to start earning a living at a young age. Younger, in fact, than they had anticipated, because their father died in 1942, when Dolores was just twelve years old. A short time prior to his death, Dolores, whose real name was Adiléa, and who loved to sing, won an amateur contest on Ary Barroso’s show at Rádio Tupi, Calouros em desfile (Amateur Parade). Thus her mother saw a way for her to get started, she introduced the girl behind the scenes in nightclubs and radio stations so that she might become a singer.
It was normal for many of those back-door entrances to lead to the director’s bed, rather than the microphone. But in 1946, Adiléa made it to the microphone at the Vogue nightclub and, shortly afterward, to César de Alencar’s show at Rádio Nacional. By then, she had already begun calling herself Dolores Duran—a much more suitable name than Adiléa, mainly because she had an aptitude for languages and a flair for singing boleros and ballads in Spanish, French, English, and even Esperanto. And in any case, the name Dolores was much better than the nickname she had been given, “Bochecha” (Chubby Cheeks), which could have destroyed her career before it had even begun.
From her stint at Rádio Nacional to her ascent to fame as Copacabana’s carousing cult goddess, a large part of Adiléa’s metamorphosis into Dolores was due to all those vocal jams with João Donato and João Gilberto around Johnny Alf’s piano at the Plaza. But while the others hung out under the hot street lamp at the Plaza, Dolores was already being seduced and adopted by another gang, who discovered her at the Clube da Chave: that of the nightlife journalists. Her new late-night companions became Antônio Maria, Fernando Lobo, Sérgio Porto, Mister Eco, Lúcio Rangel, and Nestor de Holanda, the latter a walking scandal for having coined the extremely offensive phrase “female theater monkeys,” referring to the predominant skin color of César de Alencar’s audience.
Hanging out with those journalists, who were more bitter than witty, made Dolores more sophisticated. They polished her up, taught her to appreciate songs that “said something” and, in a way, extracted from the happy and playful woman that she was the gutsy Dolores who became her public persona. All the lyrics they gave her to sing were along these lines—”Canção da volta” (Returning Song), “Bom é querer bem” (It’s Good to Love Well), “Quem foi?” (Who Was It?)—a veritable lineup of tortured souls.
When Dolores herself began to compose, in 1955, she incorporated that tragic mask that they had molded for her full-moon face. Thus, small day-today dramas—the end of love affairs, broken hearts, and painful solitude—became her specialties. For those who knew her then, hanging out with her friends at four in the morning on Avenida Atlântica and jokingly singing, at the top of her lungs, an aria from “Tannhäuser” by Wagner, it was as if Dolores, when it came to writing her lyrics, cried “Shazam!” backward. (Not that she really was permanently euphoric. There are those who believe that, following a series of disastrous love affairs, Dolores began to believe too much in her own lyrics.)
Her first song, “Se é por falta de adeus” (If It’s Because We Haven’t Said Goodbye), in partnership with fellow novice Tom Jobim, was a mere drop in the ocean of tears that she would shed in future songs: Se é por falta de adeus / Vá-se embora desde já (If it’s because we haven’t said goodbye / Leave me now). Young Jobim, happily married to Teresa, his first and only childhood love, did not have the sort of romantic past that would allow him a basic understanding of those problems. (As we know, his only preoccupation was paying his rent.) By way of compensating, he was able to find solutions to everything on his piano. Years later, in 1957, Dolores wrote the lyrics to two other songs by Jobim. One of them, “Estrada do Sol” (Road to the Sun) tells the story of such a joyous “morning after” between two lovers that those who were used to Dolores’s somber lyrics must have been somewhat taken aback. The other, “Por causa de você” (Because of You) gave rise to one of the most often-repeated stories about Dolores: that she had written the famous line (“Ah, if you could only see / The way in which you left me / And everything was left …”) in one fell swoop, with an eyebrow pencil, on the lid of the piano where Jobim played the tune to her at Rádio Nacional.
It’s a good story, but it seems more like a scene from an MGM musical than real life. The two of them had met by chance at Rádio Nacional, and Jobim had shown her the song, which didn’t yet have any lyrics—Vinícius de Moraes was supposed to be taking care of that. When Dolores heard the music, she took her eyebrow pencil out of her pocket, rapidly scribbled a few lines on a paper napkin, and showed them to Jobim. He liked them, and sighed:
“What do you think this music would sound like with Sinatra?”
Then he slapped his forehead and said: “Oops! What about Vinícius?” So Dolores wrote on the back of the paper napkin: “Vinícius, these are my suggested lyrics for this music. If you don’t like them, it’s a shame.” At which, days later, Vinícius gallantly withdrew his own lyrics.
Everything was perfect, except for a few things here and there. It would have been difficult for Dolores (or any lyricist who was not familiar with music) to write the lyrics to “Por causa de você” (Because of You) on her first try, in such a way as to make them fit so perfectly into the melody, much less to do so in the middle of the confusion at Rádio Nacional, over the clamor of the “female monkeys.” And much less still with an eyebrow pencil on a paper napkin. Try it. In fact, Jobim had to play the tune a few times, and repeat several bars, in order for Dolores to fit lyrics and music together. Thus, they formed an occasional but categorical partnership, which Jobim could allow to happen at that time because Vinícius lived outside Brazil and did not yet feel that he alone had exclusive rights to him. As far as Jobim’s fantasy was concerned (“What do you think this music would sound like with Sinatra?”), it did eventually happen—twelve years later, in 1969, when Sinatra recorded “Por causa de você” (Because of You) under the title “Don’t Ever Go Away,” on the second of the two records that the two of them made together.
Jobim and Dolores would have produced more songs in partnership if Vinícius de Moraes hadn’t from the moment that he first “discovered” Tom safeguarded his talents so jealously. In his gently implacable manner, he kept Jobim so busy that the latter drifted away from former associates like João Stockler, Alcides Fernandes, Roberto Mazoier, and even their old mutual friend, Paulinho Soledade. Not to mention Billy Blanco. From the Vinícius era on, Tom could only compose songs with others when Vinícius wasn’t looking, as he did in 1958 with Marino Pinto (“Aula de matemática” [Math Class]) and in 1959 with Aloysio de Oliveira (“Dindi,” “De você eu gosto” [I Like You], “Demais” [Too Much], and “Eu preciso de você” [I Need You]). Ronaldo Bôscoli always complained that Vinícius threatened to break up with Tom if h
e collaborated on a song with Ronaldo, with whom Vinícius, by the way, was great friends.
The only colleague that Vinícius did not object to was Newton Mendonça. Not because Jobim and Mendonça were childhood friends, but because Mendonça was more of a musician than a lyricist, and when the two of them opened up the piano, sevenths and ninths were more important to them than “the feathers that the wind carried through the air” (from “A felicidade” [Happiness]). Perhaps it was because of this that Vinícius did not consider him a threat—as Bôscoli would undoubtedly be, and Dolores certainly was.
However, in the light of what Jobim and Vinícius accomplished, we can’t really complain. And Dolores proved herself to be surprisingly capable of writing music and lyrics on her own, in “Fim de caso” (The End of the Love Affair), “Solidão” (Solitude), “Castigo” (Punishment), and, of course, “A noite do meu bem” (My Sweetheart’s Night).
Maysa Figueira Monjardim already had those eyes when she, like Sylvinha Telles in Rio, was a student at the Sacré-Cœur school in São Paulo. However, unlike Sylvinha, she left boarding school in 1954, at the age of eighteen, and went straight into a wealthy marriage: to the austere André Matarazzo, nephew of the extremely rich Count Francisco Matarazzo, who was twenty years older than her and whose family coat of arms bore the inscription Honor, fides, labor (honor, faith, work). Despite the coat of arms, the Matarazzo did not prevent Maysa from singing, provided that she restrict her performances to aristocratic São Paulo soireés. But Maysa’s father, the Federal Revenue agent Alcebíades Monjardim, had other plans.
