Sex Lives of the Great Dictators (21 page)

On the night of the benefit, Evita spotted Libertad Lamarque - one of Argentina's loveliest actresses - on the arm of a tall, handsome army officer. Evita had done her homework. She knew that this was Colonel Juan Domingo Peron, the Minister of Labour, and rising

strongman in the regime. She went over to Libertad Lamarque, who she knew slightly, and asked to be introduced. When it was Libertad's turn to do her bit at the microphone, Evita slipped into the empty chair beside him.

Peron was a ladies' man with a reputation for preferring young girls. He was then forty-eight; she was twentyfour. It took little to seduce him. In Evita's own words: "I put myself at his side. Perhaps this drew his attention to me and when he had time to listen to me I spoke up as best I could: "If, as you say, the cause of the people is your own cause, however great the sacrifice I will never leave your side until I die.""

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

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

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

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

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

By 1945, Peron was Minister of War and Vicepresident. Then there was another coup

conducted by senior army officers alarmed by Peron's mobilization of the masses. When Peron was arrested, Evita organized a protest by the labour unions. Thousands gathered in public squares and he was released on 17 October, 1945. Together, Evita and Peron were taken to the presidential palace. From the balcony, he addressed a crowd of 300,000 people.

A few days later, they married. Anti-Peronists spread the rumour that when he asked her to marry him, she was so shocked she nearly fell out of bed.

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

They contrived to give the impression that theirs was a sexless marriage, that they dedicated all their energy to the people. Certainly, Evita was Peron's greatest political asset.

Despite her jewels, turn and regal manner, the people recognized her as one of them. Her beauty was said to personify Peronist femininity. Peronist posters portrayed her as the Virgin Mary, but political enemies still referred to her as "the little whore".

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

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

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

Even Argentine poet and leading opponent of the regime, Jorge Luis Borges, said:

"Peron's wife was a common prostitute. She had a brothel near Junin. And that must have embittered him, no? I mean, if a girl is a whore in a large city that doesn't mean too much, but in a small town in the Pampas, everybody knows everybody else. And being one of the whores is like being the barber or the surgeon. And that must have greatly embittered her. To be known and to be despised by everybody and to be used."

Not content with being a back-seat First Lady, Evita wanted political power for herself.

She tried to legalize prostitution and regulate Buenos Aires" redlight district, further exacerbating rumours about her past. She also promoted votes for women and organized workers. The Eva Peron Welfare Foundation pumped millions of pesos of government money into welfare programmes, though some of it was siphoned off into her Swiss bank account.

Through her sexual charisma, Evita controlled a web of men strategically placed

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

Evita seems to have been faithful to her husband throughout her marriage - with one exception. During World War II, she met Aristotle Onassis, who was channelling food parcels through Argentina to Nazi-occupied Greece. When Evita was in Europe in 194"7, they met again at a formal lunch and arranged a private meeting at her villa on the Italian Riviera. As soon as he arrived, they made love. Afterwards, he was hungry and she made him an omelette. In return, he donated $10,000 to her favourite charity. He said later that it was the most expensive omelette he ever had.

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

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

After Evita died, Juan Peron, who was already fifty-six, began to take an inordinate interest in the Union of Secondary School Students, especially its young female members. It had branches in every school. The girl recruits were sent to luxurious "recreation centres"

where they entertained high-ranking government officials. The centres had teams of doctors to handle unwanted pregnancies and venereal disease.

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

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

Then she was assigned to take some papers from Olivos down to the presidential palace.

She spent the afternoon there talking, then stayed the night. The next day she went to a sporting event with Peron. It finished late, so she stayed again. The third night there was a rain storm, so she could not go home. In fact, she never went home again.

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

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

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

Later, the torrid correspondence between Juan and Nellie was published, further

besmirching his reputation. He was tried
in absentia
by a military court for his affair with Nellie Rivas and he was stripped of his rank of general for "conduct unworthy of an officer and a gentleman".

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

Nellie was heartbroken.

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

Nellie was sent to a reformatory for eight months. Her parents went into exile in

Montevideo. Later, she married an Argentine employee of the American embassy.

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

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

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

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

11 - SHOE FETISHISM IN THE PHILIPPINES

Ferdinand Marcos, the head of state of the Philippines from 1966 to 1986, was a master at fraudulently manipulating the electoral system. To keep himself in power, he declared martial law in 1973 and, again, in 1986. When he was forced to hold presidential elections in 1983, the opposition leader Benigno Aquino returned from exile in the U.S., only to be shot as he stepped off the plane.

Ferdinand managed to cling onto power for another three years until, in 1986, he and his wonderful wife Imelda went into exile in Hawaii, leaving behind her collection of over three thousand pairs of shoes.

As a child, Imelda had gone barefoot. Although she belonged to the influential

Romualdez family on the Philippine island of Leyte, her branch of the family was poor. For a time, she and her mother lived in a car port; but by the time she was sixteen, she was a sought-after beauty.

In 1951, she fell in love with Victoriano Chan, the heir of a wealthy Chinese family who owned the Tacloban Electric Plant. His parents considered her unsuitable and he broke it off.

Soon she fell in love again, this time with Justo Zibala, a good-looking medical student from the island of Negros; but he was a Protestant and Imelda's father Orestes, a fervent Catholic, objected.

To escape another suitor, Dominador Pacho, a sawmill owner who had a reputation for getting what he wanted, Imelda fled to Manila with just five pesos in her purse. She got a job in a bank. In Manila, she was quickly noticed for her beauty. The editor of the Sunday supplement
This Week
used her picture on the cover of the Valentine Day's issue, which brought her instant stardom. At the home of her uncle, Congressman Daniel Romualdez, she was besieged by wealthy playboys of Manila's polo set. One of them picked her up, toyed with her, then dropped her. He was the young, up-and-coming politician Benigno Aquino.

Imelda decided that she had to make her way on her own merits, so she entered the Miss Manila competition. Her family were shocked. They assumed that the winner would have to sleep with the judges, but Imelda was above that. She lost to twenty-year-old Norma Jimenez from Pangasinan province.

Imelda did not give up that easily. She went to see Manila's Mayor Arsenio Lacson, the organizer of the competition. He was well known for his sexual proclivities. Every afternoon between three and four, he would retire to the Hotel Filipinas for "Chinese tea"- he would spend an hour with a couple of Chinese girls supplied by his constituents. In his office, Imelda sobbed uncontrollably. He comforted her. When their meeting was over, Mayor Lacson disowned the decision of the judges and declared Imelda Miss Manila. The rumour immediately spread that Imelda was Lacson's latest conquest.