Carmen Miranda

Born in the town of Marco de Canavezes in Portugal on February 9, 1909, Carmen came to Brazil with her family when she was not yet two, and grew up in the city of Rio, at about the same time that Bidu was learning to climb trees in her backyard.

She was called "Carmen" in honor of the Spanish protagonist made famous by the eponymously titled Bizet opera, or so the story goes. Otherwise, her connection to the art form was minimal, if not non-existent.

She, too, was the offspring of a well-to-do family. In her father's case, he was the owner of a successful wholesale produce business, after first starting out as a barber (!), although some sources are in disagreement over this.

But whatever the family's financial condition had been, the naturally plucky and irresistible personality - later to blossom into the phenomenon Carmen Miranda - that characterized the young Portuguese immigrant was already in evidence. Little Carmen left no doubt as to what her future aspirations might be: she would tell everyone that she was predestined by the entertainment Muses for a career on the stage and in the movies. Enter Carmen Miranda!

Like most working-class youngsters in Brazil at the time, she was forced to quit school at an early age to go into the business world, holding down a variety of low-paying jobs, including one as a chatty salesgirl, and another as a "singing" store clerk, which resulted in her being fired by an irate boss for deliberately distracting her co-workers.

Luckily for her, and for the labor market, Carmen was snapped up by several local radio stations while simultaneously cutting her first records for the Brunswick label. She eventually landed a contract in 1928 with RCA Victor, later with Odeon-Brazil and American Decca. Her large recorded output of popular songs, sambas, and other more obscure material would reach into the literal hundreds.

Some revisionist authors have described her early singing style as a Carioca version of Elvis Presley, that is, of a poorly educated white person with a modicum of musical talent who just so happened to incorporate the soul and substance of African descendants into her entertainment vocabulary, and in the process made them virtually her own.

While the jury may still be out on Elvis, it is an unfair indictment in the case of Carmen Miranda. In the first place, she was neither poor nor uneducated, nor was she a "pale" imitator of a prevailing ethnic trend; in the second, the growth of choro, marcha, maxixe, modinha, and samba had already spurred on many of Brazil's early songwriters and composers to write down and interpret them as far back as 1915, most strikingly by Ernesto Nazaré, Chiquinha Gonzaga, Pixinguinha, and Heitor Villa-Lobos, joined later by the likes of Noel Rosa, Ary Barroso, João de Barros, and Dorival Caymmi.

Carmen's particular genius was in taking the basic raw elements found in this multitude of musical styles and thoroughly reinvigorating the form by applying to it her own unique blend of crystal-clear vocalism, rapid-fire verbal patter, and razor-sharp rhythm. This would ultimately lead to her creation of a black-white composite of the streetwise baiana, an endearing (and idealized) cultural by-product of Northeastern Brazil, accessible to even the most sophisticated of theater-minded audiences.

She would develop this character further in her later domestic and 20th Century-Fox film work, but for now she strived hard to concentrate on her nightclub routines with younger sister Aurora. The two of them would appear frequently throughout the thirties at the Cassino da Urca in Rio, and usually backed by the Bando da Lua combo.

Such bubbling effervescence as Carmen Miranda seemed to exude should have been a veritable shoe-in for the nascent Brazilian film industry; and, true to form, she soon appeared in her first feature O Carnaval Cantando no Rio, in 1932, although she sang in only one musical number. A Voz do Carnaval was released the following year, along with Alô Alô Brasil and Estudantes (both 1935), Alô Alô Carnaval (1936), and Banana da Terra (1939), where she introduced moviegoers to her Bahian alter ego.

During one of her many flamboyant performances at the Urca, visiting American impresario Lee Shubert decided to hire the flashy entertainer for his new Broadway extravaganza, to premiere in New York in the summer of 1939.

The stage was now set for

the Hollywood phase of Carmen Miranda's showbiz career, a change not as readily accepted, or as welcomed, by fellow Brazilians as her "O que é que a baiana tem?" (What is it that the Baiana has?) period.

Carmen Miranda - Biography

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