Gina, Imelda, Manda, and the Tasadays
/La Lollo ended up in a cauldron of confrontation, publishing intrigues, and double-cross with the equally controversial but powerful beauty of her time, former Philippine first lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos.
Here for the first time, the stray pieces and loose ends of that curious chapter are finally pieced together into an intriguing narrative.
La Lollo graced the cover of Time in 1954 as representative of the new wave of Italian actresses rising at the time—along with Anna Magnani, Silvana Mangano, Rossana Podesta, and Lollobrigida’s main rival, Sophia Loren—and would dominate international movie screens for at least two decades.
In her early jet-setting days, former first lady Imelda Marcos fancied herself somewhat of an Italophile—hobnobbing with sycophantic, celebrity-hungry Italians and going so far as to buy an un-vetted supposed “Michaelangelo drawing” for $3.5 million from a shady Italian art dealer who had just made her “…a very special deal offered to no one else (wink-wink).” A bosom buddy of the insecure, naïve one-time Leyte lass who facilitated her Italian “connections” and took advantage of her largesse was one Cristina Vettori, who also happened to be Mrs. Henry Ford II at the time. (This was the same Cristina for whom Imelda broke protocol at the 2,500th anniversary celebrations of Persepolis, Iran in 1971, when she asked the Shah’s court to allow Mrs. Ford, a non-VIP, non-head-of-state, to move into her personalized, AC/heated tent.)
Not Joan Collins but the late Gina Lollobrigida in her mid-years (1980s) as a budding photo-journalist kuno. ( O534277-50728.jpg (2681×3519) (osobnosti.cz)
Three years later, Gina Lollobrigida waltzed into Imelda’s ditzy orbit, the same year that Imelda was greatly distracted by the first of her many, mid-1970s big international extravaganzas, the 1974 Miss Universe pageant. The first lady pawned off major decisions on a collaborative Lollobrigida book project to journalist Carmen Guerrero Nakpil and Imelda’s PNB president-lackey, Panfilo Domingo.
The Imelda-Lollobrigida chapter would soon evolve into a web of intrigue, which hovered around the Tasadays, the supposed late-twentieth century “Stone Age” tribe who had been “discovered” a few years earlier by one of Imelda’s technocrats, Manda Elizalde. Under his wing as minister of PANAMIN (Presidential Assistant on National Minorities), Elizalde took credit for “presenting” the so-called “Tasaday Stone Age-tribe” to the modern world the same year (1971) Imelda was traipsing around in the ruins of Persepolis. Ironically, Elizalde also happened to be the blue blood scion of one of Manila’s oldest and most sosyal, mestizo clans.
Manuel (“Manda”) Elizalde, Jr., one-time PANAMIN Minister, 1936-1997.
The oddest thing about Lollobrigida getting swept into a controversial Philippine political soap opera was that she was already past her celluloid prime. At that later stage in life, she had transformed her on-screen energies into a photo-journalistic career. How Lollo was able to negotiate a $4,000,000 commission—far more than she would have gotten for any film contract that might have come her way then—for two vanity books, is anybody’s guess.
Imelda thought she had struck publishing gold by signing up a recycled, café society-name like La Lollo to a project which was designed to be a glossy PR job to parry the negative press about the martial law that Marcos had imposed on the country in 1972.
The Dueling Coffee-Table Volumes
The two-year contract signed with Lollobrigida was for two coffee-table volumes extolling the beauties and glories of the Philippines under the aegis of self-appointed “star and slave of her people,” Imelda, who was racking up jet-hopping miles around the world, more than St. Nicholas on Christmas Eve.
The two volumes were supposed to be the main giveaways in the swag bags for the 4,600 attendees (plus world press) of the big Marcos show for 1976, the International Monetary Fund summit slated in Manila. The glossy books were also to be distributed to Philippine embassies and consulates, to Marcos friends and sympathizers, and also on the shelves of the most prestigious bookstores in the world (e.g., Rizzoli, Harrods Department Store, Galeries Lafayette, etc.). Alas, like the best laid plans of mice and men, the grand plot began to unravel past the midway point.
There was conflict from the start. Since the martial law government was “footing the bill,” Imelda thought she had artistic control, but halfway through, La Lollo foisted her own intractable ideas.
The two volumes were planned in sequence—with Volume One being readied for 1975. It was to be a paean to Manila and the governor of the whole metropolitan area, none other than Imelda Marcos herself. The following images speak for themselves.
The Lollobrigida book which survived is, of course, the one about Manila and its Metro Governor then, Madame Imelda Romualdez Marcos.
The centerfold of the Manila volume. This is a clearer image of what’s on the cover.
Book One’s contents, of course, were the prettiest and the most photogenic images of Manila as a metropolis, its way of life, and its citizens. But one of the centerfolds inside that struck me as most odd and curious was this . . .
Who was this “…young Manila sculptor“?
This was a spread supposedly of “…a young Manila sculptor at work …” but the very un-Filipino, European-looking young man was none other than Freddie Elizalde, the younger brother of PANAMIN boss Manda Elizalde, who was anything but your average “struggling” artist. Coincidence? (To his credit, Freddie Elizalde hosted the Beatles during their infamous visit to Manila in 1966.)
Because La Lollo was getting acquainted with the country at the time in line with her work, Volume One’s realization proceeded without much controversy. In the Foreword to Volume One, the author had nothing but glowing words of praise and affection for the Manila she had gotten to know through her lens, and they seemed sincere enough. (Of course, it was a “commissioned” work.)
Gina Lollobrigida's Foreword
Volume Two took a much rougher road from inception to realization. It was going to cover a much larger scope, The Philippines, and would carry more of Lollobrigida’s imprint—as seen through her eyes.
But cracks in the partnership started appearing in prep for Volume Two. Imelda Marcos, of course, wanted another “pretty, sugar-coated product—in effect, showing that the Philippines was “a happy, well-fed, functioning society which thrived” under their conjugal Martial Law rule.
It was also La Lollo’s understanding that Volume Two was going to be a commercial publication, sold at bookstores and to the public at large. Thus, it had to have commercial draw and veer away from the ordained PR approach of Volume One. La Lollo wasn’t convinced that Imelda’s (and Nakpil’s) sugar-coated approach in presenting the Philippines was quite right and felt this would be a sure-fire dud in Europe. She felt very strongly that it had to have commercial appeal and she was hot on featuring the Tasadays.
Brandishing her new credentials as a “photo-journalist,” La Lollo was thoroughly convinced that Europeans (and North Americans) would be far more intrigued by this new “primitive” Stone Age-tribe than more pretty pictures of Mayon Volcano, Moro vintas and smiling folk dancers. After all, she hailed from that part of the world which was going to be the target market, so how could parties from elsewhere know about what appealed to the Europeans more than a native of the target area? Makes sense.
So Lollo dug in with her primitives approach, but Nakpil, under direction from Malacañang Palace, tried to keep the volume’s content within the original sugar-coated dicta. Per the contract, there was still to be a (second) press run of another 30,000 copies (as there was for Volume One).
Vanished From the Face of the Earth
The unofficial discredited Volume Two, The Philippines, with a young T’boli lass on the cover.
In the final stages of publication of Volume Two, disagreement had become so raw that the frustrated La Lollo threatened to sue for “breach of contract.” It wasn’t clear where and how she could take the ruling dictator’s wife to court, considering the intended defendant would have been a dictatorial government in full control of its own judicial system, although such a suit could only have been adjudicated in a Philippine court. Since it did not involve international borders or interests, Lollo could not have brought it to the ICJ in The Hague. It was purely a domestic Philippine IP lawsuit.
‘Just Get Her Out of the Country!’
In 1975, however, Imelda was distracted not only by global gallivanting and prepping for the IMF confab, but also by the various affairs of hubby Ferdie. To prevent La Lollo from personally reaching out to the president while she was abroad and Ferdie’s roving eye from falling on the star in person, Imelda ordered her PNB lackey to settle with the fading Italian screen siren and get her out of the country once and for all.
In the end, the Philippines just “settled” with a final fee that was whittled down to $400,000 or 1/10th of the original contract, still a hefty sum for an ex-movie star with no bona fide journalistic credentials.
Favorite ‘Impounding’ Maneuver
Nonetheless, per the contract, the second 30,000 print run of The Philippines was realized. With that, Imelda and the martial-law-government felt they had fulfilled their end of the (re-negotiated) contract. But upon delivery of the copies to Manila, the Palace did not feel compelled to disseminate the finished product. So aside from distributing a handful of keepsake copies to selected parties, most of the 30,000 copies of Volume Two never saw the light of day. They were destroyed.
The Marcos regime already had practice in the “Operation Seize, Burn and Destroy” maneuver. A few months before martial law was declared in September 1972, a candid, unflattering biography of the first lady, Imelda Marcos by Carmen Navarro Pedrosa hit Manila bookstores. Of course, the Manila intelligentsia ate it up but, the subject, Imelda, was obviously furious. Available copies of the book in Manila were immediately seized, and author Pedrosa was hounded and intimidated that she and her daughter fled immediately for a life in London.
More Books and Magazines to Burn
In the intervening years 1975-76, despite the pakulos (extravagant stunts) that Imelda was planning--Miss Universe in 1974, Da Thrilla in Manila in 1975, and the IMF summit for 1976, new condos at the Olympic Tower in New York City, state visits to Kenya and Moscow--the Marcos couple had more than a few other fires to put out:
First, in December 1975, the US magazine Cosmopolitan had the nerve to declare that Madame was “the richest woman on earth” bar none, even surpassing Queens Elizabeth II and Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. This simply would not do. Marcos operatives in the US sprang into action and bought as many copies in newsstands around the US as they could find, swiped those in public libraries, and destroyed the offending copies, of course.
The now “scarce,” offending December 1975 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.
A few months later, the bombshell book The Conjugal Dictatorship (1976, 1st edition) by former insider Primitivo Mijares, came out. Because the book was available only via mail order from a San Francisco P.O. Box, Marcos operatives anonymously placed countless orders to buy out publisher Alex Esclamado’s entire stock. Again, they struck public libraries in the US: whatever copies had made their way to libraries were “borrowed” by Marcos operatives and never returned. (A few years ago, before namesake son BBM returned to power, the Mijares family reissued The Conjugal Dictatorship in an edited, updated and annotated version.)
The original cover art of the controversial, “tell-all” book which cost the lives of author Primitivo Mijares and his only son.
Then finally, they saved the best seize-and-destroy subterfuge for last. The most nefarious episode of Imelda’s information blockade operation began with the attempted purchase in 1981 of a penthouse in a co-op Park Avenue building belonging to philanthropist and art collector Leslie Samuels.
Initially, Imelda tried to buy the triplex penthouse lock, stock, and barrel for $10 million “anonymously” with toady Glecy Tantoco of Rustan’s fronting. This was a co-op building and obviously, the board was turned off by Imelda’s clandestine approach. They turned her down. Failing that, Tantoco then offered to buy it openly in her name. However, the board was already wise to their ruse, and once again turned the determined Filipinas down. You can’t fight the board of a New York City co-op building.
A few months passed and the first lady, rejected but unbowed, would extract her pound of flesh, or more exactly, acquire the nearly 800 objects d’art contents of the Samuels’ penthouse she had salivated over. The hoard was going up on a Sotheby’s auction. Two hours before the opening gavel, the collection was quietly pulled off the market. But the real cause was that Imelda executed a last-minute coup de grace by buying the whole lot for $5,950,000 plus the 10 percent buyer’s premium a few hours before the opening. She wanted all the trinkets and tapestries—the entire hoard—for herself.
The geegaws eventually ended up decorating “her” townhouse in the East 66th Street, the former combined offices of the Philippine New York Consulate and of the Mission of the Philippines to the United Nations but now claimed as her own pied-a-terre. Camping out at the Waldorf or The Carlyle was getting to be a drag. If the Madrigals, Aranetas, de los Reyeses, and Ilusorios have their own Upper East Side apartments, why shouldn’t she?
Having preempted the Sotheby’s auction, Imelda next tried to cover her tracks by paying an additional $38,000 for the remaining 5,500 yet-to-be-mailed copies of the catalogue, even though some 500 advance copies had already gone out to favored customers and antiques dealers. Those 500 copies of the catalogue that escaped the clutches of Imelda and Glecy Tantoco’s minions have become much sought-after by auction catalogue collectors, much more so than the fewer surviving copies of the Lollobrigida-Volume Two coffee-table book. The embargoed 5,500 copies of Sotheby’s catalogue were incinerated in a New Jersey junk yard.
“The two-year contract signed with Lollobrigida was for two coffee-table volumes extolling the beauties and glories of the Philippines under the aegis of self-appointed 'star and slave of her people,' Imelda.”
Even the Volume One-Manila book is rather hard to get hold of. The one copy this writer laid his hands on used to belong to a Philippine ambassador (and that copy was donated to the San Francisco Public Library). Because it was a non-commercial (i.e., vanity) publication, it carries no ISBN, no initial $$ price assigned to it; it is something, even in secondary markets, that cannot be tracked although some copies can probably be found in private libraries.
With the whole project ending up as a half-fiasco, it is interesting to do some educated guessing as to how much the whole affair ended up costing the Philippine government. Going by the supposed settlement figure for La Lolla’s services at $400,000 and that 60,000 copies were eventually published, I’d hazard a guess that the printing of the books in Italy cost at least $410,000, plus shipping costs to the Philippines of another $25,000; then the costs for raw publication alone would’ve totaled some $435, 000. Add La Lollo’s reduced fee of $400,000 and perhaps another $50,000 for Imelda staffers Carmen Guerrero Nakpil and Marita Manuel, and the whole Imelda-La Lollo-Tasaday publishing saga cost the Philippines at least $885,000 in 1975-76 dollars.
Once again, who was caught holding the bag at the end of the whole episode? Why, poor Juan de la Cruz. Looking at it from the initial contracted $4,000,000 fee for La Lollo’s services + printing costs, then whittled down to $885,000, it came out as a bargain. So, thanks to La Lollo’s attraction to the primitive culture, her “journalistic intransigence” and gumption to be obstinate, all that saved the poor Philippines some $3.9 million additional costs. In hindsight, molto grazie a la Signora Lollobrigida.
Even though Manda Elizalde still headed PANAMIN when La Lollo wanted to steer the focus of Volume II to the Tasadays, Elizalde was under orders not to make it easy for her to get to the “Stone Age” tribe, which is why it was a young T’boli child who ended up on the Volume Two cover instead of a Tasaday. Of course, the other backstory at the time is that maybe Manda feared that if he let La Lollo too close to his “Stone Age” tribe, the jig might soon be up?
In 1981, with La Lollo long gone from the Manila scene, Elizalde himself broke from the Marcoses, supposedly absconded with PANAMIN funds and his harem of “Tasaday” maidens to Costa Rica until he was about to be kicked out of that country for debauched activities. When the Marcoses fell in 1986, so did the mystique of the “Tasadays,” which was exposed as fake. Because the Manda’s clan had already withdrawn their support for the Marcoses in the regime’s final months and switched to the opposition, Manda was able to return to Manila post-Marcos without too much accountability. The fake “conquistador” of a “Stone Age tribe” passed away in the comfort of his Manila mansion in May 1997, taking the secrets of the “Tasaday” chapter to the grave with him.
Meanwhile, La Lollo had returned to Europe to pursue other projects, with the whole Philippine chapter not exactly a shining notch on her CV. Imelda returned to her high-flying ways and other extravagant projects, her husband’s dictatorship facilitating her free-spending ways for another few years.
Recent biographies of La Lollo very strangely fail to even mention this rather unpleasant chapter in the actress’ life. Is it because it happened in a rather distant corner of an otherwise US-Euro-centric world? Maybe so, but Filipinos should not forget.
SOURCES:
Remembering Carmen Guerrero Nakpil’s cultural battle with Gina Lollobrigida - VERA Files
The Tasaday tribe, the Paleolithic fraud that dazzled the world (ireneu.blogspot.com)
“Thirty Years Later . . . Catching Up with the Marcos-Era Crimes,” Garcia, Myles, MAG Publishing, © 2016, p.71-2.
Tasaday: The Stone-Age Tribe That Never Was (esquiremag.ph)
Manuel Elizalde, 60, Dies; Defender of Primitive Tribe - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Myles A. Garcia is a Correspondent and regular contributor to www.positivelyfilipino.com. He has written three books:
· Secrets of the Olympic Ceremonies (latest edition, 2021);
· Thirty Years Later . . . Catching Up with the Marcos-Era Crimes (© 2016); and
· Of Adobo, Apple Pie, and Schnitzel With Noodles (© 2018)—all available in paperback from amazon.com (Australia, USA, Canada, UK and Europe).
Myles is also a member of the International Society of Olympic Historians, contributing to the ISOH Journal, and pursuing dramatic writing lately. For any enquiries: razor323@gmail.com
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