There’s the story of busty Jayne Mansfield´s missing bikini top.
And Orson Welles´ one-night drunk.
And attempted murder…of Brazil’s President!
Then there was the night Dolores Sherwood Guinle, wife of Copa heir Jorginho Guinle, threw a party for 150, excused herself for a few minutes, and didn´t come back for 25 years.
That´s how it was for the people who made Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Palace the first—and, for decades, the only—luxury hotel in Brazil.
“Guests had everything—pool, theater, gambling casino—and the best service,” said Gabriel Catena Filho, a Copa waiter for 39 years, in a 1980s interview. “We weren´t allowed to say ´no´ when a guest asked for something.”
Known simply as the Copa, the hotel stood magnificently alone fronting Rio’s sweeping Copacabana Beach when it was inaugurated in 1923 as resort, gambling den and haven for the rich. It was, and is today, as welcoming and palmy as the French Riviera hotels, the Negresco in Nice and the Carlton in Cannes, it was modeled after, as delicious and gleamy white as a wedding cake. In 2004, Jorginho Guinle, dying of heart disease at 88, left a Rio hospital for his suite at the hotel, telling doctors, “I’m going to heaven; I’m going to the Copa!”
Copacabana Beach today is more crowded and grimier than in 1923, but the hotel, after many face-lifts and changes in ownership, still glitters.
Rio’s Black-tie Era
In 1923, gambling was all the rage.
Games were black tie only.
“Some people came just to gamble,” said Catena. “And there were some who played too much. A Portuguese nobleman, known as the Marques de Pombal, would come over just to gamble. Then there was an Argentine millionaire, whom everyone knew as Dodeiro, and a Madame Seabra—nobody knew her first name. But the biggest was a gaucho landowner who would come just to drink and gamble. Over the years, he had to sell off more and more of his property until he ended up with nothing.”
The Copa had several game rooms, including one called the Morgue, featuring the lowest bet in town. The Morgue was located near the main entrance so the croupiers could expel bad losers. But even the Morgue was black tie.
In the 1930s a shocked Rio columnist wrote, “Respectable women—really the very best of society—hock their jewelry to pay gambling debts!”
In 1928, the Copa was venue for a first-class scandal. Brazilian President Washington Luis Pereira de Sousa was shot and wounded during a stay at the hotel. The alleged perpetrator was his jealous mistress, Italian Marchioness Elvira Vishi Maurich. She was 28; he was 59. The President was rushed to a nearby hospital for surgery. The country was told it was an emergency appendectomy, a story that held up for years. The Marchioness was found dead four days later, an alleged suicide.
In 1946, casino gambling was outlawed in Brazil. For years, the Guinles kept the Copa´s gaming paraphernalia in storage, but they needn’t have bothered. Some say the 1950s was the Copa’s heyday.
Hardly a celebrity who passed through Rio in those years missed the Copa. Rio was Brazil in the 1950s and the Copa was high society, what they called in those days “café society.”
Marconi, FDR, JFK (“when he was just a young guy in his 20s right after the war,” recalled Catena), Lana Turner, Joan Crawford, Tyron Power, Cesar Romero, Eva Peron (“with ten attendants and 100 suitcases”), King Karol of Romania, who sought political asylum in Brazil and found it at the Copa just after World War II, Mussolini´s son, Chiang Kai-shek, Charles de Gaulle, Emperor Hirohito, Kim Novak, Mary Pickford, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Roman Polansky, Marlene Dietrich, the Shah of Iran, and Ali Khan were all guests at one time or another. Nat King Cole, Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier, Tommy Dorsey, and Harry James all performed there.
And so, in curious ways, did Orson Welles and Jayne Mansfield.
Orson Welles’ Rio Odyssey
Famed show promoter Carlos Machado, in a 1980s interview, recalled Welles’ stay in Brazil in 1942: “Everything they say about Orson Welles in Rio really happened; it’s all true.” The director arrived with dozens of technicians, hundreds of pounds of expensive equipment and $100,000 in cash after a two-day flight from Washington. It took days just for the entourage to install itself comfortably at the Copa. But there were parties right from the beginning. “Five bottles of whisky were sent up to Welles’ suite every night,” said Machado. “And five empty bottles came back every morning.”
But Welles also worked hard filming slum dwellers, fishermen and samba schools. “He spent RKO’s money with incredible ease,” recalled Machado. “But the film, a documentary called It’s All True, was never finished.”
What happened next is the subject of controversy; there are at least two versions.
According to former Copa doorman Manuel Oliveira, Welles was so upset one night over a telegram from Mexican actress Dolores del Rio, a sometime mistress, that he got drunk and started throwing furniture out the window and into the pool.
In the Carlos Machado version, the object of Welles’ peak was different, sultry Rio singer Linda Batista, but the furniture went into the pool just the same. “Welles was never arrested,” said Machado. “He was the honored guest of the Brazilian government.”
Busty Hollywood actress Jayne Mansfield visited the Copa in the mid-1950s. Social columnist Jeff Thomas recalled the story of how Mansfield´s bikini top mysteriously disappeared one night. “…It was there, at the Copa pool, that the string of Jayne Mansfield´s famously overflowing bikini top was ‘accidentally’ pulled some years ago, to the delight of all those present, provoking a typically cinematographic reaction from the actress—her famous ooooh. A saving towel then appeared and the ooohs that were heard didn´t emanate from the actress; they came from the unhappy onlookers, myself included.”
The Last Latin Playboy
One reason for Mansfield´s stay in Brazil was her affair with Jorginho Guinle, nephew of Copa founder Otávio Guinle, and one of the hotel´s heirs.
Guinle was Brazil´s first jet-setter. His international connections, four wives, innumerable lovers and, despite an oft commented deficiency in height causing him to wear three-inch elevator shoes (“he always seduced taller women;” according to one social columnist, “that was inevitable”), winning looks and personality made him, and by extension the Copa, the center of Rio night life.
Guinle’s friends included Nelson Rockefeller (Guinle was Rockefeller´s assistant during World War II when the future governor of New York was President Roosevelt’s “ambassador” to Latin America), and Ali Khan, then one of the richest men in the world. Lovers included a list that sounds like the cast of a Cecil B. de Mille epic: Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe (when she was still Norma Jean Baker), Ginger Rogers (“she was already a grandmother at the time,” Guinle later stated), Anita Ekberg, Jayne Mansfield, Romy Schneider, Kim Novak, Lana Turner, Zsa Zsa Gabor (“a simple matter of friendship”), the illusive Hedy Lamar, Veronica Lake, and countless others.
Three of his four wives, Tânia, Ionita and Maria Helena, were little known outside Brazil; the exception was Dolores, the daughter of acclaimed American playwright Robert Sherwood.
A reporter once asked Guinle whom he would have liked to seduce but didn´t. “Gina Lollobrigida and Ava Gardner,” was the reply. He added, “You know, they´re best on the way up or on the way down. At the top of the world, everybody is a bore.”
Guinle burned through a personal fortune which, in today’s money, would add up to a hundred million dollars. He once said, “The secret to the good life is dying without a cent in your pocket.” He was as good as his word.
Of all the glamourous women Jorge Guinle attracted to the bars and bedrooms of the Copa the most popular was his wife Dolores. Together, they were café society (everyone loved the Guinles except the French ambassador because Dolores drank her Dom Perignon with ice) and remained so until the night in 1955 when Dolores stepped out for a few minutes of fresh air.
Taking an invaluable diamond and emerald necklace, her six-year-old son, and her elegant evening gown, she proceeded directly from the cocktail party for 150 in her honor to the airport, where she boarded a plane for the United States, ending her 11-year marriage to Jorge Guinle.
“It was the second greatest tragedy for café society of the 1950s (the first was the blaze which destroyed the popular Hotel Vogue night club),” wrote Rio social columnist Ibrahim Sued years later.
In 1980, Dolores, 55 and married to her fourth husband, visited the Copa again. Jorginho, then 64 and on his umpteenth girlfriend, threw a party for her. The same old crowd came out to see the Guinles entertain. This time, Dolores stayed until the end.
-Thomas Murphy, 2026
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