Chapter 1The Hat

Foreword

I have spent my working life writing about performers who got to cross over. The ones for whom a door already existed, however narrow, however watched. It took me most of that career to think seriously about who had stood at the door first — before it was a door, when it was only the place in the wall where an entire hemisphere was pressing and nothing had yet given way. When I finally turned and looked, the person standing there was wearing a hat piled with fruit.

Carmen Miranda is not mine. Not in the way the subjects I have written about before are mine. She was born in Portugal and raised in Rio de Janeiro; she did not come from my Texas, my language, or my music. I want to say that plainly at the start, because the easy version of this book would have reached for kinship, and there is none to reach for. What there is, instead, is a debt — one the performers I built a career covering carried whether or not they knew its name, and one that runs across a distance of country, of decade, of race that I would rather measure than paper over. This is not a book about a woman like us. It is a book about the woman who walked first so that the road could exist for anyone at all.

I expected, going in, to write about a victim. The record makes that easy. The highest-paid woman in the United States in 1944, and a joke in every film she made. Two hundred and eighty-one recordings in Brazil, and not one of them known to the country that put her face on its screens. A serious musician turned into a wiggle and an accent, rejected by the country she left for being too American and by the country that took her in for being too Brazilian. It is a victim's ledger, and every line of it is true.

But victim is not a word that can hold her, and I found that out early. Because Carmen Miranda understood the bargain she was making. She made it with her eyes open. She knew the hat was eating her and she wore it anyway, six days a week, because it fed an entire family and because the alternative to being the cartoon was being nobody at all. To call that victimhood is to take the last thing she had — the choosing — and hand it back to the people who reduced her.

This is what the fruit hat hides, and it is the thing the title of this book points at. A door opened and a cage gilded can look identical from the outside. She was the first Latin American performer Hollywood ever invited to press her hands into the cement at Grauman's; she was also the first it locked into a single face and would not let out. She proved a Latina could sell tickets, top a marquee, out-earn every woman in the country — and she paid for the proof with the whole of her own life, so that the terms might be a little less cruel for whoever came after. Every Latina performer who has since had to fight her way out of the sexy sidekick, the tropical novelty, the accent played for laughs, is fighting her way out of a room Miranda was the first to enter and the first to die in. That is a debt. I do not think it can be repaid. I wrote this to see its size.

I worked from the record any biographer of a public woman works from: the films and the recordings themselves, the published memoirs of the people who stood near her, the court filings and studio paperwork, the newspaper morgues of two countries that could not agree on what she was. Where the record falls silent — and around a woman who performed every waking hour, it falls silent often — I have said so rather than filled it in. The caricature can survive on invention. The person cannot.

She belongs on that Latin Music Legends stamp beside Selena, beside Celia Cruz, beside Gardel and Puente — the ones I have spent a lifetime insisting the record take seriously. But she is the outlier among them, and the outlier is the reason for this book: she is the one whose image the whole world knows and whose music almost no one has heard. That gap, between the face everyone can draw from memory and the voice no one can name, is the exact shape of what was done to her. This book tries to close it.

— Esperanza Villalobos, San Antonio, Texas

Chapter 1 · The Hat

There is a hat. You have seen it. Everyone has seen it. It sits on top of a small woman with large eyes and an enormous smile, and it is piled with bananas and strawberries and grapes and pineapples and sometimes oranges, sometimes cherries, sometimes things that are not fruit at all but beads and sequins and silk flowers and feathers, a cornucopia so absurd and so towering that the woman beneath it disappears. That is the point. The hat is the whole act, the whole career, the whole legacy. Carmen Miranda, and you know the name even if you know nothing else, is the woman under the fruit. She has been the woman under the fruit for seven decades. She is the origin of every Latina caricature in American entertainment, the punchline of every joke about Latin American exoticism, the first and most enduring image that Hollywood created to represent an entire hemisphere. The hat weighs approximately five pounds. The myth weighs considerably more.

The fruit was always artificial. This is the first fact about the hat: none of what she wore on her head was real. The bananas were silk or plastic, the strawberries papier-mâché, the grapes glass beads. The headdresses were engineered objects, constructed in the studio wardrobe department by craftswomen who understood structural load, center of gravity, and the minimum wire gauge required to hold an arrangement that sometimes extended eighteen inches above a human skull. Carmen Miranda herself, who had been a professional milliner in Rio de Janeiro before she became a professional performer, understood construction. She had worked in a hat shop on the Rua da Carioca in the mid-1920s. She knew how hats were made. The ones she wore in Hollywood were among the most technically complex objects ever placed on a performer's head, and she wore them eight hours a day, six days a week, on studio lots where the temperature in the Technicolor lighting could exceed one hundred degrees.

What the hat obscures is this: the woman wearing it was the most important cultural ambassador in the history of the Western Hemisphere. The Internal Revenue Service confirmed in 1945 that Miranda had earned $201,000 the previous year — making her the highest-paid woman in the United States. The figure is not a rounding error or a rumor. It is a documented federal tax record. The woman who has been remembered as a comic novelty act was, in the year the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, earning more than Eleanor Roosevelt, more than Katharine Hepburn, more than Lana Turner, more than every female executive in every industry in the most powerful country on earth. She was thirty-six years old. She had been in the United States for six years. She did not speak English without an accent. And she earned more than every woman in America.

This is not hyperbole. Before Carmen Miranda arrived in New York in May 1939, there was no meaningful popular cultural bridge between Latin America and the United States. North Americans knew almost nothing about Brazilian music, Brazilian film, Brazilian anything. South Americans consumed Hollywood films but had no reciprocal presence on American stages or screens. The cultural exchange was entirely one-directional, the colossus of the north broadcast, and the south received. Miranda reversed this. She brought samba to Broadway, Bahian dress to Technicolor, Portuguese-accented English to the American vernacular. She made Latin America visible in American popular culture for the first time. She became, briefly, the most famous woman in the Western Hemisphere, the highest-paid woman in American entertainment, and the single most recognized face associated with South America in the minds of three hundred million North Americans.

And then the hat ate her alive.

The story of Carmen Miranda is the story of what happens when a genuine artist is consumed by the image an empire creates for her. It is the story of a Portuguese immigrant who became the most beloved singer in Brazilian history, who was plucked from Rio de Janeiro and delivered to Broadway and Hollywood, who was costumed and choreographed and marketed and reduced until the person vanished and only the persona remained, and who died at forty-six, her heart giving out within hours of performing a dance number filmed for television, still being exactly what America had decided she was.

The hat was not her idea. Or rather, the hat was her idea, but not that hat. The turbans and the fruit and the Bahian jewelry that Miranda wore in Brazil were adaptations of the dress of the Baianas, the Afro-Brazilian women of Bahia whose samba de roda was the musical tradition Miranda brought to mainstream Brazilian audiences in the 1930s. In Brazil, the costume was cultural homage, complicated, sometimes appropriative, but rooted in a specific tradition and a specific musical practice. In Hollywood, the costume became a cartoon. The fruit got bigger. The platform shoes got taller. The colors got louder. The accent got thicker. The roles got smaller. By 1945, Carmen Miranda was the highest-paid woman in the American entertainment industry, and she was playing the same part in every film: the comic Latina, the samba-dancing sidekick, the woman who existed to be laughed at between the serious scenes performed by serious white actors.

She knew what was happening. This is the detail that the caricature cannot accommodate: Miranda was intelligent, self-aware, and increasingly desperate. She understood that she was trapped. She understood that the persona Hollywood had built for her was a prison she could not escape, because the studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, would not cast her in any other kind of role, and no other studio would cast her at all without the hat and the fruit and the accent and the samba. She understood that she had become a joke. She also understood that the joke paid extraordinarily well, and that she supported her entire extended family on its proceeds, and that the alternative to being Carmen Miranda the Cartoon was being Carmen Miranda the Unemployed Former Star.

She drank. She took Benzedrine, the amphetamine of choice in mid-century Hollywood, and barbiturates to sleep. She married David Alfred Sebastian in March 1947 at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, a man who managed her career badly and her money worse. She gained weight. She lost sleep. She performed. The Library of Congress selected her 1943 film The Gang's All Here, directed by Busby Berkeley, for permanent preservation in the National Film Registry in December 2014, recognizing it as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Berkeley's number "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" — which featured Miranda surrounded by forty dancers carrying giant bananas while an overhead camera transformed the human figures into abstract geometric patterns — remains one of the most recognizable two minutes in the history of American cinema. Miranda received no additional compensation when the Chiquita Banana character, created by the United Fruit Company in 1944, was modeled directly on the same image. The company that produced the mascot, which controlled banana production across Central America through economic coercion so complete that its operating countries were called "banana republics," paid Miranda nothing. The fruit hat had escaped her ownership and entered the world.

On the evening of August 4, 1955, Carmen Miranda appeared on The Jimmy Durante Show, a variety program filmed for NBC. She was forty-six years old. She wore the platform shoes. She danced a number with Durante. During the dance, she dropped to one knee, a stumble that she disguised as a choreographic flourish, because she was disguising pain as performance for her entire American career. The audience laughed. She finished the number. She went home.

She died in the early hours of August 5. The cause was a heart attack. She was found that morning on her bedroom floor, still holding the small mirror she had been using when she collapsed. She was forty-six years old. She weighed less than she had weighed in a decade. Her heart, an autopsy would reveal, was enlarged and scarred.

Brazil mourned her as though she were a head of state. More than half a million people lined the streets of Rio de Janeiro for her funeral procession, the largest such gathering in the city's history to that point. The Brazilian government declared a national day of mourning. Newspapers that had mocked her for becoming too American now praised her as the greatest ambassador Brazil had ever produced. The country that had rejected her reclaimed her in death.

In America, she was a footnote. A funny accent. A fruit hat.

This biography is an act of recovery. Its subject is not the hat. Its subject is Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha, born in Marco de Canaveses, Portugal, on February 9, 1909, the daughter of a barber who left for Brazil and the wife who followed with their children. Its subject is a girl who grew up in the Lapa neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, who dropped out of school to work in a tie shop, who sang in her spare time and was discovered and became, by the age of twenty-one, the best-selling recording artist in Brazilian history. Its subject is a musician, a serious musician, whose phrasing, whose rhythmic sense, whose ability to communicate emotion through a lyric made her the voice of Brazilian popular music during the nation's most self-consciously nationalist decade. Its subject is a cultural innovator who brought Afro-Brazilian samba to white Brazilian audiences and then to American audiences and then to global audiences, functioning as the single most effective ambassador for a musical tradition that had been marginalized within its own country.

Its subject is also a woman who suffered. Who was caught between two countries that each demanded she be something she was not. Who watched herself become a caricature and could not stop it. Who medicated the pain and performed through it and died of it.

The received narrative of Carmen Miranda reduces a life of extraordinary complexity to a visual gag. She was the woman with the fruit on her head. She was the funny Brazilian. She danced and wiggled and mangled English and everyone laughed. This narrative has been sustained for seventy years because it is convenient: it allows American culture to avoid examining what it did to Carmen Miranda, and it allows Brazilian culture to avoid examining what it wanted from her. The hat is a distraction. It has always been a distraction.

The biography you are about to read takes the hat off.

What is underneath is more interesting, more painful, more important, and more beautiful than anything that was piled on top.

The 2016 Summer Olympics closing ceremony in Rio de Janeiro included a tribute to Miranda, with singer Roberta Sá portraying her before a global audience. On February 9, 2017, Google honored what would have been her 108th birthday with a Google Doodle. In 2009, on the centenary of Miranda's birth, Brazilian singer Daniela Mercury recorded a duet with her, overlaying her own vocals onto Miranda's 1939 recording of "O Que É Que a Baiana Tem?" — a woman singing across seventy years of silence. In 2011, the United States Postal Service placed Miranda on a Latin Music Legends stamp alongside Selena Quintanilla, Celia Cruz, Carlos Gardel, and Tito Puente. She had been on the Hollywood Walk of Fame since at least the 1970s, at the 6262 block of Hollywood Boulevard. In September 1998, a square in Hollywood was named Carmen Miranda Square, at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Orange Drive, across the street from Grauman's Chinese Theatre, where Miranda had left her handprints on March 24, 1941, becoming the first Latin American performer ever invited to do so. These are the posthumous tributes. The woman herself was never given a dramatic role. She was never nominated for an Academy Award. She was never profiled in an American newspaper as anything except a novelty.

Consider for a moment the scale of the erasure. Carmen Miranda recorded approximately 281 songs for the Victor and Odeon labels between 1929 and 1939, during her decade of Brazilian supremacy, a body of work that constitutes one of the most significant catalogs in the history of Latin American popular music. These recordings are the work of a vocalist of extraordinary sophistication, a singer whose rhythmic phrasing, whose dynamic control, whose ability to communicate emotion through the specific music of the Portuguese language placed her among the finest popular vocalists of the twentieth century in any language. How many of these recordings has the average American heard? Zero. How many of these recordings are discussed in the standard American accounts of popular music history? Zero. The woman whose image is recognized by hundreds of millions of people worldwide is, as a musician, virtually unknown outside Brazil.

This is not an accident of history. It is a consequence of a specific process, the process by which the American entertainment industry consumed Carmen Miranda's talent, extracted from it a visual spectacle, and discarded the rest. The fruit hat is what survived because the fruit hat is what America wanted. The music, the actual art, the actual work, the actual thing that made Carmen Miranda a genius, was irrelevant to the American project. The American project was spectacle, and spectacle does not require music. It requires images. Miranda provided an image so powerful that it obliterated everything else about her, including the reason she mattered.

This biography exists to reverse the obliteration. It does not argue that the spectacle was unimportant, it was, in its way, remarkable, and Miranda's ability to command a camera was genuine and rare. But it argues that the spectacle was the least significant aspect of a life and a career that were, in total, among the most consequential in the cultural history of the Americas. It argues that the woman who has been remembered as a joke was, in fact, an artist of the first rank, a cultural ambassador of unprecedented importance, and a human being whose suffering at the hands of the systems that exploited her deserves not just sympathy but the kind of serious examination that her talent and her significance demand.

The woman under the fruit was the most significant Latin American cultural figure in the twentieth century, and she has been buried under bananas for seven decades. It is time to see her face.