Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (18 page)

Colé promised that he would behave himself on stage, and he did, but Candinho, who hadn’t made any promises, fooled around in the wings. He had an affair with one of Colé’s starlets, and was flayed alive by Sylvinha. Sweet Sylvia was thus given the opportunity to show the other gloriously explosive side of her character; she set fire to her dressing-room at the Follies theater. The firemen arrived instantly, and nothing too serious happened, but it was a warning signal that she was capable of roasting far more than just peanuts.

Candinho begged forgiveness, and Odeon invited Sylvinha to record “Amendoim torradinho.” The radio stations fell in love with the song and made her a star. The B side of the 78, which bore a composition by Garoto entitled “Desejo” (Desire), was recorded to fill the record, but it revealed what an accomplished guitarist Candinho was. It was said that Candinho slept with matchboxes jammed between his fingers in order to increase his finger span and allow him to stretch to more difficult chords, such as those which Garoto and Luiz Bonfá were able to play, without the need for all that work. Be that as it may, the record allowed him to progress to working at Rádio Mayrink Veiga, where he became part of the ephemeral Trio Penumbra [Shadow Trio], with Luizinho Eça on piano and Jambeiro on double bass. With a name like that, they would never overshadow the “King” Cole trio, on which they modeled themselves. This forced the young Eça to continue dedicating
himself to late nights at the Plaza nightclub with his own trio, with which he had been hired to replace Johnny Alf. Candinho then decided to dedicate his career—and his life—to the fiery Sylvinha, starting by marrying her.

He did not make the same childish mistake as João Gilberto, and went to her father in person to ask for the girl’s hand. He was unsuccessful, but he won it anyway, because Sylvinha was already old enough to make up her own mind, and she wanted to marry him. They didn’t just get married, they also played out their real-life roles of husband and wife on a TV sitcom for thousands of viewers. It was perhaps the first marriage in Brazil where people who wanted to know what was going on between the couple had only to switch on their TVs on Wednesdays at eight o’clock in the evening.

The show was called
Música e Romance
and reminded one of
I Love Lucy
with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, who were also husband and wife in real life. Despite the absolute scarcity of resources of the recently inaugurated TV Rio, the show was, in a way, the prime-time soap opera of the era in Rio. Not so much for the story line, because
Música e Romance
didn’t really have one, but for the quarrels the two of them would have on screen. Sylvinha and Candinho played a couple who would host friends “at home,” to sing and chat. In theory, it was an easy show to do: one studio set, a single microphone, the two hosts, and a few guests. It was shown live, of course, in the days before videotape.

However, in practice, it was the most complicated production in the world. Candinho was always late and, once the show had already gone on the air, Sylvinha would try to save appearances: “Huh, he hasn’t arrived! Could he have forgotten?” Or Candinho would turn up slightly tipsy, and his wife and partner would gnash her teeth at him and at the camera. Or sometimes, Candinho would simply not show up, and Sylvinha’s fury would strike fear into the hearts of the technical crew that she would also set TV Rio on fire. Even Katharine Hepburn never got so marvelously annoyed with Spencer Tracy. The situation was even more pathetic because Sylvinha was pregnant, and according to the script, her belly would be the conversation-starter. (The previous year, Lucille Ball had based an entire series of
I Love Lucy
episodes around her pregnancy, but none of her run-ins with Desi Arnaz ever surpassed those that Sylvinha had with Candinho.)

Once the show was over, the soap opera continued in real life, in front of their friends and guests on the program. If Candinho was there, the episode would conclude right there in the studio; if not, Sylvinha would go home to Rua Anita Garibaldi and wait for him. Candinho would appear hours later, bringing flowers, which Sylvinha would throw out of the window, threatening to throw him out as well. Candinho would run down to the street to pick them up and take the opportunity to serenade her beneath her window. Sylvinha
would throw a bucket of water over him, close the window, leaving him in the street, and go to bed. It was even better than the show.

But there were also viewers who always watched
Música e Romance
for the music, which, when things were running smoothly, could be sensational. Guests would perform their latest creations, and it was thus that they got Garoto onto the program with “Duas Contas” (Two Beads); Dolores Duran, with Tom Jobim on piano, in “Se é por falta de adeus” (If It’s Because We Haven’t Said Goodbye); Johnny Alf with “Rapaz de bem” (Nice Guy); and Billy Blanco with “Mocinho Bonito” (Pretty Boy). Sylvinha herself, with Candinho on guitar, displayed her impeccable taste with songs like “Canção da volta” (Returning Song); the very new “Chove lá fora” (It’s Raining Outside) by Tito Madi; “Amendoim torradinho” (Roasted Peanuts), which was a must on the program; and “Foi a noite” (It Was the Night) by a new duo: Antonio Carlos Jobim and Newton Mendonça.

Despite all this,
Música e Romance
didn’t last very long; there was no reason for it to continue after Sylvinha and Candinho’s marriage ended. As soon as Sylvinha gave birth to their daughter, the two separated and were much happier. So much so that he accompanied her on her next record—”Foi a noite” (It Was the Night) on one side, and “Menina” (Girl), by Carlinhos Lyra, on the other. And in 1957, when the new A&R man of Odeon, Aloysio de Oliveira, decided to expand the 78 r.p.m. into a ten-inch LP, Sylvinha and Candinho rereleased, for the last time, the duet with which each episode of
Música e Romance
would start and finish: the
samba-canção
by Altamiro Carrilho and Armando Nunes, “Tu e eu” (You and Me), an ode to the happiness of married life.

Talking of married life, Sylvinha’s life and career soon fell into someone else’s hands. Though unable to play the guitar, they were much more experienced, for they belonged to Aloysio de Oliveira.

If all the good ideas that came to people over a bottle of whiskey survived until the last drop in the bottle, Casa Villarino, at the corner of Avenida Calógeras and Avenida Presidente Wilson in downtown Rio, would have been declared a national historical site. There, in the 1950s, a daring gang of late-night lushs planned the biggest shows on the radio, the most definitive poems, plays that would make posterity drool, the most earth-shattering
samba-canções
, the deposition of certain presidents, and, with or without justifiable motivation, the destruction of the most unblemished reputations. It’s true that almost all of this happened only in the imaginations of those who frequented the place—not that they weren’t capable of pulling those sorts of
things off, but because they were more interested in continuing drinking than actually putting their plans into practice. It’s almost unbelievable that
Orfeu da Conceição
(Black Orpheus), which signaled the beginning of the partnership between Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes, was conceived at the Villarino.

Newspaper offices, book publishers, recording companies, the Ministry of Education, the Palácio do Itamaraty, and Rádio Nacional, the main employers of those carousers, were all relatively close to the Villarino. This made it easy to make a daily pilgrimage there, during that agonizing time between five-thirty in the afternoon and nine at night, before serious drinking
really
began in late-night Copacabana. The Villarino was (in fact
is
, because it still exists) whatever you wanted to call it. From the outside, it looked like a grocer’s shop, which sold grapes from Argentina, sardines from the Baltic, and a huge stock of imported drinks. In the back room, it was transformed into a charming whiskey bar, with the vague atmosphere of a speakeasy.

One official story tells of a time when, at the end of an afternoon in May 1956, the poet and diplomat Vinícius de Moraes—recently arrived from Paris, where he had been gently compelled to fulfil the role of Brazilian vice-consul—was looking for an associate to write the music for a Greek tragedy that he was adapting into a black tragedy, set during Rio Carnival. It would be something like
Cabin in the Sky
, a Broadway musical that had been made into a Hollywood film. Vinícius had brought the libretto, in verses, almost finished from Paris. It was missing the songs, to which he would write the lyrics. However, Vinícius did not want just any old composer. It had to be someone modern. His first choice was the pianist and composer Vadico, also known as Oswaldo Gagliano, Noel Rosa’s former associate in “Feitiço da Vila” (Village Witchcraft), “Feitio de oração” (Prayer Style), “Conversa de botequim” (Baroom Chat) and other pre-1934 sambas.

It may seem surprising (although, apparently, no one thought it strange) that, in search of someone modern, Vinícius should propose musical marriage to a forty-six-year-old man like Vadico, whose last successes had happened almost twenty years before. But Vinícius did not see that as a hindrance. The harmonies written by Vadico, who at the time was Rádio Mayrink Veiga’s arranger, were so modern that they made Sílvio Caldas, who was allergic to any type of innovation in samba, break into a cold sweat. Surprisingly, Vadico declined Vinícius’s proposal because he “didn’t feel he was up to it.” (Strange excuse, considering his ample experience as a Hollywood arranger in the forties, and as the conductor of the orchestra that accompanied American ballerina Katherine Dunham on a tour of Europe in 1949.) But the fact was that Vadico said no, and Vinícius needed an associate for
Orfeu
. Well, according to
the official version of the story (repeatedly told by Aloysio de Oliveira, who wasn’t even there), the poet found a collaborator at the Villarino.

The story goes that, asking for suggestions from this and that patron, Vinícius’s friend Lúcio Rangel repeated the name of Antonio Carlos Jobim, who, by coincidence, was sitting two tables away “having a beer,” on the lookout for a possible ride to Ipanema. Rangel introduced them, and Tom, who was interested, was bold enough to ask: “Would there be a little cash involved in the project?”

It was a very logical question, given that his day job at Odeon (he walked around day and night with a briefcase, which contained material that allowed him to do instant musical arrangements for everyone) still did not allow him to give up his night job. But Lúcio Rangel did not understand it that way and reacted indignantly:

“How can you talk about money in the face of such an invitation? Tom, this is
the
poet Vinícius de Moraes!” (This gave the impression that an invitation from Vinícius de Moraes meant that one had to work for free.)

But in the end, Jobim shrugged his shoulders with embarrassment, and on being hired by Vinícius, their fantastic partnership began.

It must have been fascinating to witness dear old Lúcio introducing Jobim to Vinícius at the Villarino. The two of them probably made a huge effort to pretend they didn’t recognize each other from three years ago, in 1953, when the poet, accompanied by Antônio Maria, entered the Clube da Chave, heard the pianist, liked what he heard and, at the end of Jobim’s shift, took him out to eat ham and eggs at the Bar dos Pescadores (Fishermen’s Bar), where they talked until the sun came up. They must also have neglected to tell him that, months later, Vinícius, passing through Brazil, went to hear Jobim at the Tudo Azul nightclub in Rua Domingos Ferreira and from there, they left—with another friend of Tom’s, named João Gilberto—to go and chat at the Far West, another late-night bar.

“I talked and the two of them listened. Everything I said seemed profound,” Vinícius told reporter Beatriz Horta many years later, on one of the rare occasions on which he admitted that he already knew Jobim before being introduced to him at the Villarino.

OK, so why the discussion on such an apparently banal subject? It wasn’t as banal as it seems. The meeting between Jobim and Vinícius totally transformed Brazilian music, and it’s only natural that everyone would like to have been responsible for its origin. The two of them really did meet at the Villarino—and Lúcio Rangel was not at fault for the story having been simplified like that by Aloysio de Oliveira—but that meeting was merely the formalization of a campaign that had been in the making for days to bring them together as associates. The day before, for example, Vinícius had spent hours
hearing about Jobim from someone for whom, at the time, he had the utmost respect: his brother-in-law Ronaldo Bôscoli.

Bôscoli and his friend Chico Feitosa had gone to Vinícius’s house, in Avenida Henrique Dumont in Ipanema, with the express purpose of selling him the idea to invite Jobim to write the music for
Orfeu
, and Vinícius had bought it. What a year, 1956.