Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Evita Peron

by Barnes, John

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  AN ASPIRING ACTRESS

  For an aspiring young actress, no other city in Latin America offered such a kaleidoscope of opportunity. Buenos Aires in the 1930s was the cultural mecca, the leader of the continent’s artistic and literary world. There were twenty-five theatres, nine radio stations, and three film companies, all squeezed into the city’s compact downtown area of wide avenues and narrow side streets. To the porteños, the people who live in the great port on the River Plate, their capital was the Paris of Latin America, a city of beautiful parks, elegant shops, restaurants which were packed until the early hours of the morning, flower sellers, book shops, and pavement cafés; the whole overlaid with an Italianate air, derived from the ornate marble and granite façades of the buildings and the noisy vibrance of the street life.

  Eva moved into the heart of theatreland on her very first day in town — taking a room in a cheap hotel just off Calle Corrientes, a street that slashes from west to east across the heart of the city centre. It is the Broadway of Buenos Aires known to porteños as ‘the street that never sleeps’. During the day, crowds flock to the banks and stores that line its pavements. At night, while the bankers and shopkeepers sleep, Corrientes changes its image and becomes a neon-lit street of dreams — theatres, cinemas, cabarets, and dance halls — glittering with excitement and romance until the dawn tarnishes the gilt.

  For Eva, the glamour of Calle Corrientes faded quickly, blotted out by the desperate need for a job. She made the rounds of the theatrical agencies. But she had no background, no experience, no references. She dressed badly, and her rough country accent more often than not provoked a smile and a shake of the head among the agents who deigned to see her. She fell nearly three months behind in her rent, and she was reduced to a diet of sandwiches and coffee. Sometimes, she did not even have the few centavos necessary for that.

  Her brother Juan, himself now working in a bank in Buenos Aires, tried to persuade her to return to Junin. ‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘I know what I’m doing.’ She had no intention of leaving. Her will to survive was unbreakable. She told everyone she met that she was going to be Argentina’s leading actress — an ambition that must have seemed as ridiculous to the theatrical agents she pestered constantly as if she had announced that one day she was going to be Argentina’s First Lady. For she lacked talent, beauty, and charm.

  In those humid early summer days of 1935, Eva Duarte’s sole preoccupation was getting a job, any job. Indeed, there may well have been moments when she came perilously close to following in the footsteps of so many young peasant girls who arrived in Buenos Aires full of dreams and ambitions, only to finish up in the sleazy brothels down by the waterfront. But in March, just when things were at their darkest, Eva got her first break, a small part in La Seora de Perez, a comedy at the Comedia Theatre, starring Eva Franco, one of Argentina’s most popular actresses, and Pascual Pelliciota, an actor who quickly replaced her Junin saviour, Magaldi, the tango singer, in her affections. It was the first of a long series of lowly-paid bit parts and short-lived love affairs. The acting jobs never lasted long, either, as it was rare for a play to run for more than a few weeks in Buenos Aires.

  In July, she picked up a job in There’s a World in Every Home. But she was dropped from the company when the play went on tour in the provinces. Then there was a drought until December when she got the part of a laundrywoman in Madame Sans Gene for which she received three pesos per night (in those days about 37p). The other members of the cast teased her at rehearsals, testing her dramatic progress by asking her to walk with a book on her head and a lighted candle in her hand. One of the actors in the play remembered her as ‘childish, naive, and very romantic’, an interesting recollection of a girl whose life was a constant struggle for survival.

  In June, 1936, Eva went off on her first provincial tour in a play called The Mortal Kiss, about the evils of sexual promiscuity. It was financed by the Argentine Prophylactic League, an organisation of well-meaning, wealthy ladies who believed that they could cut down the illegitimacy rate in Argentina’s rural towns with good rousing melodrama. If that was a theme that cut too close to home, the illegitimate girl from Los Toldos needed the money too much to complain about it. Half-way through the trip, however, one of the cast fell ill with an undiagnosed infection. She was sent to hospital and no visitors were allowed. But Eva was determined to show everybody how much she cared for her colleague. She slipped into the hospital and visited her. Inevitably, she became infected, too, and lost her job.

  Ill health dogged Eva throughout her life. But she never gave up. That was one thing about which her admirers and enemies could agree. She was quickly back on her feet and making the daily rounds of the theatrical agencies, driving them and her acquaintances mad, begging for parts, any parts, trying anything to charm the influential in the world of the theatre. One of her young contemporaries, Pierina Dealessi, remembers the day when her theatre manager told her there was a girl outside looking for a job. ‘We were casting a new play. So I had a chat with her. Evita was a plain girl, very thin, black hair. I asked her if she’d ever worked on the stage before. She told me that she was just back from a provincial tour with Pepita Munoz. We took her on at a miserable salary — 180 pesos a month (about twenty pounds). There were no rest days; besides which we gave four shows on Sunday. We always took a tea break in the middle of the afternoon. Evita drank maté (a relaxing Paraguayan tea drunk out of a gourd through a metal tube). She looked so thin and delicate that I used to add a little milk to her maté to give her some nourishment. She weighed nothing at all. What with hunger, poverty, want, and general neglect, her hands were always cold and damp. We were doing a play called The Horn of Plenty by Ricardo Hickens. Evita’s part was that of a young, well-dressed lady. She had a beautiful bust but it hung badly because she was so skinny. She once borrowed my stockings to build it up a bit — poor kid. Time and time again I told her — “eat more; don’t stay up late, you’re in no state to take late nights!” She told me that she had to moonlight other jobs in order to send her mother 700 pesos per month. That was a lot of money in those days. Poor Evita.’

  Just how she earned that extra money is one of the many mysteries surrounding Eva Duarte’s actress years. Later, she never referred to that period of her life except, vaguely as her ‘career as an artiste’. A rumour, never substantiated but long lingering, was that she spent those late evenings in the city’s gaudy, noisy nightspots, places like the Tabaris, the Gong, the Embassy, where rich businessmen spent as much on champagne in an evening as a third-rate actress could count herself lucky to earn on the stage in a year. The girls made a tiny percentage on the drinks bought by the men they met at the bar. At closing time, after the final cabaret, Argentine dignity, respectability, and the law, made it impossible for couples to leave the club together. So assignations would be made to meet at nearby amoblado love hotels or the man’s garçonnière bachelor apartment. At dawn, the girl would take a taxi home, richer by fifty pesos or so.

  Whether Eva went that route or not, she certainly collected a succession of lovers, each one carefully picked to help her career. One of her earliest, most ‘helpful’ romances began when she was making the rounds during her daily job hunting. It was early in 1937 and she was just eighteen. She called in on Sintonia Magazine, which covered theatre and films in typical movie fan magazine style with lots of pictures and breathless reports about the stars and starlets of Argentina’s stage and screen. Eva told a friend later that she fell head-over-heels in love with Sintonia’s owner, a tough former motor racing driver named Emilio Kartulovic, at that very first meeting. It was a romance that did not hurt her. Immediately doors started opening. She got her first job in films, a small part in a fight film called Seconds out of the Ring. Gossip had it that during the filming she indulged in a quiet, brief affair with the film’s star, Pedro Quartucci.

  From then on the threat of hunger disappeared. Jobs were easier to come by, although even she prob
ably realised by then that she was never going to become the great theatrical star of her childhood dreams. She eked out a living with small parts on the stage and in radio. She appeared, briefly, in a few dreadful Argentine films — The Charge of the Brave (1939), The Unhappiest Man in Town (1940), and A Sweetheart in Trouble (1941). And every now and again she landed a modelling assignment for fashion houses and hairdressers. She was learning to take care of her appearance and becoming a good-looking young woman.

  She was making enough to move into a better hotel (although she still couldn’t afford an apartment) and she even considered having plastic surgery to enlarge her breasts (in crude Argentine macho talk, a girl had to have melones (melons) rather than limones (lemons) if she wanted to keep a man). But when the day came for the operation, she failed to appear. She had apparently decided to leave nature alone, although the decision may well have been determined by an unexpected setback in her fortunes at about that time. Her brother Juan phoned her to say that he had been caught stealing money at the bank where he worked. It was not a large amount. But if he could not replace it immediately he would go to jail. Eva did not hesitate for a moment. She appeared to have a genuine love for her big brother, despite his playboy ways. She sold everything she had, gave him every peso she possessed and moved back into a cheap boarding house, this time in the Boca, the old Italian district down in the port, where the buildings lean crazily over twisting, narrow alleys leading down to the quayside.

  Eva had the steel will of a survivor. Living in the Boca could not have been a pleasant experience for a single girl on her own. In those days in Argentina’s big cities, an unchaperoned girl was considered fair game. On the narrow dockside streets, she had to contend with the chirripos, the neighbourhood dandies in their tight black suits, gummed-back hair, and highly polished shoes, who lolled their days away in street corner bars, passing leering comments at any girl who passed by. But they quickly learned to respect the backlash of the peasant girl from Los Toldos. ‘she had a tongue to skin a donkey,’ one of them remembered admiringly years later. Then, after running the gauntlet of the chirripos, Eva would ride the collectivos, the fat little buses that rattle round Buenos Aires packed to overflowing (former motor racing world champion Juan Fangio developed his lightning reflexes as a collectivo driver). Eva rarely survived one of those journeys without two or three black pinch marks on her behind. ‘Everybody makes a pass at me,’ she’d grumble once safely inside the theatre stage door.

  The years passed with a gradual improvement in her fortunes. One of the reasons for this was the current prosperity in Buenos Aires. For while war clouds rumbled across Europe and the Pacific in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Argentina was reaping handsome profits from the sale of its beef and grain to countries that had beaten their ploughshares into tanks. In Buenos Aires, the lights burned late and the champagne flowed. The sensual tango moved uptown from the old waterfront bars and flourished in the dance halls along Corrientes. The theatres were packed, and the city’s radio stations thrived on the advertising of rich foreign companies — Cinzano, General Electric, Johnson and Johnson, Harrods, Ford, RCA, and many others — whose products impinged on the daily lives of every Argentine. It was during this period, when Eva was in her early twenties, that a wealthy soap manufacturer fell in love with her and gave her a radio programme of her own.

  Cesar Marino, head of production at Radio Argentina, recalls that early in 1942, his boss, Roberto Gill, who owned the station, called him into his office and introduced him to Eva Duarte. ‘She had obtained the backing of the Radical Soap Company and was looking for a station to put her show on the air. Gill was more interested in the advertiser than the actress, as he’d never met the Duarte girl before, either. “As from now,” he told me, “she is going to be our leading star.” I didn’t know where to begin as the kid was a very, very poor actress. But she was docile, well behaved, nicely-mannered and serious. She always arrived an hour early for rehearsal and left immediately after the broadcast. She never talked to anybody.’

  That may have been because Eva was becoming a busy young lady. Besides Radio Argentina, Radio El Mundo was also enjoying her soap-sponsored talents. There, appropriately, she broadcast soap operas with titles like Love was born when I met you, and Love promises. Later, she also began appearing on Radio Belgrano, where, in January of 1943, she began a radio series that was to make her well-known throughout Argentina. It was called My Kingdom of Love, and consisted of weekly soap operas written by a student of philosophy. In them, Eva acted out the lives of famous women in history — Lady Hamilton, Queen Elizabeth I, the Empress Josephine, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the Tsarina Alexandra of Russia.

  The series ran for over a year and was so successful that Eva’s picture appeared twice on the cover of Antena, a weekly radio newspaper that had one of the largest circulations of any publication in the country. Argentine families bought it primarily for its programme listings. They learned from the coy cover stories about Eva that she loved sentimental waltzes and Greer Garson films. She confessed to being ‘a tranquil woman, a homemaker, one who loved family life’. What they did not learn was that the tranquil homemaker had been busily making powerful friends in high places.

  In June 1943, a military coup had brought a small group of Army generals to power in Argentina. One evening a month later, Eva picked up the telephone in the dressing room she shared with other actresses at Radio Belgrano. ‘Girls,’ she said, ‘listen to this,’ as she dialled a number. ‘Hello, is that Government House? Give me President Ramirez.’ Then, as the girls gaped, wide-eyed, ‘Hello, Mr President. This is Eva Duarte . . . Yes, I’d love to have dinner with you tomorrow evening. At ten. Good. Until then. Chau, Pedro.’

  Word of the conversation quickly reached the ears of Jaime Yankelevich, the owner of Radio Belgrano. He was a shrewd fat man who had laid the foundation to his fortune in 1923 by cornering the market in the crystal headsets that were needed for the primitive radios of the time. It was just before the world heavyweight boxing championship between Jack Dempsey, the holder of the title, and Argentina’s hero, Luis (The Wild Bull of the Pampas) Firpo, and Argentines were rushing to buy radios to listen to the broadcast of the event. So Yankelevich made a fortune. Eva’s dinner date prompted him to make another investment. He raised her salary from 150 pesos a month to 5,000. But such uncharacteristic generosity was not prompted by any optimism that a relationship between his young actress and the nation’s president would help him. He knew it would not.

  President Pedro Ramirez had the reputation of being a henpecked husband whose wife kept a very un-Argentine grip on him. On top of that, his stiffness and reactionary ways had earned him the nickname of the ‘Little Stick’. So Yankelevich was fairly sure that Eva would not get very far with the president. But he knew something that the other girls in his radio station did not: that Eva already had hooked a member of the military government who was in a position to be much more useful to him. It was Colonel Anibal Imbert, the Minister of Communications, a post which controlled the country’s radio stations. The Colonel, a stout little man, had already moved his young, pretty mistress out of the Boca and into a comfortable apartment on Calle Posadas, a quiet, tree-shaded street just off Avenida Alvear, a very fashionable part of Buenos Aires. As far as Jaime Yankelevich was concerned, any girl friend of the man who controlled the life and death of his business was well worth a substantial increase in salary, even if she was a terrible actress.

  When the other actresses at Radio Belgrano found out about the sudden rise in their colleague’s salary, they were more amused than angry. Knowing the reason, they called it Eva’s ‘official velocity’ and they expected her to fall to earth with equal speed as soon as the Colonel dropped her, which the girls, wise to the demi-monde life that most of them lived, knew would be sooner or later. They could not have been more wrong. Eva was on her way to dizzying heights and it was the plump Colonel Imbert who dropped by the wayside, a combination of events that, ironically, he
had the misfortune to arrange himself.

  On January 15, 1944, an earthquake almost completely destroyed the old Spanish colonial town of San Juan, 500 miles to the west of Buenos Aires. Thousands were killed. In the tremendous wave of sympathy that swept the nation, actors and actresses pounded the streets to collect money to help the survivors. As part of that fund-raising effort, Eva persuaded her lover to stage a monster variety show in Luna Park, a large open-air boxing arena in the centre of Buenos Aires. Leading theatrical and radio stars turned out to perform before a packed audience and a nation-wide hookup of all the country’s radio stations.

  As the stars mingled on the stage, taking their turns at the microphones, Eva, who had arrived on the arm of Colonel Imbert, caught sight of Libertad Lamarque, one of Argentina’s loveliest actresses. She was talking to a tall, handsome army officer. Eva knew who he was — Colonel Juan Domingo Perón. He was rumoured to be the Strongman among the colonels who controlled the military government. She went over to Libertad, whom she knew only slightly, and asked to be introduced. Then, when it was the actress’s turn to take the microphone, Eva slipped into the empty chair beside the colonel.

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  AN AMBITIOUS ARMY OFFICER

  ‘I put myself at his side. Perhaps this drew his attention to me and when he had time to listen to me I spoke up as best I could: “If, as you say, the cause of the people is your own cause, however great the sacrifice I will never leave your side until I die.”’