The year was 1989 and Interviú magazine published the image that would forever change the destiny of Marta Chávarri. Just three days after Diez Minutos published the images of Chávarri and Alberto Cortina – both married – leaving a hotel in Vienna together, the image of her without her underwear would go around the world.
A photograph with a million-dollar price and which, coincidentally, was part of the magazine’s number 666 and which caused a business storm, in addition to bringing out all the force of machismo in the country’s press.
Marta Chávarri was the perfect victim. Woman, blonde, cosmopolitan, privileged and without fear of being disliked. That’s why seeing her on the cover of Interviú, at the Mau Mau nightclub with an orange dress and without her underwear went around the world. “The never seen before of Marta Chávarri,” read the headline.
“It was the perfect soap opera. If a scriptwriter manages to write it, it won’t turn out so perfect,” says Rosa Villacastín. “At that time, people only talked about money.” Precisely for this reason, the most controversial image of Chávarri, taken in 1988, saw the light of day six months later.
Marta Chávarri, married at that time to Fernando Falcó, ceased to be Marchioness of Cubas at that same moment; She became the object of all kinds of ridicule and sexist harassment in the media. El País journalist Martín Bianchi remembers how it was made “in a double-page spread, in the least subtle way possible.”
Jesús Mariñas wrote things like: “The orange model was the first relief dress she wore after the death of her grandfather Santo Floro, a shame. Marta wouldn’t have half-mourning panties on hand, it should have been that and not a forgetfulness.” Paco Umbral defined her as “the unbridled nymph of socialfelipism.”
The publication of the image gave free rein to the most rancid machismo, but it also frustrated the most ambitious financial operation in Spain at that time, that of Banesto Central; Marta Chávarri being the tool for a handful of powerful men – the Koplowitz sisters, “the Albertos”, Mario Conde or Alfonso Escánez – to achieve their objective, revenge, without caring in the least about the damage they caused to their protagonist for decades. .
Isabel Chávarri, sister of the protagonist, says that her sister left the house inside the trunk of a car, a situation that “took its toll” on Marta Chávarri. “Marta thought she was used,” she admits in Anatomy of Her.
Marta Chávarri died unexpectedly due to an aneurysm on July 21 at the age of 62. She had been away from public life for years, and it had not emerged that she suffered from any health problems. She had an only son, Álvaro, current Marquis of Cubas.
