“Once the day was over, I left in the afternoon for a long-desired meeting. A man in the decline of his life feels, in an event like this, as if bathed in a ray of sunlight”, he wrote in his diary on April 29, 1937.
At that point, the Gaucho leader had commanded the country for almost seven years. And the “long-desired meeting” was with the woman from Paraná, wife of Luís Simões Filho, none other than Getúlio’s chief of staff.
The extramarital affair, which lasted through 1937 and the first months of 1938, was kept secret for more than half a century. It only became widely known with the publication of Getúlio’s diaries in 1995.
Who was Aimée? What did you do before meeting the president? What was your life like after the love affair?
These and other questions are answered by journalist Delmo Moreira in “A Bem-Amada”, a title that alludes to the way Getúlio began to refer to her in his diary when the novel gained momentum.
Based on diary entries, there were 38 intimate encounters between the politician in his fifties and the girl who had just reached her 30s. It is, to say the least, curious to follow Getúlio’s sweet records, from the “most beautiful flower at the party” to the “balsamic and compensating light of my troubled days”.
There is no exaggeration when he talks about “troubled days”, on the contrary. Throughout their relationship, there were at least two decisive episodes in the first half of the 20th century.
In November 1937, Getúlio presented a new Constitution, starting to govern as a dictator. It was the beginning of . In May 1938, the integralists, outlawed by the government, tried to stage a coup, but were blocked by federal forces.
As Getúlio and Aimée were not exactly discreet in their meetings in Rio de Janeiro and in , soon Darcy Vargas, the first lady, and Simões Filho became aware of the case, leaving the situation untenable. Separated, Aimée left for Paris, where her sister, Vera, lived, and began a life among the European and North American aristocracy.
It was in the post-war period that this high society had its “golden age, with abundance and exuberance”, says Moreira, a journalist with stints at the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo and TV Globo, among other newsrooms, and author of
In Palm Beach, Florida, Aimée met her second husband, Rodman de Heeren, one of the heirs of Wanamaker, one of the largest department stores in the USA. She was now Aimée de Heeren, who was divided into four homes: two in the USA, New York and Palm Beach, and two others in France, Paris and Biarritz.
Over time, Aimée and Rodman began to live as friends, cultivating their relationships outside of marriage. “This is not an unusual arrangement among the elite. They did not want to divide the assets”, says the biographer.
One of these romances took place with , a Brazilian press magnate — the socialite never publicly admitted the affair with Chatô, but the author heard sources who lived with both of them and assure that it happened.
According to Moreira, Aimée was the greatest Brazilian socialite of the 20th century, a term that implies “centrality” and “convocative power” in her social circles. There were other women of great prominence in this sense, such as Isabel de Orleans e Bragança and Elisinha Moreira Salles, but the biographer decides the tie considering that none of them lived at the “top of the top of the top”, close, for example, to the English nobility.
It also takes longevity into account. Aimée died at almost one hundred years of age, a significant part of that time among the wealthiest and most influential families in the USA and Europe. In addition to all this, “no one was as much of a party girl as her.”
When she died in 2006, she was remembered as “the last of the great ladies”.
“I wanted to take someone who was at the bottom of history, who few people know, and remember this life in such a way that readers would ask themselves: ‘How did I not know that?'”, says Moreira. Judging by the surprising episodes of Aimée’s career portrayed in the book, he achieved what he was looking for.
