Carmen Miranda, Brazil
The story of the Brazilian Bombshell who conquered Hollywood and turned the world onto samba. Carmen Miranda was born in Portugal, but her heart was “100 percent Brazilian”.
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Carmen Miranda, a Portuguese woman from Marco de Canavezes, made Brazil take a look at itself in the mirror and discover samba and joy. Then, laden with exotic fruit and bangles, she exhibited that personality on Broadway and got the Americans singing in Portuguese to the beat of the tambourine, cuica drum and guitar. Next was Hollywood and worldwide stardom. Never was a woman so famous in Brazil’s history. The “remarkable girl’s” turbans became a fashion item, both on the heads of New York feminists and in Parisian salons. Women admired her sensuality, natural elegance and voice, men desired her, seduced by her malicious grace and the flirtatious nature of a woman who, above all, wanted to be loved by everyone.
Carmen Miranda was the biggest star of record, radio, cinema and the Brazilian stage of the 1930s. At this time, Rio de Janeiro witnessed the success of the record holder in the areas of recordings, sales, cachets and salaries, but also how the public and press alike adored her. Perhaps, they identified with her straightforward and coquettish soul, made of samba and the joy of the Brazilian people. A joy that, until then, had been hidden by the Portuguese legacy o fado and the melancholy of the sugar plantations.
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Lusitanian Roots
Várzea de Ovelha, a hamlet in the municipality of Marco de Canavezes, is in the north of Portugal. It was in this middle of nowhere place that Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha was born on 9th February, 1909. Her parents, José Maria, a simple barber and Maria Emília, had little more than the dirt floor of the house they lived. If it weren’t for Emília being pregnant they would have already set off for Brazil.
Christened Cármen by her uncle as a tribute to Bizet’s popular opera Carmen, she arrived in Rio de Janeiro at the age of 10 months and eight days. The city that she arrived in was as Portuguese as the place she’d left behind. At the time, in a population of a million inhabitants, Rio was the adopted home of 200 thousand citizens born in Portugal. Not counting the various generations of people with Portuguese ancestors.
Despite hardships, the family grew and Carmen was able to finish school. In 1923, at the age of 14, she followed the same path as her older sister, who, like her, stood out because of her beauty, because she liked to sing and dance, because she’d run up copies of foreign fashions and because of her natural elegance and joy. Her first job was as an apprentice at a hatter’s, where her sister worked and it was behind the counter that she met her first boyfriend, Mário Cunha, rower on the Flamengo team and the product of good family, with whom she had her first contact with the Rio jet set. She was still fascinated with the starlets in the films she watched in Cinelândia. The star system invented by Hollywood contaminated the world and Carmen Miranda, like thousands of other girls, dreamt of the life of a film star.
The ladder of success
One day, one of the customers at the guest house that her mother ran in Lapa, where they lived, recommended to the violinist and composer Josué de Barros. When he saw her, Josué realised immediately had it, the word imported from the States, to define women with charisma. Her debut occurred in January 1929 at the Instituto Nacional de Música. In his biography Carmen, Ruy Castro wrote: “When she climbed on stage she was a nobody, when she left it ten minutes later, the enthusiastic applause gave her a new identity: Carmen Miranda had a grace and energy never before seen.”
Towards the end of the year, the record company RCA Victor heard her and contracted her with two strange clauses. She would only sing Brazilian music and the fact that she was Portuguese would be hidden so people wouldn’t think she was a fado singer. In 1930, her first record came out and, before Carnaval, she met Joubert de Carvalho who would write the song “Taí”, the marchinha that established Carmen in a Carnival so musically impressive that Ruy Castro wrote, “it would divide popular Brazilian music into two categories. Before and after those days in February, 1930.” The life of the artist and her family would also never be the same again. “Taí” sold 35 thousand copies and Carmen was becoming increasingly famous.
Many successful years would follow and plenty of loose living, with theatre seasons in the main cultural centres of the country and in Buenos Aires, in Argentina, where Brazilian music was starting to become popular with the demanding tastes of the porteños and gain international acclaim. As the woman herself said: “It was a total “blast’!” Carmen was causing a revolution in Brazilian music. For the public, the singer of her own hits, such as “O Que É Que a Bahiana Tem?”, “Mamãe eu quero” and “Chica-Chica-Bum-Chic” and borrowed tunes, like “Chiquita Bacana” and “Cidade Maravilhosa” (previously sung by her sister Aurora Miranda) was the first Brazilian woman to create a public personality and live off it.
Sans frontiers
In 1939, at the age of 30, rich, beautiful and independent, the Brazilian diva accepted a new challenge and set off to conquer New York and the most competitive market in the world. Without speaking a word of English, all it took was her debut in a Broadway musical to become a star. In a matter of weeks, she filled the pages of magazines like Life, Look, Vogue, Esquire, and Harper’s Bazaar. Everybody wanted a piece of Carmen, who left saying, “I’m going to give those good people a taste of Brazilian spice… My numbers will have plenty of cinnamon, pepper, palm oil, cumin…”. But Carmen took more than spices with her. The Americans were besotted and Hollywood was offering her fame on a scale unlike any other she could have dreamt of. However, the Brazilian Bombshell, continued to be “that small, down to earth, pleasant and humble companion, that everybody knows in Brazil” (Magazine O Cruzeiro, Rio 30-3-1940), and that, with her “one hundred percent Brazilian” heart, she introduced the musical wealth of the country that adopted her to the world.
Throughout the 1940s and ‘50s, the diva just added success after success in Hollywood, starring alongside big names like Dean Martin, Elizabeth Taylor, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Much to her chagrin, Brazil never realised her legendary status, not forgiving her for spending 14 years away. Few knew about the dramatic private life of the woman who, in 1946, was the best paid artist in Hollywood. After an unhappy marriage with David Sebastian, Carmen became dependent on alcohol and barbiturates in her Beverly Hills mansion and she returned to Brazil in 1954 a shadow of her former self. Once she had recovered, she was on the verge of returning to Hollywood, but her heart stopped at the age of 46, in August, 1955. When her body arrived in Rio de Janeiro, half a million people accompanied the funeral procession, softly singing “Taí”.
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by Patrícia Brito
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