Seductress (35 page)

Like Theodora, Evita was born into the fille de joie guild. The fourth of five illegitimate children, she grew up on the squalid wastes of the Argentinian pampas, shunned and despised by local landowners. She escaped into tabloid fantasies of movie stardom and ran off to Buenos Aires at fifteen, some say with a tango singer. But she didn’t find the white satin sheets and klieg lights of her dreams. Between the few walk-on parts she hustled in traveling plays, she lived on her back and knees, scrounging for pesos.

She wasn’t even pretty; she had sallow skin and no
melones,
the first requisite for Latina sex appeal. But she stubbornly clawed her way through the male ranks, with a fixed eye on her goals and firm hand on the amorous reins. Men existed to serve her, period. After nine hardscrabble years, doors began to open. A movie magazine editor featured her in his pages, and finally a soap magnate gave her a role in a radio soap opera and made her a minor celebrity.

With name recognition and a sleek new pinup persona, Evita gained entrée into the power circles of the city. She became a fixture at government functions. At one of these, a benefit for earthquake victims, she met Vice-president Juan Perón, a popular hero of the masses and kingpin of the military junta that had taken over the state in 1943. In a piece of pure soap opera she snaked Juan away from Argentina’s reigning sex goddess by sidling up to him and murmuring: “Thank you for existing; I will never leave your side.”

Perón listened. He soon fell in love—insanely so by macho standards. Forgetting his manhood, he not only installed her in an adjoining apartment but invited her to his top-level meetings. A quick study in politics, she kept her ear to the ground and may have rescued his career during a countercoup in 1945. While Perón looked down the barrel of a gun in a jail cell, Evita rallied his populist supporters and staged the march of two hundred thousand on the capital that installed him as president.

Having consecrated his rule, Evita demanded her mythic perquisites. Juan did the unheard of: He married his mistress and gave her carte blanche as first lady. In the years that followed, she imposed her wishes on Argentina with the zeal of a chess master playing five games at once.

To smooth the way, she launched a full-dress seduction of the public. The tactic was double-barreled; the more the people loved her, the more her husband doted on her. He ended his compulsive womanizing and behaved like a “lovesick adolescent” in her presence until she died.

As soon as Evita moved into the presidential palace, the seductive machinery went into gear. The Casa Rosada was turned into a rococo movie palace of gilt, marble, and French antiques; and her ranch, filled with a menagerie of exotic animals. No courtesan queen ever made more of the erotic accessories of power—the limos, private planes, flunkies, and major jewels. And with the help of imagistas, she re-created herself as an iconic glamour goddess, haloed with a blond pouf and dressed in couturier splendor. “The poor,” she said imperially, “like to see me beautiful; they don’t want a badly dressed old hag.”

Evita’s cerebral seductions, though, were the heavy crowd pleasers. She took her script from soap opera. Touring the country in a series of
actos
(splashy public events), she addressed her “dear
descamisados
” from small-town balconies like a televangelist healer. In the purple prose of
radionovela,
she told them Juan was their “God.” My heart “bleeds and cries and covers itself with roses,” she harangued, “we cannot conceive of heaven without Perón.” She chanted the words every man yearns to hear: “I am a fanatic for Perón! Viva Perón, viva Perón!”

By extension, she was their goddess, Venus, Cinderella, and the Virgin rolled into one. She dramatized herself so successfully as a semidivinity that she became a national
objet de culte,
Santa Evita. But true to her mythic ancestry, she was no saint. She had a sting in her tail, a “Lady Wildcat” temper and a touch of goosestep. She spiked her charm with
cojones
and sometimes swaggered around her apartment in Perón’s military tunic.

Although without an official title, she took charge of the Ministry of Health and Labor and applied herself to the “right ordering of society.” In a country where aristocrats owned 80 percent of the assets while 60 percent of the people lived in abject poverty, she worked to equalize the wealth. She decreed drastic reforms: a universal pension plan, general health care, and a gigantic building program of hospitals, schools, parks, and housing in Levittown-style complexes for the aged and poor.

To fund these projects, she ran the Eva Perón Foundation, a blatant extortion racket that siphoned off lottery profits and bilked the rich. In 1949 she obtained the vote for women and brought four million women to the polls for the first time. They elected six female senators and twenty-three deputies. “Women have the same duties as men,” she pointed out, “and therefore should have the same rights.” If Juan’s army thugs hadn’t threatened revolution, Evita would have been made vice-president, but she ensured that Perón’s third wife would receive it automatically in 1971.

In any case, Evita was too sick to run by the election. Diagnosed with cervical cancer (likely contracted through Juan), she had less than a year to live. After her death at thirty-three, her cult swelled into a national mania, complete with miracle cures at her shrines and a macabre fixation on her mummified corpse and its supernatural properties.

Without her, Juan, like the mythic Dumuzi, guttered out. Lacking her divine imprimatur and guidance, he committed blunder after blunder until he was deposed and sent into exile in 1955. His will to live (and perhaps sanity) snapped. He picked another wife who resembled her and tried to instill Evita’s soul in her through a reincarnation ceremony with a sorcerer. But the transplant failed; he remained a “vegetarian lion” without his “Chinita.”

With time Evita has been downsized, like all
Machtweiber,
to manageable proportions, Disneyfied into a pop opera diva and dissed as a “Woman Behaving Badly” in an A&E special. Her image, dimmer by the day, merely suggests tales of shopaholic orgies, gold medal fellatio, and severed testicles in jars in her desk drawer.

Evita, admittedly, was an imperfect siren-politica—humorless, fascistic, undereducated, and possibly frigid. But her political accomplishments are nothing to sneeze at. She outwitted one of the sexist strongholds of the Western world, seized the position of strong-woman, told the aristocratic establishment to shove it, and gave Argentina a semblance of social justice.

She did this through self-mythologization with an old twist, transcending the binary goddesses and recalling the ancient synthetic deity of eros and earthly rule—another Inanna, “the divine ordainer,” and power behind the throne. In the end it went to her head. Wasted with illness, she thought she might be a “supernatural being.” That so many believed her so long testifies to a buried psychic hunger for a she-divinity at the helm, even in the heartland of machismo.

 

 

As male dominance gained ascendancy in the West, the goddess became less and less welcome in the throne room. No longer required to validate the king’s rule, she was booted downstairs and sent packing. The powerful, autonomous female ideal did a 180; it now threatened the social order and menaced the divine plan.

The jade was Lilith. Adam’s first wife, who refused to lie beneath him, she personified female sovereignty. When Adam rebuked her, she flew off in disgust to the Red Sea and founded a kingdom more to her taste. She ruled, fornicated day and night with a tribe of hot demons, and devoted her life to terrorist raids on society with the object of reinstating her primacy.

For Hebrew mythmakers, Lilith epitomized the evil woman, the unholy rebel who wanted to tear down the pillars of male privilege and upend the sacred hierarchy of the universe. No good came of her. Reversing the goddess’s positive attributes, she brought death and shape-shifted into hundreds of diabolic femmes fatales. Her names are legion: the queen of Sheba, who quizzed Solomon with her riddles and destroyed the Temple, and the whole society of female revolutionaries throughout Western history.

These hellcat
Machtweiber
mutinied against the establishment, rabble-rousing and agitating like Lilith, “the original advocate of women’s rights.” Though hounded by her bad press, they preserved the sex goddess’s affirmative character intact—overscale abilities, wholeness, energy, and lovecraft. That two of the most prominent were Americans should come as no surprise. With an entrenched double standard and boys’ club tradition, many female leaders in the United States worked outside the system as insurrectionaries and sisters of the “Sower of Discord.”

Victoria Woodhull had few friends in the ranks of nineteenth-century feminism. The leading ladies of the movement drew back their skirts in disgust; she was a “snake,” an “impudent witch,” and the “Mrs. Satan” of a popular cartoon, a bat-winged harpy peddling a broadsheet with the diabolic message “Be Saved by Free Love.” As Henry James sneered, Victoria was “not respectable.”

But Victoria’s very lack of respectability, her wrong-side-of-the-tracks raciness and freedom from feminine socialization made her the most pioneering feminist of them all. While the blue-nosed suffragists dithered and compromised and chirruped of purity and uplift, Victoria cannon-balled into the political arena with a full-scale revolutionary agenda.

More than the vote, she demanded total female emancipation: equal job opportunity, domestic freedom, federal support services, redistribution of wealth, and sexual liberation. She was ahead of both her time and ours. She argued that until we prevailed in the bedroom and recovered our pump-action orgasmic legacy, we lived in bondage to male authority—even if we could head Merrill Lynch and campaign for the Oval Office.

As the goddess’s heiress Victoria had it both ways. She not only founded her own brokerage house and ran for president, two firsts for women, but was also a stellar seductress. Plying her amorous arts for pleasure and profit, she scaled other heights as well. Before her, no American woman had ever founded and run her own newspaper, addressed Congress, or practiced free love in public. All this she combined with frontline leadership in women’s rights and a life of fabulous pluck and drama.

Just to have survived her youth required heroic mettle. The seventh of ten children, she was born into a brawling family of miscreants and social outcasts in a wooden shack on the fringes of Homer, Ohio. Her illiterate mother communed with spirits in the apple orchard, a talent she bequeathed to little Vicky, who began seeing angels and predicting the future in infancy. Against every law of probability, Vicky foresaw an elect destiny for herself.

Her father foresaw more concrete possibilities. Buck Claflin, a petty crook and lowlife con artist, farmed out Vicky and her sister Tennie as clairvoyants, a dollar a session. To heighten her prophecies, Buck whipped, starved, and abused Vicky (perhaps sexually) until she collapsed into a near-death coma.

The doctor who treated her, Canning Woodhull, promptly abducted and married her. She was fifteen, a scrawny, frail hayseed with a third-grade education and no resources except an “unshakable sense of her own worth” and a good preparation for seduction (with its basis in altered states of consciousness) and revolutionary politics.

All this potential, however, languished for years. Canning turned out to be a drunk, quack, philanderer, and wastrel. He subjected her to squalid boardinghouses and forced her to support him and their two children (one mentally defective) through acting and part-time prostitution. Finally the spirits directed her home, and she joined her family in a traveling medicine show as a psychic healer.

Now in her early twenties, she’d come through her assorted hells with survivor guile and armor-plated sex appeal. She practiced an early form of touch therapy that combined psychological counseling with escort service extras. Laying her hands on ailing clients, she mind-read their buried fears in a “deep, melodic voice” and made them feel they were “the center of the universe.” Unfazed by the cultural flesh phobia, she believed she possessed “strong sexual powers” and should use them.

When the handsome Civil War veteran Colonel James Harvey Blood visited her for a consultation, she seduced him in five minutes. She’d filled out. She wore body-hugging black sheaths on her full curves and had the face of a Phidias Athena—chiseled features, plump mouth, and thick corona of auburn hair. As soon as he sat down, she fell into a deep trance, decreed their future union, and led him off to bed. They divorced their respective spouses, and he agreed to an open marriage in 1866.

Two years later Victoria got another command from the Beyond. Demosthenes’s ghost ordered her to New York City, then the unruly capital of the postbellum greed grab. She and her sister Tennessee zeroed in on the seventy-six-year-old robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt and captured him in a neat pincer movement; Tennessee took him on in bed, while Victoria channeled ancestors and stock tips in the séance parlor. He gave them their own brokerage firm, Woodhull Claflin & Company, which these “Queens of Finance” parlayed into a fortune. On Black Friday of the Great Gold Panic alone, they netted seven hundred thousand dollars.

Financially secure at last, Victoria turned to revolution. A reporter spotted her at the First National Suffrage Convention and pronounced her “The Coming Woman.” He bet on the right horse. She started an incendiary, radical newspaper,
Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly
(the first to publish Karl Marx), and opened an avant-garde salon at her Murray Hill town house that teemed with raucous family members and such countercultural gurus as Stephen Pearl Andrews, a free lover, utopian, and spiritualist.

Andrews became her intellectual tutor and liege man; and General Benjamin Butler, a one-man steering committee. Over doughnuts and whiskey during their midnight trysts, she and Butler orchestrated her “Woodhull Memorial,” which she delivered in person to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee.