ARGENTINA: Little Eva

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One day Eva's car bumped into an Italian woman who had rushed forward to ask that her son be allowed to go to Argentina. Eva got out to help, promised that the woman's petition would be granted. Next day, as she had done in Spain, she visited public nurseries, stuck lire into grimy, outstretched hands, talked steadily about her love for children and the poor.

The day Eva Perón left Rome for Milan, the boiling sun hid under a cloud. Cooling showers put an end to the heat wave that had stifled the city. At the Argentine Embassy, a wan official ran a finger under his collar and said: "I don't know whether I'm gladder that the rain came or that Eva has gone." But in France and England, there were other Argentine officials whose worries were just beginning.

Would Eva go to Paris and London? There had been some loud reverberations. In Paris, Mmes. Auriol and Bidault had expressed their willingness to carry a welcome as far as a purely private tea party. Britain's press had warned of a frosty reception (the Royal Family will be in Scotland, obviating the possibility of a palace snub). The final decision would doubtless be made by Eva. She was as used to having her own way as she was to snubs.

Rainbow's Start. It was not the humble swamp from which the Argentine rainbow first rose that earned her the haughty looks of B.A.'s aristocrats; it was the murky clouds through which she had climbed to arch so gracefully over their heads.

Official quarters resent investigation into Eva's past (she has never been listed in Argentina's Who's Who), but unofficial biographers state that Eva Duarte was born on May 7, 1919, in the tiny village of Los Toldos in Buenos Aires province. Her father, Juan Duarte, was a handsome and susceptible small landowner of nearby Chivilcoy. Her mother was a dark-eyed Basque named Juana Ibarguren, whose charms were sufficient to lure Juan from his wife. The couple set up housekeeping in a tumbledown house with an unkempt yard overrun by chickens. They had five children, of whom Eva was the last.

Soon after, hard times came; Juan lost his property and died, leaving Juana and the children in poverty. Like most landholders, no matter how small, Juan had been a member of Argentina's Conservative Party. But after his death, his rich friends in the party had little time for Juan's five orphans or their mother. For help, Juana was forced to turn to a local politician of the Radical Party.

Cinderella. Eva may have remembered in later years how he helped the family move to the larger town of Junin, where he got the eldest girl, Elisa, a job in the postoffice. With Elisa's pay, Doña Juana managed to make ends meet. In time she established herself as a respectable boardinghouse keeper, and one by one she set about marrying off her daughters to the star boarders. The first two were soon settled, but thin, dark, energetic little Eva had other ideas. Movie magazines were full of Cinderella success stories, and there was a girl down the street who had run away to sing in Buenos Aires and ended up a banker's wife. Eva knew what she wanted. After two years of high school, she left for the big city, to become one of the desperate band of young hopefuls cluttering the casting offices along Calle Corrientes, Buenos Aires' Broadway.