I'm Jill St. John. Tonight on Intimate Portrait, Eva Peron, who in her time was called the most powerful woman in the world. Born on the wrong side of the tracks, she grew up yearning for fame as an actress, but played a real role in the film. real life role that went way beyond anyone's imagination.
Eva Peron would rise from the slums of Argentina to become its first lady. A potent mixture of youth, beauty, and ambition that aroused fierce passions throughout the nation. To her admirers, she was a saint who gave her life to help the poor.
To her enemies, she was nothing but a common whore, grasping for the power and luxury to which she had no right. How did this slender young... woman rise so far in a society dominated by men? How was she able to fascinate an entire nation and change it forever?
She would die tragically young before she could have children. But she considered all of Argentina to be her family. She left behind a heartbroken country. But the power of her legend would extend beyond the grave, continuing to shape Argentina and inspiring one of the best-known musicals of all time and a film starring Madonna.
Eva Peron, the woman who called herself Evita, an intimate portrait, next. It was an unlikely opening scene for the tumultuous life to come. The vast, lonely prairies of Argentina known as the Pampas.
This is cattle country, the key to the nation's wealth. And it was in one of the small... towns that still dock the prairies that a girl, the last of five illegitimate children, was born in 1919. Eva Maria Ibarguren never knew her father. When she was just a year old, he left to return to his legal wife and children in another town. Left destitute in a small town, Ava's mother struggled to support her five children, a job made even harder by the scorn of the villagers who sometimes called Ava's mother a whore.
Her realization of the situation of her mother, her own illegitimacy in relation to her father's family, other families, because they were both families, I think must have been a traumatic experience. traumatic experience and I think that this is something that marked her for life. It came out in a desire to defy convention, in not being afraid to do what she wanted to do. And I think that it gave her a strength and an audacity that was quite extraordinary.
It would have been a certain source of shame for her. And we can tell from her future actions how important this must have been because she made a point later of changing the law such that illegitimate children were never again called illegitimate, but rather natural children. So she must have had this extremely present in her mind as she grew up.
As far as I can remember, the existence of injustice has hurt my soul, as if a nail was being driven into it. From every period of my life, I retain the memory of some injustice tearing me apart. She called herself Evita, Little Eve, a petite girl with big brown eyes.
From an early age, she dreamed of escaping the poverty and small-mindedness of the prairie towns, and her dreams were fueled every day. weekend. Evita became a movie fanatic, entranced by the stories of actors who'd overcome humble beginnings to find stardom on the screen.
I made myself believe there were other places. Marvelous places where only wealth existed. At the age of 15, Evita decided to make her dream come true.
She boarded a train and left for the capital of Buenos Aires, 150 miles from home. If you wanted to be a... actress, which she did, from always, there was no other way but to go to Buenos Aires.
Buenos Aires was Hollywood, so therefore that's where you have to go. Buenos Aires in the 1930s was the third biggest city in the Americas after New York and Chicago. It was a whole new world to a 15-year-old girl from the prairies. She soon found that work in the theaters was scarce and badly paid. For the first several years, Evita was poor and hungry, and sometimes could not even afford the local beverage, mate.
She probably pounded the pavements at enormous lengths, and there are rumors from other actresses and so forth that she was incredibly thin, and when they would offer her a mate with milk in it, she would grab the mate. I just remember the tone of these stories, that she was hungry, and so she would have been pushy. You're pushy when you're hungry.
Evita's persistence paid off. Under the name Evita Duarte, her father's name, she began to get regular work in the theater and on radio in the immensely popular soap operas. When I knew her, She was kind of quiet, nice with everybody, but not an extrovert at all. She was a complete, I won't say was a complete introvert, but was not necessarily. She was quiet.
She was always very, very ambitious and persistent. I mean, she was not the one that give up easy, no. Uh-uh. No, she never did.
Nature gave her the power to talk face-to-face to people. But as far as reading a script, she was pretty bad. She wasn't good.
She didn't have it. Despite her less than brilliant acting ability, Eva Duarte became one of the most popular radio actresses in Argentina. But her success led to accusations her opponents would repeat throughout her life that she had... won all her roles on the casting couch. Actually, the way what people accuse her of here, in general, is of being a prostitute.
And there's no evidence whatsoever that she received any money for her sleeping around. We also don't know to what extent she slept around. And I would emphasize again that it probably was no more than any other of the actresses who tended to throw this in her face. But much bigger issues were about to engulf Evita.
In 1943, the Argentine military took power in a coup, and her life would change forever. She would cross paths with the most powerful officer in the new regime, a colonel named Juan Perón. In 1943, when she was 24, Evita would begin the romance that would change history. She fell in love with the strongman in Argentina's new military government.
Juan Perón was the secretary for labor and war. He had a gift for politics and an undeniable charm. The two met at a fundraiser for Argentine earthquake victims.
Probably she went after him. I would imagine her going after him. She went after fame and fortune, so why not go after this handsome man who seemed to be the best catch-around?
Colonel Perron was smitten by the young actress. He was 48, she was 24. She was a woman of fragile appearance, but with a strong voice and fevered eyes. When she spoke, her face seemed to catch fire.
They became lovers almost immediately. Evita quickly installed herself in Perón's apartment without asking him beforehand, and ordered his previous mistress to leave town. Becoming Peron's mistress gave Evita's acting career an immediate boost.
She suddenly began getting movie roles she'd never had before. She did use the fact that he was a colonel in the government and soon vice president of Argentina in order to get better contracts. She did.
She hadn't gotten that before and I cannot believe accidentally she got it just then. But Evita's focus was shifting from acting to politics. Juan Peron was championing the rights of the poor and Evita, who'd known poverty well, began supporting his vision by making radio speeches. The revolution came because there is hate and the sense of injustice. There is a man, a soldier, who can bring dignity to the workers.
Evita did more than make speeches. She sat in on Perón's private political meetings. She hears the discussions among the politicians. Apparently she would serve coffee and she would stay. And she would listen and she would hear.
In male-dominated Argentina, allowing a mistress to sit in on such meetings was unheard of. They don't accept senior officers to have mistresses. and particularly of her social background. So this was something that was very brave or daring or radical on his part, and it's hard to imagine that it was a slip. It looks as though it was on purpose.
Perhaps Perón valued Evita's advice, or maybe he was simply in love. But his fellow officers were appalled by her constant presence. Soon Perón was expelled from the government. His fellow officers were also expelled from the government.
officers jailed him in 1945. One of them said it was the military's duty to stop the country falling into the hands of that woman. Evita's radio contracts were immediately canceled, and suddenly she felt abandoned once again. She is lost. I mean, she's lost everything that she had.
She cannot be an actress. The man she loves is in jail, and God knows what's going to happen to him, and she knows that her destiny has been, by then, very close to it. Those days still cause me pain. I never felt so small, so utterly unimportant. Evita tried single-handedly to win support for Perón to get him out of jail.
She went around knocking, you know, from door to door, knocking on people's doors and windows and anything to try to... get people to help and she at that point people were aware of her relationship with peron and she apparently was pulled out of a car and beaten up as she as she went around trying to drum up support for pity Whether through Evita's efforts or not, no one knows for sure, a minor miracle happened. A spontaneous rally of 200,000 workers descended on the presidential palace, chanting that Perón must be freed. The military leaders, fearing they'd lost control of the country, released Perón and let him speak to the mass of demonstrators. He was cheered wildly and instantly became the frontrunner for the upcoming presidential election.
Only four days later, Perón and Eva were married. Conscious of her new image as a candidate's wife, Evita tried to have her acting publicity shots destroyed. And in her hometown, someone went into the municipal archives and removed her birth certificate. Evita had never told her husband she was born illegitimate. When Perón began campaigning for the presidency, Evita again defied convention.
She campaigned with him. That might have been the first time, however, that she could see, and of course Perón could see, the kind of popular reaction to her presence and the response. In the countryside, particularly and amongst the working class, it was pretty astounding. An enthusiasm that was a mix between enthusiasm for a political leader and for a beautiful woman who was telling people, I'm one of you.
Perón won the election easily, which meant that Evita was now, at the age of 26, the first lady of Argentina. Evita was popular with the masses, but the upper class was horrified to see a woman of her upper class. bringing his first lady. I think it was total horror, absolute horror, dismay, disgust, all the negative things that you could imagine come up because of her origins, her lack of education, the fact that she's been a movie actress, I mean, which was the pits. There's a terrible saying here about the monkey dressed in silk is always a monkey.
Here they used to say, well, Evita, finally she dressed like a queen, but she had thick ankles. But by the time she was at the sort of peak of her power, at which point she was the most powerful woman in the world, she was dressing impeccably. Evita dressed like the movie star she'd once dreamed of becoming, and the public loved it.
It was as though one of their own had made it to the top, but Evita constantly reminded them that she was still working class. I am a greaser, she used to say, or grasita. I'm a greaser, she wrote from her Dior suits.
And you could say that the Dior was contradictory, but nevertheless she vindicated people's rights to remain working class and supposedly have some of the privileges of the higher social classes, if you will. Evita further annoyed high society by making a grand tour of Europe in 1947. Touring Europe was something only available to the rich. But now Evita would show the wealthy class just how far a girl from the slum. had come. The trip to Europe is her moment of glory as far as that is concerned and also the rubbing their nose into it.
Nobody, no Argentine will become more famous than she does. She will wear the best clothes, the best jewels, she will be more beautiful than anybody and then the actress that comes into play and nothing that shapes her very very much. Evita was a hit in Europe drawing big crowds first in Franco's Spain then in Italy, France, Portugal and Switzerland.
Benito Iambi was Argentine ambassador to Switzerland during her visit and remembers that even the normally reserved Swiss were affected by Eva's charisma. I was very surprised to see the Swiss standing on their balconies with flowers, applauding, so happy to see her. One day, we went out in open coaches, drawn by horses, and the Swiss women would come up and scream, Oh, what a beautiful woman!
In Paris, she made contact with the great fashion houses who would dress her from then on. Yet, despite all the adulation, she told her priest, What have I, an illegitimate child, done to deserve all this? But Evita would prove to be much more than a fashion statement. She would return home to become a champion of the Argentine poor and to become, in the eyes of some, a saint. Although she was now Argentina's first lady, Eva Perón had not forgotten what it was like to grow up poor in the countryside, or to walk the city streets hungry and rejected.
And so she began a campaign to help the... long-neglected poor. A campaign that became a crusade when the high society women who resented her refused to let her join their charity group. She was thrown out, more or less, I mean, that's a good way to describe it, of the main club of the upper classes here, which was a...
Like a charity organization, a very ritzy charity organization, and everyone knows that they told Evita that she was too young. So Evita turned on them and said, well, what about my mama, who of course was the mistress of this rancher in the province of Buenos Aires? And so that was an insuperable rift, and she never forgot that.
Evita set up her own charity, the Eva Peron Foundation, and encouraged the poor to write to her directly and to visit her at her office. Soon she was receiving hundreds of people every day. She actually gave people, for example, beds, housing, sewing machines, very important sewing machines.
What you can do with a sewing machine, you know, changes your whole life of your entire block, not to speak of your family. This instilled a total and lasting loyalty. I want to hit people in the face to make them see what poverty is. It probably had a lot to do with the way she grew up. She had more than just ambition.
She had absolute convictions. She was very genuine. She could have carved out a...
comfortable life for herself, going to parties and that sort of thing, but she left all that and dedicated herself to the needy and the poor. She worried about education, schools and health. She was worried about education, school, and health. Evita made a special point of receiving the sick, often welcoming tuberculosis victims and lepers with a kiss, despite the warnings of her staff. The Eva Perón Foundation built thousands of schools and hospitals, often stocking them with the most expensive equipment, to show that the poor deserved the same as the rich.
Eva herself would visit the projects at night to make sure to make sure they were running properly. She remembered what people needed. She remembered that people were playing football but they didn't have shoes.
She remembered that people couldn't get to doctors and she never seemed to have gotten sufficiently distant from that to forget. France's Le Monde newspaper called Evita the Madonna of the Argentine poor, and the poor themselves often used the word saint. They were so surprised that they...
would say, I have found my fairy godmother, my angel. They were not used to being received with this kind of generosity, so vital, so full of emotion. The Eva Perón Foundation became a huge business with 200 million dollars in assets and 14,000 workers.
Much of the money came from unions and private industry with Evita's prodding. She didn't ask, she would order. Whenever it had something to do with the poor and the humble, she would tell the businessmen and the cabinet ministers in her husband's government what she needed.
She didn't ask for favors. Evita's opponents claim she siphoned off much of the money for herself. One report claiming she had 700 million dollars in a Swiss bank account.
Whether that is true or not, it's certain that Evita cared deeply about herself. social work, and put in tremendously long hours. In a very real sense, I had lost my wife by 1950. We saw each other only occasionally.
She would work all night, I said to her. Eva, get some rest. You are my wife.
And she said, doing this makes me feel I am your wife. One day, we'd been working till three in the morning, and she said, let's go and eat something at the presidential residence. We had to go in on tiptoe because General Perón was asleep. He was always in bed by 10 because he had to be at his office at 6.30 in the morning. We had a quick snack, then we went home and she went off to sleep.
She is convinced that she is a special person who has been destined, marked by destiny to do what she does and that she's going to do until she drops dead. Evita was still in her 20s, but her youth and beauty hid a tragic frailty. Time is my greatest enemy, Evita often said.
Soon she and her beloved poor would realize how true that was. In helping Argentina's poor so conspicuously, Evita was doing more than just charity work. It was good politics. Her social crusade, combined with her youth, her beauty, and her fairytale rise to power, won her the support, even the adulation, of the masses. They see a very beautiful woman, very blonde, very white skin, very beautiful, who says, I am one of you.
She makes them identify with her despite the fact that they are obviously very different. And they accept her, they defend her as they're one of them. Just imagine what it would be like to be still a very young woman and walk out on a balcony and hear again millions of people calling your name.
When you go back off the balcony what do you what do you think? That she was that she was convinced that she was saving the country. The people of the country are happy, they are celebrating the work, the party of the people.
Because today they don't want to be the crystal arms of the socialist government that they had in the darkest night, in the darkness of the night. I talked to a big group of people. Everybody was mesmerized.
She really, she acted magnificently there. She would have been so good in the theater, she would have been a superstar. She was able to put 100,000 people on their toes and yell like crazy, Evita. And that is something, you know. She made the language of law a political language because the way she talked to workers is as if she was, she was still talking in acting in a soap opera.
And it worked. Evita's political savvy helped her husband to strengthen his hold on the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada, or Pink House. While Juan Perón had to speak diplomatically to woo the upper classes, Evita, because she was not officially part of the government, could be as radical as she liked in support of the workers. He would have her in banquets and so forth and give her the floor, you know, so that she would give one of her radical speeches and he would more or less say, there, there, but he'd let her talk at the end, there, there, dear, and he'd look around and say, you know how women are, and seat her again.
So it was a way that he could have his cake and eat it too. Evita organized the Peron Women's Party, giving hundreds of thousands of women a political voice. When a woman goes into politics, she told recruits, the man can eat cold stew.
I think Evita's insights into social problems made her a very early feminist. She had to overcome all the disadvantages of gender being poor, the way in which her mother had solved her problems by becoming someone's mistress. Neva brought this to the forefront and said, this is what a poor woman is, this is what it is to be working class.
The Perons had no children. In her autobiography, Evita said it was because her real children were the poor and the helpless of Argentina. She styled herself almost as a religious icon, the pure virginal mother figure. In a Catholic country where there is the cult to the Virgin Mary is an important cultural phenomenon.
Her possible identification with the Virgin Mary happens. By 1950, her heavy work schedule was beginning to tell. She was taken to the hospital with exhaustion.
But tests revealed something far worse. She had cancer of the uterus. Evita was not told directly. But when her doctors suggested surgery, she became enraged and refused, claiming there was nothing wrong with her.
And she went straight back to work. Because I think that what she was doing was by then far more important. It was her. I also believe that she was immortal somehow, that it was never going to happen to her. And she's 33. Despite her illness, Evita became even more political.
She allowed her name to be mentioned as a vice presidential candidate in the 1951 elections. At a giant rally for Perón, a million people began chanting Evita's name. demanding that she run.
She told the crowd she would do whatever the people asked, but her husband knowing the military would never accept her on the ticket was not amused. And at one point you can hear Perón's voice as this accelerates the people crying for her to say she'll be the candidate who says stop this act. And that's very significant that it was out of control. And at that point, she may have felt that she may have really wanted to say yes. A few days later, Evita announced she would not run, but her decision was immaterial.
She was now fatally ill and increasingly unable to get out of bed. The government told the public she was suffering from severe anemia. Masses were held for her recovery and altars raised in her name.
There was great anxiety. First of all, she was very beloved, so people were waiting, dreaded her death. I think that a big...
The ingredient of that would also have been fear of what would happen after her death. Since she'd actually made this an explicit theme, you know, I cannot be divorced. So you are in the government with me. And she's dying. So what do you register from that?
Evita's weight dropped to just 80 pounds. And when new gowns arrived from Paris, she was too thin to wear them. She had to have her maids model them. Looking at old pictures of herself, she would weep and say, to think of what I was and what I have become. Although Evita was losing her health, she did not lose her spirit.
In her rare public speeches, she became increasingly fanatical against Perón's enemies within the military. We will not let madmen get their hands on Perón. When I go down, I will go down with the working people and leave nothing standing that is not for Perón. Making that speech took all her strength. She had to be helped from the balcony by Peron.
She was so slight in my arms. There was nothing more than a dead woman. In June, she amazed her doctors by finding the strength to attend her husband's second inauguration.
She had actually, um... Ridden in Perón's parade, tied to a wire apparatus to keep her standing, which is hard to imagine what she must have been feeling at that point, but people could see her standing, they could see she was sick, but they wouldn't have known that she could not stand up. Only a few weeks later, on July 26th, as a nation prayed, Evita told a maid, I could never have stood being ordinary in this life, and lapsed into a coma. She was given the last rites.
The national radio began preparing the public, calling her condition very serious. At 8.25 that night, with her mother, sisters, brother, and Perón himself at her bedside, Evita took her last breath. She was 33 years old.
With the news of Eva Perón's death, the country went into deep mourning. When Evita's body was moved to the Ministry of Labor to lie in state, eight people were killed in the crush to see her, and 2,000 were injured. Lines to see the coffin stretched for 30 blocks, and the viewing lasted two weeks. It was a spectacular display of emotion that went on for days.
People came from all over the country to be at her funeral. It was pain on a very grand scale. She was like the protector of everybody.
She was the ray of sunshine in their lives. She was the one who would make sure that things happened for them. Unions asked the Pope to make her a saint. Cities, schools, and subways were renamed for her, and the evening news broadcast moved from 8.30 to 8.25, the hour at which she had passed into immortality. At the funeral, 17,000 police were needed to hold back the weeping crowd.
Juan Peron himself, surveying the scene, said, I never knew they loved her so much. Evita was not buried. Her body was embalmed so that it could be laid inside a proposed grand monument.
But the monument was never built. President Perón, without his wife's popularity and beset by economic problems, was ousted in a coup three years later and sent into exile. The new military government, which hated the Peróns, immediately tried to destroy the Evita myth by displaying the wealth she had acquired.
But that backfired once Evita's will was released. I desire that all my assets be used for the poor as proof of my love for them. In each shirtless one, God was asking me for love which I never withheld. The military also had the problem of what to do with Evita's embalmed body, which they knew would be an important symbol for her supporters. The very thought of her body gave them the shakes.
They knew it was a symbol they could not destroy easily. The church would not allow cremation, so in 1957, five years after she died, Evita's body was secretly buried in a cemetery in Milan, Italy, but her influence would extend beyond the grave. As military governments floundered throughout the 1960s and 70s, the Perons became a symbol for the opposition. Left-wing guerrilla groups made Evita their spiritual leader, citing her final speeches about blood and sacrifice.
People had an interpretation that Eva represented this unadulterated, working-class... radical working class element, revolutionary working class element. People remembered her as their most, as this person who called people to action and told people to defend Perón, told people to die for a cause.
Evita's body was recovered from its unmarked Italian grave in 1971 after Argentine guerrillas murdered a former military president and arranged to swap his body for Evita's. Evita's corpse... apparently in near perfect condition, was sent to Juan Perón in exile in Spain.
Perón would soon return triumphantly to Argentina to be elected president again in 1973. but he did not take Evita's body with him. Instead, he brought his third wife, Isabel, who achieved Evita's goal of becoming vice president. Isabel told Argentina she wanted to follow in Evita's footsteps. She tried earlier to have a hairdo, a hairdo similar to Evita's, but it...
But nevertheless, I think that she was really haunted by Evita in ways. Because in fact, she did what Evita couldn't do. Because Evita wanted to be vice president. But certainly, she was occupying a place that, in the minds of everybody, was Evita's place.
Isabel became president when Perón died in 1974, and during her rule, Evita's body was finally returned home. Eva was laid to rest in her family's vault in a Buenos Aires cemetery. Today, her legend lives on, most famously in the musical Evita, now a major film starring Madonna.
It's nearly half a century since Evita's death, but the story of an illegitimate slum girl who rose to captivate a colonel, and then a nation, still fascinates the public imagination. Evita was a... symbol of femininity with a fantastic personality.
I think the personality intrigues people and at the same time, tragically, any woman who gets... gets into power, and we are talking 50 years later, any woman in power intrigues because it's not the way things should be. I think people are drawn to this figure to try to understand how did this work? How did she pull it off?
Because it's very, very, very difficult for people to pull this off. And then, of course, she dies beautiful. You know, it's like Marilyn Monroe. Blonde, beautiful, not a single wrinkle, not a double chin, nothing. I mean, those beautiful eyes and that beautiful smile.
And she will be forever portrayed as she was at 33. Evita's life was brief, but it had all the ingredients of great myth. An astonishing rise to the top, a magnetic appeal that enthralled a nation, and a tragic finale, just as her star shone at its brightest. I