I am puzzled by a book on Eva that disputes many of the claims made about her early life, her liaisons with persons other than Peron, and her effects on Argentina’s culture and politics. Who’s right?
This account seems balanced– as far as it might be possible to be about a woman who was determined to mold her own image.
What is indisputable– and acknowledged even by her defenders– is that Evita was extravagant and self-indulgent, and consistently tried to control and manipulate her public image. She is legendary for kissing the poor, but she is also legendary because she ensured that her “charitable” activities received maximum exposure. And the media understood exactly why they were to give her prominent exposure. She had a forged birth certificate created with an altered birth date in honor of her wedding to Juan Peron, in order to conceal her humble origins and real age. She traveled the world at state expense and demanded to be treated like royalty. She famously refused the position of vice-president– after moving mountains to secure it– as an act of “self-denunciation”, as if she would not have declared that a willingness to serve in that post would not also have been an act of supreme self-denunciation.
She received the poor in front of portraits of Christ… and of the Perons.
Like Diana, she embraced and kissed individuals with visible manifestations of infectious, disfiguring diseases. Passion? Or a case of the actress beginning to actually believe she is the part she plays?
Yet some biographers continue to insist that the negative press she received was undeserved.
The final word? How about this, from the Boston Review above: to understand the people, she said from her sickbed, one must “become one body with them, so that every pain, every sorrow and worry, all the joys of the people is as if it were ours. This is what I did . . . in my life.”
This is what I did. An act of monumental narcissism.
What, pray tell, is remarkable about Eva Duarte Peron, other than her steely-eyed devotion to promoting herself? The truth is, had she not met Colonel Juan Peron at a charity fund-raiser, nobody, today, would remember or care about “Evita”. In short, she was remarkable for nothing except for the remarkable ability to become well-known by attaching herself to a man of wealth, in spite of a completely unremarkable accomplishments in every field except the most obvious one.
And that, I suppose, is an accomplishment.