Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

10. DON’T CRY FOR ME, ARGENTINA

Argentina’s most famous dictator of modern times was Juan Domingo Peron. He was born on 8 October, 1895 in Lobos, a small town in the Pampas about sixty miles south-west of Buenos Aires. His parents were Creole and unmarried. At the age of fifteen, he went to military school. Far from the warmth of his family, his first sexual experiences were with prostitutes. He recalled later: “In the era when we were boys, we weren’t accustomed to going to social parties, and it would not have occurred to us to go to a home and make love to a family girl.”

In 1928, at the age of thirty-three, he married schoolteacher Aurelia Tizon. She was a modest soul. Her only contribution to his career was her translation of some English military textbooks for him. Though it seems to have been a loving marriage, he seldom mentioned her in later years. She died in 1938, leaving no children.

In 1939, just months before the outbreak of the war in Europe, Peron was appointed military attache in Rome, where he witnessed Mussolini’s methods at first-hand. Peron travelled through Hungary, Austria, Germany, Spain and Portugal, observing Fascism at work. In Spain, he had an affair with an Italian woman. After they parted, he discovered she was pregnant, but was never able to find her or the child again.

While Juan Peron learnt his Fascism from the European master, he would never have been able to put it into practice if it had not been for his second wife, the redoubtable Evita A second-rate actress and right-wing ideologue, she was South America’s Ronald Reagan.

Born Marma Eva Duarte in Los Toldos on 7 May, 1919, she was the fourth child of Juanita Ibarguren, the mistress of the local landowner, Juan Duarte. At the time, any man with wealth or station in Argentina was expected to keep a mistress. Wives accepted it, provided the husband did not flaunt his mistress in their social circles.

Men would maintain a garconniere, or bachelor apartment, where they would entertain women and even the smallest town would have its amoblados, or love hotels, where rooms could be rented by the hour.

The best a peasant girl like Evita’s mother could expect was to become the mistress of a man wealthy enough to keep her. She and Duarte were together for fifteen years until suddenly, when Evita was seven, Juan Duarte died. After that, to support her children, Evita’s mother ran what was said to be a boarding house, but was probably a brothel.

Los Toldos was a poor town in the middle of the Pampas, 150 miles from Buenos Aires. Prospects there were bleak for a girl like Evita. At fourteen, she agreed to sleep with tango singer Jose Armani if he would take her to Buenos Aires. Later, she claimed that the better-known singer Agustin Magaldi was her first lover.

Although it is popularly supposed that she worked as a prostitute when she first arrived in Buenos Aires, she probably never walked the streets. She certainly worked as a photographic model and posed for pornographic pictures; and she picked up rich and powerful men who could help raise her status.

At fifteen, she became the mistress of Emilio Kartulovic, publisher of the movie magazine Sintonia. His contacts gave her the perfect springboard into society.

She was fairly tall for a Latino — 5 feet 5 inches — with brown eyes and dyed blonde hair, and she longed to become an actress. Using her charms on Rafael Firtuso, the owner of the Liceo theatre, she was cast in one of his productions. Ironically, her first provincial tour was in a play called The Mortal Kiss. It was about the evils of sexual promiscuity, financed by the Argentine Prophylactic League who thought that a rousing melodrama would cut down Argentina’s soaring illegitimacy rate.

Her first film part, obtained through one of Kartulovic’s contacts, was in a boxing movie called Seconds Out of the Ring and she had a brief affair with the star of the film, Pedro Quartucci. She appeared in small parts in a number of other dreadful Argentine films — The Charge of the Brave (1939), The Unhappiest Man in Town (1940) and A Sweetheart in Trouble (1941) — which, together with the occasional modelling assignment, was barely enough to keep her afloat.

To make ends meet, she would spend her nights in clubs like the Tabaris, the Embassy or the Gong, where wealthy businessmen would spend more in a night than she would have earned in a year. It was not done for couples to leave together at closing times, so they made assignations to meet at one of the nearby bachelor apartments or love hotels. A girl could expect to ride home in a taxi with an extra fifty pesos in her handbag, though Evita would probably have saved the cabfare and walked. She was safe in the rough streets of Buenos Aires even unchaperoned. It was said: “She had a tongue that could skin a donkey.”

Evita’s career began to take off. Soon she became radio’s queen of the soaps, appearing on Radio Argentina and Radio El Mundo on shows like Love Was Born When I Met You and Love Promises. But the show that brought her national stardom was My Kingdom of Love. It was a series of historical love stories written by a philosophy student. In it, Evita played the female leads — Queen Elizabeth I, Lady Hamilton, the Empress Josephine, Tsarina Alexandra of Russia and Madame Chiang Kaishek. Twice she appeared on the cover of Antenna, the weekly radio listings magazine which had the largest sale of any magazine in Argentina.

In June 1943, a military coup, in which Juan Peron played a major part, brought a group of army generals to power. A month later, Evita, shocked her colleagues in the rehearsal room at Radio Belgrano by demonstrating just how influential her stardom had made her. She picked up the phone and said to the other actresses: “Hey, girls, listen to this.”

She dialled a number.

“Hello,” she said. “Is that Government House? Give me, President Ramirez… 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.”

As soon as the owner of Radio Belgrano heard about this, he upped her salary from 150 pesos a month to 5,000 pesos. It was a shrewd move. Evita was having an affair with Colonel Anibal Imbert, the Minister of Communications in the new administration, who controlled the country’s radio stations.

Colonel Imbert moved his pretty young mistress out of the rough Boca district and into a comfortable apartment on Calle Posadas, a quiet, tree-lined street just off the fashionable Avenida Alvear. Her fellow actresses were jealous. They looked forward to the day when Imbert dropped her, as he surely would, and she would come crashing to the ground. But Evita was looking for an opportunity to move onwards and upwards.

On 15 January, 1944, an earthquake destroyed the Spanish colonial town of San Juan. Thousands were killed and a wave of sympathy swept across the country. Evita persuaded her lover to hold a huge benefit for the victims in Luna Park, the open-air boxing arena in the centre of Buenos Aires. Argentina’s leading actors and actresses would turn out, and it would be broadcast nationwide on the country’s radio stations.

On the night of the benefit, Evita spotted Libertad Lamarque — one of Argentina’s loveliest actresses — on the arm of a tall, handsome army officer. Evita had done her homework. She knew that this was Colonel Juan Domingo Peron, the Minister of Labour, and rising strongman in the regime. She went over to Libertad Lamarque, who she knew slightly, and asked to be introduced. When it was Libertad’s turn to do her bit at the microphone, Evita slipped into the empty chair beside him.

Peron was a ladies’ man with a reputation for preferring young girls. He was then forty-eight; she was twentyfour. It took little to seduce him. In Evita’s own words: “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’.”

What dictator could resist? They went to bed that night. She soon learnt that Peron was involved with a number of other military men who were plotting to overthrow the civilian government. His plan was to put Fascism into practice, he said, without making the mistakes Mussolini had made. With her help, she was convinced power would be his.

A few days later, Evita marched around to Peron’s apartment. At the time, he was living with a teenaged mistress, a girl from the northern provinces who Peron had nicknamed Piranha. Evita evicted her and, knowing his weakness for young women, persuaded him to move into an apartment in the same building as her own.

It was rare for an Argentinian man to marry his mistress and, with frequent coups and counter-coups, it was rare for a minister to hold his job for long. Evita realized that for them to stay together, he had to hold onto power.

The source of power in Argentina had traditionally been the gauchos (the cowboys from the Pampas), but they had largely migrated from their power base to the shanty towns that surrounded the major cities. Evita convinced Peron that he should mobilize their support. As Minister of Labour, he was in the perfect position to do just that. He brought in a minimum wage and gave workers four weeks holiday a year, sick leave and protected them from arbitrary dismissal. Most popular of all, he introduced the agonaldo, an extra month’s wages to be handed to each worker just before Christmas. He developed a broad base of popular support and founded the descamisados, a civilian paramilitary organization similar to Mussolini’s Blackshirts.

Evita continued her career as an actress but now, of course, she got the star parts. In Circus Cavalcade, she played opposite Libertad Lamarque who had not forgiven her for stealing Peron from her. To rub salt in the wounds, Evita got Peron to pick her up each evening from the studio. One day, Evita sat in Libertad’s chair and Libertad slapped her across the face. The tension on set was palpable. The movie was a flop. Soon after, Libertad was forced into exile.

By 1945, Peron was Minister of War and Vicepresident. Then there was another coup conducted by senior army officers alarmed by Peron’s mobilization of the masses. When Peron was arrested, Evita organized a protest by the labour unions. Thousands gathered in public squares and he was released on 17 October, 1945. Together, Evita and Peron were taken to the presidential palace. From the balcony, he addressed a crowd of 300,000 people. A few days later, they married. Anti-Peronists spread the rumour that when he asked her to marry him, she was so shocked she nearly fell out of bed.

Evita cracked down on that sort of talk. Their love, she maintained, was not sexual, but pure. She did not consider herself the wife of Peron but “an Argentine woman and an idealist who, confronting the responsibility of the fatherland, forgets everything”. When he wanted to reward her, she wrote, he did so with a kiss “on the forehead”. Peron used his power to help conceal the sordid details of her past. The pornographic photographs she had posed for were collected and destroyed.

They contrived to give the impression that theirs was a sexless marriage, that they dedicated all their energy to the people. Certainly, Evita was Peron’s greatest political asset. Despite her jewels, turn and regal manner, the people recognized her as one of them. Her beauty was said to personify Peronist femininity. Peronist posters portrayed her as the Virgin Mary, but political enemies still referred to her as “the little whore”.

Years later, while travelling in an official car with an Italian admiral, jeering crowds taunted her.

“Do you hear that?” she said. “They are calling me a whore.”

“I quite understand,” said the admiral. “I haven’t been to sea for fifteen years and they still call me an admiral.”

Even Argentine poet and leading opponent of the regime, Jorge Luis Borges, said: “Peron’s wife was a common prostitute. She had a brothel near Junin. And that must have embittered him, no? I mean, if a girl is a whore in a large city that doesn’t mean too much, but in a small town in the Pampas, everybody knows everybody else. And being one of the whores is like being the barber or the surgeon. And that must have greatly embittered her. To be known and to be despised by everybody and to be used.”

Not content with being a back-seat First Lady, Evita wanted political power for herself. She tried to legalize prostitution and regulate Buenos Aires” redlight district, further exacerbating rumours about her past. She also promoted votes for women and organized workers. The Eva Peron Welfare Foundation pumped millions of pesos of government money into welfare programmes, though some of it was siphoned off into her Swiss bank account.

Through her sexual charisma, Evita controlled a web of men strategically placed throughout her husband’s regime. She politically castrated many leading figures, and dealt more literally with others. Political opponents were tortured with electric shocks that left them impotent. She also took direct responsibility for the castration of rebel leaders, keeping her victims” testicles in a glass jar on her desk. This obviously made a considerable impression on the ministers, officials and union delegates who came to petition her.

Evita seems to have been faithful to her husband throughout her marriage — with one exception. During World War II, she met Aristotle Onassis, who was channelling food parcels through Argentina to Nazi-occupied Greece. When Evita was in Europe in 1947, they met again at a formal lunch and arranged a private meeting at her villa on the Italian Riviera. As soon as he arrived, they made love. Afterwards, he was hungry and she made him an omelette. In return, he donated $10,000 to her favourite charity. He said later that it was the most expensive omelette he ever had.

On that same trip, in Rome, thousands of people gathered outside her window at the embassy, screaming: “Peron! Peron!” When she went out and waved to the crowd, they responded with a straight-armed Fascist salute, which had not been seen in Italy since the downfall of Mussolini. Fighting immediately broke out between Communists and Fascists. It took an hour for the riot police to clear the street and the embassy’s flower beds had been trampled out of existence.

Evita died at the age of thirty-three from cancer of the uterus. Her death plunged Argentina into mourning and moves were made to have her canonized.

After Evita died, Juan Peron, who was already fifty-six, began to take an inordinate interest in the Union of Secondary School Students, especially its young female members. It had branches in every school. The girl recruits were sent to luxurious “recreation centres” where they entertained high-ranking government officials. The centres had teams of doctors to handle unwanted pregnancies and venereal disease.

Peron had his private recreation centre where he would spend the afternoon with teenaged girls, watching them play basketball or swimming. One of them, Nellie Rivas, became his mistress.

The daughter of a worker in a candy factory, she was just thirteen, but Peron said he was not superstitious. She slept on a sofa at the foot of her parents” bed. One day at the Union of Secondary School Students at Olivos, she was told that she would be having lunch with the President. That lunch led to others.

Then she was assigned to take some papers from Olivos down to the presidential palace. She spent the afternoon there talking, then stayed the night. The next day she went to a sporting event with Peron. It finished late, so she stayed again. The third night there was a rain storm, so she could not go home. In fact, she never went home again.

Peron built her a luxurious love nest with mirrored walls and white bearskin rugs in the basement of one of his villas and showered her with jewels. But the relationship, though sexual, was caring. Peron would spend time teaching her the rudiments of culture. He even offered to send her to Europe to learn about the world, but she refused as she did not want to leave him.

“The very thought of leaving the residence brought me attacks of madness,” she wrote later.

Stories about Peron’s teenaged mistress spread. Soon people were talking about sex orgies behind the high walls of the presidential mansion, with Peron running amok like a Roman emperor among slave girls. Although most of the tales were fanciful, many of his followers believed that Peron was defiling the memory of Evita. In 1955, amid economic ruin and having alienated a large section of his support, Peron was deposed. He was forced to seek sanctuary on a Paraguayan gunboat that had put into Buenos Aires harbour for repairs. Before it took him into exile, he scribbled a final note to Nellie Rivas. It read: “My dear baby girl… I miss you every day, as I do my little dogs… Many kisses and many desires. Until I see you soon, Papi.”

Later, the torrid correspondence between Juan and Nellie was published, further besmirching his reputation. He was tried in absentia by a military court for his affair with Nellie Rivas and he was stripped of his rank of general for “conduct unworthy of an officer and a gentleman”.

The judges wrote: “It is superfluous to stress the horror of the court at the proof of such a crime committed by one who always claimed that the only privileged in the land were children.”

Nellie was heartbroken.

“He loved me,” she said. “He could have been my grandfather, but he loved me. He always told me I was very pretty, but I’m not really, am I?”

Nellie was sent to a reformatory for eight months. Her parents went into exile in Montevideo. Later, she married an Argentine employee of the American embassy.

At the same time, Evita’s remains were disinterred and removed from Argentina in an attempt to prevent them becoming an object of Peronist veneration. They were hidden in Italy.

Exiled in Spain, Peron met Isabel Martinet, an Argentine dancer. She quit her career to become his personal secretary. They married in 1961. In 1971, there was yet another coup in Argentina. This time the military promised to restore democracy and as a gesture to Peron, who still had a huge following, Evita’s remains were returned to him in Madrid.

In 1973, Peron returned to Argentina and successfully stood in the presidential elections with Isabel Martinet as his running mate. When he took office in October 1973, he already knew he was dying. His widow succeeded him on 1 July, 1974. Politically, she suffered in comparison with Evita — or at least, the legend of Evita. In desperation, she brought Evita’s remains back to Argentina and had them interred next to Juan Peron’s in the crypt in the presidential palace.

It did no good. In 1976, she was seized by Air Force officers and held under house arrest for five years. In 1981, she was exiled to Spain, where she resigned as head of the Peronist party. She died there in 1985.