The Steel Butterfly Still Soars

Like a cockroach after a nuclear bomb, Imelda Marcos’s charm has survived what should have been a deadly blow. Back in 1986, a popular revolt ended her 20-year reign as the Philippines’ first lady. She fled to Hawaii with her husband, Ferdinand, leaving behind a grisly record of human rights abuses, corruption and, of course, more than 1,000 pairs of shoes.

Last week, Imelda’s notorious designer footwear was in the news again after officials at the National Museum of the Philippines in Manila discovered that part of their collection had been destroyed by termites and mold. A team of curators is racing to contain the damage.

Yet whatever the damage to those Charles Jourdans and Jimmy Choos, the so-called Steel Butterfly’s seductive power remains largely intact, as revealed in the surprisingly sympathetic new musical “Here Lies Love,” produced by the artist and musician David Byrne. The show played to sold-out audiences in Massachusetts last summer and will open at New York’s Public Theater this spring. It’s named after Imelda’s wish for her epitaph, a typically sugary sentiment from the woman who once referred to the Marcoses’ nine years of military repression as “martial law with a smile.”

As her husband’s partner in what Filipinos have labeled the “conjugal dictatorship,” Imelda could have taught Ronald Reagan a thing or two about Teflon. She fascinated American officials, diplomats and journalists with her striking beauty and lavish hospitality. She waltzed with Reagan and Lyndon B. Johnson, turned over her own bed to a visiting Richard M. Nixon, and helped convince Americans that the Marcoses alone stood between order and Communist chaos — while distracting them from accumulating evidence of torture, executions and disappearances. Mr. Marcos treasured Imelda as a political asset, once calling her his “secret weapon.” Yet after the dust cleared, it was obvious that her hubris had hastened his downfall.

Much to the chagrin of their American sponsors, she consorted with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and Fidel Castro. Her legendary shopping sprees ultimately included the assembly of a splendid portfolio of secretly acquired American real estate, featuring such jewels as the Crown Building on Fifth Avenue and a Long Island estate that is once again on the market. State Department sources have told me that Imelda may even have planned the brazen 1983 murder of the opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino, shot down on the Manila airport tarmac in front of a planeload of foreign journalists. It’s no wonder witnesses reported hearing Mr. Marcos turn to his wife, while awaiting the American helicopters that whisked them away from their palace, and growl, “It’s all your fault.”

Still, Imelda’s moment of reckoning was relatively short-lived. After five years of comfortable exile in Hawaii, she was acquitted of racketeering and fraud charges in the United States. She returned to Manila in 1991, two years after Mr. Marcos died. By then, with few improvements under the new, democratic government presided over by Mr. Aquino’s widow, Corazon, many Filipinos were already nostalgic for the Marcoses’ firm hand. She ran unsuccessfully for president in 1992 and 1998. Yet in 1995, she snagged a seat in the national Congress and ran and won again in 2010. Earlier this week, she announced her plans to seek another term.

Today, at 83, she heads a political dynasty in which her daughter governs a province and her son is a national senator and strong contender in the next presidential elections. The great majority of the 900 civil and criminal cases against the Marcoses, filed in the Philippines and the United States, have been dismissed.

“Here Lies Love,” based on a 2010 song collection that Mr. Byrne produced with the British musician Fatboy Slim, cheerily plays down the Marcoses’ corruption and cruelty. Instead, Mr. Byrne’s libretto keeps the focus on Imelda’s rags-to-riches story. Mr. Byrne has said he wants his audience to “reluctantly empathize” with Imelda, who, after listening to a CD of songs portraying her rise from a poor provincial beauty to first lady, told reporters she was “flattered.” The one song that explicitly addresses the infamous “Order 1081” that proclaimed martial law even seems to celebrate it: “Now it’s safe to walk the streets at night — a new world has begun. Ev’rybody’s sleeping soundly — thanks to 1081.”

The pop-iconization of Imelda and the success of “Here Lies Love” is an affront to the Marcoses’ surviving victims. A spokesman for Mr. Byrne told me that he was editing his libretto over the summer. Yet I’d be surprised if he adds even a passing mention of Hilda Narciso, a former church worker who was taken to a safe house for “interrogation” and repeatedly gang-raped by soldiers in Davao City in 1983. Or Mariano Pimentel, who was held for four years without charges, beaten by soldiers, buried up to his neck in a remote field and left for dead, before his serendipitous rescue by local children.

While Ms. Narciso’s and Mr. Pimentel’s stories may not easily lend themselves to a disco beat, they represent 7,526 plaintiffs in a suit against the Marcos estate, one of the world’s first certified class actions for human rights abuses. It was first filed in 1986. Nine years later, an American judge ordered payment of a total of nearly $2 billion to the victims. Yet Filipino officials have balked at distributing any of the money collected from the Marcoses and their cronies, despite a scolding by the United Nations Human Rights Commission and a bill pending in the Philippine Senate, where many lawmakers are themselves victims of Marcos-era abuses.

When I listen to the giddy beat of “Here Lies Love,” I can’t help but recall Imelda’s optimistic take on events when I interviewed her in Malacanang Palace in 1985, as the “People Power” protests were gaining force and just a few months before she was forced to flee.

Decked out in a low-cut vermilion dress and enormous diamond earrings, she sat below a life-size portrait of herself in younger days, rising from a clamshell and swathed in an aquamarine mist. “History will be much kinder to me,” she assured me, beating her ox-blood-colored nails against her breast. “Once all the passions and emotions will have died down, they will know, this was my first concern: man.” Sighing, she added, “It’s a beautiful world.”

Katherine Ellison is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of Imelda: Steel Butterfly of the Philippines.

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