The Max who changed my life

On my second year of Business Administration at the UP Diliman, I knew my heart was not in the right place. The numbers I read in my Calculus book looked Greek to me. Accounting was like rocket science.

I went to the Guidance Office at the Vinzons Center, and I looked through my entrance exam results. Though I passed Business Administration, a quota course, the results showed that I leaned more towards Communications and History. Perhaps that’s why I was exempted from taking three units of English I, three units of Philippine History and three units of Asian Civilization on my freshman year.

I was the editor of my high school paper at the Assumption Convent and always dreamt of being a writer. But in the early ‘80s, there was no freedom of the press in the country and my parents believed that perhaps it was not the best of times to be a woman and a journalist. So thus began my odyssey into Business Ad, concepts of LIFO and FIFO and what-have-you.

But I was unhappy. I felt like Juliet, and Journalism was my Romeo.

Then one day, my parents Frank and Sonia Mayor were invited to a cocktail party at the Hotel InterContinental where they were introduced to the respected opposition columnist Max V. Soliven. Max’s sister-in-law Remedios Laguindanum (Precious Soliven’s sister) was my mom’s classmate at the St. Scholastica’s College.

During their conversation, Mom told Max that she had a daughter who wanted to become a journalist, but that she and Dad were against it because there seemed to be no future for journalists under the Marcos dictatorship.

“Oh, you let your daughter take up Journalism if that is where her heart is. It won’t be long now and will have press freedom back,” the prescient Max told my mom.

The next morning, my parents gave me their blessings to take up Journalism. I no longer felt like Juliet.

True enough, People Power and Cory Aquino gave press freedom a new lease on life, and I was one of the first to savor it as a practicing journalist. Ironically, I didn’t join a newspaper right away  I joined Cory Aquino’s campaign media bureau as one of her writers, and later, her press office at Malacañang.

In July 1992, about a month into the presidency of Fidel V. Ramos (who kept me in my post as executive editor of the Presidential Press Staff as I was a civil servant), the late Betty Go-Belmonte asked me to join The Philippine STAR  the newspaper she had founded with three gentlemen.

One of three gentlemen was Max V. Soliven. He was going to be my publisher. It was almost like poetic justice.

* * *

I had not yet been formally introduced to Max at the time I joined The STAR. I was introduced to him some months later, because he never really reported to The STAR offices in Port Area. He never knew he was instrumental in tilting my notebooks towards a course in Journalism.

Eventually, he would give me big breaks in my career. He appointed me editor-in-chief of PeopleAsia magazine, a glossy he founded with The STAR, Babe Romualdez and Choy Cojuangco in 2000.

He enabled my headline scoop on Fernando Poe Jr.’s seeking the presidency on Nov. 23, 2003. Not really a political writer, I consider that the biggest scoop of my days in the news desk of The STAR. Max had assigned me to get FPJ (the father of my former student Grace Poe) on the cover of the December 2003 issue of PeopleAsia. During the course of our conversation during the photo shoot held at the FPJ studios in Quezon City, “Da King” told me that there was “no more turning back” from his resolve to seek the presidency in 2004. He said he wanted to do it for the poor. He didn’t say our conversation, in English, was “off the record” and so I reported it to Boss Max.

“Write it for tomorrow’s edition of The STAR, I want it to be the banner,” he ordered me. “And point out that your conversation was in flawless English.” I told him that perhaps FPJ was just caught off-guard by revealing casually to me something that was going to indelibly change the political landscape in the blink of an eye.

“Well, if you don’t write it someone else will beat you to it!” he warned me, brooking no dissent. He even wrote down his instructions on a piece of paper that I was to show to the desk editors.

The following day, The STAR bannered “FPJ running in 2004.” FPJ’s camp at first denied it. I stood by my report.

A few days later, my editor-in-chief Isaac Belmonte texted me, “We are vindicated!” When I turned on the TV, lo and behold, FPJ was confirming my scoop in a press conference at the Manila Hotel.

Max Soliven taught me that journalism isn’t a field for the tentative, the diffident, the cautious, the faint of heart. As long as you weren’t reneging on your word, your first instinct is to bring the hottest, latest news to the desk because if you don’t, the competition will bring it to theirs.

Max didn’t make me feel like I had brought home the Miss World crown with my FPJ scoop (Well, I wished he did, too). To him, it was part of my job. Dapat lang.

Once, he asked me to give up a trip to the US because he needed me for a project. Though he had a temper, he was also pusong mamon, so he said, “Joanne, I am sorry you had to give up this trip.”

“It’s okay, Sir,” I answered, “I know this is part of my training so I will be a good editor someday.”

“You won’t be a good editor,” he told me, “You’ll be one of the best.”

* * *

I have been thinking of Boss Max lately because of the recent launching of his biography, Maximo V. Soliven, The Man and the Journalist, by Nelson Navarro (the book is available at Solidaridad. You may also e-mail [email protected]).

In the last year of his life, a wedge came in between Boss Max and me. I don’t really know for sure who drove that wedge between us. But those close to us both and who knew of the trust relationship Boss Max and I once shared have told me they knew it would have been restored some day.

But Boss Max went to see his Maker on Nov. 24, 2006.

Let me thank you now, Boss Max, for all the opportunities you gave me to be a good editor. I hope, too, that someday, I am going to be one of the best  as you said I would be.

I hope the faith you had in me that fateful day at the InterCon when you spoke to my parents  even when you didn’t know me yet  was not wasted on me.

Because it changed my life  to the max.

(You may e-mail me at [email protected])