The Later Years 425
but it is probable that he had (well-founded) doubts about her ability to show up
in public as his wife. At Golnik, the female patients who had met both Zdenka
and Jovanka noted that there was no comparison between them. Whereas the
first, in the shadow of death, became silent and melancholic, the second behaved
aggressively and haughtily.^178 In 1948 she took part in the Fifth Congress of the
CPY as one of the representatives of the Ministry of Defense, taking a place
usually reserved for high officers and Spanish Civil War veterans. Seated in the
first row, she behaved like a cheerleader during Tito’s inaugural speech, leaping
up at every moment to applaud and forcing the other two thousand delegates
to follow suit. When Jovanka went to Koper in 1949 with Ranković’s wife,
where she got a fake passport to go incognito to Trieste “to go shopping,” she
did not make a good impression on the local policemen. “Who is this goose?”
asked one of them. “Shut up, she’s Tito’s future wife!” said the other.^179
Tito’s decision to make his relationship with Jovanka official was heavily
influenced by the puritan Ranković, according to whom the top cadres should
be an example to others, even in their private lives.^180 On 15 April 1952 their mar-
riage was celebrated without fuss and pomp; the wedding dinner was served at
an estate on the Danube among vineyards and woods. Jovanka was twenty-
eight, while her husband was more than twice her age. The guests, Tito’s clos-
est collabo rators, had not completely shed the popular and rather primitive
habits of their youth. As Slavka, Ranković’s wife, related, they made toast after
toast, everything degenerating into a state of collective drunkenness.^181 The
ever present Ivan Krajačić (Stevo) welcomed Tito into the “henpecked hus-
bands’ club,” where he would shortly be joined by other eminent bachelors who
obeyed the marshal’s council to follow his example. In Belgrade, there was an
epidemic of weddings, which prompted the wife of the French ambassador to
make the amused comment: “In other countries we go to funerals, here we go
to weddings.”^182
Jovanka appeared for the first time in public as Tito’s consort on 10 Septem-
ber 1952, when the British foreign minister, Anthony Eden, visited Yugoslavia.
It was not a routine meeting, but an occasion for important discussions regard-
ing the Trieste question. It was also the first official visit of a foreign dignitary
after Tito’s split with Stalin. The meeting took place at Lake Bled, where Tito
used the occasion to introduce his wife to the public. The photo of the three
sitting on a sofa went around the world: on one side sat the marshal, portly but
still youthful, on the other the aristocratic Eden, in the middle Jovanka with
short hair, slim as a mannequin, with a marvelous Hollywood smile that would
shortly be proclaimed “the best Yugoslav smile.” (Later, Belgrade students
would mock her as “Holy Jovanka of the smile.”)^183 The harmonious impres-
sion of the photo, however, hides Eden’s outrage at not having been informed