Most Spaniards know Isabel Preysler’s house better than the Zarzuela or La Moncloa palaces. Over the past 35 years, several generations have grown up watching Preysler’s home stories in the magazine Hello!, posing even in the last corner of her Puerta de Hierro mansion: in the library of her late husband, the socialist politician Miguel Boyer, where a portrait of the socialite made by Pinto Coelho; in it hall at the entrance, with its checkerboard floor and a painting of his mother-in-law, Carlota Salvador y Sáinz de Vicuña, signed by Sotomayor; in the indoor pool… The years go by for everyone, except for Preysler and his house. The platform of streaming Disney+ premiered this Tuesday Isabel Preysler: My Christmasa special preyslerian in which the call Queen of Hearts shows how he lives and prepares his house for the Christmas holidays that, in reality, he is not going to spend there (he will do it in Miami, with his children and grandchildren).
Isabel Preysler’s house became famous long before the cornerstone was laid. In the late 1980s, the socialite and Baroness Carmen Thyssen bid for the 5,045 square meter land on Miraflores Street, then owned by the shipowner Fernando Fernández Tapias. “There was a war over the plot. Isabel took it from Tita in a masterful poker play. She beat him to the punch. Since then, the Baroness has not bought it,” explains journalist Juan Luis Galiacho in conversation with EL PAÍS. According to Galiacho, author of the book Isabel and Miguel (La Esfera de los Libros, 2014), Preysler then paid 95 million pesetas for the land, although it was said that the Central Bank had valued it at 253 million. To Heini Thyssen’s wife it seemed like a small thing. “The lot was small for us. I need at least 10,000 square meters,” she declared.
The problems had just begun. In January 1989, a few weeks after a massive general strike against the Government of Felipe González, the magazine News Tribune He published an exclusive that shook the foundations of Felipism. “The Boyer palace, inside: 2,000 meters built, 44 rooms, 13 bathrooms, 2 swimming pools, a deck, interior elevator,” the weekly newspaper directed by Julián Lago titled a report in which the plans of the palace were shown. mansion that Miguel Boyer, González’s former Minister of Economy, and his second wife, Isabel Preysler, were building. Panoramaweekly newspaper of Grupo Zeta that competed with Grandstand, also published some plans and details of the works. The magazines of the time estimated the construction budget of the mansion at 400 million pesetas.
“I didn’t have all the plans for the house, just part of it. But I hired an architect so that, through the documents that he had obtained, he could imagine the size of the entire property,” recalls the paparazi. Antonio Montero, author of that exclusive, in conversation with EL PAÍS. “The number of bathrooms was the most striking thing. There was talk for months and years about the bathrooms,” explains the photographer, who sold the story for more than a million pesetas. “It was a lot of money at the time. For two or three million you could buy an apartment,” he recalls.
The Boyer mansion’s 13 toilets, 15 sinks, six showers, seven bathtubs and seven bidets became an object of ridicule. national. “The house only has one possible name, which at first may seem shocking, but over time, out of habit and custom, it will sound normal and even possibly beautiful,” wrote Alfonso Ussía in the newspaper ABC at the beginning of 1989. “That house cannot be called anything other than ‘Villa Meona’. Construction begins urgently.” Almost 35 years later, Spaniards still refer to Preysler’s home as Villa Meonaa name that, according to her surroundings, she detests.
At that time, some sources pointed to businessman José Antonio Ruiz-Mateos, a public enemy of Miguel Boyer since the expropriation of Rumasa in 1983, as the “black hand” behind the leak of the plans for the couple’s house at the time. “It wasn’t Ruiz-Mateos. I recently asked journalist Marisa Martín Blázquez, then Antonio Montero’s wife, this question. “Both worked at the Korpa agency,” Galiacho clarifies. “She probably left the architects’ office,” adds the journalist, who at that time worked in Panorama. Those in charge of building the palace preyslerian They were the architect Carlos Boyer Monsalve, cousin of the former socialist minister; the Argentine architect Mario Connio, one of the most requested by the jet set international; and the interior designer Jaime Parladé. “The information came to me through an operator who worked there,” Montero himself reveals.
Miguel Boyer held a press conference to deny some published information about his future home. “That was something unprecedented. A socialist defending that piece of palace. He had neither head nor tail. I think that, in reality, he did it to defend his wife, who was the only one who supported him,” reflects Galiacho, who remembers that at that time the former minister was very alone. “His father, José Boyer, had just died and no one had gone to the funeral. Everyone had abandoned him. At that press conference he looked completely unfocused, his glasses even fell off,” he recalls.
The appearance marked a before and after for the beautiful people. According to Galiacho, that was the coup de grace to Boyer and Felipismo. “The unions and the ranks of Alfonso Guerra, the war“They were disgusted with Miguel and used the scandal against him,” says the journalist. Everyone seemed against the couple’s new house, including some residents of Puerta de Hierro. In 1990, Grazia Bergese, Boyer’s former sister-in-law and neighbor of the mansion, filed a complaint against them for urban planning violation. According to Bergese, the paddle tennis court that they were building did not respect the distance of seven meters from the fence of his chalet. “I have the right to those seven meters of separation that urban planning regulations contemplate and I plan to go to the end,” said the ex-wife of the painter Agustín Boyer. The works were provisionally suspended. The dispute lasted for years. Miguel Boyer explained to the press that the continuous demands of his ex-sister-in-law were due to issues of “bad neighborliness” and “a personal vendetta.” “My brother and her separated in bad ways,” he acknowledged. The case reached the Supreme Court, which in 2000 issued a ruling ordering the demolition of part of the paddle tennis court.
But neither family quarrels nor attacks from old political enemies managed to stop construction. In November 1992, Preysler opened his house with an exclusive in Hello!, teaching it “room by room.” The magazine needed 32 pages to include almost fifty photos of the 44 rooms: Boyer’s library, full of volumes on Egypt and books on mathematics, physics, philosophy and economics; the main living room, decorated with paintings by Tàpies; the dining room, with an English table for 14 people, vases from the Ming dynasty and a crystal lamp from La Granja; the winter pool, decorated with wicker furniture; or Tamara and Ana’s playhouse, built of wood and decorated with real furniture. Not even the heated doghouse was spared from the exclusive.
The works, which lasted four years, left Preysler without strength and Boyer without political prestige. “We don’t have the budget or health to be able to build another house ever again,” she confessed. socialite in the interview with his leading magazine. The only thing that readers could not see in that report was the garden, which was unfinished. The grass needed to be planted due to the water restrictions of the time in the Community of Madrid. “We thought that in this situation the best thing would be to wait a while until it can be watered again,” explained the owner of the house. The exclusive, which came out in the midst of the economic crisis of 1992 and on the eve of one of the worst recessions in the history of Spain, unleashed a media and political storm. “Neither I nor anyone in the editorial office expected the impact that the report would have. It was an authentic revolution,” acknowledges Tico Chao, a historic journalist from Hello! and author of the exclusive. “I think that in my almost forty years in Hello! “I have never seen a story again that provoked so many comments.”
Now, the Disney+ platform announces the docureality of Preysler as an opportunity to discover how the Queen of Hearts in his palace. In 1995, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, not the playwright of the Golden Age, but a 32-year-old man who was a driver for the socialitehe told the magazine Ten minutes the details of Isabel’s domestic life. According to her story, the lady gets up between eleven in the morning and one in the afternoon, has breakfast in her room and organizes her papers until lunchtime, talks on the phone between four and five hours a day, and at five she receives to his gym instructor. Calderón de la Barca stated that among her employer’s favorite readings is the gossip press, but that she also watches television and knits, and that she goes to the beautician twice a week. From what you see in the documentary, not much has changed.
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