The Legacy of an Icon
Carmen Miranda’s last filmed appearance was on the Jimmy Durante Show, and the final program was a combination of all that Miranda enjoyed as a performer and was known for on the screen: laughter, dancing, singing, joking around, speaking in her signature lightning-quick Portuguese and her heavily accented English, and accompanied by a group of her “boys.” The last picture of Carmen Miranda alive was taken with Durante on the set, complementing the taped show later that week that aired, with the family’s permission, after her death.1 Durante added a moving prologue to the show’s opening: “One of the greatest performers I’ve ever known was the little lady from Brazil, Carmen Miranda. Her last appearance was here on this show with me, and she was never better.” The Jimmy Durante Show episode was the first filmed tribute to the memory of the deceased star, with the peculiar twist of Miranda herself being part of the homage.
From the moment of her death, Carmen Miranda’s legacy has been interpreted, questioned, and revisited in a myriad of ways by fans, critics, writers, film directors, artists, singers, and performers, whose works constantly renew the magnitude of Miranda’s stardom and performativity. National commemorations and institutional, academic, and personal initiatives in music, film, literature, and art continue to legitimize Carmen Miranda’s position in Brazil’s cultural memory and to remember, celebrate, and draw from the uniqueness of her Latinidade in the United States, each nation contributing to the immortalization of Carmen Miranda’s legacy.
Remembering: Film, Music, and Revival Shows
In a retrospective appreciation of Carmen Miranda’s films, the singer and writer Caetano Veloso comments on the perfection of her art, the definition in the movements, and her talent for the polished finished product as he attempts to pinpoint the reasons for her popularity.2 The legacy of Carmen Miranda’s films is tightly intertwined with that of the Hollywood musical, which occasionally goes through periods of revival with new releases of classic films or certain anniversaries of the Hollywood golden age. All Miranda’s movies were of the “feel good” variety, living in and relishing the present, as the musical numbers exploded beyond normal limits, filling the viewers’ imaginary sense with a world of dazzling songs, music, and dance. In the United States, Miranda’s stardom stemmed from Broadway but was consecrated on the silver screen, and it is this visual image of her magnificent costumes—far more than her explosive screen characters—that has come to represent her star image. As Gledhill writes, “while other entertainment industries may manufacture stars, cinema still provides the ultimate confirmation of stardom” (Stardom xiii). In Miranda’s case, this was definitely true in the United States: her Broadway songs would long have been forgotten had they not been immortalized through her Twentieth Century-Fox productions. Camp culture has likewise enabled a constant revisiting of Miranda’s star persona, providing a means to reread her performativity and endear a new generation to Miranda’s excesses. It is not by chance that the film that has been most viewed at special revival screenings, The Gang’s All Here, is also the film that cemented Miranda’s place in the camp hall of fame.
In Brazil, as the media attempted to come to terms with the unexpected death of one of the nation’s most beloved singers of the radio days, her voice and musical hits received the most coverage in the Brazilian press.3 O globo predicted, with great lament, that Miranda’s death marked the end of Brazilian popular music.4 Representing the consensus among her composers, Josué de Barros remembered how fabulous and quick she was to learn new music; she knew how to sing and did so with expression and grace.5 Miranda’s talent and stage presence enabled her to mark her niche in an emerging industry of popular music as she brought radio, the art of live performances, and discography to a greater level of popularity than ever before. Both on and off the stage in Rio’s 1930s society, where she became a household name in a category apart from all others, Miranda was the epitome of the modern female celebrity: a free spirit who playfully and audaciously pushed the boundaries of conventions and was able to leave her unique imprint on the performance scene with her uninhibited renovation and re-creation of her star status. Her performance style was genuinely “Miranda”: her natural talent resonated throughout her shows and recordings, and although she was widely imitated, she was never surpassed as a performing artist.
The world over, undoubtedly any Brazilian Carnival celebration or Brazilian-themed soirée, by metonymy of Miranda’s representing Brazil abroad, inevitably takes form in the shadow of Brazil’s most famous international performer to this day.6 As Dunn rightly comments, whenever Brazilian music is mentioned, the suggestion of Miranda is always there; she is “Brazil as viewed by foreigners” (“Tropicalista Rebellion” 133–35). In Brazil, Carmen Miranda as a singer has merited several significant re-enactment shows, with three interpreters unavoidably rising to the forefront of the genre: Marília Pêra, Stella Miranda, and Erick Barreto. These artists interpret Carmen Miranda rather than imitate her, in that they appropriate songs from Carmen Miranda’s repertoire to create their own performances. Marília Pêra (1946– ) is a Brazilian actress of renown who for over half a century has been interpreting Carmen Miranda, beginning in 1965 as part of Carlos Machado’s dance troupe in Mexico City,7 and then most notably in 1972 with the show A pequena notável (The remarkable young girl) at the “Night and Day” nightclub in Rio,8 a brief filmed segment in Mixed Blood (1985), the one-night show A Pêra da Carmem at Rio’s Canecão venue in 1986,9 A Tribute to Carmen Miranda at New York’s Lincoln Center in 1995, and then a more elaborate rendition in 2005 titled Marília Pêra canta Carmen Miranda (Marília Pêra sings Carmen Miranda), this time touring the theaters of Rio and São Paulo through 2006.10 The way Marília Pêra performs should be understood not as Marília being Carmen but rather Carmen through Marília, or as one critic writes, “an interpretative performance . . . an actress who evokes a personage, whether in song or in body language.”11 Pêra brings Carmen Miranda’s music back to life in shows that, rather surprisingly, remained popular despite Pêra’s ill-executed choreography; brightly colored but tasteless costumes that draw from the Miranda motif but do very little for Pêra’s physique, along with platform shoes that topple her balance; and her lack of Miranda’s youthfulness, grace, style, beauty, and charismatic appeal. One can only suspect that the success of the live show was mostly due to the memory of Carmen Miranda rather than Pêra’s kitschy and awkward interpretation.
The singer and actress Stella Miranda (1950– ) has interpreted Carmen Miranda as part of several stage shows and guest television appearances with talent, energy, and humor since 2001, when she took the stage as one of the two Carmen Mirandas in Miguel Falabella and Maria Carmen Barbosa’s musical extravaganza South American Way: The Carmen Miranda Musical, which ran for several months at the Scala Theater in Leblon, Rio de Janeiro. Staging the two Carmen Mirandas was an original approach to the different phases of the star’s career, yet it also conflated both periods through scenes shared by the two actresses. Stella Miranda was the older, embittered Carmen at the end of her life, and her costar Soraya Ravenle (1962– ), also a seasoned actress and singer of the Carioca scene, was the hopeful, lively young Carmen. While both actresses displayed great talent and syntony on the stage, Stella Miranda stole the show with the perfection of her art, diction, and stage presence, and her performance earned her the prestigious theater award, the Prêmio Shell.12 As one critic writes, “the script favored Stella who was impeccable in all her good-humored interventions.”13 With luxurious sets, exuberant costumes, grandiose musical numbers, scenes filled with chorines, and beautiful choreography, South American Way did not disappoint the theatergoers who came night after night to see this major musical spectacle that, according to one reporter, was certainly “deserving of Broadway.”14 The show mixed light-hearted, moving music with deeper themes of self-representation, Miranda’s authenticity and place within Brazilian popular culture, and her role as a token Latin American icon. Being a musical with a tropical twist, the result was a “delirious kitsch” spectacle, according to Miguel Falabella, one of the producers.15 Fitch characterizes the show as a “two hour commercial . . . an advertisement for Brazilian tourism,” tellingly sponsored by Petrobrás and a host of tourism-oriented businesses (61). In this, Miranda continues as Brazil’s most famous postcard and its most popular international star.
In a less extravagant but no less moving and entertaining show, Stella Miranda returned to perform Carmen Miranda in 2009 for the centennial of Miranda’s birth in the production Miranda por Miranda (Miranda by Miranda), which she also wrote and directed. As of this writing, after an extended season in Rio beginning in 2009, then touring Brazil on prestigious stages such as the Palácio Quitandinha in Petrópolis in July 2010, this popular show was taken to Porto, Portugal in May 2013, where it was acclaimed by the public, then staged again for two seasons in São Paulo in 2014 (at the Teatro Augusta) and 2015 (Espaço Promon).16 Miranda por Miranda hinges on the paradoxical aspect of Carmen Miranda’s life: her sadness as a counterpoint to the tropical representation of Brazil that she personified. Stella Miranda intersperses spoken thoughts about her own life and how it intersects with Carmen Miranda’s, all while singing a repertory of over twenty Carmen Miranda songs set to upbeat, modernized arrangements by the awarded composer and musical director Tim Rescala. The rest of the cast consists of four “Miranda boys,” likewise modernized with suits and ties, leaning closer to the harmonizing “Blues Brothers” than the original Bando da Lua, and three musicians: a pianist, bassist, and drummer. Stella Miranda’s costumes are also subdued in comparison to the exuberant Miranda originals. Emphasizing Carmen Miranda’s musical legacy is at the heart of the show: as Stella Miranda mentions in an interview at Globo, the public may not recognize all the tunes, but they pay attention and love this music that is part of Brazil’s long-forgotten, rich musical abundance from the 1930s and 1940s.17
As a third and final example in this group of professional Carmen Miranda interpreters, Erick Barreto (1962–1996), under the stage name Diana Finsk, performed as Carmen Miranda on such a professional level that his art form is far beyond that of the casual Miranda drag or comic performances. Barreto was a drag-queen artist who brought transformism to a new level of artistic performance in Brazil, and Carmen Miranda was one of his most perfected acts. Originally from Recife, Barreto lived and worked in Rio de Janeiro, where he became well known for his fabulous impersonations of unforgettable personages such as Argentina’s iconic first lady Eva Perón, one of the greatest Brazilian singers of popular and jazz music of all time Elis Regina, and most notably Carmen Miranda. Barreto’s art helped to rid transformism of its social stigma, making it a more widely respected performative genre. From the early 1980s to his premature death in 1996, Barreto fascinated his audience with the perfection of his art, often incorporating costume changes on stage and provocative stripteases, carried out with dignity and precision. Indeed it was in the details of his impersonations that he most excelled, allegedly studying his personages in great depth to faithfully portray them onstage. Barreto’s Carmen Miranda numbers were among his most successful, inevitably fascinating his public with his gracious gestures, the batting of his eyes, and the fluidity of his movements, creating the most beautiful rendition of Miranda down to the minutest detail. Barreto performed on a variety of shows, such as Hebe, the Silvio Santos Program, Doris Para Maiores, Show de Calouros, and at Cabaret Casanova, one of Rio’s oldest gay bars. The most significant evidence of the outstanding quality of his art is his casting in Helena Solberg’s documentary Bananas Is My Business (1995), in which Barreto is a beautiful Carmen Miranda, as discussed below. One could argue that Barreto is imitating Carmen Miranda, but his demeanor, personal investment, and the reverence with which he performs his numbers set him apart from the comic, camp imitations. In all these Miranda interpretations, Erick Barreto shines from within, doing what he most enjoyed with all the talent, class, and distinction his muse deserved.
Beyond these performances in Brazil, a few significant revival shows have been staged in the United States. Over the years, performing arts centers in the New York area have presented tributes to Miranda. On at least two occasions, in 1995 and 1996, BrazilFest, hosted by the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, showcased Carmen Miranda with the participation of a variety of singers such as Bebel Gilberto, Denise Dumont, Elba Ramalho, Aurora Miranda, and Maria Alcina, with over-the-top costumes, a recurring banana theme, and drag impersonations reiterating Miranda’s unique image forty years after her death.18 Arto Lindsay’s Carmen Miranda took to the stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Opera House on October 23, 25, and 26, 1991, as part of their ninth Next Wave Festival. The performers consisted of two of Brazil’s most sought-after singers, Bebel Gilberto and Gal Costa, with the participation of Aurora Miranda and musical accompaniment by the Afro-Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos; the Brazilian comic actress Regina Casé impersonating Carmen Miranda in gesture and speech; and poignant, amusing, and satirical commentary, English translation, and musical accompaniment on a synthesizer by the American experimental performance artist Laurie Anderson. As Lindsay commented to the New York Post, he viewed Carmen Miranda “as one of the most cult-worthy people in the world,” despite the fact that “Hollywood treated her like a caricature of herself,” and the BAM show aimed to set the record straight.19 Aurora Miranda, at age 76, had “a diva’s presence,” as one reporter commented.20 She sang Noel Rosa’s playful “Você só . . . mente” (You only . . . lie) and then returned for the grand finale with Rio de Janeiro’s ever-popular official anthem, “Cidade maravilhosa” (Marvelous city), the Carnival march that Aurora recorded in 1935. Aurora’s costume, consisting of a golden dress with wide off-the-shoulder sleeves, necklaces, and a red headscarf, recalls the one she wore decades earlier in Disney’s The Three Caballeros, a reference that is not left merely implicit as Anderson probes Aurora to talk about her experience “kissing Donald Duck.” Halfway through the show, the first backdrop, resembling a café in Rio looking out over the picturesque Guanabara Bay, gives way to an overflowing headdress of money, reminiscent of Miranda’s enormous two-dimensional banana headdress in the “Tutti Frutti Hat” number of The Gang’s All Here, a Busby Berkeley parody that was not lost on the press.21 Through the choice of songs, spoken word, music, costumes, and talented voices of Gal Costa and Bebel Gilberto, all linked together by Laurie Anderson’s dry commentary peppered with humor, sarcasm, and melodious, interactive music on the keyboard, Carmen Miranda recuperated Miranda’s essential Brazilianness and, foregoing all Miranda’s US repertory, the sounds of Rio, her beloved city.
After over a year away from Rio de Janeiro, Carmen Miranda returned home in June 1940, hoping to renew her ties with her fans and reclaim her status as the hottest female singer of popular music. Making the performative faux pas of greeting the well-to-do Urca Casino audience in English and singing some of her American-made numbers left the crowd frigid. While some critics attributed the cold reception to the elite status of the patrons at the casino that evening, who were not her usual audience, most likely it was Miranda’s Americanization of her performance that upset her audience. As Marshall indicates, viewing a celebrity antipathetically is not uncommon, leading to ridicule and derision, when “the sign of the celebrity . . . represents the center of false value” (xi). In Carmen Miranda’s case, the fact that she had successfully built her stardom on authenticated Brazilian performances and returned changed after a year was cause enough for her to be read as “false value.” Ironically, some of her last words reported in the media before she left for Broadway were promises of “not forgetting her homeland” and “not becoming Americanized.”22 The harsh criticism extended from the casino floor to the media, with the local newspapers accusing Miranda of adulterating national music (Garcia 190). Miranda learned the hard way that the meaning of her stardom was something that was not immutable, and its transformative nature was to be continuously renegotiated, even from afar.23
The Urca Casino reception casts a dark and far-reaching shadow over Miranda’s career path, illustrating the idea that “any reception is part of a historical chain of reception, constantly being transformed by the current text’s relation to the past” (Marshall 67). Powerless and dismayed, Miranda thought it wise to cancel all further commitments at the Urca Casino until she had regained her fan base and reacclimated herself to the Carioca music scene. The media’s rhetoric had also changed: whereas before Broadway the press had focused on Miranda’s stardom and her celebrity road to success, the discourse around the casino incident moved emphatically the focus to the audience’s reception, underlining the importance of the popular base for performative acceptance. Miranda only performed in the Urca Casino once more, in September 1940, with several new numbers to narrativize the trauma of an artist who has returned from abroad and seeks to reconcile international fame and fortune with the sincerity of her Brazilian roots and love of samba. Her new songs included “Voltei pro morro” (I returned to the morro. This refers to the hills of Rio de Janeiro, which for many is symbolically the birthplace of samba) and “Disseram que voltei americanizada” (They say I returned Americanized). Miranda’s stage comeback represented more than a performative feat of courage and audience perceptivity; it showed how talented Miranda was at poking fun at her own Americanization, just as she would continue to parody her depiction of the stylized baiana through a performative wink to the audience, whether they were the North American moviegoers or her compatriots in Brazil.
The unfortunate episode of the June casino debacle, despite the September comeback, caused deep-rooted scars for Miranda, who would not return to Rio for the next fourteen years. During this time away from Brazil, Miranda’s performances continued to be discussed in the Brazilian media among critics and fans who remained divided over the image of Brazil and Brazilian music that she projected abroad and the fact that she continued to star in Hollywood-made films rather than supporting the national film industry.24 As Simone Pereira de Sá and other critics have discussed, the Brazilian public was proud that Miranda had become a Hollywood star, but they resented the stereotypical portrayal of Brazilianness and the homogeneous image of Latin Americans that she came to embody (21).
Miranda’s complicated relationship with her Brazilian public and her paradoxical portrayal of Brazilian culture abroad—simultaneously embodying a stereotypical image of Brazilianness and the most famous Brazilian performance worldwide—was revisited, refurbished, and reinvented by the Tropicália movement in the late 1960s. In a tense climate of political instability, in which Cold War reactions to threats of budding communism throughout the region were spearheaded from afar by the United States National Security Council, vanguard and counter-culture manifestations emerged as an outlet and expression for a critical stance against political models that banished social and cultural freedoms. In this context, the Tropicália artistic movement emerged, a phenomenon that embraced poetry, cinema, theater, and the plastic arts, while most prominently displaying a hybrid music style that mixed national rhythms with foreign imports such as blues, rock ’n’ roll, jazz, and psychedelic music. The Tropicalists’ reworking of national symbols and destabilizing of artistic hierarchies was imbued with camp sensitivities and coalesced, with irreverent fervor, many celebratory truisms, self-reflective ambiguities, and self-mockery within a climate of censorship and repression.25 As Schwarz notes, Tropicália was allegorical in nature, with the Tropicalists drawing from “suggestive and dated materials” to emphasize an “atemporal idea of Brazil” (144), recalling the past in images of the present through absurd, irreverent, and often provocative anachronistic combinations.
Carmen Miranda’s link to the movement as a cultural sign was first explicitly articulated by the final words of the song “Tropicália” by Caetano Veloso, the since-then much-quoted “viva a banda-da-da, Carmen Miranda-da-da-da-da” that poetically matched Miranda to Chico Buarque’s hit song “A banda” (1966), which many have interpreted as an expression of “bread and circus” politics—i.e., it momentarily distracted people from the hardships of reality. The insistent rhyme of the song’s concluding verse emphatically harks back to the anti-art Dada movement post-World War I, an anti-Nationalist expression that sought to negate not only art itself but also the bourgeois materialism and culture it fueled. For Dunn, while Tropicália in general plays with forms of parody to recycle dated cultural styles, discourses, and materials, Veloso’s reference to Miranda in “Tropicália” is more akin to the aesthetics of pastiche due to the embedded neutrality that embraces Miranda as an image, a sign, a cultural icon deprived of her musical value (Brutality Garden 91). As Dunn explicates, there are no mimetic references to her musical style within the song, but the final notes invoke Miranda and leave her image literally resonating, ripe for interpretation. This is the point of neutrality that Veloso refers to, projecting Miranda uncritically after coming to terms with the complexities of her image. This moment can also be viewed as a tipping point, for Veloso goes on to recall that from this moment on Miranda “was no longer a grotesque thing, unpleasant, but was something that began to fascinate me, something I wanted to play with: it had already become lovable for me in many respects” (qtd. in Dunn, “Tropicalista” 132). This admitted playfulness, paired with Miranda’s “vulgar iconography” (Dunn, Brutality Garden 36), was ripe for the Tropicalists to engage through both camp and kitsch aesthetics. The conflation of Buarque’s song and Miranda’s provocative image encapsulates incongruous juxtapositions frequently used for camp purposes,26 which are at the core of the Tropicalists’ agenda. In this case, the internal societal injustice and political oppression, implied in Buarque’s song, and the nation’s internationally revered tropicalism are inevitably evoked by Miranda’s image. It is through a camp gesture that the Tropicalist movement adopted Carmen Miranda as their muse, fitting with their proclivity to recycle cultural materials and free them for redefinition, projecting them anachronistically and toying with the disjunction of appearance and meaning. However, Miranda is not viewed as a camp icon but rather a popular cultural image. It was not until he appeared on stage in Miranda drag for his first show after returning in January 1972 from exile in London that Caetano Veloso, playing off his oft-accused androgyny, engaged in a new interpretation by taking Miranda as a full-on camp icon.27
By the late 1960s, both Miranda as a cultural sign and her music were thought of as outmoded and obsolete relics of popular culture, items the Tropicalists prized and refurbished.28 While the intention with which they embraced Miranda was a tongue-in-cheek, camp practice lost on those who read it at face value, the Tropicalists’ Miranda representations veered with ease toward kitsch aesthetics consisting of cheap imitations and lofty pretensions, such as grotesque figurines, caricatures, and stylized reproductions of Miranda as a cultural icon. Through Veloso’s “Tropicália” song in 1967, Miranda resurfaced out of oblivion, soon to become a key figure at the core of the Tropicália movement’s aesthetic concerns, which “appropriated her as one of its principal signs, capitalizing on the discomfort that her name and the evocation of her gestures could create.”29 As a “cause for both pride and shame,” their caricature and their X-ray, Miranda is refurbished and no longer imbued with Veloso’s proclaimed neutrality. In his memoirs about the Tropicália movement, Veloso later relates how the mere mention of Miranda was “a bomb that the tropicalista guerrillas would, fatefully, seize,” an act that required overcoming their initial shame through their acceptance of American mass culture and Hollywood, as well as acceptance of the stereotypes of a hypersexualized, hypercolorful, and fruit-filled Brazil (Tropical Truth 167). Miranda’s neutrality was also set off balance by the political message that she inevitably projected, which Veloso was cautious to avoid on occasions.30 Veloso recounts being accused, as had been the case with Miranda, of being “Americanized” because of his hippie appearance, his personal attitude, and his embracing pop music and rock ’n’ roll (Dunn, “Tropicalista” 121–25). Therefore, it is perhaps not surprising that twenty years later, Veloso recorded Miranda’s above-mentioned comeback song, “Disseram que voltei americanizada,” live in concert, actualizing the multifaceted readings of Miranda and crystalizing this moment of Tropicália cultural self-reflection.31
A Literary Legacy and Dramatic Staging
Over the years, Carmen Miranda has appeared as a fictional character in several novels, short stories, and plays, a narrative and dramatic presence that, while individually bringing to the texts certain aspects of her star persona, when taken as a whole emphasizes the extent of her impact on North American and Brazilian high and pop art.
With the publication of publicist Abby Hirsch’s 1974 pseudomemoir The Great Carmen Miranda Look-Alike Contest and Other Bold-faced Lies, Miranda first crossed over into a narrative genre, although not as a full-fledged fictional character. In witty autobiographical style, the author recounts her experience working as a press agent for a screening of The Gang’s All Here that required last-minute publicity. Desperate for reporter coverage, she promises an ABC-TV assignment editor a lobby full of Carmen Miranda look-alikes (A. Hirsch 115). She enlists the help of a filmmaker, but only four “hastily-costumed drag queens” come to the so-called contest in the lobby, and the event is a complete flop. The ticket-taker’s reaction says it all: “My god. . . . It’s gay Guevara” (A. Hirsch 116). While this text does not develop Miranda as a narrative character per se, it reiterates her image as a gay icon, here transposed to a pseudofictional account.32
From the late 1980s, Carmen Miranda has appeared as a literary figure in several different genres of fiction and drama through a process narratologists have termed metalepsis, namely “the passage from one narrative level to another” (Genette 243), a transgression of the boundaries between the fictional world and the real world. Carmen Miranda’s stylized persona first appeared as a literary figure in a short-story anthology edited by Don Sakers in 1990 and appropriately titled Carmen Miranda’s Ghost Is Haunting Space Station Three, in which Miranda is a spectral character transposed to the science-fiction realm, defying all realist logic. The collection drew its inspiration from filk artist Leslie Fish’s original song, “Carmen Miranda’s Ghost,” which was released in 1986 and has since been recorded several times, receiving the Pegasus nomination for “Best Humorous Song” in 1993.33 The lyrics describe the returning presence of Miranda’s ghost to Space Station Three and the sense of mystery that surrounds these visits. Throughout the anthology, the authors rehearse elements from Fish’s filk song (Fish included, as she has a story in the anthology) with a prominence for the repeated appearance of fruit baskets that Miranda’s ghost leaves, the clacking of her maracas (poor Miranda—she never used maracas!), rhumba music, and several references to tangerines rolling unrealistically along the floor despite antigravity. As early as the late nineteenth century, and then more visibly since the early 1930s, there has been a history of space stations as a literary theme, even before the emergence of science fiction as a recognized genre (Westfahl 29). In the case of the Carmen Miranda stories, the space station locale amplifies the eeriness of her premature passing and, in several cases, provides a reassessment of her stardom (with the culture lag of several decades’ hindsight) reduced to her films and the incongruity of her costumes (Scott and Barnett 113; Friesner 228). S. N. Lewitt’s story “That Souse American Way” stands out as the piece that most approximates Brazilian culture with mentions of axe, Afro-Brazilian deities, Carnival, macumba, Latin American stereotypes, and uncanny references to Brazil’s having been “foreclosed, repossessed and sold at auction” (149), and it ends with the Brazilian protagonist’s personal reassessment of the star, realizing he “had been wrong about her all along. Carmen Miranda did not sell out to the Yanquis. She conquered them” (161). Drawing from the image of Miranda as the quintessential popular-culture symbol of fruit associated with Mother Earth, her presence in an afterlife where she carries on the trope of abundance challenges the way readers typically view space as an infertile dimension and adds an interesting twist to the dominant metaphor of space as sea with the appearance of Miranda’s bounty transforming the space station into a sort of oasis.34 In all these stories without exception, the presence of Carmen Miranda’s ghost is marked by the exotic fruit baskets she brings, and in some instances, the fruit plays a crucial role in the plot’s development. Why and how Miranda’s ghost appears on the space station are central elements to the stories, and the treatments vary greatly: from Miranda’s ghost solving mysteries, to saving protagonists from death, to reuniting loved ones, to being unjustly accused of a crime herself. Through the poetic license of science-fiction writing, Miranda’s ghost appears through an array of media that include holography circuits, phase generators, and a computer program, or she is summoned by a member of the space station (on occasion even ardent fans) or, in at least one case, explicitly claims that she stumbled upon the station by chance (Mand 299). Overall, these literary texts project Carmen Miranda’s ghost as friendly and helpful, dressed in all her Hollywood glory, with the exception of the menacing Miranda of Amanda Allen’s “Rolling Down the Floor,” described as a ghost with a gruesome, hollow smile, peeling skin, rotten and flyblown fruit, and a filthy, tattered Bahian dress (168), who at the story’s conclusion destroys the space station and observes the bobbing corpses with “a contented smirk” (170). Similar to several of the other stories in the collection, in Don Sakers’s “Tarawa Rising,” Miranda’s ghost appears and disappears throughout the narrative, immediately recognizable with her signature fruit headdress and broken English, occasionally dancing or singing a samba. The ghost is particularly present in the life of the title protagonist, Tarawa, a suicidal drag queen whom Miranda saves from death by radiation on the outside of the airlock, leading a repentant Tarawa to change his act to impersonate Miranda. This short story was retitled “The Ghost of Carmen Miranda” and became the title story of a subsequent anthology, The Ghost of Carmen Miranda and Other Spooky Gay and Lesbian Tales, edited by Trevelyan and Brassart (1998), emphasizing the drag-queen storyline and reinforcing Miranda’s longstanding connection to gay subculture. Despite the commonalities among all the ghost of Carmen Miranda short stories, their humor and creativity make them great entertainment for Miranda and fantasy-writing fans alike, and they contribute to immortalizing her as a cultural icon whose spirit lives on—in Space Station Three.
Carmen Miranda is one of the main literary characters in Leslie Epstein’s 1999 Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail, the third book by the author to focus on the (mis)adventures of Leib Goldkorn, a Jewish woodwindist who escaped Dachau and, since 1943, has been a resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan.35 Written as the humorous yet wistful memoirs of a ninety-four-year-old Holocaust survivor, the narrative is earthly, picaresque, erotic, and crudely raw, with subtexts of anti-Semitism, social injustice, survivor’s guilt, and responsibility that give it a deeply poignant edge. The memoir is funneled through the unreliable narrator Leib Goldkorn, creating a mixture of fantasy, tragicomedy, and bedroom humor, and the delusion of a flutist manqué who imagines fortuitous sensual encounters with no less than three leading ladies of Hollywood’s golden age, all while aspiring to bring about world peace, thwart Brazil’s alignment with Axis Nazis, and revenge anti-Semitism. D. T. Max pertinently summarizes the style of the novel as “its own genre—at once a travel tale, a historical meditation, a Holocaust revenge fantasy, a comedy of manners and a bedroom farce.”36 Following the title’s triptych format, the novel intertwines Leib’s present life as a flautist in New York’s Upper West Side with three episodes of his past. In his late thirties, he had pursued his passion for music and women in the romantic locales of Hollywood, Rio, and Paris, and these three successive, unsuccessful adventures each occupy a section of the book. The most substantial section is the Carmen Miranda encounter, “Fire,” that occupies the central part of the novel. It begins with Leib as a stowaway on a steamship heading for Brazil and then reconstructs Leib’s recollections of saving Miranda from her Nazi-sympathizing musicians and orchestra leader and lover, Arturo Toscanini. Miranda’s trademark fruit-piled headdress is emphasized throughout the narrative, with comedy, irony, and at times sensuality. Whenever Miranda appears in a scene, her ever-changing headdress remains her most prominent feature, often serving as a synecdoche for Miranda herself. At one climactic moment, as Leib escapes his nemesis, Italian orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini, “a pile of tangelos” starts to talk, introducing beneath a “heaped-up fruit cup” Miranda, who is prompt to offer her services to “cure all [Leib’s] protuberâncias” (Epstein 139). Later, in a paternal, condescending moment, the Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas candidly asks Miranda, “May I take off your hat, Dear? It’s covered with dates” (Epstein 174). In a comic moment after a torrid sex scene with Toscanini that is abruptly interrupted by a hiding Leib’s sneeze (creating a typical theatrical moment of discovery), Toscanini stands “in his birthday suiting” with Miranda right behind him “wearing only her trademark chapeau” (Epstein 145). Infatuated by Miranda, Leib emphasizes his role as rescuing her from the claws of her Nazi-following band and, by association, saving the destiny of Axis-inclined Brazil. In these moments, the narrative becomes a tale of melodramatic honor, with Leib’s reiterating his mission and intertwining his love for Miranda and his political agenda. Miranda becomes the key political player in the outcome of Brazil’s involvement in World War II, with Vargas endowing the singer with the power to decide the country’s allegiance to either the Axis or the Allied powers. A mixture of the political and the sexual abounds throughout the novel, with sexual innuendos concentrated on Miranda’s physique and sexually liberated behavior: taking Toscanini’s fingers in her mouth to “perform a vibration” (144); sleeping with Toscanini; letting Getúlio Vargas nibble her wrist, mouth the crook of her arm, and put his tongue in her inner ear; kneeling before Leib and sucking the lumps on his scalp “the way a child might upon a Popsicle array” (141). Beyond the fruit headdress, Leib’s descriptions of Miranda focus on the sensuality of her breasts. In the final scene, as Miranda steps in as the understudy for the lead singing part of Aida in Leib’s opera, she drops her gown to the floor and reveals “bare breasts, save for, at each pap, a pasty” with, as Leib recalls, “over the infernal region . . . a black piece of cotton, hardly larger than an eye patch, held in place by what I believe is called a string in the key of G” (Epstein 167), conflating musical vocabulary with the female pleasure zone. One narrative thread throughout the novel is Leib’s frustrated sexual experience, and while the novel consistently invokes erection, through references to Leib’s constant vertical movements (standing upright, escalating stairs, climbing a volcano, being lifted in crates or movie cranes), the phallic symbol of his flute, and repeated references to the conductor’s baton as “fully erect,” Leib falls short of full-blown ejaculations at each stage of his life because of impotence. The opening section describes the nonagenarian, in the communal bathroom of the hallway of his apartment, attempting unsuccessfully for over three hours to have a physician-prescribed annual ejaculation on his birthday to keep his prostate healthy. In Miranda’s cabin on the steamship, he is excited by her sensual sucking, the proximity of her bosoms, and her humming, but it is Toscanini who gets the singer in a game of “knock hockey” atop the bed beneath which Leib is hiding. As Leib hears the couple’s “giggles and grunts . . . cries of victory and groans of defeat,” the feathers bursting from the mattress cause him to sneeze: with great irony, this is described as the protagonist’s “non-voluntary ejaculation” (Epstein 145). This is the pattern of the manqué Don Juan, and if through the protagonist’s imagination he is able to embellish the grandeur of his anti-Nazi mission, the reality of his sexual shortcomings is undeniable, concentrated in the figure of Carmen Miranda.
A last North American example of Carmen Miranda’s literary “life” is the nostalgic, reflective, and in parts melodramatic novel Samba Dreamers (2006) by Kathleen Azevedo, which recounts the experience of Rosea, a second-generation Brazilian immigrant in the United States, as she attempts to reintegrate herself into society after serving time for arson, and chronicles her relationship with Joe Silva, a recently arrived Brazilian immigrant who was tortured under the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985). The narrative focuses on the immigrant experience in Los Angeles, social marginalization, Latin homogenization, poverty, and hypocrisy in a classist and racist system that revolves around the Hollywood film industry’s ephemeral stardom. Rosea lives in the shadow of her deceased mother, Carmen Socorro (modeled closely on Carmen Miranda), and the narrative’s dominant tone is of rage toward vivid memories of the past and the movie industry that killed Carmen film by film, intertwined with the nostalgic pull of the Brazilian homeland in the form of Carmen’s mythical Amazon, an imagined Brazil Rosea has never known, and, in Joe’s case, a Brazil freed from the terror of an authoritarian and violent regime.
The narrative begins in 1975, two decades after Carmen Miranda’s death. Transposed to the fictional narrative, episodes of Carmen Socorro’s life are recalled through her daughter’s memories, comments by adoring fans of the belated star, or the omniscient narrator. The memories filtered through Rosea are the most prominent in the text, interweaving her own intimate memories of her mother and her outrage at Hollywood, which she metaphorically views as “nothing but a big fat lie! It’s nothing but a bunch of plastic bananas” (K. Azevedo 139). Fans remember Carmen for her sex appeal, physical beauty, dark hair, round hips, and tight-fitting clothes (K. Azevedo 44). Melvinor, an old man who, pertinently, runs a fruit and vegetable stand, refers to Carmen as “the legend, the greatest star in Hollywood” and remembers her fruit as symbolically nurturing her public during wartime, her tutti-frutti hat as “the cornucopia for starving Americans” (K. Azevedo 47). At the conclusion of the novel, Joe, working as a tour guide of stars’ homes, demythicizes stereotypes of Hollywood and tells of the price Carmen had to pay for her fame, the torture of her hats, the rejection by her people back in Brazil, and how she ended up broken and died prematurely. An immigrant himself, he sees Carmen as a symbol of immigrant heartbreak in a country that is “both beautiful and cruel, innocent and guilty” (K. Azevedo 289), the paradox of Carmen’s stardom in Hollywood. Samba Dreamers brings to the forefront the price of Hollywood stardom, and the perspective of the fictive daughter of a deceased star develops the intersection of cultural memory, affectivity, and fandom. The unusual narrative ploy of using a pseudohomonym for the main character creates a margin for poetic license yet seems rather inconsequential since the text most frequently uses only her first name, “Carmen.” Furthermore, specific mention of Carmen Miranda’s films, her nickname “Brazilian Bombshell,” as well as constant references to her fruit-laden headdress inevitably reference Carmen Miranda. Carmen Socorro’s daughter wrestles with the impossibility of anyone doing justice to her mother’s life through a film: “who knew enough about Carmen to make a film?” (K. Azevedo 201). Unable to interpret her mother’s memory, Rosea throws herself out to sea, symbolically departing toward the Amazon and the birthplace of her mother.
In Brazil, Carmen Miranda has appeared as a fictional protagonist in several theatrical plays, some of which were staged for the 2009 centenary of Miranda’s birth. These included the one-night performance O que é que a Carmen Miranda tem? (What does Carmen Miranda have?) by Renata Martelli and the Colibri Sextet (March 18, 2009), with deliberate wordplay on the title of her signature song “O que é que a baiana tem?,” and the original Foi Carmen (Carmen is gone) by Antunes Filho, performed for several weeks from mid-July to the end of September 2009 in São Paulo.37 Foi Carmen was a postmodern show that, as a theatrical technique, integrated abstraction, silence, and absurdly prolonged stage action with what Antunes calls “fonemol”: abandoning Portuguese for the use of a fabricated, gibberish language with intensified voice modulations.38
These were not the first plays to center on Carmen Miranda as a dramatic figure. The Brazilian dramatist, actor, and director Ronaldo Ciambrone, who is well known for his transgender plays and acting, wrote Uma certa Carmen (A certain Carmen) in 1980. It has been staged several times since then, with Ciambrone playing the lead role on occasion, and was once performed as a staged reading set to live music in June 2000.39 It was also staged as part of the commemorations of Carmen Miranda’s one-hundredth-year birth anniversary in July 2009 by the São Paulo theatrical company Companhia Instável do Teatro at the Teatro Ruth Escobar in São Paulo, where it ran for several weeks.40
As these examples illustrate, Uma certa Carmen has been staged by different theatrical groups and for a variety of audiences, a testament to the play’s versatile appeal. Part of its originality lies in the doubling of Carmen Miranda on the stage: the main protagonist, “Carmen,” and her alter ego, “Carmen Verdade” (translated as “The True Carmen” or “Carmen of Truth”), who appears through the theatrical staging of a mirror to dialogue with “Carmen.” As an explicit matrix of “descending metalepsis” from the real world to the fictional world of the play, Carmen Verdade heightens the illusionist impression.41 The staging of Carmen (as a performed character) and Carmen Verdade mimics the viewer’s double awareness of fiction and reality, projecting simultaneously Carmen-as-an-actress and the “real” Carmen, respectively, through the process of tacit and explicit metalepsis. The dialogue between the two Carmens is “harsh and realistic, densifying the protagonist’s personal tragedy” (Herculano 18). Carmen delimitates their differences by telling Carmen Verdade: “This is theatre and I am an actress. . . . You are patrimony.” This provokes Carmen Verdade to respond: “While you are alive, there is censorship. Once you die, they invent patrimony” (Ciambrone 41). Unlike the Ciambrone performances, in the Companhia Instável production both Carmen roles were played by female actresses, Lilian Grünwaldt and Priscila Labronici, thus eliminating the transgen-dered component of the original staging. Yet the gender-play is not altogether eliminated and is still expressed through some of the dialogues, as when one of the band members cautions Carmen not to go out in one of her outfits or they’ll call her a viado (fag) (Ciambrone 39). The camp nature of Miranda’s costumes is inseparable from her representation, as this example projects. A taping of the Companhia Instável performance shows that Carmen’s costumes closely resemble those Carmen Miranda wore at different phases of her career.
Ciambrone’s creative and poignant text draws on anecdotes from Miranda’s biography that have long held common currency and is divided into two acts woven around some of Miranda’s greatest radio songs in Brazil (Act 1) and her Hollywood hits in the United States (Act 2). David Sebastian is portrayed as slowly killing Carmen, pushing her to the limit, demanding she take pills to sleep and to wake up, forcing her to come back from Brazil to tape the Jimmy Durante show, arguing with her on the day of her death, and, with tragic irony, yelling at Carmen at one point, “If you die, you’ll still have a year of engagements!” (Ciambrone 52). The scene “The Marathon of Carmen Miranda’s Life Starts” includes explicit stage directions that “this scene must be absurd but extremely lyrical” (Ciambrone 47). Carmen and the Bando da Lua stand ready at the starting line, and David Sebastian symbolically fires the gun to start the “race,” a medley of Carmen’s recordings but also an analogy of Carmen’s overexerted life.
When Carmen explains she needs to finish the first act, Carmen Verdade retorts that her “whole life was only one act,” pointing to the artificiality of the staged play’s divisions, and asks that Carmen “talk a little about Getúlio Vargas, or the people will forget what a dictatorship is” (Ciambrone 42). Carmen Verdade’s exhortation is immediately implemented as the next scene depicts Getúlio applauding the triumph of the revolutionary movement and the reaffirmation of the country’s nationalism while pompously expounding, “Have you ever seen such happiness? You and your balangandãs, me and my Steel Plant in Volta Redonda, the United States with their military base in Natal and Brazilians marveled by their American dreams” (Ciambrone 42). The seductive nature of the Carmen/Getúlio relationship is exaggeratedly expressed in the diminutive nicknames she uses, “Gê” or “Gegê,” and in Getúlio’s offering Carmen no less than a fur coat and a diamond broche as parting gifts (Ciambrone 43). As Herculano comments, along with the exchanges between the two Carmens, “equally successful is the doubling of Miranda singing over Getúlio Vargas’s speech, that beyond the historical testimony creatively expresses her proximity to the populist president” (18).
In the final scene, Carmen Verdade coronates Carmen with her headdress as a sign of approval of the story that has been told, and then the whole cast sings two of Miranda’s most well-known songs, “Adeus, batucada” (Goodbye, batucada) and “Cantoras do rádio” ([Female] radio singers). This grand finale transmits several paradoxical messages: the sealing of the play as an authentic representation of Carmen Verdade/Carmen Miranda’s life experiences and the success of Carmen as an actress to mirror this “reality” in the diegetic level of the play. Yet at the same time, the finality of life and the motif of the departure (in “Adeus, batucada”) are set against the affirmation of Carmen and Carmen Verdade as “the (female) radio singers” who are no longer. Therefore, the end of Ciambrone’s play can be read as a mise-en-abîme of Carmen Miranda’s stardom, with the reference to the end of batucada through her departure to the United States and then through death, yet remembered and beloved in Brazil first and foremost as a radio singer.
While different in genre, there are several commonalities to these literary re-creations of Carmen Miranda. All inevitably depict Miranda’s extravagant fruit-laden headdress, borrow from the fruit motif, and include a sampling of Miranda’s signature songs. Among the other characters, it is interesting to note the repeated presence of Getúlio Vargas, long identified as an ardent admirer of Carmen Miranda, although the poetic license of these texts takes this relationship to a far more advanced level than historical evidence has ever proven. Other repeated themes touch on Miranda’s personal tragedy through an unhappy marriage, her sadness and longing for Brazil, her rejection at the Urca Casino, and overall a reevaluation of the Carmen Miranda paradox—Brazil’s most visible ambassadress abroad and the country’s most debated representative. This reconciliation is at the heart of the Helena Solberg docudrama Bananas Is My Business, the first fully developed film on the life and career of Carmen Miranda.
Seeking Reconciliation: Helena Solberg’s Bananas Is My Business
In the summer of 1995, the documentary Bananas Is My Business was released and began the circuit of international film festivals, garnering several awards in the “Best Documentary” category.42 Directed and narrated by Helena Solberg, a Brazilian native living and working in the United States,43 the docudrama was mostly well received by critics as an insightful, engaging, and well-produced film despite its flaws. Critics were unanimous in their praise of the valuable retrospective look at the life and career of Carmen Miranda that consists of a hybrid composition of several different genres. In typical biopic style, Bananas Is My Business integrates accepted details and moments in Miranda’s life “into the genre’s conventional narrative pattern, that of the American ‘myth of success’” (Curry 130). The documentary intersperses interviews with contemporaries who knew Miranda well (including costars Alice Faye and Cesar Romero; composers Synval Silva and Laurindo Almeida; her sister, Aurora Miranda; the maid of her Beverly Hills residence, Estela Romero; her first boyfriend, Mário Cunha; and her most loyal friends, Jeanne Allan and Aloísio de Oliveira), clips from both her Brazilian and Hollywood films, images of personal items such as photographs, letters staged as being read by Miranda, home videos, historical footage from Brazilian newsreels and Rio in the 1930s, the inside of the Urca Casino (indelibly associated with Carmen Miranda), and sequences in which the transformist artist Erick Barreto impersonates Carmen Miranda, developing historical reenactments to a crescendo of bizarre fantastical dream segments.
The tone of the film is tragic-dramatic with the reenacted scene of her death (which bookends the film) and the first live shots of Miranda’s coffin being greeted in Rio de Janeiro by crowds swarming the streets. These glimpses of the funeral procession and wake are juxtaposed with brightly lit filmed segments of Hollywood boulevards, Miranda’s square on the forecourt of the Chinese Theatre, and her star on Hollywood Boulevard, reiterating the image of a fallen star, symbolically both sought after and trampled under the feet of tourists bustling around the footprint gallery. Nostalgia is woven throughout the film, coupled with bitterness and sadness as those closest to Miranda remember her fabulous career, her wonderful singing voice, her charisma, her greatest recorded hits, the impact she made on the Brazilian public, and all in all the joie de vivre that permeated her life. That is, until she married David Sebastian: all those interviewed focused on their dysfunctional marriage and the sadness and abuse Carmen endured during those final years. David Foster’s interpretation indicates that the film “would have the spectator understand that Miranda had come to occupy a no man’s land: repudiated in Brazil, unloved and abused by a husband whose personal sexual drama may have been the reason for his alienation” (120). Miranda’s friends and costars focus on how unique and vivacious Miranda was and how perfect she was for Hollywood’s musical golden age, and this stands in stark contrast to the interior suffering of her home life. While Miranda’s first boyfriend, Mário Cunha, speaks fondly of Miranda as the woman he most loved in his life, Aloísio de Oliveira’s memories are particularly moving as he talks of their closeness, having worked with Carmen from 1934 until her death. One short home movie shows Aloísio and Miranda dancing around and having fun on what appears to be a road trip, accompanied by the Nicholas brothers and Carmen’s sister, Aurora. These segments of great happiness are interspersed with images of the sea, a grey and cold-looking ocean that symbolically separated Miranda from her beloved fans in Brazil, embodied by her greatest fan of all time, Aloísio, who gazes out toward the horizon. These insistent images of the sea foreshadow the film’s final scene that ends with Synval Silva’s composition and one of Miranda’s most beautiful songs, “Adeus, batucada” (Farewell, batucada), which laments the separation from something that one loves, a jewel that is lost in the ocean, the samba rhythm or lifestyle.44
Miranda’s paradoxical relationship with her Brazilian public is developed throughout the film, her meteoric rise to stardom as a radio singer and performer, the fiasco at the Urca Casino that left her with pain she would never overcome, and the importance of bringing her body back to Rio de Janeiro, with the narrator commenting that “Carmen had finally come back home.” The documentary includes the live footage of Miranda making her imprints in the forecourt of the Chinese Theatre and her accompanying message to her fans back in Brazil, claiming that she was thinking of them. In this, the film shows Miranda constantly reaching out to her first public, the Brazilian nation, despite the different path her career took. This need to reconcile the Brazilian public with Miranda’s memory is symbolically embodied by Helena Solberg’s own narration of her quest to reappropriate Carmen Miranda’s memory, and by the image of Solberg’s mother, in a moment of blatant self-indulgence, posing next to Erick Barreto as Miranda in the film’s afterward. In this and in Solberg’s constant over-indulgent self-referentiality in the parallels she draws between herself and Miranda, the film takes on the characteristics of a performative documentary as defined by Stella Bruzzi.45 This narrative ploy results in a documentary style that is “highly personal,” as Erik Mink writes for the Daily News.46 The narrator, who identifies herself through photographs and references to her youth, portrays her personal quest as a journey that leads her on a mystified search of the archives “after the secrets of Carmen Miranda” and results in recurring dreams. Solberg’s metaleptic “intrusion” (Genette 234) as she forces the comparison between herself and Miranda, including self-portraits from her youth and voiceover narration, problematizes the boundary between the extradiegetic narrator and the realm of the documentary, expected to be objectively portrayed with a certain distance between the film director behind the camera and its filmed subject. Solberg tells of the heartache she felt when unable to identify with the woman on the screen, yet after the electric-shock treatment, acute depression, and anxiety that Miranda suffered, Miranda becomes Solberg’s broken “dancing doll,” as symbolized by a quick shot of one of Tom Tierney’s paper dolls and a broken wooden puppet on strings. It is an eerie segment of lost happiness and destruction. It is also one of collective guilt, as the narrator expresses, “we should have kept [Carmen] with us, and never let her go.” The film’s conclusion focuses again on the narrator’s relationship with Miranda as she attempts to understand Carmen Miranda’s legacy in Brazilian cultural memory. In somewhat contradictory terms, the narrator concludes that Miranda could never have lived up to all the different expectations people had for her or be the perfect symbol for the nation, despite her undeniable talent as an artist.
While critics have been divided on Erick Barreto’s performance in the documentary, this might be because Barreto performs two different types of reenactments: the historical moments (such as Miranda’s arrival at the port of New York) to enable the chronology of Miranda’s life events and then the more fantastical sequences that add a new dimension to the film that is playful, make-believe, carnivalesque, and camp. In truth, several of these latter segments are definitely a stretch of the viewer’s imagination, such as Miranda’s escaping from a display case and out of a museum (with real footage of the Carmen Miranda Museum in Rio de Janeiro), jumping out of a television set into the living room of an ardent British fan (Ivan Jack), dancing around an empty dance floor of the Urca Casino, wearing a costume that resembles a pineapple while singing to the tune “I made my money with bananas,” and finally, parading with Carnivalesque crowds on top of a float. The ultimate message of all these fantasy sequences is that Miranda is escaping from an existence of entrapment, whether confined symbolically to a museum to be looked at in a showcase and admired for her outward appearance, or bound by a film or television set. Solberg was aware of the stylized nature of these recreations. In an interview for Américas, she states, “We were trying to give a feeling of the overly staged, both as a criticism and a celebration of what is ‘fake’” (qtd. in Terrell 53). The “overly staged” is simply the performativity of camp, and it is certainly convincing, especially in the scene toward the end of the documentary in which Barreto is filmed dancing as Miranda “in full, feathered tropical regalia, hovering in the sky like a virgin icon surrounded by flying bananas instead of angels” (Terrell 52). David Foster indicates that staging Barreto as an investment from the drag perspective is unclear in the Miranda portrayal, for the viewer is left wondering if the transvestite choice was motivated by Miranda’s exuberance or if there was an underlying agenda about her construction as a Brazilian or Latin American actress for US audiences (123–24). Regardless of the camp nature of these scenes, the dancing segments performed by Erick Barreto are extremely captivating: he is indeed Miranda’s greatest interpreter to this day. In contrast, while there is certainly great physical resemblance and the costume and makeup team did an outstanding job, the close-ups of Barreto as Miranda in the biographical moments are less convincing.
In this search to provide new meaning to Carmen Miranda’s legacy, always from the Brazilian perspective as embodied through the narrator’s voice, the film attributes the blame for Miranda’s stylized baiana on the US public and the demands placed on a Latina star to constantly perform as a stereotype, over-sexed and vivacious, as Rita Moreno discusses. Immediately upon arrival in New York, Miranda’s portrayal as a foreigner with a reduced command of English is summarized by the narrator’s disbelief: “something happened, this is not our Carmen.” Later in the film, when Miranda returns to Brazil in 1955 following her acute depression only a few months before her death, the narrator remarks with great sadness that she is “another Carmen . . . years alone couldn’t account for the change in her face, in her expression.” Framing the film with her death adds significant gloom to the narrative and contrasts with images of Carmen, youthful, happy, coquettish, and playful, enjoying the camera and the company of her friends, which is reiterated by the repetition of a saying attributed to Miranda: “All I need to be happy is a bowl of soup and the freedom to sing.” The cinematic juxtaposition of composers Synval Silva and Laurindo Almeida singing and playing on the guitar some of her most popular songs along with Miranda’s recorded voice is powerful and emotionally charged. This technique brings Miranda into the present, and her voice “materializes” Miranda more successfully than any of the reenactments interspersed throughout the film. The final images return to the opening scenes with the drama of Miranda’s death, reiterating the tragedy of an inflexible industry and her physical, mental, and emotional fatigue: there is also no redemption for the fan, the viewer, or the director herself. Through the most brilliant archival recovery of this beloved singer in Brazil and amazingly unique and much-loved performer in Hollywood, Brazil in particular may hope to reconcile the past with the present’s memory of the “remarkable young girl,” but it is too late.
Immortalized Baiana
A few months before her untimely death, Miranda spent a few weeks in Rio de Janeiro. It was her first trip back to Brazil in fourteen years, and her name inundated the press with articles reflecting on her past and present stardom and what she had come to represent for Brazil. One reporter, writing for O jornal in January 1955, summarized her star status as the product of her own creativity: “In truth Brazil did not make Carmen, it was Carmen who made Brazil; it was not the baiana that made Carmen, but she made the baiana; her songs did not make Carmen, she made her songs. An artist at 100%, this is manifest in her gestures and in the smallest of movements, singing, dancing and being photographed.”47 Neither before nor after Carmen Miranda has anyone blended, with such efficiency, music, dance, fashion, cinema, samba, and Carnival: Miranda had and did it all, and as such she lived up to her moniker of the “remarkable young girl.” Miranda projected the baiana on an international platform, both then and now, and although Hollywood greatly transformed the image, it remained indelible as the national symbol by excellence.
Indicative of the baiana as representative of the nation was the trend throughout the 1950s and 1960s of Brazilian competitors in the “Miss Universe” pageant wearing the baiana costume.48 Far from the infelicitous outcome of the baiana dolls withdrawn from the Exhibition of the Portuguese World, as discussed in Chapter 1, the prestige of the baiana that is at the forefront of the national imaginary grew through its international trajectory. This is also apparent in film where, in the recycling of the Hollywood musical in the form of the Brazilian chanchadas, the baiana of the 1950s and beyond has been tainted with its international projection.49
To materialize the memory of Carmen Miranda, the city of Rio de Janeiro—Miranda’s hometown, the heart of the recording industry, and the most prominent locale for her live performances in Brazil—has been a central driving force, although not all the initiatives of Carioca enthusiasts have been successful. In Rio de Janeiro, only three days after the star’s passing, a bill was presented in the City Council building to name one of the city’s streets after the star to publically consecrate Carmen Miranda’s enduring importance for her hometown.50 The original proposal to rename the short street Travessa do Comércio (where the actress lived from 1925 to 1932) was rejected, and Rio’s Rua Carmen Miranda (Carmen Miranda Street) went to the Jardim Guanabara neighborhood in the Ilha do Governador.51 A few years later, sculptor Mateus Fernandes’s bronze bust of Carmen Miranda, which depicts the star in her baiana costume and fruit-laden headdress, was donated to Rio de Janeiro and inaugurated in one of the main downtown squares, the Largo da Carioca, on September 20, 1960 (Garcia 239). With the construction of the metro in that area in 1979, the statue was removed and reinstalled in the Ilha do Governador on a square off Rua Carmen Miranda.
In the United States, the materiality of Carmen Miranda’s legacy dates back to March 24, 1941, when Miranda immortalized her footprints with her trademark platform shoes, handprints, and signature at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The inscription reads: “To Sid Viva! in the south american way” (sic), and Miranda’s lack of capitalization for “South American” follows the rules of the Portuguese language as Miranda makes her mark as the first Latino/a star to have her prints in the forecourt of the Chinese Theatre. Over the years, the square has cracked and deteriorated, and the area that contained her right footprint has been patched (Endres and Cushman 152), but the square continues to attract scores of Latin American tourists for whom, collectively, Miranda continues to represent the inscribed “South American Way.” Only a few feet from Miranda’s grey-toned slab is an intersection that bears the name Carmen Miranda Square. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, when the Carmen Miranda Square in Hollywood was named in September 1998, it was one of a dozen Los Angeles city intersections named after historic personages, such as Wolze Brothers Square in Lincoln Heights and Dosan Ahn Chang Ho Square near the University of Southern California.52 A city traffic sign marks the intersection, keeping Carmen Miranda’s name present and visible for those who pass by.
Carmen Miranda’s legacy continues to emerge and develop, often in unexpected contexts, yet always harking back to her unique stardom and the impact she left on Brazil’s music industry and the greatest musical film period in the history of Hollywood. A few of these eclectic tokens of Miranda’s star image include paper dolls, stamps, coloring books, and Christmas tree ornaments, a host of imitations that for Melissa Fitch have commodified the Miranda image to the extreme and have taken on a life (and a market) of their own (57). Over the years in Brazil, significant state-endorsed and other privately funded initiatives have aimed to preserve Carmen Miranda’s legacy as national patrimony. In the mid-1990s, the secretary of culture and sports of the state of Rio de Janeiro inaugurated what turned out to be a successful campaign: “Adopt Carmen,” whose goal was the restoration of Carmen Miranda’s fabulous wardrobe. In 2005 the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro curated an elaborate temporary exhibit, Carmen Miranda para sempre, the largest exhibition on the star ever created, whose purpose was “to give its visitors the opportunity to follow the path to fame of the greatest interpreter of Brazilian music, celebrating all aspects of her life” (Canosa 2). Designed in a circular disposition to symbolically indicate neither end nor beginning to Carmen Miranda’s legacy, the exhibition consisted of over seven hundred items that belonged to the family, private collections, and the Carmen Miranda Museum, recreating the ambiance of Rio in the 1930s as a backdrop to her early career and then accompanying her trajectory through her Hollywood days.53 The display of Miranda’s original clothes and others designed specifically for the event highlighted her importance as a fashion trendsetter and designer. After six weeks in Rio, the exhibition was transferred to the Memorial of Latin America in São Paulo, and then later that year to Salvador, Bahia.54 Prior to this initiative, other exhibitions had been organized around the country on several occasions, but Carmen Miranda para sempre was the most complete exhibition to date.55
Of particular note was the year 2009, the one-hundredth anniversary of the singer’s birth, for which innumerable activities, some of great proportions and impressive ambition, were organized to commemorate Carmen Miranda’s legacy. While many of these initiatives took place in Rio, other cities also participated in the “Miranda year,” creating a large number of creative, eclectic, and wide-ranging events. These events often provided an overview of Miranda’s life and career in Brazil and the United States, but for the most part in Brazil the focus was on her music. Live performances of Miranda’s songs were performed in tributes by Revista do Samba, Edna Pimenta, Carlos Malta and Pife Muderno, Tio Samba, Band 1E99, Pedro Luís and Roberta Sá, Clara Sandroni and Marcos Sacramento, Janaína Moreno, Diana Dasha, Miramar Mangabeira and the band Bola Preta, Janette Dornellas and Bando do Sol, Maria Alcina, Uli Costa and Bando da Rua (a play-on-words with Bando da Lua, Miranda’s “Moon Band”), and many others. Most of these sung tributes were staged for only one or two evenings at a variety of venues, ranging from local nightclubs and bars to concert halls, libraries, museums, and even the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Along with these live presentations, several recordings were released, such as the double CD 100 anos Carmen Miranda, duetos e outras Carmens (100 years of Carmen Miranda, duets and other Carmens; Song BMG/February 2009), Ná Ozzetti’s Balangandãs (MCD/June 2009), and Banda 1E99’s electronic versions in Carmen Miranda (CID/November 2008). Focusing on Carmen Miranda’s days as a radio singer and performing artist in Rio, Carmen, o it brasileiro (Carmen, the Brazilian it girl; dir. Antonio De Bonis) was a musical show that presented songs and spoken text from that earlier period, staged at Rio’s Teatro Rival for the month of November 2009 with Andrea Veiga in the leading role.56 Television was not left out of the circuit of the Carmen Miranda centenary celebrations, with special homages airing throughout the year but particularly around the date of the star’s birth, February 9, on all the major daytime programs.
During this year, numerous special exhibitions were prepared to showcase Carmen Miranda’s life, stardom, and legacy through displays of her costumes, accessories, platform shoes, personal items, photographs, records, magazine covers, and newspaper clippings. The São Paulo Fashion Week (January 2009) used Carmen Miranda’s image as a bold statement for its exhibition, with walls covered floor to ceiling with blown-up photographs of the star, films playing on large screens throughout the space, display cases with show-business and personal items, and several life-size mannequins wearing reproductions mixed with a few originals of some of her stage and film costumes. Many of these items were on loan from the Carmen Miranda Museum. During the centennial year, the role of the Carmen Miranda Museum as a center for educational events, film screenings, debates, and musical shows was paramount, with particularly intense programing the week of February 9. These events were often fortunate to have the participation of Cesar Balbi, the museum’s director and specialist on Carmen Miranda, along with Ruy Castro, Brazil’s foremost expert on the star and author of the most thorough and insightful biography, Carmen—Uma biografia (Carmen—a biography; 2005), who brought his expertise and years of research to debates, film presentations, and the opening ceremony of the week’s commemorative events. For the museum’s centennial exhibition, Carmen, notável para sempre (Carmen, remarkable forever), the sculptor Ulysses Rabelo created several new busts and life-size statues of Miranda to bring the star more vividly to life in her museum.
Since the Carmen Miranda Museum opened its doors, it has been the main public institution to preserve Miranda’s memory. Officially created in 1956 but only inaugurated twenty-one years after her death, on August 5, 1976, the original museum in the Botafogo neighborhood of Rio had a permanent exhibition that showcased a small portion of the over three thousand items it owns, consisting of Miranda’s accessories, personal belongings, shoes, purses, eleven complete costumes from her Hollywood films, hundreds of photographs, newspaper clippings, dozens of magazines whose covers she graced, and recordings of her music. The collection did an excellent job of illustrating Carmen Miranda’s stardom in attractive displays that changed every few months to rotate the Miranda artifacts in the museum’s limited space. Difficult to access in a small, oddly shaped park surrounded by four lanes of traffic, the museum was housed in a concrete, windowless bunker-like building (some have referred to it as a “hat box,” “donut,” or “flying saucer”).57 A refurbished recreation pavilion whose modernist design was the work of the Brazilian architect Afonso Eduardo Reidy (who had also designed the iconic MAM/ Museum of Modern Art), the building was adapted for the museum in 1975 by the architect Ulisses Burlamaqui. In 2016, the Carmen Miranda Museum is being integrated into the new MIS/Museum of Image and Sound on the centrally situated Avenida Atlântica in Copacabana, certainly a more tribute-fitting space.
When Carmen Miranda left Brazil for the United States, she was preoccupied with the distance from her national public as her career embarked in a new direction. When she bid her nation goodbye, she ended her speech by reiterating, “Goodbye, my dear friends. . . . Remember me always. I will never forget you. . . . Goodbye, until we meet again.”58 Generations later, Carmen Miranda continues to be remembered, probably far more than anyone at the time could have ever imagined. Memories of “the remarkable young girl” and the “Brazilian Bombshell” continue vividly in Brazilian and US culture. As we seek to understand her stardom in both countries, it is clearly above and beyond this multiplicity of meanings that Miranda lives on as an easily recognizable image. Carmen Miranda remains present as one of the most beloved voices of Brazilian popular music of all time, a unique film personality in the musicals of Hollywood’s golden age, and a lasting camp icon. Undoubtedly, Carmen Miranda’s long-enduring legacy constantly renews the uniqueness of her visual impact.