For this Kennedy, the world has been a book
Fellow survivors from my “silent generation,” and some among Baby Boomers, may still recall the late 1960s when bohemian Malate welcomed an itinerant British blonde who was immediately branded a hippie when she showed up at Cafe Los Indios Bravos as a guest of its proprietor, Beatrice Romualdez Francia.
That Caroline Kennedy was a much-traveled writer made her a perfect fit for the Indios crowd of visual artists, poets, journalists, musicians and filmmakers. She soon became the toast of local media, too, invited to appear in television talk shows and write for various publications. Her peak of celebrity or infamy, depending on one’s tolerance level as a macho Pinoy, was when she wrote a piece for the Philippines Free Press, on the invitation of Nick Joaquin, that made fun of the Filipino lover.
In this day and age—as Butch Dalisay recently observed about the trigger-happy response from cheerless local officials—she might have instantly been declared persona non grata. But despite that prickly essay, and another that called then senator Ninoy Aquino to account for his alleged bombast of ego, she was still conscripted to appear in action movies with the likes of Leopoldo Salcedo and Jun Aristorenas.
It certainly wasn’t Caroline’s first brush with entertainment A-listers. As she turned 20 while making the scene at the Big Apple, she had consorted with the likes of Yul Brynner, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, Frank Sinatra, Sharon Tate, Tiny Tim…
And now, approaching her eighth decade of global adventures, Caroline Kennedy has authored an entertaining page-turner of an autobiography, I’ll Be There: Vignettes of an Intrepid Traveller—all of 326 pages and 42 chapters, and which has been attracting readers to Amazon.
It starts off intriguingly enough, right from her Introduction:
“It was summer of the following year, 1964. I had been attending an informal Democratic fund-raising barbeque, hosted by the actor Paul Newman and the President’s daughter, Linda, in the magnificent grounds of one of those rambling Long Island heritage homes.
“Within minutes of my arrival I found myself rubbing shoulders with Senator Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, the Philippines presidential candidate. As a woman, I should probably have had some feminine intuition here for, in a few years’ time, I was to become an outspoken adversary of both him and his wife Imelda. I would write exhaustively on the ill-gotten gains of their conjugal dictatorship and I would clash, more than once, with their eldest daughter Imee, on television in Manila. But there was no way of knowing then what a central part of my early life they and their country would become. So I shook hands, smiled politely, made some innocuous comment on the evening and moved on.
“It was then that I almost bumped into Lyndon Baines Johnson…”
Titled “A Wanderer Is Born,” the first chapter identifies her parents as “Geoffrey Farrer Kennedy, a civil and consulting engineer, and Daska Marija Ivanovic, an auburn-haired beauty from what is now Croatia, who was dubbed by the UK Press as “the Pearl of Dubrovnik.” Later, we learn that her grandmother, “self-taught and multi-lingual,… had married one of Jugoslavia’s richest men. After his death she had taken up residence in Monte Carlo to offset taxes and was immediately courted by Prince Pierre, the father of Prince Rainier.”
In the UK, her family moves to “a large, white-stuccoed family home in Liphook, Hampshire, where a neighbor was Boris Karloff, the actor whose iconic role had been to play the monster in the 1931 Frankenstein movie!” Another neighbor was the iconic poet Robert Graves. Summer guests included Princess Margaret. It seemed that early on, Caroline was destined to rub elbows with world-class artists, writers, and royalty.
After summers in Mallorca and winters in Scotland, and having been a reluctant debutante in London, Caroline had her first independent jaunt in Manhattan, where “neighbors in some of the other studios included the Italian impresario Gian Carlo Menotti, the famous NY street photographer Bill Cunningham, fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt, the actor Marlon Brando, the photographer Richard Avedon, the jazz pianist Bobby Short and one floor above us was the Actor’s Studio run by Lee and Paula Strasberg.”
A reader might gag at the torrent of seeming name-drops. But her ensuing narrative assures us that Caroline was no inveterate go-getter who crashed parties and elite circles. Her association with artists (Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Al Capp…) and writers (John Steinbeck, James Michener, Truman Capote…) was founded in admiration, and always with the hope of landing interviews and writing them up as a budding journalist herself.
My dream has been to travel the world. And I still have new places to visit, new horizons to explore, new adventures ahead. But San Augustin’s words remain as relevant to me today as they always were: ‘The world is a book. And those that do not travel read only one page.’
In 1965, her first article published and syndicated across North America was brokered by her godmother, Olga Horstig, who gifted her with a backstage interview when Brigitte Bardot visited the US.
But wanderlust drew her away from New York. Like her favorite author Freya Stark, “I wanted to trek through uncharted territories searching for ancient cities. My head teemed with plans for adventures to remote and exotic places.” Her exploits reveal the side of her that ever brims with empathy. Her efforts to help the downtrodden and disabled turned her into an expert in Conflict Recovery after her experiences during the wars in Bosnia and Azerbaijan.
It’s quite a tale that takes us through her work with BBC, personal peril, and time zones, as when she slogs it on a Trans-Siberian train that eventually lands her in Asia, leading to her Philippine sojourn and taking home a husband, Filipino artist Ben Cabrera. Their union produces three beloved children—Elisar, Mayumi and Jasmine.
Her descriptions of landscapes, habitats and wildlife are impressive, as is her ability to dramatize a story with the judicious use of dialogue in proportion to exposition. And the funny parts are all well told, as when she details an evening in Indios when Federico Aguilar Alcuaz is asked by Gen. Hans Menzi about the availability of “pot.”
Over the past two decades, she took residence in Newfoundland and Costa Rica, before she moved to the US to be with her grandchildren. Home is now Raintree Circle, “the old MGM, Lot 3 in the old movie capital of Culver City (with) 37 acres of natural landscaping, immense trees, a huge lake, an island and plenty of wildlife.”
She concludes:
“I know Elisar, Mayumi and Jasmine wanted me to finish this book that I started decades ago.
“… (W)hether visiting remote places or familiar ones, I have kept my writings, my journals, my letters, my articles and my press clippings for when, one day, I would need them. …(A)mazingly, most of them have remained intact. And together they tell a story of a wandering life. My wandering life…
“My dream has been to travel the world. And I still have new places to visit, new horizons to explore, new adventures ahead. But San Augustin’s words remain as relevant to me today as they always were: ‘The world is a book. And those that do not travel read only one page.’"
“He was right, of course. To me the world has been a book and there may still be a few more chapters to write.”
