Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Evita Peron

by Barnes, John

  About one o’clock that morning, Evita phoned Buenos Aires and spoke to her husband. It had become a nightly routine for her to share the joys and griefs of the day with him. Evita sent off a package every night to Buenos Aires of all the pictures taken of her that day, and, wherever she stayed, her hosts always made sure there were photos of the General prominently displayed. They had never been apart so long, and they both must have felt the loneliness that goes hand-in-hand with power, surrounded by aides prepared to do their instant bidding, yet isolated, rather in the way of that old Irving Berlin melody — ‘What’ll I do with just a photograph to tell my troubles to?’ The kind of troubles that neither aides nor photographs could solve, and which they most certainly must have discussed during those long nightly phone calls, included the question of whether she should or should not go to Great Britain.

  The British Prime Minister Clement Attlee had invited her to his country after word had reached the Foreign Office via the British Embassy in Buenos Aires that an invitation would be appreciated. At first the British were delighted to get what they saw as an opportunity to put their rather strained relations with Argentina on a warmer footing. Perón had swept them economically from a country that they had long regarded as a sixth dominion. Their investments in Argentina had been reduced practically overnight from 250 million pounds to four million as a result of sales forced on them under the threat of expropriation. So they no longer possessed the kind of economic power over Argentina that fourteen years earlier had forced it to sign a trade pact that had included an agreement eliminating privately-owned Argentine bus lines in Buenos Aires for no other reason than that they threatened the profitability of the British-owned transport system in the city. But now all the British were concerned about was to safeguard their supplies of desperately needed beef. If that meant giving the wife of the Argentine President a few pleasant days in England then the British Government was happy to extend a warm welcome. Unfortunately, it did not work out in quite that way.

  Basically the problem was that the British were finding it much more difficult to divest themselves of their colonial mentality than they were their empire, and Attlee’s Labour Government handled the arrangements for the visit with all the tact and sensitivity of a nineteenth-century Tory gun-boat diplomatist. Responsibility for putting together a schedule was handed over to the Anglo-Hispanic Council whose secretary, it was announced, was well fitted to handle the matter because ‘he has a close knowledge of Latin America. He was a Methodist missionary there, and has explored up the Amazon.’ If that was not bad enough, the next word out of the Foreign Office was that arrangements were in hand ‘to show Señora Perón things in which she is interested, such as the Royal Agricultural Show and the London Docks.’ As an added attraction, Mrs Attlee had kindly offered to have tea with her.

  If the Government thought it had everything under control, it was in for a big shock. That was not what the Señora wanted at all. First and foremost, she wanted to stay at Buckingham Palace with the King and Queen. That was all that mattered as far as she was concerned. It was to be the pinnacle, the supreme moment of her European Tour. Never again would her neighbours, those society ladies on Avenida Alvear, be able to look down on her.

  So, suddenly, British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, whose beginnings in life were almost as humble as Evita’s found himself with a diplomatic crisis on his hands. For not even a solid working-class socialist like Ernie Bevin could allow a woman with Evita’s shady reputation to stay even one night under the roof of his Sovereign’s palace. Word was passed to Evita that, unfortunately Their Majesties would not be in town during her visit. When her displeasure at that turn of events was leaked to the British press, a Foreign Office spokesman loftily commented on suggestions that there was some occasion for surprise that Señora Perón would not be staying at Buckingham Palace. ‘It is not a State visit,’ he said. ‘such visits are extremely rare and to draw a comparison between them and a private visit is only proof of ignorance.’

  Hastily, the Foreign Office made it clear that its spokesman was not referring to Señora Perón’s ignorance. It was the newspapers, the ministry suggested, who had got it all wrong. The primary target of the FO’s wrath was the tabloid Sunday Pictorial which had carried a front page streamer headline that ‘The President’s wife is not welcome’. The article said that the planned visit was ‘causing increased embarrassment’ to the Government. British members of Parliament were concerned because Señora Perón is ‘the wife of a fascist dictator’, because Argentina has ‘consistently demanded pistol-point prices for meat that often proved to be of appalling quality’, because she would come to Britain fresh from a ‘triumphant reception in Franco’s Spain, a country of oppression’, and because ‘the Señora’s favourite party trick is to produce the fascist salute on the slightest pretext‘.

  That story was immediately picked up by the Associated Press wire service and transmitted to Argentina where it was gleefully carried by anti-Perónist newspapers. General Perón read it the next morning, and the AP promptly felt his wrath. The Ministry of Information put out a radio bulletin on the State network accusing the American wire service of being ‘an instrument of certain interests engaged in disturbing good relations between Argentina and friendly countries’. Just who those certain interests were the Argentines did not say. But that same day, the British Ambassador was called to the Foreign Ministry in Buenos Aires and told that Señora Perón would not now be visiting Britain after all. There was no explanation. In London, British Ministers quietly heaved a sigh of relief, although naturally their Foreign Office spokesman voiced ‘the liveliest regrets‘.

  So instead of Buckingham Palace, Evita had to make do with Switzerland, and just to add to her tale of woe, the Swiss gave her the most unpleasant reception of her whole trip. When the President drove with her from Berne station to the Town Hall, a young man who had pushed his way to the front of the curious crowd hurled two stones at the car, smashing the windscreen. Evita threw her hands up to protect her face. She was unhurt, and the stone-thrower was arrested after a struggle. The Swiss Government offered profuse apologies. But the next day, a group of young communists hurled tomatoes. They missed their target, striking the Foreign Minister who was sitting next to her and splattering her dress.

  After two months on the road, Evita had finally had enough of Europe. She cut short her Swiss stay, flew to Dakar in West Africa, and there boarded an Argentine freighter, the SS Buenos Aires.

  After voyaging across the Atlantic, she still had one final stop to make, disembarking in Rio de Janeiro just in time to upstage the continent’s first post-war Inter-American Defence Conference. The night before she arrived, the Argentine Embassy papered the city with thousands of huge ochre-tinted posters of Evita. But by dawn the Brazilian police had taken them all down, and the Argentines were gently chided by the evening newspaper, Diario da Noite, with the comment that ‘Brazilians don’t need advice on how to treat beautiful charmers’. The Brazilian Foreign Minister decorated her with the Orden Nacional do Cruziero do Sul and then drove her the 40 miles to the fog-bound mountain valley where the conference was being held in the Quitandinha Hotel.

  Now that she was back on Latin American soil that old magnetism of hers was beginning to work again. Special squads of police had to be rushed in from Rio to cope with the thousands of local people who swarmed into the hotel, eager to catch a glimpse of the Argentine goddess they had heard so much about. Escorted by the Foreign Mirfisters of both Brazil and Argentina, Evita made a dramatic entrance into the Quitandinha’s salmon-pink conference salon just five minutes before US Secretary of State George Marshall began his keynote speech. Delegates from every country in the hemisphere rose to applaud her as she took her seat in a specially roped-off section in the front of the hall by the speaker’s rostrum.

  Later she drank champagne with Marshall who told her that her country’s representative at the conference, Foreign Minister Juan Bramuglia, had become everybody�
��s hero. From his hotel room, sipping maté from a silver gourd, Bramuglia had set aside years of Argentine animosity and distrust of American intentions in the continent, managing to orchestrate the necessary compromises whenever delegates appeared bogged down in disputes as they worked their way towards a treaty that would bind all the nations in the Americas to mutual defence. Evita smiled a watery smile at this fulsome praise for Juan Bramuglia. Indeed, Secretary Marshall unknowingly could not have done his Argentine colleague a greater disservice. As Evita set off on her last lap home, she gave much thought to her husband’s foreign minister and the reputation he was making for himself.

  8

  ‘LOVE CONQUERS ALL’

  Undoubtedly the noisiest place in the world on August 23,1947, was the port of Buenos Aires. Evita was coming home. A chill breeze off the Rio de la Plata whipped the muddy water-front as her ship slipped past the old yacht club of the oligarchs and pulled into harbour. Sirens howled. Tugs boomed their welcome. On the dockside, 250,000 Argentines roared a greeting: ‘Uno, dos, tres, Evita otra vez!’ (One, two, three, Evita once again!). Thousands of them had poured into the capital by train and bus the previous day, sleeping out in the city parks, wrapped in their ponchos to protect them from the cold winter night air. Their dark skins, Indian-mestizo features, and ragged clothes — the badge of the descamisados, Evita’s Shirtless Ones — were their passport to the dockside festivities.

  Amid the din, the ship inched up against the quay. Evita was on the bridge, waving and wiping the tears from her eyes. Her husband-president was crying, too. For in Latin America, a man is allowed to show his emotion. He is not considered any less of a man for that. As his wife stepped ashore, dressed in a kohinoor mink coat with luxurious balloon sleeves, he crushed her in an emotional embrace in front of the crowd. Then, with a flourish, Juan Domingo Perón wiped the tears from her eyes and led her to a specially-built platform draped with wine-coloured velvet.

  Obviously, it was a happy and exciting moment for both of them. While the Grand Tour had had its ups and downs — diamonds in Madrid, boos in Milan — Eva Perón had become a world-famous figure. The Presidents of Spain and France had kissed her hand. She had met the Pope. She had stolen the limelight from US Secretary of State George Marshall. For two months her name had been in the headlines every day throughout Western Europe as newsmen scrambled over each other to cover every word and move of the illegitimate farm girl from the pampas. Every newspaper told and retold the astonishing rags to riches success story of the beautiful enchantress from Argentina.

  It would not have been surprising if the Peróns had used those moments in front of the microphones for a little reflective glory and mutual back-slapping. Perhaps it says a lot about their characters, their single-minded devotion to power, that they used their few minutes with their descamisados and their captive nation-wide audience to attack their enemies. For even after nearly two years of close to dictatorial Perónista power, there were still opposition newspapers that refused to be silenced and political opponents who refused to be cowed. The President warned them on that August afternoon that his patience was exhausted and that if they did not accept his bid for tranquillity, it would be forced upon them.

  ‘We have been tolerating the intolerable for the past year and a half,’ he thundered. ‘We are still asking that they do not use infamy as a battle nor calumny as a weapon. It is to their advantage that they listen to us: we want peace, we want tranquillity, because if some day they convince us that in order to obtain that tranquillity it is necessary to fight, we will fight! If tomorrow the moment should come to impose that peace by force I am decided to do so and on their shoulders will rest the responsibility.’

  The crowds loved it. That was the kind of oligarch-bashing they had come to hear. They cheered even louder when their beloved Evita stepped forward to the microphones. First, she said softly, ‘It is with profound emotion that I return to this my country where I left my three great loves, my homeland, my descamisados, and my beloved General Perón.’ Then she, too, turned on her enemies. She had heard disturbing rumours in Europe and Rio, she cried, ‘But whatever the future promises, if I fall, I will fall with my beloved descamisados, and at the side of General Perón.’

  And yet whatever it was she had heard, this hardly seemed the right moment for such sabre-rattling. For barring a few boos in middle-class suburban cinemas when pictures of her return were shown on the newsreel programmes that precede every film in Argentina, she had received the most tumultuous welcome ever staged for any woman in the Americas. While church bells rang out throughout the nation, a thanksgiving mass was held in the main cathedral in Buenos Aires. Airplanes dropped olive twigs, tied with the ribbons of flags of all nations, over the city. Coloured pigeons — dyed pink and blue (a task that occupied the attention of lowly Perónista functionaries for days) — fluttered across the central plazas of the capital. It was an outpouring of love, genuine as well as organised, on a scale that even that admittedly emotional nation had never known before. A writer for the New Yorker magazine caught the mood of the moment with an article called ‘Love, Love, Love’. The classic pulp romance of our time,’ wrote Philip Hamburger, may well turn out to be ‘The fabulous Adventures of Juan and Eva Perón, or Love Conquers All.’

  Hamburger wrote that on his first day in Buenos Aires, he was lunching in a restaurant on one of the main downtown streets, sampling a practically raw sirloin the size of a telephone directory, when he heard a shrill honking of horns. He looked out of the window and saw a long parade of trucks that had halted, snarling traffic. The drivers were just sitting in their cabs, grinning and blowing their horns. On the side of each truck were crude posters bearing pictures of red hearts pierced by arrows, and mingled with the hearts, inscriptions reading: ‘Eva, We Love You,’ ‘Eva and Juan, a Blessed Couple,’ ‘You Will Go to Heaven, Eva and Juan,’ and so on.’ Thinking that it was a satiric attack on the administration and perhaps the beginning of a revolution, he paid his bill and went out into the street to get a closer look.

  ‘Hundreds of people, mostly pale, thin little men with tiny black moustaches, were glancing at the posters as they rushed past, presumably on their way to a steak lunch. Hundreds of other people were peering from the windows of the tall, modern buildings along the street. The unceasing sound of the horns, the truck drivers’ foolish grins, and the mocking, insolent signs shimmering in the bright sunlight gave the scene a momentous and historic air.’

  ‘This is it,’ he thought. The Perón police will come. They will destroy these seditious posters. Heads will roll.’ He stood there for quite a while. The police did not come. The only policeman he saw was standing on a white wooden platform in the middle of the cross-roads, and he was simply shrieking at the driver of a huge bus, who, delayed by the cavalcade of trucks, had begun to honk his horn.

  Finally, he caught sight of a North American friend of his, a long-time resident in Argentina, in the crowd. He grasped his arm. ‘Revolution?’ he asked, pointing at one of the signs. ‘Revolution, hell,’ his friend said. ‘Just a demonstration of affection. The trucking union is about to strike. They want to make certain in advance that Juan and Eva are on their side.’ The friend looked again at the signs. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Properly affectionate. They’ll probably win the strike.’

  In Argentina, Hamburger wrote, ‘love makes the Peróns go round. Their whole act is based on it. They are constantly, madly, passionately, nationally in love. They conduct their affair with the people quite openly. They are the perfect lovers — generous, kind, and forever thoughtful, in matters both large and small. Their love is all-encompassing, ever present. It settles like a soft blanket over the loved ones, providing warmth and protection and the opportunity for a good, long sleep.’

  But there were still plenty of Argentines who did not love the Peróns. Not that there was anything they could do about it except exchange gossip and rumours — there were plenty of these, told at fashionable cocktail parties and din
ners. At one dinner party a guest had learned that the Señor and Señora were splitting up. Just that morning, he had heard from a man who knew a man who had a friend who worked in the President’s office, in the Casa Rosada, that the Señora often screamed at the President and that her voice could be heard down the corridor outside his chambers. This split, the guest continued, was quite in line with the rumour that the Señora coveted the Presidency herself and had secretly ordered the printing of hundreds of thousands of posters bearing her picture and the words ‘The First Woman President’. When the time comes,’ the guest said, ‘she will poison him.’ Another guest was also flushed with rumour. The President, he said, was fascinated by the Señora. In her presence, he acted like a lovesick adolescent. At official dinner parties, she would endlessly relate details of her famous trip abroad, and the President would clap his hands at each tiresome incident and cry, ‘Wonderful, wonderful!’ But the party’s hostess said she had been told that the President was tired of the Señora and was considering forcing her into exile. When she insisted on boring dinner guests with reminiscences about her trip, he would ostentatiously drop his chin onto his chest and make rude snoring sounds.

  Certain stories were staples. When the Señora autographed pictures, she always misspelled most of the words of her inscription; the Señora had left huge unpaid bills behind her in Rome; every evening after work she repaired to the Central Bank, where she drank ‘real French champagne’ with the directors and plotted the undermining of the nation’s financial structure; she carried about with her several million pesos in cash, in a little black bag; she had recently bought a £550,000 diamond from Cartier’s in Paris; at dinner parties she admired the jewellery of other female guests with such feline emphasis that she was invariably presented with it before the end of the evening.