by Castro, Ruy
Aloysio yielded and made the record, but in the text he wrote for the album sleeve he had to make an effort to disguise his dislike of Nara’s repertoire, which included songs that, according to him, “had nothing to do with bossa nova.” And—Aloysio observed—even when Nara sang compositions by those connected with bossa nova, she leaned toward compositions “with strictly regional tendencies,” like “Feio não é bonito” (Ugliness Is Not Beautiful) and “Maria Moita” by Lyra; “Berimbau” and “Consolação” (Consolation), by Baden Powell and Vinícius; “Nanã,” by Moacyr Santos, which did not yet have any lyrics; and “Canção da terra” (Song of the Land) and “Réquiem para um amor” (Requiem for Love) by the young Edu Lobo and Ruy Guerra—all with more than just a faint redolence of the slave quarters about them. Without realizing it, Aloysio had good reason to be concerned: that flirtation with Populism was going to end up ruining the poetry of the genre.
But when Nara’s album was released, bossa nova ended up taking to it fairly well. It was the conservatives who set Nara in their sights, accusing her of diluting the purity of authentic popular music by getting mixed up in it. The veteran musician Jacob do Bandolim (who had the reputation of being bad luck, and people knocked on wood whenever they spoke his name) despised her as a singer. And his son, the journalist Sérgio Bittencourt, started attacking her every other day in his bad-tempered column, Bom dia, Rio (Good Day, Rio) in the newspaper Correio da Manhã. He even initiated a byzantine discussion on whether or not Nara was a sambista and, to his surprise, she was defended by two unsuspected fans of the old guard: Lúcio Rangel and Sérgio Cabral. At the time, Bittencourt was accosted in the street by Zé Kéti: “For God sake, stop this,” begged Zé Kéti. “She’s the only one who’s recording my music and that of Cartola and Nelson Cavaquinho!”
Shy Nara, who up until very recently still needed to be protected by her friends, was holding her own splendidly in those battles. We’re able to tell by checking her album of press clippings that she kept everything that was written about her, even the insulting articles, with the same pride that she kept the ones that praised her. The dragonfly finally emerged from her coccoon and dared to fly close to the neon lights. In January 1964, she survived a run at the almost uncivilized Bottles nightclub, and a few months later she went to Japan with Sérgio Mendes’s trio, Tião Neto, and Edison Machado. The trip was sponsored by Rhodia, a textile manufacturer, for the release of their fabric collection, Brazilian Style.
Before leaving for Japan, Nara and the trio posed for an extensive fashion spread in the magazine Jóia (Jewel), shot in Salvador, with Nara modeling the collection of garments. Her image up until that point, except for the fact that she was the “bossa nova muse,” was not that different from that of her big sister, Danuza, in the frivolous elegance department. But something happened to Nara in Tokyo, and she insisted on including “Diz que vou por aí” in her repertoire, the greatest hit of which was, of course, “The Girl from Ipanema.” Sérgio Mendes refused to pose—he didn’t feel comfortable playing Zé Kéti’s songs in a runway fashion show—and there was considerable friction between the two of them.
On her return from Japan in the second half of 1964, Nara the dragonfly decided to play with fire: now that Brazil was suddenly under a military dictatorship and liberal Brazilians were savoring the bitter taste of defeat, she signed with Philips to record a controversial album—Opinião de Nara (Nara’s Opinion).
This was in fact the record that caused the rift in the bossa nova gang, much more so than the jealousy and commercial squabbles between Carlinhos Lyra and Ronaldo Bôscoli four years earlier, or the record Nara made at Elenco. Except for “Derradeira primavera” (Final Spring), by Jobim and Vinícius, and “Em tempo de adeus” (In Times of Farewell), by Edu Lobo and Ruy Guerra, two romantic ballads of undefined genre, the rest was a ninety-degree bow to the genuine values of the real Brazil: it contained two sambões by Zé Kéti (“Opinião” [Opinion] and “Acender as velas” [Light the Candles]); two others by Baden and Vinícius (“Deixa” [Leave] and “Labareda” [Flame]); a carnival marchinha from 1940 (“Mal-me-quer” [Unwanted]); a protest song by the Maranhense João do Vale (“Sina de Caboclo” [Caboclo Fate]); other assorted protest songs by Sérgio Ricardo and Edu Lobo; and even two Bahian folk music capoeiras. It was the greatest escape that Ipanema had encountered since “Chega de saudade” changed the lives of “a generation.”
The irony is that anyone who was to listen to Opinião de Nara for the first time nowadays would consider it as much a “bossa nova record” as any other. The only explanation for this resides with the musicians who accompanied her: Erlon Chaves on piano; Edu Lobo on guitar, emulating João Gilberto’s beat; Tião Neto on double bass; and none other than Edison Machado on drums, playing as jazzily as if he were at Bottles, while Nara stated, in João do Vale’s song, that she was “a poor Caboclo peasant.” But to the ears of 1964, it was as anti–bossa nova as they came. And even if it wasn’t, it soon became that way when Nara responded to the criticism she had been receiving, for having betrayed the movement, in a pompous interview with reporter Juvenal Portela in the magazine Fatos & Fotos (Facts & Photos).
“Enough bossa nova,” she declared in the interview. “Enough of singing little apartment compositions for two or three intellectuals. I want pure samba, which has much more to say for itself, which is the people’s way of expressing themselves, and not something written by some small group for another small group. The story that bossa nova originated in my house is a big lie. Even if the gang did often get together here, they also did so in a thousand other places. I want nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with a musical genre that I don’t feel a part of, and that isn’t even genuine.”
Portela asked her if that meant she was breaking away.
“If I’m disconnecting myself from bossa nova?” replied Nara. “I did that some time ago, but nobody wanted to believe it. I hope everyone understands now that I no longer have anything to do with it. Bossa nova is boring, it doesn’t excite me. Perhaps I was an idiot in the past, blindly accepting that square form of music that, even now, people are still trying to pin on me. I’m not the person they’re trying to make me out to be: a little rich girl, who lives on Avenida Atlântica, overlooking the sea.”
All of the newspapers visited Nara at her home on Avenida Atlântica to confirm the truth of her statements, and she became more aggressive with each interview: “Bossa nova always has the same basic theme: love-flower-sea-love-flower-sea, and it goes on ad infinitum. It’s very complex. You need to hear it sixty times in order to understand what’s being said. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life singing ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ much less in English. I want to be understood, I want to be a singer of the people.”
Bossa nova’s ears were burning, but it didn’t pout at its former muse dragging it through the dirt to the press. The following issue of Fatos & Fotos printed several reactions to Nara’s point of view: “Nara’s trying to make a big leap, while she’s still in the age of love-flower-sea,” said Sylvinha Telles. “But no matter how much she dreams of being otherwise, she’s the original bossa nova. She’s underestimating the intelligence of her audience in saying that bossa nova songs need to be played over and over again in order to be understood. Bossa nova is the music for an age in which everyone lives in an apartment.”
“I don’t know who Nara’s audience is,” Aloysio de Oliveria remarked, sarcastically. “‘The Girl from Ipanema’ is a song for everybody. Whether she likes it or not, she’s a typical apartment singer, who wants to deny the existence of the love-sea-flower theme as musical inspiration. That would be denying what the entire world wants. Nobody wants to change Nara. She’s the one who’s trying to pass for something she’s not.”
Her ex-fiancé, Ronaldo Bôscoli, with the intimacy common to former lovers, was harsh: “It’s ugly, it’s not nice, what she’s doing to us. Nara is too young to understand that nobody can deny their past. In denying bossa nova, she is deny
ing a part of herself and is being ungrateful to those who helped to promote her career. Just to point out her inconsistency, she recently traversed four continents singing ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ in English. It was therefore she who broadcast the bossa nova ‘lie’ to the world. And earned a fair bit of money doing so.” (Bôscoli was exaggerating: Nara only traversed two continents.)
“The day that Nara discovers what pure music is, and manages to convey it to the world, we’ll all be pure musicians and will ascend to Heaven together,” Menescal retorted. “Until that happens, we’ll all go on singing in apartments, making a little bossa nova to sell.”
Bossa nova resented what it considered to be Nara’s “ingratitude.” A running joke at the time was “Let’s see if she manages to survive outside her apartment.” But Nara did not lack supporters. The group of sambistas Voz do Morro (Voice of the Hill), who up until that point had never heard of her, threw a party at the Estudantina Musical dance hall in downtown Praça Tiradentes to commemorate her joining their ranks. The samba school Unidos de São Clemente made an appearance, and the event attracted more than five hundred people. Considering itself to be included among the invitees, bossa nova (read that as Ronaldo Bôscoli) responded with a mocking telegram published in the newspapers:
CONGRATULATIONS NARA STOP FORTUNATELY IMPOSSIBLE TO ATTEND PROMOTIONAL EVENT USING PRESTIGIOUS REPUTATION OF BOSSA NOVA STOP SIGNED BOSSA NOVA.
At the beginning of December, war was definitively declared with the opening of Opinião, a theatrical show by Oduvaldo Viana Filho, Armando Costa, and Paulo Pontes, directed by Augusto Boal and starring Nara, João do Vale, and Zé Kéti. The stage of conflict was the arena theater of the Super Shopping Center in Rua Siqueira Campos, in Copacabana. In that highly political climate in the latter part of 1964, during which many people had already begun to suspect that Brazil would not be rid of its military rule any time soon, Opinião was exactly the cathartic remedy the doctor ordered. It was also the inauguration of the “ideology of poverty” that would, for a long time, infest Brazilian culture.
All of the dialogue and songs in the show spoke of hardship. But the theme of Opinião was a little confusing. Most of the northeastern songs were appeals for agrarian reform, but as things were rarely referred to by their proper names, any member of the audience who wasn’t fully paying attention would be confused as to whether a peasant was unhappy because he had no land or because he had no girlfriend. It later became evident that the military dictators should have been listening more carefully to João do Vale’s oration in “Sina de Caboclo”: “It’s just a matter of giving me some land to see how it is / I plant beans, rice, and coffee / It will be good for me and the doctor / I send him beans, he sends me a tractor,” because they all but included it in their new Land Statute. The show merely appeared to be revolutionary. Underneath it all, it was characterized by a delicious and moderate reformism, well in accordance with the political tactics of its authors, all of whom were closely aligned with the Communist Party.
It was also natural, in that oppressive Brazilian atmosphere of 1964, for the audience to be deeply moved when Zé Kéti sang “You can imprison me, you can beat me / You can even starve me / I won’t change my beliefs.” It was like an anthem of resistance to the hard-hearted militiamen, perfect for the era. But it’s hard to believe that people wouldn’t have felt uncomfortable when Zé Kéti went on: “I will never leave the hillside slums.” Why on earth would anyone prefer to continue living in a shack, if they had any choice in the matter? “If there’s no water, I’ll sink a well / If there’s no meat, I’ll buy a bone / And make some broth / And leave it to simmer,” insisted Zé Kéti. This was no longer reformism, but the craziest and most idle conformism imaginable; nobody, however, seemed to cotton to this.
The Opinião audience (almost a hundred thousand people up until August 1965) would have been very disappointed had they known that, when he wrote that song (the title song of the show), Zé Kéti had in fact not lived in a hillside slum for a long time, but in a house that was at sea level, with a “garden and back yard,” in the suburb of Bento Ribeiro. And they would have been appalled, to say the least, if they had known that, “moved by his song,” the then-despised secretary of Social Services in Guanabara, Sandra Cavalcanti, had given him a house in Vila Kennedy—in the exact same spot where they were sending the slum inhabitants that the fiercely right-wing governor, Carlos Lacerda, had ordered to be removed from the Pasmado hill, setting fire to the shacks. And worse still, Zé Kéti had accepted it.
The show stirred the city in several ways. During its opening week, some unidentified but certainly ill-intentioned students vandalized the billboards outside the entrance to the theater, scribbling beneath the innocent names of Nara, João do Vale, and Zé Kéti the ridiculous and provocative slogan, “Directed by Karl Marx.” What nobody was expecting was that that the resulting commotion was such that, without intending to, the Opinião show caused the downfall of the establishment that had inspired it: the Zicartola restaurant in downtown Rua da Carioca. At the beginning of the year, its owner, the composer Cartola, had bought out his partners, closed the restaurant for renovation, and re-opened it with great fanfare, using Zé Kéti and João do Vale, as well as himself, as featured artists to attract customers. The intelligentsia was crazy about the place and even raved over the dried meat with pumpkin served by Dona Zica, the composer’s wife. The result was that Cartola was doing very well for himself—that is, until the opening of the Opinião show.
The show stole more than his main stars—it also stole his customers, who all converged on the Rua Siqueira Campos Shopping Center. Many of them saw the Opinião show five or six times; others went every night, without actually going into the theater, as if they were regulars. It was difficult for Cartola to keep the Zicartola going, which featured permanent acts like Nelson Cavaquinho, Geraldo Babão, a local ensemble, the mulatta Teresinha, and Jorginho de Pandeiro’s group of samba dancers and percussionists. There were a hell of a lot of salaries to maintain, given that the artists were now performing to an empty house. Nara herself felt she ought to sing there one night, in order to help repair the damage, but it was already too late. A short time later, when the Zicartola closed down, the Opinião show was still running.
Each artist performing in the Opinião show had a specialty: Zé Kéti sang about urban hardship, João do Vale about rural hardship, and Nara—well, Nara tried to make it understood that the fact that she had grown up in an apartment overlooking the sea didn’t necessarily restrict her repertoire to music from the social class from whence she had come. Looking at the situation today, it all seems so simple. The very clothes she wore to perform—black, white, and red striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up, off-white corduroy Lee pants, and tan tennis shoes—could not disguise her origins in the boutiques of Ipanema. But when she launched into “Carcará” (Caracara), by João do Vale, the audience felt a shiver, as if the rebellion against dictator Marshal Castello Branco were being exposed right then and there. And each time that Nara ran her fingers through her bangs, it was as if Castello Branco was being physically swept out of Brazilian life.
Carlinhos de Oliveira, who was at the time the most influential columnist of the Rio press, selected her to be his column’s “spiritual sweetheart,” and wrote about her practically every day in the newspaper Jornal do Brasil. When he didn’t really have anything to say, he made something up. At the same time, whenever another columnist, Nelson Rodrigues, of O Globo, wanted to say that someone was getting rich, he would compare that person to Nara Leão. People thought it was another example of his usual tirade against “leftism,” but Nara confirmed: “I’m earning so much money that I don’t know what to do with it all.”
In December 1964, Nara admitted to earning a salary of 1,100,000 cruzeiros a month on the Opinião show, plus eleven percent of the profits, and that wasn’t counting the revenue from her album with Philips and payment for television appearances—for which she had suddenly beco
me the artist most in demand. (For the sake of comparison, pop-star Roberto Carlos, who was the highest-paid singer in Brazil at the time, was said to earn 2,000,000 cruzeiros per month in record sales, and 300,000 cruzeiros per performance.) Nara wasn’t doing at all badly—especially given that none of the bossa nova gang earned even a fraction as much.
The Opinião show had many consequences in addition to pulling Nara out of her apartment and making the bossa nova gang green with envy. It turned her into the “muse of protest songs,” at a time when the new college generation desperately needed something of that genre. Regardless of whatever happened, the newspapers wanted her opinion on it. Nara gave interviews on the Pill, the Pope, cancer, the Dominican Republic, and the Pierre Cardin line. In May 1966, she told the Rio newspaper Diário de Noticias that “the militia might understand cannons and machine guns, but they don’t have a clue about politics.” In the same interview—exhibiting almost unprecendented courage for the era—she called for the eradication of the Brazilian army, the deposition of military leaders in positions of power, and the return of the country to the leadership of the people. And, in a slap-on-the-wrist style criticism, she said that “our Armed Forces are useless, as they demonstrated in the last coup, during which the mobilization of troops was hampered by a few punctured tires.” Wow!
It’s not hard to imagine the nervous state of mind this statement inflicted on Marshal Artur da Costa e Silva, the Minister of War at the time. He had already had similar problems with the bold Correio da Manhã columnist, Carlos Heitor Cony, who had poked fun at his uniform, condemning it to the moths, as well as branded him a blockhead, saying that he probably got around by swinging from a vine. And now this girl was insulting the Army like that, talking about punctured tires. (The militia must have taken Nara’s comment to heart because shortly afterward they helped themselves liberally to the Union budget to buy new tires and to properly equip the Army.) Costa e Silva wanted to detain her under the new National Security Law, and the intellectuals came running in Nara’s defense. Poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote an eloquent column, columnist Sérgio Porto dubbed her “the Joan of Arc of the samba,” and poet Ferreira Gullar wrote: “Boy, don’t mess / With a certain Nara Leão / Because she’s armed / With a flower and a song.”