I once talked to an old man who was then eighty years old. He owned a lumber company and had built a considerable business around it. With the confidence of someone who believed that age had already proved his theories correct, he told me:
“You know, a mistress is a medical necessity.”
According to him, a mistress gives an aging man excitement and a reason to wake up early in the morning. She drives him to earn more, look for new business, dress better, and remain physically active. She rejuvenates him. That, he claimed, was one of the secrets of longevity.
Then came his peculiar cost-benefit analysis.
An angioplasty or heart bypass, he said, could cost two million pesos for the medical procedure alone. That would not include the doctors’ fees, hospitalization, rehabilitation, and the maintenance medicines needed to sustain the body after the intervention. By comparison, he argued, the expenses associated with a mistress might be considered preventive medicine.
It was outrageous, of course, romance, however irregular, was cheaper than cardiology.
That conversation comes to mind when one examines the intimate histories, whispered or documented, of the men (and a woman) who occupied the presidency.
Before Ferdinand Marcos married Imelda Romualdez, he had lived with Carmen Ortega, Miss Press Photography of 1949, with whom he reportedly had children. Marcos was already thirty-six when he married the twenty-four-year-old Imelda on April 17, 1954. Their whirlwind courtship and marriage eventually became part of the mythology surrounding the Marcos dynasty. The account concerning Carmen Ortega, however, complicates the carefully cultivated legend of Ferdinand and Imelda as a love story ordained by destiny.
Even Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., whose marriage to Corazon Aquino became intertwined with the country’s democratic history, was not spared from political gossip. One politician crudely described Ninoy’s supposed appetite for women by saying:
“Napakalibog ni Ninoy. Kahit poste, lagyan mo lang ng palda, liligawan niya.”
Whether fair, exaggerated, or entirely malicious, the remark demonstrates how political folklore reduces even the most consequential public figures to stories about their private appetites.
Then there was Fidel V. Ramos. For many years, Manila society whispered about his alleged relationship with Rose Marie “Baby” Arenas and the persistent rumor that he had fathered a son with her. Ramos publicly denied that allegation. The purported Ramos issue is a carbon copy of the of the original. The rumor nevertheless endured, perhaps because all his acknowledged children with Amelita “Ming” Ramos were daughters and political gossips conveniently supplied him with the supposed male descendant they imagined every powerful man desired.
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