Stargazing

The Philippine government has been inventorying the contents of Malacanang Palace, where Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos kept house until prudence led them to seek safer accommodations abroad. Imelda’s closets are likely to prove of particular interest to connoisseurs of the grotesque. Along with hundreds of silk dresses, 500 black brassieres and five shelves of never-used Gucci handbags, they contain 3,000 pairs of designer shoes. What does a person do with a half-million dollars worth of shoes? Even if she changed shoes four times a day, it would have taken Imelda more than two years to work her way through this hoard. By then, no doubt, she would have acquired enough new footwear to start all over again.

Expensive perfumes by the gallon, expensive soaps by the crate, $1 million in jewelry bought in a single morning, $2 million worth of antiques purchased in the afternoon--the lists go on and on. The mind boggles at the corrupt and obsessive self-indulgence that is revealed. “Filipinos want beauty,” Imelda once said. “I have to look beautiful so that the poor Filipinos will have a star to look at from their slums.” In the slums of the Philippines, children daily die of malnutrition. From her Hawaii exile the star contemplates her next shopping spree.