How do you solve a puzzle like Maria?

In life and in death, Maria Teresa Carlson was a puzzle to many people.

Maria (this was how all her friends called her) burst into the limelight in 1979 via print ads – one of which was for an underarm deodorant. That same year, she joined the Binibining Pilipinas contest and was a crowd favorite from the very start of the pageant. She was voted Miss Close-Up Smile and was later crowned Miss Young Philippines.

When she went for the crown in the Miss Young International competition in Tokyo, beauty contest watchers had high hopes for her to bring home the title. Two years before that, another Fil-Am girl, Dorothy Sue Bradley, made an impressive second place finish and everyone back home had expected Maria to do better.

Unfortunately for her, she had a terrible time in Tokyo during the contest. For one thing, she was annoyed that she and the other contestants were made to sell tickets in public parks and other recreational areas in the capital city.

Then, she caught the flu and was unable to attend most of the functions related to the contest. As a result, she returned to Manila only with the sincerest appreciation of the pageant organizers for her having joined the 1979 Miss Young International search. In other words, she came home a "thank you girl."

Although the international pageant proved to be uneventful for Maria, the world was still at her feet at that point of her life. She would have been called crush ng bayan – had that tag already been coined that time.

Maria Teresa Carlson was really no classic beauty. But she looked young and fresh and every boy wanted his girlfriend to look like her.

The year she turned in her crown, she immediately joined television and was cast as one of the girls in Chicks to Chicks along with Ruby Anna and Maluh de la Fuente. (Carmi Martin wasn’t going to join the sitcom until much later).

Maria became an overnight sensation in this show because of her fractured delivery of the Filipino languages – which everyone thought was cute. (That was a bad thing if you think about it because it was a deliberate mangling of the national language.)

In the early ‘80s, I had the chance to interview Maria at the canteen of Broadcast City. She knew I was new on the job and – bless her – tried to put me at ease. She talked a lot and regaled me with happy stories about her family.

According to her, she was the product of an American father and a Filipina mother (a Gerodias from the north). She was alone in Manila because her father had brought the entire family to Saudi Arabia where he worked as an engineer for Aramco. (Rudy Fariñas –in interviews – now claims that Maria was a GI baby who never knew her father).

She also said that she was going to finish high school in May of that year at the International School in Makati – and that her favorite subject was, believe it or not, Pilipino.

But there was one piece of information she gave about herself that I doubted during the interview. During our conversation, she insisted that aside from her studies and television job, she also worked as a marketing manager for a food company that time. I didn’t want to believe that a company was going to hire her for an important position like that because, well, she was only then in her teens and had yet to finish high school. But I published all the information she gave me about herself as if these were the gospel truth.

As my last question, I asked her if that was really the way she spoke Tagalog. Or was it an "act" that she was just being made to perform for television.

Without hesitation – and as if her hand was on the Bible – she said, yes, her Tagalog was really fractured and that was really the way she spoke the language. As a parting shot, she even told me in a rather playful manner, Hindi kaya ni ikaw ’yon.

After the interview, however, I chanced upon her in one of the offices of Broadcast City talking to one of the executives and she spoke Filipino with the fluency of someone who was all set to join a Balagtasan contest in one of the old towns of Bulacan.

But I didn’t really take that against Maria. Obviously, she was told to play the part even away from the camera – and especially before the press.

Maria’s si ikaw, si ako act was actually an invention of the late Ading Fernando, the creator of Chicks to Chicks. He drew inspiration from Chuchi (she played Maria’s lola in the series) who overdid an act where she fused Tagalog and Spanish in the delivery of her dialogues.

From television, Maria branched out into the movies – mostly opposite Chiquito and Cachupoy. (One title role she played was Wander Woman Si Ako.)

In 1982, it was rumored that she had been killed in her house in Parañaque – when all along she was really just vacationing in the US. She believed then that this false news about her was spread by Maluh de la Fuente, who – that time – had become her archenemy.

In the mid-’80s, however, she totally quit the entertainment business when she married then Laoag City Mayor Rudy Fariñas whom she met (through Freddie Webb) when Chicks to Chicks did an out-of-town episode there.

It was a pity that Maria Teresa Carlson had to quit show business at the peak of her career. Although her films were mostly B-movies, she really had a great knack for comedy. And her comedic timing was perfect.

Later, the public, of course, was horrified when she told the world about the abuses and maltreatment she went through in the hands of her husband – statements she would later retract to the horror of TV producers who already have her interviews in the can.

Now, I cannot discuss the supposed nightmare she went through as the wife of Rudy Fariñas because I never got to see her any- more in person after that one interview with her. Friends in the business, however, swear that they saw big, ugly scars all over her body, particularly in the abdominal area.

When her suicide was reported early morning of Friday, no one was surprised anymore that it happened. Somehow, everyone knew it was bound to happen.

And now that she is in her eternal rest, let us just hope that – in the other world – she’ll finally find the peace that had long eluded her on this earth.