The last rock star: Carmen Guerrero Nakpil
You can’t be a rock star without enraptured fans and a handful of stalkers — Mom had plenty of both. It’s funny to think about it in the age of Twitter, but when she would tap out her columns on an analog clunker called the “typewriter,” the Manila Times had a circulation of one million readers a day. (Think about it: this wasn’t views for free, but people plunking down real money to get the lowdown on the world.)
Hollywood’s biggest leading stars — Cary Grant and Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart and even Lauren Bacall — played hard-boiled reporters. Newspapermen starred in their own comic books: Superman’s alter ego — and Spider-Man’s too — worked for the press. Oped columnists (like Mother) were, of course, newsroom royalty and were courted not only by the rich and powerful but also by competing papers that sniffed out the first hint of discontent, faster than you could say “LeBron James.” Mother, in fact, had a strict “no-edit” rule in her contracts, which meant that not one word — even if it had been misspelled inadvertently by her typist, little ol’ me — could be changed without a quick consult.
Of course, I didn’t know any of that when it was all happening — although I would occasionally be allowed to read the adoring letters from readers. As far as I could tell at the time, Mom 0seemed to have succeeded in spite of herself, certainly in spite life — at one point, becoming famous enough to be invited to star in her own movie to be titled appropriately, Amazona. (She turned that down. Lord knows what would have happened, if she hadn’t.)
She wrote landmark essays on Filipino women — and men— and the culture they lived in, the whole time presiding over a remarkably modern “blended” family — spanning three marriages (hers, his, and theirs) and seven children. (Two of her children remain the most famous: Gemma Cruz Araneta and Ismael “Toto” Cruz, named after her first husband; two others passed away before her, Ramon Guerrero Nakpil and Carmina Nakpil Dualan. Three more survived, myself and two more siblings, Luis Guerrero Nakpil and Nina Nakpil Campos.)
As a little child, I actually thought at one point that Mom was Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy,a dizzy housewife that specialized in burnt dinners and fun misadventures. The screwball aspects of her life almost certainly came from having to produce a daily column while running a very much expanded household — and refusing to fall into the expected, genderspecific stereotypes. (For good measure, Mom would make sure I went to driving school while the boys had cooking lessons.) She never approved of pets either, saying with such conviction that “animals should either be