Saint
or swindler? Why, more than 70 years after her death, Eva Perón remains so
fascinating
Source: The Independent news London
Images from Google
As Tim
Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s juggernaut musical ‘Evita’ prepares for its West
End return, Alastair Smart revisits the life and legend of Argentina’s former
first lady
ome 12
miles southwest of the city of Buenos Aires is a remarkable settlement called
Ciudad Evita. It was founded in 1947 by the then-president of Argentina, Juan
Perón, in tribute to his wife, Eva. What’s remarkable about it is that the entire
street grid is designed to look like her profile – meaning that passengers
flying in and out of the capital can, if they look closely enough, make out her
nose and chignon bun from 10,000ft in the air.
This feat
of urban planning is just one example of how Eva Perón’s legacy is kept alive
in her homeland, where museums and monuments have been erected in her honour.
“My biggest fear in life is to be forgotten,” Eva once said – though she really
needn’t have worried.
Internationally
too, Argentina’s former first lady has inspired many a film, play, novel and TV
show. In 2022, Santa Evita on Disney+ dedicated itself to telling the story of
Eva’s corpse after her death from uterine cancer aged 33. As a testament to her
cultural pull, Eva featured in an episode of The Simpsons in which precocious
Lisa channels her in becoming head of her school’s student body.
Most
famous of all, though, of course, is the stage musical, Evita, by Tim Rice and
Andrew Lloyd Webber. This tells the story of Eva’s brief, brilliant but
controversial life, which took her from nowheresville to the Casa Rosada
presidential palace. It received a standing ovation on its opening night at
London’s Prince Edward Theatre in 1978, with Elaine Paige starring – and ran
for another 2,912 performances. A successful Broadway production followed.
Evita was
adapted into a film starring Madonna in 1996, and is said by Donald Trump to be
his favourite ever stage show. It returns to the West End this summer in a new
production at the Palladium directed by theatre powerhouse Jamie Lloyd, with
24-year-old Rachel Zegler – star of the recent movie adaptation of Snow White
and Hunger Games – in the title role.
How to
explain, though, the world’s lasting fascination with the woman who was briefly
married to the president of a Latin American country and who died in 1952?
Clearly, a smash-hit musical helps maintain a subject’s fame over the years,
but there is plenty about Eva’s story that attracted Rice and Lloyd Webber to
her in the first place.
“She died
so young, yet achieved so much,” says Jill Hedges, author of the 2020 biography
Evita: The Life of Eva Perón. “She rose from nothing, to a position of immense
wealth and power, yet never forgot where she came from.”
Maria Eva
Duarte was born into poverty in 1919, in a small agricultural town called Los
Toldos: one of five illegitimate children fathered by a farm manager (who died
when Eva was a young girl) and a seamstress. Aged 15, she took off for the
bright lights of Buenos Aires, intent on making it as an actor. And make it she
did, finding success in a string of radio soap operas.
After
becoming reasonably famous, she started a relationship with Colonel Juan Perón,
then the labour secretary in Argentina’s military government. Perón was a
widower aged almost 50 when he and Eva met; she was in her mid-twenties. The
couple married roughly a year later, in October 1945, a few months before Perón
was elected president.
Both were
relatively low-born, and Eva in particular had an antipathy towards her country’s
rich elite, which goes some way to explain the populist agenda that the Peróns
pursued in power. Crucially, Eva wasn’t a spouse to disappear into the
background. She was at the heart of policy, with Perón – aware of her mass
appeal – happy to give her a platform. “I speak in the name of the humble [and]
homeless, to cry out against the old evil days,” she declared.
Eva Perón
was a little like Diana, Princess of Wales
Jill
Hedges, author of the 2020 biography 'Evita: The Life of Eva Perón'
For
pretty much the first time in Argentina’s history, large sums were spent on
building a social infrastructure for the poor: schools, hospitals, shelters and
more. In many cases, Eva attended personally to those in need, handing out
dentures to the toothless, for example, and medicines to the sick.
Her fame
reached new heights. “A little like Diana, Princess of Wales, a few decades
later, she showed incredible social sensitivity,” Hedges says, “and this
resulted in a huge amount of public affection for her.” Her supporters called
her Evita, a nickname that translates literally to “little Eva”.
Perón won
re-election by a landslide in 1951. His wife turned down the chance of being
his vice-president, though, in no small part because by then she was terminally
ill.
A year later, she would die and go on to receive a state funeral, with 3
million people lining the streets of Buenos Aires in mourning. Many of those
people saw her as a saint who had been put on earth to protect them. The
Vatican was inundated with requests for her canonisation. So influential was
Eva’s legacy that when Perón was ousted from power years later in a 1955 coup,
his usurpers had her embalmed body smuggled aboard a ship to Italy, and buried
under a false name – so as to avoid its becoming a rallying point for the
Peronist cause.
Another
reason that her fame endures – and why it translates so well to the musical
form – is that Eva’s life was a stunning case of rags to riches: an age-old
story archetype in the vein of Cinderella, Aladdin, and Annie. In her case,
those “riches” included diamonds and mink coats, which she was particularly
fond of wearing.
For all
the millions who idolised Eva, there were millions of others who loathed her.
The latter mostly came from the wealthy classes, whom the Peróns taxed heavily
and disempowered. They told their own tales about her, often misogynistic ones
– that she was power-hungry, that she had slept her way to the top, and that
much of the money meant for the poor was spent on her own wardrobe (hence the
fabulous line from Evita: “They need to adore me, so Christian Dior me”). There
were even rumours that she connived with her husband in the transfer of huge
wealth from Nazi Germany to Argentina at the end of the Second World War.
With so
many competing narratives, it’s all but impossible to get to know the real Eva
– even for those embodying her. “She was a very polarising figure in Argentina
– and still is,” says Elena Roger, an Argentinian actor who has played Evita in
big productions on the West End and Broadway. “This made it both a challenge
and a responsibility to portray her.”
As the
writer VS Naipaul put it in a dispatch from Argentina for The New York Review
of Books in 1972, “the truth begins to disappear; it’s not relevant to the
legend”. The truth, of course, is never as interesting as a legend, and never
survives as long.
Eva
herself had been involved in conjuring a version of her own legend. On becoming
Perón’s wife, she created what might be called a carefully edited version of
her back story. She replaced her birth certificate, for instance, with a
falsified document that concealed her illegitimacy, and destroyed all prints of
the old movies in which she had played bit parts to erase any record of her as
a struggling actor.
In Evita
the musical, Rice presents his subject as a supreme social climber, keeping
relationships with people only as long as they benefited her advancement; a
hostile early biography of Eva by Mary Main called The Woman with the Whip is
often cited as his chief source of information. Rice denies this, but did go so
far as to describe his subject as “dishonest”, “fake” and “self-interested”
(albeit also “fascinating”) in a podcast with the politics professor David
Runciman.
Whoever
you are, power brings out your true self... And the way Eva used her power, in
such a brief and intense space of time, is fascinating
That view
is far from the dominant one, though. After all the research that Hedges
completed for her biography, the author came away with the belief that “Eva
cared passionately about the causes she backed”.
There are
at least two further reasons why Eva continues to enthral us. Firstly, she is
at the centre of a great what-if of 20th-century politics. With her impassioned
speeches made to the masses from the Casa Rosada balcony – and with the
important role she played in granting suffrage to Argentinian women during
Perón’s first term – Eva was, consciously or unconsciously, forging a
presidential path. Had she not been cut down by cancer, she might have gone on
to become the first democratically elected female head of state. That honour
went instead to Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who became prime minister of Sri Lanka
in 1960.
Secondly,
her journey from entertainer to politician is one mirrored increasingly today.
Eva’s successors in this regard include Ronald Reagan, Volodymyr Zelensky and,
of course, the erstwhile presenter of The Apprentice who today occupies the
White House. All found their performative skills to be transferable. (Trump
says he saw Evita six times on its initial run on Broadway in 1979.)
It has
been over a decade since Roger, now 50 years old, played Eva on Broadway, and
still the actor finds herself in thrall to the role. “The musical character of
Evita, just like the real Eva, was someone who assumed great power,” Roger
says, “and for me that’s where much of the interest is. Partly because women in
power [are so rare that] they’re always interesting, and partly because,
whoever you are, power brings out your true self. Once you have it, you no
longer need to pretend to be somebody you’re not. And the way Eva used her
power, in such a brief and intense space of time, is fascinating.”
With
affection,
Ruben