Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory. Com and join the club. That is therestishistory. Com. 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 to 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 a 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 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 in 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 Ava Peron, a. K. A. Avita. 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, I mentioned that Sadie and I were great habituates of Love Muscle at the fridge in Brixton. And the film Avita came out, I think, a couple of days after Christmas. And there was a rumor that there was going to be a big Avita night to celebrate it coming out at the fridge at Love Muscle. And the rumor was that Madonna herself was going to turn up. So we drove all the way back from where we'd been staying Christmas to go to it, dressed up in our glad rags, and went to the night.

What did you dress as Avita?

Yeah, Avita or Colonel Peron, I can't remember. One of the two.

I mean, you would remember that, Tom. So that suggests that you did dress as Avita.

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. They'd sang that, they sang all kinds of other stuff. And they had people in the crowds with Peronist slogans, waving it around. And I remember thinking, this is completely mad. What other That figure from South American history would inspire a night like this.

I'd go to a Simon Bolivar night.

They don't hold it back in Brixton. They didn't have it.

No.

As a result of that, I didn't really know anything about Avita, but I read about her a lot over the following year. Of course, the film and the musical opens with Avita'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 Avita. It's true.

It's a good point. Tom, well, first of all, that is a lovely story. Thank you. That gives us a wonderful insight, I think, into the cult of Avita and the Argentine history. 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 Avita, to go to a performance that would be Avita-themed in London unlike you, and somebody with whom you've often been compared, actually.

Would it be the Iron Lady by any child?

It would be the Iron Lady. In August 1978, Margaret Thatcher went to see Avita with her speechwriter, Roni Miller. The Andrew Lord Webber musical. After When she got back, she wrote, Roni Miller, a letter which is in her archive, and it says, Dear Roni, 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 Mars. Margaret in 30 years time. So you are the Iron Lady of this podcast, are you not?

She's being harsh there, I think, Mrs. Thatcher on Avita, because I think Avita did have ideals.

She did indeed.

But I think actually the parallels between Avita and Mrs. Thatcher on one level, absolutely mad. They're at opposite ends of the political spectrum. But on the other- I'm looking forward to this. The devotion to, I suppose, to taking center stage and playing the diva, which is, of course, what the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is all It's playing with riffs of opera, the tragic heroine, and all that thing. Yeah, of course. Both Avita and Mr. Thatcher were very good at playing the diva. 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 Avita 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. Avita is easily one of the most famous female public figures of the 20th century, probably Mrs. Thatcher and Indira Grande, I guess, or Goldermier in Israel.

But they haven't had a smash hit musical written about.

No. 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 not just her performance, but her politics is enormously informed by the soap opera melodramas that she embodied on the radio. 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. I think it's exactly the same thing with Ava Peron, that her show business background in the 1930s and 1940s actually is her politics in a weird way. That cult of the spectacle and of performance and sentimentality has been at the heart of Argentine politics ever since.

There's also a further dimension which you don't get with Thatcher and Reagan, which is the Catholic dimension. Because Santa Rivita, 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 canonized. 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 Avita mythos and just makes her an amazing, amazing subject.

I agree, Tom.

So that's what we're going to do today.

It reminds me a little bit. We did an episode back, the Saint Catherine of Siena, who's suffering and who's self-mortificating who's visible suffering the fact that she embraces people who are deeply, deeply ill and all of that thing.

So there's a thing, isn't there? She kiss a leper. Avita kiss a leper. Yes. And someone rushes forward and tries to swab her lips with alcohol.

She smashes It's a bottle.

Yes. And she says, no, these are my people.

You could say she's the link between Catherine O'Siena and Diana, who you mentioned. She's also, as I hope we will show, she's the link between Catherine O'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 Peron, her extraordinary death, and the way in which that becomes this public melodrama, and then the even more bizarre story.

Yeah, that's really mad.

About what happens next to her body, to her reputation, to her ghost, and the attempts of people to basically be a vita in the 1970s, in the mid the chaos of Argentine politics with and bombings. It is a most amazing story. Let's start, obviously, with the woman and her background. We are in Argentina in the late 1910s, and I think 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. In her lifetime, it's population almost quadrupled. 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 overseas. 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, we'll 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 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 remember that. The third thing, I think, is that Argentina, uniquely, even in Latin America, it looks to Europe. It sees itself as 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, but very few of them left. So they're purely European. They're always looking to Europe, but at the same time, they're very conscious of being out on them. 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 a sense of a desire to emulate Europe, and particularly Britain, but also a sense of being snubbed and being forgotten and put down. 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. 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, the land owners who wanted to keep their power out in the provinces.

Then later on, you have a great deal of tension between the old land of delites, the polo set, and this swelling mass of urban workers. 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? But for now.

Ava Peron, as she becomes, is born in this nothing place called Los Tolos, in the middle of Argentina, 150 miles from Buenos Aires in May, 1990.

That means the tents, doesn't it? It's an allusion to the native encampment that had once been there.

It is, exactly. When she was growing up, there would have been a handful of native people living in hovels, shacks outside the village, and you would see them at feast days riding around in their ponchos and stuff. But by and large, it's a village of farm workers, farm laborers.

There's not a lot to do there, is there? There's nothing to do. The big sport is cockfighting. 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.

Her father is a man called Juan Duarte, who's 43, and he comes from a town 20 miles away. He works as an estate manager. He's not married to her mother. He's in his forties. Her mother is a woman called Juana Ibargüren, who's a Basque.

Like Unai Emory, the manager of Asnabilla.

Oh, thanks. That's nice. Like Unai Emory. Yeah. Or the former wolves manager Hulaine Lopategu. Yeah. I mean, there's loads of Basques in the world. Yeah.

They're everywhere, the Basques.

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 farm manager. 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. At first, the norm was this would be with an indigenous woman, a native woman. But over time, it evolves. So he has Juana. Interestingly, she's clearly a very proud, ambitious, and stubborn woman.

Well, that will be her Basque heritage, Dominic.

It would, of course. They're very proud people, the Basques.

They are a proud people. Proud and independent. Yes.

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 upwardly mobile, isn't she? And with more than a hint of snobbery. 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, Ava's birth certificate will come a little bit later in a subsequent episode. So the very complicated 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, Ibargüeren. 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 had 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 legally entitled to. So right from the start, there's 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 Chivelkoy.

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 Ibargüeren 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. 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 in 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 morning. They all go to Chivelkooy. The wake is in progress, and everybody is absolutely horrified to see them. It's not that they don't know they exist. I think they know they exist, but they just do not want this, basically, second family turning up.

Specters at the feast. Yeah.

And there's a lot of arguing. And eventually, the compromise is made, that the Hearst will proceed to the graveyard and they can walk but right at the back, not with the real family, in averted commas. There'll be a spectacle. They will be publicly humiliated. I mean, everybody's humiliated by this scene.

It's a reminder of the hierarchical character of Washington 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 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 every period of my life, I retain the memory of some injustice tormenting me and tearing me apart. I think this undoubtedly lies at the heart of it all. So they go back to Los Tontos, 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 Húnin, which is a railway junction.

It's apparently, Dominic, derived from the quetscher word for planes.

Oh, that's nice.

So it's flat, isn't it? Not a lot to do.

Dusty, scruffy the unpaved roads.

Wild West.

Yeah, a little bit Wild West. She goes to school in Húnin. 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 invulnerability. 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... There's no husband, no father. There's a slight cloud hanging over them. Some girls are told you don't talk to their duartes as they're calling themselves.

So the mother is calling herself the widow duarte. Exactly. And she's still very keen on 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 façade if you don't actually have any money.

No, obviously, don't.

So the mother, she sews a lot, doesn't she? And sewing machines will become a important icon for Avita later on.

Yeah, and she takes in lodgers.

She takes in lodgers and she cooks for them. This will provide a lot of scope for anti-Avita propagandists later on. Because the story, and it's one that Jorge Louis Bourguès, the great writer who we've already mentioned, he said 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 the opposite.

I mean, big spoiler. Ava Peron, 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. 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, 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 Hoonin. The great biography of Ava Peron by Nicolas Fraser and Marisa Navarro. She says, 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 speakeies, and the Americans have imposed a ban on the sale of cinefilm.

Well, also, I think the Argentine film industry, those people who are historians of Argentine cinema may object to this, but I think there's a sense 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, 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.

Augustine Magaldi, who was actually one of the biggest tango singers in Argentina. Aka.

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 classic tango singer, is he? Because he's much more concerned with social issues. He's very passionate about social justice. And I always wonder whether this story emerges because the themes of his songs are seen to map on to 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 Ludwebber Tim Wright's musical. There's a story that Augustine Magaldi came to Junin 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 Hoonin at all. But also, 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, that his wife would smile meekly while he brings her back with them to the capital. I think that's very unlikely. What it actually obviously, express 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, 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 ports of Buenos Aires. Then it becomes a bit more respectable, goes to Paris and so on. The tango is melancholy. Its themes are generally love and suffering and sacrifice. Actually, as we will see, those are the themes of Ava Peron's politics. There 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 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 to Ava, to the Big Apple.

Very good.

What's new a Buenos Aires, as Avita famously sang when arriving in the streets of the great Argentine capital city. Dominic, she's 15. 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 Ava is one of many, many people who are at this point arriving in Buenos Aires from the interior of Argentina, who are moving off the land and into the city. So Buenos Aires in the 19th century has been quite a small place. It has expanded massively. It's a city of immigrants. So it's population 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-Meat packing.

I know you love meat packing, Tom.

And speakees.

Yeah, two things very close to your heart. It's the center of the railway network. It's full of trains and stations. It's full of abattoirs. This is where they This is the meat. This is the meat on which Argentina has 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 European baron houseman, late 19th century Parisian style. So it looks in some ways, a alternative universe version of Paris in which the elite behave as though they're on Bond Street in London. Now, obviously, most people are not part of that elite. So there's a huge working class, largely immigrant. 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 this outskirts of Buenos Aires, and they're often living in very, very poor, cramped, insalubrious conditions. So that is her milieu. She will be spending the next few years drifting around these pensioners, these boarding houses, lodging houses, crowded, miserable, probably frightening, frankly, for a girl in her teens.

But at the same time, 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 steal to continue to remain in the city, to not give up, to not go back.

Yeah, most people would go back, though. As her biographer say, everybody dreams of a life in the big city and life in 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. I still dream of that little the Hollywood agent getting in touch. Yeah, I suppose. Yeah. Eurovision is not closed off to me entirely. So most people dream of that, but settled 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. 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 croque, they shop at Harrods, which has a branch in Buenos Aires. They go to the Opera House, the Teatro Colombo.

They go to the Jockey Club, which is the gentleman's club. 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 rich, I suppose. So in Paris, there's 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 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.

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 social issues, and she's entirely focused on making her way as an actress. She is. To begin with, I mean, she's not a very good actress. It's part of the problem. No. Her earliest roles, even on 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. We only get fragmentary glimpses of her life. She's in a play about a girls' 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. There's also a glimpse we have of her. She goes to some friends at some point to the beach in Montevideo. Montevideo day at the capital of Uruguay. There are boys who see her on the beach, upper class boys. One of them said later, I remember her. She seemed neither stupid nor intelligent, perfectly unremarkable, and rather lower class. That rather lower class, that's the tone.

Is that the It's that she's gone with this rather sinister sounding guy, Pablo Swero, aka the Toad. Yes. 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. But anyone listening and thinking, attractive young girl wanting to make her way as an actress in a very predatory and masculine dominated world. I mean, it seems improbable that the directors with the power 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 me too era.

Well, because there's this famous... So after Swero and Avita split up, She goes to ask him for another part. That's right. And he keeps her sitting outside the office for hours and hours. And then he 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. The person who sees it says her voice became softer and softer. She became whiter and whiter, with humiliation again. A terrible scene. Even if that one incident didn't happen, there must have been many such incidents.

Yeah. You can see why in due course, she will want to erase the record of her career as an actress as well as her origins completely from the record.

Yes, 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 tango competition, that she was an extra in a film about boxing. We We know that she's listed in stage programs, but 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, 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 a 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 Pierrina Di 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 sweating. She would come to the theater 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. It's such a common story.

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. The friend is saying, Why don't you try and improve your ability to speak so that you will get better parts? She says, I just 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.

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. In 1939, 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 Ector Blomberg. And she actually manages to land a role as one of the stars of this series. She's about 19. And the first thing they're going to do is this love story in century, late 19th century, Belle Épouc, Paris. 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, far bigger than in a 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 cuts his political teeth, doesn't he? Selling fridges, essentially.

Yeah, General Electric.

And there's a sense in which Ava's ability to act 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 Canon, Reagan's great biographer, 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 a lot 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 biographies, Fraser and Navarro say, the soap operas, they were more recitals of a script than they were traumas. So the script would have been written just beforehand. The entire thing is at an absolute pitch of emotion.

Yeah, histrionic, almost.

Histreonic 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 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 to remote plaintively about duty, love, sacrifice, blah, blah, blah, blah, martyrdom.

But she does it incredibly well. 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 helped out Juan, who's got gambling debts. 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 the girl who suffers, who then gets her man. And 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, Matané IDle, Colonel Juan Domingo Peron.

Peron. 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 Ava and Peron. 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 Rest is history. Com by going there and signing up, or if you already remember, brilliant. We will see you whenever. I hope you've enjoyed it and hasta luego.

Bye-bye. Hi, it's Cathy here from the Rest is Politics US. Anthony Scaramucci and I want to tell you about this great new series we've done on how Donald Trump won the White House in 2016. We're going to take you right back in time and explain just how Donald Trump went from being that extraordinary apprentice reality TV star and real estate developer in New York City to being President of the United States in just 18 months. We're going to start right from the moment he descended the escalator to November the eighth. I was with them at 6:00 PM on November the eighth, election night, and we're going to regal you with stories related to the campaign, why he has so much loyal support, what he does in debate preparation in 2016, all of the different entry that went on in the campaign, and some of the things that we were battling internally while we were also fighting the Clinton campaign. There's no doubt that 2016 was this extraordinary historic moment. It changed American politics. It hangs over the country. It hangs over the world still today. So come join us. The rest is politics US, wherever you get your podcast.

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