Delia has unseen protector

We have always considered Delia Razon a.k.a. Lucy May Gritz, a good friend and neighbor in San Juan where she still lives. Although we had already moved to Pasig, the friendship has remained. When asked what she had that attracted us to Delia, we would always answer, “She makes me laugh.”

At the recent seniors’ reunion at the Sampaguita Gardens, we waited for her to arrive but she didn’t. We called her up on the telephone and when she answered, we asked her what she was doing. “Sorry, hindi ko napansin ang oras. Kausap ko kasi si Antonio Banderas,” she replied, laughing at her imagined phone pal.     

An inveterate collector of nostalgia, she had turned her home at Horseshoe Village to a repository of her photographs, some more than a hundred years old of her great grandfather; quite a number of photos with her leading men during the ’50s, restored, blown up and framed to decorate the walls of her dressing room. These were the things she showed us when we first came to visit. She loves retelling stories of her experiences at LVN which together with Sampaguita, Premiere and Lebran were known as the Big Four Filipino producers from the ’50s to the ’80s.

Stars in the early days of Philippine cinema were neither discovered through TV competitions, beauty pageants or modeling and advertising stints. They were either a movie fan, related to someone working in the studio, or brought over to be a bit player in a movie. To this day, Delia finds it difficult to understand what it was the LVN matriarch saw in her as she was chubby and dark-skinned, certainly not star material.

While Delia remains very religious with her special guardian angel, she is also a firm believer in reincarnation. She relates going for a reading of her former lives only to find out the presence of people who had already died. It seems to us that Delia has a third eye, is sensitive to extra-sensory perception, and also can feel what will happen before it does happen.

Delia shares all her blessings with others, including those we would consider a miracle. Of course, Delia attributes all these to her special guardian angel.

During her heydays in the movies, she had helped four families financially get on their feet. Now that they are all comfortable and living abroad, Delia pours her attention on her three children, nine grandchildren and two great grandchildren. The eldest is Carl Glenn eldest, then Maria Aurelia and Maria Aurea who was formerly married to actor of the ’80s Rey PJ Abellana. Their daughter is Carla Abellana, lead star of the Filipino version of the Mexican telenovela Rosalinda.

Once, she and her sister were on their way from the US to visit Lourdes, but had to fly through Frankfurt to Cologne to Paris and onward to Lourdes. There was little time given to change planes and they couldn’t understand the signs that they had almost resigned themselves to being left by their flight. Out of nowhere, some foreigners showed them how to reach the boarding area for Cologne. Even this, Delia considers a miracle.

She is quick to forgive even those she feels have done her and her family wrong. She tries to understand the background, even childhood of her tormentor. After which she feels cleansed. The families she helped out morally and financially while she was at her height have long been asking her to join them in the US. She has refused saying that she will not leave the Philippines, not while there are still people to help.

We had been on the phone with Delia for an hour. We bid her goodbye promising to call again soon. “Give my regards to Antonio,” we told her.

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