And peripatetic. “I don’t know where we didn’t go in this year and a half, almost two years,” she says. “And he would come and go, and disappear and come again. It was a nightmare and a wonder at the same time. I was in a dream. Famous people around all the time—parties, traveling, going to the country—I mean, it never stopped.”
But it did. Machado was well aware of Dominguín’s reputation; she saw daily the way women fell all over him. “Telephone calls, letters. You’d go to a party, and they’d completely surround you and practically push you out of the way.”
Yet he apparently stayed relatively faithful, until a chance meeting with a woman as famous to those in the know for her voracious sexual appetite as she was to the larger public for her screen-queen credentials. At the time Ava Gardner was still married—on paper, at least—to Frank Sinatra. The matador and his girlfriend met the actress at a party, and Gardner made an immediate play. “She would go to bed with a waiter! Completely on a whim,” Machado says. “Can you imagine the most beautiful woman in the world coming in and going after your guy like this?” Machado grabs the air with her hands. “Not easy. It was a nightmare. I was a kid; these people were world champions.”
Though she ultimately lost Dominguín to Gardner, whatever bitterness lingered paled next to the upside of his influence. “It was so intense, an opening of a life that I [would not have] had,” Machado says. “I mean, I would still be in South America.” And, she says, after the paparazzi had made a huge fuss over her at the Cannes Film Festival, “he said to me, ‘You know, Paris is going to make you a star.’”
He was right. Machado moved to the City of Light, where, as at the Lima country club, kismet struck again. A friend named Olga—“a tall Chilean girl, completely insane,” who modeled for Jacques Fath—offered a place to stay. The two went to a cocktail party where a woman who worked for Cristóbal Balenciaga asked if Machado was interested in modeling. Flattered but noncommittal, she left the city soon thereafter to summer in Saint-Tropez. Back in Paris in September, she followed up at the house of Balenciaga, only to learn that Monsieur Balenciaga had returned to Spain, but word was that Hubert de Givenchy had an opening for a model. She walked in for an interview, and was mistaken for a “replacement model” for a sick girl. “They grabbed me,” Machado says. “A girl put me in clothes and threw me out onto the runway. When I finished that show, Givenchy said, ‘Would you like to join the company?’ That’s how I started modeling.”
