Lessons in life, love & survival from Marietta Guanzon-Holmgren

Marietta Guanzon, heiress to the Farmacia Oro heritage, may have been born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth, but she chose early in life not to be spoon-fed and earn her own keep. While still a junior pharmacy student at the University of Santo Tomas, this little rich girl met her Prince Charming (or so she thought) and married him after three weeks of intense courtship.

“I joined a parade as Miss UST during the fiesta of Quezon City and after the parade, he approached me and said, ‘I just landed from New York where I studied.’ I was impressed by his accent, how he dressed, and his good looks. He owned a bookstore. And he courted me morning, noon, and night.”

The starry-eyed 19-year-old Marietta, wearing a Ramon Valera King and I-inspired gown, kept her altar date with the man of her dreams (which would eventually turn into a nightmare, as she saw stars when he hit her hard once). They had six children (five boys and one girl) and she was kept busy taking care of the kids while her husband was preoccupied with his women.

She put up with her husband’s philandering, until one day ... “I got a call from a veteran actress who was my neighbor. She said that every Wednesday, at 9 a.m., she would see my husband driving out of a motel across her house with a woman in a nun’s habit,” Marietta relates. “So one day, I followed their car and saw them with my own two eyes. I was shocked and outraged; I went to the nun’s school to report her and she had the nerve to admit that my husband was attracted to her. Then I confronted my husband: ‘Why a nun? You’re robbing from God.’”

She goes on to relate, “I was tolerant at first. But he wouldn’t come home for three months. I put up with him for 20 years. The last straw came when I asked him for support for our six kids who were all in school then and he hit me so hard he broke my nose.”

Finally, she left her husband, never looked back, and boarded a plane for the US to start a new life. She applied for church annulment in Brooklyn. “I was not intending to remarry, I just wanted to be at peace,” she stresses. “The bishop said it would cost me $1,000, but I told him I didn’t have that kind of money because I had six children with me, I just bought a house and a second-hand wagon. He said, ‘OK, my child, $500.’ I said, ‘Thank you, your honor, can I pay in installment, $50 every month?’ He agreed.”

To support her children, she juggled three jobs with the flair of an acrobat walking on a tightrope. She reported for work at the Egyptian Mission to the UN at 7 a.m. and then took the graveyard shift at the Hilton, where she was the night manager, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. “I would just take a bath and go to my next job,” she recalls. “I only had four hours of sleep every day.”

Saturday was no rest day for this workaholic single mom as she taught at the Barbizon Modelling School. After school, she would go to the supermarket and do her assorted house chores, do the laundry, and cook.

One day, she was set up on a blind date with a bachelor doctor, a Yugoslavian born in America. “I met him in December and in May, he wanted to marry me,” says Marietta. “My mom wanted me to marry him just to get me off her back, so she won’t have any problem with me anymore. But his mother was strongly against the relationship. I was living in Queens and that means I was not a rich girl. His mom called me up and said, ‘Look for your kind, a Filipino.’ My motto in life is I’m a simple person, but don’t step on my toes, I will put up a fight. I told the mother of my fiance (yes, we were going to get married then), ‘Madam, I’m not a poor little girl, I’m a rich little girl. I have two degrees and a master’s degree from Cornell University. And your son told me you came to Amerca no read, no write.’ I was able to buy a house near my fiance’s house and, one day, I put all his gifts in a Manila envelope and dropped it at his doorstep with this note for his mother, ‘Dear Madam, now you know we’re neighbors!’”

Marietta may not have been lucky in love, but she was certainly lucky in her career. As a single mom working to put food on the table for her six children and send them to school, she held high-profile jobs: manager at Mirage of the New York Hilton, general manager at General Electric Conference Center, assistant manager at Tarrytown Courtyard by Marriott.

At Marriott Washington, Marietta was able to sell 260 rooms for the New Year’s Eve dinner dance. “My GM, a Chinese woman, was so happy that she said she wanted to treat me at Waldorf Astoria,” says Marietta. “She was driving a Jaguar and I said to myself that if I had the money, I’m gonna buy one. I have one now, with the exact same color as the car of my former GM.”

Then she met a Swedish guy, Tage Holmgren. To marry her, he gave up his Lutheran faith. “We lived together for 14 years until he died of cancer.  It was a happy marriage. He left me with five apartments and a house in Sweden.”

Marietta shares this take-home lesson from her past failed relationships: “Don’t cry. In all the churches, I walked on my knees to pray for my husband to change. It will never happen. Just accept it. But if you fall, you will rise again and do something even better. There’s a purpose for all this. I always pray to God and to Mama Mary.  And I always say that whatever happens is for the better.”

Her unflinching faith and indomitable spirit helped her weather many storms and win many bruising battles in life. She once had a cyst in her breast, which miraculously disappeared, thanks to her mom who stormed the gates of heaven with her prayers.

 Recently, one of her sons was in the ICU in critical condition. She received news that her son had flatlined so she took the first flight out to be at his side. When she got to the hospital, she saw her son already sitting up as if nothing happened. She survived bone cancer — her mother, a Marian devotee,  was a cancer survivor for 30 years and, as a gesture of eternal gratitude, she put up the Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan to replicate the one in Lourdes, France. “There’s a spring there, and they gave us water from Lourdes,” Marietta tells us. “Yes, many have been healed, you can see the crutches they have left behind.”

Marietta runs the grotto and makes sure the image of Our Lady of Lourdes is impeccably clean. “I clean her myself and she’s six-foot-tall and I’m only five feet,” she says with a chuckle.

Turning 80 next year, Marietta looks half her age and has twice the energy of a 20-year-old. At 8 a.m. on the dot, she’s behind her desk at Oro Enterprises, Inc. where she’s president for life.  “I will work until I drop dead,” she declares. As if her job does not keep her busy enough, she still finds time for her assorted charities and socio-civic activities.

Her beauty secret? “I put a little egg white on my face every morning, after taking a bath. And I wash with cold water, otherwise I might end up like a scrambled egg. Now, I have made a soap called Marietta’s egg white soap so you, too, can avail yourself of this beauty secret. And as you can see, my hair is thick, and that’s because of the gugo that I use. I don’t go to the beauty parlor. Of course, I use our Citrobelle (from the words Citroen, the French car, of which my dad was a distributor, and belle, which is French for beauty).”

Her diet? “I don’t diet,” comes the quick reply. “As soon as I wake up, I drink 250ml of water with chlorophyll (green pigment of leaves). I take brewed coffee for its antioxidants, no sugar, no milk. Also, I have my cereals and fruits, like a banana. I never eat canned or processed food like sausage. I drink milk (regular, not low-fat or nonfat because as a pharmacist, I know that they put chemicals to get the fat out) before I go to sleep.”

She has 20-25 vision and her hearing is superb it’s almost bionic. She hardly ever gets a headache or gets sick except perhaps for that one time when she had dengue and had a near-death experience. “I was swimming in a dark tunnel,” she relates. “They say I’m like a cat who has nine lives.”

Of course, dancing keeps Marietta on her toes (she studied ballet and is a great ballroom dancer). She does Bikram Yoga once a week. She has her regular dose of body massage — Swedish massage for deep tissue, Thai massage for good circulation so she gets rid of the stubborn cellulite and gets only firm muscles. Probably the only massage she doesn’t need is an ego massage.

Marietta’s simply nifty at 80. Indeed, 80 has never looked this good!