Mother’s special day

Besides Quezon City Day, today is the birthday of Regal Matriarch (Mother) Lily Monteverde, who’s a Leo through and through. Unlike in the past many years, however, no invitations (neither "formal" nor "by word of mouth") have been sent out to the "traditional" parties the Birthday Girl used to organize, August 19 also being the anniversary of Regal Films (turning 25th if you count only back to 1977 when the company actually produced a movie, Pang-umaga, Pangtanghali, Panggabi, directed by Chaning Carlos; or 42nd if you include the years from 1960 when Mother Lily was releasing foreign films).

Or it could be because she hates to be reminded that she’s growing, ehem, older (but definitely wiser), even if turning sixty- something in this time and age isn’t really considered growing older. Or maybe she’s simply keeping in tune with the mood of the times (austerity, you know). Or perhaps, just perhaps, she has had enough of those parties where the aperitif is the beso/beso and chika-chika and the main course is the juicy-meaty showbiz gossip served by the plateful.

But knowing Mother Lily, I’m sure she’ll lay out on her buffet table the usual Chinese goodies/delicacies for those, even without invitations, remember to greet her personally at the Monteverdes’ Greenhills residence. And there will be legions of them, I assure you, from the superstars to the lowly and loyal employees of the company, the management of which is now slowly but surely being passed on to the younger Monteverdes, Dondon and Roselle.

Last Friday evening, Mother Lily presided over the sixth-anniversary celebration of her own Mother’s School of Child Development (located just beside the Regal offices on Valencia Street in Quezon City), playing to the hilt her real-life role as surrogate mother to the dozens of kiddie students, smiling in near tears as they paid her a tribute of songs, dances and declamations.

As controversial as, if not even more so than her Regal Babies, Mother Lily could be an interesting subject for a teleserye (a two-hour movie is not enough for the many highlights of her dramatic and colorful life) which would, if and when, put to shame all the top-rating soaps on ABS-CBN and GMA 7 combined. It will tear the sides of televiewers with high comedy and slapsticks, and then tear their hearts to pieces with heavy drama, with a generous serving of "action" and pathos and all the other ingredients that make a Regal flick a smash-hit, with a sprinkling of, uh, sex and violence.

Come to think of it, who would Mother Lily pick to play her complex and complicated character if ever a company (Star Cinema, maybe?) decides to do the Mother Lily movie, if not teleserye?

"Judy Ann Santos as the younger Mother Lily," she said, "o kaya si Sharon Cuneta, Maricel Soriano or Vilma Santos as the older Mother Lily."

Because it’s Mother’s Special Day, Funfare is giving her a little "tribute" (as Funfare also always does when Susan Roces’ birthday – July 28, also The STAR’s anniversary – comes around) in the form of trivia.

Take these:

• Mother Lily is the only person I know who can talk to four people on four different phones simultaneously, two on landlines between her ears and shoulders, and two on cellphones vibrating in front of her, in the process often closing four different lucrative deals at the same time. Sometimes, she’s quarreling with somebody on one phone, making chika-chika with somebody else on the other phone, inquiring about the progress of the shooting of a movie on the third phone and saying hello ("Where are you?") to her husband, Remy Monteverde, on the fourth phone.

• As everybody knows, Mother Lily is an avid Nida Blanca fan who, at age 12, would wear a petticoat she bought in Zurbaran market, making like Nida Blanca dancing in front of the mirror. She would skip classes at UNO (an English-Chinese school owned and managed by her family, with her late father, Yu Chu, as founder) and climb the walls of LVN Pictures or break into the well-guarded lobby of the old Dalisay Theater during openings of Nida Blanca movies just to get a glimpse of her idol. Nida rolled over with laughter hearing Mother Lily recount those days.

• Yes, it’s true: Regal Films started from popcorn. In 1960, refusing to ask for money from her parents, she decided to put up two popcorn machines, one at the Good Earth store on Avenida and the other at Cherry Foodarama on Shaw Boulevard. Her P10,000 capital was borrowed from her late brother, Jesus Yu. She herself popped the corn and acted as tindera.

• Having saved a little money, Mother Lily bought a copy of the weepy movie All Mine to Give for P10,000, which was a hit, making a profit of more than P500,000, part of it she used to buy the local distribution rights to the Hollywood-made movie Walls of Hell, starring FPJ and John Saxon. There was no stopping the movie fan from then on. She bought more films, until she decided to put up Regal and concentrated on producing local films.

• Mother Lily finished high school at St. Scho and was a B.S. Education sophomore at Maryknoll when she quit in favor of marriage. She admitted having been the one who "courted" Remy, then one of the star basketball players of San Beda (Remy’s father was known as the Copra King of both Quezon and Bicol). "He was tall and handsome, soft-spoken pa, kaya nabaliw-baliw ako sa kanya," recalled Mother Lily with a laugh. "When we went to New York to buy a copy of All Mine to Give, we stayed in a rundown hotel so we could save. There, I really showed how much I loved Father. I’d buy meals from a fast-food center and let Father eat. He’d ask me to eat with him but I would decline, pretending I wasn’t hungry. But after he ate, once he wasn’t looking, I‘d eat his leftovers."

• To make up for her inability to graduate from college, Mother Lily took up special courses in UP a few years ago, prior to her putting up the Mother’s School of Child Development. At UP, she donated a Professorial Chair, the first showbiz person to do so (she’s in the company of such distinguished gentlemen as Ramon Cojuangco, Carlos Romulo, Go Puan Seng, Luis Beltran, Benigno Aquino and Mel Mathay).

• At St. Scho where she was an interna, Mother Lily would play truant and make lakwatsa, thus incurring the ire of the nuns who, one time, "imprisoned" her in school to teach her a lesson. "You are good-for-nothing!" one nun told her pointblank. The same nun would embrace Mother Lily during a homecoming many years later, telling her with a mixed feeling of disbelief and amazement, "I can’t believe that you are the Lily Yu I used to know!"

• Mother Lily doesn’t flaunt it but she has actually helped make a President (Fidel Ramos for whom she organized a movie press conference at the start of the 1992 Presidential campaign and, later, a blowout at Manila Polo Club when Ramos won), several senators (among them Loren Legarda and Gringo Honasan), although she has turned down several invitations to run in an election. (Can you imagine Mother Lily delivering a bombastic speech!?!)

• Oh, yes, whatever happened to Mother Lily’s "magic camision," said to be the box-office "secret" of dozens of Regal bold flicks, worn by the likes of Dina Bonnevie, Gina Alajar, Cherie Gil, Rio Locsin, Lorna Tolentino and Alma Moreno? "It’s in my baul," said Mother Lily who isn’t about to dust it off for yet another "re-launching." Mother Lily bought that camison from Rustan’s for her and Remy’s honeymoon.