Gloria Trevi - Agarrate
HE moment Gloria Trevi left prison in September, Luis Medina's problems began. "My phone started ringing nonstop," says Mr. Medina, who was then days from staging the Latin Music Fan Awards in Los Angeles. "Hundreds of people were calling and asking: 'Is Gloria going to be there? Oh my God, I can't wait to see her. Is she going to sing?' "
Mega TV hizo un reportaje aserca de la hija de gloria trevijudith chavez flores, eres una vieja amargada, ironica e irrespetuosa, como se atreve esta vieja bruja hablar mal de la trevi y hablar de ana dalai diciendo semejantes mentiras? lo unico que merece esta vieja pende...ja es la muerte
nosotros creemos mas a la trevi que a esta ignorante vieja
cuando fue este programa??? esa mujer que dice que la nina esta viva, esta locaaaaaes una "artista" frustrada!!!!That would be tricky. Ms. Trevi had certainly racked up extraordinary accomplishments over the past five years, but none involved music. Even by Courtney Love's standards, Ms. Trevi's scandals were astonishing: she had landed on Mexico's most-wanted list; eluded Interpol for more than a year; slipped in and out of at least three countries without detection; ignited a prison scandal in Brazil when investigators said that she had impregnated herself using a syringe made out of a ballpoint pen and sperm smuggled from a Brazilian drug lord (a claim later disproved by DNA testing); and been accused of helping to brainwash aspiring young singers and turn them into sex slaves for Sergio Andrade, Ms. Trevi's mentor and one of Mexico's top music producers.
So what was an awards director to do? The music fan awards are decided by popular vote, but even though Ms. Trevi was one of Mexico's most famous singers, she wasn't on the ballot because she hadn't recorded in years and wasn't expected out of jail for several more. Her sudden and unexpected acquittal on rape, kidnapping and corruption of a minor charges on Sept. 21 shocked even Ms. Trevi, who had complained angrily and often during three years of fighting extradition from Brazil and one year in pretrial custody in Chihuahua, Mexico, that she would never get a fair trial.
Mr. Medina, faced with the prospect of handing out an award to an artist with no votes, simply made one up. He announced that Ms. Trevi would receive the first Soul of the People Award, and was soon glad he did: he had to double security to handle the crowds and triple the space for satellite news trucks. True to recent history, no sooner had Ms. Trevi arrived in Los Angeles than Armando Gomez, her lawyer and new fiancé, was arrested on charges of money smuggling and extradited to Texas, where he is now awaiting trial.
Once onstage, Ms. Trevi dazzled. "The people adore her," Mr. Medina says, which taught him a lesson: "Latinos like a rebel, but we love a martyr." But Ms. Trevi's comeback from one of the most lurid scandals in pop history is being built on more than just the Evita syndrome and sensationalism. In a way, she has come up with a solution that mimics Mr. Medina's: make something up, make it glamorous and make it in America. Just six weeks out of prison, the performer known as the "Mexican Madonna" is showing a flair for reinvention that the Material Girl-turned-Kabbalist might gasp at.
Before she vanished in 1999, Ms. Trevi had been Mexico's most beloved star and one of Latin America's highest-paid female performers. She had three hit movies, six smash albums and several top-rated television specials. Her pinup calendars sold by the millions, and talks were under way for her Hollywood debut. But in 1998, a former backup singer, Aline Hernández, published a book in which she said that she had been tortured, starved and sexually abused by Ms. Trevi and Mr. Andrade. She wasn't the only one, Ms. Hernández wrote: dozens of girls had also been enticed and brainwashed. Ms. Hernández said that she had been 13 when Ms. Trevi lured her into the clan, and that she had to help recruit other girls before escaping at the age of 17.
At first, few people believed Ms. Hernández, who was widely painted as a vindictive Trevi-wannabe. But when Ms. Hernández filed a criminal complaint in 1999, Ms. Trevi disappeared. So did Mr. Andrade and a dozen young women. It took more than a year for Interpol to track them down. By the time they were captured in Brazil in January 2000, a 14-year-old member of the clan had abandoned a newborn infant in Spain, while at least five others were pregnant by Mr. Andrade, including two teenage sisters. Ms. Trevi had given birth while on the run, but the baby girl had died in her crib.
While fighting extradition to Mexico from an all-female wing of a maximum-security prison in Brasília, Ms. Trevi somehow became pregnant again. The Brazilian police floated their smuggled-sperm theory, but DNA tests proved the father was Mr. Andrade, who the police said had bribed guards for time alone with Ms. Trevi in an attorney-client conference room. Their motive, federal investigators said, was to follow the example of Ronnie Biggs, Britain's "Great Train Robber," who had escaped to Brazil and avoided extradition by fathering a child there.
But in December 2002, Ms. Trevi and her friend and fellow band member María Raquenel Portillo (better known as Mary Boquitas) dropped their appeals and went home to stand trial. Mr. Andrade followed a year later. That was supposed to be the final curtain on Ms. Trevi's sensational career - by the time she finished serving a sentence for rape, kidnapping and corruption of a minor, she would be too old and despised to return to the stage as the sexy rock rebel nicknamed La Atrevida, or the Daring One. The only way she could win an acquittal, it was thought, was by destroying her image: she could claim she was just another of victim of Mr. Andrade, but that would mean never cashing in again as an untamable, girl-power idol.
Ms. Trevi, however, never doubted that she would come back. I had a chance to witness that when she was nine months pregnant and under federal guard in a Brazilian maternity ward. After I had interviewed her for three hours, Ms. Trevi suddenly asked, "Would you like me to sing for you?"
She hummed for pitch, then began:
I want to take the mountains from your shoulders,
And let you rest.
Because there's no one like you,
There's no one, like you.
Expectant moms with tears in their eyes crowded the door of Ms. Trevi's room, and the two guards applauded.
I knew the song, written while she was in prison, was for Mr. Andrade, but only later would I realize how much it revealed about who was really the strong one in that relationship: the survivor who would keep on fighting no matter how bad things became. Once back in Mexico, Ms. Trevi persuaded the warden to allow her to convert a sewing room into a sound studio. During the year she spent in Chihuahua's Cereso prison awaiting trial, Ms. Trevi wrote and recorded an album's worth of songs, even though one of her lawyers had said her chances of acquittal were slim. But when she and Ms. Portillo finally faced a judge in September, they discovered that the prosecutors no longer had a case: during Ms. Trevi's years in Brazil, the clan girls had grown up, married and moved on. They were reluctant to speak out against Mr. Andrade, whose brother is a well-connected politician.
One crucial witness, Karina Yapor Gómez, had provided some explosive testimony. "When I was a 9-year-old girl going to see my favorite music star," Ms. Yapor testified, "I never thought that I'd one day help her hide a corpse." But she also had trouble keeping her story straight, briefly ran away from home between pretrial hearings and missed court dates to go Christmas shopping.
Ms. Trevi and Ms. Portillo were exonerated for lack of evidence. Mr. Andrade will be tried later this year. Ms. Trevi was Mr. Andrade's most vocal defender during their years behind bars in Brazil, but there have been signs of estrangement: in a pretrial deposition, newspapers reported, she blamed him for her bulimia and declared that she disagreed with the way he disciplined young singers. Mr. Andrade arranged with prison officials to bid Ms. Trevi a face-to-face farewell after her acquittal, but she skipped the meeting.
So what will the 36-year-old singer do without the mentor who shaped her career since she was 15 and transformed her from a cute provincial girl into a rock goddess? "She's extremely talented, but Sergio called the shots," says Mario Salinas, owner of Milagro Sound Studios in Glendale, Calif., where Ms. Trevi recorded all her albums. "When she came back for her fifth album, I said, 'Gloria, great to see you again!' and put out my hand. She just stared at me, waiting for orders, until Sergio said, 'Gloria, shake Mr. Salinas's hand.' Then, she came to life."
The first scandal in Ms. Trevi's career broke out when her grandmother took out a full-page advertisement in their hometown newspaper, begging Ms. Trevi to stop tearing her clothes onstage and shaming the family. Ms. Trevi's response that she loved her music as much as her abuelita ignited nationwide headlines. "Sergio engineered the whole thing," Mr. Salinas says. "He'd think up ways to get everyone in the country talking about her, and she'd go along with it."
But if Ms. Trevi was under a Svengali's spell all those years, she learned a few things. As soon as she was freed, she surprised many in the Latin music industry by leaving Mexico, where her records had sold in the millions, and heading to the United States, where she had sold very few. That might turn out to reflect a shrewd understanding of where her strongest and best-financed fan base now lives.
"Most people thought her only strength was in her home country, but Gloria has a different game plan," says Paula Kaminsky, a vice president of marketing for BMG U.S. Latin records, Ms. Trevi's label. "First, many of her old fans are now new Americans. She appealed to the rebels, the bolder kids, and they're the ones who came over here and brought their tastes with them."
Many Latinos undergo a cultural freeze when they cross the border, said Ms. Kaminsky, a transplanted Argentine: their nostalgia for home becomes a nostalgia for their favorite old tunes. "The teenager who loved her 10 years ago is now living in Chicago and still listening to her records," Ms. Kaminsky says.
Meanwhile, the Mexican population in the United States has nearly doubled since Ms. Trevi released her first album in 1990. There are now more than 20 million recent Mexican immigrants or Mexican-Americans living in the United States, and according to the Recording Industry Association of America, their median age, 24, and household income, $42,000, match the profile of the top consumers of Latin American music. Factor in this group's favorite genre, pop rock, and a whopping 21 percent increase in Latin music sales during the first half of 2004 over the same period in 2003, when overall music sales rose 10 percent, and Ms. Trevi may have as many fans in the United States as she does at home.
Ms. Trevi now has the name recognition and novelty appeal to feed off this listener pool: mainstream Americans with a taste for Latin music are likely to be curious to hear how the once-jailed songbird sings. "The truth is, we have even higher expectations for the next album than this one," Ms. Kaminsky says. "Curiosity is going to draw a lot of first-time buyers, but when they find out how talented she is, they're going to be hungry for more."
Mr. Medina of the music awards agrees. Ms. Trevi played some rough cuts for him before the ceremony, and he said he was "blown back'' in his chair by them.
But no matter how solid her music, warns Mr. Salinas of Milagro studios, Ms. Trevi will have to repackage herself to hold onto American listeners. "With her notoriety, it's wide open for her to break in a really big way, bigger than she ever was before, but she'll have to warp herself a little culturally, like Marc Anthony and Ricky Martin, and master the language," he says. "Don't forget, Gloria has been an absolute original from Day 1. She's dominated every medium she tried - I'm talking movies, TV, live performances - because she writes amazing lyrics and can think on her feet like few people you'll ever see."
Ms. Trevi was such an innovator in her first television appearance in 1989 that she was subsequently banned from Televisa, Mexico's only television network at the time. Until then, the ideal of a female singer in Mexico was an elegant, gowned balladeer with unmovable hips and hair. But when Ms. Trevi made her debut on "Siempre en Domingo," the country's highest-rated program, she tore at her nylons and writhed around the stage, screaming out a song about a young mental patient being seduced by her psychiatrist. Despite her exile from television, her first album dominated the charts, landing three singles in the top three slots.
Throughout the 1990's, Ms. Trevi perfected the role of rock rebel, winning support from both cultural critics, who applauded her witty lyrics and outspoken feminism, and teenagers, who copied her short skirts, clunky boots and wild hair. It was from the legions of "mini Trevis" that her pack of acolytes was formed. "Whenever Sergio was in the studio," Mr. Salinas recalls, "he'd have five or six of these very young girls sitting at his feet, just staring up at him."
In a perverse way, Ms. Trevi's legal problems couldn't have come at a better moment in her career: she was becoming too old to play the bad girl. "Now she can make the shift to martyr," Mr. Salinas says.
Jackie Madrigal, the Latin formats editor for Radio and Records magazine, adds: "In the past, she always had this stand-up-for-yourself image, and that's working for her now. She's depicting herself as a woman who's been wronged, and even people who believe she was guilty figure she's paid the price with five years in jail."
So far, Ms. Trevi seems to be managing her rebirth well, despite the continuing turmoil in her personal life. She has signed with World Entertainment Associates, Miami-based agents who specialize in veteran, scandal-free performers like Gloria Gaynor, Jose Feliciano, Maria Conchita Alonso and Dionne Warwick. She has a new album in production, "The Birth of the Universe." She also has a guest role in "Aventureras," a popular, American-based theatrical revue for Latinos, and a photo layout of her seminaked in the current issue of the Spanish-language men's magazine H. In the works to accompany her album is a tour that will kick off in Mexico City (where Ms. Trevi can still fill the 104,000-seat Aztec Stadium) before shifting to the United States.
"En Medio de la Tempestad" ("In the Middle of the Storm"), the first single from the coming album, has already shown Ms. Trevi's staying power on the charts. According to Radio and Records's rankings, it has lodged in the Top 20 on Spanish contemporary radio in the United States for nearly a month, beating out Paulina Rubio's "Algo Tienes" and Marc Anthony's "Ahora Quién," and crept into the Top 5 for most increased plays. Aside from two television performances, Ms. Trevi has done nothing to promote the single, which was also released in Mexico.
The secret to her success might be silence: La Atrevida always loved a microphone, but the new Ms. Trevi is granting no interviews. She is following R. Kelly's example and keeping her mouth shut until the turmoil from the sex scandal dies down. When it does, American talk-show hosts who haven't followed the Trevi scandal as rabidly as their Latin American counterparts won't have the archival memory to press Ms. Trevi about the weird questions still swirling about her case.
Juan Osorio, the Aaron Spelling of Mexican television, was so ready to gamble on Ms. Trevi's marketability that he signed her to a contract before she was acquitted; he created a soap opera, yet to be produced, based on her life, and figured out a way she could phone in her lines from jail in the event of her conviction.
"If Trevi used to be an idol," Mr. Osorio says, "she will now become a phenomenon."