Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Marcos set up a glittering society affair at the Miguel Pro-Cathedral in Manila. Philippines President Ramon Magsaysay acted as co-sponsor. Imelda was dressed in a couture gown of tulle and white satin, embroidered with leaves of sequins, seed pearls and rhinestones. There were three thousand guests at the reception including a large number of congressmen and senators. It was held in Malacanang Park, across the Pasig river from the presidential palace. The cake was a replica of the Congress building.

  “It was a very political wedding,” concluded Imelda’s sister, Conchita.

  The Marcoses had a very public honeymoon in Baguio. This was because Ferdinand already had a common-law wife, Carmen Omega. She had met Marcos four years before when he had offered to sponsor her for the Miss Press Photography contest. Soon she became his full-time mistress and he moved her into the house he shared with his mother, Doña Josefa. A press announcement of their forthcoming wedding appeared, but they underwent neither a civil nor a church marriage. Nevertheless, Carmen Omega was known around Manila as Mrs Marcos. Imelda must have known of her — once Marcos had taken Carmen to a bank where Imelda’s sister, Loreta, worked to withdraw $50,000 for a spending spree in the U.S. and he had introduced Carmen as Mrs Marcos.

  Doña Josefa considered Carmen to be her son’s wife. As far as she was concerned, Imelda was simply his political mistress. Marcos was planning to run for the senate. The Romualdez family controlled over a million votes on the central island of Visayan; and Eduardo Romualdez was the chairman of Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which controlled millions of dollars-worth of foreign exchange credits. Although Imelda did not realize it at the time, marriage to her set the seal on his political and financial future.

  By contrast, Carmen Ortega was without power or influence. While Ferdinand and Imelda honeymooned, Carmen and their three children were moved out of the Marcos’s home to a large house in the suburb of Green Hills. However, the memory of his mistress could not be erased so easily. The house Ambled was to share with her new husband and his mother was on Ortega Street. She tried to insist that they sell up immediately and move elsewhere, but Marcos and his mother refused.

  If that was not painful enough, Imelda soon discovered that Marcos was continuing to see, Carmen. So she screwed up all her courage and went over tee Green Hills for a confrontation. Carmen must, stop seeing her husband immediately, Imelda insisted, she was destroying her marriage and her happiness.

  Carmen replied coolly that it was Imelda who was ruining her happiness. She was already pregnant with Ferdinand’s fourth child-and, what’s more, it had been conceived after his marriage to Imelda.

  Imelda found herself completely powerless. After so public a wedding, she could not up and leave her husband. In a Catholic country like the Philippines, there was little hope of an annulment and no chance of a divorce; nor could she stop him seeing his mistress.

  Imelda had a mental breakdown. Marcos sent her to New York for psychiatric help. After three months in Manhattan’s Presbyterian Hospital, the dilemma she faced was just as stark either leave her husband and face ruin, or bite the bullet and make the best of it.

  Imelda decided to fight fire with fire. From New York, she flew to Portugal and, at the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, she prayed for children. The following year, her prayers were answered and in the middle of Marcos’s congressional campaign, Imelda gave birth to Imee, the first of their three children.

  Her second child, Bong-Bong, was born two years later and her third, Irene, during Ferdinand’s 1959 senate campaign. During these years, Imelda suffered from migraine and, on at least one occasion, took an overdose of medication. She sought psychiatric help again and, slowly, reconciled herself to her situation.

  Although Ferdinand had succeeded in making her pregnant three times, he was far from attentive. He confided to one of his extramarital conquests that Imelda was frigid and that he had become impotent with her. In a public outburst, he claimed she suffered from “virginitis”. However, their sex lilt may have been a little more active than Ferdinand made out. During the 1965 presidential campaign, a nude photograph of Imelda was circulated. It was said to have been filched from Ferdinand’s private collection. The Marcos camp claimed that Imelda’s head had been superimposed on another woman’s nude body. When Imelda heard about it, she collapsed in a state of shock.

  Her reaction was similarly dramatic later, when the governor of Negros, Alfredo Montelibano Jr, pulled a cruel trick on her. He installed a one-way mirror in the lavatory of his hacienda. During a party, he invited several guests into a back-room to watch while the Philippines” First Lady took a pee. A photograph of the act was circulated. Benigno Aquino had a print, which he kept in his wallet until shortly before he died.

  Ferdinand Marcos’s womanizing represented a political danger, and it was a danger particularly threatening to Imelda. Throughout his political career, he paraded his young wife. Their destinies were intertwined. Indeed, with a persistently unfaithful husband, she was First Lady of the Philippines or she was nothing. In 1969, he began showing a great interest in Gretchen Cojuangco, wife of Eduardo Cojuangco who belonged to a family that controlled a billion-dollar sugar-producing organization. Losing Cojuangco family support would have destroyed Marcos’s political base. Imelda sent Gretchen a note the content of which we know not, but after she had read it, Ferdinand said, Gretchen would “no longer- stop weeping”.

  Eduardo Cojuangco knew what was going on and tried a more subtle approach. Marcos faced an election and needed a propaganda coup. Marcos had written a highly fanciful autobiography called Rendezvous with Destiny. In it, he claimed to have been a fearless fighter against the Japanese. He was rewarded for his valour with some twenty Philippine medals and the U.S. Medal of Honour. When, mysteriously, as President of the Philippines, he could not put his hand on his U.S. medal, the American government issued a new one. The Philippine army followed suit.

  In fact, Marcos had fought on the Japanese side against the Americans during World War II, but at the height of the Cold War, why should the State Department bother with such details?

  The idea was that Marcos’s book be made into a feature film — it had already surfaced as a TV documentary. Eduardo Cojuangco had contacts in Hollywood. He set to work.

  According to Rendezvous with Destiny, during his fictitious anti Japanese guerrilla fighting days, Marcos had a Filipino-American lover called Evelyn, who had saved his life by stopping a Japanese bullet meant for him.

  Cojuangco got a small-time producer at Universal Studios, Paul Mason, to recruit girls to audition for the part of Evelyn. He sent Joyce Reese and Dovie Beams.

  When the two girls arrived, they were driven directly to a house in the Green Hills suburb for a party. They were taken to a half-finished house, to a room with a large bed in it. Ferdinand Marcos turned up a little later, introducing himself as “Fred”. Dovie sang “I Want To Be Bad”. “Fred” got the message. After a few words in Tagalog (the Filipino language), the other men left the room, taking Joyce Reese with them.

  Once they were alone, Marcos kissed Dovie on the back of the neck. She asked if he was a lawyer. He admitted that he did have something to do with the law. He was President of the Philippines. The next day, they became lovers.

  He installed Dovie in the mansion in Green Hills which was being renovated with a swimming pool being built in the garden. He told her that he had been sexually estranged from Imelda for many years. They lived separate lives, he said. That may have been true, but Dovie soon found out that Marcos was still seeing Carmen Ortega; and, after Dovie had had a quarrel with Marcos, Carmen fell pregnant once again.

  Dovie was told that she had got the part of Evelyn in the movie. He bought her a tape recorder to help teach her Tagalog, but sometimes he would break off from the lessons to make love to her. Soon Dovie had a library of very interesting tapes.

  They also made love in the cottage on the palace golf course; and when Imelda was away, Marcos would sneak Dovie into
the presidential palace. After they had made love and he had fallen asleep, she would quickly search through the papers on his desk and steal documents to stash away for a rainy day.

  Marcos’s aides were terrified by the affair. If they helped Ferdinand, Imelda might have them shot. If they didn’t, Ferdinand might have them shot. It was a fine line to walk. When Imelda got suspicious and made: them follow his car, somehow they would always manage to lose it.

  One day, Dovie returned home to the house: in Green Hills to discover that it had been closed up. Marcos told her that it was too dangerous to slay there. The place was being watched by spies. She would have to move to a hotel in Wack Wack. She soon discovered that her Green Hills home had been given to Carmen Omega, which had been the plan all along. That was why it was being renovated.

  Dovie continued surreptitiously recording their lovemaking sessions. Marcos wanted some souvenirs too. He bought a Polaroid camera and took a series of shots of Dovie in the nude, in explicit poses on the bed and in the bathroom. Then Dovie got lucky. Marcos asked for a lock of her pubic hair. She said she would give it to him in exchange for a lock of his. She sent that, the tapes and the documents she had filched to the U.S. for safekeeping.

  Marcos’s affections were cooling fast. One night he told her that her movie was no good and she had been miscast. She packed her bags and headed back to Los Angeles.

  Later, under the guise of making a travelogue about the Philippines, she returned. She was given $10,000 for her silence. She took it, but said that her silence was worth something more like $100,000. When that was refused, she upped her demand to $150,000. That night she was picked up by the secret police and taken to a safe house. Marcos turned up and there was a blazing row. It ended with Marcos trying to make up with her. She refused to kiss him though, and was taken to a room in the Savoy Hotel where she was beaten up and tortured.

  When she was allowed to go to the bathroom, she escaped, found a phone and called a friend in Los Angeles. The friend contacted influential people Dovie knew in the U.S., one of whom was the Governor of California, Ronald Reagan. While the State Department alerted the American embassy in Manila, Dovie checked into the Manila Medical Centre under a false name.

  By this time, Imelda had learned everything and her agents were combing the Philippines for Dovie. Dovie called the U.S. Embassy and talked to Consul Lawrence Harris. He and Ambassador Henry Byroade turned up at Dovie’s bedside with an offer from Imelda — $100,000 tax free if she would keep quiet.

  Dovie told the two diplomats of the incriminating evidence she held against Marcos. She believed her life was in danger. They arranged a press conference for her in the Bay View Hotel across Roxas Boulevard. There, she spilled the beans — but referred to Marcos only as “Fred” so that the media could relay the facts without falling foul of reporting restrictions that prevented them from saying anything critical of the President of the Philippines. She even played one of her tapes that featured creaking bedsprings, murmurs, moans and Marcos singing an Ilocano love song which the whole of the Philippines knew was his favourite. Copies were soon changing hands at $500 a time.

  Students at the University of the Philippines got hold of a copy. They commandeered the University radio station and played a looped section of the tape. In it, Marcos was begging Dovie to perform oral sex on him. Even the troops sent to re-take the radio station found it hard to keep a straight face. With his tongue buried firmly in his cheek, Senator Benigno Aquino called for a congressional investigation.

  The U.S. authorities had to employ the strictest security to gel Dovie out of the country. Imelda’s secret agents were curl to get her. Eventually, Dovie had to fly via Hong Kong, where an attempt was made on her life. The British secret service had to take her into protective custody for five days.

  Dovie continued her campaign against Marcos from the U.S., publishing her accusations in the Manila-based journal Graphic, which was closed down, and a book called Marcos’ Lovie Dovie, which included nude photographs. This mysteriously disappeared from bookshelves. Even the Library of Congress’s copy has gone missing.

  Meanwhile, Marcos was having an affair with the wife of a U.S. Navy officer and State Department cables were describing him as a “ladies” man”. There were dangers for Filipino-American relations in this affair and Marcos soon moved on to Filipino singer Carmen Soriano. Imelda caught up with her in San Francisco in 1970. Going into her apartment with her financial adviser, Ernesto Villatuya, Imelda demanded that Carmen sign a declaration that she had never gone to bed with Ferdinand. When she refused, Imelda took a swing at her. She ducked and Imelda floored Villatuya. Soon after, he was made head of the Philippine National Bank, a position he held until 1972.

  Imelda began extorting money and gold out of her husband over his affairs. At the same time she travelled the world as a roving representative of the Philippine head of state. She went to Libya and, afterwards, implied that Qaddafy had made a pass at her. But to friends, she confided that Qaddafy was gay. There were gay rumours about her too. Among the jetset the word was that Imelda and her constant companion Cristina Ford, wife of Henry Ford II, were lovers. Other gossip was that Imelda had gone to bed with actor George Hamilton.

  It was Imelda’s sexual jealousy that finally brought the Marcoses down. It was she who ordered that Benigno Aquino’s feet should not touch Filipino soil again when he flew back from exile in 1983. Marcos watched in horror as his political rival was shot down on the aircraft steps at Manila airport in front of a plane-load of international journalists. He knew his time was up. Although Marcos managed to blame top military officials for the assassination and fixed the presidential elections, they had to flee the Philippines in 1986. The new president was Benigno Aquino’s widow, Corazon. Marcos died of lupus in exile in Hawaii in 1989. Imelda went on to become the queen of the chat shows.

  12. EATING OUT IN AFRICA

  One of the most bloodthirsty dictators Africa has known was Idi Amin of Uganda. The son of a peasant witch doctor, he converted to Islam. His religion, however, did not stop him drinking. One morning, while he was still in the King’s African Rifles, he awoke in a Mogadishu brothel with a fearsome hangover to hear the cry of the imam calling the faithful to morning prayer. Amin knelt at the brothel window and bowed his head, but his prayers were interrupted by the snores of the woman he had left in bed. So he walked over to her, pulled her out of bed by the hair, slapped her across the face and said in Swahili: “Pray you Muslim bitch.”

  After rising through the ranks of the Ugandan army to become a colonel, Amin staged a coup in 1971, and established his infamous dictatorship. Once in power Amin ruled both the country and his personal life with an awesome vindictiveness. To get any woman he wanted, he would simply order the execution of her husband or boyfriend. Edward Rugumayo, Amin’s Minister of Education who defected in 1973, wrote a five-thousand-word condemnation of Amin, which he circulated around the OAU, UN and Commonwealth. In it, he charged Amin with being “a racist, tribalist and dictator” and said that Amin “would kill anyone without hesitation as long as it serves his interests, such as prolonging his stay in power or getting what he wants, such as a woman or money”.

  Women who did not comply with Amin’s orders would be brutally raped. Their breasts would be cut off. Some ended up in Amin’s fridge. Sarah Amin, his fifth wife, said that she saw the head of a beautiful girl called Ruth in the icebox. She had been one of Amin’s lovers and he suspected her of seeing other men.

  Amin’s first wife was Malyamu Kibedi, the daughter of a schoolteacher. He fell in love with her when he was a twenty-eight-year-old sergeant and army boxing champion. She was an intelligent six-footer. Her family opposed the match, but they lived together anyway.

  They had several children, but did not get married formally until 1966 when they had already been together for thirteen years. Even then, there was no ceremony. Amin simply paid the bride price and the marriage was recognized. He did this because, as a Muslim, he was ready t
o take a second wife and he wanted Malyamu to be recognized as the senior of the two.

  Three months after his marriage to Malyamu, he married Kay Adroa in a registry office. The daughter of a clergyman, Kay was a student at Makerere University and a striking ebony-skinned girl. She wore white for the wedding. Amin turned out in full dress uniform. The ceremony took place in Amin’s home town, Arua, and there was a proper wedding reception. Kay called Malyamu “Mama” in recognition of her status as senior wife.

  Within a year, Amin married again. He had already risen to national prominence and was seen as a political threat by President Milton Obote. So he married Nora, a Langi from Obote’s own region to allay his fears of tribal rivalry. She moved in with the other two wives and, by the late 1960s, Amin had fourteen or fifteen children.

  Wife number four was Medina, a Baganda dancer. Her troupe, the Heartbeat of Africa, used to entertain foreign dignitaries at state functions. She was agile and sexy, and Amin used to sit and watch her spellbound. She was so attractive that she was picked to star in a Ugandan tourist film — though Amin had the footage of her cut out after they were married.

  Their affair started in 1971 just after Amin had ousted Obote. In September 1972, people all over Uganda were tuning in to hear news of the ill-fated invasion Milton Obote had mounted from Tanzania. Instead, the news was dominated by the announcement of Amin’s forthcoming marriage. Medina, Amin said, had been given to him by the grateful people of Buganda in recognition of all he had done for them since the coup. The only thing Amin had done for the people of Buganda was to murder them brutally in their thousands.

  In March 1974, during the fighting that followed the mutiny of Brigadier Charles Arube, Amin had another incongruous announcement for his people. His first three wives, Malyamu, Kay and Nora were being divorced because, Amin said, they were involved in business. This was true. Amin himself had given them textile shops confiscated from the exiled Ugandan Asians. Malyamu, it was also intimated, was politically suspect. Her brother, Wanume Kibedi, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, had recently fled the country. Kay had to go because she was a cousin, the communique said, and this was too close a blood relationship to sustain a marriage.