Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (67 page)

Elis Regina was out of the running for that 1966 festival, but she couldn’t really complain. She had recorded the second volume of
Dois na Bossa
(Two in Bossa) with Jair Rodrigues, which looked likely to be as successful as the first (it wasn’t quite, but almost) and brought the house down with the weekly show
O fino da Bossa
(The Best of Bossa), which was also shown on TV Record. The unforgettable highlight of the show was her rendition of “Canto de Ossanha” (Ossanha’s Chant), an afro-samba by Baden and Vinícius. When she sang the refrain
“Vai, vai, vai, vai!”
(Go, go, go, go!), it was feared that her audience would indeed take flight, but she was gaining admirers even among people from whom it was least expected: “Elis Regina manages to turn just about any song into the Marseillaise,” remarked author Nelson Rodrigues to his friend journalist Otto Lara Resende when the two of them attended Elis and Baden’s show at the Zum-zum.

Bossa nova didn’t come into the world to produce Marseillaises, but in 1966,
O fino da Bossa
had already stopped being about
Bossa
and had its title cut to just
O fino
. The main reason was Horácio Berlinck’s departure from the production team, and he owned the title of the show. But it made no difference, because for some time the program had been a kind of Top Ten of all Brazilian pop music that couldn’t be classified as rock ‘n’ roll.

One of the up-and-coming stars of
O fino
was a Bahian named Gilberto Gil. In 1965, he arrived in São Paulo sporting a suit, tie, and briefcase, to work as a bureaucrat at Gessy-Lever, bringing with him songs like “Louvação” (Praise), “Roda” (Circle), and “Lunik 9”—the latter, by the way, an admonition against the artificial satellites that threatened to steal the moonlight from poets, serenaders, and lovers. (Former Sinatra-Farneys Armando Cavalcanti and Klécius Caldas had already broached the weighty issue in a carnival
marchinha
from 1961, “A lua é dos namorados” [The Moon Is for Lovers]). Gil’s songs were energetic, written to be sung at the top of one’s voice—Marseillaise-style—and he arrived on the scene none too soon for
Elis, with her nationalistic and proclamatory song themes. Gil himself was one of those singers who could be heard at quite a distance. A short while later, concerned about the increasing popularity of Brazilian rock ‘n’ roll, Gil, Elis, Edu Lobo, and a small gang of artists and groupies marched from the Paramount Theater toward the Largo do São Francisco, in São Paulo, in the burlesque incident that became known as the “protest march against electric guitars.”

“It wasn’t exactly against electric guitars,” remembered Gil, years later, in an interview with reporter Regina Echeverria. “In fact, it evolved from a surge of people’s utter resentment, a half-xenophobic, half-nationalistic thing ‘in support of Brazilian music.’ That rally was in protest of several things, but the wording of the slogans was aimed against foreign, alienating music. It was a semi-Geraldo Vandré thing.”

Gilberto Gil had every reason to gently blush when talking about the incident because, in less than a year, he himself was using Os Mutantes’s electric guitars in his performance of “Domingo no parque” (Sunday at the Park) at a song festival. He would have been even more uncomfortable had he known that that protest march, as has been confirmed by some, was merely a strategy dreamed up by Paulinho Machado de Carvalho to stir up rivalry between the two music shows broadcast by his TV station: Elis Regina’s
O fino
, and Roberto Carlos’s
Jovem Guarda
(Young Guard).

Jovem Guarda
first aired in September 1965, five months after
O fino
(which at the time was still
da Bossa
), and was shown live on Sunday afternoons, a sort of matinée performance. It brought together the gang of young rockers that Carlos Imperial had been trying to develop for years in Rio, without much success. Now in the hands of an astute businessman from São Paulo, Marcos Lázaro, and with Roberto Carlos already famous for his cover of “Splish Splash,” they were ready for things to turn around. This happened with “Quero que vá tudo pro inferno” (I Want All the Rest to Go to Hell) in 1966, and from that point on, all they had to do was grow and iron their hair. André Midani’s recipe for successful record sales in that long-ago year of 1958 was more on target than ever: young people were the biggest market. And the music they were now listening to was rock ‘n’ roll.

“Elis Regina can always take comfort in the fact that the Vietnam War is much worse,” wrote columnist Carlinhos de Oliveira in the
Jornal do Brasil
, when news broke of Elis’s marriage to her sworn enemy, Ronaldo Bôscoli.

History had already been privy to other surprising matches—Hitler and Stalin in 1938, Brazilian Communist leader Luís Carlos Prestes and dictator
Getúlio Vargas in 1945, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller in 1956—but nobody from Rio to São Paulo was expecting what happened in 1967. Ever since their famous rift in the Lane, in 1964, Elis and Bôscoli had spent the next three years hurling darts instead of words when they spoke of each other, whether in writing, through messages, or in poisonous interviews. The vitriol was confined to each other’s professional careers because up until then, their only physical contact had been a warning finger on their respective noses. Bôscoli even produced a show in Rio for the singer Cláudia, entitled
Quem tem medo de Elis Regina?
(Who’s Afraid of Elis Regina?)

But by the middle of 1967,
O fino
was losing its audience—due in part to the rise in popularity of
Jovem guarda
, but mostly because it had deviated considerably from its original format, in hosting popular music artists who had little or nothing to do with bossa nova, like Elizeth Cardoso, the regional style of maestro Caçulinha, rustic singer Ary Toledo, the boring Juca Chaves, and, of course, Jair Rodrigues. In TV Record’s opinion, the way to save the show was to hire a new duo of producers: Miéle and Bôscoli. To Elis Regina, this solution seemed about as stable as throwing her a high-voltage cord to pull her out of a well.

That year, Ronaldo Bôscoli’s prospects in Rio didn’t seem all that great either. Almost the entire bossa nova gang had left Brazil. Tom Jobim, João Gilberto, Eumir Deodato, Luiz Bonfá, Maria Helena Toledo, Astrud Gilberto, and Hélcio Milito had all moved to New York. Sérgio Mendes, João Donato, Tião Neto, Dom Um Romão, Luizinho Eça, Oscar Castro-Neves, Walter Wanderley, The Girls from Bahia, Aloysio de Oliveira, Moacyr Santos, Raul de Souza, and Rosinha da Valença were all in California. Pery Ribeiro, Leny Andrade, Bossa Três, and Carlinhos Lyra were in Mexico. Baden Powell was in Paris. Francis Hime and Edu Lobo had their bags packed and were ready to go. Marcos Valle couldn’t make up his mind whether to stay or go. And Vinícius de Moraes was on a permanent world tour.

Os Cariocas had just split up. Sylvinha Telles had died. The Lane ceased to exist when Alberico Campana sold his nightclubs in 1966. Aloysio de Oliveira had practically given Elenco to Philips. He, Ronaldo, was composing less and less with Menescal, or anyone else, for that matter. Of the old gang, Chico Feitosa had become a jingles producer, Normando was off the air, and Nara still wasn’t speaking to him. What was left of bossa nova? A group of young people who were more interested in talking about politics or winning festivals than in making music—and the radio stations and recording companies were totally caught up in rock ‘n’ roll.

It was the end of that long, unforgettable holiday.

So Ronaldo Bôscoli, together with Miéle, swallowed his pride and went to São Paulo, with the purpose of trying to save
O fino
for Elis Regina—and for himself, too. He wasn’t successful, because the damage that had been done to the show was too great to repair. If anyone had told him, on the way to TV Record for his first meetng with Elis, that on December 5 of that year, he would be married to the woman, Bôscoli would have replied that Frank Sinatra would come to Brazil to sing at the dollhouse-sized Zum-zum before that was likely to happen.

Sinatra, Bôscoli’s idol since 1940 (“I love Frank Sinatra more than I love women”), was one of the major bones of contention in his marriage to Elis. After they were married, he walked into the house on Avenida Niemeyer, in Rio, where they were going to live, with a trunk containing his entire collection of Sinatra releases: hundreds of albums, some of them rare, others already out of print, all of them valuable, and many of them bought at Flávio Ramos’s record shop at the beginning of the 1950s.

Bôscoli’s entire life (well, almost) was in those imported Sinatra albums, such as
Swing Easy
, from 1954,
Songs for Young Lovers
, from 1955,
Close to You
, from 1957, and
Only the Lonely
, from 1958. So just imagine his horror on returning home after a fight with Elis only to find that she had gone out onto the balcony and launched them all, like flying saucers, into the Atlantic Ocean. Some of the records hadn’t quite made it to the sea, and could be seen lying like dead fish on the asphalt of Avenida Niemeyer. This was not Elis’s first vendetta. Some time before, she had set fire to another of Bôscoli’s trunks, which had contained letters, poems, original copies of lyrics, and photos of fishing trips, nights at the Lane, and his many ex-girlfriends.

Columnist Carlinhos de Oliveira had been right: this wasn’t a marriage, it was Vietnam, although it was hard to figure out who was playing the role of the Americans—and Bôscoli wasn’t exactly a victim. One of their fights erupted when Elis received her credit card statement and found a charge from the King’s Motel. Ronaldo had only stopped by the motel with a dancer from TV Globo, and paid with Elis’s credit card. Furniture flew and Elis, as always, took João Marcelo, their son, and went to stay with Jacques and Lídia Libion in Copacabana. Sometimes she would storm out of the house after a fight, go to Jacques and Lídia’s house, and find Bôscoli already settled in. He had also gone there in search of refuge.

These, at least, were fights with concrete reasons behind them—because, in the four years and four months they were married (until 1972), not one day went by in which the gossip in Rio surrounding Elis and Bôscoli wasn’t further augmented with pulse-quickening details of domestic disputes. And that didn’t even include the fights they had on the eve of their wedding day and on the actual day itself. In 90 percent of the cases, nobody, not even themselves,
could tell you how the fight had started. Foundering in those turbulent waters, the marriage between the singer of “Arrastão” and the composer of “O barquinho” (The Little Boat) wasn’t exactly the most fertile soil for the continued growth of bossa nova.