Valentine reportage from February of 1969.
Caroline Kennedy of London has been an honorary India Brava since July of last year, when she arrived in Manila trailing hippie robes and veils and long golden hair. Since then her feline green eyes and staccato tones have been the terror at the Café Los Indios Bravos, where she’s the resident witch. She has been carried in procession round the Mabini area, enthroned in a pushcart borrowed from scavengers. She attended Betsy Romualdez Francia’s wedding as bridesmaid, in lace pantalettes, looking like a Dresdren shepherdess. Her column in a weekly supplement has made many a shorn Samson crave to pull it down. A guest appearance on TV led to her scathing report on the medium that has it still wincing. It was brave of Larry Santiago to ask her to work in a movie. She has just emerged from the ordeal and heads will roll.
Because wherever a girl like Caroline is, Sex Rears Its Ugly Head, she has amassed data on Love In A Hot Climate and her opinion of local swains, with one dear exception, is harsh.
“Filipinos,” declares Caroline Kennedy, “are clumsy lovers.”
Before the male population of this country rises in wrath to demand that the lade be for burning, let it lend a sporting ear to Miss Kennedy’s testimony.
“My first date in the Philippines: I went out with an actor; I had seen him around quite a bit. He took me to Shangri-la and from there we proceeded to Patio Flamenco. And then it was already midnight and I said, ‘It’s time to go home.’ He said, ‘What’s the trouble with me? Do you think I’m oversexed?’ He said, ‘Would you condemn me because when I see you I feel excited and when I hold your hands I get more excited and when I can’t I get even more excited? Am I supposed to be tried as a criminal for that?’ Then he said, ‘Would you mind if I masturbated in front of you?’ I told him, ‘I do mind very much.’ So he didn’t. He said, ‘I’m terribly sorry. I don’t believe in wasting time.’ After that I went home—alone. I left him cold.”
Should she have humored him, lightly laughed away his lust? But she was to learn that it’s dangerous to laugh at the Filipino male.
“There was this boy who saw me in a restaurant. He bought twelve strings of sampaguita and put them around my neck and he said, ‘My love is like a red red rose.'”
Since sampaguitas are not roses, she couldn’t help laughing. The boy felt humiliated.
“Next time I saw him, he was with a group of friends and he said to them, ‘I think we should take her out and rape her because she needs it.’ I just didn’t speak to him again.
For older creeps, she has found an effective damper.
“A married man was trying to take me out, calling me on the phone every single day, begging me to go to bed with him. I was running out of excuses. So finally I thought of a way to get rid of him. I told him I would call up his wife and tell her that her husband was madly in love with me and that she would have to separate from him. Though I had never gone out with him, believe me, he was scared. I never heard from him again.”
Caroline suspects that what seems to be ardent desire in a seducer is really nothing more than the desire to acquire a status-symbol mistress.
“There was a very rich guy, vice president of a bank, who asked me for a date and then brought along six chaperons! He said he would lend me his private plane and he would give me a free trip to India.”
Why to India?
“For tiger-hunting. So I went out with him once. He tried to seduce me, he did not succeed.”
She didn’t bring out the tiger in him?
“I don’t think there was any tiger in him. It was just a facade, as with many Filipinos. They are faced with the need to have a mistress as status symbol. But I can sympathize with those who have convent-educated wives. There’s nothing more unattractive than a woman who gets a large belly the moment she is married. No wonder half the male population of the Philippines is homosexual. I find it very unhygienic, these women with litters of children; they remind of the sound of little pigs. I think marriage would be a lot more fun if Filipino women ignored the Pope a little more often, because they use the Pope not for religious purposes, as they imply, but to get a lover into marriage. ‘Oh darling, come to bed with me.’ Then the unforeseen happens and: ‘You must marry me!’ And the girl’s parents make sure he does marry her. I think the girls here are very hypocritical. They pretend to be shocked when you mention sex. If you touch their shoulders, they cross their legs.”
As a result, the Filipino as lover is insecure and must shore up his sex with mistresses.
“English men are more casual, more nonchalant about approaching a girl, because they know they can get what they want. But Filipinos are not quite as sure of themselves. Therefore they overact. I find them very clumsy and heavy-handed. They rather remind me of Groucho Marx in a glass factory. They try to pretend they are confident about their seduction scene, but, in fact, they find it so hard it becomes slapstick, throwing things around. They send you roses, they write you little notes on napkins, they telephone you five times a day.
“They should be more forthright, or pretend to ignore you completely. In that way, the girl becomes curious, she is aroused, and the rest is done for them. As English boy you meet for the first time, if you agree to go out to dinner with him, then he knows he can expect you to go to bed with him. And you do. It does not mean anything; it’s just like shaking hands or going to the toilet.
But the Filipino dillydallies.
“I try to egg him on to see how long it will take him to come to the point. It may take weeks, or months. Boring!”
And when he does come to the point, there’s more clumsiness about getting down to business.
“It’s like somebody starting to learn horseback riding. They don’t know the back from the front. They fumble. You begin to wonder if they know what this is all about.”
However, the actual performance, when it’s finally achieved, is usually satisfactory.
“The Filipino is a practical lover once he discovers the right zipper. He is good once he gets down to it. No more fumbling.”
But then comes the aftermath.
“Now, as a lover, he is very jealous, very possessive. If you speak to another man he wants you to tell him everything that was said. You have to explain every single line you spoke. And you have to boost his morale because he needs confidence. You have to whisper nice things in his ears, play him up the way he wants you to do.
Caroline has heard of the expression: From deuce to deuce. What, she wonders, does it really mean?
*Caroline is a true hippie in the sense that she has never joined any official hippie group: an outsider to even outsiders. She prefers to be a whole non-conformist movement all by herself. Indios is about the only Bohemia she has called turf; and she’s transient there, too. Despite the mod clothes, her provenance is not the Beatles but rather that free soul from Mayfair who, in a younger day, flaunted the Green Hat. For Mayfair, or thereabouts, is where Caroline Kennedy began and what she’s fugitive from.
“I was born outside London. My mother is Jugoslav; my father is a nuclear engineer: he builds nuclear power stations. I am the youngest of four and my parents divorced when I was four. I went with my father. My mother remarried. I did not see her very much, only twice a year, by the order of the court.”
After high school she took a course in journalism.
“Because very few girls go to universities in England. And I had always wanted to be a writer. I had no other ambition at all. When I was ten I was already writing for our school magazine. I read John Steinbeck; I loved his characters. I also read Evelyn Waugh, Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer.”
At 16, she went to live with her mother.
“She’s Catholic but I’m Protestant. She had married a Member of Parliament and they live in Belgravia. (Belgravia is a residential area for the rich in London.) I don’t really like my stepfather very much. He’s an expert in guerrilla warfare, always fighting wars—first in the Congo, fighting with Tshombe, then he went to Algeria and fought in the Algerian-Syrian war. The last four years, he has been fighting in Yemen. My mother never sees him, he goes away for months. He prefers his crusades.
The young Caroline, when Belgravia palled, found her way not to the hippies but to the theater crowd.
“I was going out with actors mostly. No, I never wanted to be an actress. But I like that crowd very much; they are more free.”
When she left home to be on her own she got into one of those curious arrangements of Love In A Cold Climate: a platonic affair with a journalist.
“He was not a lover because he was much older than I. But I went with him for two and a half years. We were just very good friends, but we did not go to bed together. I was very loyal to him.”
When the arrangement ended, Caroline decided to go to the United States.
“For more freedom. I am very adventurous and I hate to be tied up.”
And what did she use for funds?
“I just had money. It’s a rich family, but my father doesn’t give me money; my mother does.”
She was in New York for three years, doing theater reviews, then a nightly radio program. “I interviewed people like Mayor Lindsay and Salvador Dali. I lived in Carnegie Hall, in the studio above the auditorium.” She says she didn’t go to Greenwich Village much or meet the flower people. “I didn’t have enough time.” And love in America left her cold.
“American men are henpecked mostly; not much fun, not very entertaining. I did not find them attractive.”
However, New York was an international testing ground.
“I was with a French crowd for three months.”
And how were the French as lovers?
“No, sir, they don’t live up to their reputation.”
The Germans? “They are clumsy.”
From an Italian boy friend she learned about the Latin lover.
“He thinks only of himself. He has not discovered the art of making love. It’s purely personal with him, nothing of a union between two people.”
A junket to the Caribbean taught her about the Englishman as lover in the colonies, under a tropic sun, and she has one stark word for him.
“Ugly.”
Indeed she suspects that Love In A Hot Climate is not Briton’s cup of tea. She will not include herself, being only half-British. “I don’t have enough English blood for that.”
On a visit to London she met a TV scriptwriter and they fell in love. She went back to New York but they corresponded, became engaged, and then he insisted that she come home.
“So I went back to London, and because we were engaged, we went to Jordan together. Kaput. The trip to Jordan ruined it completely. The trouble was, the heat affected him, he developed a very bad temper, and then he became ill. I feel very sorry for him. It was not hot enough for me but it was too hot for him. He was merciless with me. He was completely English. We were engaged when we went to Jordan, disengaged when we came back.”
Mod Love, too, knows the broken heart. Because of the break-up Caroline suffered a nervous breakdown, had to be hospitalized, was given electric shock treatment. Her grieving over the death of love could be the lament of any Victorian maiden, of any romantic.
“He cared more for his work than for me. He was too ambitious for his own good, really. He had no time for me. I never saw him; he was working every day, every night. He was not like that in the beginning. He was not well-known in the beginning; he was just making a name for himself. I certainly want a man to be ambitious but I want him to have a place for me as well. When I marry I shall certainly go on working. I don’t want to do nothing but produce babies.”
After the hospital, she went to Scotland to convalesce, with her ex-fiance, apparently in an effort to save the affair.
“But when we returned to London I already decided to go away as soon as I could.”
*She had only two places in mind: Russia and the Far East. “I had always wanted to come to the Far East.” Then her literary agent got her a contract to do a travel book. She headed for the Orient.
“I came through East Germany, Poland, Russia, Serbia. I just passed through Russia, two weeks there, on my way to Japan. I stayed in Tokyo for five weeks. I didn’t know anybody there but I just called up one person and she introduced me to several people. So I was working in Japan: writing, modeling, doing fashion layouts.”
Japan did not live up to her expectations.
“In the first place, Tokyo is not that beautiful. It is very commercial now, very industrial.”
And in the second place, the Japanese as lover was not all that impressive.
“He is like the Latin: it’s his pleasure, not the girl’s.”
From Tokyo Caroline went to Hong Kong and on the way there fell in with Betsy Romualdez, who was returning to Manila from a stay in the States. Betsy urged Manila on Caroline but Caroline wanted to see Hong Kong. Afterwards, she would rue not having gone on to Manila with Betsy.
“I stayed in Hong Kong for four weeks and I hated it. The British colonials again.” She was thinking of North Vietnam—”I tried to get a visa to China but it’s very difficult since the riots”—when a letter came from Betsy inviting her to Manila.
“So I arrived in Manila on July 6, 1968. I was planning to stay only 21 days; I had a ticket out already.” BUt she got involved in a number of things: Indios, its second anniversary, Betsy’s wedding to Henry Francia, then the weekly column for the Mirror magazine. “I was glad for an excuse to stay: I was scared of the idea of going to North Vietnam. And I had met friendly people here. Friendly really, amazing.”
Imagine dear old Manila as lotos land!
“My agent has written me to get off my ass and start working on the travel book.”
But lotos land is not all the way edible.”
“I long for sausages and mash. I eat my rice with milk and sugar. Of native food, I like fresh lumpia, without the garlic. Nothing else, I don’t eat adobo.”
But adobo land is where she has found her true Mod love.
“He is fabulous. He is not typical Filipino but then he is very good. He is much more subtle. I mean, he ignored me until my curiosity was aroused. He admits now he was attracted to me from the start. I was also attracted to him. All were fighting to get me and here was a person who ignored me until I wanted to seduce him. I found him very attractive physically anyway. He is a very good companion and a very good lover.”
Not possessive?
“Yes, but very quietly. I think he is that way. We have been going together for six months. For his age, he was quite inexperienced when I met him—naive, but that makes him a very nice pupil. I think he has a lot of talent and I think he should travel. He is going to Europe in May or June. He wants to go to Spain to see his girl friend.”
And she won’t fight to keep him?
“I never fight,” replies Caroline. “He wants to go. I can’t help that.”
She herself still means to see North Vietnam, or Cambodia at least. And she has to write the travel book and, after it, the book she has long been wanting to do: “A multi-autobiographical novel.”
“A friend of mine writes me that she wrote a How To Make Love in Five Languages. I want to outdo her by writing How To Make Love In Ten Languages.“
And what will be the general statement in it on the Filipino?
“That he is a clumsy lover. I think before he seduces girls he should take a course in anatomy. I believe the Jesuit should offer such courses. Once he finishes the course, he won’t be so heavy-handed about the whole situation.
“However, since I have remained six months with one lover, I cannot ridicule, I cannot complain too much about the Filipino as lover.”
Tender indeed turn the green eyes and clipped accents when she speaks of her Filipino as lover, her mod Valentine.
“I am very fond of him,” she says.
(P.S.—So fond indeed was Caroline of her Filipino that she married him and is now Mrs. Ben Cabrera. He is better known in international art circles as the painter Bencab. He and Caroline live in London with their babies—which, yes, she has been having one after the other.)
Written by Quijano de Manila. February 13, 1995. Philippine Graphic.
