‘Street Smart’ PDI columnist Mandy Navasero; 84
While aboard the luxury Escalera yacht one day in February 2001, Mandy Navasero received a text from her bookkeeper. “Ma’am, hindi na si LJM editor in chief ng PDI (Philippine Daily Inquirer). Ousted na, parang Erap!” (Ma’am, LJM is no longer editor in chief of PDI. She’s been ousted, like Erap!)
The Escalera had been cruising around Manila Bay since morning, and the signal was intermittent. Upon docking at the Manila Yacht Club, Mandy called her bookkeeper, who said she got the info from her sister, a journalist in Mindanao.
Her next call went to LJM herself, Letty Jimenez Magsanoc, who was already at her desk in PDI. The big story that day was the assassination of leftist labor leader Felimon “Popoy” Lagman inside the University of the Philippines Diliman campus. Three weeks earlier, President Joseph “Erap” Estrada was ousted in a peaceful People Power uprising.
Late that night, Letty hosted Mandy and two other journalists for dinner at the PDI. It took almost a month before the “Hello Kitty/Oust LJM” plot was officially nipped, and the “plotters” outed. Mandy and Letty never talked about it, but the incident deepened their friendship in ways others called favoritism.
Loyal and loving
On occasions that a Mandy Navasero photo landed above the fold of PDI’s front page, not a few tongues wagged about her taking undue advantage of that friendship.
But Mandy was like that, loyal and loving, with a penchant for going overboard. Maybe she learned it from her mother, Leonora Cruz-Navasero, whom she called “my home, where love is given, without condition.”
A public school teacher, Leonora raised six sons and one daughter, Luz Amandolina, almost single-handedly. At her wake in February 1984, her only daughter, Mandy, introduced several women and children as “my father’s children and their mothers.” They were all gathered at the mortuary like one big, bereaved family.
“My mother loved my father,” Mandy would explain. “Those whom he loved, my mother embraced.” The elder Navasero, who was of Spanish-Portuguese descent, died in 1981.
And once loved, the love stays on. In an out-of-town coverage for the Mr & Ms Special Edition, which Letty edited and Eggie Apostol published following the assassination of Ninoy Aquino in August 1983, Mandy would not hesitate to knock on the doors of a former boyfriend’s residence to refresh memories and say hello.
Often, it was the ex-BF’s mother who welcomed her “like a long-lost daughter.”
One even showed her the red Alfa Romeo, well-kept and covered in the garage, that Mandy and her son had driven around before.
Astonishing portraits
Adopting four children, however, would change Mandy’s life in ways even she did not imagine.
When I met her in October 1983, she was showing Letty photos of Julia. I would meet three more babies in the next 10 years: 7-month-old Kate in her Palm Village apartment in Makati, and siblings Amanda and Kert at her house on Dominga St. near St. Scholastica’s, Manila.
She raised Julia and Kate while covering Cory Aquino, Bea Zobel, Ting-ting Cojuangco, and socialites who fulminated against the Marcos dictatorship from Ugarte Field in Makati to Camp Crame on Edsa in Quezon City.
In the late 1990s, Mandy became the pen and camera behind the Inquirer Entertainment column “Street Smart,” which ran until 2015. Titled by Letty herself, “Street Smart” showcased glamour photos of celebrities and everyday people, with a brief story about each encounter.
Why “Street Smart?” Letty was supposed to have said, “Because Mandy is.”
Indeed, street-smart Mandy was. She could take pictures of Cory Aquino and Bea Zobel, telling them to smile, look at the camera, and would say the same words to the peanut vendor, and with the same result: an astonishing picture of a human being.
“Photography takes place in the brain,” Mandy used to say. “The eyes and the camera are just the tools.”
‘Make something of myself’
She did not set out to be a photographer, especially glam photography. All she wanted to do was “make something of myself, rise above the poverty.”
Growing up with six brothers, who demanded that she cook their meals and clean the house, she learned to assert herself, sometimes fighting back if she could.
After high school in Los Baños, she enrolled in night school at the Philippine Women’s University to earn a degree in mass communication. Years later, she enrolled in an MA in English Literature at the Ateneo de Manila University. And finally, a course in Photography at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, California.
She credited her “sugar brother,” Hector Navasero, for financing her stay at Brooks. Hector founded PhiLab, a pioneer manufacturer of science teaching equipment, and was the former president of the Philippine Amateur Baseball Association. He died in 2013.
But it was her years as a flight stewardess for Philippine Airlines that taught her social graces. At that time, a flight attendant (FA) was a dream job reserved for girls with good looks, presence of mind, and a hint of a party animal.
Last leg
Mandy was scheduled for an early-morning flight, but went disco dancing late into the night.
Unable to untangle herself from her date, she called another FA to take her place. She was still asleep, hungover, when colleagues came looking for her.
The plane Mandy was supposed to fly had crashed early that morning. “And everyone thought I was on the plane,” Mandy used to tell friends.
She also worked at Bank of America and in public relations for several five-star hotels in Manila.
Photography defined the last leg of her life, and the job that most people remember her.
Mandy Navasero succumbed to cardiac arrest on June 1. She was 84.
She is survived by her children, Julia, Kate and Carl Martin BJimenez; Amanda and Dr. Jimmy Dumlao II; and Kert; grandchildren Dylan Tyler Navasero, Enzi Jeremiah Casiano, Audrey Jimenez and Jimmy Dumlao III; and brothers Nestor and Ding.
Her remains will be cremated today at La Funeraria Paz in Quezon City.
