494. Evita: Birth of a Legend (Part 1)
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Under pressure. I always love the story about Churchill when he became prime minister in 1914. It's all kicking off. The Germans are invading in the east. And he says that that night he went back home and he slept like a baby because the pressure that this was the culmination of everything he'd been planning for. And actually, he was at his best under enormous pressure. This is the moment that he lived for.

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It won't be easy, you'll think it's strange When I try to explain how I feel That I still need your love for all that I've done You won't believe me All you will see is a girl you once knew Although she's dressed up to the nines

At sixes and sevens with you I had to let it happen I had to change Couldn't stay all my life down at heel Looking out of the window Staying out of the sun So I chose freedom Running around Trying everything new But nothing impressed me at all

I never expected it to. Don't cry for me, Argentina. The truth is I never left you. Through my wild days, mad existence, I kept my promise. Don't keep your distance. Don't keep your distance.

So, Dominic, that was Madonna playing Evita in the Miami mix of Don't Cry For Me Argentina, written, of course, by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Tom, what happened to Madonna's voice? Could you tell? It was actually me! Was she singing a Spanish accent? Is that deliberate? No, that was American. Oh, really? That was American? Yeah, it was an American accent. You could tell. Could you? Anyway, so today we are looking at Eva Perón, Evita.

aka Evita. Yeah. And she has a place in my heart. And that particular track has a place in my heart. Oh, that's nice. Did you ever see the film? I did. So it came out just after Christmas. And you may remember in the episode we did on disco. Yes. I mentioned that Sadie and I were great habituates of love muscle. Yeah. At the fridge in Brixton. Yeah. And the film Evita came out, I think, a couple of days after Christmas.

And there was a rumour that there was going to be a big Evita night to celebrate it coming out at the fridge at Love Muscle. And the rumour was that Madonna herself was going to turn up. Crikey. So we drove all the way back from where we'd been staying at Christmas to go to it, dressed up in our glad rags and went to the night. What, did you dress as Evita? Yeah, Evita or Colonel Perron, I can't remember. One of the two. I mean, you would remember that, Tom, so that suggests that you did dress as Evita. Ha ha!

Anyway, let's move on. And we went there and of course Madonna didn't turn up. No. But it was a brilliant, brilliant evening. You know, they sang that, they sang all kinds of other stuff. And they had people in the crowds with Peronist slogans waving it around. Mm-hmm.

And I remember thinking, this is completely mad. What other figure from South American history would inspire a night like this? I'd go to a Simon Bolivar night. They don't hold it that in Brixton. They didn't have it. No. And so as a result of that, I didn't really know anything about Evita, but I read about her a lot over the following year. And of course, the film and the musical opens with Evita's funeral, where everyone is terribly upset. And of course, 1997...

which is the year of Diana's death, was the perfect year to be reading about Evita. That's true. That's a good point. Tom, well, first of all, that is a lovely story. Thank you. And it gives us a wonderful insight, I think, into the cult of Evita and Argentine history. Yeah. But also, Tom, you're in very good company. Because do you know who you remind me of? Who also went out of their way to engage with the cult of Evita, to go to a performance that would be Evita-themed in London, like you, and somebody with whom you've often been compared, actually. Yeah.

Would it be The Iron Lady by any chance? It would be The Iron Lady. So in August 1978, Margaret Thatcher went to see Evita with her speechwriter, Ronnie Miller. So the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. And after she got back, she wrote Ronnie Miller a letter, which is in her archive. And it says...

Dear Ronnie, it was a strangely wondrous evening yesterday, leaving so much to think about. I still find myself rather disturbed by it. Which is exactly how a lot of listeners to this podcast would be feeling, Tom, having listened to your singing. And she says...

Now, if they can do that without any ideals, then if we apply the same perfection and creativeness to our message, we should provide good historic material for an opera called Margaret in 30 years' time. So, you are the Iron Lady of this podcast, aren't you? Are you not? She's being harsh there, I think, Mrs Thatcher, on Evita, because I think Evita did have ideals. She did, indeed. But, I mean, I think actually the parallels between Evita and Mrs Thatcher are...

on one level absolutely mad they're at opposite ends of the political spectrum yeah but on the other I'm looking forward to this the devotion to I suppose to kind of taking center stage and playing the diva which is of course what the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is all about it's kind of playing with riffs of opera the tragic heroine and all that kind of thing yeah of course and both Evita and Mrs. Thatcher were very good at playing the diva and

And also, both of them were simultaneously loved and hated. They were. And it's a perfect example of how a female politician or political figure generally, I would say, elicits stronger reactions than a man does. Extreme reactions. Of course. But there have been lots of female leaders, indeed, in Argentina. Yeah. Cristina Kirchner. Yeah.

But I think that Evita and Mrs. Thatcher are probably the most diva-esque female political leaders since the war, wouldn't you say? Since the war of the 20th century, I would say, Tom, with no question. Yeah. Evita is easily one of the most famous female public figures of the 20th century, probably Mrs. Thatcher in Indira Gandhi, I guess, or Golda Meier in...

Israel. But they haven't had a smash hit musical written about. No. And the fact that she had a musical written about her is very revealing. She was a creature of show business. Because she was an actress. Yes. As we will discuss, it's not just her performance, but her politics is enormously informed and

by the soap opera melodramas that she embodied on the radio. And in that sense, I think there's actually a comparison with Ronald Reagan in America. When we did our Reagan series, we talked about how Reagan's worldview, his sense of himself, the message he took to American voters, was really strongly informed by his time in Hollywood. The Hollywood thing wasn't a joke or an accident. It was really important. And I think it's exactly the same thing with Eva Peron.

that her show business background in the 1930s and 1940s actually is her politics in a weird way. And that sort of cult of the spectacle and of performance and sentimentality has been at the heart of Argentine politics ever since. And there's also a further dimension which you don't get with Thatcher and Reagan, which is the Catholic dimension. Because

Santa Revita, as she's hailed both in the musical and on the streets of Buenos Aires when she was the star of the show, that is a genuine expression. When she died, there were moves to have her canonised. There were, absolutely. Which the Vatican rejected for reasons that we will explore. But

Obviously, the sense of drama that public displays of Catholic ritual have is something else that is a part of the Evita mythos and just makes her an amazing, amazing subject. Agreed, Tom. So that's what we're going to do today. It reminds me a little bit. We did an episode about the Saint Catherine of Siena, who's suffering and who's sort of self-mortification, who's visible suffering the fact that she...

embraces people who are deeply, deeply ill and all of that kind of thing. So there's a thing, isn't there? She kisses a leper. Evita kisses a leper. Yes. And someone rushes forward and tries to swab her lips with alcohol. She smashes the bottle. Yes. And she says, no, you know, these are my people. You could say she's the link between Catherine of Siena and Diana, who you mentioned.

She's also, as I hope we will show, she's the link between Catherine of Siena and Donald Trump. Her politics are not the same as Donald Trump's, but we will see how... She's all about the vibe, isn't she? The vibe. The style. Politics as style. So...

It's an amazing story and we'll be doing it in the course of this week. Evita's background, her rise, her relationship with Perón, her extraordinary death and the way in which that becomes this public melodrama. And then the even more bizarre story. Yeah, absolutely mad. About what happens next to her body, to her reputation, to her ghost. And the attempts of people to basically be Evita in the 1970s amid the chaos of Argentine sort of politics with terrorism and bombings. And it is the most amazing story.

Let's start, obviously, with the woman and her background. So we are in Argentina in the late 1910s. And I think, you know, we can't spend ages on all this. But just to give you four things I think it's important to have in our heads about Argentina. First of all, Argentina is par excellence the country of immigrants. So in her lifetime, its population almost quadrupled.

And these are people who are quite poor, often, coming from Italy, Spain, and Germany. During her early years, probably a third of the Argentine population had been born Argentinian.

They had arrived in Argentina because it's the promised land. Great hopes for this wonderful new life, this utopian world into which they are coming. It is a rich and prosperous country, isn't it? It's a very rich and prosperous country. But of course, the thing is, you arrive somewhere with great ambitions. You are very easily frustrated if it doesn't work out. Yeah. And you look for someone to blame. Well, in the words of Jimmy Nail, Ava, beware of the city. Jimmy Nail. I didn't think we'd have Jimmy Nail on the podcast. That's nice. Our friend of the show, Dan Jackson, will enjoy that.

Number two: Argentina is a country dominated by one city, Buenos Aires.

Huge port. It looks out to the old world and particularly to Britain, actually. It's integrated into British imperial economic networks. And behind it is this vast agricultural hinterland, the Pampas, which is where she comes from. And a lot of the people who are kind of the ruling classes, the oligarchic classes, are either British or very influenced by Britain. I mean, that's how football becomes so huge. Exactly. So football, polo, rugby, we'll discuss some of this later on. So it's important to sort of remember that.

The third thing, I think, is that Argentina, uniquely, even in Latin America, it looks to Europe. It sees itself as a kind of a European country. It had a very small population of African slaves who ended up being completely assimilated. The Indian indigenous population, so-called Indian, largely extinct, very few of them left.

So they're very European, they're always looking to Europe, but at the same time they're very conscious of being out on the complete margins, the very bottom of South America. And there's a sense, I think, lots of political scientists have written about this, there's

There's a sense of a desire to emulate Europe, and particularly Britain, but also a sense of being snubbed and being forgotten and put down. And I think that's really important. And then the fourth thing is that Argentina has always had a history of very deep division and inequality. So throughout the 19th century, during its first century of independence, it was torn apart by endless civil wars between Unitarians who were centralists in Buenos Aires and Federalists, you know, the landowners who wanted to keep their power out in the provinces.

And then later on, you have a great deal of tension between the old landed elites that based the polo set and this swelling mass of urban workers. So that's all you need to know, really, about the background to Argentine politics. Well, it's not all you need to know, but it's all you need to know for the purposes of the podcast.

There is more to say, isn't there? Yeah. For now. So Eva Perón, as she becomes, is born in this nothing place called Los Tollos in the sort of middle of Argentina, 150 miles from Buenos Aires in May 1990. And that means the tents, doesn't it? So it's a kind of an allusion to the kind of the native encampment that had once been there. It is, exactly. When she was growing up, there would have been a handful of...

of native people living in hovels, sort of shacks outside the village. And you would see them at feast days kind of riding around in their ponchos and stuff. Mm-hmm.

But by and large, it's a village of farm workers, farm labourers. There's not a lot to do there, is there? There's nothing to do. So the big sport is cockfighting. So if you like cockfighting, I mean, maybe that's good. But otherwise, if you don't like cockfighting, there's literally nothing to do. I think even if you like cockfighting, there are better places to be. Yeah, it gets a bit boring after a while. So her father is a man called Juan Duarte, who's 43, and he comes from a town 20 miles away.

And he works as an estate manager. He's not married to her mother. So he's in his forties. Her mother is a woman called Juana Ibarguren, who's a Basque. Like Unai Emery, the manager of Aston Villa. Oh, thanks. That's nice. Like Unai Emery. Yeah. Or the former Wolves manager, Julen Lopetegui. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's loads of Basques in the world. Yeah. They're everywhere, the Basques. One.

Wonderful. Her mother had met Duarte when she was probably about 15 and bore him four children. This is not, unfortunately, the last time in this series that there will be relationships with an alarmingly large age gap. I think it's fair to say. Now, Duarte is actually married and has a family elsewhere. He comes to this town, Los Toldos, to work as a sort of farm manager.

And as is very common in Argentina in those days, he basically has a second marriage. Because he's a long way from his first wife. He's a long way from his first. And at first, the norm was this would be with an indigenous woman, a native woman. But over time, it kind of evolves. So he has Juana. Interestingly, she's clearly a very proud, ambitious and stubborn woman. Well, that will be her Basque heritage, Dominic. Of course, they're very proud people, the Basques. They are proud people. Proud and independent. Yes, absolutely.

She takes his name, which is unusual. She calls herself Duarte. People in the village don't like her. It's not clear whether they think she's sleeping with a big man, so they envy her, or whether they despise her for doing this. Maybe a bit of both. She's kind of upwardly mobile, isn't she? And with more than a hint of snobbery. Yeah. And so the fact that she's simultaneously looking down on people who have reason to look down on her, and there's nothing to do except cockfighting. I mean, it's an absolute nightmare, isn't it?

It is. I mean, essentially, people are going to bitch about her. They are indeed. And they do. Yes. Now, Eva's birth certificate will come a little bit later in a subsequent episode to the very complicated issue of the birth certificate. What it seems pretty clear is that her birth certificate was later destroyed for reasons that we will explain. But at the time, people who saw it said that her surname was not given as Duarte, her father's surname, but as her mother's surname, Ibarguerene.

And there was a lot of gossip in the village. There had been a massive row about this between the two of them, which is why there'd been a big delay in registering Ava's birth. She's the fourth child. She's got two elder sisters and one elder brother, Juan. And what is clear is that the children and the mother insisted that they would continue using Juan Duarte's name.

even though he didn't want them to, and they weren't kind of legally entitled to. So right from the start, there's a sort of a taint, I suppose. Her parents are unmarried, but then she's using a name that is not her own. But also a sense of moving up, of...

aspiring of wanting something better than what you were born into. Exactly, yeah. There's also, I think, a sense of resentment and humiliation because when Ava is not even one, Duarte says, I've had enough of my time working in this pathetic little town. I'm actually going back to my real family. And back he goes to his real family, which is in a place called Chivilcoy. And is that a family middle class, Dominic?

If he's a farm manager, it's not elite by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly more middle class than the Ibargueran family. And so it would inspire Evita to cry, screw the middle classes. I will never accept them. My father's other family were middle class and we were kept out of sight.

hidden from view at his funeral. So that's a moving rendition from the musical. If you're going to consistently recite things in the musical, it will become tiresome. I'm speaking for the audience. No, but that is an important aspect, isn't it? The fact that he dies. Yeah. And by custom, they should not be allowed to go to the funeral. Exactly. Although I do think it would be an editorial error to sing too much. I think you are right to mention it. Thank you very much. And kudos to Tim Rice for summing it up so well. Well done, Tim Rice.

Because I think this is probably the single most influential thing that ever happened to her in the first 10, 15 years of her life. When she's about six, her father is killed in a car crash. And Juana, her mother, says, I will go to the funeral. We will all go.

Now, she dresses the children in mourning. They all go to Chivilcoy. The wake is in progress and everybody is absolutely horrified to see them. Of course. It's not that they don't know they exist. I think they know they exist, but they just, they do not want this basically second family turning up. Spectres at the feast. Yeah. And there's a lot of arguing and eventually the compromise is made that the hearse will proceed to the graveyard and they can walk but right at the back.

Not with the real family, in averted commas. You know, there'll be a spectacle. They will be publicly humiliated. I mean, everybody's humiliated by this scene. It's a reminder of the kind of the hierarchical character of Argentine rural society. Right, it is. So Ava must know at that point, six, you're old enough to remember this and for this to have an impact on you to be aware, at the very least, that there are people who despise you and who despise your mother.

And it is clear that for the rest of her life, Ava, like her sisters, had a tremendous sense of hurt because of her parentage and because of her background. So she never, ever admitted it or talked about it. She would just make these sort of coded references to her outrage against injustice. From as far as I can remember, the existence of injustice has hurt my soul as if a nail was being driven into it. From

From every period of my life, I retain the memory of some injustice tormenting me and tearing me apart. And I think this undoubtedly lies at the heart of it all.

So they go back to Los Tolos anyway. She is a very skinny, small little girl. They call her skinny, la flaca, the thin one. They end up moving eventually when she's about 10, 11 to a slightly bigger place called Junin, which is a kind of railway junction. Apparently, Dominic, it derives from the Quecha word for planes. Oh, that's nice. So it's kind of flat, isn't it?

Not a lot to do. Dusty, sort of scruffy, unpaved roads. It's Wild West. Yeah, a little bit Wild West. She goes to school in Hunin. One of the teachers remembers her later and says, a very beautiful little girl with dark hair, skin like porcelain, a very self-absorbed child with an intense inner life, great sensitivity and great vulnerability. Of course, you never know with this how much this is back projection, do you? I mean, maybe that teacher doesn't even remember her at all.

It seems that they, again, were, you know, there's no husband, no father. There's a slight sort of cloud hanging over them. Some girls are told you don't talk to their duates as they're calling themselves. So the mother is calling herself the widow duate. Exactly. And she's still very keen on kind of

projecting respectability and she's raising her girls and her son Juan to think of themselves as respectable. Yeah. But there's the challenge obviously of how do you maintain that facade if you don't actually have any money? No, which they don't. So the mother, she sews a lot, doesn't she? And sewing machines will become a kind of important icon for Evita later on. Yeah. And she takes in lodgers. She takes in lodgers and she cooks for them.

And this will provide a lot of scope for anti-Evita propagandists later on. Because the story, and it's one that Jorge Luis Borges, the great writer who we've already mentioned, he says that she was running a brothel and that she was pimping out the girls. I mean, this is simply not true at all, is it? No, it's not true. There is no foundation for that whatsoever. It's

It's the opposite. I mean, big spoiler. Ava Perron, I think, was never a prostitute. I think it's often claimed that she was, but I don't think she was. I think they are actually quite the opposite. As you say, I think they are obsessed with respectability. Yeah. It is something that is always out of reach and they're desperate to reach it. The thing that I think Ava thinks about more than anything when she's growing up, like a lot of people, is, you know, where are we? We are in the 1930s. This is the age of the cinema.

So there's a cinema. There were multiple cinemas actually in Hunin. The great biography of Eva Perrin by Nicholas Fraser and Marisa Navarro. She says, you know, every week they go and see these films and on the films are images of a European or North American life, depictions of wealth and power, visions of great and glittering cities, and most of all of love, love across class barriers, love and money, love and furs, love and destiny.

Yeah, it is by this point chiefly American films. Yeah. Because the Argentine film industry has basically been decimated by the rise of speakeas and the Americans have kind of imposed a ban on the sale of cine film. Well, also, I think the Argentine film industry, those people who are sort of historians of Argentine cinema may object to this, but...

I think there's a sense that in the 1930s, actually, it's not very good. Yeah. I mean, it's in decline at this point. Now, Ava is like a lot of girls. She loves the cinema. She loves music and dancing. She dreams of a life in show business. And ultimately...

And ultimately, when she's 15 years old, she persuades her mother to let her move to Buenos Aires to seek her fortune in this world. Because you mentioned her love of dancing. And of course, the famous Argentine dance is the tango. Yeah. And the story is that it's not her mother who takes her to Buenos Aires.

but a tango singer. Isn't that right? Yes. Agustin Magaldi, who was actually one of the biggest tango singers in Argentina. A.K.A. Jimmy Nail. Of course, it's Jimmy Nail in the film. It's Jimmy Nail in the film, yeah. So Magaldi looked nothing like Jimmy Nail in reality. No, he didn't.

But also, he's not a kind of classic tango singer, is he? Because he's much more concerned with social issues. He's very passionate about social justice. And I always wondered whether this story emerges because the themes of his songs are seen to kind of map onto Ava's later concerns. I don't know what you think about that. No, I think that's a fair point because his music...

his lyrics echo the themes of her rhetoric. So you'll see this a lot. It's definitely a thing in the musical, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Tim Rice musical. There's a story that Agustin Magaldi came to Junín to perform. He's a great hit, and then he takes her back with him to Buenos Aires, effectively as his mistress. But her biographers say this is rubbish. First of all, there's actually no evidence he ever came to Junín at all.

But also, you know, he travels with his wife. His wife comes on tour. It is highly implausible that his wife would approve of him with this very skinny. And she's not exactly a bombshell young Ava. His wife would smile meekly while he brings her back with them to the capital. I think that's very unlikely. Yeah.

What it actually obviously expresses is, one, that suspicion that you've already said that basically the family are all prostitutes and that she only advances because of her sexuality, which I don't think is right at all. And secondly, I totally agree with you. The sense, in some mysterious way, her life and career must be bound up with the tango, which is the one thing that people know about Argentine culture in the early 20th century. Tango, of course, is born in brothels in the port of Buenos Aires.

Then it becomes a bit more respectable, goes to Paris and so on. The tango is melancholy. Its themes are kind of generally love and suffering and sacrifice. And actually, as we will see, those are the themes of Eva Peron's politics. They are rhetorical themes that she goes on about. So she's undoubtedly steeped in the world of the tango. I mean, that music is playing all the time. I mean, it is the sound of Buenos Aires and...

The realm of film is also that of great cities like Buenos Aires. So obviously, if you are the kind of girl who doesn't want to be stuck in Hicksville, who dreams of the bright lights, and you are in the middle of Argentina, Buenos Aires is the only place to go. So I think we should take a break at this point. And when we come back, we will follow Ava to the Big Apple. Very good.

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What's new Buenos Aires, as Evita famously sang when arriving in the streets of the great Argentine capital city. And Dominic, she's 15. Yeah. She has no money. She has no particular education or aptitudes. What is life like for someone with no particular skills turning up in this massive city? Overwhelming, Tom. Terrifying, actually. So 18 years ago, I was in Argentina.

So Eva is one of many, many people who are at this point arriving in Buenos Aires from the interior of Argentina and moving off the land to

and into the city. So Buenos Aires in the 19th century had been quite a small place. It has expanded massively. It's a city of immigrants. So its population is about two and a half million, rising towards three million, full of Italians and Basques who have come across the Atlantic in the last couple of decades. I guess a way to think about it, especially for American and Canadian listeners, it's basically a combination of New York and Chicago. So it's... Meatpacking. I know you love meatpacking, Tom. And speakeasies. Yeah, two things very close to your heart.

It's the centre of the railway network, so it's full of trains and stations. It's full of abattoirs. This is where they freeze the meat. This is the meat on which Argentina's got rich, and they send it across the Atlantic. It's full of banks. There's a stock exchange. There are opera houses, all built in a kind of European, barren houseman, late 19th century Parisian style. So it looks like, in some ways, a sort of alternative universe version of Paris in which the elite behave arbitrarily.

as though they were on Bond Street in London. Now, obviously, most people are not part of that elite. So there's a huge working class, largely immigrants. The Italians and the Basques came at the turn of the century. Now there are lots of people like Evita coming from the interior, and they are working in factories and shops on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and they're often living in very, very poor, cramped homes.

insalubrious conditions. So that is her milieu. She will be spending the next few years drifting around these kind of pensiones, these like, you know, boarding houses, lodging houses, you know, crowded, miserable, probably frightening, frankly, for a girl in her teens. But at the same time, kind of exciting. Oh, totally. Yeah, definitely. And she has got away from the controlling presence of her mother as well. Yeah. Which must also, I mean, if you're independently minded...

which Ava clearly is, that must also be a factor, don't you think? And must have steeled her to continue to remain in the city, to not kind of give up, to not go back. Yeah, most people would go back though. So as our biographers say, everybody dreams of a life in the big city and life and showbiz and being on the stage and being in front of a camera. Except for you, Dominic, to be fair.

well maybe I have my dreams too Tom you know I still dream of that little the Hollywood agent getting in touch yeah I suppose yeah Eurovision is not closed off to me entirely um

So, you know, most people dream of that, but settle down in their little town. There's something in her, the drive. There is undoubtedly a drive because there are no sources about this time. We don't have evidence for it, but the evidence is her life, I guess. I think what she sees in Buenos Aires is the possibility of another life. So I mentioned the elite. The elite are impossibly rich, even by European standards. So there's an amazing statistic that in 1930, the top 2,000 people in Argentina owned

land that was the equivalent to Holland, Belgium and Switzerland put together. I don't know why you'd put those three countries together, but anyway, that's the equivalent of the land holdings of this elite. And these are people who made the money in the 19th century. They're the old families. They live like English country gentlemen and ladies. They play polo. They play croquet. They shop at Harrods, which has a branch in Buenos Aires.

They go to the Opera House, the Teatro Colón. They go to the Jockey Club, which is the gentleman's club. Yeah, the watering holes of the well-to-do. And in the Argentine winter, which is our summer, they would go to Europe, to the Côte d'Azur, to summer on the Italian lakes, to go to the races in England. And people would say, oh my God, Argentines are so rich. They're not country cousins. They're nouveau riche, I suppose. So in Paris, there was an expression at the time to be as rich as an Argentine.

So these are the people that she is looking up to, I think. Well, she's not looking up to them, though, is she? She despises them. She hates them precisely because she is looking up to them, though, surely. That's why she hates them. Because they are at the top of that pyramid. Yeah, but looking up to them implies that they provide her with the standard. No, you're right. She wants to displace them. She absolutely does. Yeah. But...

I mean, important to say that at this point, she's not politically minded at all, is she? No, not at all. She has no real interest in kind of social issues. And she's entirely focused on making her way as an actress. She is. And to begin with, I mean, she's not a very good actress is part of the problem. No. And her earliest roles, even on stage, she's part of the lower classes. She's always playing maids or...

secretaries rather than queens or anything. She is. She's in terrible plays that run for two weeks and are never heard of again. And we only get like fragmentary glimpses of her life. So she's in a play about a girl's school and somebody says, young, very pretty, dark eyes, the personification of innocence. She seems very pure. That's her persona at this point, of course, because she's 15, 16. Yeah. There's also a glimpse we have of her. She goes to some friends at some point to the beach in Montevideo, Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay.

And there are boys who see her on the beach, upper class boys. And one of them said later, I remember her. She seemed neither stupid nor intelligent, perfectly unremarkable and rather lower class. And that rather lower class, that's the tone. So is that the place that she's gone with this rather sinister sounding guy, Pablo Suero, a.k.a. the Toad? Yes. Yeah. And it's said of him...

that she is sleeping with him. Which she probably was. Because we've said that she's not a prostitute. Yeah. But anyone listening and thinking, you know, attractive young girl wanting to make her way as an actress in a very, very predatory and masculine dominated world. I mean, it seems improbable that the directors with the power would

would not have leveraged their control. Of course. And I don't think even the most sympathetic biographer would doubt that in a way that we undoubtedly would find repellent now in the kind of Me Too era. Well, because there's this famous kind of... So after Suero and Evita split up...

She goes to ask him for another part. That's right. And he keeps her sitting outside, you know, the office for hours and hours. And then he kind of bounds out of the office and yells at her. Do you think that because I slept with you, I'm always obliged to give you work very publicly in front of all the other actresses? Yes. There are loads of other actresses there.

And the person who sees it says her voice became softer and softer. She became whiter and whiter with humiliation again. A terrible scene. And even if that one incident didn't happen, there must have been many such incidents. Yeah. And you can see why in due course she will want to erase the record of her career as an actress.

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Which obviously then makes it difficult to know what was going on. Exactly. We do have a sense, I think, of what was going on because people have dug into the listings and things. We know that she was in...

a terrible radio science fiction program in a tiny part. We know that she entered a beauty contest and lost it, that she was the emcee of a kind of tango competition, that she was an extra in a film about boxing. And we know that she's listed in stage programs. But, you know, she's in the chorus or she has no lines or she has one line. She must have been...

very, very poor. I don't mean a poor actress. I mean, you know, no money. I mean, one point of contact that she does have is her brother Juan, who is in Buenos Aires as well. Yeah. And he's kind of, he's a slightly shady character, isn't he? He is. And later on, he will be accused of gross corruption. I think not entirely unfairly. So she does have her brother, but that avails her very little. One of the actresses who she worked with, the lead actress in a play, a woman called Pierina D'Alessi, she took her under her wing a bit and she later said,

I remember her. She was hungry, unhappy, careless about herself. Her hands were cold and sweaty. She would come to the theatre early because it was warmer than her room and she had nowhere else to go. A sad scene, but one that you can completely imagine. You know, such a common story. And there's another record, I can't remember who it is, who is saying to her, why don't you improve your elocution?

because she has a very working class accent, very provincial accent. She mispronounces a lot of words. And the friend is saying, why don't you try and improve your ability to speak?

so that you will get better parts. And she kind of says, I just, I can't. I just haven't got the energy for it. Yeah. She's always hungry, always tired. Yeah. She's too tired, too hungry, even to do that. And actually, also, Tom, let us be honest, she's not actually very good. She's not a great actress. She's not stunningly beautiful. Although, her style of acting actually turns out to be quite effective on the radio. Yes. And this is really the making of her, isn't it? It is completely. You're absolutely right. So...

In 1939, I mean, she would be hanging around all the time outside the offices of agents and producers and things. And she seems to have got in with a group who were going to produce a whole series of plays by this playwright called Hector Blomberg. And she actually manages to land a role as one of the sort of the stars of this series. She's about 19. And the first thing they're going to do is this love story in 19th century, late 19th century, Belle Epoque kind of Paris story.

And it's the first time that she really gets any publicity and she is going to become a bit of a radio star. Now, I think that this is absolutely central in the making of her, not just as a show business personality, but as a political personality. Argentine radio is not nothing. It's the second biggest commercial network in the world. So the biggest is the US.

And in this vast country, you know, far bigger than any European country and incredibly underpopulated. So people are living gigantic distances from each other. The radio has this almost supernatural power over people.

And particularly soap operas, which are broadcast every evening at 5.30 to women preparing the dinner for their husbands to come home. And they're called soap operas because basically they're sponsored by soap manufacturers. Yes. And you mentioned Reagan earlier. I mean, there's an echo there. Reagan kind of cuts his political teeth, doesn't he? By selling fridges, essentially. Yeah, General Electric. And there's a sense in which Ava's ability to act affirmatively

effectively as a radio star is also about selling stuff. I mean, she's selling soap as well. Yeah, she is. And so that idea of broadcasting messages is something like Reagan, that she is learning by doing this. It's the intersection of capitalism and acting, I guess. It is. When we did the Reagan series, I remember we were talking a lot about Reagan and Hollywood. And I said, I always thought, like Lou Cannon, Reagan's great biographer, that

that it's bonkers that people would say of Reagan, he's just an actor. Because being an actor is brilliant preparation for politics. Saying the lines, wearing the makeup, standing in the right place, meeting the fans, all of that. And I think radio...

Ditto with politics in Argentina. So the way it would work in Argentina is because there are lots of people who are very poor in these far-flung villages, the radio manufacturers would get trucks and they would send them to these villages and they would have loudspeakers and they would play the soap operas to the people in the village. And the soap operas, as her biographers, Fraser and Navarro, say, the soap operas, they were more recitals of a script than they were dramas. So the script would have been written just beforehand.

The entire thing is at an absolute kind of pitch of emotion. Yeah, histrionic almost. Histrionic from the start to the end.

And it's always about love, disappointment, sacrifice. The lead characters are young women who are always being betrayed or sacrificing themselves for their husbands or whatever. But who in the long run finish up in the arms of a handsome and dashing hero. Yes. And these are the roles that Ava is playing. The girl who is poor.

who suffers, who endures, but who does, in the long run, get a man. And it's the only role, really, she ever plays. I mean, that's the thing. It's not like this is one role among many. This is all she can do. People said of her voice, I mean, we were talking, weren't we, about her voice before we started recording. Her voice is unbelievably monotonous. And all she can do is to sort of emote plaintively about duty, love, sacrifice, blah, blah, blah, martyrdom. But...

she does it incredibly well yeah so that what by 1943 she's earning a fair amount of money and she's able to buy a place i think she also helps out juan who's got gambling debts yes so she's starting to get a degree of security in a way that she had never before in her life had and she's doing it by playing this role of you know the girl who suffers who then gets her man and don

Dominic, would it be fair to say that reality maps onto art? It does indeed. It's extraordinary how in this story, again and again, the soap operas anticipate what is to follow. Because in January 1944, she goes to a gala event where she meets the man with whom her life will be forever entwined. And this is the rising star of Argentine politics, matinee idol, Colonel Juan Donizel.

Domingo Perron Perron

So I think on that thrilling soap opera-esque moment, we should stop this episode and we will come back next time with the seismic meeting of Eva and Perón. And you can either wait for it if you are a de camisado, if you are one of the suffering poor of Argentina. Don't be mad. But if you want to be a member of the Buenos Aires elite, part of the snooty country clubs, you can, of course, hear it on the radio.

therestishistory.com by going there and signing up or if you already remember brilliant so we will see you whenever i hope you've enjoyed it and hasta luego bye-bye one for sorrow two for joy three girl four for a boy

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