Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (50 page)

“Grow, baby!”—wailed Lennie Dale every thirty seconds in the empty Bottles Bar, at four in the afternoon, while rehearsing Wilson Simonal or Leny Andrade.

He didn’t just wail, he also gesticulated, waving his arms like a propeller, and spinning around in the air like an out-of-control helicopter. The Lane had never seen anything like it. Lennie Dale didn’t expect the singers to actually do this, of course (or did he?), but he wanted to give them an idea of how an artist should
grow
on stage, and be larger than life—although it was risky to try and be bigger than Bottles’s tiny stage, given than the entire nightclub wasn’t much larger than fifteen square meters.

Nobody really knew where the American dancer, whom impresario Carlos Machado had met in Rome—apparently at a party for Elizabeth Taylor in 1960, celebrating the beginning of the filming of
Cleopatra
, for which he was assistant choreographer—had come from. Lennie Dale had already been in Brazil for two years, and the filming of
Cleopatra
was still far from being finished, perhaps because he had left the production. Machado brought him in to inject some life into the choreography for his show,
Elas atacam pelo telephone
(They Attack by Telephone), at Fred’s nightclub, and was impressed at how he rehearsed the dancers almost to death. The dancers survived and Lennie, born Leonardo La Ponzina, decided to stay in Rio.

His arrival in the Lane caused a stir at the time, precisely for the innovative concept he introduced: rehearsal. Up until then, singers, musicians, and producers would only do a quick sweep of the nightclub before a show to try and steal a few drinks in the absence of the owners. Despite their improvisory nature, the shows were miraculously good, but only because Johnny Alf (having returned to Rio in an effort to make up for lost time) or the intrumental bands, like Sérgio Mendes’s sextet, the Tamba Trio, or Bossa Três, were good enough to make up for even those tinny-sounding microphones. Sylvinha Telles would be singing accompanied by a playback on which were recorded the fantastic arrangements that Nelson Riddle had written at Aloysio de Oliveira’s request, when suddenly the playback would fail to come on. It wasn’t terribly professional. But after all, nobody performing in the Lane had aspirations to make it to Broadway.

With Lennie Dale, the Lane almost became Broadway, even though it was a somewhat run-down version. He made the singer and the band rehearse as if they were beginners (which, by the way, they were), repeating each detail dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times until it became second nature to them. And they were complicated details, with sudden breaks and even more unexpected entrances, like a lighting change at the exact moment at which a cymbal was hit, colored spotlights flashing when the drumsticks rolled on the skin of the drums, and so on.

Some people thought the gringo was half-crazy; others attributed his cheerful disposition to his frequent pit-stops in his dressing-room to smoke something; and others couldn’t figure out why Lennie Dale was wasting his time in Brazil when he could have been a top choreographer, the new Jerome Robbins, Michael Kidd, or Bob Fosse, in his own country. “Oh, well,” he used to say modestly.

Some of Lennie Dale’s productions in the Lane required props worthy of Hollywood films, like his own show at Bottles, in which he sang “O pato” (The Duck), and came on stage with a live duck inside a glass. Obviously, the “glass” was a fruit bowl and the duck a duckling. The duck behaved
itself and was very quiet, having been trained to exhaustion. But during the length of time that the show ran (largely due to the duck), Lennie was unable to prevent the duck from growing, and it would no longer fit inside the fruit bowl. It made more sense to substitute the duck than to find a bigger fruit bowl, but this meant that the new duck had to be trained to keep quiet. Don’t ask how, but each substitute duck seemed an even better actor than the one before.

The main problem caused by the duck was that Bottles didn’t have a suitable dressing room for it. Because of this, it was entrusted to Lidia Libion, Sacha Gordine’s former representative in Brazil. Lidia’s job was to keep the duck at her house, in Travessa Santa Leocádia, in Copacabana, and bring it to Bottles a few minutes before its entrance on stage. Once the number was over, Lidia would quickly take the duck home because, had the duck remained in that unbreatheable environment for even a few minutes, Lennie would have had to sing “O pato” by himself the following night.

The last duck was a great hit with the audience and critics alike while the show was running, but its subsequent career—prepared by Lidia in
tucupi
style for her husband Jacques and some friends—merely received mixed reviews.

Not all of Lennie Dale’s ideas were as successful, but his greatest flop was trying to invent a bossa nova dance. At the time, any new musical rhythm was mandatorily associated with a dance, even if the idea had never so much as crossed its creators’ minds—and if there was a rhythm with which to dance to the sound of João Gilberto, of course it had to be samba. But they imposed restrictions even on this, because among bossa nova musicians, almost all of whom had a strictly classical or jazz training, there was no worse indication that a colleague was having difficulties than when he was playing “music to dance to.” Jobim, who had never danced in his life, had just finished writing “Só danço samba” (Jazz ‘n’ Samba) with Vinícius, but it was without much conviction. So much so, in fact, that on hearing “Só danço samba” for the first time, João Gilberto asked him, “What’s this, Tomzinho? A boogie-woogie?”

The dances that were popular among young people were
rock ‘n’ roll
, the
twist
, and the
hully-gully
, which the young Nara Leão had already very properly defined as “stupidity times three.” (There was also
la bostella
, introduced in Fellini’s film
La Dolce Vita
, in which people threw themselves to the ground and contorted their bodies epileptically in time to the music. It didn’t last long.) As a form of music that was meant to be exclusively listened to, bossa nova was competing against all of those heavyweights challengers in international music—and was winning. But it might not withstand the siege for very long. The French singer Sacha Distel was already touring Brazil, after
having heard in Paris the songs that his namesake Sacha Gordine had bought for an absolute steal in Brazil, and was looking for a way to turn bossa nova into a dance.

Lennie Dale, who was, after all, a choreographer and already considered himself to be part of the bossa nova scene, decided to jump the gun and invent a dance before some other gringo did. And he did in fact create one, but there were several small problems with it: men did not feel comfortable dancing it because it didn’t suit their masculinity terribly well; it suited Lennie Dale, but then he was a dancer. And the only women who were capable of executing such contortions, without ending up at a chiropractor, were Sigrid Hermanny and Letícia Surdi, who were also professional dancers. Lennie Dale’s greatest achievement with his dance was managing to perform it on the tiny stage in Bottles Bar, although this restricted the spins to a vertical plane only. Jumping to the side, one would land on top of millionaire Cesar Thedim’s table, or in the lap of photographer Paulo Garcez, two regular customers. Marly Tavares, another professional dancer, also danced at the Bottles, but reached a point at which she felt that the stage was better suited for just singing.

Without meaning to, Lennie Dale ended up being more influential as a singer than as a dancer. Not that he could really sing, mind you, but in his capacity as an American showman, he had to be able to do everything, including this. And naturally, he sang like the Americans of his generation who aspired to become the new Sinatra: Steve Lawrence, Buddy Greco, Bobby Darin, Frank D’Rone, and Julius La Rosa. It was very funny listening to him sing “The Lady Is a Tramp” in Portuguese, because everyone knew he wasn’t serious, but he ended up passing those vocal arabesques on to Wilson Simonal, Pery Ribeiro and, in the near future, Elis Regina. They all ended up singing like Johnny Alf had ten years before.

First voice: “This is a collaboration … “

Second voice: “… between Tom … “

Third voice: “… Vinícius … “

Fourth voice: “… and João Gilberto … “

Unison: “… with the special participation of Os Cariocas.”

The voices, which were almost like resonant stars twinkling, were those of Os Cariocas introducing, at the Au Bon Gourmet restaurant, the bossa nova show to end all bossa nova shows: Antonio Carlos Jobim, Vinícius de Moraes, and João Gilberto—together on stage for the first and last time—with the efficient participation of Otávio Bailly on double bass and Milton Banana on
drums, directed by Aloysio de Oliveira. It was also a show intended to get bossa nova back on track, after all the liberties that had been taken in its name, and to remind people that it continued to be a refined musical genre—the most refined and musical, in fact, of them all.

It was the idea of Flávio Ramos, the “man of the night,” who was then the owner of the Jirau nightclub, which was now a
hi-fi
club (one at which a disc jockey played records), where customers would digest the chicken
stroganoff
on the dance floor itself, to the sound of the
twists
and
hully-gullies
. Ramos, with good reason, considered those
hi-fis
to be poor entertainment, primarily because his self-confessed dream was to be a kind of Humphrey Bogart in
Casablanca
, and have a nightclub that was considered mandatory to frequent, like Rick’s in the movie. There was room for such a club in the Rio nightlife, which, in Ramos’s view, was restricted at the time to Sacha’s, which no longer had the same old glitter, and Baron Stuckart’s Top Club. (Bottles didn’t count, because more of its customers were outside than inside the nightclub.)

One night in 1962 Flávio Ramos went to see Sylvinha Telles’s show at Bottles, during which she sang with a playback of Nelson Riddle’s arrangements. Put like that, it sounds like it must have been the greatest, because Riddle was Sinatra’s arranger, and what greater privilege was there than being “accompanied” by him? In actual fact, the operator of the playback, Aloysio de Oliveira, was separated from the singer by a common shower curtain, working an ancient Webster recorder that was being undernourished by an RCA amplifier that had seen better days—during World War II. It wasn’t quite what Flávio Ramos had in mind when he thought of a show worthy of that music.

Fate gave him a hand. The caterer and restauranteur José Fernandes, a legend in Rio nightlife, was moving to Brasília and was practically giving away his restaurant, the Au Bon Gourmet in Avenida Copacabana, with all its red velvet. Flávio Ramos bid for the restaurant, changed the entire décor, and transformed its 6 X 40 meter space into a show house for three hundred people. He equipped it with a battery of spotlights, bought Shure microphones, and, together with Aloysio de Oliveira, planned the first show with none other than Tom Jobim, Vinícius de Moraes, João Gilberto, and Os Cariocas. And if Frank Sinatra happened to be passing through Rio, then he would also be included.

The show was originally planned to run for one month, but having a full house every night made Ramos extend its run by another two weeks. The show only closed due to the terminal fatigue suffered by all of its participants—the artists and producers. They were worn out on a daily basis. The show, scheduled to begin at midnight, never started on time because, just a
few minutes before it was due to begin, there was always someone missing. It was almost always João Gilberto. Flávio Ramos would telephone him in a state of desperation and he would answer the phone, with the voice of someone who had just woken up: “Oh, Flávio, is it already time? Just let me take a quick bath and I’ll be on my way.”

Flávio was seized with panic: “No, don’t come! Don’t leave the house! Take a bath and stay where you are. The car is leaving right now to come and pick you up!”

Flávio Ramos’s black Cadillac went to fetch João Gilberto in Ipanema, and after several such instances, Ramos decided to make it standard practice in order to avoid unexpected surprises. Later—due in part to slight paranoia—he also extended the privilege to Jobim and Vinícius, who was staying at the São Vicente Clinic. Sometimes the Cadillac would go to pick up Vinícius and would fail to find him at the clinic. But he wasn’t far from the nightclub. In fact, he was already in the neighborhood, in a bar close to the Au Bon Gourmet, inexplicably drinking a domestic whiskey called Mansion House with Badeco—when they could have been helping themselves to the Scotch that Flávio Ramos left in their dressing room.

Vinícius needed official permission from the Itamaraty to take part in the show. As was completely understandable, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t consider it seemly for one of its vice-consuls to sing sambas in a nightclub with a glass of whiskey in his hand—and to be paid for doing so. But all would be forgiven as long as he refused the vile payoff that was offered to him. Vinícius arranged with Flávio that instead of being paid for his performance, his guests should be allowed to get in to see the show for free. Ramos agreed, but hadn’t counted on Vinícius dragging in a crowd of six or eight guests every night, who drank like fish and seemed to have insatiable appetites for the oysters and steak tartare that were the specialties of the house at the Au Bon Gourmet. By the time the show closed and accounts were tallied up, Vinícius ended up owing Flávio Ramos.