Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [80]
Marcos was with Ali and Frazier only once before the fight, during a press affair at the palace. It was a sumptuous dwelling, with marble that echoed to the step blending with rich, crafted wood, and prominent was a portrait of Imelda set in Mikimoto pearls. Marcos stood between the pair when something was exchanged between them, and Frazier said loudly: “I’m gonna whup your half-breed ass once and for all!” He then abruptly took his leave. Marcos seemed startled for a moment; he was not used to the naked vow of violence, just the delivery of it. The president had met Ali on a previous occasion, was complimentary of Veronica’s beauty. She had been introduced by Ali as his wife. In Chicago, Belinda read of the moment in the papers. Embarrassed and angry, she flew immediately to Manila. Ali had also said that “even if [his] children died in a fire, nothing is gonna stop this fight.” Once in Manila, Belinda went to the Hilton Hotel, wrecked his suite with Ali gazing on in silence. A few hours later she flew back to Chicago; their marriage was over, and Belinda would get $2 million and their houses.
The fighters trained at the Manila Folk Arts Center, facing the bay and built “for the people” by Imelda. Building was a huge part of her collectomania, as clinical as kleptocracy, and she was an overseer with merciless schedules. One of her hotels, now as numerous as the frangipani trees, was put up so hurriedly that it collapsed on workers. She would later build, in an effort to make Manila the equal of Cannes as a magnet to the stars, the Manila Film Center. With a twenty-four-hour breakneck schedule, it too descended on tired workers, killing hundreds, many with ghostly limbs dangling out of the concrete. Not enough to stop Imelda; she had them chainsawed, then had the place exorcised. Her most splendid creation was for a visit by the Pope, the Coconut Palace (made of 100,000 coconuts), filled with ivory and jade. The Pope refused to take up residence there. “Quite a place,” Ali said of his training site. “There must be a lot of money here.”
The Marcoses’ attitude must have been contagious. That thin line that separated Ali’s usual burlesque from insufferable ego seemed to disappear. It crossed over, without doubt, into a disturbing sense of his own power, not dissimilar to what the Marcoses had come to believe of themselves. After running, he’d sit in the predawn on the Hilton steps and say to the hundreds of Filipinos who had run with him: “Don’t judge us by ugly Joe Frazier. He’s the black who’s gone. Watch me! How pretty and smart. There’s a new black man in America! All of them like me.” At his workouts, he castigated Filipinos for working at menial jobs for a few pesos, while praising President Marcos, the source of all their misery in a brutal web of oligarchy. One day, he abused a shy little Filipino reporter who asked a perfectly clear question. “You don’t speak very good English,” he chastened him. Ali as Pygmalion? Ali slowly repeated the question (visibly shrinking the fellow into a little nut of shame) with his own brand of fractured syntax. Conspicuously supporting