Though “The Girl from Ipanema” shot 24-year-old Astrud Gilberto to worldwide fame in 1964, the Brazilian singer was overshadowed by another figure in her home country. Instead of idolising the song’s performer, everyone in Rio de Janeiro seemed to be obsessing over the girl in the title. Who was “she”?
In 1965, the song’s co-writer Vinicius de Moraes grew tired of the speculation and all the women pretending to be The Girl and held a press conference to reveal his inspiration’s identity. Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, also called Helô, lived on Montenegro Street, near Ipanema beach. De Moraes and his long-time collaborator, pianist Antônio Carlos Jobim, often gawked at her from the Veloso bar as she ran errands for her parents.
At the time, the pair were working together on a musical comedy and wrote “Menina que Passa” (“The Girl Who Passes By”), a song about a lonely Martian who lands in Rio in the midst of carnival and marvels at the beauty of a young woman. At his press conference, De Moraes explained that Helô’s hip-swing defied “spatial geometry” and escaped “even Einstein’s grasp”. She was “a golden teenage girl, a mixture of flower and mermaid, full of light and grace, the sight of whom is also sad, in that she carries with her, on her route to the sea, the feeling of youth that fades, of the beauty that is not ours alone.”
Today, De Moraes’s description comes across as creepy — he was nearly 50, she was a teenager. But back in the 1960s, Helô’s hip-swing helped popularise Brazilian music across the world.
While Jobim and De Moraes’s extraterrestrial musical comedy never took off, “Menina que Passa” was recorded in 1962 by Brazilian singer Pery Ribeiro under the title “Garota de Ipanema” (“Girl from Ipanema”). In 1963 Jobim teamed up with guitarist and singer João Gilberto (who died earlier this year) and saxman Stan Getz in New York to record an album, which included the now-retitled “The Girl from Ipanema”.
The full-length album version of the song opens with Gilberto strumming his guitar and singing in Portuguese; then comes a verse in English written by Norman Gimbel and sung by João Gilberto’s then wife, Astrud Gilberto. She had never sung professionally before, but it was her untrained, beguiling voice that made the song (along with Getz’s breathy sax solo). A shortened version of the song, featuring only Astrud’s voice, was released as a single and was a worldwide hit, and came to define an entire genre, bossa nova, blending Brazilian samba with jazz and blues.
By the time the song won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1965, bossa nova was in decline in Brazil. The light, frivolous sound was eclipsed by more politically charged tropicalia music that responded to the country’s slide into dictatorship.
In the US, however, bossa nova appealed to jazz singers such as Frank Sinatra who, when he recorded the song as a duet with Jobim, said he had not “sung so soft since [he] had the laryngitis”. Ella Fitzgerald, and Nancy Wilson before her, also sent the tan and tall figure walking, but this time as a boy.
Girl or boy, the track is one of the most recorded songs in history. Artists such as Madonna, South Korean band Shinee and Maroon 5 have sung it while performing in Rio. “The Girl from Ipanema” was also the first song 18-year-old Amy Winehouse recorded when she travelled to Miami to work on her debut album, Frank.
But the song also came to be associated with easy listening and elevator music. Film-maker John Landis turned it into a comic movie trope by using the song in several elevator scenes in his films.
Meanwhile, Helô became something of a national star, joining footballer Pelé as one of Brazil’s goodwill ambassadors. But if “The Girl from Ipanema” glorifies love and beauty, the story of its making is as tangled as a Brazilian soap opera. Jobim did actually fall in love with the girl, who rejected him repeatedly. Even as a married man, he would joke that he had only married his wife Ana Lontra because she looked like Helô.
In 2001, years after the two composers had died, Helô was sued for using the name “Garota de Ipanema” for her clothing boutique. The court eventually ruled in her favour, confirming Helô’s status as an icon. To this day, the muse-turned-businesswoman proclaims herself the “eternal girl from Ipanema” on her Instagram page.
What are your memories of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Puzzle Productions; Verve Reissues; UMC (Universal Music Catalogue); Capitol Catalog; EMI Catalogue; Universal-Island Records Ltd
Picture credit: PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images