JUST suppose the centre of attention at the world premiere of the movie Evita later this month were to be Maria Eva de Peron herself. If cancer had not carried her off at the age of 33, she would by now be a slight, stooped figure; at 77 doyenne of the world's most famous widows. Would she still be as beloved and determined to keep up appearances as the Queen Mother in Britain; and, dressed by Givenchy, elusive and alluring as Jackie Kennedy? Or, having long ago swapped haute couture for the garb of an order of nuns, would she now be shawled and self-effacing as Mother Teresa?
Just as likely, of course, she might be as ridiculed and hated by the gawpers as is Imelda Marcos: Peron the jade rather than the icon, past her sell-by date, but still a tacky crowd-puller. We shall never know, of course and the abiding image that will be unveiled at the opening in London on Friday, December 20th and in New York on Christmas Day, is of the other Madonna - star in Andrew Lloyd Webber's film version of the musical born in the West End 18 years ago.
It is peculiarly apt to speculate how, were she still alive, Evita would present herself as the year 2,000 approaches. She would certainly be making a bid for a place as one of the foremost women of the century, if not the millennium. And she would be adjusting the facts - concealing some, highlighting others, and adding yet more gold-leaf to the image; weeping fountains for the poor and pulling public stunts of compassion for the sick and dispossessed to make Princess Diana look like an amateur.
Evita enthralled the poor of Argentina, and died, a year after cancer of the uterus was diagnosed, on July 26th, 1952. "The poor like to see me beautiful; they don't want to be protected by a badly-dressed old hag," she famously said. Wearing Dior and diamonds was OK so long as you were fighting for workers' rights or women's status - both of which she did with some success. But there is a paradox about the myth that shrouds Juan `n' Eva. The more one part of it is unpicked, the more embroidered another part becomes.
Last week, for instance, a local paper in Argentina published a photograph taken, it claims, in the late 1940s, allegedly showing a Nazi submarine in a Patagonian bay in the south of the country. For decades, rumours were rife in Argentina that Nazi war criminals had been given refuge by the Perons in return for a share of stolen cash, gold and art treasures.
Some of the proceeds from this racket, according to a recent investigation by a Spanish magazine, were used to fund the huge charismatic system which Evita started to help the poor - everything from pots and pans and wedding dresses to schools and hospitals were doled out, often by Evita herself, as supplicants filed by her desk. The Eva Peron Foundation which, in her lifetime, eclipsed all state welfare programmes and is still powerful, has never been found guilty of corruption.
For decades, the establishment turned a deaf ear to such whisperings that might besmirch the former presidential couple's reputation. Then, four years ago, President Carlos Menem announced that his country was "paying its debt to humanity" by releasing all secret files on Nazis who fled there after the war. Eichmann, Mengele, and, some believe, Bormann, were among hundreds of war criminals who holed up in Patagonia.
That seems to acknowledge that some mud is too encrusted on Peron's tunics and Eva's designer dresses ever to be removed. Yet a couple of years ago, when Menem's permission was sought by the film-makers to use the fabled balcony in the presidential palace and other locations in Buenos Aires, he was furious in his refusal. "The musical is a libellous interpretation of Evita's life. The masses who still believe Evita was a true martyr are not going to tolerate it," he thundered.
He has since relented: some say it was the seductive sight of Madonna's bra-strap ostentatiously on display when she met him. If this is so, there's a canny parallel with a famous dinner, when Evita shocked the grandes dames of Buenos Aires (after all, she was an illegitimate, badly-educated girl from a hick town in the pampas) at which, shoulders brazenly bare, she sat next to a cardinal.
If Menem's attitude to Evita is confused, then it probably echoes the national schizophrenia surrounding her memory which has replaced the clear-cut attitudes during her lifetime: the adulation by the poor; the hatred and vilification by the landowners.
And it is more than just the memory of the former first lady: it is the knots Argentina has tied itself into about her body, which refuses to go away. For while bits embarrassingly fall off the preserved remains of stuffier world leaders, Evita was embalmed with such technical perfection she continues to radiate physical perfection rather than ooze putrefaction.
This is just as well, since her corpse took on an existence of its own after her death. The Perons hoped it would be that way, though it is unlikely they realised how much hide and seek would be involved. President Peron had lined up the best embalmer in Europe, Dr Pedro Ara, after Eva became terminally ill. And one of her last requests was for a manicure after she passed away.
Anyway, the body hail become such a potent object of popular veneration by the time President Peron was kicked out in 1955 that it was seized by rightist colonels who realised that, somehow, the keeper of the corpse would also hold Argentina's destiny. And so, for 15 years, the corpse was hidden, hijacked, replicated (two "dummies" were made), smuggled abroad (to Germany, Italy and Spain), buried, resurrected and, finally, repatriated. For the last 20 years, it has lain in the Duarte family vault with as many grills and locks as in a Hammer horror film - but not alongside Juan Peron, who died in 1974, within months of making a comeback to the presidency after a long exile in Spain.
A curse seems to have become attached to the corpse on its journeyings. A major who was guarding embalmed Evita in a closet fired his gun one night, only to discover that the "intruder", whom he had killed, was his wife; another army officer charged with finding hiding places became so obsessive that he was declared insane. All this might seem like macabre fiction, but it is detailed in a book which has been top of the best-seller lists in Argentina. Tomas Eloy Martinez says he has had to fictionalise his account to protect sources but he swears it is all true.
In effect, Martinez (born in Argentina) has invented a new genre - necrobiography - to which the title, Santa Evita, does not do justice. It is true that in the months just before her death until two years after, the Vatican received almost 40,000 letters testifying to miracles worked by her. But little Eva never was and does not need to be canonised: she was always more potent as a go-getting sinner.
Don't those red lips still speak to the Argentine macho of her reputed skill in fellatio?" asked V.S. Naipaul as he laid into Argentina as one of the "half-made" societies he loves to dissect. And the wealthy women did attribute to her a licentiousness "the details of which no woman's stamina could have withstood", according to Mary Main's 1950s biography, which hides its prim and hostile tone under the title The Woman With The Whip.
The lips were not always that lubricious; Evita was a rather pale and sickly-looking kid; unremarkable except for her tantrums and - or so she claimed in later life - an early and acute hatred of the gap between rich and poor.
Her latest American biographer, Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, implies that she was frigid; there is wide agreement that Juan was no great shakes in bed. There was the age difference: she was 24 and he was 48 when they met. Perhaps it did not matter so much as they developed in their roles as First Couple.
Her years spent getting rid of her gaucheness (but those grandes dames always thought her common and badly-spoken) as an actress in radio soaps (all the rage when she came to Buenos Aires in her late teens) at least gave her the sense to come up with the right line; on the night in 1944 when she first met Peron: "Thank you for existing".
HE had many occasions to return the compliment once he ceased to be just another colonel: there were times when her steeliness kept him in politics when he might have quit, just ash there were times when he acted more gently - and guilefully - than her ruthless suggestions. Peron once refused to shoot those involved in a plot against him, as she demanded. Another time, urged to give imported weapons to her devoted descamisados (the "shirtless" ones), Peron saw that the weapons went to the military.
What worked for them was that they were an upwardly mobile couple: both illegitimate, he using the army to lever himself up, she (fuelled by a deeper resentment of being downtrodden in a rich and vast country) bounded ever upwards from the casting couch. And why not? A half-made society it may have been, but if recent European immigrants were determined to make it good for themselves, why couldn't a girl from the backwoods? Whatever interpretation Madonna comes up with in the movie, it cannot be anything like the brazen self-reinvention that Evita achieved.
And so she marched on to the big themes that musicals are made of. "My reason for living" was one of the affectionate names she called Peron, and the title of her (ghosted) autobiography. But increasingly, the masses became the object of her affection, rather than her spouse. A bearer of grudges, a fueller of feuds, a settler of scores; greed and vanity, manipulation and nepotism were all there.
At one and the same time, Evita managed (though for fewer years than we think), to be both the best-loved and most reviled woman in Latin America. She had a campaigning energy, firstly for Peron himself (but he vetoed her chance when she came closest to becoming his vice-president in 1951), but then Peronism was the force that drove her.
Was it all anything more than a glorious self-gratifying stunt? The lack of a grand political, social and economic design is pretty damning. The journalist Alma Guillermoprieto suggests the right size for Evita in this week's New Yorker. She writes: "If Peron had few ideas about how to use his country's wealth to generate real national prosperity, or how to create a true body politic, Eva... had none. She did what she could with the irresistible possibility that was granted her to do good, while living out a fantasy that dated back to the days when she left her home town for the capital, impelled by the dream of becoming like her idol Norma Shearer in the role of Marie Antoinette."