Travels with Paolo B.

Curtain-raisers:

• While political rivals continue to growl and grab at each other’s throats, never mind what happens to the country, two showbiz adversaries have kissed and made up and both of them should now feel better and lighter and happier, what with the emotional load taken off their chests. Yes, Cristy Fermin and Piolo Pascual, the "tormentor" and the "tormented" respectively, casually buried the hatchet the other day when Piolo (bless him!) showed up at the wedding of Cristy’s son. It was a nice gesture from Piolo, wasn’t it? All’s well that ends well?

• Regine Velasquez has moved from her townhouse somewhere in the Teachers Village, Quezon City (now occupied by her younger sister Cacai and husband Raul Mitra with their child) to the Velasquezes’ new three-story house in Tabang, Bulacan, which has 11 rooms and nine comfort rooms. The house is a symbol of Regine’s hard work (blood, sweat and tears, if you may).

• No truth to the report that Martin Nievera’s late-night ABS-CBN show is moving to GMA where he used to belong. A Funfare DPA said that the show, which has lately been showing replays, will be reformatted but will stay on the same timeslot.

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I am tempted to banner today’s column as Travels with Uncle Paolo (with apologies to Graham Greene’s Travels with my Aunt) but since the Extra! Extra! host is, ahem, "slightly" younger than me I’m dropping the "uncle" and simply calling him Paolo (as in Bediones).

The first time I travelled with Paolo was in December, 1999, to interview Pierce Brosnan for the movie Tomorrow Never Dies in Hong Kong. Paolo was then a greenhorn in TV hosting, doing half of the job for GMA’s S-Files with Lyn Ching (who has since been replaced by Janice de Belen). It was Paolo’s first face-to-face encounter with a Hollywood superstar and naturally, he was nervous, fidgeting with both his tie and his notes a few minutes before he was called into the room for his seven minutes with the dashing and dapper 007.

From Hong Kong, I proceeded to Los Angeles with Baby Gil (who flew in from Manila and met up with me at the sprawling HK airport) for more interviews, this time with Jodie Foster and Chow Yun Fat (on the same Cathay Pacific flight with us, accompanied by his wife-manager) for their starrer, Anna and the King. I didn’t know how Paolo survived his one-on-one with Pierce (beautifully, I surmised, with himself and his poise intact).

Middle of December last year, Bulletin’s Cris Belen and I went to Singapore with Paolo to cover the premiere and press conference for Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz’s movie, Vanilla Sky (showing in Manila first week of February) and how Paolo has changed! He wasn’t nervous anymore (experience is the best teacher, you see!) and instead of fidgeting with his tie (he didn’t wear any) or with his notes (he didn’t need any, thank you!), he was forever on his cellphone, kept in his breast pocket and connected to his right ear by an earphone. It turned out that while waiting for his four minutes with Tom and Penelope, he was coordinating with his Manila staff for his and co-host Miriam Quiambao’s next taping for Extra! Extra!

So confident was Paolo that he even sought out the cameraman assigned to me, giving the guy instructions on when and how and what to shoot. Face to face with Tom (first) and Penelope (soon after) on the red carpet leading to the theater where the Vanilla Sky premiere was to be held, Paolo was cool and composed amid the sweltering humid heat, unmindful of the fans shrieking at the sight of our very own Donita Rose (a superstar out there) when her arrival was announced by the noisy TV newscaster whose voice was grating in our ears. Donita was there to, like us, cover the event.

A few minutes after we checked into the Hilton, Paolo went out with Cris and me and two other companions, acknowledging greetings from Filipino workers there as we strolled along Orchard Road and window-shopped around Lucky Plaza (called Philippine Plaza by Pinoys in Singapore and also "La-Lucky Plaza" because that’s where lonely Pinays look for Pinoy sailors for some, well, "relief") and gorged on frankfurter sandwiches in one of those cute kiosks near the Hilton.

When Cris was fetched by her niece, who’s married to a Singaporean, for lunch at a Chinese fast-food center, Cris invited Paolo to come along and he did (while I and my companions made a quick trip to Sentosa Island). He didn’t have any star complex at all and didn’t expect any star treatment perhaps because Paolo was aware that in press junkets like that, everybody is equal – except, of course, the "real stars" of the event who are the topbillers of the movie at hand.

On the PAL flight to and from Singapore, Paolo, like the rest of the passengers, slept on his seat in Economy Class, waking up, like everybody else, to eat his meals and going right back to sleep with his headphone on.

I discovered one thing about Paolo during my second travel with him – he’s an incurable workaholic.

As soon as the plane touched down in Manila, he was again on his cellphone, asking his staff where the taping for Extra! Extra! was. He said he’d be dropping by his mom’s place in Makati to deliver his pasalubong (Paolo didn’t tell us what) and he’d hie off to work, presumably until the early hours of the next morning before dropping exhausted on his bed at his well-appointed townhouse in Woodside, Quezon City, where he lives alone – or so he claimed – with only his pet dog and the household help for company.