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

by Castro, Ruy

  It was a natural mistake to make. João Gilberto was the name that was most often repeated in that house. After his shift at the nightclub, Mendonça would go to someone’s house, booze it up, smoke the second-to-last cigarette of his four daily packs of Lincolns, and collapse onto a sofa. He was treating his heart like a punching bag.

  Mendonça wasn’t able to thwart his obvious symptoms and had a heart attack while leaving work at the Ma Griffe. He was rushed to the first-aid clinic in Praça do Lido and the following day was admitted to the Civil Servants’ Hospital. He stayed there for three weeks. When he was discharged, the doctors gave him a prescription that he felt was excessive: he had to immediately stop smoking, drinking, and playing peteca on the beach; moderate the amount of sex he had; and not work for six months. Mendonça more or less fulfilled the first requirement—he stopped smoking whenever anyone was watching—and violated all the other recommendations with religious fervor. Less than two months after his heart attack, he returned to playing piano in the late evenings again, at the Carrousel nightclub; he chose the Veloso, in Rua Montenegro, as his mandatory bar stop on the way to work or wherever; and he continued to play peteca, although now in secret, in Copacabana. The very idea of the mature composer of “Meditação” being forced to play peteca in secret is tragically sad, but that’s what happened.

  Regarding sex, Newton was even less Solomonic. He accepted the doctor’s advice that he and Cyrene should sleep in separate rooms to spare his heart from turning somersaults. But he did not spare it from the intense hammering it took on the occasions, either real or imaginary, when he went to see a prostitute outside his home. His work colleagues were ladies of the night, which opened up a large range of choices for him when he wanted a little fun. But what probably overloaded his emotional senses was his capacity for fantasizing about having love affairs, like the torch he carried for the sambista Francineth and especially for the rock starlet Sônia Delfino, who presented the show Alô, brotos! (Hey, Teeny-boppers!) on TV Tupi. At seventeen, a rival of Celly Campello and, according to her, a virgin, Sônia was the most coveted nymphet in the music business—and she knew it. Cyrene suspected that the two of them were having an affair, which Mendonça neither confirmed nor denied. (Sônia would later admit that she much admired Newton “from a distance,” but denies that they ever had an affair.)

  To be on the safe side, Cyrene thought it best to take her husband far away from Ipanema. They went to live in a duplex in Rua Torres Homem in the Vila Isabel neighborhood, where she thought she would keep him relatively safe from any temptations. They ended up isolating themselves, which wasn’t good for Newton. The only friends who bothered to go all the way to faraway Vila Isabel to see them were Jobim and a young man named Cariê (Carlos Alberto Lindenbergh, later a TV personality in the the state of Espírito Santo). But, as he continued to work in the nightclubs of Beco do Joga-a-Chave-Meu-Amor (Throw-Me-the-Key-My-Love Lane), Mendonça was a regular visitor to the Copacabana social scene and began coming home later and later, taking the precaution of buying some candy for his wife beforehand to appease her.

  On Tuesday, November 11, 1960, Mendonça went out on a rainy night to meet some friends at the Ponto dos Músicos (The Musicians’ Meeting Place) in the center of the city. He wasn’t going to work that evening. When he returned in the early morning, Cyrene had already gone to bed. She heard him struggling with his key in the lock, and thought he was drunk. She got up and went into the living room to look for him. The fumes of alcohol coming from her husband could be detected a mile away, but he was also chalk-white and was clutching at his chest. He had managed to put the candy on top of the piano and tried to hang up his umbrella, which fell to the ground. There was an armchair close by, and he collapsed into it with a heavy sigh. Cyrene realized that he was having another heart attack, and ran to get the doctor who lived on the floor above. When he arrived, Newton Mendonça was dead.

  The breakup in the bossa nova world sent shock waves through Copacabana and Ipanema in the first few days of 1960, and people spoke as if they were screaming headlines: Carlinhos Lyra has split from Ronaldo Bôscoli! He took back ten songs that he had given him to write the lyrics for! Carlinhos isn’t doing any more bossa nova! He’s doing sambalanço—he’s even trademarked the term! He’s signed with Philips and told the others to go to hell! He’s going to record a solo album! Their mutual friends are also splitting up! Sylvinha Telles, the Castro-Neves brothers, and Alayde Costa are going with Carlinhos! Menescal, Nara, Normando, Claudette Soares, and Sérgio Ricardo are staying with Bôscoli!

  What could have caused all of this?

  There were a thousand theories. Lyra was eaten up with jealousy when Bôscoli started composing with Menescal. Lyra discovered that Ronaldo had right-wing sympathies. Lyra was seduced by Philips into signing a contract and making a solo album, without waiting for the promised record that the gang was going to record at Odeon. This last theory was the correct one.

  André Midani had been promising to make the record A turma da bossa nova (The Bossa Nova Gang) since the show at the School of Architecture in September, but continued to meet with resistance at Odeon. The “contract” that he had made them sign at Chico Pereira’s house was never legally binding, and now that they were on the verge of turning professional, it was even less so. Midani managed to get them into the studio at the end of 1959 and started to make the record, but without a well-thought-out, legal contract, it would never be released. Lyra considered himself, rightfully so, the star of the gang—even more so than Bôscoli, who was the leader. If the parameter to be measured by was the album Chega de saudade, both of them had written two songs recorded by João Gilberto, but “Maria Ninguém” cast the vote in Lyra’s favor because he had written it by himself. And besides, Lyra also sang and Bôscoli didn’t. He had more reasons than the others to get annoyed with that Odeon turncoat regarding the contract.

  That was when Philips (through João Araújo, according to Lyra; through Marino Pinto, according to Bôscoli) waved a contract under his nose, with the promise that they would record his album immediately—solo—and that they would make him a João Gilberto in his own right. The contract flashed in neon before Lyra’s eyes, but he loyally revealed that he had already committed himself to participating in the Turma da Bossa Nova album at Odeon. Philips assured him that without a contract, that committment meant nothing. So Lyra signed with Philips, and João Araújo quickly made sure that a photo commemorating the event was published in every newspaper the following day. The news exploded like a one-megaton bomb (the largest bomb in existence in those days) in the bossa nova neighborhood.

  André Midani, purple with disgust, summoned reporters to announce that Odeon would boycott Lyra’s record with Philips. Philips thought this highly amusing. Odeon then withdrew the Turma da Bossa Nova project and scaled it down to a seven-inch disc with Menescal’s group, who had also already recorded with them. Some members of the gang, like the Castro-Neves brothers, were upset by this and stuck by Lyra. Alayde Costa was also unhappy with Odeon. Philips came running to sign them and started blasting apart the group that Odeon had been carelessly protecting. Suddenly, bossa nova became the fuse for a war between the two recording companies—and, coincidentally, between a powerful multinational (Odeon) and a courageous binational company (Philips, formerly the Companhia Brasileira de Discos [Brazilian Record Company], which was formerly Sinter, bought out by the Dutch, but still run by Alberto Pittigliani).

  The nationalistic boils still weren’t quite as inflamed in 1960 as they would become two or three years later. But they had already begun to break out at the UNE (União Nacional de Estudantes—National Students’ Union) headquarters, in Praia do Flamengo, where the young men who were forming the CPC (Centro Popular de Cultura—The People’s Center for Culture) gathered. Among them were Ferreira Gullar, Leon Hirszman, Carlos Estevam, Oduvaldo Viana Filho, and Carlinhos Lyra. The CPC was created to “revive” the “roots” of “authentic popular culture” which
had been “suffocated” by the “tentacles” of General Motors, Esso Standard Oil, Coca-Cola, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and other giant American corporations.

  Lyra didn’t agree with everything that was discussed at the CPC. For example, he disagreed with the noted Hungarian philosopher Gyorg Lucáks, whose very word was law at the CPC. Lucáks ridiculed Kafka, whom Lyra thought was tops, and only liked Thomas Mann, whose books Carlinhos considered boring. Before this, however, Lyra had already demonstrated slight dissent by disagreeing with the original name they had wanted to give the CPC, which was the CCP (Centro de Cultura Popular—Center for Popular Culture).

  “I vote against it,” he declared. “I’m part of the bourgeoisie. I don’t create popular culture, I create bourgeois culture, so it doesn’t make sense.”

  Some of the kids looked at him in horror. How could someone so intelligent and so much in tune with popular aspirations say that he was “bourgeois”? Lyra explained that just because he liked samba de morro (samba written in the hills) didn’t mean that he wanted to move to the slums, and that, consequently, he wouldn’t know how to reproduce the kind of music those sambistas played. Besides, he wore blue jeans and Navy shirts just because they were in fashion. But he was in favor of a people’s center for culture, which would be open to people from all walks of life. The influential poet Ferreira Gullar felt he had a point. And he really must have thought so, because less than a year before, Gullar was still writing concretist poems, one of which, entitled O formigueiro (The Anthill) was written to be buried—physically buried—in a patch of wasteland, with who knows what purpose.

  “And that was how the CCP became the CPC,” Lyra would later remember.

  Lyra’s rebelliousness also became apparent when he went to São Paulo for the first bossa nova performances on occasional TV shows, and the shows’ producers tried to get him to say something nice about their sponsor. On one show, on TV Excélsior, sponsored by Mentex chewing gum, he finished singing and a girl dressed up as a bunny, complete with ears and a pom-pom tail, with a signboard around her neck, approached him, smiling, and asked him on the air, “Would you like a Mentex?”

  “No. I hate it,” he replied, live.

  Lyra took advantage of those trips to São Paulo to participate in the founding of a cell of the Communist Party in the Higienópolis neighborhood. But his contract with Philips began to get too demanding, and the collaborations he had with Viana, Flávio Rangel, Chico de Assis, Cleide Yáconis, Stenio Garcia, and Gianfrancesco Guarnieri really only made him wish that their songs dealt with less unfamiliar subjects than those he had written with Ronaldo Bôscoli. Ironically, the first person from whom he heard the expression “left-wing,” some years earlier, had been Bôscoli—speaking out against it, of course. The two of them clashed on this particular issue. He, Lyra, was “left-wing,” but this did not prevent them from writing “Canção que morre no ar” (Song That Dies in the Air), which wasn’t either left-wing or right-wing but merely pretty.

  For someone who was left-wing, Lyra really had a remarkable head for capitalist business. At his initiative, the guitar academy he ran with Menescal had expanded to include a branch in Rua Maestro Francisco Braga, also in Copacabana. It was Lyra who had fought the hardest to try to get Odeon to honor their blessed contract. And it was he who tried to convince Ronaldo Bôscoli to register a trademark for the expression bossa nova, in both their names.

  Lyra had foreseen, with good reason, that by the amount of fuss being caused by the term—which had definitively hit the streets—soon everything would be called bossa nova. Unfortunately, this was already starting to happen; now and again, a new brand of refrigerator or the opening of some new building would be billed in the newspapers as “Bossa Nova.” He felt, due to the prolific use of the term, as if someone were stealing his property. But to his surprise, Bôscoli wasn’t interested. He said he didn’t think it would be fair; nobody knew who had invented the expression and if it had to be attributed to someone, then it belonged to the anonymous secretary at the University Hebrew Group, where the expression had first appeared. He, Bôscoli, had merely contributed to popularizing it, together with Moysés Fuks and João Luiz de Albuquerque. Besides, who had invented bossa nova? João Gilberto? Tom Jobim, Newton Mendonça, Vinícius? Johnny Alf, João Donato? Or everyone?

  There were many differences between Lyra and Bôscoli, whom their elders dubbed “the Jobim and Vinícius of the younger crowd.” When the contract with Philips caused his separation from the rest of the group, Lyra felt he no longer had the right to say he wrote bossa nova. He searched for another name to call his music and found it: sambalanço (samba-beat, or sam-beat). Of course the music was the same bossa nova, but the name at least was his. Lyra was so confident in the success of sambalanço that, before any opportunists had the chance to steal his idea, he spent the time and money to register the term with the Registry of Trademarks and Patents. (In fact, in practice, nobody was interested in stealing sambalanço, and the only use of the term by someone other than Lyra was done so inadvertently by the pianist César Camargo Mariano, who years later gave the name to his trio, who played bossa nova.)

  Philips allowed Lyra to play around with sambalanço, but when it came to naming his first album they didn’t hesitate for a second. They called it Bossa Nova Carlos Lyra. And they even asked Ary Barroso, who was at the time practically institutionalized as the main supporter of the movement, to write the text for the album sleeve. Whether he liked it or not, Carlinhos Lyra continued to be classified as bossa nova, and bossa nova would never dispense with its (in the words of Jobim himself) greatest melodist.

  Philips honored their word and released Bossa Nova Carlos Lyra at the beginning of May. The conductor Carlos Monteiro de Souza did his best to ensure that the arrangements were like those that Jobim did for João Gilberto, but the album gave one the impression of containing more bossa nova on the sleeve than in the content of the record itself. Half of the songs were his old samba-canções, or sounded as if they were. Lyra was also clearing out his drawers. But, obviously, as a singer he was no João Gilberto, and as a guitarist, even less so. (Baden Powell, who was much better suited to jazz than bossa nova, played the guitar for Johnny Alf’s “Rapaz de bem” [Nice Guy], which Lyra sang on the record.) But the repertoire (“Chora tua tristeza” [Cry Your Sadness], “Ciúme” [Jealousy], “Barquinho de papel” [Little Paper Boat], “Gosto de você” (I Like You), “Quando chegares” [When You Arrive], etc., not to mention “Maria Ninguém”) was very pretty, and more than tried and tested at bossa nova shows the year before.

  A show? That’s right! There would be another big one that month, at the very same School of Architecture where the first one had taken place. Bôscoli had booked it months in advance and promised that this would be the consecrational show, the glorification of bossa nova. But now, with his breakup with Carlinhos, how would things turn out?

  Lyra’s gang gave their reply: they would do their own show, at the Catholic University, that same night. Rio de Janeiro would soon find out if it was big enough to host both bossa novas.

  The young people of Rio got moving that Friday night in May 1960. Many were disappointed at being unable to be in both places at the same time. The school in Praia Vermelha would host A noite do amor, do sorriso e a flor (Night of Love, a Smile, and a Flower), with Bôscoli’s entire gang and João Gilberto’s promised attendance (for the first time at a bossa nova show), as well as Vinícius. The school in Gávea would hold the “Noite do Sambalanço” (Night of Sambalanço), with Lyra’s gang, featuring a debatable guest performer: Juca Chaves, who was popular at the time for his ballads and modinhas, all of which were better suited to medieval Avalon than to bossa nova–flavored Arpoador beach in Ipanema.

  The newspapers, led by Última Hora, did their best to put out the fire with gasoline. They openly sided with Bôscoli’s gang, revealing day-to-day details of the rehearsals and the team’s setup, together with the lineup of all the stars: João Gilberto; Vinícius
; Os Cariocas; Johnny Alf (flown in from São Paulo by the newspaper); Norma Bengell; and three more contributions from Odeon—beautiful Rosana Toledo, sparkling black sambista Elza Soares, and Trio Irakitan. Whenever they mentioned the other show, Última Hora loved to quote a comment made by Nara Leão: “The others are Carlinhos Lyra, Juca Chaves, Alayde Costa, and a group of amateur guitarists.”

  It was clearly Odeon’s show versus that of Philips, but not all of the participants were aware of this fact. As for the public, they had no idea. Odeon supplied all the equipment for the performance, set it up in the School of Architecture, and even provided station wagons to transport the artists. Philips did the same at the Catholic University. Once again, crowd estimates were three thousand people inside the School of Architecture and almost the same number outside. At the Catholic University, which was also packed, the crowd was a little smaller, but only because they had less space. The show at the School of Architecture was, predictably, much better, and those who had elected to go to the other one regretted it the following day. That particular battle was won by Odeon—so triumphantly, in fact, that nobody there could have guessed that Philips would eventually win the war.

  Ronaldo Bôscoli announced into the microphone, “This is the night of love, of the smile, and of the flower. It’s the first bossa nova festival—true bossa nova, that is.”

  The implication was that the other show at the Catholic University was not—and that the one which had taken place at the Teatro Record in São Paulo the week before wasn’t really either, given that it had been performed by members of Lyra’s entourage and local singers. The genuine bossa nova was there at the School of Architecture, and had as a backdrop a screen painted by the student Mauro Halfeld dos Guaranys, depicting a rose and the impressive list of featured artists.