Chapter 1The House on General Solano

Foreword

I have spent my working life writing about two families — the Marcoses and the Aquinos — and for most of that life I believed I understood the first one. I grew up in Manila, in the country the Marcoses made and unmade; I came of age as a journalist covering the dynasties whose quarrel has organized Philippine politics for as long as I have been alive. Imelda was never a subject I sought out. She was weather. She was there before I started, and she was there — convicted, unincarcerated, singing at birthday parties — when I finally sat down to write this book. You do not choose to write about weather. Eventually you concede that it has been writing you.

So when people asked why I would spend years on a woman about whom everything has supposedly been said — the shoes, the shopping, the three thousand pairs — my answer was that the everything was the problem. The shoes have done the country a strange double disservice: they made the regime unforgettable, and they made it a punchline, and a punchline is a form of forgetting. A punchline does not require you to understand the coconut levy, or the Swiss foundations, or the bodies. It requires you to laugh, or to shake your head, and to move on. I have watched my country move on for four decades. I wanted to stop moving for a while and look.

I expected, going in, to be writing a book about excess. I was, but I kept finding myself somewhere else: in a garage on General Solano Street, where the children of a second marriage slept on boards propped over milk boxes while the children of the first marriage slept in the house. The garage is not my discovery — it belongs to the biographers who came before me, who did their work under a regime that banned it — and Imelda spent a lifetime insisting it never existed. That insistence became, for me, the spine of the book. A woman who denies the wound while building palaces in restitution for it is telling you the truth in the only language she trusts. My job was to learn the language.

I should be precise about the record I worked from, because precision about the record is the discipline this subject punishes you for lacking. This book is built from the public account: the court records and the judgments, the asset-recovery litigation, the press archives here and abroad, the published memoirs and the biographies that preceded mine, the documents that four decades of investigation have pried loose. I conducted no interviews for it, and I have tried never to let the mythology — hers or her enemies' — stand in for the paper. Where the record is silent, I have said so. Where Imelda's version and the documented version diverge, I have given you both, because the divergence is itself the story. She is one of the great mythmakers of the twentieth century, and a mythmaker's lies are a kind of confession.

What I expected to find was a villain, and I want to be honest that I found one — the theft is documented, the cruelty is documented, the accounting has never come. But I also found something harder to file: a woman whose entire public existence was an argument with a garage, conducted at the expense of a nation of people whose poverty made her childhood look like privilege. The wound was real. What she did with the wound was monstrous. Both sentences are true, and a biography that keeps only one of them is not a biography. It is a verdict, and verdicts are what the courts were for, and the courts, as this book records, never enforced theirs.

Why does Imelda Marcos deserve a book? Because she is the twentieth century's clearest demonstration that a personal mythology, held with sufficient conviction and married to sufficient power, can outlast the facts arrayed against it — can outlast the prosecutors, the revolutions, the anniversaries, the obituaries of everyone who might have contradicted it. She outlasted nearly all of it. She did not outlast the record. This book is my attempt to put the record where the punchline has been standing.

The shoes, you will find, were always the least of it.

— Liwayway Sanchez, Quezon City

Chapter 1 · The House on General Solano

The house stood on General Solano Street in the San Miguel district of Manila, walking distance from Malacanang Palace, and before the story of the shoes and the billions and the dictatorship and the revolution and the exile and the return and the son who became president, there was this house, and what it meant, and what it cost the girl who grew up in it.

It was not a small house. The Romualdez family did not live in small houses. The Romualdezes were one of the great political dynasties of the Visayas -- a family whose name had been carved into the history of Leyte province the way the names of Rockefellers and Roosevelts had been carved into the granite of American institutions. Imelda's grandfather, Daniel Romualdez of Pandacan, had been the patriarch of a family that produced lawyers, jurists, and politicians; a younger Daniel of the same line -- a first cousin, son of Imelda's uncle Miguel Romualdez, a former mayor of Manila -- would later serve as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Miguel's other son, Eduardo, became a Philippine ambassador to the United States. Norberto Romualdez, Imelda's uncle, had been an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines. The family had land, position, connections, and the particular kind of authority that accrues to provincial dynasties in the Philippines -- where politics is not a profession but a patrimony, passed from father to son like a hacienda, and where a family's political standing determines not merely its influence but its economic survival.

The house on General Solano Street was a product of that patrimony. It was also, by the time Imelda was old enough to understand what she was seeing, a monument to its collapse.

Vicente Orestes Romualdez, Imelda's father, was the weak link in the chain. He was an educated man -- a lawyer, like most Romualdez men were lawyers, because the law was the instrument through which Philippine political families maintained their grip on the courts and the contracts and the land titles that constituted real wealth in a colonial economy. He had married twice. His first wife, a woman from the Acereda family of Leyte, came from a provincial family of means. She bore him five children. She died young, of an illness the family records do not specify with the precision one would wish for. And then Vicente married again.

His second wife was Imelda's mother. The second marriage produced six more children, making eleven in all, and the household economics of eleven children supported by a provincial lawyer whose family connections were deteriorating was a different proposition entirely from the household economics of five children supported by a man whose dynasty was still intact.

Imelda Remedios Visitacion Romualdez was born on July 2, 1929, in Manila. She was the eldest child of the second marriage. And from the beginning, the arithmetic of her family's decline shaped everything she saw.

The first wife's children occupied the main house. The second wife's children -- Imelda's cohort -- were relegated to the garage. This is not metaphor. The family had a main house and the family had a garage, and the children of the second marriage lived in the garage. The world knows this not because Imelda told it but because a biographer unearthed it: Carmen Navarro Pedrosa, whose book The Untold Story of Imelda Marcos reconstructed the garage childhood from the recollections of relatives and household helpers -- the boards propped on milk boxes that served as beds, the humid cement floor barely a foot off the ground. The arrangement was humiliation, pure and unalloyed, the kind of childhood wound that does not heal because the person who carries it will not permit it to be seen. The wound becomes the engine. The humiliation becomes the explanation -- the biographer's explanation, never Imelda's -- for everything that follows: every shopping trip, every palace, every pair of shoes.

Imelda's response to the story, once it surfaced, was not to tell it. It was to bury it. Pedrosa's book appeared in 1970 and the Marcoses failed to suppress it; after martial law was declared in 1972 it was banned, and the Pedrosa family remained abroad in the conviction -- one Imelda herself later confirmed in an interview -- that they would have been arrested had they returned. "My father was not impoverished. My father was a doctor of laws," she insisted decades later, describing an outstanding father, a scholar, a renaissance man, a childhood too dignified to have contained a garage at all. By an account preserved in Manila memory, after she became First Lady she had the garage itself razed. What she could not raze was the architecture of the memory. The first wife's children had the house. The second wife's children had the garage. The hierarchy was architectural. The message was biological: these children matter more than those children. These children are legitimate in the full weight of that word -- not merely legally but socially, economically, spatially. Those children are lesser.

The biographer must be precise about what is verifiable and what is Imelda's construction. That the Romualdez family experienced financial decline during Imelda's childhood is documented. That Vicente Romualdez struggled to maintain the family's standing on a provincial lawyer's income while supporting eleven children is established by multiple accounts. That the household was divided along the lines of the two marriages is consistently reported. But the emotional texture of the arrangement -- the degree of deprivation, the cruelty of the distinction -- comes from the witnesses Pedrosa found, not from Imelda, who spent the rest of her life insisting on the opposite story: a beautiful and dignified childhood, a distinguished father, a family that was never poor. The deprivation was documented over her objection.

And Imelda Marcos is, among her many other qualities, one of the great mythmakers of the twentieth century. Her myth simply ran in the other direction.

The Philippines into which Imelda Romualdez was born was a country whose political DNA had been written by colonial masters who never intended to leave. Spain had held the archipelago for more than three centuries -- from Magellan's landing on Cebu in 1521 and the establishment of permanent Spanish rule in 1565 to the Treaty of Paris in 1898, which transferred sovereignty not to the Filipinos who had fought a revolution to claim it but to the United States, which paid Spain twenty million dollars for the privilege of calling itself a liberator. The Americans fought a war against the Filipino independence movement that lasted three years, killed an estimated two hundred thousand Filipino civilians, and established the colonial relationship that would define Philippine politics for the next half-century.

The American colonial period, from 1898 to 1946, was the foundational period for the political class into which Imelda was born. The Americans introduced three things that shaped the Philippine political landscape permanently: English as the language of government and education, a civil service modeled on American bureaucratic structures, and an electoral system grafted onto an existing social structure of regional dynasties, landed families, and patron-client relationships that predated the Americans by centuries. The result was a democracy that functioned, at the formal level, according to American principles -- elections, legislatures, courts, constitutions -- while operating, at the substantive level, according to the older logic of patronage, kinship, and the exchange of loyalty for protection that Filipinos call utang na loob, the debt of the inner self.

Utang na loob is not corruption in the Western sense, though it produces outcomes that Western observers consistently describe as corruption. It is an obligation system in which favors received create debts that must be repaid -- not in money, necessarily, but in loyalty, support, and reciprocal favors that may be called in years or decades later. A family that helps another family in a time of need creates a debt that the helped family carries until it is discharged, and the discharge may take the form of a vote, a contract, a favorable ruling, or a silence maintained when a question is asked. The system is not secret. It is the operating code of Philippine political life. And it means that political families -- families like the Romualdezes -- maintain their power not through ideology or policy but through the density of their obligation networks: the sheer number of people who owe them, and whom they can call upon.

This was the world into which Imelda was born: a world in which family name was political capital, in which the decline of a family's fortunes was not merely an economic event but a political catastrophe, and in which the recovery of lost status was not a personal ambition but a familial duty.

Manila in the 1930s was a city of contradictions that the colonial project had never resolved and never intended to resolve. The Americans had built a capital that looked, in its public buildings and broad boulevards, like a provincial American city -- the plan drawn by Daniel Burnham, the same architect who had designed the White City of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, who came to Manila in 1905 and laid out a city of neoclassical government buildings, tree-lined avenues, and a waterfront park along Manila Bay that was meant to demonstrate, in stone and landscaping, the civilizing mission of American imperialism. The city that Burnham designed was beautiful. It was also a performance -- a stage set for the exercise of colonial authority, built on top of the older Spanish city of Intramuros, which the Americans had kept as a historical artifact, and surrounded by the barrios and squatter settlements where the majority of Manila's population actually lived.

The gap between the colonial city and the real city was the gap that defined Philippine life, and it was the gap that Imelda Romualdez grew up straddling. The Romualdezes were not poor -- not poor in the way that the tenant farmers of Leyte were poor, not poor in the way that the Manila slum dwellers were poor. They were poor in the way that a family that had been wealthy is poor: with the memory of wealth, the social connections of wealth, the expectations of wealth, and the daily humiliation of being unable to meet those expectations. This is a peculiar and corrosive form of poverty, and it produces a peculiar and corrosive form of ambition -- the ambition not to gain what one has never had but to recover what one has lost, which is always more desperate and more dangerous because it is fueled not by aspiration but by grievance.

Imelda's father, Vicente, moved the family between Manila and Leyte province, following the diminishing opportunities of a political career that had never quite materialized into the power his family name should have commanded. He ran for office. He lost. He practiced law. The fees were insufficient. He relied on the diminishing network of Romualdez family connections to keep his household afloat, and the household, with its eleven children and its divided architecture, was expensive to keep afloat.

The children of the first wife -- the children in the main house -- went to better schools. They wore better clothes. They had the quiet confidence of children who know their position in the household hierarchy is secure. Imelda and her siblings in the garage had none of this. They had their mother, who worked to hold the second family together with the fierce tenacity of a woman who understood that her children's position was contingent, dependent on the sufferance of a husband who had another family that came first.

Imelda's mother died when Imelda was eight years old. The cause is variously given in the secondary literature as pneumonia or another respiratory illness; the family records do not specify with the precision one would wish for. The death removed the one person in the household whose primary commitment was to the children of the second marriage, and it left Imelda -- the eldest of those children -- in the position of surrogate mother to her five younger siblings in a house where they had always been second-class residents and were now, with their mother gone, orphans within their own family.

The psychic architecture of Imelda Marcos -- the architecture that would eventually express itself in the Cultural Center of the Philippines, in the three thousand pairs of shoes, in the multimillion-dollar shopping trips, in the relentless accumulation of beauty and extravagance as proof of worth -- was built in this period. This is psychoanalysis at a distance, and the biographer must own it as such -- because Imelda never told the story of the garage. Her self-presentation ran the other way: the denial of poverty, the outstanding father, the beautiful childhood. But a woman who bans a book, who insists across decades of interviews that her father was not impoverished, who by one account sent a demolition crew against the building where she slept as a child, is providing raw material of her own kind. The denial is the myth. And myths, even when they invert the facts, reveal the truth of what the mythmaker needs to believe about themselves.

What the record suggests Imelda carried -- the inference her biographers have drawn from the accumulation itself, since she never made the argument aloud -- was the conviction that she had been unjustly deprived. That she had been born into a family that should have given her everything and instead gave her the garage. That the beauty and the ambition and the hunger for recognition that defined her adult life were not the products of vanity but of justice -- the universe correcting an error, restoring to Imelda Romualdez what should have been hers from the beginning. Every palace she built, every gown she wore, every jewel she acquired was, in this construction, not excess but restitution.

This is the psychic mechanism that made Imelda Marcos possible. And it is the mechanism that made the kleptocracy possible, because a woman who experiences accumulation as justice rather than theft is a woman who can steal billions without guilt. The shoes were never about shoes. They were about the garage.

But the biographer must note what the garage story, even fully credited, omits. The Romualdezes, even in their diminished state, were not ordinary Filipinos. They were a political dynasty. They had connections, education, social standing, and the protections that family name provides in a society organized around utang na loob. Imelda's childhood was difficult -- the accounts are consistent enough to establish that. But it was difficult in the way that the childhood of a minor aristocrat is difficult, not in the way that the childhood of a tenant farmer's daughter is difficult. The millions of Filipinos who lived in genuine poverty during the 1930s -- the sharecroppers of Leyte, the fishermen of Samar, the sugar workers of Negros who labored on haciendas owned by families like the Romualdezes -- those Filipinos had no garage and no main house. They had a nipa hut and the hope that the landlord would not raise the rent.

Imelda Romualdez's childhood humiliation was real. What she built on top of it -- an accumulation that functioned as restitution for a wound she publicly denied ever receiving, financed by people whose poverty made her childhood look like privilege -- that was the transformation that the acquisition of power made possible. The wound was real. What she did with the wound was monstrous.

The war came to the Philippines on December 8, 1941 -- December 7 in Hawaii, but the Philippines sits across the International Date Line, and the Japanese bombed Clark Air Base and other installations hours after Pearl Harbor, in a coordinated assault that caught General Douglas MacArthur's forces as unprepared as their counterparts at Pearl Harbor, despite having received notice of the Hawaii attack ten hours earlier. The failure to disperse the aircraft at Clark -- the B-17 bombers lined up wingtip to wingtip on the tarmac, destroyed in a single strike -- was one of the most consequential military blunders of the Pacific War, and it ensured that the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, which followed within days, would face minimal air resistance.

Manila fell in January 1942. MacArthur withdrew to Corregidor, then to Australia, uttering the promise -- "I shall return" -- that became the most famous piece of American war propaganda and that the Filipino people took, with varying degrees of credulity, as a guarantee. The Japanese occupation lasted three years and eight months, and it was, for the Filipino people, a catastrophe on a scale that the American colonial period had never approached. An estimated one million Filipinos died during the occupation -- from combat, from the Manila Massacre of February 1945 (in which Japanese troops killed an estimated one hundred thousand civilians in a month-long rampage as American forces closed in), from starvation, from disease, and from the calculated cruelties of an occupation that treated the Filipino population as subjects of imperial Japan rather than as human beings with claims to dignity or survival.

Imelda was twelve when the war began and fifteen when it ended. The Romualdez family, like all Philippine families, navigated the occupation according to the resources available to them. They were in Leyte during the worst of the fighting -- Leyte, where MacArthur made good on his promise in October 1944, wading ashore at Red Beach in the photograph that every Filipino schoolchild knows, and where the Battle of Leyte Gulf became the largest naval engagement in history. The family survived. The details of how they survived -- which Romualdezes cooperated with the Japanese, which resisted, which simply endured -- are not fully documented in the sources available to the biographer, and Imelda's own accounts of the war years are characteristically romanticized: she has described herself as a guerrilla's companion, a beautiful girl in the jungle, a wartime heroine. The accounts are uncorroborated.

What is documented is that the war devastated the Philippines in ways that shaped the political landscape Imelda would later inhabit. Manila was the second-most-destroyed Allied capital of World War II, after Warsaw. Eighty percent of the residential buildings in the city were destroyed. The economy was shattered. The infrastructure was rubble. And when independence came -- on July 4, 1946, a date chosen by the Americans with the unmistakable colonial arrogance of scheduling another country's liberation to coincide with their own national holiday -- the new Republic of the Philippines inherited an economy dependent on American aid, a political class whose members had collaborated with the Japanese in numbers too large to prosecute, and a social structure in which the old landed families and political dynasties, including the Romualdezes, resumed their positions as though the occupation had been an interruption rather than a catastrophe.

The war did not change the Philippine political class. It merely paused it.

After the war, Imelda Romualdez grew into a young woman of extraordinary physical beauty in a country where beauty was one of the few forms of capital available to a woman from a diminished family. This is not a figure of speech. In the Philippines of the late 1940s and 1950s, beauty pageants were not frivolous entertainments. They were social institutions -- mechanisms through which young women from provincial families could gain visibility, connections, and the attention of the men who held political and economic power. A beauty queen in the Philippines occupied a social position analogous to a debutante in American high society: she was being presented, not to the public, but to the men who might marry her and thereby elevate both her and her family.

Imelda understood this. She may not have articulated it in these terms as a teenager, but she understood it with the intuitive intelligence of a person who has grown up watching the mechanics of social power operate on her own family. She knew that the Romualdez name still carried weight but no longer carried money. She knew that her father's generation had failed to convert the family's political capital into economic security. She knew that her beauty -- which was, by all accounts, genuinely striking: tall for a Filipina, with high cheekbones, large eyes, and the particular combination of Spanish, Chinese, and indigenous Filipino features that the colonial beauty standards of the era prized -- was an asset more liquid than any property her family still held.

She sang. Her voice was, by the accounts of those who heard her in these years, genuinely good -- a trained soprano that she had developed in church choirs and school performances. She would sing for the rest of her life, at state functions and diplomatic events and campaign rallies, deploying her voice the way she deployed her appearance: as a performance of beauty that was simultaneously a performance of power. The song she returned to most often was "Dahil Sa 'Yo" -- "Because of You" -- a love song that became so associated with her public persona that it functioned as an unofficial anthem of the Marcos regime. The choice was revealing. A love song -- not a patriotic hymn, not a folk melody, but a love song -- as the soundtrack of a dictatorship. The message was: I am doing this for love. Everything I do, I do for love. The palaces, the jewels, the martial law -- all of it is love.

She moved to Manila in 1952, living with relatives, working first in a music store and then as a clerk at the Central Bank -- positions found for her through the family's political connections. By the early 1950s, Imelda Romualdez was in Manila, she was beautiful, she was ambitious, and she was looking for the thing that beauty and ambition could not, on their own, provide: power.

She found it. She found it in the person of Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, a congressman from Ilocos Norte who was, in 1954, the most eligible bachelor in Philippine politics.

But before the marriage, there was the pageant. And the pageant is where the mythology began.

In 1953, Imelda Romualdez entered the Miss Manila beauty pageant. She lost. Then she refused to lose.

The facts, as reconstructed from contemporary accounts, are these: the pageant's board declared another contestant -- a woman named Norma Jimenez -- Miss Manila. Imelda would not accept the result. She secured an audience with Manila Mayor Arsenio Lacson, a populist politician known for his directness and his considerable personal charm, and she protested the decision -- pointing to irregularities in the canvassing of the ballots and, by the accounts that survive of the meeting, weeping in the mayor's office. Lacson, who had backed her candidacy, took up her cause. He disowned the board's result and declared that Imelda would be Manila's representative. The board did not yield. The mayor did not retreat.

The result was a compromise that satisfied no one and that Imelda never forgot. Norma Jimenez remained Miss Manila. Imelda was given the title "Muse of Manila" -- a consolation prize, an honorific improvised to acknowledge her beauty without granting her the crown. Both women went on to the national Miss Philippines contest; both lost. And Imelda Romualdez absorbed the lesson.

The lesson was not about beauty pageants. The lesson was about power. She had lost, and everything she salvaged from the loss had come through a man with more power than she had. The beauty was not enough. The talent was not enough. The name was not enough. Without power -- her own power, power that did not depend on a mayor's rescue -- she was vulnerable to the same humiliation she had experienced in the garage. The mechanics were different, but the architecture was the same: someone with more authority deciding that she was second, that she would be given the lesser prize, that she would live in the garage while someone else lived in the house.

She would not be overruled again. But to ensure that, she needed something beyond beauty. She needed the kind of power that beauty could attract but not generate on its own.

She needed a husband.

And in the corridors of the Philippine Congress, in a building whose marble floors and dark-wood chambers had been designed to project the authority of a democracy modeled on America's and operated according to the Philippines' own rules, a man was watching her.

His name was Ferdinand Marcos. He was thirty-six years old. He was a congressman from Ilocos Norte. He was brilliant, ruthless, charismatic, and bound for the presidency. And he was about to meet the most expensive woman in the world.