Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World

by Castro, Ruy

  Mind you, they only asked him to do one thing: sing. On the air, a voice offscreen (that of Arruda himself) asked him about his career or current events, and João Gilberto gave his replies in the form of songs —the entire repertoire of Chega de saudade and bits and pieces that he was preparing for his second album. In the four shows in which he starred, a total of two hours on the air, he didn’t have to say a single word that wasn’t part of the lyrics of his songs. “The remuneration was a joke,” remembers Walter Arruda, “but to João, it must have been a fortune. The show bombed in the ratings, but this never seemed to inconvenience the sponsor, Abraão Kazinsky, owner of the store Lojas Três Leões.” João Gilberto gave them fewer headaches than the next artist featured on Musical Três Leões: the pianist and sensation of Beco das Garrafas, Sérgio Mendes. Every week, Arruda had to leave São Paulo and go and fetch him from Niterói (near Rio but across the bay), where the timorous Sérgio lived, get on the plane to São Paulo with him, and then take him back again, holding his hand during the flight.

  Neither the spectre of the rent nor Astrud’s pregnancy prevented João Gilberto from continuing to do things for the simple pleasure of doing them, or from settling accounts with the past. Like the Lux soap jingle he recorded for an advertising agency one time he went to São Paulo for Tom’s show. A PR man and composer, Heitor Carrillo, was one of the guests on O bom Tom. He sang his hit “O vendedor de laranjas” (The Orange Seller) on the air, and, behind the scenes, he showed João the piece of music he had written for the soap commercial: “Movie stars use Lux / It’s the soap you should use / Radiate more beaut / Be your own movie star / Use Lux soap.” The agency’s campaign called for three versions with different singers, and two of them had already been chosen: Agostinho dos Santos and Tony Campello.

  To Carrillo’s surprise, João Gilberto insisted on being the third. He was already famous for “Chega de saudade,” and singers with his status didn’t usually offer their talent for promoting soap. When remuneration was mentioned, João Gilberto even changed the subject, merely wanting to know the time and place for the recording. The next day, he arrived punctually at the Magisom studio in Rua Barão de Itapetininga with the little song learned by heart.

  The recording of the thirty-second jingle took almost four hours to complete, because João kept continually interrupting to whisper: “This song is so pretty …”

  Carrillo lowered his eyes modestly, but the studio hours were mounting, and the agency directors were getting nervous on the other side of the glass partition. Finally, one of the versions was deemed perfect by both João Gilberto and the agency. When they mentioned money, he insisted that it was nothing. The director of the agency argued that this would cause them problems, because the client had already paid and the money had to be used. If it wasn’t, they would have to explain why. But João refused to accept anything. Someone had a brilliant idea: why not give him a present? When they saw that he would perhaps not put up quite as much resistance to this, they took him to the Di Giorgio guitar store in Largo do Arouche and told him to choose one. They were unaware that João Gilberto was merely enjoying the luxury of being able to record a jingle for free—and not for his lunch, as he had a few years earlier.

  At any rate, he must have kicked his heels when he found out that his jingle and that of Tony Campello were approved by the client—and that of his rival Agostinho dos Santos was rejected.

  While João Gilberto’s voice and guitar were touting the excellence of “the soap used by the stars” on Rádio Nacional, during commercial breaks between soap operas, the very same voice and guitar were in the Odeon studio recording the album that would be called O amor, o sorriso e a flor, which would put the stamp of authenticity on bossa nova. On March 28 he recorded “Meditação” (Meditation), by Jobim and Mendonça, “Só em teus braços” (Only in Your Arms), by Jobim alone, and “Se é tarde me perdoa” (Forgive Me if It’s Too Late), by Lyra and Bôscoli. All three were recorded with an orchestra. And he might have recorded others had he not received a phone call from Astrud telling him that his cat (a beautiful black cat, a stray, called simply Gato [Cat]) had fallen out of the window.

  Gato had dozed off on the windowsill and fallen several floors down. João had been afraid this would happen one day and had continually asked Astrud to keep the window closed. João was heartbroken by the accident, interrupted the recording, and flew home in a taxi. Astrud had picked Gato up, still breathing, and they took him to the vet, but the little creature died on the way. That day, in the studio, the orchestra musicians spread the tale around that João Gilberto’s cat had committed suicide because it could no longer stand to hear him practicing “O pato.”

  Two days later, having recovered from the shock of losing Gato, he returned to the studio and recorded “Corcovado” (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars), by Jobim, and “Discussão” (Discussion), by Jobim and Mendonça, with the same orchestra. But João didn’t hear the musicians’ tale about Gato (which, much to his disgust, would haunt him forever) right away—he only learned about it years later in Mexico, when it was recounted to him by the singer Leny Andrade. It was just as well that the musicians respected his mourning for Gato because in the days that followed he completed the album in just four sessions: on April 1, he recorded “Um abraço no Bonfá” (A Hug for Bonfá), an instrumental tribute to his friend (“Have you ever noticed the size of Bonfá’s hands?,” he used to remark), “Doralice,” and the song he had learned in Belo Horizonte, “Amor certinho” (Sure-Fire Love). On April 4, he recorded “Samba de uma nota só” (One Note Samba) and, finally, “O pato.” On April 5, he recorded Jobim’s “Outra vez” (One More Time), which Dick Farney had released in 1954 and which Elizeth had recorded in 1958 with João on guitar. And he finished the record on April 8, with “Trevo de quatro folhas,” “in an atmosphere of peace and birdsong,” as Jobim wrote on the album sleeve.

  And indeed it must have been. While preparing “Corcovado,” whose first verses would be the most remembered and best loved in bossa nova for the next thirty years, something bothered João Gilberto. He started to sing and soon stopped: “Um cigarro e um violão / Este amor, uma canção” (A cigarette and a guitar / This love, a song). He tried it again and couldn’t do it. Then he finally realized what was going on and said to Jobim: “Tom, this thing about ‘a cigarette and a guitar.’ It shouldn’t be that way. Cigarettes are bad for you. What if you change it to ‘a little corner, a guitar’?”

  Jobim, who smoked about three packs a day, agreed to João’s suggestion, as it had been years since the latter had smoked anything. In fact, since his first stay at Dadainha’s house in Diamantina, João had become extremely anti-marijuana, blaming it for all his initial failures. He wanted nothing more to do with it. One of Bôscoli’s friends, a funny guy nicknamed “Ilha Rasa” (Flat Island), used marijuana. João Gilberto didn’t like it when Ilha Rasa came to the apartment and lit up a fino, but he never said anything; he’d lock himself in the bathroom or go outside. He had become a good boy.

  Of the six songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim on O amor, o sorriso e a flor, three were his alone and three had been written in collaboration with Newton Mendonça: “Samba de uma nota só,” “Meditação,” and “Discussão.” Few people noticed, but it was a record made without Vinícius’s collaboration. There were no problems between Jobim and Vinícius. The poet had merely spent most of 1959 in Montevideo, working for the Itamaraty, torturing himself for being abroad while the music scene was taking off in Rio. This was the only reason the two of them hadn’t done much together. It was great for Mendonça, though, because without Vinícius there to hire him out, Jobim was able to return to working with his oldest partner and friend, from whom he had been somewhat distant over the last few years.

  “One-Note Samba,” like “Desafinado” (Off-Key), became a bossa nova anthem from the outset—a type of bill of principles that musicologists examined in minute detail. It’s a mystery how it ever became a popular hit. Never had so few beats inspi
red such long discussions. The concept of “only one base” (an expression used in the lyrics) was João Gilberto’s idea, to explain where the syncopation of his beat fell. But what, then, did “only one note” mean, if João Gilberto didn’t play notes, but chords? And for some, “Samba de uma nota só” inconveniently resembled the little-known verse of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” In short, it was very confusing. For heaven’s sake, why didn’t they just go and ask coauthor Newton Mendonça?

  Because nobody knew who he was.

  13

  Love, a Smile, and a Flower

  In with the in crowd: João Gilberto at the last amateur bossa nova concert.

  Manchete Press

  Newton Mendonça was bossa nova’s greatest mystery. When he died on November 11, 1960, only thirty-three years old, many of the movement’s participants realized that they had barely gotten to know him. Few had even seen him, and almost nobody was close to him. To the public, his was just another name that appeared in parentheses next to that of Jobim on several of the songs on João Gilberto and Sylvinha Telles’s records. (And even then, on the 78 r.p.m. label of “Desafinado” [Off-Key] by João Gilberto, his name appeared as Milton Mendonça.) Not even his fans could have confirmed that he had brown hair and brown eyes, was slightly overweight, was not very tall, wore glasses, and preferred peteca to soccer. Nobody saw him in the university shows and he didn’t participate in the bossa nova social life. (Carlinhos Lyra only spoke to him once, at Bené Nunes’s house.) His photograph never appeared among the dozens of articles about bossa nova in 1959 and 1960. Reporters did not seek him out for interviews. When he died, his obituary fit in a single short column on the national news pages. His burial, at the Caju cemetery, was uneventful.

  Years passed. “Desafinado” and “One Note Samba” became classics, resistant to the effects of time and even to the “death” of bossa nova. For many, they were just Jobim’s songs. Nobody ever made much of an effort to ensure that the name Newton Mendonça emerged from the shadows.

  Until now.

  With the rebirth of interest in bossa nova in the last few years, people have begun to wonder who Newton Mendonça was, why he wrote so little, and why he died so young. As few of his contemporaries are able to answer those questions—and not all of them have the patience to impart the information—the fantasy of a possible curtain of silence surrounding his life has evolved. “Why do people change the subject whenever Newton Mendonça is mentioned?”—frequently garners the response, “You’re right. Why indeed?” With such fertile ground for rumors, even the circumstances surrounding his death have become suspect.

  To make matters worse, unchallenged theoreticians, who were more lazy than truly investigative, radiographed the challenging formats of “Desafinado” and “One Note Samba” and thought they were doing Newton Mendonça a huge favor by reviving him as “the first great bossa nova lyricist.” They took it as a given that, if Jobim wrote the music, then Mendonça wrote the lyrics. And in doing so, they put an academic seal of approval on the theory that Mendonça was only a lyricist, which isn’t true by any means. It never occurred to these theoreticians that, although unlikely, it could have been the other way around, that is, that Mendonça had written the music and Jobim the lyrics to these songs. Or that they could have had a different arrangement altogether, that Jobim and Mendonça had an equal hand in writing both the music and the lyrics. And that by canonizing Mendonça as a lyricist, they were being unfair to both Mendonça and Jobim.

  At the end of the fifties, Newton Mendonça wasn’t making any progress as an evening pianist. According to his employment book, the Mocambo nightclub was paying him six thousand cruzeiros a month in 1953—not a vast fortune. The last entry in the book, by the Caroussel nightclub in 1958, records that Mendonça was making two hundred cruzeiros a night, which theoretically adds up to the same six thousand a month, had they been worth the same as they were five years previously. And that’s only if he didn’t miss work once. The other difference is that, in 1958, at least his work was being acknowledged outside the nightclubs. He had already been recorded by several singers; his collaboration with Jobim in “Foi a noite” (It Was the Night) was a hit by Sylvinha Telles; and before he died in 1960, he witnessed—and “witnessed” is indeed the appropriate term—the frenzy caused by João Gilberto with “Desafinado” and “One Note Samba.”

  But Mendonça did not participate in that frenzy, not even peripherally. For several reasons, including his unsociable manner and overwhelming pride, he didn’t know how to capitalize on the craze for bossa nova in order to increase his fee for his evening services and make the nightclubs pay him a decent salary—given that he insisted on continuing to work at them. And in those days, Brazilian copyright laws were little more than a rumor. The fact is that none of Newton Mendonça’s hits made him any real money while he was still alive.

  He was a private and introverted man who kept his diplomas under his mattress and whose only pastime during the day was to play peteca on the beach—a very popular sport in those days. He was jealously protective of his friends and did not like strangers in his circle. In 1959, bossa nova attacked him on all those fronts. His best and oldest friend, Jobim, over whom he had, up until that point, considerable influence, became a mini-celebrity. From that moment on, it became difficult for Mendonça, on finishing his nightclub shift at four in the morning, to persuade Jobim to defy his wife Teresa and get out of bed to meet him at a bar in Rua Teixeira de Melo in Ipanema like he used to. Newton had already resigned himself to sharing Jobim with Vinícius, who had also become a friend of his, but after “Desafinado,” Tom became everyone’s property in the competitive world of bossa nova. And to cap it off, it was Tom, and not him, who became the darling of the press—as if it could have turned out any other way. But Mendonça resented it and was accusatory toward the journalists: “They only want to know about Tom,” he complained to his wife, Cyrene. Later, she would have a different explanation: “Newton frightened reporters.”

  Had he been interviewed by one of them, Mendonça probably would have had a lot to say. Like the things he would tell Cyrene when he was chastized by her for the state of financial hardship in which they lived: “I don’t write music for the cleaner to sing as she’s sweeping the room.”

  This could only be a malicious reference to the story of the maid who had inspired Jobim to write the dazzlingly successful “Chega de saudade.” But he also acknowledged that his ambition to make a name for himself was undiminished and that he was growing increasingly irritated at Jobim’s jokes, like the one the latter made in 1956 at the Posto 5 nightclub, where Mendonça worked. Jobim walked in with the young journalist José Carlos Oliveira, took Mendonça’s place at the piano and said, in all seriousness: “Carlinhos, listen to this samba-canção that I’ve just finished writing.”

  He then played “Foi a noite,” which was his and Mendonça’s, of course. Ronaldo Bôscoli, who was present and recognized the music, made an effort not to laugh, but Mendonça didn’t think it was very funny. This could have become some sort of sick game between the two collaborating partners. A few years later, in 1959, Mendonça ran into Tito Madi in Beco das Garrafas and made him go into Ma Griffe nightclub, where he was now working. “Tito, look at what I’ve just finished writing,” Mendonça said. He sat down at the piano and played him a revolutionary samba. Tito Madi was practically motionless. He couldn’t have known it, but he had just heard, firsthand, “One Note Samba”—the melody, harmony, and rhythm, complete except for the lyrics.

  Jobim and Mendonça wrote “One Note Samba” at the end of 1959, once again at Mendonça’s apartment. But this time they did so with a more serious attitude, without all the fun and games that had surrounded the writing of “Desafinado.” Even so, they were unable to resist poking a little fun at Ary Barroso, by starting the lyrics with the line “Eis aqui este sambinha / Feito numa nota só” (This is a little samba / Composed of only one note). Barroso, who truly believed in the nation
alistic bragging that he penned, was perhaps the only Brazilian composer from the old guard who never flirted with foreign rhythms. In his amateur night radio shows, Ary vigorously defended the sanctity of the samba, and became a tiger whenever some poor, ignorant fool announced that he was going to sing a sambinha (a little samba), sometimes one of his, Ary’s, very own great big sambas. Both Jobim and Mendonça admired Ary, but they resented the blows that the man who wrote “Brazil” directed against bossa nova at the tables of the Fiorentina. They didn’t want to provoke him. By understating their own achievement, classifying their samba as a sambinha, they actually hoped to win him over—and neutralize his opinion of bossa nova. They succeeded.

  When “One Note Samba” was recorded by João Gilberto in April of the following year (1960), bossa nova had already become a national craze, but this didn’t change Newton Mendonça’s lifestyle. His name was relatively well-known on record labels—despite receiving acknowledgment as Milton on “Desafinado”—but his presence remained as much in the shadows as it had in the days of “Foi a noite.” “Desafinado” was now played on all the radio stations, but Mendonça was not basking in his success to the fullest extent. The Ma Griffe was practically a whorehouse and was still paying him poorly. Everything could have been different had he not suffered his first heart attack in May of 1959. The evening before, having returned home in the early hours, he had complained of pains in his arm, and a tingling sensation in his hands. “Last night, I played for business’s sake,” he told Cyrene.

  It wasn’t the first warning signal, and he knew that his family, his father and sister in particular, had a history of heart problems. But those alarms did not prevent him from continuing to participate in abysmal alcohol marathons with his gang in Ipanema. One evening, after draining the supply of Georges Aubert cognac that he had at home, he sent his maid out to buy another bottle at the corner liquor store. The girl returned with the news: “They said they don’t sell João Gilberto.”