MARKETING MIRANDA
Stardom, Fashion, and Gossip in the Media
In the opening scene of Carmen Miranda’s third Twentieth Century-Fox film, Weekend in Havana (1941), the camera zooms in on a snowy New York City storefront window in which life-size cutout figures of Miranda and her band set the ambiance for an agency promoting luxury cruises to the Caribbean. Framing the display, an arrangement of posters aims to lure the passersby with enticing headlines that evoke the sunny tropics, romance, and fun. The camera then cuts to the rhythmic hand movements of one of the percussionists of Miranda’s band, who appears to come alive before the spectators’ eyes. Dressed in Cuban shirts with frilled sleeves, the band accompanies Miranda in the opening musical number and the film’s title-song, “Weekend in Havana.”
This cinematic transition ties the promotion of a fun-filled, exotic, gay, and romantic experience to a musical number that reinforces the invitation to escape to a foreign and exciting destination through the lyrics, the music, the performers’ costumes, and Miranda’s sensual movements—in particular, her trademark “come hither” gesture and enticing fluttering of the eyes. The representation of exotic tourism was a staple of Hollywood films that provided a temporary means of escape and contributed “to the marketing of cultural exoticism as a ‘spectacle of difference’ available via the travel package or the luxury cruise” (Berry, Screen Style 131). Miranda’s foreign, exotic, and utterly other aura promoted this associational tropical merchandising (ranging from the film’s visual product being packaged for consumption and sold as the illusion of gaiety, to specific items of consumer culture such as her turbans, platform shoes, jewelry, and dresses), as many of her film titles explicitly denote.1 The spectator vicariously becomes a cultural shopper-tourist who absorbs the images of foreign lands, customs, and people, all mediated through the lens of the studios that have packaged these illusionary destinations for the viewers’ consumption.
At the height of the studio system, the interconnectedness between the cinema and consumer culture was at the core of Hollywood’s promotion of both its stars and films and fueled the intense commodification surrounding the stars, both on and off the screen. Marketing the stars, especially the top-billed cast, was essential to this profit-maximizing industry governed by best practices, film trends, and audience expectations. The films, doubling as living display windows, showcased the most modern furnishings, accessories, and fashions. As part of the films’ extended commercial culture, the industries provided a forum for commodity tie-ins, which were all the rage during this period. The film exhibition windows were seen as publicity opportunities for producers’ goods, and stars were widely featured in advertisements, dispersing, as Mary Ann Doane writes, “the fascination of cinema onto a multiplicity of products” (25).2
The interconnectedness of film showcasing and manufacturer tie-ups gave rise to the parallel development of business initiatives that employed specialists working both for and outside of the studio. One of the most unique examples of commercial tie-ups connected to a Carmen Miranda feature film was the appropriately named “Copa bras” manufactured by Arrow Brassiere Company. The advertisement, featuring Miranda and some of the cast from Copacabana (1947), urged female patrons to watch for the “Copa Girl Contest” at local theaters, promising the most beautiful and shapely contestants elaborate prizes, such as “screen tests, expensive wardrobes, all-expense paid trips to New York and some royal entertainment.”3
This symbiotic relationship among the films, the stars, and the extensive discourse around them both fueled the industry’s “dream factory,” which Jane Gaines describes as “the sensorial engulfment of the spectator, a kind of commodity immersion,” and consolidated the relation between cinema and consumerism by projecting objects that were enhanced by the magical touch of the silver screen and its stars (“Wanting to Wear” 106; 147). Star adulation is passed on to the products they endorse, creating a unique aura, and unlike any other mutually endorsed media relationship, the cinema/consumption symbiosis is endowed with a particularly strong emotional bond that stems from the stars’ projection of success, beauty, and power.4 This was especially pronounced during the first half of the 1940s, when film attendance reached its all-time apex, averaging around eighty-five million spectators weekly.5
This mutual dependence of film viewing and consumption is also ensconced in the physical proximity of exhibition halls and department stores, some of which built theaters inside their stores as early as the 1910s and catered to those skeptical of nighttime showings with matinée projections originally geared, in particular, toward women shoppers (J. Allen 486). At one of these matinée showings of Weekend in Havana, women were reportedly overheard claiming they would like to come back and see it all over again.6
The exhibition halls were jam-packed with studio-devised marketing ploys that aimed to leave the viewers insatiable and give the film-going public a sense of ownership and a greater connection to the stars. These incentives included games with prizes, audience competitions, give-a-ways, and bond drives, a plethora of ideas that could liven the reception of the feature film and add a participatory level of involvement to the film-going experience.7 The pairing of Carmen Miranda’s distinguishable look with the musical genre provided a goldmine of options, limited only by the studio publicists’ imaginations, to assist exhibition halls with promoting her films. Emblematic of this trend is the pressbook for Greenwich Village, which suggests an array of options typical of the Miranda films, including rhumba, conga, or samba contests; prizes for the best girl imitation of Miranda;8 elaborate jewelry showcased in local stores; and blow-ups or mannequins of Miranda wearing the popular Latin American styles.9
This tailored marketing of a film through the uniqueness of one of its main female stars was typical of the time period when, more than at any other period in cinematic history, actresses occupied the lion’s share of the studio’s payrolls.10 The cast, and primarily the main female stars (with few exceptions), featured prominently in all forms of publicity: they were the subject of trade and commercial newspaper articles, radio interviews, extensive press releases, and pressbooks and were included on movie posters in multiple formats and sizes. The public could not get enough of Hollywood, and its embellished objects of sale—ranging from paper dolls to Dixie Cup lids—fueled the industry’s myth-making endeavors, which were essential to film marketing and extended the experience of going to the movies far beyond the film viewing per se.11
From the 1940s on, celebrity gossip permeated the media, progressively occupying more print space, as journalism in general incorporated more “soft” news such as entertainment and leisure. Stardom, as Richard Dyer has developed, “is the way stars live, this generalized lifestyle that is the assumed backdrop for the specific personality of the star and the details and events of his/her life” (Only Entertainment 35). Publicity and advertising focused on and were driven through the stars—their personal lives, loves, tastes, and hobbies—enticing the movie-going public with a projection of the players that extended far beyond the scope of the films themselves, creating an extensive extra-filmic discursive and visual apparatus. Since stars have been defined as actors and actresses whose public interest encompasses their lives beyond their screen performances, consideration of these parafilmic materials is essential to understanding the creation and promotion of Miranda as a star and provides a deeper understanding of her multifaceted stardom. As Gaines has pertinently suggested, fans did not need to see the motion pictures to follow their favorite stars, who were projected just as much through fan magazines, women’s fashion, and publicity releases as by their films (“Costume” 198).
Film reviewers provided descriptions and classifications of the films along with their appreciation and judgment, although as John Ellis reminds us, these reviewers often had a limited degree of autonomy in relation to the studio (37). Despite this gap between the industry’s official discourses about the films and the press’s interpretations on one side, and the empirical experience in the movie theaters themselves on the other, the information contained in the press, as a pseudofictional genre of its own kind, gives the critic an insight to how the films were constructed in the media. What is of interest is not the veracity or validity of the pronouncements but rather a knowledge of what is in fact being said, even when in media publications the opinions of a few may become a distorted ruling index of the film’s general reception.12
Furthermore, the publicity produced by the studio was not always an accurate representation of the film. The film’s “narrative image” for a forthcoming release does not, as Ellis rightly points out, “summarize the film, it indicates it” (32).13 Furthermore, the information included in the publicity material may or may not be accurate. This was all the more so for musicals, in which scenes with song and dance numbers that did not further the plot were commonly the first to be cut if the film length needed to be reduced, often after marketing departments had already released the film’s publicity. A case in point is a widely circulated image of Miranda with a lighthouse headdress in Doll Face for her performance of “True to the Navy,” which was cut from the film’s final version.14
Carmen Miranda with her lighthouse headdress in a Production Code photograph for Doll Face (1945). Courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library
Given Carmen Miranda’s charismatic stage and film presence, the media wrote extensive commentary about her stardom, capitalizing on Miranda’s unique and flamboyant star-performance and celebrity persona. Careful consideration of these media and publicity texts provides an essential additional level of understanding of Miranda’s stardom beyond her filmic portrayal and enables us to analyze the media’s construction and interpretation of Miranda. As Gledhill succinctly indicates, “Actors become stars when their off-screen life-styles and personalities equal or surpass acting ability in importance” (xiv). This approach situates Miranda as a foreign-film commodity in relation to the industries’ construction of a collective, imagined “Latin-ness” through media products and star publicity, corresponding to a “Hollywood Latinidad,” as coined by Mary Beltrán (3). Publicity for Miranda’s films highlighted the uniqueness of her physical appearance—in particular, that of her costumes. She figured prominently in promotional materials, as it was an easy transition for the artists to make from film presence to posters, magazine photos, caricatures, and lobby cards.
A Marketing Goldmine: Miranda’s Narrative Image
In the late 1930s, nationwide advertising for film releases was orchestrated with the uttermost care by publicity departments, with writers and art staff dedicated to devising aggressive sales campaigns focused on marketing the film’s main stars.15 Some of the challenges inherent to the marketing of Miranda’s Twentieth Century-Fox films were common to all the studios: it was essential to ensure interest in the picture before its release to generate expectations and spike the audience’s curiosity, and the primary method was to draw on past studio successes while emphasizing the novelty of the new release.16
The film posters, in a variety of formats and styles, were the crowning element of the studio publicity effort and were not meant as merely informational but rather as powerful tools to enhance movie sales where it mattered most: at the box office. Similar to the poster cutouts in the aforementioned opening scene of Weekend in Havana, the posters were intended to stand out prominently in the exhibition halls, but they also “bombarded the eye from every available vantage point: brilliantly lighted theater lobbies, billboards, brick walls, roofs, fences, buses, even taxicab wheel covers” (Rebello and Allen 13–14). The posters needed to loudly acclaim the film’s appeal as the most vital link between the studio and the potential audience by translating into pictorial form, with irresistible draw, the essence of the film, the plot, the stars, and the genre, capturing, as Haralovich writes, “moments of narrative rupture” in posters that were often rim-filled “snapshots” of the film (52). Competing with other forms of entertainment such as the theater, radio, stage shows, fairs, and circuses, the poster’s main purpose was to aggressively sell the film. It was not enough to portray an image from the film and provide the essentials about its contents and cast; the poster needed to make the film irresistible for a broad audience, and if necessary that took the form of enhancing its most marketable features. In short, the posters were designed, as Rebello and Allen colorfully summarize, “to sell the sizzle, not the steak. . . . Posters needed to be sensational” (14).
The posters created to promote the Carmen Miranda movies were able to achieve this level of sensationalism by foregrounding her magnificent costumes, using bright, eye-catching colors and artsy compositions that screamed excitement, exoticism, and gaiety and that echoed the copy of the poster. Even for her first film, Down Argentine Way, in which she did not have an acting role, the publicists merchandized her foreignness and unique performance with taglines that read: “Introducing tantalizing, torrid voiced Carmen Miranda. She’s terrific!” and promised “irresistible rhythms of rhumbas and congas.” Miranda was one of the film’s “show-stopping new personalities.”17 Several of the artist’s drawings used in the posters for Down Argentine Way show a slender Miranda at the center of the poster layout, featured with one of her legs exposed, her hands on her hips, and her head to one side, portraying a promise of seduction that is limited in this film, given that Miranda’s part is confined to the proscenium stage.18
Despite the restrictions of the war period, printing and paper remained relatively cheap, and studios ordered posters with abandon, typically with several posters focusing on the main star and a variety of posters that would appeal to different sensibilities according to the targeted audience.19 Posters intended for Spanish communities or Spanish-speaking countries, for example, featured Miranda more prominently to emphasize the shared Latinidad/e.20 Ideally, stars’ representations had to correspond with their public figure and forefront the traits that the audience expected from the star, toward whom they felt a pull of loyalty, blending continuity effectively with novelty to consistently draw audiences to the box office. In the case of the Twentieth Century-Fox musicals in which Miranda’s roles varied very little from film to film, the posters needed to evoke her distinct “look” but also the newness of the film’s plot and setting, the music, and her costumes. Typecasting was not peculiar to Miranda; as Alexander Walker discusses, it was a phenomenon of the time period, and the studios manipulated the stars, providing little, if any, margin for change (254). If the studio’s marketing strategies were successful, the balance between novelty and coherence was obtained and translated to profit at the box office, as the audience was able to locate the film while being seduced on the expectation of pleasure.21 Therefore, That Night in Rio (1941) was heavily marketed with publicity posters referencing the studio’s past success with Tin Pan Alley (1940) and Miranda’s sensational performance in Down Argentine Way (1940).22 Despite That Night in Rio’s being her first full acting role in a US film, Miranda’s unique performance style had made a mark on Hollywood: Photoplay praised That Night in Rio for its “songs in the Carmen Miranda manner,” already an established trademark of performativity.23 As Richard deCordova writes, “the actor’s previous film experience worked to establish intertextual connections between films . . . [and] to establish the actor’s identity across films. . . . The star system provided not only a means of differentiating films but also a means of grouping them, experiencing their interconnections and even their history” (90, 113). Miranda’s films, similar to a film series, are a particularly strong example of how the discourse worked to produce the picture personality across films, since a very similar character with a similar personality appeared repeatedly in film after film.
The positioning of the new film needed to be apparent in the film posters and entice the viewers with a product that would not disappoint. The publicity materials for The Gang’s All Here promised Miranda’s performance would make the audience “shake with laughter,” since Carmen Miranda is “delightfully delirious” in this new Twentieth Century-Fox production. In this case, for most audiences the movie probably made good on the splashy promise of the advertising.24 At this point of her North American career Miranda was at the height of her success, needing little if any introduction. Screenland of October 1943 features a full-page, color poster of Miranda in one of the fabulous costumes she wore in The Gang’s All Here: a green, purple, and white outfit with purple and orange butterflies on a green turban. The artist has depicted Miranda leaning back in her characteristic pose, with her head erect and eyes half-closed, and her signature appears across the top left-hand corner, adding a personable touch to the poster.25
The techniques of the Fox artwork, with rich, saturated colors, captured the essence of Miranda’s often garish and always strident color scheme. This was true for both the posters and the lobby cards, which were always produced in color, even when the film was in black and white. The Twentieth Century-Fox posters often contained as much information as the lobby cards, typically using every possible inch of white and preferring bright contrasting colors over the pastels or muted primary colors that were the general norm with the art directors and illustrators at MGM, Paramount, and Columbia. Representative of this trend are some of the publicity posters created for The Gang’s All Here, so packed with copy featuring the top-billed players, supporting actors, director, producer, dance director, screenplay and original story writers, composers, and lyricists, along with the titles of all the feature song hits, that very little space was left to include pictures from the film or of the actors.26
The Miranda posters are very typical of the Hollywood musical poster style that Rebello and Allen describe as sporting “cluttered, ‘busy’ designs, with arcing or rhythmically undulating title treatments. Motifs, including chorus lines, musical bars and notes, fireworks, pinwheels, shooting stars, confetti, and balloons, jollied up the design” (232). Miranda’s inclusion in the musicals and depiction on the Twentieth Century-Fox posters was a perfect match for the film’s projected image, which promised the audience gaiety and romance, frolicking and dancing, music with an exotic vibe, and a splashing array of costumes, with taglines adding a sense of dynamism to the posters. Although in truth Miranda’s visual appeal could forego all narrative necessity, the designers never skimped on the copy that merely emphasized her unique expression of otherness, gaiety, color, and tropical music, all part of the presold premise of each Miranda film. At times, the poster artists’ stylized portrayals of Miranda border on caricature, a technique that was often used in posters for comedies and rightly fits with that aspect of Miranda’s comedic roles. The use of the caricature also speaks to her popularity and the fact that she was an easily recognizable screen persona.27 In all cases, as Twentieth Century-Fox illustrators continued to use drawings rather than photographs, they maintained a consistent depiction of Miranda’s physical characteristics: emphasizing her “Latin” coloring, eyes, and lips while often portraying a more slender torso and elongated legs than she had in real life; highlighting her in movement and donning fabulous glittering costumes; and always featuring her signature headdress and platform shoes.28 Most frequently she is depicted smiling rather than singing, which was preferred in the Hollywood poster tradition (Rebello and Allen 243). At times only her head and headdress are featured, in the common cutout technique that designers, especially at Twentieth Century-Fox, utilized as a way to free up more space for the copy.
As often happened, the publicity artists adapted several images from the studio-provided stills, and publicity materials for each film tended to repeat one of Carmen Miranda’s most striking costumes that was more clearly distinguishable from all those previously worn. The Carmen Miranda image most widely reproduced for Greenwich Village is the striking costume she wears for the nightclub rendition of “O que é que a baiana tem?”: a full-length, black and hot-pink, boa-like, feather-adorned skirt bearing a large opening at the front; skimpy black lace flowers covering her breasts; a towering headdress of black plastic flowers; black polka-dot net hose; and long black gloves with pink on the underside. For Doll Face, Miranda is portrayed throughout the publicity materials with her lighthouse headdress, which, as mentioned above, ended up on the studio’s chopping block. The constant repetition of one costume in particular in a film’s publicity images enabled the public to recognize the forthcoming release by providing a visual “trademark” for that specific film.
The posters’ composition was symbolic of the importance the marketing executives gave to the different stars, and in Miranda’s first seven films, she is pictured prominently in the layouts, even for her first non-acting film, Down Argentine Way. For That Night in Rio, in several posters she is depicted as one of the three main stars, alongside Alice Faye and Don Ameche, in the same scale and at the forefront of the designs.29 By the time Miranda starred in Greenwich Village (1944), her name was headlining lobby cards and publicity posters, appearing above the “cherry blond” Vivian Blaine’s, who was seen as a newcomer. Miranda’s poster portrayal was proportional to her outstanding success during the war period, when Latin American themes were heavily marketed.30 Indeed, there is a noticeable shift in Miranda’s prominence starting with the publicity posters for Something for the Boys (1944), on which the artists repeatedly draw Miranda in a diminished scale and to the side of the romantically involved couple Michael O’Shea and Vivian Blaine. In hindsight, these images mark the beginning of her popularity decline. In the following release, Doll Face (1945), Vivian Blaine takes top billing and appears central in all publicity posters, with Miranda to the side or pictured merely in a headshot. The same occurs in the posters for If I’m Lucky (1946), on which Vivian Blaine, Perry Como, and Harry James are pictured as a star trio. The irony of this poster composition is that, according to the reviews of If I’m Lucky, Miranda’s music, Harry James’s trumpet, and Perry Como’s songs were the film’s saving grace. Variety refers to “a generous showing of Carmen Miranda” and concludes that the “jam session in Brazil” with Miss Miranda and the band doing “the Batacuda song is the show’s most elaborate number.”31 Miranda would have to wait for her first non-Twentieth Century-Fox role in Copacabana to regain the limelight. Paired with Groucho Marx and promoted as the new comedy duo, she once again, but for the last time, shares top billing.
The posters, echoing the narrative from the studio press releases, reflect Miranda’s roles as either supporting to the main romantic couple or paired with her own love interest. In this, the Fox posters mirror the typical heterosexual format of Hollywood musicals and Miranda’s artistic representation, which often reveals her bare midriff and skirts slit high above the knee, emphasizing Hollywood trends of the late 1930s and early 1940s that “were characterized by the representation of women as objects of male sexual desire and by the display of women’s bodies as the focus of sensational heterosexuality” (Haralovich 56). In Carmen Miranda’s second feature film, That Night in Rio, the publicity translated the studio’s heterosexual paradigm through her “heavy romance” with Don Ameche, “which required frequent embraces.”32 A similar suggestion is prominent in Miranda’s portrayal in the publicity materials for Weekend in Havana, which make broad use the film’s grand finale Ñango dance number, a tropical riot of colors, textures, and movement. The final camera shot focuses in on the two couples—Carmen Miranda/Cesar Romero and Alice Faye/John Payne—linked arm in arm, and the equal balance of these two couples in this scene is transferred throughout the publicity materials.
This heterosexual dominance of Hollywood musicals was coupled with a white, racial bias, and as a consequence, the posters, like the films they represented, were essentially a white space: if top black performers, such as the Nicholas Brothers, were included on the poster layouts, they were most often featured as “guest performers” who could be eliminated for viewings in the South.33 Dyer clearly defines the vision of race that the musical constructs as containing blackness in “only entertainment” segments, depriving black characters of any wider screen life beyond their professional entertainer part, making “spontaneous” outbursts of song and dance a white privilege (Only Entertainment 39). The posters mirror this marginalization of black entertainers: their artistic depiction is sketchy rather than detailed, with racial markers camouflaged by the common technique of silhouette drawings. Miranda’s inclusion as a white “Latin” star was permissible without these artistic limitations, despite her extreme otherness, because of her European origins. She represented the borders of a safety zone of preconceived and widely accepted ideas concerning race and heterosexuality, and the films’ narrative image in each poster remains true to these known ideological trends (Ellis 79). It is also not by chance that Miranda would be safely paired with another “Latin” actor, such as Cesar Romero, but never with a US leading star.34
The trailers screened at the exhibition theater before the featured films were equally as important as the movie posters and were one of the principal ways the studios hoped movie audiences would become enthused for upcoming releases in the very same venue where the film would be played.35 Although it is impossible to discern the effectiveness of trailers in general, and unfortunately not all the trailers for Miranda’s films have been preserved or made available for viewing, it is telling how the studio showcased Miranda, as the following examples illustrate.36
In the trailer for Down Argentine Way (1940), Miranda is featured in a ten-second segment with a voice-over introducing her as “the fascinating star of New York’s hit Streets of Paris, the glamorous, exotic Carmen Miranda, who will teach you to forget . . . in the ‘South American Way.’” The trailer encapsulates Miranda’s Broadway fame and South American flare and showcases a clip of her singing. She is the only specialty act to be included in the trailer, and her name appears immediately after those of Betty Grable and Don Ameche, an unusual publicity placement for a newcomer.
For Carmen Miranda’s next film and first acting role, That Night in Rio (1941), the trailer features Miranda immediately after Alice Faye and Don Ameche. She is first presented as “the exotic, fascinating, new screen sensation: Carmen Miranda” with clips from two of her musical scenes, “Chica Chica Boom Chic” and “I, Yi, Yi, Yi, Yi (I like you very much),” and several of her acting scenes. As the announcer boasts, the trailer’s desired effect is one of “carefree gaiety, glamor, and enchantment,” and Miranda fits right in with “the backdrop of Rio’s brilliant boulevards and colorful cafés, all in glorious Technicolor.”
In the trailer for Miranda’s third film, Weekend in Havana (1941), Miranda features more prominently as both a performer and an actress as the studio clearly showcases side by side the two leading ladies, Carmen Miranda and Alice Faye, with their respective beaux, Cesar Romero and John Payne. The audience is invited to join “the lovely Alice Faye in her search for fun and romance” with her soft, contralto songs—the smooth, husky “Romance and Rhumba” and “Tropical Magic” numbers—in contrast to “the sizzling songstress, Carmen Miranda, singing her tantalizing tunes”—the exotic, quick-paced, and colorful numbers and the carnivalesque “Ñango” grand finale. The preview shows a segment of a quick-paced scene with Miranda chasing Cesar Romero around a casino floor, punctuated by the tagline “Comedy! A fiesta of fun and frolic,” juxtaposed to the next segment with Alice Faye sauntering across the dance floor dressed in a fabulous deep-blue gown and the promise of “Beauty! Scenes of brilliant splendor! Photographed in Technicolor!” As this trailer promotes, Miranda was a top star in Hollywood by the time she filmed Weekend in Havana, and the audience was in for a “torrid tropical holiday” with Miranda and Faye at the helm.
For many critics, Miranda’s fifth Twentieth Century-Fox film, The Gang’s All Here (1943), was the peak of her Hollywood career, and the trailer focuses almost entirely on its eight musical numbers. Similar to the trailer for Weekend in Havana, the preview alternates between Alice Faye’s slow-paced, romantic musical numbers and Carmen Miranda’s upbeat performances, along with the big-band numbers of Benny Goodman and his orchestra, all dressed up in vibrant Technicolor. With complete disregard for the stars in their acting roles, the effect is one of “pure entertainment” (Dyer, Only Entertainment 19), bound not to disappoint.
Miranda’s last color film at Fox was the 1944 musical Something for the Boys. As the trailer shows, Miranda has top billing, and the studio pitches the film as “the perfect musical for Carmen Miranda.” She is featured performing the “Samba-Boogie” number with the promise that the audience will experience “more comedy, more side-splitting laughter, more Technicolor magnificence” than ever before. After The Gang’s All Here, any promise the studio could make was sure to fall flat—none could approximate the tutti-frutti success.
The trailers for Doll Face (1945) and If I’m Lucky (1946) are a move away from the effusive and lavish film previews that marketed the previous Miranda musicals and that the audience was accustomed to seeing—as were the films. Both releases, the last for Miranda under Twentieth Century-Fox contract, were printed in black and white and lacked, along with the by then expected Technicolor, the excitement and gaiety of the previous Miranda features. Released in the postwar period, the films flopped at the box office, even though Miranda maintained her usual spunk in her renditions of “Chico Chico, from Puerto Rico” (in Doll Face), “Follow the Band,” and “Bet Your Bottom Dollar” (in If I’m Lucky). Throughout the trailers, Miranda contributes to the films’ narrative image as a gleeful, talented, exotic performer and comedian and adds to each film’s preview the dimension of tropical gaiety, otherness, music, and laughter. Unfortunately, however, this image had begun to lose its box office appeal, and Miranda’s marketing pull was waning.
Dressed to Impress: Miranda’s Visual Appeal and the Lure of Costumes
Carmen Miranda’s exquisite costumes were an important selling point for her films. Each presented a variant of the Miranda signature look, enhanced with garish Technicolor in most of her films and producing an overall striking visual effect that would become Hollywood’s star-image of Carmen Miranda, her “visual shorthand” that remains an easily recognizable iconic symbol to this day.37 Similar to Dorothy Lamour and her famed sarong, Miranda’s signature “look” was tied to her costume, which became a deliberate fashion and film statement that could then be mass marketed in exotic clothing lines, complete with turban, platform shoes, and bulky jewelry.38 The mass marketing of fashion appropriated the stars as vehicles to showcase norms of femininity, and all across the country, women could see the same actresses and fashion statements, facilitated by the technology of the closeup and the film’s reproducibility.39 Although at this time the fashion statements made by actresses such as Miranda were clearly geared toward female imitators and lines of clothing that would replicate her style at face value, Miranda’s popularity crossed gender divides and held appeal for male viewers also.40 The exquisiteness of Miranda’s costumes, made out of yards of the best fabrics, ornamented with sparkling sequins, beads, and jewels, and topped by fascinating headdresses, placed her at the helm of this category of actress as spectacle and fashion model to be emulated. Miranda’s costumes were all variants of the same style, which would become her “brand-name personality” in fashion.41 Unlike her English malapropisms, Latin looks, and effervescent and explosive onscreen demeanor—all characteristics she shared to some degree with other Latin stars of the Hollywood golden years—the components of her costumes were her identifying mark and set her in a category apart from all other Latin performers of the time.
Whereas in the case of most actors and actresses, costumes are secondary other than in period films, for Miranda they constituted her screen persona with a heavy emphasis on glamor. In this, Miranda is one of the few cinematic exceptions to the common perception that a successful costume is one that does not appear as a costume, for the “troublesome distraction” diverts the viewer’s attention from the story itself (Gaines, “Costume” 193). In Miranda’s Hollywood films designed around a flimsy plot, her costumes were—quite on the contrary—a welcome distraction. One reviewer sums this up in Photoplay in reference to The Gang’s All Here: “beautiful to look at, lovely to listen to, but so fragile in story is this lavish production.”42
Moreover, Miranda’s costumes accompanied her performance and were often referred to as spectacular in their own right. The publicity director at Twentieth Century-Fox, Harry Brand, summaries the synergy between Miranda’s acting and costume in a press release for Something for the Boys (1944): “As spectacular as the number and its enactment by the volcanic Miranda is the peacock, cyclamen and royal purple costume designed for the Brazilian Bombshell by 20th Century Fox stylist Yvonne Wood” (3). The “spectacular” quality could be said of any one of Miranda’s musical numbers and costumes. As Miranda’s US career progressed, the visual presence of her costumes was further enhanced in her films by a new dimension of spoken references: the scriptwriters included commentary about Miranda’s costumes in the dialogue, most noticeably in a much-quoted scene in Springtime in the Rockies discussed in Chapter 5.
With the fabulously rich possibilities of Miranda’s basic costume, especially the infinite variants for the headdress, the studio designers were able to create artistic designs that emphasized her unique appearance but always with a touch of novelty. In this, the Hollywood costume designers, similar to the intellectuals and artists that Bourdieu discusses, “[had] a special predilection for the most risky but also most profitable strategies of distinction, those which [consisted] in asserting the power, which is peculiarly theirs, to constitute insignificant objects as works of art” (282). Miranda’s headdresses were built from what might appear to be the most “insignificant” elements, and at times even indistinguishable elements, but the overall effect made the costumes unforgettable.
Miranda was so closely identified with her turbans, jewelry, and platform shoes that her stage and screen persona dominated her life off the set. Miranda was often spotted around town wearing her turban in public, such as to the Academy Awards evening in February 1941 and, most emblematically, at the ceremonial moment when she immortalized her hand and shoe prints at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on March 24, 1941. Miranda was viewed as one of Hollywood’s best-dressed stars, both on and off the stage, a characteristic that was formalized by her March 1943 Photoplay nomination among Hollywood’s best-dressed women, including Claudette Colbert, Loretta Young, and Rosalind Russell, with the justification that her fabulous clothes would turn most women into circus horses but look “superbly right” on her.43 When articles mentioned Miranda’s presence around town, they invariably drew attention to her clothes with reference to the staples of her stage costume. A reporter for Screenland, March 1941, writes, “there is no experience more vastly diverting or stimulating than being invited to take luncheon with Carmen Miranda. [She was] dressed in a yellow suede from top to toe, with a sleek fitting turban and accessories in lush, vivid green (her national colors).”44 Innumerable are the photos of Miranda around town in Hollywood and New York wearing a subdued form of her baiana costume.45 Since Miranda often wore similar accessories off screen as in her films, namely costume jewelry, a turban, and platform shoes, she blurred the distinction between the screen costumes and everyday wear. In social settings, playful comments were also made about her turbans.46
Carmen and Aurora Miranda arrive at the Biltmore Hotel for the 13th Academy Awards ceremony (February 27, 1941). Courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library
Often in Miranda’s films, as an intermediary between the proscenium Miranda-actress performing on a stage within the film and her out-of-the-film/off-the-set appearance, she wears “street clothes” that still hark back to her signature look. In these scenes she does seem rather plain looking, as though something is missing to complete the picture. Following The Gang’s All Here, the characters she plays continue to have multiple costume changes, but on many occasions she wears a pantsuit and a hat, headscarf, or smaller version of a turban, and always a few key elements are retained, such as platform shoes or bulky jewelry. Even if the look is downplayed, there is a definite reminder of her full-blown, signature costume. In several scenes of Greenwich Village and If I’m Lucky, she appears with “half-turbans” that reveal her hair in an up-do. In the opening factory scene in Something for the Boys, she is wearing a colorful scarf tied in a bow on the top of her head to distinguish her from the costars. These progressive levels of “Mirandization” of her Hollywood costumes, along with the everyday turbans she wore in public, created a sense of consistency between Miranda’s onscreen and offscreen personae that collapsed the performative divide. This continuum was further enhanced from film to film by Miranda’s being cast as protagonists with interchangeable names (Carmelita, Dorita, Rosita or Conchita) and maintaining her physical appearance and various traits consistently throughout her Twentieth Century-Fox years. In several films, she played “herself” as “Carmen Miranda” (Down Argentine Way) or simply “Carmen” (That Night in Rio) or “Carmen Novarro” (Copacabana), following the practice of naming characters after actors, which “served to diffuse the boundaries between the two and encourage one to take the personality of one for the other” (deCordova 89).
Because of the importance of Carmen Miranda’s costumes, for each film the publicity materials boasted that her next release would have the most exquisite and unique costumes to date. Since the late 1920s, an industry-wide emphasis on star costumes had aimed to draw large numbers of women to the theater, and Miranda never moved beyond this “clothes horse” phase of her career, even after she ended her years with Twentieth Century-Fox. The publicity in Screen Guide’s March 1944 issue captures this trend: below a large, central photograph of Miranda as she appeared in Greenwich Village is the caption: “Preview of fireworks to come is the above picture of Carmen Miranda in a one-of-a-kind costume for a one-of-a-kind Miranda specialty for 20th’s gay Greenwich Village.”47 As this example illustrates, it is through her costumes that Miranda becomes a spectacle, and for the most part, she is dwarfed and even effaced by their presence.
Since she typically changed costumes for each musical number or scene, with the exception of her first film, Down Argentine Way, the studio was able to lure the audience to the exhibition hall with the promise of Miranda’s exotic costumes, and publicity releases provided ample discussion about her costumes for each forthcoming film. Both the trade journals and the commercial press drew attention to Miranda’s costumes when reviewing the films, and their commentaries were overwhelmingly enthusiastic.48 Variety records that for Weekend in Havana Miranda “wears her bizarre costumes with barbaric flair,” qualifying Twentieth Century-Fox’s chief designer Gwen Wakeling’s creation as “striking plumage,” an expression that was used several times in the media and that calls forth imagery of tropical birds and the savage customs of an exotic performer.49 The studio had issued an intentionally enticing statement about the “highly daring nature” of both Alice Faye’s and Carmen Miranda’s costumes for Weekend in Havana, claiming that one of them “barely got by the Hays Office restrictions,” and understandably so, given the large open spaces over Miranda’s hips, which are only slightly veiled by an almost invisible netting. For this film, Harry Brand played the authenticity card, claiming “the original native costume worn by the native of one of the remote Brazilian provinces is even more daring.”50 This comment leaves ethnographers wondering to what costume Brand could possibly be referring. A commentary in Screen Guide, June 1944, about Miranda’s forthcoming part in Greenwich Village provides another emblematic example of the importance of the costume in the marketing of Miranda’s star persona. After a detailed discussion of all her different costumes in the film, which could only be surpassed by the color-splurge of a sunset and would make “rainbows fade away when La Belle Miranda emerges from her dressing room,” the article concludes that “the over-all effect gives you an idea of what Miranda means when she says ‘I am thee (sic) only one who dresses up for movies!’” (26).
Miranda was so closely associated with her Hollywood turbans that when the producer of Springtime in the Rockies opted for her to wear a hat, much ado of this wardrobe change was made in the studio’s press releases. They claimed that Miranda never wore hats even as a child because of her personal preference for turbans and that they had battled for weeks to convince Miranda that a hat would not offend her Brazilian fans, creating emotional ties through (fabricated) references to Miranda’s childhood and both manipulating and anticipating the audience’s reaction.
A new personality for Miranda was also the focus of the publicity for Greenwich Village. The pressbook for the film maximized the mystery surrounding Miranda’s so-called new personality and look, which were predicted to send “a good portion of the feminine world into a frenzy of anticipation” (16). The publicity department hinted that this new look would be a move away from the “wooden chopping bowls, banana palms, mixed fruit salads, Christmas toys, and fruit compotes on her head” (16) and had to do with the amount of leg she would reveal. If in past musicals she “adamantly refused abbreviated attire,” in Greenwich Village, “Miss Miranda does an unabashed about-face and dances and sings in a frothy bit of costume which trails about her stilted heels but does not obscure her opera length hose” (17).51 Greenwich Village, after all this hype, remained very close to the usual Miranda performance and costumes, in fact, merely adding new colors to her palette and variants to the headdress. Regardless, the reviews perceived Miranda as the star of the show, claiming it was her picture and she stole every scene.52 For Something for the Boys, Twentieth Century-Fox announced once again that Miranda would have a new personality. The New York Herald Tribune wondered with humor if that meant she would “draw less than a Baldwin locomotive for a headpiece by way of change.” Apparently she would be wearing “the briefest costume of her career” that “as sparse as a one-piece bathing suit, [would feature] a train lined with ribbon-beaded lace ruffles and opera-length purple stockings.” The headdress, allegedly designed by Miranda herself, would consist of “a pair of gold lame openwork baskets filled with multicolored jeweled fruit and leaves, worn over a gold turban.”53 As Movies magazine commented, “only Carmen Miranda can get away with a hat like that.”54 All in all, this is a more involved, albeit less fruity, version of the same motif, complete with a bejeweled golden turban. In sum, the media did not tire in promoting time after time the same theme of Miranda’s acquiring a new personality. Finally, it was in Doll Face that Miranda would indeed shed her “fruity headdress.” The pressbook makes abundant use of the story, even with humor foreseeing a large drop in the fruit and vegetable markets. The novelty of her costume resides in Miranda’s new millinery fashion, as she is quoted saying, “I got to geeve the customers someseeng deeferents.” What this “something different” would be was only hinted at in the form of “a large turban with giant snoods and spangles,” the mystery of Miranda’s next get-up adding to the publicity draw and hoped-for success at the box office.55
Despite all the media talk about a new star image for Miranda, her screen persona did not change significantly from the first Fox film to the last, proving that the studio felt the need to maintain continuity with only artistic variations from film to film. Through this intense construction of Miranda’s screen personality, the studio built around her an overcoded representation of the Latin performer that reinvents but stays true to itself through variations on her signature style.
Wearing the Show and the Film
By the time Miranda took Broadway by storm and then continued on to Hollywood with never-before-seen costumes in the most lavish combinations, the American sartorial revolution of the late teens and twenties had run its course. Clothing fashion had become democratized with the folding of class distinctions, the production of cheap fashion products, innovations in the ready-to-wear and fashion industries, and the widespread publication of fashion information in newspapers and magazines. With Miranda’s image broadly publicized throughout the New York area, and her act on Broadway the hit of the season, very quickly this new star persona translated over into the fashion world, a statement that encompassed a much-desired taste for novelty, exoticism, playfulness, and difference in a world torn by the onset of World War II, which would only be amplified once Miranda became a Hollywood star. Miranda’s performance was the epitome of the feminized spectacle and made a mark on the imagination of a predominately female audience seeking novelty and a taste of the exotic.
It is a difficult if not entirely impossible task to ascertain the impact of a fashion trend such as Miranda’s turban, jewelry, and platform shoes. One quantifiable measure is the royalties she received: in 1939, the Shubert Company declared that Miranda earned $311.44 in royalties on jewelry and hats, etc., a figure that more than doubled in 1940 to $839.90. The pressbook for her penultimate film, A Date with Judy (1948), boasts that Miranda’s income from royalties of her millinery designs based on her turbans netted her an annual income of $10,000.56 However, these figures represent only a slight portion of the Miranda-craze, given that, for the most part, her fashion was imitated without any payment of royalties, causing the Shubert Company much grief and legal confrontations, with their attorney as early as September 1939 calling the misappropriation of Miranda’s name, photograph, and jewelry “unbearable.”57 The branding of Miranda as a trademark continued throughout her tenure on Broadway as Shubert attempted to monopolize the copyright of her signature look, claiming ownership of Miranda’s impact on fashion both rhetorically, through press releases mostly written by C. P. Greneker that emphasized her role in trendsetting, and legally, by exerting their right to press charges on inappropriate uses of her trademark and, in particular, the costume jewelry that Miranda had reinvigorated. Despite Greneker’s earnest attempts, the popularity of costume jewelry predated Carmen Miranda’s Broadway début by over a decade, and Paris had given its stamp of approval at the Art Deco Exposition in 1925 (Whitaker 199). Because of its cheaper cost and the restrictions on fabric for dress designs, costume jewelry was a more important accessory during the Depression and War periods, with popular pieces becoming bigger and bolder, using brightly colored synthetics and incorporating new materials such as cork, shells, copper, and wood into the designs (Whitaker 199). A handful of official documents mention a request for the lawful use of Miranda’s trademark style. A December 22, 1941, letter from a retail corporation requests the right to use the title “The Carmen Miranda Turban” in connection with the sale of women’s hats.58 There were also licensing agreements for a line of women’s sweaters by Blume Knitwear, a line of blouses by Mitchell and Weber, and the use of Miranda’s likeness in a series of Macy’s advertisements. In an undated press release, Greneker’s imaginative prose aims to emphasize the exotic and unique nature of Miranda’s jewelry, “wrought by a silver craftsman in one of Brazil’s foremost specialty jewelry shops” and incorporating “many of her own ideas besides exemplifying the bizarre nature of South America.” Amusing anecdotes also circulated that relate how Miranda was approached by sales people trying to sell her the newest “Carmen Miranda jewelry” or being overcharged for an item of clothing that she claimed to have invented. Shubert’s press agents capitalized on these stories, probably also embellishing them, to emphasize Miranda’s uniqueness, creativity, and ownership of the trends that had suddenly become so popular.59
The reconstruction of anecdotal evidence in fashion markets, shop windows, magazines, and newspapers of the time are factors with which to approximate Miranda’s fashion vogue. As evidence, there are photos of a Macy’s “South American Way” display that features a series of mannequins dressed with turbans and heavily adorned with jewelry. Miranda was herself amazed during the 1939 holiday season to see eight mannequins looking just like herself in the window display of Bonwit Teller’s flagship store in New York at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Sixth Street, an upscale department store that specialized in high-end women’s apparel.60 This trend of modeling mannequins after stage and film stars dates from this period, with more women becoming employed in window designs for New York City department and specialty stores, a concept that also took hold elsewhere around the country.61 The fashion trends she displayed were so flamboyantly unique and recognizable that they almost instantaneously produced a fashion consensus that would find its way into mainstream clothing trends. As early as June 1939, only weeks after her arrival in the United States, an article in Women’s Wear Daily rightly predicted Miranda’s influence on the season’s fashions, especially in accessories, headdresses, and millinery, because of her attractiveness as a star, magnetic personality, and stage success.62 The combination of the radio broadcasts that were so instrumental in promoting Miranda as a star to a broad national audience and the circulation of the visual image of her star persona fueled her star status and led to the popularity of her fashion statement, to the point that, four months after her arrival, the Shubert press department was astounded that “she has seized the imagination of American women to the point where Miranda hats, Miranda jewelry and Miranda dresses are the raging mode.”63 Every mention in the media fueled Miranda’s impact on fashion, as reporters tried to define her fashion style. An article in the New York Times in July 1939 refers to her necklaces as “big ropes of large gold beads, strands of colored stones, or silver and copper balls, all characteristic of the trend toward a lavish mass of stuff around the neck.” The article also notes that because of costume jewelry’s flexibility and multiple usages, it has become “the inevitable complement of a plain black dress.”64 Toward the end of the year, when Miranda’s fame was far-reaching and undeniable, the New York Journal and American states that Miranda is a “godsend to fashion designers” and “has struck at the very lifeblood of the nation—the women’s styles!”65 The Philadelphia Record surmised her impact on fashion as the previously unknown performer whose turbans and jewelry had been adopted by American women from coast to coast.66 New shoe lines were released that drew on Miranda’s platform wedges, sometimes explicitly referring to the new Broadway star and other times launching the new product with no mention of the Brazilian Bombshell. An article that appeared after Miranda had barely been in the country a month attributed her with having popularized, if not having invented, the fashion of the wedge heel.67 This claim endured throughout her Hollywood career: a 1951 article in the Los Angeles Daily News takes up this same refrain, adding that Miranda regretted never patenting the item and admitted to having “carelessly tossed away a fortune.”68 Delman’s claimed to have made Miranda’s Broadway shoes and advertised their “golden tower” product as “fabulous footstools for Carmen Miranda in praise of her flamboyant and opulent fascination. New tapered models to heighten her beauty with six-inch heels, harvests on the toes, intricate appliqué, fantasy jewels.”69 According to Modern Screen, several female celebrities, such as Lana Turner, Alice Faye, and Vera Vague, had adopted Miranda’s “barbarous, exciting, dramatic” baiana costume.70 The fashion world and, reportedly, her feminine fans especially were wondering what Carmen would do next, or in other words, what they would do next.71 This image of Miranda remained consistent throughout her Hollywood career.
The film-industry influence on fashion had reached its height; women’s magazines continuously entertained the ongoing debate “to wear or not to wear the film,” and since the mid-1930s, Hollywood-endorsed fashions had been readily available at all the main department stores.72 Promotion tie-ins off screen, such as linking a line of clothing to a particular film, created a wider, and more emotionally driven, participatory, cinematic community.73 The glamorous stars were widely credited with popularizing fads, as women saw the movie costumes as fashion guides that they should adopt/adapt, and onscreen fashion itself was a huge draw at the box office. In particular, while many of Miranda’s most outlandish dresses could scarcely be reproduced for mass consumption, the simple turban and costume jewelry were easily accessible, and women could adapt these elements of Miranda-fashion to their personal liking. Miranda’s famous turbans were knocked off by countless department stores, yet without the excessive accessories or dramatic paraphernalia. They were scaled down to a more practical style, a process that was common at the time and that transformed the apparent “unwearability” into a fashion starting point (Gaines, “Wanting to Wear” 142). This is explicitly articulated in the pressbook for Miranda’s second film, That Night in Rio, which suggests: “For everyday purposes the excessive use of jewelry has to be modified, but the effect and the bold color combinations are useful ideas.”74 As this early example illustrates, the studios were fully aware of the impractical nature of Miranda’s fashion but aimed to facilitate its integration into women’s wardrobes by providing ready-made ideas for its adoption. Macy’s featured the turban craze in its “Today’s New Macy’s Idea” spotlight section with a collection of half body mannequins wearing simple turbans. In the back of the display, they hung a large portrait of Miranda, and in the front they presented biographical information in an “open book” prop that passersby could read.75 Naturally, turbans pre-existed Miranda’s days in New York, but her charismatic performance was enough to give the vogue its most substantial push with an added exotic spin.76 Despite Miranda’s pleasure, and at times astonishment, with her impact on North American fashion, the media made it clear that, although imitable, she remained the real McCoy.77
Costume designing was an art at its peak during the heyday of the Hollywood musical, with industry masters leaving their indelible mark on film fashion history. Despite Allen Woll’s reference to Miranda’s costume as “a combination of native Bahian dress and a designer’s nightmare” (Latin Image 68), Hollywood designers most likely relished the opportunity to create variations of extravaganza on the Miranda theme, if we are to judge by the results of their unleashed imagination on their fabulous creations. Travis Banton, chief designer at Paramount before moving to Fox in 1938, was known as “the master of shimmer and slink”—which fit Carmen Miranda beautifully. Along with Adrian, Banton was one of the most important designers of the golden years of Hollywood moviemaking, nowadays best remembered for Marlene Dietrich’s marvelous beaded dress in Angel (1937), dresses for Mae West and Carole Lombard, and Rita Hayworth’s strapless gowns. Associating Miranda so early in her career with Travis Banton bestowed a seal of prestige on Miranda’s fashionable costumes, with his signature bias-cut styles that accentuated her curves and draped softly.
Sascha Brastoff was another of the designers who left a mark on Miranda’s star wardrobe by creating the first screen costume entirely out of plastic for her performance in If I’m Lucky. There was much discussion and ink spent on Brastoff’s appointment while he was still in the army, since he had never previously worked for the motion-picture industry and was “a professional artist and sculptor maintaining his own studio.”78 The publicity department claimed that Miranda’s costume required seventy-five yards of plastic that had been shredded by hand to achieve the required soft effect, a job that took six wardrobe girls two weeks’ work. The dress was matched with a white plastic, four-foot-high Miranda headdress, “in the form of an all-white Christmas tree,” and plastic bracelets and necklaces.79 The costume appeared as the focal point of the media attention, given its novelty and being the work of such an innovative young designer, overshadowing the film’s divided reception.80
Although credit is owed and duly given to the talented costume designers who worked on Miranda’s elaborate and always scintillating outfits, the media (the studios included) frequently rehearsed her invention of the headdress as dating back to the first time she wore it in Brazil and promoted Miranda as participating in these extravagant creations, often with a dramatized edge.81 In Motion Picture of December 1944, three months after Miranda’s gallstones were removed, Virginia Wood refers to her as “indestructible,” “irrepressible,” “lying awake until all hours of the night in her usual fashion, planning some new and tricky turban or dreaming up a new dance step,” with her characteristic enthusiasm and vitality for the film Greenwich Village.82 Although Miranda was by no means the first actress to participate in designing her own costumes, as this had been the norm in the late teens and twenties,83 what was unusual, and certainly never the case with her female costars, is that the studio insisted on, and the media echoed, Miranda’s personal investment in her costumes, portraying her as participant/producer of her own image rather than what might have been a less flattering alternative: manipulated at the hands of the studio’s artistic executives.
The studio knew how to maximize Miranda’s unique look by placing her fashion impact within a wider political context of the Good Neighbor Policy and even at times extending this “neighborly costuming” to Miranda’s costars. For Down Argentine Way, for example, the publicity department claimed that two of the gowns Travis Banton had created for Betty Grable were a nod toward the Good Neighbor Policy because of the organdie fabric, very full skirt, and use of blue and white (the Argentine national colors) for one of them, although this fact would not help the film’s reception south of the border, packed as it was with derogatory stereotypes.84 The pressbook for Miranda’s second film, That Night in Rio, continued to draw on the goodwill fervor by implying that diplomatic ententes would inevitably lead to fashion exchanges, with Miranda giving the final impetus to this trend by crystallizing a vogue for “fruit-basket” and feather hats.85
The success of Miranda’s film costumes came to represent the Latin look in the “South American Way” and coincided with the fashion of the late 1930s and early 1940s, which was seeking novel vogues to accompany the exotic feel fostered to counter wartime gloom. That Night in Rio was reviewed in Motion Picture Herald as “ultra-modern Pan-Americanism,” with Miranda ably representing “the Latin influence” along with her orchestra, which also demonstrates “the South American Way.”86 Lisa Shaw develops this idea of fashion ethnicity, which she views as essential for Miranda to become a household name, as “striking the balance between ‘strangeness and familiarity’ that is central to exoticism” (“Celebritisation” 295).87
Placing Miranda’s fashion/film look within the larger context of a South American vogue was a natural marketing tool and enabled her to have a greater impact. When screen costumes vibrate with the current fashion trends, they “epitomize that trend and amplify its significance because of its association with a particular star or character” (Berry, Screen Style 92). Bourdieu likewise theorizes this need for a broader context for fashions to be popular: a trend “could not function if it could not count on already existing tastes, more or less strong propensities to consume more or less clearly defined goods” (230). There was a widespread appreciation for Latin music during the 1930s on the radio, stage, and dance floor, and Miranda entered the scene at the optimal moment to give this taste a new face and an emblematic silver-screen representation.88 For the studio, it was a question of marketing Miranda’s authenticity, along with that of the film’s foreign cultural content.89
Defining Miranda the Comedienne
Both the studio and the media provided plenty of commentary on Miranda’s acting career, often intermingled with remarks about her English and her comedy, and overall tried to define Miranda’s performance on the silver screen. At the release of Miranda’s second film (and first North American acting breakthrough), That Night in Rio, The Hollywood Reporter pointedly writes that Miranda is a “sensational newcomer” who “will soon join [Alice Faye and Don Ameche] as a marquee name of importance.”90 The film received rave reviews with Miranda’s part central to the praise. A reporter for the Miami Herald writes, “I can’t imagine anything more fabulous, more magnificent, more intriguing, more sparkling, more exciting, more comforting and generally delightful than Carmen Miranda . . . in That Night in Rio, one of the most dazzling musical pictures ever done in technicolor.”91 An article published in News declares that Miranda, who has “no classic beauty” but plenty of “oomph,”92 has apparently “quietly moved into the 20th-Fox studios and taken them over.”93 As these statements suggest, Miranda was an unexpected all-around success, and her media reception was overwhelming positive.
As Miranda was cast in more complicated character roles, the studio fueled the media with language to define her new film parts. After That Night in Rio, the studio claimed that in each subsequent film the public would see Miranda as a true comedienne. Her performance seems to come into its own in the filming of Weekend in Havana, her vivaciousness perceived as part of her unique, exotic talent. Second only to the success of That Night in Rio, Weekend in Havana was highly praised in the print media, with Miranda as one of its main attractions. An article in Photoplay includes Miranda as one of the “sights to see” alongside “colorful Cuba,” reinforcing the to-be-looked-at-ness of her spectacular performance.94 Variety published a review along the same lines, referring to Miranda as a “whirlwind of tempestuous action” and placing her in the rank of the screen’s “top comediennes and most colorful entertainers.” Every review that discusses her performance echoes this enthusiastic appraisal of the film and not only agrees that Miranda steals the show, but that with greater acting parts Twentieth Century-Fox’s musicals would only get better.95 It was apparent that by 1941 she was perceived as one of the industry’s top-billed actresses, surrounded by praise and excitement, with repeated references to the impact of her “always barbaric and brilliant” costumes, “the flicker of her eyes,” and “her singularly expressive hands.”96
By the time Miranda filmed her forth movie with Twentieth Century-Fox, Springtime in the Rockies, she was an established player of the silver screen, although press releases continued to make reference to her “new role” as a comedienne “in addition to her usual sinuous gyrations and songs.”97 Her career to date was summarized by a studio press release as evolving from a specialty act in Down Argentine Way, to “a fiery Latin” in That Night in Rio, to “a soupçon of comedy” and more “firebrand comedy” in Weekend in Havana, to being made into an “out-and-out comedienne” in Springtime in the Rockies.98 As a Latin actress, being a comedian corresponded to one of the reigning stereotypes that Hollywood films deployed to counterbalance the potential of screen seduction, fitting with the necessity of the white, North American beau to not be seriously attracted to and ultimately reject the Latina star. Furthermore, this portrayal undermined Miranda’s femininity while confirming the gender bias of the Hollywood musical comedies, which implies that “while a male comedian can have sex appeal—in fact, his humor may contribute to it—a female comedian . . . automatically disqualifies herself as an object of desire” (Haskell 62). Miranda’s stylized costumes and comedic parts placed her out of reach as a love interest in the main storylines of her films proportionately to her development, as mentioned above, into a true comedian.
Miranda’s becoming a “fully-fledged comedienne” is still lauded in the publicity materials for her seventh film with Twentieth Century-Fox, Greenwich Village, where she is said to be “realizing fully the promise of earlier productions in which she was relied upon principally for her inimitable and decorative singing and dancing.”99 After such a play-up, there would seem to be nowhere else to go in promoting Miranda, but for the next film, Something for the Boys (1944), the studio promises a new role that veers from “outright slapstick to the most seductive and difficult type of singing-dancing performance she has yet been called upon to do.”100 However, it was following the release of Something for the Boys that reviewers started to tire of what they perceived as the same Miranda performance, despite the overall continued positive reviews of the studio’s musical productions. As one reviewer writes for the Los Angeles Examiner on November 24, 1944, “how customers or the studio either, for that matter, can tell one of these pictures from t’other is beyond us, so uniformly are they cut to pattern,” but she reassures the reader that “for those a bit weary of Carmen’s indistinguishable lyrics all to the same tune, or at least it’s beginning to sound that way, there is fun in her antics as a human radio set.”101
The success of the Fox films starring Miranda dipped dramatically after Something for the Boys, a trend that was felt across the studios as the musical genre reached its popularity threshold. Previously, Four Jills and a Jeep had received negative reviews all around, although in all fairness Miranda only made a cameo appearance as a guest-star singer. Doll Face (1945) was, in the words of one reviewer, “a heck of a long wait for Carmen Miranda to do a musical number.”102 A critic for the Commonweal blatantly writes that the film as a whole is not particularly entertaining: “my interest was kept alive only by the presence of Carmen Miranda in the cast as I knew that sooner or later she would do a number.”103 This critique is not uncommon for the Hollywood film musical. For Ted Sennett, “the musical score and the performances . . . remain the most important components of the musical film. Many a film has been salvaged by its lilting songs, or made more than tolerable by the superior quality of the singing and dancing performances” (13–14). Unfortunately, however, for film viewers of Doll Face, there was not a lot of Miranda to keep the interest alive.
Carmen Miranda’s meteoric rise to stage and screen fame and her subsequent trajectory that involved more integrated acting parts retained the public’s interest for the duration of her Twentieth Century-Fox years and garnered enthusiastic reviews from reporters who continued to marvel at her screen presence, even when her films failed at the box office and she dropped to secondary billing. Despite this disconnect between the studio casting and the media reception, which became all the more pronounced in the case of Miranda’s last films at Fox, her vivacious and dynamic performances, with their characteristic gaiety and tropical colorfulness, embodied the essence of the Hollywood musical while the genre was in its heyday.
Miranda in the Media
It is not surprising that Miranda, a successful Hollywood performer with an avid fan following, was the subject of innumerable articles in fan magazines claiming to expose her private life beyond her screen persona. As is well known, the fan magazines were a form of indirect publicity for the studio, an essential marketing tool to circulate the players’ behind-the-scenes activities, and many are the critics who write of this magazine and film industry codependence that Slide labels “an incestuous relationship built on trust and mutual necessity” (7). According to Marsha Orgeron, most of the material circulated in the fan magazines, the major purveyors of information about the stars to the public, was generated by the studio’s publicity departments and even the stars themselves, enabling the magazines to “fill their pages with ‘authorized’ and ‘exclusive’ material” (100–101). The fan magazines explicitly linked the female spectators to the theaters and patterns of consumption, promising attainability and, as Orgeron writes, “if you buy this, you can be like star X” (106). The heyday of the fan magazine accompanied the decades of the studio star system, when going to the movies was the main form of media entertainment in the United States.104 At any one time, alongside the most popular, widely circulated, and longstanding Photoplay, its main competitor, Modern Screen, as well as Motion Picture, Movieland, Silver Screen, and Screenland, there were dozens of similar, often ephemeral magazines, whose existence varied from several months to several years, frequently merging among themselves as they tried to find a niche in a booming yet volatile industry. The public was hypnotized by Hollywood and its stars, and the articles in the fanzines translated this exhilaration with the movies and players, displaying “an open delight in the glamor and artistic achievements of the industry” (Ohmer 62). The fan magazines were easily accessible, cheap commodities that extended the audience’s film viewing experience to encompass the stars’ “real” personalities—their lives, loves, tastes, lifestyles, hobbies, homes, beauty and fashion tips—offering the reader a close-up and intimate relationship with their idols.105 As deCordova rightly argues, “it was very difficult to separate the idea of family life from the idea of home life, so the stars’ homes became another area of interest, another aspect of their private existence” (107). These fanzines were popular because readers found them to be simultaneously pleasurable, relevant, informative, and inspiring, and like a modern-day soap opera, they kept the audience coming back for more, month after month, as the insatiable readers wanted to consume Hollywood and the movie images beyond the exhibition hall. Once the fan magazines realized the growing number of middle-class women who went to the movies and devoured any information about the top stars beyond the silver screen, they redesigned their magazines’ content to correspond more closely with female consumer desires, including fashion coverage, beauty and health advice, social etiquette, culinary recipes, household refurbishing, home decor, etc., alongside photo spreads of the stars, film reviews, news stories, and gossip columns, a successful formula that varied little from magazine to magazine throughout the years of their existence. In this lies the paradox of the star, “at once ordinary and extraordinary, available for desire and unattainable” (Ellis 91). Columnists such as Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, the two reigning divas of the print-gossip world, fueled readers’ desire for information, often exposing the stars’ private lives and shifting the divide between the public and private, making more intimate aspects of celebrities’ lives open to public scrutiny. According to George Eells, “in their heyday Hedda and Louella claimed a combined readership totaling 75,000,000” (14) and were ruthless at obtaining and disseminating gossip before anyone else did. They contributed to the star personas, “a concept that integrated what was known—or what the studios wanted known—about stars both on-screen and off-screen” (Frost 32). Through syndicated gossip columns and fan magazines, the stars’ real lives became extensions of their onscreen personas and performances.
In Carmen Miranda’s case, gossip in the media focused on emphasizing her Latinidade—her signature look and other stereotypical behaviors expected of a Latin star. The gossip discourse around Miranda relayed her uniqueness and difference but was, for the most part, devoid of any truly scandalous stories: Miranda was not known to ever step outside appropriate norms of social behavior, other than a one-time incident on the set of Weekend in Havana with a photographer whose low angle revealed Miranda was not wearing any underwear. Both the Shubert press department and the press agents at Twentieth Century-Fox fueled the image of Miranda as a religiously educated foreigner, whose only peccadillo was supposedly having a ravenous appetite.
A sample from a few representative articles about Carmen Miranda is indicative of the most commonly repeated, salient elements of the parafilmic discourse around the Brazilian Bombshell that, as typically happens with stars in the media, privileges certain aspects of their stardom over others. As important research tools, I take heed of Slide’s advice to “examine and analyze the articles in part rather than in whole” by focusing on valuable lines or paragraphs (9). As Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz in Gone Hollywood caution, the researcher finds reliable information extremely difficult to come by in the fan magazines, but they remain fascinating documents that “gave the studios a direct line to the hard-core fans and served the important function of giving the stars an existence—however fantasized—separate from the roles they played on screen” (113). It is when these fan-magazine articles have been taken at face value that Miranda’s stardom has been distorted in film criticism. The fan magazines contribute to creating affective and emotional ties between the celebrities and the public by providing a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of the stars (Marshall 83). But this behind-the-scenes is often staged and purposely meant to support commonly circulated ideas of the stars. The magazines brought “real-life” snapshots of the stars to their adoring fans, on the set, around town, and at home. However, most often “the fan magazines were as synthetic as the world . . . portrayed by the movies” (Slide 75).
The interest of the discourse surrounding Carmen Miranda, independent of whether said information was factual or “ludicrously unreal,”106 is important to understanding her impact in popular-media culture and how this image was construed in the magazines at this critical intersection between the stars, the industry, the media, the fans, and the reading and viewing public. Women were able to use fan magazines as a resource to experience creativity, ideals, and fantasies, as transmitted through the lens of the Hollywood studios and stars. As Slide discusses, the relationship between the fan magazine and its reader was mostly articulated around a sense of identification with glamorous stars that the magazines provided to the (mostly female) fans (134). This identification was not a spontaneous or uncalculated by-product of the fanzines: the magazines fostered this process by bringing the stars’ lives to the fans and giving the readers the expectation that they, too, could emulate the stars’ lives. A 1942 Photoplay article articulates this rhetoric in relation to Carmen Miranda. After explaining how Miranda keeps her nails looking spectacular (hand cream, cotton gloves, cuticle care, nail oil treatment, two coats of nail polish, hand exercises), the article concludes with the promising warning: “Better watch out, or before you know it, you’ll be just like Miranda!”107 Orgeron writes that “such feelings of intimacy emerged partly as a result of the familiarizing discourse promoted in the fan magazines, which often situated stars as storytellers, confidants, advisers, and friends to their fans” (107).
Closeness to the stars was also fostered by a process of desacralization that included portraying their private lives while in their home settings, doing mundane activities around town, or on vacation. As Lipovetsky writes, “to be sure, cinema invented more-realistic and less-distant stars, but they were always endowed with exceptional beauty and seductive power” (184). Images of Miranda actively pursuing hobbies or physical activities (such as biking or exercising) fueled the commonly circulated convention of stars living normal, stable, and healthy lives.108 A glimpse into Miranda’s life at home, filtered through the fan-magazine lens, spies a gay and active lifestyle. When she is not filming on the set, she spends her time swimming in her home pool, painting, cooking, entertaining (mostly guests from Brazil), answering fan mail, and even crocheting.109 As Gamson explains, the presentation of stars in the 1930s had become more and more mortal, promoting “a greater sense of connection and intimacy between the famous and their admirers” (29). Many of these magazine articles on Miranda are composed almost entirely of pictures with one or two captions, rather than any sort of substantial informative narrative, and the photographs function in sequence.110 The August 1943 issue of Screenland illustrates this tendency, consisting of a fabulous double-page layout composed of six photographs featuring Miranda, with the catchy title “Miranda Makes with the Mischief!”111 One article, appropriately titled “Not all Fun and Frolic,” refers to Miranda as a “busy little beaver”: making future plans; meeting with her managers, press representative, musical director, and booking agency; taking care of fan mail, interviews, and photographs; and rehearsing new musical numbers.112 This approach is typical of the hardworking image the media liked to portray of the stars, countering the glamor of the screen with their work ethics behind the scenes, and this is repeated in the press throughout Miranda’s career.113
Much commentary was provided about Miranda’s relaxing by driving around town in her beige Cadillac, reclining on her leopard-skin couch, and ideally getting ten hours of sleep.114 The motorcar as an indicator of wealth had begun in the 1910s and the beginning of the star system and had carried over as a social-status marker into the 1930s and 1940s, especially during the war period (deCordova 108). Magazine writers commented repeatedly on Miranda’s enjoyment of the American way of life and how this feeling was reciprocal.115 Modern Screen of March 1941 discusses Miranda’s infatuation with Hollywood with dramatic, euphoric sentences such as “Hollywood, it has treated me so nicely, I am ready to faint.” The article claims Miranda spent her days kissing everyone, from her director Irving Cummings to her costar Don Ameche, and had fallen in love with all the beautiful stars of the Hollywood sets.116 Another reporter writes that she allegedly held his hand during the interview and mentions how “people feel she loves them. Men especially feel she does.” Although this physical contact through kissing and handholding is chalked up to being an “old Brazilian custom,” Miranda’s warmth permeated throughout her media articles both on and off the set.117 Silver Screen of March 1941 tells of her magnetic presence on the set of That Night in Rio, which brings her costars Alice Faye and Don Ameche out of their dressing rooms to watch, listen, and lead the applause.118 Photoplay of July 1941 emphasizes how enamored Hollywood was with Miranda, stating that “the place could eat Carmen off a spoon . . . it’s that fond of her. . . . There is more warmth in her smile, more friendliness in her hand-clasp, more genuinely ‘from the heart’ friendliness about her than in any star discovered in ages, with the result that when she is filming a scene the set is packed with everybody in the studio” (6). This “warmth” was naturally present in her live performances, such as her appearances at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where after her band played an introductory number, “the place lights up with a million watts of human electricity called Miranda—gay skirts swirling, jewels aglitter, headdress like a miniature leaning tower of Pisa. Her radiant smile embraces the audience.”119 With close to nothing in terms of information on concrete love affairs, the media did what it could to create interesting storylines around Miranda’s private life, but they were pale in comparison to the loves, divorces, and star scandals of many other players, which had been common since the 1920s.120
Food, and especially tropical fruit and exotic dishes, was a frequent topic in press articles dedicated to Miranda, showcasing “candid” images of her in the kitchen demonstrating South American recipes and culinary customs. As deCordova explains, “picture personality” is an effect of the representation of players in a film, or across a number of films, while the illusion and intertextu-ality is maintained outside the film’s frames (87). Movie Story of July 1947 features an article by the “Food and Household Editor” Vivian Reade titled “Fruit ees ze Fashion,” playing on Miranda’s costumes and the summer trend of fruit dishes, including a “blueberry soup” for an “unusual appetizer” and “fruit salad” with strawberries, watercress, peaches, and pineapples.121 Other articles focus on her “enormous appetite” that was “practically a legend” and the inordinate quantities of food that she presumably was able to eat for lunch on the set.122 One reporter lists her packing away “a shrimp salad, a meat course, five cups of bouillon, two fancy desserts and a piece of lemon chiffon pie” while her female costars were “sitting around wolfing lettuce sandwiches and shredded carrots . . . tortured by envy.”123 Even Hedda Hopper weighed in on Miranda’s appetite in her syndicated Los Angeles Times column, stating that Miranda was “one of the few stars who relishes horse sirloin steaks.”124 On the flip side, reporters frequently quoted with humor Miranda’s mentioning “being” on a diet. Screen Life reports her saying, “Mi mama is here now and she cook what I like in Brazil. Sometimes I eet too much and de meedle geet beeg. Then I go on de diet, maybe for a whole day.”125 And News writes, “She loves to eat big meals; always says ‘but I will get fat’—after she has eaten the meal. Never before.”126
The association of Miranda and exotic food was also appropriated to foster good-neighbor topics in the fan magazines, capitalizing on Miranda as the epitome of the good-neighbor cook. The connection between Miranda and exotic dishes was first projected in the pressbook for her second Hollywood film, That Night in Rio, where the publicity department suggests in a women’s page feature two examples of “‘Rio’ Recipes” that, apparently, the “glamorous Carmen Miranda,” who “is fond of concocting exotic dishes,” had shared in between takes on the set: cream of avocado and banana compote.127 In another such article, Miranda is illustrious of cooking in “The South American Way,” with the immediate subtext, “Be a good neighbor and entertain the hospitable way—The South American Way.” The article features a posed photograph of Carmen in full turban regalia reading the cookbook Restaurant La Bahia, with the caption “Singing and dancing are only two of Carmen Miranda’s accomplishments. She is also an excellent cook” (62). In the text body, we read a series of half-truths that make the reader marvel at such an invention: “Carmen Miranda is no ‘Latin from Manhattan.’ She’s the ‘real-McCoy’—straight from Bahia, Brazil. . . . Our lovely green-eyed idol from the Amazon not only sings and dances with vivacity; she’s an excellent swimmer; and better still, a cook of renown!” (62). Cooking good food in Brazil is considered natural in a “country where ‘to eat and be merry’ is to live.”128 This article is similar to one found in Modern Screen several years later, titled “The Foods of our Allies: Brazil.” Under a picture of Miranda tasting her food in the kitchen, wearing an apron and with her hair down around her shoulders, she is portrayed as your everyday cook in the kitchen with a caption that reads: “‘I taste eet, then I season eet!’ says Carmen Miranda, famous samba specialist of screen and stage. She loves good food and favors dishes prepared at home in the Brazilian manner.” The article then promotes a pamphlet of “recipes for Carmen Miranda’s Brazilian dishes” that includes picadinho, feijoada, cama-roesa bahiana, and crème de abacate (80).129
To provide a greater closeness and sense of authenticity to the star, the media and the studio sought to blur the boundaries between Miranda’s stage/screen persona and offstage life by underlining the elements that she carried from her performative onstage persona into her regular life. As one reporter writes, “she’s not really different off-stage. The face, the voice, the charm, the vitality are unchanged. But the spectacular gives way to simplicity. . . . Shorn of her barbaric splendor, she’s still Miranda.”130 This conflation of stars’ reel/real life by merging screen roles and offscreen personalities was essential to studio star making and was fueled by the publicity departments, who assured the projection of a celebrity’s personal life matched that of the screen character (Gamson 26).
As mentioned above, with the exception of a handful of articles, photographs dominated the fan-magazine pieces on Miranda with very little narrative. On the one hand, her star image included a strong visual component: the bright and often contrasting colors, lush materials, and exotic motifs combined with an original aesthetic of otherness. On the other hand, Miranda led a relatively private life. One fanzine critic reports, “she doesn’t go out much. She doesn’t drink—except for a glass of champagne to celebrate her birthday. If she has a serious heart interest, gossip hasn’t caught up with it. Invited to Ciro’s, she’ll sometimes accept, but there’s always a rider. . . . Indeed, she’s been known to appear with her whole entourage, including the band. She never stays long. An hour at most, a couple of rhumbas—her favorite dance—and she’s gone.”131 In a Hollywood magazine article from September 1941, another critic refers to her as an unapproachable star, “a touch-me-not glamour girl,” who always went out with one or a group of chaper-ones.132 Over the years of Carmen Miranda’s Hollywood stardom, several rumors circulated about her love interests, including a doctor in Rio who apparently telephoned her every weekend (Time Magazine, November 9, 1942); Gilberto Souto, who was Don Ameche’s Portuguese coach for That Night in Rio (Motion Picture, November 1942); George Sanders, allegedly one of the hardest-to-get actors in town (Silver Screen, July 1941); her costar Cesar Romero (Photoplay, November 1942); and the Brazilian composer Ari Barroso (Photoplay, July 1944). Even one of the most powerful gossip columnists, Louella Parsons, wrote an article titled “Miranda Will Wed Brazilian,” claiming that Carmen had revealed to her privately that she would marry Dr. Roberto Marin, a prominent South American, after the war was over (Examiner, May 28, 1945). Ultimately, the media announced Miranda’s engagement in early March 1947 to the film producer David Sebastian, followed by their wedding two weeks later in Beverly Hills at the Church of the Good Shepherd. A year and a half later, Hedda Hopper was prompt to announce Miranda’s pregnancy: “Carmen Miranda Books Stork—and Celebrates,”133 while the news of their separation in late September 1949 and reconciliation two months later were also widely advertised.
Yet beyond these rumors, mixed with some facts, the gossip about Miranda’s private life was relatively subdued, and as a consequence anecdotes that bordered on ludicrousness were invented to add spice to her stardom. Motion Picture of December 1942 reported in the column “The Talkie Town Tattler” that “Carmen Miranda is maaaaaaaaaaaaad because some meanie printed that she had her nose remodeled,” a suggestion she fervently denied.134 Silver Screen reported a feud between Miranda and the hot-tempered Mexican spitfire Lupe Vélez over jealousy stemming from a critic’s statement that Miranda looked like “an old aunt of Vélez” followed by Miranda’s criticism of Vélez for trying to copy her.135 Perhaps the most outrageous piece of invented gossip surrounding Miranda was Silver Screen’s claim in February 1948 that “Carmen Miranda is installing a freezing unit in her swimming pool, so that six hours after a swim, she can whip around on her ice skates,” certainly not your usual Brazilian custom.136
Despite a few isolated examples of sensationalist articles, for the most part the discourse around Carmen Miranda’s stardom created a mediated window into her offstage/offscreen life that reinforced stereotypical aspects of her portrayal as a unique Latin star. With repeated themes that bordered on clichés, the print media enabled her fans to make greater sense of her star image by providing a coherent behind-the-scenes view of her exotic otherness that extended her stage performance, thus blurring the proscenium divide and giving the audience a greater approximation of the Brazilian Bombshell’s foreignness.
The media also used Miranda’s stardom to promote commercial products, as was customary with Hollywood stars during the 1930s, a period that saw the greatest use of celebrity endorsement. As Fox’s publicity director Harry Brand writes in his “Vital Statistics” on Weekend in Havana, “although CM has been in pictures less than a year and a half, she now has more commercial tie-ups than any other film star in Hollywood except Disney’s famous mouse. Thus far they include furs, cosmetics, radio, coffee, dresses, hats, over a dozen sorts of games, books, phonograph records and a number of other items, including a bathing suit.”137 These tie-ups represented a considerable addition to Miranda’s salary and symbolized great prestige for Miranda’s career. It is hard to know exactly all the products she endorsed and whether Brand’s affirmation is correct or not; what is most evident is that she was in high demand and the studio allowed her to endorse these commercial products to maximize her popularity.
These product endorsements drew on Miranda as an exotic, vivacious, and attractive performer and featured the star in advertisements mostly related to music, beauty, English lessons, and consumable products such as beer—which is definitely odd, as she didn’t drink. A telling example is Miranda’s endorsement of the then-new General Electric radio, as printed in the February 1945 issue of Life Magazine. The caption, drawing from Miranda’s colorful attire and gay exoticness, reads, “Conventional radio—lacks color and richness. Something is missing. FM Radio by General Electric—you hear the tones in all their ‘natural color’ and beauty.”138 As was common practice, the advertisement mentions Miranda by name, her studio, and the film she was currently appearing in, Something for the Boys. This design succeeded in capturing the customers’ need for a more fulfilling listening experience and correlated Miranda’s bright and dynamic Technicolor performances to the tangible object for sale, the new radio set.139 In this, as in other advertisements, Miranda sets the mood that emanates from her iconic appearance and unique performance as a foreign, attractive, and vivacious actress and singer. Despite the mockery the media made of her supposedly poor command of English, she became the poster gal for the Barbizon English classes, a strategy that Jhally refers to as the technique of “user-centered advertising” (128). If Miranda, with the most widely publicized mangled English, can learn the language, then any foreigner could likewise and thus fulfill the American dream by becoming as successful as she was. The majority of Miranda’s advertising drew from her obvious characteristics as a performer, with mentions of her particularly widespread connotations of Latinidade, colorfulness, and singing career. It meant that without any equivocal, Miranda was an immediately recognizable star among the greatest of the period. At the same time, her stardom was still used for product endorsement back in Brazil, as in the Eucalol soap and dental paste advertisement that features Miranda in her striking Streets of Paris costume alongside a small sketch of the Statue of Liberty and the claim that, although America provides “excellent products,” there is nothing comparable to the Eucalol that Carmen Miranda used in her “beloved and distant Brazil.” Miranda is pictured as the far-away star in New York who still fondly remembers Brazilian products and, by metonymy, her Brazilian homeland.
Carmen Miranda is perhaps the lone example of a highly successful Latina star during these years able to maintain star billing, if not star roles, and Twentieth Century-Fox fostered this image throughout the production of her ten films with their studio. Yet, the true fascination of her star persona stemmed from the contained frame of her specialty acts—most often disjointed from the plot, behind a distinct and symbolic proscenium stage. And all the while, despite her growing resentment against these pigeonholed parts used for marketing purposes, as chronicled by her biographers, the United States entertainment industry gave the fair-skinned, green-eyed Miss Miranda the best it had to offer: publicity, public appearances, print coverage, and visual images spread widely throughout the media. For several years, Miranda corresponded to a specific, wartime moviegoers’ taste, and as a direct consequence, her impact on fashion and music trends was significant, albeit short lived.140 As Fiske details, the desire for the new is what fuels the production process (Reading the Popular 26) and what launched Miranda’s North American career overnight, but this same need for newness caused her downfall, along with the demise of the musical genre as a whole. Yet during her years of popularity, the audience’s attraction to Miranda’s unique je ne sais quoi created a desire to bring components of her star persona closer, allowing them the illusion of approximating her bodily image, a concept that cinematic close-ups enhance and that translated to the popularity of her commercial tie-ups.141 The promotional materials that fueled Miranda’s stardom also contributed to bridging the star/fan gap. With several emblematic milestones along the way, such as her imprints at Grauman’s Theatre and her Paul Meltsner portrait, Miranda was one of the most popular celebrities at her prime.142 Regardless of what certain film reviewers or movie patrons may have thought, it is undeniable that her broad fan base warranted Twentieth Century-Fox’s giving her top billing. Movie Stars Parade of September 1946 claimed she was the “highest paid gal in the U.S.,” according to Treasury Department statistics.143 Previously, Miranda had also alluded to her exponential salary: “‘In 1944’ she explained, ‘I was very proud. I was the highest paid woman in the world. I made more than $400,000.”144 Furthermore, just as Hollywood did not always choose to promote Latina/o stars, when they did, it showed that they believed he or she was worth the financial investment, and the star, having established an affective relationship with the movie audience, was able to enjoy the benefits of being an economic center of the studio system. The studio’s endorsement proved that Miranda was what the public wanted, a wistful collage of exotic, fun, cheery singing and dancing representing an entertaining means of escapism, all decked in bright colors, inviting the audience to surrender their rational faculties in order to enjoy the fantastic illusions presented in a glorious cornucopia of Technicolor, music, and dance.
With such a unique performance, on film and in live performances, rarely has Franz Liszt’s famous remark been truer: Miranda could definitely claim, “the concert is—myself.”145
