Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (20 page)

Ever ready for songs and girls: Menescal and Bôscoli

Manchete Press

I
n 1956, Roberto Batalha (Battle) Menescal was living up to his middle name and playing host to more internal conflicts than a sack full of cats. He couldn’t make up his mind whether to study architecture, join the Navy, or play the guitar. That’s a big decision to make at eighteen. In his triple dilemma, the option that least appealed to him was studying architecture, despite belonging to a family of architects and engineers. Or maybe because of it. He always turned scarlet with embarrassment when he had to give out his address: the Galeria Menescal building in Copacabana, built by his parents. The idea of joining the Navy did not necessarily inspire military vocation in him, and he wasn’t particularly inspired by the sailors he saw in MGM musicals. The only thing that vaguely excited him was the thought that if he joined the Navy, he wouldn’t have to restrict his harpoon fishing in Cabo Frio to the weekends—he would have the entire year and the seven seas to hone his skills with the blade. But after a few guitar lessons with Edinho, from Trio Irakitan, and breathing the scent of late nights and early mornings, he began to suspect that he was more excited about becoming a musician. At any rate, because of music, he was already taking more risks than he did with the 180-pound jewfish and manta rays that he was used to facing underwater. The year before, for example, he faked a student ID card to get into the adult hangout, the Scotch Bar, on Rua Fernando Mendes in Copacabana, to hear his idol, newcomer Tito Madi, sing “Chove lá fora” (It’s Raining Outside). At the same time, he was developing the dangerous habit of stealing bottles of White Horse Scotch from his father’s cellar to sell late at night at the Tudo Azul nightclub and, if he was lucky, catch a guy called Tom Jobim playing “Foi a noite” (It Was the Night). The only place he didn’t manage to get into was the evening performance of the revue
Gente bem e champanhota
at the Follies theater, to hear the girl who was the epitome of
modern
, Sylvinha Telles, singing “Amendoim torradinho” (Roasted Peanuts) instead, he had to settle for the Wednesday matinée.

Menescal spent hours listening to the record “Julie Is Her Name.” Not because of the bedroom voice of the singer, Julie London, and her sensational décolletage on the album cover, but for the guitar accompaniment by Barney Kessel. His parents were concerned with his fanaticism. They would have been even more concerned had they known the real reason Menescal was switching institutions in the last year of high school, from the Mello e Souza school to the Mallet Soares, which were both in Rua Xavier da Silveira. He knew that, in the latter, there was a student named Carlinhos Lyra. Apparently, Lyra could read music while playing the guitar, was a friend of Johnny Alf, and had already recorded two songs—that is, he was almost a professional. It was also said that cutting class to play guitar was standard practice in Lyra’s gang, and that the professors who liked guitar music would
cut class with them and vouch for their presence in class. Did he have to switch schools or not?

Menescal’s parents, like many parents in 1956, considered the guitar a symbol of idleness and would not, in their wildest dreams, ever have approved of his plans. Menescal wasn’t really made for a late-night lifestyle. Despite making a concerted effort to drink some alcohol, his worst vice was milkshakes—a friend, the drummer Vítor Manga, nicknamed him the “Milk King.” Even so, in an effort to curtail his activities, his parents stopped his monthly allowance. Suddenly left without sufficient resources to buy even a bag of popcorn, Menescal had to get a job. Carlinhos Lyra, also trying to escape the devoted clutches of his overbearing mother, suggested they open a guitar “academy,” and Menescal accepted without hesitation. In their vision, the academy would be a source of income which would at least pay for their
cocadas
and
mariolas
. But in practice, it soon became, on its own terms, a booming enterprise. Lyra became independent and Menescal resolved his dilemma: the academy allowed him to wave goodbye to architecture and convinced him that, from that point on, he could earn a living from music and fund his own harpoon-fishing trips, without the need for subsidies from the Navy.

João Paulo, a friend of Carlinhos, offered them the use of a studio apartment in Rua Sá Ferreira, in Copacabana, which he used as a bachelor flat, for running the academy. In exchange, he would take 10 percent of the revenue. It was essential for the bachelor flat to be run with the best possible reputation. Lyra and Menescal were very good-looking guys, which might explain why 80 percent of their students were female. But times were different then, and several of the more watchful mothers insisted on accompanying their daughters to ensure that all they did during the class was play the guitar. This made their work somewhat chaotic, and the two instructors were forced to separate the two halves of the room.

A notice that bore the extremely polite message was posted in the waiting room: “Mothers, please be so kind as to wait in the reception area.” Of course, for all intents and purposes, it might as well have read “No admittance to mothers.” However, to ensure that there was be no doubt as to the instructors’ intentions, they installed a peep-hole in the door that separated the two rooms, so that the mothers could inspect their daughters’ progress in the mysteries of the guitar. In fact, so many precautions and preoccupations were unnecessary, because Lyra and, particularly, Menescal, were most concerned about maintaining an atmosphere of propriety in the classroom. And besides, that was no obstacle to some students (almost always the oldest ones), who took extra “classes” at late hours at the academy with Menescal and, especially, with Lyra.

The two of them were also the beneficiaries of a virus that took hold of many parents at that time: that of forcing their children to study the accordion with the nationally famous professor Mário Mascarenhas. In order to escape this terrible fate, youngsters bargained with their good grades in school, or with their regular church attendance, and extracted permission from their parents to learn the guitar. Others took lessons in secret. Thus, within just a few weeks, Lyra and Menescal had almost fifty (female) students. One of them was Nara Lofego Leão.

She was just fourteen years old and was about to move into the soon-tobe-famous apartment in Copacabana, where the “bossa nova gatherings” would take place. But in 1956, bossa nova had not yet come on the scene and her apartment was merely the residence of Dr. Jairo Leão, an ambitious and intelligent lawyer from the state of Espírito Santo, and his wife, Dona Tinoca. The Leãos’s eldest daughter, Danuza, who had been a top model for the elegant fabric manufacturer Bangu, was a permanent candidate on the “Ten Most Elegant” list, became the muse of the Country Club, dated the columnist Rubem Braga and French leading man Daniel Gelin, and married journalist Samuel Wainer. What a life. Compared with Danuza’s exuberance, Nara’s shyness was cause for concern—her nicknames at home were “Jacarezinho do pântano” (little swamp alligator), “Caramujo” (clam), and “Greta Garbo.”

There was certainly nothing shy about Leão’s apartment. It occupied the entire third floor of the Palácio Champs-Elysées building in Avenida Atlântica, whose exterior was clad in mosaic-style tile typical of the fifties, right in front of Posto 4. The living room was spread out over 700 square feet, with huge picture windows that opened out to the sea. Therefore, there was no reason to keep the noise level of the music down “so as not to bother the neighbors,” as was later said in an effort to explain the coolness of bossa nova—mostly because there were no neighbors. The building next door, on the corner with Rua Constante Ramos, had not yet been built. It was an empty lot.

Contrary to Menescal’s father, who considered the guitar a tool of the devil, Nara’s father gave her one when she was twelve years old and hired, to teach her at home, the veteran Patrício Teixeira, a surviving singer from the Oito Batutas de Pixinguinha (Pixinguinha’s Eight Masters), and composer of 1937’s “Não tenho lágrimas” (I Have No Tears), a samba that Nat “King” Cole would later record in 1960 on one of his Brazilian records. During the last few decades, Patrício had merely been collecting dust and earning his living as a guitar teacher of the Rio “Ladies Who Lunch” set. To the old guard, he probably was a living legend, but this did not change the fact that for Nara, he was
too much
of a veteran; he was sixty-three years old, was tired, bureaucratized,
and he himself didn’t see much sense in teaching the guitar to a girl of twelve who was “rich” (she must have been, judging from the size of the apartment) and who would never pick up the guitar again once she got married.

For her part, Nara doubted that her guitar lessons with Patrício would ever find their way into history books. It just so happened that she was genuinely interested in playing the guitar and, at fourteen, when she found out about Lyra and Menescal’s academy, signed up immediately. She could become part of a gang, play in front of others, and perhaps even sing. It was the chance to overcome her shyness, and motivation to come out of her shell. When she discovered that Menescal was her neighbor in Posto 4, the two of them started going everywhere together, and as Menescal was four years older, you could say that he became her boyfriend. Shortly after, it was Carlinhos’s turn to court her, although, according to Nara, she was not informed of this at the time. Be that as it may, neither relationship worked out romantically. They were nothing like what she would start a year later, when Ronaldo Bôscoli appeared in the apartment. He wasn’t Vinícius’s brother-inlaw for nothing.

Menescal and Bôscoli did not suspect that they were made for each other when they met in 1956 at one of the guitar jam sessions of another veteran, composer Breno Ferreira, in the Gávea neighborhood. Breno wrote “Andorinha preta” (Black Swallow), a melody from the distant year of 1925, which would also be recorded by Nat “King” Cole. (Where did Nat find those songs?) The hit of his guitar jam sessions was the inevitable “Andorinha preta,” which had recently been revived by Trio Irakitan.

That night, at Breno’s house, after listening to enough black swallows for several summers, Menescal opened the door and went out onto the patio, where the jam participants, and their repertoire, were considerably younger. One of the two boys was singing songs like “Duas contas” (Two Beads), “Nick Bar,” “Uma loura” (A Blonde)—basically, Dick Farney’s numbers. Menescal knew that the young man was a reporter for
Manchete
magazine named Bôscoli. He should be a great journalist, to sing as badly as that, Menescal thought. The two chatted and discovered that, in addition to having a common passion for the sea, they also had the same opinions on the state of affairs in popular music. They thought it was appalling.

Both of them had a particularly strong dislike of the gloomy type of lyrics that were all the rage then, like those of a
samba-canção
entitled “Bar da Noite” (Bar of the Night), which went, “Waiter, turn out the light / Because I want to be alone.” In another song, a bolero entitled “Suicídio” (Suicide), the
singer simply fired a gun on the recording. They had no patience for Antônio Maria either, who was much admired by forty-somethings for having written “Nobody loves me / Nobody wants me / Nobody calls me / My love” and “If I should die tomorrow morning / No one will miss me.” The Mexican melodramas were nothing compared to that overdosing of nobodies. At their sexual peak, the two boys, who practiced beach sports and were the models of health, found it impossible to identify with the somber mood of those
samba-canções
, full of evil women who betrayed men and led them to their deaths.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. There were also ludicrous lyrics by Lupicínio Rodrigues, like those of “Vingança” (Vengeance), with his apparent hate for women: “While there is breath in my body / I want nothing more / Than to cry out to the saints for vengeance, vengeance, vengeance / She must roll like the stones in the street / Without ever having a refuge of her own / Where she can rest.” But not even Lupicínio, with his bad-taste tango, managed to beat Wilson Batista’s description in “Mãe solteira” (Single Mother), describing the torment of the Carnival flag-bearer who “set fire to her clothes” when she found out she was pregnant: “She looked like a human torch / Rolling down the slope / The poor wretch was ashamed / To be a single mother.”