17/11/2025
For several decades, Filipinos joked and rumored that Imee Marcos was not in fact the daughter of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Instead, she was the by-product of Imelda Romuáldez’s special favors with the late and colorful Manila mayor Arsenio Lacson in a desperate plea to overturn the results of the 1953 Miss Manila pageant.
In 1952, a 23-year-old Imelda Romuáldez had moved to Manila from Leyte, living in her politically powerful cousin Rep. Daniel Romuáldez’s garage where she shared the room with the housemaid.
During her time in Manila, she worked as an unofficial servant to her cousin’s wife, Paz Gueco, aunt of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. and heiress to the Gueco fortune, and a nanny to the children.
Later, Daniel found Imelda working as a saleslady in a music shop in Escolta. This angered her father, Vicente Romuáldez, perceiving it as ill-treatment of his daughter. To calm their uncle, Daniel and Eduardo Romuáldez would use their influence as a representative and a member of the government’s monetary board to give their cousin a job as a clerk at the Central Bank Intelligence.
But before her job at the central bank, many found the young Imelda beautiful but not enough to be the center of attention.
That was until Angel C. Anden, a professor at the Manuel L. Quezon University and an editor of This Week, a magazine of the Manila Chronicle, photographed Imelda for their Valentine’s Day cover. He described her as “The kind of face a man carries throughout his life behind a secret trapdoor in his memories.”
This was essentially her first public appearance.
After receiving some singing lessons from Adoracion Reyes (whose daughter was the godchild of Imelda’s cousin, Loreto) at the Philippine Women’s University College of Music and Arts, Imelda felt confident enough to make her debut hoping to win the 1953 Miss Manila contest. To her dismay, when the votes were counted, her name wasn’t even among the finalists. Heartbroken, she sought to overturn the results by appealing to the Mayor of Manila, the brash and colorful Arsenio Lacson.
Truthfully, the late Arsenio Lacson’s career and antics deserve an article of their own, but that is for another day.
For all his admirable qualities, Arsenio Lacson was without question a womanizer. His own widow, Luz Lacson, described him in 1987 as “a very naughty man”. This is also confirmed by Joseph Burkholder Smith, a CIA agent who was stationed in Southeast Asia and spent a great deal of his time in the Philippines. He recalled that Lacson, every day between 4:00 to 4:30 PM at what is now the Bayview Park Hotel Manila, would have “Chinese teatime”. He would be provided a lovely young Chinese girl (sometimes more than one) for pleasure.
Agent Smith also reported that Lacson died from a heart attack during one of his “Chinese teatime” sessions.
Through Dr. Angelo Singian (Adoracion Reyes’ brother-in-law), Imelda was able to have a meeting with Mayor Lacson. She plead her case that the results must have been rigged as the winner did not have any sponsors unlike her. Mayor Lacson was said to have chuckled and winked as he gave his reply:
“Miss Romualdez, you are really bent on winning this contest. Then, you are going to win the contest.”
The next day on March 3, 1953, the newspapers published Mayor Lacson’s objections against the results citing “as Mayor of Manila, he would nominate the only candidate of the City of Manila for the beauty contest.”
This did not, however, change the results. Norma Jimenez would retain her title as Miss Manila, but Imelda was able to receive a consolation prize given the title “Muse of Manila” and her first taste of political leverage.
It was a scandal: a young unescorted woman visiting a womanizing politician.
It was far too easy.
Luz Lacson even confronted the mayor about the matter asking him if he was in fact having an affair. His response was vague as Mrs. Lacson recalled:
“He just told me, ‘Don’t be silly.’ But you know how men are.”
The scandal followed Imelda even after her marriage to Ferdinand Marcos in 1954, made even more heated as Marcos and Lacson were known to hate one another. It was an eye-raising incident reported and witnessed by Marcos' publicist later dissident Primitivo Mijares.
Arsenio Lacson announced that he would publish a dossier in order to prevent Marcos from successfully running for another term in the House of Representatives. Getting wind of this from friends in the Nacionalista Party, Marcos planned to have Lacson killed, similar to what he did to Julio Nalundasan.
But Imelda would intervene. Later, Lacson proclaimed that there would be no bombshell dossier. He instead became Imee’s godfather.
One of the darkest details about this scandal was in March 1957.
Ferdinand Marcos offered a proposition with Arsenio Lacson in his own home. The proposition was Lacson would run as president with Marcos as his vice president. Lacson was angered and rebuked him for even suggesting such a union. Upon reflecting on the visit, Lacson was said to have said the following:
“You can become President of this country only over my dead body… This guy Marcos is really a scheming deadly man. Just because I was ahead of him with Imelda, he wants to get even with me in a most complicated manner! Of course, if I should be President, and Marcos is my Number 2 man, then maybe I can requisition the Vice President's lady once in a while.”
However, with both “fathers” deceased and the noted lengths the Marcos clan has gone to distort the truth and their image to the public, it may never be known if the rumors and jokes are indeed rooted in truth.
But Mother Nature and biology have their ways of answering questions of parentage.
Such as Imee Marcos’ large and protruding chin, which is noticeably absent amongst her siblings, the Ferdinand-Imelda children, but is near identical to Arsenio Lacon’s distinguishable chin.
With all this in mind, who is the father indeed?
—Raymundo White
Sources:
Ellison, K. (1988). Chapter 3: Waiting for Destiny. In Imelda: Steel Butterfly of the Philippines (pp. 34-37). McGraw Hill.
Karnow, Stanley (1989). In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines. New York: Ballantine Books. pp. 641-642
Mijares, P. (1976). Chapter II Plot Thickens. In The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos (pp. 119-120). Union Square Publications.
Mijares, P. (1976). Chapter IX. Too late the hero. In The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos (pp. 195-196). Union Square Publications.
Mijares, P. (1976). Chapter VIII The Unholy Trinity. In The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos (p. 188). Union Square Publications.
Pedrosa, C. N. (1969). CHAPTER IX How Imelda Became Muse of Manila. In The Untold Story of Imelda Marcos. Tandem Pub.
Smith, J. B. (1976). 17. The Grand Alliance. In Portrait of a Cold Warrior Second Thoughts of a CIA Agent (p. 283). New York: Ballantine Books.
