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Scott Simon's Essays
The Real Girl from Ipanema
Aug. 11, 2001 -- Is art inspiration or creation? Almost 40 years ago 18-year-old Heloisa Pinheiro walked past a couple of middle-aged men on their way to the beach at Ipanema. She was tall and tan and young and lovely, and has the song to prove it.
Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius De Moraes have always acknowledged that Ms. Pinheiro was the woman they had in mind when they wrote The Girl from Ipanema in 1962. She publicized the song with them. Both men tried to become her lover, and then, after being frustrated, were her best men in 1966 when she married a metallurgical engineer. They told music historians that Heloisa Pinheiro is, quote, "both a flower and a siren full of light and grace."
But light and grace don't always pay the rent. Ms. Pinheiro is now 57. Her husband has lost his job, and their 22-year-old son was born with brain damage and needs special care. She's opened a Girl from Ipanema boutique near the Rio beach, but the descendants of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius De Moraes are suing her to stop using that name and picture she has of herself with the composers, who are both dead. `This store,' Ms. Pinheiro told the New York Times, `is all I have. I can't afford to lose it.'
In the 1960s, Ms. Pinheiro got to make some fun promotional trips, but she earned no money from the song. This weekend, Ipanema residents are rallying in her behalf. But the case the families make may be more sympathetic than it sounds. Is the art in the sway or the song? Heloisa Pinheiro probably passed a good many cabdrivers and office workers each day when she walked to the sea, and all they said was, `Pretty girl, huh?' It took the composers to make the samba of her walk into music. And as unchivalrous as the observation might be, you have to figure that a couple of glandular but gifted middle-aged music makers would have eventually found a muse among the daily parade of young women who sway their way to the Ipanema beach. Heloisa Pinheiro did not own the franchise to being tall and tan and young and lovely.
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