The celebritisation of Carmen Miranda in New York, 1939–41

Abstract

This article considers the process of celebritisation that Carmen Miranda rapidly underwent after arriving in the United States for the first time in 1939. It focuses upon the period she spent in New York (1939–41), performing on Broadway, prior to her move to Hollywood, and examines how she negotiated her move from Brazil to North America via a conscious process of auto-exoticisation, knowingly appropriating the self-tropicalising agenda of the regime of Brazilian president, Getúlio Vargas (1930–45), as exemplified in the Brazilian Pavilion at the World's Fair in New York of 1939–40. It analyses her celebrity text by examining intertexts such as press releases, interviews and reviews published in newspapers and magazines, and interrogates the impact of her involvement in product endorsement, chiefly in the area of women's high-street fashion. It aims to show the extent of her agency in the construction of her celebrity text, focusing in particular upon how her ethnic identity shifted in the move from South to North America, and seeks to offer a historical, evolutionary perspective on the concept of the bicultural celebrity. It concludes that she can be seen as one of the earliest examples of the transnational star, not simply famous in more than one national context but actively employing her inter-hemispheric, no-man's-land position in order to carve out a niche for herself in the US imaginary.

Keywords:

• agency
• Carmen Miranda
• ‘self-exoticisation’
• transnational (bicultural) stardom

Notes

1. Within a year of her arrival Miranda's image was displayed in the leading magazines of the era, such as Life, Pic, Vogue, Esquire and Harper's Bazaar (Freire-Medeiros, 2006: 25).

2. This article takes as a point of departure Graham Huggan's (2001: 13) definition of the exotic and exoticism, as follows: ‘[T]he exotic is not, as is often supposed, an inherent quality to be found “in” certain people, distinctive objects, or specific places; exoticism describes, rather, a particular mode of aesthetic perception – one which renders people, objects and places strange even as it domesticates them, and which effectively manufactures otherness even as it claims to surrender to its immanent mystery. […] Exoticism, in this context, might be described as a kind of semiotic circuit that oscillates between the opposite poles of strangeness and familiarity.’

3. For access to this material I am indebted to the staff of the Shubert Archive, New York City. I would also like to thank Maite Conde for her generous hospitality, without which the archival research for this article could not have been carried out.

4. As Marshall argues (2006: 800), ‘Celebrity performances are not the same as a performance in a play or a film or even as a music performance: They become expressions of individuality in a playing field that is constructed as “real” and specifically beyond those “texts” (although very much influenced by those texts) that we normally think of as performance.’ Davis writes (2000: 237): ‘The relationship between official national representation and commercial entertainment is not easily reconciled, particularly when an artist like Miranda finds herself in a context in which the aesthetic demands of the new audience are fundamentally different from those of the audiences that supported her in Brazil. […] Almost immediately, Miranda's commercial instincts dominated her sense of national representation, and she began performing for the American press.’

5. These first words that Miranda uttered in the United States were reported widely in the press. See, for example, Pringle, 1939. US journalists would continue to delight in the Brazilian singer's malapropisms and in attempting to reproduce her heavily accented English phonetically. Miranda took English lessons on arrival in the United States, even appearing, in the form of a glamorous photograph, in a press advertisement for the Barbizon School of Languages. After her arrival in Hollywood the studios encouraged her to feign a poor grasp of English even when she was a fluent speaker, thus reinforcing the Latin American woman's supposed intellectual inferiority and innate comic, childlike quality. All the evidence suggests that from the outset, however, Miranda was well aware of the power of her flawed speech and deployed it as part and parcel of her emerging star text. As early as 1941 she commented in interview that a foreign ‘accent is an asset’ (Goldberg, 1941).

6. Brazilian heat wave radiates: Carmen Miranda takes on inquiring reporter. New York Sun, 27 July 1939.

7. In Hollywood Miranda would consolidate her role as de facto Latin American ambassador in a series of ‘Good Neighbour’ musicals made by Twentieth Century Fox. The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, created in 1944 and headed by Nelson Rockefeller, had a motion pictures division, directed by John Hay Whitney, which promoted the use of cinema to foster closer links and greater understanding between the United States and Latin American nations. In addition to sponsoring the production of newsreels and documentaries for distribution in Latin America, the division actively encouraged the Hollywood studios to produce feature films with Latin American themes, settings and stars.

8. It was Maxwell Jay Rice, regional director of Pan American Airlines in Brazil, and his wife Claiborne, US residents of Rio de Janeiro, who were responsible for bringing Miranda to the attention of Shubert, who after seeing her perform at the upmarket Urca casino in Rio in February 1939 signed her to his theatrical empire.

9. Miranda was actually 30 years old when she arrived in the United States. Other inconsistencies appear in Greneker's press releases, such as the transformation of her father's profession from barber to wholesaler of foodstuffs, more specifically cheese and fruits, and later sales representative (Mendonça, 1999: 74).

10. See, for example, Davis, 2000: 243–244, and Roberts, 1993: 16.

11. Tonight's the night! Miranda will see herself burlesqued: Brazilian to be in a box as Imogene Coca sings ‘The Souse American Way’, New York Herald Tribune, 22 October 1939.

12. See, for example, López, 1993, and Roberts, 1993. Both authors argue convincingly, however, that in spite of the regressive stereotypes of Latin Americans and of women that her screen roles endorsed, Miranda subverted them via knowing exaggeration and self-parody. In Roberts's view, Miranda's appeal and fame were founded, in part at least, on the possibility for negotiated or subversive readings by fans (1993: 18–19). López (1993: 78) writes: ‘Miranda's textual persona escapes the narrow parameters of the Good Neighbor. As a willing participant in the production of these self-conscious ethnographic texts, Miranda literally asserted her own voice in the textual operations that defined her as the “other”. Transforming, mixing, ridiculing, and redefining her own difference against the expected standards, Miranda's speaking voice, songs, and accents create an “other” text that is in counterpoint to the principal textual operations. She does not burst the illusory bubble of the Good Neighbor, but by inflating it beyond recognition she highlights its status as a discursive construct, as a mimetic myth.’

13. López (1993: 76–78) explores in depth Miranda's covert agency within her screen performances in Hollywood, particularly how she uses her voice, accent, linguistic code-switching and malapropisms. She writes (77): ‘Miranda's voice, rife with cultural impurities and disturbing syncretisms, slips through the webs of Hollywood's colonial and ethnographic authority over the constitution and definition of “otherness”.’

14. The figure of the baiana has a long history in Brazil. This outfit was worn traditionally by the black female street vendors of the city of Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia and main port of entry for African slaves during the colonial period. It is essentially a synthesis of diverse African traditions present in the city, and a fashion that was developed by both enslaved and free black women incorporating elements of Portuguese colonial dress styles (Ligiero Coelho, 1998: 90). By 1939, when Miranda first appeared on screen in the costume, in the Brazilian film Banana da terra (Banana of the Land), real-life baianas could be found not only selling food on the streets of Rio and Salvador, but also leading the rituals of the Afro-Brazilian religion, candomblé, or in the ranks of Rio's so-called samba schools, the neighbourhood carnival groups, paying homage to the Bahian women, such as Tia Ciata, responsible for bringing samba from the North East to the capital and subsequently the rest of the nation in the first decades of the twentieth century. The adoption of this character and the costume with which she is synonymous within the world of popular entertainment in Brazil is similarly long-standing. At the end of the nineteenth century Plácida dos Santos was the first Afro-Brazilian star to impersonate the baiana on the stage of the teatro de revista (Brazil's equivalent of vaudeville) when singing and dancing the black musical forms maxixe and lundu. Her version of the costume became the prototype for later incarnations in popular theatrical revues, which rarely failed to feature this persona in the 1920s and 1930s (Ligiero Coelho, 1998: 91–92). On stage the baiana became associated closely with the mixed-race star Araci Cortes, whose costumes were very similar to those later adopted by Miranda.

15. As Ligiero Coelho states: ‘Miranda's skirt in The Streets of Paris (1939) showed four triangular cut-outs through which parts of her belly and hips could be seen, a style that was considered very sexy at the time’ (1998: 97). This cut-out device was also used in her Hollywood movies Down Argentine Way (1940) and Weekend in Havana (1941) (Ligiero Coelho, 1998: 98–99).

16. ‘The Streets of Paris’ fast and hilarious. Chicago Daily Tribune, 15 April 1940, p. 14.

17. New shows in Manhattan. Time, 3 July 1939, pp. 42–43. See also Pollock, 1939: 7. Both cited in Sandoval-Sánchez, 1999: 39.

18. When Miranda returned to Brazil in 1940, in spite of her runaway success in the United States she received the cold shoulder from the upscale audience at a charity show at the Urca casino. The spectators reacted frostily to her greeting them in English, and were not impressed by her performance of the Broadway rumba, ‘South American Way’. Visibly distressed by this reaction, she cancelled all further shows at the casino. It seems no coincidence that two months later, in September 1940, she chose to return to this stage alongside the very dark-skinned Afro-Brazilian entertainer Grande Otelo, with whom she performed several new sambas, self-consciously aligning herself with Afro-Brazilian culture. Adopting the persona of the Afro-Brazilian baiana again in her lyrics (not just her costume), she sang Dorival Caymmi's ‘Dengo que a nega tem’ (‘That special something that black women have’) to rapturous applause. As McCann writes (2004: 149): ‘Miranda won them over by distancing herself from her American success and reasserting her music's Afro-Brazilian roots’.

19. As Molina Guzmán and Valdivia (2004: 211) write: ‘Tropicalism erases specificity and homogenizes all that is identified as Latin and Latina/o. Under the trope of tropicalism, attributes such as bright colors, rhythmic music, and brown or olive skin comprise some of the most enduring stereotypes about Latina/os, a stereotype best embodied by the excesses of Carmen Miranda and the hypersexualization of Ricky Martin’. They cite extravagant jewellery, bright seductive clothing, curvaceous hips and a focus on the area below the navel, as among the key aspects of the trope of tropicalism or tropicalisation in its feminised form. See also Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman, 1997.

20. There is ample evidence to suggest that this architectural representation of Brazil was designed to fulfil US expectations with regard to a perceived Brazilian essentialism. In a letter to Oswaldo Aranha, Brazilian ambassador to the United States, dated 18 June 1938, Francisco Silva Jr, a resident of New York, criticises the plans for a ‘majestic, austere and classical’ pavilion. He tellingly adds: ‘The Americans are expecting a Brazilian pavilion – light, simple, with a tropical atmosphere, with rare birds, regional vegetation, and so on’. Document consulted at the Centre for Research and Documentation (CPDOC), Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro. In an unsigned letter stored in the same archive, dated 9 December 1938, on headed paper from the Great Northern Hotel, New York, Oswaldo Aranha is given advice regarding the choice of music to be played in the pavilion, which should be performed by a ‘typical Brazilian band brought over from Brazil, not composed of blacks but rather the whitest possible good musicians [and] folkloric female singers like Carmen Miranda’. The letter also makes reference to samba's popularity in New York even prior to Miranda's arrival.

21. Miranda's contract with Shubert prevented her from becoming the official ambassadress of Brazilian popular music and singing at the Fair. Her musicians, the Bando da Lua, however, were invited to be part of Brazil's official musical delegation, and their travel to New York was paid for by the Vargas regime's Press and Propaganda Department. They performed on the day the restaurant at the Brazilian Pavilion was officially opened. However, according to Aloysio de Oliveira in his memoirs, the band were unable to meet their commitments to play in the Pavilion due to their rehearsals and performances for ‘Streets of Paris’ in Boston (Oliveira, 1982: 71). When it was announced in Brazil that the nation would be represented at the Fair, Miranda began a discreet campaign to be chosen to appear at the opening of the Brazilian pavilion and its restaurant (Gil-Montero, 1989: 76). During her time on America's East Coast between 1939 and 1941 Miranda attended a number of official engagements in the de facto role of Brazilian cultural envoy. On 5 March 1940, for example, she was invited to perform at a dinner for the President and Mrs Roosevelt at the Carlton Hotel in Washington DC, the Washington residence of Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

22. In an interview with the Brazilian newspaper Diário de Notícias (no date) she stated: ‘I have been given the great opportunity and honour to promote Brazilian culture. This will be the first important chance for samba. Thus I am going to do my utmost to get it right, so that Brazil's popular music conquers North America, which would lead to its consecration all over the world. […] And I am taking with me six snazzy baiana outfits […] I've done everything to ensure that our music and the baiana are a hit over there’ (author's translation).

23. Schools to pour 125,000 into Fair. New York Times, 27 October 1939, p. 16.

24. Virginia Worden, Wilmington, Delaware, cited in Cohen, Heller and Chwast, 1989: 16.

25. The discourse of the Good Neighbour Policy was used widely to promote Miranda's career. In the playbill for the ‘Sons O’ Fun’ during its run at the Broadhurst Theatre, for example, she is described as having done ‘more to cement Pan-American relations than a boatload of diplomats’.

26. Section 8, 16.

27. When the effects of the Wall Street Crash had dissipated, the Vargas regime restructured Brazil's economy to embrace exports of raw materials to the United States. Coffee, threatened by the closure of European markets as the Second World War loomed, needed an increase in its export sales that only the United States could provide.

28. Correio da manhã, 9 May 1939 (author's translation).

29. Miranda's synoptic embodiment of Latin American natural abundance reached its zenith in the Busby Berkeley visual extravaganza The Gang's All Here (1943), in the number ‘The Lady with the Tutti-Frutti Hat’, in which she is dwarfed by a set dominated by gigantic bananas and other fruit. As Shohat and Stam (2002: 158) write: ‘The final idealized image of her as a virtual fertility goddess reverberates textually with the opening of the number where very material goods from the South are unloaded in the US; the North here celebrates the South as the fecund feminine principle that gives birth to the goods the North consumes’, with the bananas enacting ‘the agricultural reductionism of Latin America's monocultural products’ in addition to their phallic symbolism.

30. As Pereira de Sá writes (2002: 119), ‘Carmen Miranda and her baiana dialogue, thus, in perfect harmony with the whole context of the emerging national musical culture of the 1930s’ (author's translation).

31. As Gil-Montero (1989: 122) underlines, the members of her band were middle-class white men, and on their second visit to the United States the only member who was married to a black woman remained in Brazil. ‘As they were not dark-skinned and fit in easily in luxurious surroundings, they complied very well with the requirements for class identification’ (author's translation).

32. The turban retailed at an affordable $US 2.77 (Gil-Montero, 1989: 91).

33. In a sense, Miranda had already broken down the baiana persona/costume into its more emblematic components when she first performed the song ‘O que é que a baiana tem?’, the lyrics of which referred explicitly to each element of the outfit. As Costa Garcia argues (2004: 111), the fragmentation of the outfit of the baiana in this song paved the way for Miranda's creative bricolage of elements of the look in her screen roles, allowing the baiana to be constantly reinvented for US audiences.

34. Elsewhere in this study, the same respondent recalls ‘I had a pair of Carmen Miranda platform shoes with ankle straps’ (Stacey, 1994: 200).

35. In this film, Miranda appears only briefly on a nightclub stage in an apocryphal Buenos Aires, performing ‘South American Way’ in a sequence that stands apart from the narrative proper, effectively a ‘show within the film’. She sings entirely in Portuguese, has no dialogue, and does not interact with any of the film's characters. Due to her busy schedule on the East Coast, Twentieth Century Fox sent a crew to film these scenes in New York.

36. For Roberts, fans who mimicked Miranda via the consumption of products she endorsed, and even by altering their accents when speaking English, ‘physically perform the Miranda masquerade, highlighting for themselves the artificiality of the stereotypes that interpellate them in their everyday life’ (1993: 18).

37. As Negra (2001: 11) writes, in relation to Hollywood stars, ‘The extent to which representations of ethnic femininity facilitated the fantasy of evasion from cultural strictures that disempowered American women cannot be gauged, but it remains a resonant possibility’.

38. Miranda's promotion of the baiana look led United Fruit Company advertising executives to create, in 1944, Chiquita Banana, ‘a half-banana, half-woman cartoon character’, still used to promote the ‘tropical’ products of the company, now known as United Brands (Enloe, 1990: 128–129).

39. Author's translation.

40. For further discussion of the concepts of border crossing and crossover in relation to contemporary Latino/a popular music stars in the United States see Cepeda (2003). Miranda's negotiation of non-whiteness for US audiences may also elucidate a diachronic understanding of how and why the star texts of the likes of López, Aguilera, Ricky Martin and Marc Anthony today rely upon what Cepeda (2003: 121) calls the ‘appearance of “whiteness” ’ to gain acceptance among mainstream audiences.