The Brazilian Suzy King, whose real name is Georgina Pires Sampaio, but was also Diva Rios, Jacuí Japurá, and Jackie Bailey, is one of those larger-than-life people whose persona is undoubtedly more interesting than the person. She was a singer, exotic dancer, snake charmer, fakir, painter, dance teacher, and a writer of plays. In none of these activities was she outstanding for her talent or beauty. So why a blog, a book and a movie on her?
Because Suzy was a prodigy in the art of self-promotion, as were her most successful contemporaries Elvira Pagã and Luz del Fuego. Each of her acts became a newspaper headline. She fights with the landlady of a rooming house. She fights with street women. She fights with the Censorship Service. Her snakes escape to the neighbors apartments. Her clothes are torn off by the mob during her Lady Godiva parade half-naked on horseback on Avenida Rio Branco. She is caught red-handed when she is a fakir trying to escape before the end of a public fast. A popular figure in the Brazilian press’ scandal columns and a veteran known to the Rio de Janeiro’s police stations.
In 1966, she disappears from the stage. And resurfaces in Mexico as Jacuí, Queen of the Amazon. And then married to an American (also a sui generis character) in the United States, where she dies alone in 1985 in a trailer in Chula Vista, San Diego, California. Filmmaker John Waters would love that ending.
This very particular character fascinated the Albertos, who for eight years undertook detailed research on Suzy and her era to reconstitute her trajectory. They located the bad girl’s old acquaintances including her son, a philosophical street dweller, and collected abundant iconographic material.
It is an almost unknown universe, that of Brazilian burlesque, currently in the throes of extinction and barely documented.
(by João Carlos Rodrigues, writer and journalist)
THE ALBERTOS (Alberto Camarero & Alberto de Oliveira) are a duo of historians and cultural producers dedicated to salvaging Brazil’s national artistic memory through books, films, shows, and events.
The duo has a series of blogs that disseminate their historical research, bringing to light performers who have been forgotten and marginalized by official culture.
The passion of both Albertos for Suzy King generated this blog, the book "Suzy King, the Pythoness of Modernity" (2021) and the feature film "The Lady Who Died in the Trailer", which was screened for the first time in 2020.
The content of this blog was translated from the Portuguese by Arlette Afagbegee.
To contact the Albertos, write to the e-mail:
alberto1992oliveira@gmail.com
To read online the book "Suzy King, the Pythoness of Modernity" in English, go to https://archive.org/details/suzyking
To watch the movie "The Lady Who Died in the Trailer" in English, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHtXJk2s0Z4
“She wanted to be a film actor... Imagine!” Suzy King’s son, Carlos, commented in a conversation about his mother in 2019.
Suzy King’s dream of starring in a movie was not realized in her lifetime, but what she could not have imagined is that her story would inspire a film: the feature film “The Lady Who Died in the Trailer” (“A senhora que morreu no trailer”), directed by the Albertos, shot in 2019 and 2020, and released by DGT Filmes.
The duo recruited a stellar cast to play her: in alphabetical order, Divina Valéria, Helena Ignez, Índia Rubla, Indiany, Julia Katharine, Márcia Dailyn, Maura Ferreira, Odre Consiglio, Regina Müller, and Zilda Mayo – each representing a different facet of Suzy King.
In addition to them, Divina Nubia, Jadde Johara, Marta Vidigal, and Toscha Comeaux made special appearances, and some men also joined the team: André Silva, Danilo Dunas, Fabiano do Nascimento, John Spindler, and Todd Hunter.
The Albertos also featured the testimonials of Angela Quinto, Arthur Husted, Esther Pearson, and Jim Wilson, the special participation of Carlos, the precious collaboration of Denise Elliott and Chip Jones, Eduardo Cabús’ very personal narration, a beautiful arrangement by Gabriel Spindler of Suzy King’s very own composition, and the remarkable presence of the snakes Suzy King, Gesse, and Osíris.
Sergio Gag did the image editing and color, and the sound editing was done by Fernando Sobreira.
The result was a film that eludes the labels of fiction, biography, or documentary to become a cinematographic poem about Suzy King.
The sphinx of modernity
by Paulo Prospero
psychoanalyst
“Placing failure on the charts of success,” Caetano Veloso said in one of his songs, which seems to have been especially written for our muse and for the great tribe of society’s “renegades” who don’t conform to stereotypes because they refuse to bow to those forces.
They are the rebels who bring us the new, who bring us existential freedom, those who compose their own soundtrack and place it on the charts of success despite all the impossibilities. They believe more in their own desire than in the desire of the other. That is why they become angels, heralds of that desire they do not renounce, which is one of the pillars of psychoanalysis. Not giving up one’s own desire, Lacan proposed.
These angels who inhabit us may have fissures, sludgy feet, somewhat blighted wings, but they fly. Oh, and how they fly! While the overwhelming majority of slaves to culture drag themselves through the dust of time, these angels of desire find themselves in the multiplicity of their dreams.
Suzy King was one of these angels who did not submit to the obvious, and this is her legacy which leaves us enchanted and keen to know her steps, her flights, her accomplishments, her intimacies.
Bahia gave her gauge, compass, and daring. She gained Brazil, gained the world, going on to become a permanent star of Olympus leaping from California, her final home.
She was a radical iconoclast, which is what renders her so fascinating. She aspired to a new alliance with the Genesis story, the primordial creation myth. She rebuilt the old alliance into another relationship with the tempting serpent. She became a pythoness of modernity, empowering herself with different and revolutionary wisdom in her relationship with the diabolical primeval serpent. While engaged in prolonged fasting, she did not give in to the temptation of that ancient serpent, she did not take the apple, she did not listen to the siren songs. To pull this off, she did not need to bind herself to a mast like Ulysses, but instead to the power of her desire.
She was the mistress of her destiny. She traded the protective comfort of being a lady of the stereotypical and ultraconservative 1950s home for this being, this chimera of woman-angel-desire-flesh.
In that moment, the pains and privations disappeared. And it was precisely this rare circus that fascinated so many. Huge queues would form wherever she performed to connect with something so uncanny. As Freud wrote in his text “The Uncanny”, it is uncanny because it is also familiar. Yes, we have had many ascetics, anchorites in the quest for the Absolute in the Thebaid desert, and these stories have always inhabited us. But suddenly in the hustle and bustle of modernity’s great metropolis, something surprising for its boldness and novelty emerges in this worldly-spiritual exercise. An unusual performance that coalesces a semi-nude woman, prolonged fasting, and snakes. So many rich, packed, polysemous signifiers. To this day, we stand in that same, imaginary queue, mesmerized and attempting to unravel this proposed mystery.
The sphinx is here to this day challenging us.
Suzy King, the sphinx of modernity, herald of important counter-cultural revolutions and of women’s liberation.
BAHIA, 1930s
From 1938 onward, anyone who asked Suzy King for any document to verify her civil identity would note that she was Georgina Pires Sampaio, born in Brazil on August 28, 1917 – which is not to say that all this was true.
If it is true that Georgina was born in 1917, then she was a single mother at age fifteen in October of 1932.
Georgina’s oldest registration found by the Albertos is her son Carlos’ birth certificate, which contains information declared by her in 1937 at the Cartório da Sé (a notary office) in Bahia’s capital, where they lived on Rua Carlos Gomes.
In this document, the child is listed as Carlos Alberto Sampaio, Georgina Pires Sampaio’s illegitimate son born at Ladeira de São Miguel, Salvador, at 13:13 on October 13, 1932.
In 1940, in São Paulo, Carlos was issued a new birth certificate at the Cartório do Brás.
According to new information declared by his mother, he was Carlos Sampaio de Araújo, her legitimate son, and son “of her husband” Rodolfo Lopes de Araújo (“resident in an unknown place”), whom she “married in Jequié”. This time, Carlos was born at 13:40 on October 18, 1932 in Salvador.
Ladeira de São Miguel (‘Slope of São Miguel’), officially Frei Vicente Street, connects the Baixa dos Sapateiros and Pelourinho neighborhoods and mostly comprised tenements, spiritist centers, and brothels in the 1930s.
Rodolfo Lopes de Araújo, the father who appears on Carlos’ second birth certificate, was a member of the Bahia State Military Police.
Thirty years her senior, he was already married and had three adult children when Carlos was born. Therefore, he was never her husband.
Taking into account the nine months of gestation, Carlos was conceived in early 1932, and indeed, at that very time, Rodolfo was the deputy of Jequié.
Reports of the time recorded his onslaught on dangerous “emulators of Lampião” bandits who were terrorizing the region.
It is up to each person to imagine the rest of the story based on the elements presented.
In 1937, shortly after registering Carlos, his mother delivered him into the care of Rodolfo’s father and brothers, who lived in Alagoinhas, in rural Bahia.
One of Rodolfo’s brothers, Porphirio Leal de Araújo, took it upon himself to raise the boy. In addition to enrolling him in a school, he arranged his baptism in the Catholic Church, becoming his godparent along with his sister Maria Angélica.
Carlos stayed in Alagoinhas from 1937 to 1940.
Meanwhile, his mother was trying her luck very far away, in the effervescent São Paulo night.
SÃO PAULO AND RIO DE JANEIRO, 1940s
The details surrounding Georgina’s arrival in São Paulo remain unknown.
Information found by the Albertos indicates that her career as a singer began in the capital of São Paulo in 1939.
Georgina gave the first stage persona she created a very characteristic name of her era: Diva Rios.
Singer and composer of sambas, marches, Indigenous Brazilian, and regional songs, Diva Rios, like all of her generation’s performers of Brazilian popular music, bore Carmen Miranda’s inevitable influence.
As soon as she felt professionally steady, Georgina went to Alagoinhas to get Carlos.
They arrived together in São Paulo aboard the ship Aratimbó in October 1940, days before the boy’s eighth birthday.
Days later, Diva Rios starred in the variety show at the Danúbio Azul dance hall, located at 4 Praça Princesa Isabel, a club where she shared the stage with attractions such as the tango singer Yolanda de Juno and the dwarf vedette Lili.
From that moment forward, Carlos began to accompany his mother on her adventures.
In 1943, the pair moved to Rio de Janeiro, where they lived in the bohemian neighborhood of Lapa in a rented room of a rooming house located at 87 Rua do Rezende.
Little is known about Diva Rios’ career in the Carioca capital.
Her only job registered with Rio de Janeiro’s Delegacia de Costumes e Diversões is her participation in the “Alvorada do Amor” (“Dawn of Love”) operetta which was put on by the Paschoal Segreto Company in 1944.
Around this time, she also started to bill herself as a fantasist dancer. Advertisements published in the press in 1946 refer to Diva Rios’ performance – as part of a duo with the dancer Jorge Livért – in a variety show held at Teatro República.
In a retrospective analysis of his mother, Carlos told the Albertos in 2018 that she should have invested in a career as an actress – “She was much better than Alda Garrido!” he said – or as a dancer, but she lacked the patience and humility to join a theater or dance company as an extra or a chorus girl.
“Performers need to understand that nobody starts at the top. In the beginning, they appear in the third row. Then in the second, then in the first. Until they get to play the lead role in the show,” he evaluated. “She didn’t want to respect this hierarchy...She tried to start as the main attraction, as a singer...But singing was not her strong suit!”
The truth of that matter is that the goal of being the show’s great highlight seems to have driven Georgina throughout her performance career, causing several doors to shut on her and leading her down increasingly eccentric paths.
RIO DE JANEIRO, 1950s
Throughout the 1940s, Copacabana increasingly established itself as Rio de Janeiro’s chic and modern nocturnal hub. As its old structures fell, imposing buildings rose up on its avenues and streets, making possible the arrival of new residents who began to live in apartments of all sorts: expensive and cheap, large and small, elegant and modest.
Simultaneously, discos, adult entertainment clubs, and nightclubs of every kind and size were springing up all over the neighborhood, attracting thousands of performers (and hopefuls) who saw an opportunity for visibility, ascension and – especially – work in Copacabana.
Georgina was among the performers who swapped a rented room in a rooming or boarding house in bohemian Lapa, already in the process of decay, for an apartment in bustling and promising Copacabana.
But after a decade of trying her luck as Diva Rios, she felt that in order to make it, she needed a more radical shift in her life than a change of address.
Copacabana required the construction of a new stage persona. Even the name Diva Rios, a typical combination of female radio singers at the time of its creation, sounded outdated.
More so because Georgina had broadened her scope of work to include classical and folkloric dance and rhythmic gymnastics, which she started to teach.
The Diva Rios persona no longer accommodated so many skills.
Thus was born Suzy King.
With an international name like Copacabana and eager to become one of the neighborhood’s main vedettes, Georgina’s new persona was still a singer, but she was also an actress and - above all - an exotic dancer.
It wasn’t long before the exoticism of her performances went well beyond the Indigenous Brazilian motifs she had always liked.
In the early 1950s, Suzy King included huge snakes in her routines, her work, and her life.
The influences of some very popular Brazilian performers in her day are obvious in the construction of the Suzy King stage persona.
The ballet dancer Eros Volúsia is considered to be the creator of a “national dance”, incorporating Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian elements into classical dance, a formula that was very successful.
Featured on the cover of “Life” magazine in 1941, she gained international fame and appeared in a Hollywood film “Rio Rita”, released the following year.
Her dance classes had a strong impact on performers like Mercedes Baptista and Luz del Fuego, who were her students.
Eros Volúsia’s influence on Suzy King’s work as a folkloric dancer was significant.
From the vedette Elvira Pagã, Suzy King seems to have assimilated the item that the veteran performer claimed – controversially – to have launched in Brazil: the bikini.
On various occasions throughout her performance career, the bikini was the uniform used by Suzy King to attract audiences, promote herself, protest, or show off.
Elvira Pagã achieved fame while singing as part of a duo alongside her sister Rosina in the 1930s. But it was in 1950, recently returned from the United States, where she had frequented the local burlesque scenes, that she solidified her image as a sensual and scandalous vedette. The bikini was part of the package and reinforced this image.
Even at the radio stations, where the other singers used to perform in massive tulle dresses, Elvira Pagã sang in an itty-bitty bikini.
Luz del Fuego’s rival, competitor, disciple, follower and “second edition” were some of the ways in which Suzy King was defined by the press.
One never referred to the other publicly, and there is no indication that they knew each other personally, but associating Suzy King with Luz del Fuego was inevitable for the simple reason that they both made dancing with snakes their flagship act.
When Georgina became Suzy King, Luz del Fuego was already known throughout Brazil for her ophidic numbers and her naturist ideals.
Although she was not the first snake charmer to perform on Brazilian stages, the polemical vedette became so famous for her intimacy with snakes that it is impossible, within the national imagination, not to associate any dancer of the genre with her.
In Suzy King’s specific case, it is most likely that the idea of dancing with snakes came about after she came into contact with some material on Luz del Fuego or even after she attended a performance of her predecessor in that art.
Apart from the snakes, they both had in common their year of birth – 1917 – and their mother’s name – Etelvina.
Otherwise, they were very different, starting with their origins: while Suzy King descended from a poor family from Bahia’s hinterlands, Luz del Fuego belonged to a traditional family from Espírito Santo.
While in Europe and the United States, snake charmers proliferated in circus and burlesque circles where performers of the genre who got top billing – such as Koringa, Zorita, Lonnie Young, and Naja Karamuru (an exotic Argentine dancer who claimed to be Brazilian) – emerged, Brazil was not very prodigal in this art, contrary to what one may imagine.
Before Luz del Fuego, the Brazilian public applauded some rare ophidic – mainly foreign - dancers who ventured onto Brazilian stages. For example, there was the American Miss Otisa, who performed in several Brazilian states at the end of the 1910s with her “twenty-seven monstrous live snakes”, an “astonishing display of skillfully-presented Mysterious Power”, as was announced at the time.
Luz del Fuego rekindled public interest in this kind of spectacle in Brazil starting in the 1940s and paved the way for various snake tamers, including Suzy King.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, some circus performers who called themselves Indians, such as India Maluá, Índia Mara, Indiany the Light Arrow Indian, and the transvestite Samira del Fuego, also rose to prominence in this genre.
Decades later, it was the turn of belly dancers to seize the monopoly of dancing with snakes in Brazil.
RIO DE JANEIRO, 1953
“Help! A giant snake is invading my apartment!” was the cry heard in the corridors of the Tunisia building on the quiet morning of December 1, 1953.
When he saw the Italian lady who lived in apartment 1004 running in scanty garments towards him, the doorman had no doubts and immediately called the police, since something very serious must have been taking place.
When the police arrived, the Italian lady, very nervous, told them that that morning, when she woke up, she headed towards the balcony of her apartment to get some air. But she instinctively looked at the ground before opening the glass door that led onto the balcony.
And what a fright! A huge snake was tangled up in a plant pot, moving in a manner of one who means to hide but is too big for that.
While the police squad tried to remove the snake from the balcony with great difficulty, the story spread throughout the rest of the building, but it didn’t even have to get very far for the mystery of the snake’s apparition on the building’s tenth floor to be clarified.
For it was from the neighboring door - apartment 1003 - that, upon learning of the matter, a woman with the airs of an exotic dancer came out who, ignoring the warning from the police to be careful, simply unwound the snake from the vase and affectionately seized it single-handedly.
Such intimacy was not love at first sight: the woman was the snake’s owner!
It was then that everything became clear: she had much more than an exotic dancer’s airs, as this was her profession.
“I am Suzy King, circus and theater performer,” she introduced herself, then pointing at the snake, “and she is my partner Catarina.”
And Catarina was not the only snake in the building - in the performer’s apartment there was another one, called Cleopatra.
Well, returning from a tour through the interior of Bahia the day before, Suzy King had left her stage companions in a crate on the balcony of her apartment.
Catarina - a “restless ophidian” in her owner’s words - had left the crate and decided to stretch out to her neighbor’s apartment, crawling from one balcony to the other.
As one newspaper later published, it was just an “unwanted visit”.
After clarifying everything, Suzy King found the neighbor’s attitude to be overblown.
“My companions are simple harmless worms!” she declared to the press, who by then had already arrived in the building in droves. “She was alarmed for no reason, because she is Italian.”
And she posed smiling for the reporters who were suspicious that it was all just “a daring publicity stunt”.
SÃO PAULO, 1956
“Perón has escaped! Find Perón! Don’t hurt him!” shouted the tearful voice that put all the guests of Hotel Irradiação on guard in the early hours of February 3, 1956.
Knocking on door after door, a woman of the exotic sort, wearing a vaporous blouse and long pants, asked everyone if they had seen Perón.
Some people immediately thought of the homonymous Argentine politician, but she rushed to dispel the confusion: no such thing – the Perón she was looking for was a one-and-a-half meter-long snake!
When they realized what the strange woman was saying, most of the guests didn’t even answer - almost all of them left their rooms without a backward glance and ran to the hotel lobby, consumed with dread.
And she carried on with her search, even more distraught than the frightened guests.
The news did not take long to reach the hotel owner, who ordered the whole staff to look for Perón.
Not out of empathy towards this woman, but to reassure the other guests, who refused to return to their rooms until Perón had resurfaced.
In the morning, the police were called to ramp up the search.
Every room was thoroughly checked – every piece of furniture, luggage, appliance...And nothing!
“All in vain!” a newspaper would later say. “Perón had disappeared spectacularly, without leaving the slightest trace!”
At that moment, the press was also in attendance, and a question hung in the air: after all, what was a snake called Perón doing in a hotel located smack-dab in downtown São Paulo?
Everyone turned to the exotic woman who had initiated the search.
Accustomed to being the center of attention, she took a drag of her cigarette and finally introduced herself.
She was the snake charmer Suzy King, and Perón was a member of the ophidian troupe that accompanied her in her song and dance shows.
Faced with the scare, the hotel owner proceeded to take the necessary measures: he dashed to the artist’s room and...How surprised he was to find two more ophidian “brutes” on the bed: Cleópatra, an authentic three-meter-long boa constrictor, cuddled up with her companion Oséas Martins, a two-meter-long Rio tropical racer.
Terrified, he demanded an explanation from the performer, since he had been unaware of that “snake nest’s” existence in his establishment. He did not even allow dogs. Or cats.
The young woman then clarified:
She was a professional dancer, a radio and television performer from Rio de Janeiro, where she performed exotic numbers, singing and dancing with dozens of snakes. She has about twenty snakes in her apartment in Copacabana. Cleopatra, Oséas Martins, and Perón are her inseparable companions. Wherever she goes, she never parts with her three “little friends”. She takes them along.
Indignant at the ruckus and confusion that had settled in his hotel with Perón’s escape, the owner ordered the vedette to vacate the premises within a few hours and was minutely precise, stating: “You have until sixteen hundred hours to pick up your luggage, snakes, the devil, and get out.”
Therefore, by this time, Suzy King must already be in another establishment, playing with her “dear little girls” until, per some carelessness, Oséas Martins or Cleopatra decide to “get a change of scenery” and create a new problem for Luz del Fuego’s rival.
("Última Hora")
JUIZ DE FORA, 1956
In the mid-1950s, the fasting trials performed by men and women who called themselves faquires and faquiresas (the masculine and feminine forms, respectively, in Portuguese of the term “fakirs”) were very popular in Brazil.
Most of them fasted publicly on display for long periods inside a glass box, on a bed of nails or on shards of glass, and in the company of snakes.
Generally, these glass boxes were installed in the lobbies of movie theaters or playhouses, sheds specially set up for this purpose, and commercial halls - always in places that got heavy traffic. The public paid to enter and see the “starving” artist up close.
It is likely the fact that she already worked with snakes that encouraged Suzy King to launch herself as a fakir in 1956.
She did not adhere to the excruciating beds of nails or shards of glass, preferring to display herself lying on a mattress, but her fasting trials had a specificity that differentiated them from others: while the other women fakirs wore harem-style get-ups, overalls, and other “well-behaved” clothing inside the glass boxes, Suzy King fasted half-naked, wearing only a skimpy bikini.
Suzy King’s first show as a fakir took place in the Minas Gerais town of Juiz de Fora in March of 1956.
Days before the trial began, she arrived in town and did some publicity.
At Rádio Industrial, “Suzy King and her venomous snakes” announced their presence at an auditorium show. Afterwards, they performed at Moulin Rouge nightclub.
Suzy King was enclosed in her glass box on a Friday night on the stage of the Glória cine-theater after attending a cocktail party held for the local press at Raffa’s Club.
Before entering the glass box, she danced for the audience at Glória.
The glass box was sealed with five padlocks, and the keys of each lock were to be handed over to five of the city’s prominent figures to ensure that Suzy King would not leave town until the end of the trial. The designated people would be the show’s “sponsors”.
But none of them attended opening night, and other sponsors were provided at the last minute.
Already inside the glass box with her three snakes, Suzy King was transported to the Juiz de Fora building’s gallery, at 763 Rua Halfeld, where she was put on display in Shop #8 throughout the show’s duration.
RIO DE JANEIRO, 1956
It is all well and good that Tiradentes Square is the main meeting point for the vedettes, chorus girls, and Carioca vaudeville girls, but - at six in the afternoon of a Monday, 12th of November, 1956, passersby could not fail to notice a certain woman getting out of a cab.
That’s because she was in the street dressed as only girls on stage usually did: in a nylon bikini, knitted stockings and ballet slippers.
Upon realizing that she was being watched by the people around her, the woman took on an affected attitude to pay the driver - it was the beginning of the show she intended to give.
She stopped in front of Teatro João Caetano and started pulling a two-and-a-half-meter-long snake out of a canvas bag she was carrying.
And so, without any music or words of explanation, she began to perform sophisticated dance steps and a series of pirouettes with the snake.
It didn’t take long for a crowd to form around the dancer. Amidst whistles and cries, the spectators pushed and squeezed for a better view of her dancing and her aesthetic.
When she realized that a large audience was watching her performance, the woman interrupted her dance and started to speak loudly, using and abusing licentious expressions and gestures.
Her story revolved around the death of another one of her snakes whose name was Café Filho. According to her, its death was due to poisoning after being fed a sausage of the Saborosas brand.
The dancer had even tried to resolve the matter in a more discreet manner, demanding compensation amounting to ten thousand cruzeiros from the owner of Salsichas Saborosas S/A for the loss of Café Filho. But he had not even responded to her demand at all.
She had also gone to police stations, newspapers, and radio stations to report him. However, she was deemed crazy wherever she told the story.
So she had only one last recourse at her disposal: to protest “door to door, on every street of the city” against the manufacturer of Saborosas sausages.
Scandalized by her speech, which was lavishly illustrated with “immoral gestures” and obscene words, a gentleman who was passing by with his family started an argument with the dancer.
It was the cue for the crowd to get worked up, and about forty men descended upon the woman, trying to rip off her bikini, which was violently torn in a few seconds.
The snake, whose name was Padilha, did not like the confusion and bit its own owner on her left hand and right foot.
Wounded by the snake and the public, the woman was scared that the worst would happen to her when a municipal guard who was willing to save her appeared in Tiradentes Square.
Grabbing hold of her, the policeman managed to disperse the crowd.
Meanwhile, Padilha, who had returned to the canvas bag after biting the dancer, stuck out just its little head and also bit the guard’s left thumb.
Frightened, the man began to feel sick, breaking out in a cold sweat and vomiting.
An ambulance took the three of them - the policeman, the dancer, and the snake - to the Souza Aguiar Municipal Hospital.
The guard was treated with antivenom injections, but the woman refused the procedure, claiming that she was already “used to Padilha’s caresses”.
Wrapped in a sheet to hide her nakedness, the dancer was taken to the Tenth Police Precinct, where she was fined for “endangering the physical integrity of others” by carrying a “dangerous animal” with her.
Only at the police station was she identified: she was the “unemployed vedette” Suzy King.
RIO DE JANEIRO, 1958
Those who were present during the violent arrest of a fakir on that Thursday night in Copacabana could not imagine that the police were taking their failures with real criminals out on her.
It all started when four men assaulted a police investigator and a bicheiro (a mobster who operates a Brazilian gambling game called jogo de bicho) in Copacabana and went up Ladeira do Leme firing some shots.
A crew of police officers was deployed to capture the outlaws, unsuccessfully; they only exchanged gunfire with “suspicious individuals” on Ladeira do Leme and found out later that the four assailants had already fled another way.
By order of Commissioner Drumond of the Second Police Precinct, a roundup was carried out on Ladeira do Leme, but no leads were found.
Back in Copacabana, the frustrated deputy decided to “get revenge” by conducting a “clean-up operation” throughout the neighborhood, inspecting nightclubs for irregularities and arresting prostitutes.
Later, this police raid would be widely reported as a campanha contra o trottoir (a campaign against the tracks and street prostitution) designed by the notorious General Amaury Kruel.
Near Bolero nightclub on Avenida Atlântica, the police came across Suzy King, who was placidly returning home from TV Rio. Of course they already knew her, but they were really looking for trouble and knew it would be easy to provoke her.
When Commissioner Drumond asked Suzy King to present her documents, she rebelled and refused to acquiesce to his order.
A great uproar immediately ensued, and the performer was arrested and sent to the Delegacia de Costumes e Diversões.
Suzy King’s unjust arrest turned out to be the police’s greatest asset on that long night when those who really posed a threat escaped with impunity.
As soon as the authorities addressed her, they were met with the greatest hostility. Suzy King said right away that she belonged to the performing cast of TV Rio and was coming from the program “Do mundo nada se leva” when she was arrested on Avenida Atlântica.
Commissioner Drumond, who was in charge of the démarche, was not bothered by the explanations and asked for her documents. Suzy King then became a real wild beast, refusing to show her documents. She put on a “show” on the public street, attacking the cops with un-publishable obscenities. In view of this, Commissioner Drumond had no choice but to arrest the “performer” for contempt.
("Diário da Noite")
RIO DE JANEIRO, 1959
It happened in March of 1959, on the 13th, a Friday: at four o’clock in the afternoon, a woman in a bikini riding a white horse appeared in the center of the Carioca capital.
A mask hid her face, and a long blond wig concealed her semi-nudity.
An Indian, with a headband and everything, led the horse, and, a little further ahead, a fellow also accompanied the procession carrying a placard.
“Today at 6:00 p.m.” announced the sign, “SUZY KING the greatest fakir in the world! 110 days of fasting! 610 Copacabana Avenue”.
A short while ago, the horsewoman - already in a bikini - had left the building at 615 Avenida Presidente Antônio Carlos, at whose door a soldier from the Marechal Caetano de Faria Regiment, a military police mounted unit, was waiting for her.
The soldier fulfilled his mission: he delivered the horse into her care and left.
She didn’t miss a beat - she immediately mounted the animal and rode towards Mauá Square.
Along the way, a crowd formed around her.
Some liked the open-air show and showed their approval cheerfully; others found it to be a provocation and protested.
The woman, atop the horse, remained indifferent to the people’s demonstrations, and smiled and waved equally to everyone.
When she arrived at Mauá Square, she realized that the thing was getting out of hand - a whole lot of people, a whole lot of screaming, a great deal of confusion - and turned around.
Along Avenida Rio Branco, she began to turn back, no longer so indifferent, to her starting point.
It was at the Caixa de Amortização, between Rua Beneditinos and Rua Viscount de Inhaúma, that things got ugly.
It’s hard to figure out precisely what happened. There were many versions circulating, and none of the newspapers would report the same story the next day.
All those people, whose reactions to the procession had been limited to screams and gestures at a distance until that moment, went on the attack.
One of them stole her wig, another took her bikini top, and yet another one got her bikini bottom.
She was left completely naked!
The Indian – poor guy! – even tried to protect her, but he was beaten, kicked, and had no other choice but to run to save his own skin.
But the one that really suffered was the horse, maliciously burned with cigarette butts. Frightened, it yet had to bear the weight on its back of a man who could not contain himself and climbed onto its croup; it is not known whether he did so to defend the horsewoman or to take advantage of her.
In the end, the woman was thrown to the ground. She just had time to get back the wig and, trying to cover her body with it, she ran in despair.
Hardly anyone was willing to help. On the contrary: while she was running by, guys were copping feels all over her body.
As luck would have it, an investigator carrying a revolver was passing by.
Distressed by the woman’s situation, he fired a shot into the air to disperse the crowd. From the windows of buildings, buckets of water were thrown with the same intent.
Meanwhile, a man offered her a checkered jacket, and another gave her his shirt so she could cover herself.
Dressed in this impromptu fashion, she managed to hide in a jeep belonging to the Navy that was parked nearby awaiting an Admiral.
From the jeep, she jumped into a cab and went straight to the Seventh Police Precinct. Standing on the car’s stirrups, two policemen guaranteed her safety.
Even to enter the building, she had to be escorted by policemen because a countless number of hands looking to cop a feel awaited her at the police station’s entrance - a bunch of large, brutish rogues anxious to get one more tidbit.
Face to face with Police Chief Eugênio Moura, the woman revealed who she was and why she had brought about all that commotion.
She was the very fakir Suzy King, announced on the sign, and the only goal of the tumultuous procession was to promote a 110- day fasting trial with which she intended to beat the World Record for the Longest Fast!
Detail: she was already late for her show, which was scheduled to begin in a few minutes in Copacabana.
At the police station, after Suzy had explained all the ways in which she had been attacked, the police chief initially commented: “But I don’t see any signs of aggression.”
To which she responded: “Sir, do you think that a broth can handle so many cooks? I have never seen this level of effrontery in all my life. If Lady Godiva had endured all this, I would just like to know what she would have said.”
And as if such observations were not enough to explain the noisy affair, Suzy asked the police chief: “Where is that rascal Indian, that bum Tarzan, who promised to defend me? Did he throw away my costume?”
Not knowing how to respond, he said, “Naturally, he went back to the tribe.”
Suzy claimed that she had suffered a loss of... Cr$ 35 thousand, because the pearls from her bikini were stolen by the crowd.
“I was left with only a slipper, Mr. Police Chief,” she said.
("Diário Carioca")
RIO DE JANEIRO, 1959
All the chaos caused by her procession on horseback did not prevent Suzy King from starting her feat of fakirism at the Ritz Gallery.
110 days without eating would have sufficed for her to beat the World Record for the Longest Fast!
A contract signed with CIPA, the company responsible for the gallery’s condominium, granted her the use of store #3 for her show for a percentage of the show’s box office sales.
Enclosed in a glass box built especially for her, Suzy King fasted wearing only a bikini in the company of two snakes. A curtain prevented the non-paying public from seeing the fakir outside the store.
The problems started during the trial’s first fortnight.
The fasting woman was sleeping when a loud noise of glass shattering woke her up. Surprised, she noticed that someone had thrown a bottle in her glass box.
Very upset, Suzy King requested medical assistance from the Lido Care Station and also notified the press and the police.
She revealed to the reporters that she was unhappy with the lack of supervision by the Delegacia de Costumes e Diversões and the Second Police Precinct authorities, because “bad eggs” were taking advantage of the police’s absence to interfere with her work.
The police, in turn, ignored her call – for sure, the attack was just another of the artist’s publicity stunts.
It didn’t take long for CIPA to find out that the tickets to the fakir’s show were being sold without the tear-off portions – the receipts – being detached, hampering the management of the revenues which was supposed to ensure that the company would be properly paid its due.
The ticket seller wriggled out of this obligation: he was just obeying Suzy King’s own orders.
Increasingly convinced of Suzy’s dishonesty, CIPA tasked the building’s doorman – the known boxer Nocaute Jack – with monitoring her trial to make sure that she didn’t break the terms of the contract.
Suzy, who kept some people in her employ out of pocket, was already starting to suffer financial losses due to the lack of spectators, and the disagreements with Nocaute Jack were frequent.
Unable to concentrate on her fasting, she spent her days devising schemes to get out of the trial without having to pay the fine that would result from breaking the contract, while at the same time maintaining her reputation as a fakir.
Finally, the performer convinced her personal assistant Generosa Pereira to set fire to the store’s curtain. Students would be blamed for the fire, which would serve as a pretext for the show’s interruption.
But Nocaute Jack discovered everything and prevented the plan from being carried out, further exacerbating the relationship between him and Suzy.
53 days of fasting had already elapsed, but Suzy King wasn’t even halfway through the trial yet.
At almost three in the morning, an unexpected sound of hammering broke the early morning silence and put NocauteJack on guard.
As he was carefully surveying the gallery’s surroundings, he spotted Generosa Pereira, who was trying to communicate something to him from a distance through signals and grimaces.
A little further ahead, Suzy King was slinking away towards the gallery’s exit.
He stopped her and ordered her to wait while he called the police. After all, if she really wanted to drop out of the trial, everything had to be done lawfully and with CIPA’s knowledge.
But while the boxer was placing the call, Suzy King ran desperately to Avenida Nossa Senhora de Copacabana, shouting and waving to the passing cabs.
Firmly gripping the fakir so she wouldn’t escape, Nocaute Jack patiently explained to each cab driver that the woman couldn’t get in because she had to wait for the cops to arrive.
And who would be brave enough to contest a statement from the dreaded fighter Nocaute Jack? The drivers would quickly scatter, of course, leave the fasting woman to her fate.
Taken to the Second Police Precinct, Suzy King and Nocaute Jack accused each other in front of Police Chief Hermes Leite.
He claimed that she slipped out of the glass box almost daily to eat, and she said she was constantly receiving death threats from him.
For forty minutes, the fakir yelled at the police station.
When finally she was drained of arguments and had lost her voice, Suzy King threw herself to the ground and had a fit of nerves.
There was no other way: an ambulance from the Lido Care Station was called, and after much resistance, the performer was taken and medicated.
The trial was terminated: it was the end of the dream of the World Record for the Longest Fast.
SUZY KING V. CENSORSHIP
It was very common for the Public Entertainment Censorship Service to prohibit plays written by women in Suzy King’s day.
Co-authoring a play with a man or using a male pseudonym were some of the alternatives used by the playwrights of that era to circumvent the Censorship Service.
Suzy King was no exception among the female authors of her time. When she wrote a play alone and submitted it to the Censorship Service in 1958, she had to endure a lengthy trial fighting for its release – and was defeated.
When Suzy King submitted a play entitled “Aluga-se um quarto” (“Room for Rent”) to the Federal Department of Public Security’s Public Entertainment Censorship Service, she already figured her text would undergo some kind of restriction, but she couldn’t have imagined that the Censorship Service would completely ban the play without giving it the slightest chance to be performed, even under conditions.
“‘Aluga-se um quarto’ is wickedly obscene, immoral, and devoid of the slightest requisite to merit the Censorship Service’s conscientious approval,” was the Censorship Commission’s final opinion.
Upon receiving the Censorship Commission’s response prohibiting the staging of “Aluga-se um quarto”, Suzy King put up a fight.
With her own arguments, she filed a writ of mandamus against André Carrazzoni, then Director of the Censorship Service, with the aim of gaining authorization for her play.
Months went by. Finally, in June 1959, judge José Júlio Leal Fagundes of the Second Court of the then Federal District’s Public Treasury definitively denied Suzy King’s writ of mandamus.
“In effect, there is nary a right invoked, because the prohibited ‘comedy’ is undoubtedly obscene and offensive to public decency,’ said the judge’s ruling. “The contested decision, in addition to being carried out in accordance with legal duty, is inspired by a wholesome morality, which can only deserve, as it does in fact deserve, the support and applause of this judgment, hostile to acts that are omissive to the accomplishment of related state activities.”
The play in question, “Aluga-se um quarto”, is an eccentric tale of a stray who, in need of housing, rents a room in a boarding house. When he moves in, he finds a big, thick snake of which he grows very fond. Later, invited to move from the room he is occupying into a better one, the stray refuses, which results in a heated argument between the owner of the boarding house and her tenant.
("Luta Democrática")
MEXICO, 1960s
Jacuí Japurá Sampaio was born in Manaus, Amazonas, on December 25, 1934.
Daughter of the couple José Sampaio and Maria Sampaio, she only acquired a birth certificate and other documents when she was thirty-one years old, in November of 1966.
Her initial documents were issued in Curitiba, Paraná, just before Jacuí Japurá set off on a performance tour around Latin America, passing through countries such as Peru and Panama until she reached Mexico. She was a snake charmer and performed in nightclubs, dancing with huge snakes.
It is not known for sure whether she traveled by car, bus, or plane. But what is certain is that she made the whole journey with her large, trained snakes as her travel companions.
Between 1967 and 1969, Jacuí Japurá led a nomadic life in Mexico, living in hotels and moving to a different city whenever a new work opportunity arose.
Her “on the road” saga ended after her marriage to an American who took her to the United States in 1970, but that is another story.
The most important thing about Jacuí Japurá has not yet been said. In fact, she was neither Jacuí nor Japurá, let alone from Amazonas state or the daughter of José and Maria. In fact, besides the names of her parents, she had also “borrowed” the date of birth, December 25, from Jesus Christ.
Even her age was a farce. The year 1934 on her documents would certainly make many people who knew she had been a mother two years prior to that, in 1932, laugh.
The only real things that would remain are the last name Sampaio and, of course, the mastery of the art of dancing with snakes, her partners for over a decade.
But who was Jacuí Japurá before she was Jacuí Japurá?
For the Albertos, this answer surfaced along with the first pictures they found of her: Jacuí Japurá was just another of Suzy King’s personas, a new identity carefully crafted by her to make a life change once again.
Although a death certificate with that name was never issued, Georgina Pires Sampaio simply ceased to exist in 1966.
From Georgina, Jacuí Japurá kept only the snakes.
Even her face was altered with a plastic surgery that rejuvenated her enough to turn her forty-nine years of age into thirty-one.
The end of Georgina also marked the end of the persona Suzy King.
Her new legal name matched her craft, and she began to present herself as “Jacuí Japurá, the Queen of the Amazon”.
There has been much speculation about this radical change, but the reasons for it remain unknown.
Could it have been just to shave seventeen years off her age and prolong her “shelf life” as an exotic dancer at a time when a fifty-year-old woman was considered too old to display herself in a bikini and do sensual dances with snakes?
Could Georgina Pires Sampaio have had a problem that would have prevented her from leaving Brazil with that name?
Could she have been running from something or someone?
Or was it that she simply wanted to revamp herself and start over from scratch?
Jacuí Japurá landed in Mexico in August of 1967.
Registered with the Asociación Nacional de Actores as a singer and dancer, she performed in nightclubs in several Mexican cities between 1967 and 1969, mainly in Baja California.
In her immigration documentation, there are references to performances in the following nightclubs: Torero (Tijuana, 1967), Waikiki (Ciudad Juárez, 1968), Kahlua (Ensenada, 1968), La Cabaña (Mexicali, 1968), Panamerican (Tijuana, 1969), and Aloha (Mexicali, 1969).
In mid-1968, Jacuí Japurá was hired by the famous Caravana Corona, which traveled all over the country showcasing variety shows with singers, bands, vedettes, and performers of the most diverse genres. To give you an idea, Pérez Prado, Celia Cruz, Trio Los Panchos, José Alfredo Jiménez, and Tongolele are just some of the great Mexican and international attractions that were part of the group at different times.
Hired for a tour as “the eccentric dancer”, Jacuí Japurá visited several cities with Caravana Corona.
It appears that it was in Mexicali, at Aloha nightclub, that her last performance tour occurred, in August of 1969.
The singer Alfredo Cubedo, who was performing at Aloha during the same period, was interviewed by the Albertos over the telephone in 2018 and recalled Jacuí Japurá’s final performances: “She danced with snakes to the sound of Brazilian music... I think it was bossa nova. At the end of the show, all the artists came on stage and did a number together. In this final act, she wore a fruit turban, Carmen Miranda-style. We were staying at the same hotel, but we never got close. Off stage, she was always alone. She and the snakes.”
CHULA VISTA, 1970s/1980s
It was as Jacuí Japurá that Suzy King trod on American soil, at fifty-two years of age, about to wed for the first time.
The groom was the eccentric Texan Bill Bailey and the wedding took place in Ramona, San Diego County, California, on January 5, 1970.
How the two met is not known.
To those who asked, they told a fantastic story: while working as a miner in Brazil, Bill had seen Jacuí Japurá dancing with snakes at a show. Falling In love with her, he convinced her to travel with him from one country to the next until they reached California so that they could get married in his country.
But the fact is that Bill had never been to Brazil, and she made the journey to Mexico alone.
Most likely they met in some city on the Mexican-U.S. border, like Tijuana or Mexicali, in mid-1969.
Detail: this was Bill’s sixth marriage; he divorced his most recent wife in December to remarry in January.
Bill lived in Chula Vista, also in San Diego County, in a trailer park at 288 Broadway.
Shortly after their marriage, the couple moved to another park in the same city, at 568 Palomar Street.
Sharing a trailer with a huge albino python, a lizard, and some spiders, the exotic couple led a hectic life.
They went to the mountains together to get cacti they would prepare to eat and had plans to travel to Brazil aboard a ferrocement boat that Bill was building.
They conversed – and argued – in Spanish. Usually the discussions revolved around his love affairs. Bill being an inveterate womanizer.
When she was alone, Jackie hardly ever went out.
She spent her days painting watercolors, mainly parrots and birds, in bright hues and cooking Brazilian dishes like rice and beans.
On the walls of the trailer, along with her watercolors, one could see the photographs of a past that seemed glorious.
She didn’t perform anymore, but she liked to walk with the albino python, the last snake of her life, wrapped around her neck.
Jackie Bailey’s American dream reached its apogee in August, 1974: after a lengthy process, she was naturalized as an American citizen.
In the photo chosen for her Certificate of Naturalization, Jackie wore a bolo tie that is very typical of Texas cowboys, Bill’s influence and a symbol of her “Americanization”.
The persona socially assumed by Jackie Bailey in Chula Vista in the 1970s had a great deal in common with the Latin American characters played by Carmen Miranda in the 1940s Hollywood films: extravagant, cheerful, hyper-sexualized, and flashy, she never passed unnoticed anywhere.
Always dressed in tight, loud-colored tops and pants, Jackie had a large collection of wigs, hats, and feather boas, wore a lot of makeup, and almost never left the house without her leopard-print coat, even on very hot days.
Flaunting her well-endowed bosom – a detail remembered in the statements of all the people who met her in Chula Vista – she used to walk the streets almost skipping – “like she was dancing to a different drummer” would explain one of her “eye-witnesses” – waving her hands about and talking to herself, usually in Portuguese.
In fact, it was not unusual for her to start telling a long story in Portuguese before she remembered that her North American interlocutors did not understand the language.
Some of the English terms used repeatedly to define her by her “witnesses” are “flamboyant”, “out there”, “voluptuous”, “out of place”, “provocative”, “cover girl” and “lonely”, or simply “the old crazy South American that charmed snakes”.
So much glitz bothered some people.
In mid-1983, Jackie sued three neighbors of the trailer park where she was residing at 352 Broadway because she was being harassed and threatened by them.
“The defendants have conspired amongst them and both individually and jointly have made racial slurs about me not being an American, attempting to induce me to physically fight them, yelling obscenities, physically threatening that they are going to beat me up. This has happened so many times that I can only estimate that within the last year this occurred at least 20 to 30 times. They have also placed cat and dog excrement in front of my mobile home. Additionally, they have constantly threatened me. Your declarant has suffered severe loss of sleep throughout the last year, and I am constantly in a nervous condition as a result of the defendants’ actions. I have had continual bad dreams which I did not have prior to the defendants’ initiation of their harassing acts,” the Brazilian declared at the time.
CHULA VISTA, 1985
On August 9, 1985, the manager of Rose Arbor Mobile Home Park at 352 Broadway noticed that no one had seen Jackie Bailey, the resident of trailer A10, for several days.
Around noon, the police were called. The police officer sent to verify what had occurred was J. C. Smith.
The door of the trailer was locked and had to be forced.
It was a hot summer day in Chula Vista, and the inside of the trailer was like an oven.
Sitting on the hallway floor, Jackie was lying dead and in an advanced state of decomposition.
“The Deputy Coroner viewed the nude decedent seated on the carpeted floor of her residence hallway which leads from the living room into the bedroom. She was slumped to the left with her head resting on her flexed left knee. She was cold to the touch and flaccid with skin slippage and a green discoloration of areas of her abdomen present. A bloody purge exuded from her nares onto her left thigh. Her fingertips were brown and dehydrated. There were no signs of trauma nor criminal activity.”
(Coroner’s report)
Documents found in the trailer indicated that Jackie had purchased a funeral plan at Humphrey Mortuary.
According to the neighbors, Bill visited her every six weeks. No one could say where he lived – maybe in his truck or with a friend.
About three weeks ago, he had paid her his last visit.
Since Bill was not located, the coroner’s seals were affixed to the trailer, and Humphrey Mortuary was contacted.
According to the autopsy, the cause of death was “arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease”.
Detail: in the autopsy report, there is an observation indicating that the body appears to be of a woman who is older than the declared age of fifty. Of course – she was about to turn sixty-eight.
One week after she was found dead, Jackie was cremated in Pasadena, California.
But it wasn’t the end.
27 years later, Suzy King would resurface in 2012, more imposing than she had been in her entire life, through the Albertos’ research and work.
It was written in the stars.
CALIFORNIA, 2020
One of the most poetic ways to eternalize yourself is to turn yourself into a song, to gain the ethereal body of a melody and have your soul reflected in verses.
The final years of Suzy King’s life inspired the song “Alone”, composed by the Americans Todd Hunter, Toscha Comeaux, and Linda Hunter and made especially for the movie “The Lady Who Died in the Trailer” at the Alberto’s request.
With Todd Hunter on the piano and the Brazilian Fabiano do Nascimento on the guitar, Toscha Comeaux recorded the song for the feature film.
Alone
she sits alone with her memories
forced in a world of solitude
how did she get there? no one cares
so far from what she was
they only saw who she became
no one cared if she missed the land that knew her name
a warm August day
life slipped away
are your dreams too big a price to pay?
there for all the world to see
she hid the shattered pieces
from the whispers of broken dreams
why did she stay in the trailer?
was she trapped or just resigned?
did she know her life was over?
much more than they
could ever see
the photos on her wall that set her free
her spirit stayed
but her life slipped away
are your dreams too big a price to pay?
are your dreams too big a price to pay?
