As a child, Imelda had gone barefoot. Although she belonged to the influential Romualdez family on the Philippine island of Leyte, her branch of the family was poor. For a time, she and her mother lived in a car port; but by the time she was sixteen, she was a sought-after beauty.
In 1951, she fell in love with Victoriano Chan, the heir of a wealthy Chinese family who owned the Tacloban Electric Plant. His parents considered her unsuitable and he broke it off.
Soon she fell in love again, this time with Justo Zibala, a good-looking medical student from the island of Negros; but he was a Protestant and Imelda’s father Orestes, a fervent Catholic, objected.
To escape another suitor, Dominador Pacho, a sawmill owner who had a reputation for getting what he wanted, Imelda fled to Manila with just five pesos in her purse. She got a job in a bank. In Manila, she was quickly noticed for her beauty. The editor of the Sunday supplement This Week used her picture on the cover of the Valentine Day’s issue, which brought her instant stardom. At the home of her uncle, Congressman Daniel Romualdez, she was besieged by wealthy playboys of Manila’s polo set. One of them picked her up, toyed with her, then dropped her. He was the young, up-and-coming politician Benigno Aquino.
Imelda decided that she had to make her way on her own merits, so she entered the Miss Manila competition. Her family were shocked. They assumed that the winner would have to sleep with the judges, but Imelda was above that. She lost to twenty-year-old Norma Jimenez from Pangasinan province.
Imelda did not give up that easily. She went to see Manila’s Mayor Arsenio Lacson, the organizer of the competition. He was well known for his sexual proclivities. Every afternoon between three and four, he would retire to the Hotel Filipinas for “Chinese tea” — he would spend an hour with a couple of Chinese girls supplied by his constituents. In his office, Imelda sobbed uncontrollably. He comforted her. When their meeting was over, Mayor Lacson disowned the decision of the judges and declared Imelda Miss Manila. The rumour immediately spread that Imelda was Lacson’s latest conquest.
However, the judges insisted that their original decision stand, so Mayor Lacson was forced to name Imelda “Muse of Manila” instead. It was a title he had made up himself. As the Muse of Manila, Imelda stood alongside the official Miss Manila in the Miss Philippines” contest. Neither girl won.
These shenanigans did not seem to damage Imelda’s marriage prospects. She became involved with Ariston Nakpil, one of Manila’s wealthiest men. He was the son of one of the city’s oldest families and had studied architecture at Harvard and the Fontainebleau School of Fine Art in France. Imelda found him dashing and erudite. They spent the weekends together at his family farm in Batangas and holidayed together in the mountain resort of Baguio. The only problem was that he was already married. Imelda’s strict Catholic father came and took her home to Leyte.
But Imelda had tasted the good life and was no longer content with the sleepy ways of a backwater like Tacloban. She escaped back to Manila in the hope of resuming her year-long affair with Nakpil. It was then that she met Ferdinand Marcos, a politician who had already done the impossible — he had got himself elected to congress after being convicted of murder. In jail pending his appeal, he studied law and passed his bar examinations. He argued his own appeal in front of the Supreme Court, whose chief justice himself had been convicted of murder at the age of eighteen and had successfully represented himself to the Supreme Court. Marcos walked free.
Soon a rising politician, Marcos had given the address at Imelda’s high-school graduation ceremony. He had also been a customer at the bank where she had worked. He had a reputation as a ladies” man and could not have failed to notice her there.
They met formally at an ice-cream party and he was smitten. He began to pester Imelda so persistently that she ran away to Baguio for Holy Week with three girlfriends as chaperones. Marcos set off in pursuit with a marriage licorice, which he had already signed, and a justice of the peace, so the ceremony could take place just as soon as she gave in.
When she went to Mass each morning, he would sit beside her and tell her about the bright future they had in front of them. Then he took her and her girlfriends to the bank. In the vault, he showed her his safe deposit box which contained the best part of a million dollars in cash. Soon after, she signed the marriage contract. From meeting to marriage had taken just eleven days.
He bought a wedding ring of white gold with eleven diamonds set in it — one for each day of their courtship. The following day, a civil ceremony was performed by the justice of the peace. A few days later, they went to visit Imelda’s father who, unexpectedly, took a liking to Marcos and forgave his daughter, provided they had a proper church wedding.
Marcos set up a glittering society affair at the Miguel Pro-Cathedral in Manila. Philippines President Ramon Magsaysay acted as co-sponsor. Imelda was dressed in a couture gown of tulle and white satin, embroidered with leaves of sequins, seed pearls and rhinestones. There were three thousand guests at the reception including a large number of congressmen and senators. It was held in Malacanang Park, across the Pasig river from the presidential palace. The cake was a replica of the Congress building.
“It was a very political wedding,” concluded Imelda’s sister, Conchita.
The Marcoses had a very public honeymoon in Baguio. This was because Ferdinand already had a common-law wife, Carmen Omega. She had met Marcos four years before when he had offered to sponsor her for the Miss Press Photography contest. Soon she became his full-time mistress and he moved her into the house he shared with his mother, Doña Josefa. A press announcement of their forthcoming wedding appeared, but they underwent neither a civil nor a church marriage. Nevertheless, Carmen Omega was known around Manila as Mrs Marcos. Imelda must have known of her — once Marcos had taken Carmen to a bank where Imelda’s sister, Loreta, worked to withdraw $50,000 for a spending spree in the U.S. and he had introduced Carmen as Mrs Marcos.
Doña Josefa considered Carmen to be her son’s wife. As far as she was concerned, Imelda was simply his political mistress. Marcos was planning to run for the senate. The Romualdez family controlled over a million votes on the central island of Visayan; and Eduardo Romualdez was the chairman of Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which controlled millions of dollars-worth of foreign exchange credits. Although Imelda did not realize it at the time, marriage to her set the seal on his political and financial future.
By contrast, Carmen Ortega was without power or influence. While Ferdinand and Imelda honeymooned, Carmen and their three children were moved out of the Marcos’s home to a large house in the suburb of Green Hills. However, the memory of his mistress could not be erased so easily. The house Ambled was to share with her new husband and his mother was on Ortega Street. She tried to insist that they sell up immediately and move elsewhere, but Marcos and his mother refused.
If that was not painful enough, Imelda soon discovered that Marcos was continuing to see, Carmen. So she screwed up all her courage and went over tee Green Hills for a confrontation. Carmen must, stop seeing her husband immediately, Imelda insisted, she was destroying her marriage and her happiness.
Carmen replied coolly that it was Imelda who was ruining her happiness. She was already pregnant with Ferdinand’s fourth child-and, what’s more, it had been conceived after his marriage to Imelda.
Imelda found herself completely powerless. After so public a wedding, she could not up and leave her husband. In a Catholic country like the Philippines, there was little hope of an annulment and no chance of a divorce; nor could she stop him seeing his mistress.