Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (42 page)

And indeed it must have been. While preparing “Corcovado,” whose first verses would be the most remembered and best loved in bossa nova for the next thirty years, something bothered João Gilberto. He started to sing and soon stopped: “Um cigarro e um violão / Este amor, uma canção” (A cigarette and a guitar / This love, a song). He tried it again and couldn’t do it. Then he finally realized what was going on and said to Jobim: “Tom, this thing about ‘a cigarette and a guitar.’ It shouldn’t be that way. Cigarettes are bad for you. What if you change it to ‘a little corner, a guitar’?”

Jobim, who smoked about three packs a day, agreed to João’s suggestion, as it had been years since the latter had smoked anything. In fact, since his first stay at Dadainha’s house in Diamantina, João had become extremely anti-marijuana, blaming it for all his initial failures. He wanted nothing more to do with it. One of Bôscoli’s friends, a funny guy nicknamed “Ilha Rasa” (Flat Island), used marijuana. João Gilberto didn’t like it when Ilha Rasa came to the apartment and lit up a
fino
, but he never said anything; he’d lock himself in the bathroom or go outside. He had become a good boy.

Of the six songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim on
O amor, o sorriso e a flor
, three were his alone and three had been written in collaboration with Newton Mendonça: “Samba de uma nota só,” “Meditação,” and “Discussão.” Few people noticed, but it was a record made without Vinícius’s collaboration. There
were no problems between Jobim and Vinícius. The poet had merely spent most of 1959 in Montevideo, working for the Itamaraty, torturing himself for being abroad while the music scene was taking off in Rio. This was the only reason the two of them hadn’t done much together. It was great for Mendonça, though, because without Vinícius there to hire him out, Jobim was able to return to working with his oldest partner and friend, from whom he had been somewhat distant over the last few years.

“One-Note Samba,” like “Desafinado” (Off-Key), became a bossa nova anthem from the outset—a type of bill of principles that musicologists examined in minute detail. It’s a mystery how it ever became a popular hit. Never had so few beats inspired such long discussions. The concept of “only one base” (an expression used in the lyrics) was João Gilberto’s idea, to explain where the syncopation of his beat fell. But what, then, did “only one note” mean, if João Gilberto didn’t play notes, but chords? And for some, “Samba de uma nota só” inconveniently resembled the little-known verse of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” In short, it was very confusing. For heaven’s sake, why didn’t they just go and ask coauthor Newton Mendonça?

Because nobody knew who he was.

In with the in crowd: João Gilberto at the last amateur bossa nova concert.

Manchete Press

N
ewton Mendonça was bossa nova’s greatest mystery. When he died on November 11, 1960, only thirty-three years old, many of the movement’s participants realized that they had barely gotten to know him. Few had even seen him, and almost nobody was close to him. To the public, his was just another name that appeared in parentheses next to that of Jobim on several of the songs on João Gilberto and Sylvinha Telles’s records. (And even then, on the 78 r.p.m. label of “Desafinado” [Off-Key] by João Gilberto, his name appeared as
Milton
Mendonça.) Not even his fans could have confirmed that he had brown hair and brown eyes, was slightly overweight, was not very tall, wore glasses, and preferred
peteca
to soccer. Nobody saw him in the university shows and he didn’t participate in the bossa nova social life. (Carlinhos Lyra only spoke to him once, at Bené Nunes’s house.) His photograph never appeared among the dozens of articles about bossa nova in 1959 and 1960. Reporters did not seek him out for interviews. When he died, his obituary fit in a single short column on the national news pages. His burial, at the Caju cemetery, was uneventful.

Years passed. “Desafinado” and “One Note Samba” became classics, resistant to the effects of time and even to the “death” of bossa nova. For many, they were just Jobim’s songs. Nobody ever made much of an effort to ensure that the name Newton Mendonça emerged from the shadows.

Until now.

With the rebirth of interest in bossa nova in the last few years, people have begun to wonder who Newton Mendonça was, why he wrote so little, and why he died so young. As few of his contemporaries are able to answer those questions—and not all of them have the patience to impart the information—the fantasy of a possible curtain of silence surrounding his life has evolved. “Why do people change the subject whenever Newton Mendonça is mentioned?”—frequently garners the response, “You’re right. Why indeed?” With such fertile ground for rumors, even the circumstances surrounding his death have become suspect.

To make matters worse, unchallenged theoreticians, who were more lazy than truly investigative, radiographed the challenging formats of “Desafinado” and “One Note Samba” and thought they were doing Newton Mendonça a huge favor by reviving him as “the first great bossa nova lyricist.” They took it as a given that, if Jobim wrote the music, then Mendonça wrote the lyrics. And in doing so, they put an academic seal of approval on the theory that Mendonça was only a lyricist, which isn’t true by any means. It never occurred to these theoreticians that, although unlikely, it could have been the other way around, that is, that Mendonça had written the music and Jobim the lyrics to these songs. Or that they could have had a different arrangement altogether, that Jobim and Mendonça had an equal hand in writing both the
music and the lyrics. And that by canonizing Mendonça as a lyricist, they were being unfair to both Mendonça and Jobim.

At the end of the fifties, Newton Mendonça wasn’t making any progress as an evening pianist. According to his employment book, the Mocambo nightclub was paying him six thousand cruzeiros a month in 1953—not a vast fortune. The last entry in the book, by the Caroussel nightclub in 1958, records that Mendonça was making two hundred cruzeiros a night, which theoretically adds up to the same six thousand a month, had they been worth the same as they were five years previously. And that’s only if he didn’t miss work once. The other difference is that, in 1958, at least his work was being acknowledged outside the nightclubs. He had already been recorded by several singers; his collaboration with Jobim in “Foi a noite” (It Was the Night) was a hit by Sylvinha Telles; and before he died in 1960, he witnessed—and “witnessed” is indeed the appropriate term—the frenzy caused by João Gilberto with “Desafinado” and “One Note Samba.”

But Mendonça did not participate in that frenzy, not even peripherally. For several reasons, including his unsociable manner and overwhelming pride, he didn’t know how to capitalize on the craze for bossa nova in order to increase his fee for his evening services and make the nightclubs pay him a decent salary—given that he insisted on continuing to work at them. And in those days, Brazilian copyright laws were little more than a rumor. The fact is that none of Newton Mendonça’s hits made him any real money while he was still alive.

He was a private and introverted man who kept his diplomas under his mattress and whose only pastime during the day was to play
peteca
on the beach—a very popular sport in those days. He was jealously protective of his friends and did not like strangers in his circle. In 1959, bossa nova attacked him on all those fronts. His best and oldest friend, Jobim, over whom he had, up until that point, considerable influence, became a mini-celebrity. From that moment on, it became difficult for Mendonça, on finishing his nightclub shift at four in the morning, to persuade Jobim to defy his wife Teresa and get out of bed to meet him at a bar in Rua Teixeira de Melo in Ipanema like he used to. Newton had already resigned himself to sharing Jobim with Vinícius, who had also become a friend of his, but after “Desafinado,” Tom became everyone’s property in the competitive world of bossa nova. And to cap it off, it was Tom, and not him, who became the darling of the press—as if it could have turned out any other way. But Mendonça resented it and was accusatory toward the journalists: “They only want to know about Tom,” he complained
to his wife, Cyrene. Later, she would have a different explanation: “Newton frightened reporters.”

Had he been interviewed by one of them, Mendonça probably would have had a lot to say. Like the things he would tell Cyrene when he was chastized by her for the state of financial hardship in which they lived: “I don’t write music for the cleaner to sing as she’s sweeping the room.”

This could only be a malicious reference to the story of the maid who had inspired Jobim to write the dazzlingly successful “Chega de saudade.” But he also acknowledged that his ambition to make a name for himself was undiminished and that he was growing increasingly irritated at Jobim’s jokes, like the one the latter made in 1956 at the Posto 5 nightclub, where Mendonça worked. Jobim walked in with the young journalist José Carlos Oliveira, took Mendonça’s place at the piano and said, in all seriousness: “Carlinhos, listen to this
samba-canção
that I’ve just finished writing.”

He then played “Foi a noite,” which was his
and
Mendonça’s, of course. Ronaldo Bôscoli, who was present and recognized the music, made an effort not to laugh, but Mendonça didn’t think it was very funny. This could have become some sort of sick game between the two collaborating partners. A few years later, in 1959, Mendonça ran into Tito Madi in Beco das Garrafas and made him go into Ma Griffe nightclub, where he was now working. “Tito, look at what I’ve just finished writing,” Mendonça said. He sat down at the piano and played him a revolutionary samba. Tito Madi was practically motionless. He couldn’t have known it, but he had just heard, firsthand, “One Note Samba”—the melody, harmony, and rhythm, complete except for the lyrics.

Jobim and Mendonça wrote “One Note Samba” at the end of 1959, once again at Mendonça’s apartment. But this time they did so with a more serious attitude, without all the fun and games that had surrounded the writing of “Desafinado.” Even so, they were unable to resist poking a little fun at Ary Barroso, by starting the lyrics with the line
“Eis aqui este sambinha / Feito numa nota só”
(This is a little samba / Composed of only one note). Barroso, who truly believed in the nationalistic bragging that he penned, was perhaps the only Brazilian composer from the old guard who never flirted with foreign rhythms. In his amateur night radio shows, Ary vigorously defended the sanctity of the samba, and became a tiger whenever some poor, ignorant fool announced that he was going to sing a
sambinha
(a little samba), sometimes one of his, Ary’s, very own great big sambas. Both Jobim and Mendonça admired Ary, but they resented the blows that the man who wrote “Brazil” directed against bossa nova at the tables of the Fiorentina. They didn’t want to provoke him. By understating their own achievement, classifying their samba as a
sambinha
, they actually hoped to win him over—and neutralize his opinion of bossa nova. They succeeded.