Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

musicians’ only apparent use was to feature as whimsical characters in Walt Disney films set in Bahia. (Or not? After all, his namesake, Dick Haymes, was Argentine—and despite everything, he was Dick Haymes!) It’s true that Farney already had a starting contract for fifty-two weeks with the radio chain NBC—the brainchild of an American conductor named Bill Hitchcock, who had heard him at the Urca. The opportunities in Brazil for singers like him, who needed to be accompanied by a large orchestra, were fewand far between. President Eurico Gaspar Dutra had threatened to close the casinos (“You’ll shee: I shall closhe the cashinoshe,” he announced in his peculiar diction), and indeed he did. In doing so, he also shut down the orchestras who played at them, and laid off innumerable crooners.
    So what did Dick have to lose now? Not a lot, and maybe something would pan out. He had a good image, perfect English, the voice of Bing Crosby (with a few Sinatra-like touches) and, most importantly, he had already mastered an enviable jazz piano style. And didn’t everything work out? Within a short time, reports began to arrive that Dick was truly dominating the chic cabarets of New York, recording hits such as “Tenderly” with Majestic Records, and that he had even managed to land two radio programs dedicated exclusively to him, sponsored by Pepsi-Cola and Chesterfields cigarettes. Of course, there were those who sneered quietly to themselves and refused to believe the reports.
    In order to silence the skeptics, live recordings of those programs, brought over on V-discs by Dick’s father, began to make the rounds of the radio stations in Rio, as if providing proof of the crime. (V-discs were sixteen-inch 33 r.p.m. acetate records produced by the Allied forces during World War II in order to bombard the Axis powers with Glenn Miller recordings. They were part of Allied propaganda. With the final victory of “In the Mood” over “Die Fahne Hoch,” those cumbersome objects were used to record everything, but only the radio stations had the equipment needed to play them.) From that point on, no one doubted that Americans were actually paying money to hear a Brazilian named Dick Farney.
    In the two and a half years that followed his departure, his Brazilian recording label, Continental, continued to flood the domestic market with the songs he had recorded, of which he had left behind a large supply before he departed. His renditions of other songs that were even more modern than “Copacabana,” like “Ser ou não ser” (To Be or Not to Be), “Marina,” and “Esquece” (Forget) were launched in dribs and drabs during 1947 and 1948, in the hope of maintaining Farney’s popularity should he return one day.
    Dick
return
? At that point, no one in Brazil thought that would happen. The more presumptuous believed that, if he continued in the same vein, Dick would soon overshadow Sinatra himself and, following in Carmen Miranda’s footsteps, would only return to Brazil on vacation. After all, his recording of “Tenderly,” a ballad by the pianist Walter Gross—at that time accompanist to the young Mel Tormé—had entered the American charts, or so they believed. Why would Dick want to return to Brazil?
    But in December 1948, he announced his return to Rio de Janeiro—to stay. He would leave behind the success he had managed to build abroad in order to pursue his career in Brazil. No one really understood why, but Brazilians being who they are, many saw this as a patriotic gesture, and his popularity in Brazilexploded. No one questioned his return. If they had, and Dick had replied—like many others before and after him—”The food didn’t agree with me,” “I missed my mother,” or “Folks, there’s no moonlight like this, etc.,” they would have thought it perfectly normal. But Dick didn’t proffer any of those clichés, and, anyway, they didn’t fit to his image as a well-bred, refined, and wordly