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”.