Frank Sinatra

The girl was Helô - Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, who lived on the Rua Montenegro in Ipanema, in southern Rio. Tall and tan and young and lovely and emerald-eyed and wavy-haired, the girl from Ipanema came walking past the Veloso bar every day, and the patrons sighed. And sometimes she even came into the bar and bought a pack of cigarettes for her mother. And, when she exited, she was swinging so cool and swaying so gentle that the barflies would wolf-whistle ...but it sounds better if you say they were "Ah"-ing and "Oh"-ing. Helô was 19 years old and beautiful - ""the paradigm of the young Carioca," as Vinícius de Moraes would later write of her, "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 - it is a gift of life in its beautiful and melancholic constant ebb and flow":

He trained for this album - not just in more sessions than usual with his pianist Bill Miller; he also eased up on the booze and the smokes, and went back to his old Dorsey-era vocal training - swimming laps underwater to extend his breathing and sweeten his tone. Softer, softer, softer: "If he sang any softer, he'd have to be lying on his back," wrote Stan Cornyn of the first session.