Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (61 page)

It wasn’t wise to pick a fight with Elis Regina. She got even more squinty-eyed when she was annoyed, and anything could happen, as all her friends attest. Her moods displayed more ups and downs than an electrocardiogram. She was capable of literally overturning the table if she lost at canasta and within a minute would sit down and start knitting, humming to herself. Her life, up until she began to achieve success, had been a long succession of fights—one of them against poverty. Her family lived in a high-rise tenement building in the slums (a housing project in Porto Alegre), and she was shunned by her neighbors for singing on the radio. When she recorded her first discs in Rio, the
gaúchos
resented her because they felt she was speaking with a
carioca
accent. Her father went with her to Rio, they moved into a tiny apartment in Rua Figueiredo Magalhães in Copacabana, and, a few months later, her mother and brother came out to join them. They lived on what she earned and soon a perverse relationship of dependency developed, in which she appeared to derive pleasure from being exploited by them, and able to humiliate them in return. In fact, although she gave as good as she got, Elis was the one who got hurt.

At the beginning, she was unanimously considered ugly, tacky, and ignorant. But Elis learned quickly—sometimes too quickly. “To her, everyone had something to teach her,” Walter Silva once said. “Once she had learned all she
could from them, she moved on to someone else.” Her most serious boyfriend after she arrived from the South was Solano Ribeiro, producer for TV Excélsior. The success of the Paramount shows inspired Solano to organize what would be the first Song Festival at Excélsior, in which Elis competed with “Arrastão” (Fishing Net), written by Edu Lobo and Vinícius, and “Por um amor maior” (For a Greater Love), by Francis Hime and Ruy Guerra. She won with “Arrastão.” During the festival, she got pregnant by Solano. When the festival ended, she got rid of her child and also finished with her boyfriend. There was no arguing with Elis. The nickname “Pimentinha” (Little Pepper) was given to her at this time in her life, a dubious tribute to her appalling temper, and Elis hated it. When anyone called her this, she responded by flipping them off.

But if you peeled off her outer veneer, she was still the same romantic girl who listened to the radio in Porto Alegre and dreamed of being a star. When she fell for Edu Lobo after the festival, she started drawing hearts pierced with arrows and scribbling with permanent marker pen on the cubicle dividers of the dressing room at TV Record: “Elis loves Edu, Eduardo Góes Lobo.” And—what must have been shocking for Elis given the person she would become—she gave in-depth interviews to the corny
Revista da Rádio
, divulging information like her favorite color (brown), perfume (
Réplique
), hair-style (top knot), and authors (Walt Disney and Sophocles).

In April 1965, some days before the first anniversary of her leaving Porto Alegre, Elis did a show at the Paramount that resulted in a disc that broke all sales records and a television program that, in a way, would be a shot in the arm to bossa nova. The show and the record were made with singer Jair Rodrigues and the sensational Jongo Trio. The program was
O fino da Bossa
.

Moving to São Paulo was the best thing for bossa nova once it began to stagnate. In Rio, none of the shows at the Bon Gourmet in 1963 managed to repeat the success of the show with Jobim, Vinícius, and João Gilberto—which also meant no profit for owner Flávio Ramos. What he spent on pampering his stars led him to ask himself if he shouldn’t be managing someone like Maria Callas or Renata Tebaldi.
Pobre menina rica
had suffered as a result of Nara’s inexperience, and subsequent shows also gave Flávio Ramos a few splendidly gray hairs.

Baden Powell’s show, which followed, would sometimes be interrupted halfway through because Baden—already drunk as a skunk—would bend over his guitar, as if he were searching for a note in the depths of his chest—and, when the audience realized, astonished, that the right note was not coming,
some of them would cup their hands over their ears and hear a gentle hum. The guitarist had fallen over his instrument into a deep sleep, with his hands in the position of the chord he was looking for. It’s worth mentioning that Baden moved to a room in the cellar of the Bon Gourmet, where he could sleep at will without risking being late for work. When he awoke to the sight of all those bottles, he thought he had died and gone to Heaven. He imbibed most of what he earned and, by the end of the show’s run, ended up almost in the red with the nightclub and went straight to the Clínica São Vicente.

Maysa’s show—the last one produced for Flávio Ramos by Aloysio de Oliveira—was written
à propos
. Maysa left the audience and took the stage with a glass in her hand, singing “Demais” (Too Much), written by Tom and Aloysio (“Every one thinks I talk too much / And that I drink too much / And that this restless way of life / Is good for nothing / Going here and there, from bar to bar, from bar to bar”)—and nobody doubted her sincerity in the slightest. Not everyone in the audience knew that before she had come on stage, she had spent more than an hour having makeup applied by the Bon Gourmet coat-check girl, who was trying to hide the swellings and bruises on her face from the fights she had on a daily basis with her new boyfriend, a Spanish bullfighter named Miguel Azenza. Despite all of this, Maysa gave a fantastic performance almost every night. (One of them was recorded by Aloysio and released on disc by Elenco.) At the end of the show, she was taken home almost in a dead faint in the famous black Cadillac. After all those exciting events, the Bon Gourmet closed its doors in December 1963.

Almost nobody was terribly professional in those valiant days, and the few that tried to be, like Sérgio Mendes, were accused by the others of being mercenary. But some of them were catching on. Menescal was performing with Sylvinha Telles at the Zum-zum, the nightclub in Copacabana that replaced the Bon Gourmet in 1964, and wasn’t happy when payment for his performances started being delayed more than he expected. Without batting an eyelid, he enlisted the help of his old friend Candinho, Sylvinha’s ex-husband, former guitarist, former carouser, and now a sober lawyer—and Candinho impounded the Zum-zum’s refrigerator by way of payment for Menescal.

One night during the show’s run, Sylvinha closed the show, washed down a tranquilizer with a shot of whiskey, and got into her little bottle-green Fusca to go home, a few blocks away. She fell asleep at the wheel coming out of the Major Vaz tunnel, in Rua Toneleros, and hit a Chevrolet head-on. The Chevy and Sylvinha’s car then hit three other cars. The impact caused the steering wheel to crumple against her stomach. She broke her front teeth and the windshield shattered, embedding shards of glass in her forehead. Sylvinha passed out and was rescued by Portuguese singer Francisco José, who happened to be passing by and saw what happened. He did not recognize her
right away beneath the copious quantity of blood on her face. He took her to the Miguel Couto hospital and she was treated for, among other things, internal hemorrhaging. Sylvinha would not allow them to perform plastic surgery—a few months earlier, she had undergone six procedures in one sitting, with Dr. Urbano Fabrini, which had left her looking like a then-unknown singer named Barbra Streisand. That wasn’t her first accident—in 1962, she had hit a car on the Rio–São Paulo highway and broke her arm. Unfortunately, it also wasn’t her last accident, either.

Since 1961, Sylvinha’s career and personal life had been in the hands of Aloysio de Oliveira. From that year on, he was instrumental in arranging for her to record a series of great albums for the American market with arrangers like Nelson Riddle, Calvin Jackson, Bill Hitchcock, and the idolized guitarist Barney Kessel, and took care of her television appearances in the United States. But Aloysio was merely her instructor in the studio, because their marriage was one of the most fiery, jealous matches in the history of bossa nova. At one time, Sylvinha took to carrying a gun, in case she caught him with another woman. Even so, when they split up so that he could marry Cyva, of The Girls from Bahia, Sylvinha made a point of insisting on being the matron of honor. Her heart was bigger than a triple album.

Despite being “older” (after all, she was from the same generation as Dolores), Sylvinha continued to be the female face of bossa nova, resisting following in the doomed footsteps of the new singers who joined the movement every fifteen minutes. Except for Carnegie Hall, she was present at all of bossa nova’s most important moments. She recorded the 78 r.p.m. of “Foi A Noite” (It Was the Night) in 1956; her name practically carried the University Hebrew Group show in 1958; she was the first professional to bridge the gap between the gangs; and, almost right up until the end, she never sang anything that couldn’t be classified as modern samba. Not only that, it’s far from preposterous to assert that, despite the stylistic incest between the first bossa nova singers and João Gilberto, she had influenced him—and not the other way around. Remember that the two of them had dated back in 1952, when João sang with a strong voice like Orlando Silva and would accompany her all day long on his guitar. We can’t be sure how she sang in those days, but from her first 78s, beginning with “Foi A Noite” in 1956, to 1959, when she recorded “Amor de gente moça” (Young Love), Sylvinha was still the same singer. She hadn’t changed, but João Gilberto had.

In 1966 on TV Globo, on the show
O jogo de verdade
(Truth or Dare), hosted by comedian Dercy Gonçalves, Sylvinha condemned the singers who were turning bossa nova into “calisthenics.” She didn’t single out Elis Regina, who was then at the peak of her whirling arms quirk, and perhaps she didn’t intend to refer only to her. At about the same time, Pery Ribeiro was introducing
to Brazil the fashion of leaping on stage to the sound of clashing cymbals, and Elis’s partner, Jair Rodrigues, managed to sing while upside-down. Many singers were inventing their own gimmicks and increasingly forgetting how to sing. That just wasn’t Sylvinha’s cup of tea.

Sylvinha was going to return to New York in December 1966 to record another American disc. Kapp Records wanted her in the studio that month, but she decided to postpone the recording and only go after Christmas. In the early morning of December 17, a Saturday, she got into her Beetle with her little dog, Nicole; the lawyer Horácio de Carvalho Jr., her ex-boyfriend from a rich Brazilian family, was driving, and they left on the Amaral Peixoto highway, bound for Maricá, in upstate Rio. It was a farewell journey for both of them, as they planned to definitively go their own ways from then on, Horácio was engaged to another girl, and Sylvinha was going to the United States for a prolonged stay. The sun was coming up over Kilometer 24 of the Amaral Peixoto when the Beetle zig-zagged across the highway, went under a truck loaded with pineapples, was dragged along by it, and finally plunged into thick undergrowth several meters down. They were both killed. The Rio state police concluded that Horácio had fallen asleep at the wheel.

The original lineup for the show at the Paramount Theater in São Paulo that April of 1965 included Elis Regina, Wilson Simonal, and the Zimbo Trio. But Lívio Rangan, of Rhodia, booked Simonal and the Zimbo Trio for a tour of Brazil. The producer of the show, Walter Silva, had to settle for Elis, Baden Powell, and the Jongo Trio instead. The day before the show opened, Baden decided he’d rather go and play in Germany. Silva and Elis went to look for businessman Marcos Lázaro at the Cave nightclub and saw Jair Rodrigues performing on stage. Jair Rodrigues had had a hit the year before, “Deixa isso pra lá” (Leave That over There), which he sang while gesticulating extensively. He already grated on the nerves of anyone who listened to him, but he was cheerful and had a suitable physical strength for being teamed up with the dynamic Elis. He was hired on the spot. The first rehearsal took place in the afternoon of the opening night, with the sequence of songs for each medley painted on the stage floor: “O morro não tem vez” (The Hill), “Feio não é bonito” (Ugliness Is Not Beautiful), “Samba do carioca” (Samba of the Carioca), etc.—twelve songs in each medley.