Behind Closed Doors

The visitors found themselves inside a bizarre combination of Macy's and the palace at Versailles. As hundreds of Manila's poorest, many of them in ragged clothes and rubber sandals, shuffled between golden ropes through Malacañang Palace, the residence of former President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda, they witnessed a show of conspicuous consumption beyond their imaginings. Inside Imelda's boudoir were two queen-size beds on an elevated platform, and a grand piano. The former First Lady's washbasin was made of gold. Downstairs, in a not-so-bargain basement, the woman who used to refer to "my fellow poor" had left behind some 2,700 pairs of size eight shoes, five shelves of Gucci handbags and 38 of her 105 clothes racks, designed to carry 80 outfits each. Around the château hung life-size portraits depicting the former First Couple as a scantily clad Filipino version of Adam and Eve. Elsewhere, the Marcoses had been a touch more modest: the legends on their bedroom intercoms read simply "King's Room" and "Queen's Room."

In opening the doors to Malacañang Palace last week, President Corazon Aquino was hoping to close the doors, symbolically, on an era of covert monarchy. True to her campaign promise, the new leader turned the Marcos mansion into the People's Park, a public museum. Faithful so far to another promise, the former housewife showed every sign of for-swearing the designer life-style of her predecessors. She still operates out of a guesthouse next to the Spanish-style palace and commutes to work from her modest suburban home.

At the same time, however, Aquino remained determined to bring to light all the hidden wealth of the exiled couple. Before the palace was thrown open to the public last week, investigators spent two weeks compiling an inventory of the belongings abandoned by the Marcoses during their precipitate departure. The findings suggested that the skeletons in the Marcos closets were quite as outrageous as the Valentino gowns.

Many of the objects found around the palace documented the paranoia and the prodigality of the Marcos regime. Some of the paintings hanging from the walls had been appropriated at will by the Marcoses from the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. Scrapbooks contained photographs of properties in New York City and London, presumably belonging to the royal couple. Bea Zobel, an art collector who led volunteers in sorting through the Marcoses' possessions, noted that Imelda may have spent as much as several million dollars on jewels and antiques in a single day. Given her husband's official salary of $5,700 a year, such a shopping spree amounted to more than 500 years' income for the former First Couple. "The Marcoses did not realize the value of money anymore," said Zobel. "They just kept on buying and buying."