Behind Closed Doors

The visitors found themselves inside a bizarre combination of Macy’s and the palace at Versailles. As hundreds of Manila’s poorest, many of them in ragged clothes and rubber sandals, shuffled between golden ropes through Malacañang Palace, the residence of former President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda, they witnessed a show of conspicuous consumption beyond their imaginings. Inside Imelda’s boudoir were two queen-size beds on an elevated platform, and a grand piano. The former First Lady’s washbasin was made of gold. Downstairs, in a not-so-bargain basement, the woman who used to refer to “my fellow poor” had left behind some 2,700 pairs of size eight shoes, five shelves of Gucci handbags and 38 of her 105 clothes racks, designed to carry 80 outfits each. Around the château hung life-size portraits depicting the former First Couple as a scantily clad Filipino version of Adam and Eve. Elsewhere, the Marcoses had been a touch more modest: the legends on their bedroom intercoms read simply “King’s Room” and “Queen’s Room.”

In opening the doors to Malacañang Palace last week, President Corazon Aquino was hoping to close the doors, symbolically, on an era of covert monarchy. True to her campaign promise, the new leader turned the Marcos mansion into the People’s Park, a public museum. Faithful so far to another promise, the former housewife showed every sign of for-swearing the designer life-style of her predecessors. She still operates out of a guesthouse next to the Spanish-style palace and commutes to work from her modest suburban home.

At the same time, however, Aquino remained determined to bring to light all the hidden wealth of the exiled couple. Before the palace was thrown open to the public last week, investigators spent two weeks compiling an inventory of the belongings abandoned by the Marcoses during their precipitate departure. The findings suggested that the skeletons in the Marcos closets were quite as outrageous as the Valentino gowns.

Many of the objects found around the palace documented the paranoia and the prodigality of the Marcos regime. Some of the paintings hanging from the walls had been appropriated at will by the Marcoses from the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. Scrapbooks contained photographs of properties in New York City and London, presumably belonging to the royal couple. Bea Zobel, an art collector who led volunteers in sorting through the Marcoses’ possessions, noted that Imelda may have spent as much as several million dollars on jewels and antiques in a single day. Given her husband’s official salary of $5,700 a year, such a shopping spree amounted to more than 500 years’ income for the former First Couple. “The Marcoses did not realize the value of money anymore,” said Zobel. “They just kept on buying and buying.”

Even more graphic evidence of decadent splendor, Marcos-style, was afforded by a private collection of more than 500 videotapes unearthed in Manila and New York. In one of the tapes, taken by an exclusive presidential crew, Imelda cavorts with bejeweled guests in a private Malacañang disco, complete with disk jockey’s booth and man-made waterfall. Another video chronicles an abandoned bacchanal aboard the presidential yacht, celebrating the birthday of the youngest of the three Marcos offspring, Irene Araneta, last year. A man in a baby bonnet bursts out of a cake. The First Lady jives under flashing strobe lights with an American consular official dressed in Bermuda shorts. Then Ferdinand Marcos Jr., a former provincial governor known to family and friends as Bong-bong, steps up to a mike, sporting makeup and a flashing electronic bow tie, and joins in on a raucous rendition of We Are the World, the song recorded to raise money for the starving in Ethiopia.

A third video, discovered inside one of the Marcoses’ semiofficial New York residences, showed Imelda, in black velvet and diamonds, as hostess at a dinner party for Saudi Arabian Billionaire Adnan Khashoggi in a plush Manhattan town house. “You have contributed a lot,” says her guest in a gallant toast. “History will judge you.”

Among the first of history’s judges were the Filipinos who filed through the palace last week, many of whom earn less in a year than Imelda spent on a single pair of shoes. “I am appalled by the greed,” said one nun after her glimpse into the life-style of the rich and famous. “In the palace, I saw all the seven capital sins.” Even visitors accustomed to more affluent surroundings were stunned. “Next to Imelda,” said Democratic Congressman Stephen Solarz of New York after visiting Malacañang, “Marie Antoinette was a bag lady.”

For the Marcoses, however, leaving may be the best revenge. In the manner of deposed royalty, they have apparently taken the lion’s share of their wealth into Hawaiian exile with them, together with their imperial habits. Last week the Pentagon reported that the cost of transporting and supporting Marcos and his retinue had come to $450,000, thanks in part to the $500 long-distance telephone bills run up each day by the party. As the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations debated the merits of entertaining the exiled dictator in such high style, Marcos reportedly was looking for a haven outside the U.S., even as he was trying to close a deal on a Waikiki estate. The property, appointed with two single-story houses and signs in the driveway to scare away trespassers, has a market value of almost $1 million. The Marcoses may have left some of their splendor, but the love of splendor has not, it seems, left the Marcoses. –By Pico Iyer. Reported by Edwin M. Reingold and Nelly Sindayen/Manila