Essay: The Shoes of Imelda Marcos

A man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his.

–William James, 1890

The palace doors came loose on their hinges, and the inventory began tumbling out of the overstuffed world of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. It was an impressive accumulation: a billion here, 800 million there; an office tower in Manhattan; a waterfront estate on Long Island; dozens of country houses in the Philippines; and even a second palace in Marcos’ home province, Ilocos Norte, which almost no one knew about until now. One took the spectacle in with a feeling of wonder and disgust, something like one’s reaction, as a child, upon learning that Egypt’s King Farouk ate 600 oysters a week.

In the Marcos accounting, a central question–what might be called the Farouk Conundrum–kept arising. The conundrum was prefigured by Farouk’s grandfather, Khedive Ismail, a grandee who died in 1895 while trying to guzzle two bottles of champagne in one draft. Khedive Ismail kept a harem of 3,000 women. The central question posed by Ismail’s harem, by Farouk’s oysters and by Marcos’ billions is this: Why, exactly?

One may focus the question by meditating upon the 2,700 pairs of shoes that Imelda Marcos left behind in Malacanang Palace. A person’s vision may cloud a little as he tries to peer into the shadows of Swiss bank vaults or into the double-bottomed luggage of the Marcos real estate deals. But the image of the 5,400 shoes of Imelda Marcos makes the metaphysics vivid.

Sophie Tucker said, “I have been rich, and I have been poor. Rich is better.” Of course it is, especially when spring arrives and the IRS closes in. But when most people imagine what life would be like after winning the lottery, they do not come up with 5,400 shoes. The methodical analyst switches on his calculator. If Imelda Marcos changed her shoes three times a day, and never wore the same pair twice, it would take her more than two years and five months to work through her shoe supply–as it existed on the day she fled Manila. Since she undoubtedly would continue to buy new shoes even while trying to do justice to the old supply, it is clear she could never wear all of her shoes.

The parable of Imelda’s shoes has something to teach. She could never wear them all. Nor could the Marcos family, one suspects, manage to spend the billions of dollars they plundered from the Philippines. As easily could Khedive Ismail labor through his harem of 3,000 women. (It is perhaps just as well that Ismail’s champagne overdose spared him the exhaustion of trying to scale that particular Everest.)

Why accumulate so much–2,700 pairs of shoes, 3,000 women–if there is no use for all of them? How much gold is enough? Only a sane person would think to ask. An Eskimo hunter who kills only the game necessary to feed his family would have been horrified by Theodore Roosevelt, who could not have consumed more than one ten-thousandth of the animals he slaughtered. Roosevelt loved hunting the way that Imelda loves shopping. He loved the kick of the gun and the smell of the powder. He loved the antlers. The same sportive hormones may be active in Imelda. Nature is filled with wild waste, unthinkable redundancies. Why does nature toss off a billion sperm when only one of them is necessary to fertilize a human egg? Imelda’s shoes, ecologically baffling, are part of the mystery of life.

Consider her profligacy in another way. What is the purpose of riches? To buy freedom–to purchase choices, immunities from the will of others, or of fate. If Imelda kept a collection of 2,700 pairs of shoes, it was not because (as some candle-snuffing moralists might think) she should be expected to wear them all, and must be judged a wastrel if she did not, but because the 2,700 pairs gave her options. Her step no doubt grew lighter in the knowledge of such freedom. Did she display her shoes the way that Jay Gatsby reveled in his wonderful shirts?

Or were the Marcos shoes, like the billions of stolen dollars, merely grotesque? The Russian word poshlost suggests the transcendent vulgarity at work in the Marcos spectacle. Poshlost is something preposterously overdone but without self-knowledge or irony. It is comic and sad and awful. An 18th century French merchant of great wealth named Beaujean came to the same dead end as Marcos with his Swiss gold and his ruined kidneys. “He owned amazing gardens,” the historian Miriam Beard wrote of Beaujean, “but he was too fat to walk in them . . . He had countless splendid bedrooms and suffered from insomnia . . . a monstrous, bald, bloated old man in a bed sculptured and painted to resemble a gilded basket of roses.”

Children often have delusions of omnipotence, and perhaps adult megalomania derives from that, with a sinister admixture of the child’s spirit of play and exhibitionism. As the economist Robert Heilbroner wrote, “Analysis finds . . . that even after the child separates the world outside from the world within, he continues to endow outside things with the magical property of being part of himself. To put it differently, he sees his personality as contagious, shedding something of itself on objects of importance. His possessions are part of his self.”

Wretched excess comes in many forms. Theologians distinguish the excess called avarice–the sheer, mean taking and hoarding of things–from the excess called prodigality, which is a messier and more full-blooded fault, a form of generosity, almost, but one that has come unhinged. Ideally, world-class plundering should try to pay its way as entertainment. The Romans had a genius for transforming loot into colossally vulgar display, ostentation on an imperial scale. The Emperor Elagabalus, it is said, ordered his slaves to bring him 10,000 lbs. of cobwebs. When they finished the task, Elagabalus observed, “From this, one can understand how great a city is Rome.” Louis XIV of France wore a diamond-covered coat that, at the turn of the 18th century, was worth a dazzling 14 million francs: the Sun King got up in the splendors of Liberace. And so on.

The Marcos plundering seems ultimately a cheerless affair, covert though sometimes ostentatious, avaricious though often prodigal. Christ said, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.” Marcos did not wish to wait. He turned Christianity upside down. He took nourishment from the mouths of the poor and transformed it into his treasure on earth. Such venality is not a matter of either Freud or metaphysics. It is just a brutal habit, the crocodile reflex of a man too long in power. It is a subdivision of the banality of evil.