Almost a year is about to pass since the publication of one of the books that has sparked the most talk in Spain in recent years, alongside the king emeritus’s autobiography: Isabel Preysler’s memoirs (Manila, 1950). With the title My True Story, the Filipino socialite and businesswoman sought through her 336 pages “to break, once and for all, with the false myths that have been circulating about her for years.”
Mother of five children –Chábeli, Julio José and Enrique Iglesias, Tamara Falcó and Ana Boyer–, Isabel Preysler has become a social icon that has shaped the imagery of elegance. Something that, according to what we can read in her memoirs, “has always surprised me because I neither consider myself elegant nor do I have the habit of following fashion.”
The queen of hearts travels in this book through the different chapters of her past, “from her childhood in the Philippines to the great loves that marked her destiny,” as stated by its publisher in a press release. It is in those early years of life in Manila where Isabel Preysler’s memories begin. A vital stage that the ex-wife of Julio Iglesias remembers with great affection at 76 years old.
“It was a happy childhood. I was a privileged girl.” My cousins, with whom we grew up, always remember that we had been privileged children, Isabel Preysler recalled in her memoirs about those years of childhood in Manila. A childhood that ended when she began to attend high-society parties at the age of 15.
At 18, after participating as a model in a charity fashion show, she fell in love with Juni Kalaw, a man with a Playboy reputation. He was her first love and the reason her parents made the firm decision to send her to study in Madrid in 1968. “I let myself be carried away, because at that moment I was a teenager who only knew how to live life. He was surprised to find out that it was my first time. And from that first time I keep a memory full of tenderness and affection, which made it unforgettable,” she wrote in her memoirs about that brief relationship.
Isabel Preysler and her Filipino roots
A year before publishing her memoirs, the Philippine Embassy in Spain awarded Isabel Preysler the Tanglaw Award, a word in Tagalog meaning “guide light.” Upon receiving the recognition, at a ceremony where she was accompanied by her daughter Tamara Falcó and her son-in-law Íñigo Onieva, she stated that she feels no difficulty in being both Filipino and Spanish.
“I don’t need any prize to remember my roots. I have been living in Spain for 55 years, where they always call me ‘the Filipino.’ But when I go to my country they consider me ‘the Spanish’,” Isabel Preysler stated about this curious geographical dichotomy. “Continuously, people ask me if I feel more Spanish or Filipino, and I answer that there is no need to choose, because Spain and the Philippines, despite the occasional rift, have always been united,” she added in a speech that ended with a wish: “As soon as I find a moment, I hope it will be soon, I will return to the Philippines.”
