"Not a Woman's Woman"

Evita Peron and Fleur Cowles have a number of things in common. They are both blonde, sleekly dressed and eminent go-getters who came up the hard way. Some 18 months ago, Fleur, accompanied by her husband, Publisher Gardner (Look, Quick) Cowles, paid a 5 1/2-day visit to Argentina, during which she met Evita. Fascinated, Fleur came home and wrote a book, her first. Published this week in Manhattan,* the book shows Fleur's flair for the feminine glance, supplemented, as she says,"by my own sharpened intuition."

The two women met in President Peron's office. "She was elegantly dressed," writes Fleur, "as millions of American women would like to be dressed. The only giveaway was the orchid in her lapel [see cut]. No real flower that, but one of diamonds, larger even than an orchid, about five inches across by seven inches high--a brooch of big, pure white diamonds that must have been worth $250,000. Barrel earclips of diamond baguettes and her ball-like diamond ring were minor accessories by contrast . . ."/-

Presidential Eye. "She stared back at me at first with a cold, unpleasant look." But "after she'd taken in every part of me (including the black pearl and diamond pin I wore)," Evita asked Fleur to stay a while.

"She displayed a willingness (later, eagerness) to talk 'girl talk' about clothes, jewelry, coiffure . . . She kept eying the jewel I wore. Peron winked at me and said in his halting English: 'That's one she can't have.' " When Fleur remarked that Evita's hair was "very becoming worn straight and simply, she asked if I would look at pictures of her in the many ways she'd worn it." Big photographs were spread on the floor. Fleur looked them all over and pronounced Evita's latest hairdo her best. "Evita asked my age. When I told her mine , I asked about hers. She said 28." About six or eight years shy, Fleur thought.

Before their chat ended, Fleur got a chance to ask Evita how she kept track of the estimated $100 million a year that flows into her Social Aid Foundation. "I put the question to her carefully, saying I presumed she kept a very strict accounting of every dollar spent. 'How else will history give you credit for your charitable efforts?' was the way I put it. She brushed history and the accountants aside without blinking an eye. 'Keeping books on charity is capitalistic nonsense! I just use the money for the poor. I can't stop to count it,' she reported."

Intuitive Eye. Having collected her facts about Evita, Fleur said that they only confirmed her first intuitive size-up. Summing up, in her woman's-magazine style, she wrote: "Not a woman's woman, with a warm remembrance of moments spent like any woman with her friends . . . not a man's woman either, even if she once may have been, [but a] woman politico ... a woman too fabled, too capable, too sexless, too driven, too overbearing, too slick, too sly, too diamond-decked, too revengeful, too ambitious--and far, far too underrated far, far too long by our world."

*And entitled Bloody Precedent (Random House; $3) because it also tells about Argentina's throat-cutting 19th century tyrant couple, Juan Manuel and Encarnacion Rosas. /-Fleur herself favors a macadam-sized Russian emerald ring. Says she: "It's my trademark, it's me, it's Fleur--rough, uncut, vigorous."

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