Marta Chávarri Figueroa died early yesterday due to a heart attack, at her home in Madrid. He would have turned 63 on August 1. The new generations will barely hear the name of the mother of Álvaro Falcó, Marquis of Cubas, and married to Isabelle Junot, since Chávarri lived withdrawn from public life for almost thirty years. But during the decade of the eighties she was the woman most desired by the pink press, she even jumped into economics, and starred in media scandals that took a toll on her personally and emotionally. Possessor of class and elegance, she was an it girl, long before this expression began to become popular, setting a trend with an iconic style that is still current today.
The last images of her are from a month ago, on June 14, when the media at the door of her house asked her about her granddaughter Philippa, who had been born two days earlier. He thanked for the congratulations, said that everything had gone very well and that the child was very beautiful. The sequelae of the serious domestic accident she suffered at her home ten years ago, which forced her to have surgery on her jaw and eye, were evident. Because of this, he was left with a certain facial paralysis, his emotional fragility increased – he always left the house accompanied – and he had severe headaches.
But if the last times he was seen were a month ago, and before that, at the wedding of his only son, on April 2, 2022, at the Mirabel Palace, in Plasencia, his irruption in the pink press was precisely in that same place forty years earlier. On June 2, 1982, at the age of 21, she became Marchioness of Cubas by marrying Fernando Falcó, who was twice her age and who was the brother of the Marquis of Griñón, married to Isabel Preysler. Marta Chávarri, on the other hand, was the great granddaughter of the Marquis of Santo Floro. The parents were the diplomat Tomás Chávarri and Matilde Figueroa, sister of Natalia, Raphael’s wife. Two years before getting married, Marta lost her mother to a stroke.
After the wedding, Marta became the paper cuixé’s favorite character. Her hair and locks were the most in demand in hairdressers. His newspaper image was summed up in tight trousers, shirt or turtleneck sweater, blazer and sunglasses. And in the summer, she enhanced her silhouette with tanned skin, swimsuits, T-shirts and shorts. Her social ascension included the title of Lady Spain 1988, which the previous year had been for the Duchess of Alba. The gala was held in August in Ibiza and among the guests was businessman Alberto Cortina, married to one of the richest women in Spain, Alicia Koplowitz.
Chávarri and Cortina then began a clandestine relationship that came to light in February of the following year when Diez Minutos caught them leaving a hotel in Vienna. Those photos rocked the financial world, as the Albertos (Cortina and her cousin Alberto Alcocer) were about to merge the Central Bank with Banesto, an operation involving the money of their wives, the Koplowitz sisters. And two weeks later the magazine Interviú published some photos of Marta Chávarri in a nightclub in which it was seen that she was not wearing underwear, only panties. It was the result of blackmailing Cortina into giving up the merger.
In 1991 Chávarri and Cortina got married. She earned a life as a multi-millionaire, but removed from the media spotlight, and without the marquisate or custody of her son. In 1995 the couple divorced and Marta then had several romantic relationships with Philippe Junot (now the father of her son’s wife), Javier Salaverri (with whom she was for five years) or the artist Richard Hudson. But she has always stayed away from the media spotlight: “I stopped going to parties and withdrew from the spotlight because I couldn’t stand the fame or the press. It was unbearable. I’m not compensated by popularity, I don’t want any limelight. I had it and I was fed up, that’s why I retired”, she confessed to Vanity Fair in an interview in 2011. Now she lived retired but with a full family life with the support of her sisters and her son, who yesterday at the funeral home said: “We are all devastated”.
