Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (17 page)

Jobim and Dolores would have produced more songs in partnership if Vinícius de Moraes hadn’t from the moment that he first “discovered” Tom safeguarded his talents so jealously. In his gently implacable manner, he kept Jobim so busy that the latter drifted away from former associates like João Stockler, Alcides Fernandes, Roberto Mazoier, and even their old mutual friend, Paulinho Soledade. Not to mention Billy Blanco. From the Vinícius era on, Tom could only compose songs with others when Vinícius wasn’t looking,
as he did in 1958 with Marino Pinto (“Aula de matemática” [Math Class]) and in 1959 with Aloysio de Oliveira (“Dindi,” “De você eu gosto” [I Like You], “Demais” [Too Much], and “Eu preciso de você” [I Need You]). Ronaldo Bôscoli always complained that Vinícius threatened to break up with Tom if he collaborated on a song with Ronaldo, with whom Vinícius, by the way, was great friends.

The only colleague that Vinícius did not object to was Newton Mendonça. Not because Jobim and Mendonça were childhood friends, but because Mendonça was more of a musician than a lyricist, and when the two of them opened up the piano, sevenths and ninths were more important to them than “the feathers that the wind carried through the air” (from “A felicidade” [Happiness]). Perhaps it was because of this that Vinícius did not consider him a threat—as Bôscoli would undoubtedly be, and Dolores certainly was.

However, in the light of what Jobim and Vinícius accomplished, we can’t really complain. And Dolores proved herself to be surprisingly capable of writing music and lyrics on her own, in “Fim de caso” (The End of the Love Affair), “Solidão” (Solitude), “Castigo” (Punishment), and, of course, “A noite do meu bem” (My Sweetheart’s Night).

Maysa Figueira Monjardim already had those eyes when she, like Sylvinha Telles in Rio, was a student at the Sacré-Cœur school in São Paulo. However, unlike Sylvinha, she left boarding school in 1954, at the age of eighteen, and went straight into a wealthy marriage: to the austere André Matarazzo, nephew of the extremely rich Count Francisco Matarazzo, who was twenty years older than her and whose family coat of arms bore the inscription
Honor
,
fides
,
labor
(honor, faith, work). Despite the coat of arms, the Matarazzo did not prevent Maysa from singing, provided that she restrict her performances to aristocratic São Paulo soireés. But Maysa’s father, the Federal Revenue agent Alcebíades Monjardim, had other plans.

According to Ronaldo Bôscoli, Alcebíades was admired in São Paulo for being one of the few people capable of getting drunk three times a day: at eleven in the morning, he was already well into his first binge; at three in the afternoon, he was fresh and ready for the second; and at nine at night, cool as a cucumber, he prepared to start the third. However, from that point on, one could no longer vouch for his sobriety. One night in 1955 he was in the Oásis nightclub, in the Praça da República, with his old friend Zé Carioca, one of Carmen Miranda’s orphans from Bando da Lua, and Roberto Corte Real, a broadcaster with links to the Columbia recording company. Alcebíades spoke to them about his daughter: a singer that the world was missing out on due
to a marriage of convenience, a talent just waiting to be discovered, a young woman who could be the Brazilian Edith Piaf.

His two companions dismissed his enthusiasm as paternal pride, but they remained curious enough to hear the girl sing. A meeting was arranged for the following day at Alcebíades’s house, far from the eyes and ears of any member of the Matarazzo family.

Going by her father’s description, Corte Real and Zé Carioca expected to find a timid girl hiding behind the curtains. They certainly weren’t expecting the feisty woman of nineteen who was waiting for them: full bleached-blond hair; an extremely pretty face, dominated by a sensual mouth (with twisted lips that were surprisingly like those of Elvis Presley) and a pair of eyes veritably floodlit with green (sometimes blue) beneath full eyebrows; a husky, “deep” voice that Piaf would have liked to have had when young; a whiskey in one hand, a cigarette in the other; and—why hadn’t Monjardim warned them?—unmistakably pregnant.

Maysa looked sensational despite her pregnancy, and she further impressed her guests when she sang a few American songs—”The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Round Midnight.” It was enough to awake enthusiasm in Corte Real, who was proud to correspond with Dick Haymes and considered himself a personal friend of Cole Porter himself. But what really made her shine was when Maysa’s mother, Dona Iná, as beautiful as her daughter, suggested she sing some of her own compositions.

Maysa picked up her guitar and, as if she were tearing the most bitter of sentiments from the depths of her cleavage, sang “Marcada” (Marked Woman), “Adeus” (Goodbye), “Agonia” (Agony), and “Rindo de Mim” (Laughing at Me). Corte Real couldn’t believe his ears. There was a girl, who composed and sang like a goddess, with the demeanor of a mature woman who had truly lived the experiences she sang about. And (not that this small detail was pitiable) the fact that she was the wife of a man who was prominent in São Paulo high society would have tremendous commercial appeal.

Corte Real wanted to immediately take her to Columbia to do some recording, but at the time, Maysa knew her priorities. First she would have her child. Then she would try to convince her husband and his family to allow her to make a record. This was unthinkable in 1956. People from good families did not mix with musicians and singers, except to hire them to play at their parties—in which case they arrived and left via the servants’ entrance—much less record songs and perform as professionals. Besides, they didn’t do anything as professionals that wasn’t directly linked to managing their fortunes. If they had, they wouldn’t have been rich. Maysa would be different, and her husband’s family knew that her parents were in another mindset. A few months later, Maysa gave birth to her son (later, the famous
TV director Jayme Monjardim) and managed to overcome her husband’s family’s opposition. The Matarazzos agreed to allow her to record her songs, provided that the net revenue from the sale of her records, once recording costs had been deducted, be donated to Dona Carmen Prudente’s Fight Against Cancer campaign—a discreet way to pretend Maysa was retaining her amateur status, and singing only for charity.

But, to Corte Real’s surprise, Columbia rejected Maysa before even listening to her sing. Its directors did not allow themselves to be swayed by the exhortations of her discoverer, and one of them wanted to know “how many records her husband would buy.” This is mere speculation, but it wasn’t improbable that the then-powerful Matarazzo family had expressed their “disapproval” of the idea that the recording company sign Maysa as a singer. Corte Real didn’t hesitate. He took Maysa to his friend José Scatena, who was a member of a publicity jingles recording studio in São Paulo, RGE, and in return for making the record, proposed making RGE a music recording label. Scatena agreed. There was no outside interference, and what would be the first “Convite para ouvir Maysa” (Invitation to Listen to Maysa) was made, a ten-inch record with eight songs, all written by her.

Nothing out of the ordinary happened at first. They cut a mere five hundred copies, Andre Matarazzo did
not
buy the entire stock, and a surplus seemed inevitable. Dependent on Maysa’s contributions, the cancer that Dona Carmen Prudente was fighting would continue to run amuck. That is, until the record was discovered in Rio, after an article about it by Henrique Pongetti was published in
Manchete
, a news magazine. Radio stations began to play it, RGE had to cut several thousand more copies, and Maysa became a national sensation. No singer could be more modern or sophisticated. So when TV Record offered her one hundred thousand cruzeiros (then almost two thousand dollars) per month to host a weekly show, her parents, standing up to the Matarazzos, would not allow her to refuse.

The “society” to which Maysa belonged by virtue of her marriage started a campaign against her, insinuating that one of its most beloved daughters had taken a downward slide into shame. André Matarazzo tried hard to save face, accompanying her to all the radio programs and interviews at which she now had to appear. It was as if he were putting his seal of approval on his wife’s work, but in fact all he really wanted was to chaperone Maysa to ensure that she did not commit any serious social blunders—and he was unable to hide his displeasure for the people who had begun to surround her. Maysa must have known what he was doing, because she wasn’t able to hold up for long. Reporters would go to her house to interview her, and she would serve them coffee in the living room, while drinking booze under the table in the kitchen. At the end of each show, she would invite the entire television
crew back to her house, on Rua Traipu, in Perdizes, with predictable results. At first, they were merely merry gatherings, at which she attempted to maintain a minimum level of sobriety in front of her husband. But soon the gatherings became drinking sprees with Maysa out of control, allowing one or other of the couples she had invited to disappear into one of the bedrooms.

The record’s success freed her from the compromises she had made to the conventions of the Sacré-Cœur school and Matarazzo family. It allowed her to publicly assume the tragic façade that she exhibited when singing and that was perhaps the true side of her character: that of a single woman, for whom it did not matter whom she was going out with, or whether or not she was going out with someone.

It quickly became obvious that if Maysa was actually going out with someone, that someone was not André Matarazzo. The marriage ended less than a year after her debut as a singer, and without the protection of her husband’s last name, Maysa was left at the mercy of everyone’s judgment. The press stopped calling her “Mrs. Maysa Matarazzo” and referred to her simply as Maysa—which, all things considered, suited her better. The respectable poet Manuel Bandeira, at the peak of his eighty years, got a hard-on for Maysa and published a poem in a literary supplement, in which, after eulogizing her details from top to toe, he tempered his sonorous pass at her with a pretty verse: “Maysa’s eyes are two non-Pacific [turbulent] oceans.”

Sylvinha Telles, like Maysa, also had to break down the door of her house from the inside. After her affair with João Gilberto in 1952, when she was nineteen years old, nothing could be that serious in the eyes of her father. Even so, it was without his knowledge—but with the complicity of her family—that Sylvinha appeared on Ary Barroso’s show at Rádio Tupi,
Calouros em desfile
. Her brother Mário Telles “casually” encouraged their father to listen to the show on the radio in his car, and when he realized that the singer he liked was Sylvinha, he could no longer prevent her from joining that forbidden world. Especially as the first job the girl was offered was as an ingénue, assistant to the clown Carequinha on his program
O Circo do Carequinha
(Carequinha’s Circus), on TV Tupi.

However, she soon started receiving more adult offers. At the beginning of 1955, at the age of twenty-one, Sylvinha was dating Candinho, whose real name was José Cândido de Mello Mattos. A year younger than she, he studied law and had all the qualities attributable to someone who played the guitar: he was a lovely lush. Candinho used to go to the Alcazar bar in Avenida Atlântica, famous for chicken soup in the early morning and guitar jam sessions
that he and Carlinhos Lyra used to participate in. The two of them were pupils of the famous guitarist Garoto, and loved to show off what they had learned that evening. Sylvinha sang at one of those jam sessions and was heard by the mocking Colé, a revue theater star, who was sitting at a side table.

Colé behaved himself according to the script. He invited her to participate in a show that he was producing in the disreputable Follies theater, in the Alaska gallery. The invitation was about as insolent as asking Father Helder Câmara, Rio’s pious Archbishop, to ride in a horse race at the ultra-chic Jockey Club. To his surprise, Sylvinha agreed, but this time, the one who put the brakes on was Candinho. It would be scandalous for his girlfriend, a well-brought-up convent girl, to work in a revue theater with all the chorus girls. Mário, Sylvinha’s brother, also considered the offer an insult, but Colé, amazingly enough, managed to overcome their reservations. He rewrote the script of the show,
Gente bem e champanhota
(The Smart Set and Some Champagne), deleting all four-letter words, and swore that he would cut off his tongue if any immoral remarks were made on stage. He kept his word, and Sylvinha Telles was able to work in the cleanest show in the history of revue theater. Her participation was limited to singing a song called “Amendoim torradinho” (Roasted Peanuts) by Henrique Beltrão, but it was all she needed to become the singing sensation of 1955.