Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World (68 page)

One reason for this was, according to Bôscoli, that Elis lived in a perpetual state of discord with the big names in bossa nova. She had never completely recovered from the veto imposed on her by Jobim in the recording of
Pobre menina rica
(Poor Little Rich Girl), and although she eventually included his songs in her medley albums (what modern Brazilian singer could do without Jobim in the 1960s?), she didn’t do so with the same zeal that she reserved for Edu Lobo, who was, for a long time, her favorite. But Jobim was a friend of Bôscoli’s, and frequently came to their house. In the beginning, Bôscoli had to keep a careful eye on Elis to make sure that she didn’t serve him charred steak during the barbecues that the couple held in Avenida Niemeyer.

It was a marriage that would have put the Borgias to shame, but at least it served to heal old wounds between the greatest female vocalist (Elis) and the greatest composer (Jobim) in Brazil, because in 1969 she recorded an entire song of Jobim’s (“Wave”) for the first time, on the record she made with harmonicist Toots Thielemans in Sweden. From that point on, she regularly included Jobim’s compositions in her repertoire, made “Águas de março” (Waters of March) her own and, in 1974, two years after her official separation from Bôscoli, she recorded her best record up until then,
Elis & Tom
, with Jobim in Los Angeles—on which the orchestra was, coincidentally, conducted by Bill Hitchcock, the man who had discovered Dick Farney at the Urca Casino in 1946.

“OK, stop telling stories,” said the singer Dionne Warwick in Rio, in 1966, to Ronaldo Bôscoli. “Everyone knows that Burt Bacharach invented bossa nova.”

What do you mean “everyone”?—Bôscoli might have asked. But then, had she been French, Dionne Warwick probably would have attributed bossa nova to Francis Lai and Pierre Barouh, whose score for a tremendously popular
film released that year,
Un homme et une femme
(A Man and a Woman) was bossa nova at its best. The cream of the crop was the lengthy “Samba saravah”—Baden and Vinícius’s “Samba da benção” (Benediction Samba), with the authors carelessly omitted from the screen credits—which Barouh had recorded in Rio with Baden, Oscar and Iko Castro-Neves, and Milton Banana.

Silently (which is a contradiction in terms, given that we’re talking about music), bossa nova had crept into the inner ear of people everywhere, and there were already several who could reproduce its guitar beat, sublety of percussion, and vocal style as if it had always existed.

Antonio Carlos Jobim spent a large part of 1965 and 1966 in the United States, this time in California, doing television appearances, personal performances, and arrangements. To help stave off his homesickness, Brazilian friends who were passing through brought him gifts from his mother: Phebo soap, Garoto chocolates, and Praianinha
cachaça
. (One of the bottles of booze, brought over by a photographer, never reached its destination: the customs officer in Los Angeles was suspicious of its contents and broke open the bottle right then and there, flooding the entire area.) But the main activity that occupied Jobim was the records he started making for Warner, through RioCali. Ray Gilbert was working in that respect, at least—although, as is to be expected, he gave preference to the songs for which he was lyricist and editor.

Jobim sang for the first time on one of the records,
The Wonderful World of Antonio Carlos Jobim
. It’s true that he was firmly backed by Nelson Riddle’s orchestra and arrangements, but this was no picnic. Quite the opposite. Goodness knows what it must have been like to feel almost a novice, and to be recording with a musician he had spent his entire life admiring, especially the man who had given new life to Sinatra’s career just eleven years previously. And besides, Nelson Riddle was used to Sinatra; he had heard him singing in the bath and was close enough to him to call him “Frankie.” It was a huge responsibility. But with the exception of his limitations as a singer, nobody would ever have guessed, on hearing
The Wonderful World of Antonio Carlos Jobim
, that Antonio Carlos Jobim actually felt nervous.

Nervous is indeed what he felt some months later, in December, when he was back in Rio and settled back into his favorite niche, the Veloso Bar, having a few evening beers with friends. Mr. Armênio, one of the bar’s waiters, told him there was a telephone call for him—from the United States. Jobim picked up the receiver; it was Gilbert, and Frank Sinatra wanted to talk to him.

Pause.

In December 1966, if someone told you that you had a phone call, and Frank Sinatra was on the other end of the line, 10,132 kilometers (6,296 miles) away, it would really make you stop and think. How is it possible to explain to today’s reader exactly what that meant back then? There are no artists of equivalent stature in show business today. None of the post-Sinatra megastars (except perhaps for the Beatles, and even then, there were four of them and they hung out together) ever managed to accumulate the same amount of power, prestige, and inaccessibility—all at once. (Many of today’s idols might have two of those things, but none have all three.) In 1966, at fifty years of age, Sinatra also had reason to be proud of his staying power; no other singer had managed to stay the distance with the legend himself for so many years—he had been famous since at least 1940. Once, in 1939, when he was still singing with Harry James’s band, a reporter told James that he was going to interview his crooner. “For the love of God, don’t!” implored James. “The kid has only barely gotten started, nobody knows who he is, and he already thinks he’s bigger than Caruso!”

Sinatra’s supremacy reached its peak in 1960 when, an ardent supporter of the Democratic Party, he gave his all as both a voter and an artist to John Kennedy’s campaign for presidency of the United States. With Kennedy’s victory, he was practically appointed as a minister without a cabinet. He organized the colossal show for the inauguration party, and from that point on became almost a permanent fixture at the White House—until Jack’s brother, Bobby Kennedy, began locking the door. Bobby was attorney general, and was threatening to put an end to the Mafia; he felt that he wouldn’t be taken seriously in his crusade when someone whose favorite dish was macaroni had taken up permanent residence in the guest room. Bobby’s interference ended with John Kennedy going to California and staying at the home of Republican supporter Bing Crosby—symbolizing his break with Sinatra. The latter withdrew from the White House, but he and John remained friends and the two of them still had a lot of fun together, when the president went to New York for secret flings at the Carlyle Hotel.

Sinatra was still the biggest popular singer in the world in 1966. From 1954 to 1961,
all
of the albums he released with Capitol were in the top five sold in the United States.
Only the Lonely
, from 1958, and
Come Fly with Me
, from 1959, had been number one. In 1961, he set up his own recording company, Reprise, which he opened in 1963 with WEA, a business that made him even more of a millionaire than he already was. And that same year of 1966, in the middle of the Beatles era, his
Strangers in the Night
single, a Bert Kaempfert song, was also number one. This was the man who was phoning Tom Jobim at the Veloso.

Not that it came as a complete surprise to Jobim. Since 1964, Rancho Mirage, Sinatra’s stronghold in the middle of the desert in Palm Springs, was already indicating that The Voice wanted to record his songs. But with Sinatra, things only happened when he decided it was time—and besides, there was no reason for him to rush. For years, his market had been the adult public, and the Beatles explosion in 1964 did not affect him seriously. What was happening was a low release rate of great songs in his style—in fact, it was the beginning of the decline of great American music. Like other singers, he was looking for new types of material, and bossa nova had more than enough quality, sophistication, and commercial appeal. And to Sinatra, bossa nova was Jobim.

Ray Gilbert passed the telephone to Sinatra, and he said, “I’d like to make a record with you, and to know if you like the sound of the idea.”

Jobim replied, “It’s an honor, I’d love to.” Sinatra suggested the German Claus Ogerman to do the arrangements, and Tom promptly agreed—it was Ogerman who had written the arrangements for his own album
The Composer of “Desafinado”
three years earlier, and that was, without a doubt, the record that Sinatra must be using as a benchmark. Sinatra suggested that Jobim play guitar on the record. Handsome Jobim, a pianist, was growing a little weary of being portrayed as a guitarist in the United States—where they associated the guitar with the clichéd stereotype of the Latin lover—but that was no reason to make things complicated. He agreed, but asked for a Brazilian drummer. Sinatra agreed. In the end, Sinatra asked him if he could go to Los Angeles right away, in order to get to work with Ogerman on the arrangements—which meant that the songs had more or less already been chosen. The Voice issued his final instructions: “I don’t have time to learn any new songs and I hate rehearsing,” Sinatra told him. “Let’s stick with the best-known ones—the classics.”

The recording was set for the end of January, and with that, the two of them bade each other farewell and caught their respective planes—Jobim to Los Angeles, and Sinatra to Barbados—on the one hand, to prepare his voice, and on the other, to recover from the tremendous crisis that was going on in his marriage to actress Mia Farrow. Sinatra, who was fifty, and Mia, twenty, had married less than a year before, and ever since, stories surrounding the
event had put food on the table and paid the rent of practically every American comedian. Thousands of jokes were being made on a daily basis in the newspapers and on television. It was said that some of Sinatra’s neckties were older than Mia; that Ava Gardner had always known that Sinatra would “end up in bed with a little boy”; and that all that was left was for Frank Sinatra, Jr. to marry Maureen O’Sullivan (Mia’s mother, and former Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan).

The problem in that marriage, meanwhile, was that Frank wanted Mia to stay at home making ravioli, and she, with the willfulness of her twenty years, insisted on pursuing a movie career—in order to avoid merely being labeled “Sinatra’s wife.” Against his will, she went to New York to film Roman Polanski’s
Rosemary’s Baby
. Her role was intense, the film was intense, and Roman Polanski was intense. All that intensity ended up draining her both physically and psychologically. If you’ve seen the film and remember Mia’s appearance in the final scenes, it’s worth noting that she wasn’t
made up
to look like a woman who was in labor with the son of the Devil. Filming ended, but Mia didn’t want to go back to the marriage. The two were, for all intents and purposes, separated.

Round about the time he had telephoned Jobim, Sinatra invited Mia to spend Christmas with him in Palm Springs, in a tentative effort to salvage what was left of their marriage. She accepted, but according to columnist Earl Wilson, her stay was very much along the lines of a “visit.” The two of them agreed to “take a break,” during which Frank went to Barbados. As for Mia (once again, against Sinatra’s wishes, who thought she was being taken advantage of), she fled to India that January—in the company of John Lennon and George Harrison—to visit a meditation, relaxation, and LSD “spa” with guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. This was the atmosphere in which
Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim
was to be recorded.