They complained that her hat was too high. She was the one that was too high, according to Kenneth Anger’s book ‘Hollywood Babylon’: Carmen Miranda had cocaine stashed into hollows in her platform heels, and was seriously addicted.
I made a piece of artwork (which was shown in Portugal) based on Carmen Miranda’s heritage, called “I’m Not Really From Brazil” – the words were spelled out on her bandana/hat/headgear fruit-bowl. This was at the special request of Pablo Leon de La Barra who I am unable to resist. So this year when he asked me if he could show that piece at the Carmen Miranda Museum in Rio – and did I have anything else? – I went to work.
South America. Think of some women who represent South America and you will be hard-pushed to name five without the services of the internet. The most obvious is Portuguese-born Carmen, followed by (thanks to That Song) Eva Peron. I wondered what would have happened to the displaced Carmen Miranda had she landed up in Mexico instead, and drew the picture you see here. An alternative idea was a nether-region “Brazilian” based on an idea of a tattooed depiction of her fruity chapeaux placed with the odd hairy outcrop representing foliage on a (female) pubis, but you may understand why I went for the former (simpler yet more subtly complicated) idea instead.
Back in the day, when I was a juvenile New Romantic/embryonic senile delinquent, I obsessively scoured magazines like The Face, Blitz and New Sounds New Styles for what music to listen to. And what to wear: like skinny or fat/kipper- ties, cummerbunds and shoulder-pads, high waists or low waists on trousers, hats?, pointy shoes etc. Smash Hits and NME reflected the world of pop like the broadsheets and tabloids covered politics. Via this limited media-land I came across Kid Creole and the Coconuts. I think it was the NME who first promoted them, but I never will forget The Face interview with Kid Creole about genital herpes. It put the whole world off sex for a long time. It was revolting. It was about two years before AIDS came out. Oh hold on, am I getting my chronology confused here? Anyway, I saw a Kid Creole single in a reduced 25p rack in my local record shop (where nobody bought anything), and bought it on a hearsay offchance. It was ‘Latin Music’.“Uh – oh. It’s CAR-A-MEN MI –RAN – DA. The CO – CO –NUTS got a brand new CHA – CHA. OH NO! The rumba and the samba. Whatever happened to the Hullaballoo?”
I had already encountered Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band (Kid Creole’s first big band), and Ze Records’ (their highly trendy label) bitter, jaded, desolee vamp Christina Monet (of ‘Is That All There Is?’ fame) previously. I remember now: I first heard Kid Creole in a year I fail to recall. I must have been 18. I think the cleaner at the pub/so-called Cocktail Bar I worked in had a market stall selling jumpers, and she took me back to her bloke’s one lunchtime to “try” weed. That was it. Anyway, I took a big toke on this dramatically oversized spliff and nearly fell over while listening to the orchestrated introduction to ‘Annie I’m Not Your Daddy on the album. That is one heaven of an aural build-up, stoned or not. I was stoned for the first time. I passed out at their place and was so useless on my evening shift that I got sent home with no pay. I was crap at making excuses for myself in those days. God knows what I looked like too. The manager must have realised what had gone on. Where was I?
I suppose I was introduced to Carmen Miranda as a kid watching old Bob Hope and Busby Berkeley movies on telly. My grannies’ pals and my mother’s theatrical cohorts would sing her songs – drunk or sober.
I certainly remember exploding with laughter at Stanley Baxter’s impersonation of her, phallic bananas and all; but after re-watching Carmen doing her stuff on Youtube, I feel that she out-camps even him. I bet that Stanley Baxter realised that any drag version of Carmen Miranda was never going to be as over-the-top camp as the real thing. She remains a very good example of what Beyond Parody is. When someone takes something kitsch/camp to such an extreme then there really isn’t anywhere further to take it. It would be like trying to do a parody of Divine. You just couldn’t. Baxter ably lampooned camp divas like Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland but probably found he had little material to work with regarding the fabulously OTT Carmen.
Carmen had The Glance; she had The Stare. She could slide her tongue in-and-out of her cheek while rolling her eyes and raising an eyebrow simultaneously -faster than ten queens on speed. Her songs were generally banal, but irresistible. I like the ones she did with the Andrews Sisters (gee I’m Camp!) and of course her Busby Berkley numbers are enormously climactic. With lots of sceno-graphical bananas.
Oddly, when I was in Vienna recently (ok that is quite odd too); I met a couple of men who found the Carmen Miranda Museum in Rio to be a let-down. “Shoddy,” said Bolton Man, “about two frocks and a couple of cabinets of sheet music and photos. Pathetic. Not her at all. Not Carmen Proper. Not a proper tribute to Carmen Miranda at all.” Thanks to Pablo this is now no longer the case. His involvement has produced a great big banananormous tutti-frutti hat of Carmen-related exotica to peruse. Follow the link to his blog for more photos. I-I-I-I-I-I like this very much!
http://centrefortheaestheticrevolution.blogspot.com
