Late one recent morning, the door opened on a thirty-seventh-floor suite in the Waldorf Towers, where Imelda Marcos, the former First Lady of the Philippines, lived in the eighties, during her reign and subsequent exile. “It was General MacArthur’s apartment,” Michael Romei, the chef concierge, explained to a visitor. The visitor, a man in a blue linen suit, surveyed the décor—fleur-de-lis walls, tasselled drapes—and, snapping pictures on his iPhone, said, “This is, like, a full-on apartment!”
The visitor was David Byrne, whose tenure with the band Talking Heads roughly coincided with the Marcos regime, and whose musical about Imelda, “Here Lies Love,” has just opened at the Public. (The title is her suggestion for her epitaph.) Byrne, who began the project as a concept album, has been studying Marcos for years. “When I read that she loved going to dance clubs and discothèques, I thought, Wow, here’s someone whose life was filled with music,” he said, standing in her onetime foyer. The show is staged as an interactive disco: spectators mill around, dance, and jubilate in Imelda’s rise to power, while feeling uneasy about how much fun they’re having.
“Mrs. Marcos was always very generous to the staff,” Romei said, holding up a pair of triple-pearl cufflinks that she gave him. He once escorted her to a Broadway production of “Oklahoma!,” when her lawyer, who usually accompanied her, was running late. “In the car, she asked me if I knew how to sing,” Romei recalled. “Then she sang this aria”—“Un bel dì”—“from ‘Madama Butterfly.’ She has a wonderful voice.”
Nicknamed the Steel Butterfly—Thatcher with bling—Marcos called herself “my little people’s star and slave,” a burden that ended in 1986, when she and her husband, Ferdinand Marcos, were ousted in the People Power Revolution, amid accusations that they had looted the national coffers and conspired to kill a political rival. Her First Ladyship was eclipsed by other roles: shoe enthusiast (her thousand-plus-pair collection, in Manila, was recently found to have been destroyed by termites and mold), jet-setter (she once reportedly had her plane turn around after taking off from Rome, because there was no cheese on board), socialite (her friends included George Hamilton and Muammar Qaddafi), and art collector (van Goghs and Picassos, most of which are now missing). At eighty-three, she is currently seeking reëlection as a congresswoman in Ilocos Norte’s Second District.
She was also, occasionally, a New Yorker. While her husband imposed martial law in Manila, Marcos relocated, to spend her dubiously acquired fortune in a city more scaled to her appetites. The late New York congressman Stephen Solarz, investigating her assets, said, “Compared to Imelda, Marie Antoinette was a bag lady.” A tour of Imelda’s Manhattan might proceed from the Waldorf to her town house, on East Sixty-sixth Street (now the Philippine consul-general’s residence), where she installed a permanent disco ball. “She would sing all night,” the gossip columnist Cindy Adams, who befriended her, said. (Her favorite song, apparently, was “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”) “She would dance. She loved to stay up.” Adams went on, “She always had around her a coterie called the Blue Ladies. Their job was to adore her.”
The next leg might cover the sites of her spending sprees: Fred Leighton, the former Scribners store (where she once bought every leather-bound book in the shop), Bloomingdale’s (where, having persuaded management to empty the store of other customers, she pointed to items, declaring, “Mine. Mine. Mine”). Then, there was the Plaza, where Bob Colacello, the writer and former editor of Interview, said that he and Andy Warhol would be summoned to Marcos parties: “Franco Rossellini would always call us and say, ‘Imelda’s in town, and she would like to see Andy and you, but you must bring very glamorous dates, preferably titles.’ So I would round up Princess Radziwill and Princess Furstenberg—you know, Diane. For one dinner at the Plaza, she had Van Cliburn playing cocktail music as if he were her private pianist.”
Next stop: U.S. District Court, where, in 1990, Marcos and Adnan Khashoggi were tried for racketeering. (Doris Duke posted her bail.) She was acquitted on her birthday and threw a party for the jurors at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. Ten of them came, including Catherine Balton, now a retiree on the Upper East Side. “She actually sang at one point!” Balton, who brought along her mother, said. “She gave us each a photograph of her in a silver frame.”
The tour might conclude at the Crown Building, which the Marcoses secretly bought in 1981, Imelda having deemed the Empire State Building “too ostentatious.” Her biographer Katherine Ellison says, “She loved to drive past it with acquaintances not in the know and say, ‘That’s a wonderful building. Who owns it, I wonder?’ ” ♦