For more than 30 years, Time magazine’s Nelly Sindayen fearlessly covered the Philippines – a dictatorship, People Power, bloody insurgencies – until her death last month. POWER editor Anthony Spaeth pays tribute to a woman who exemplified the Philippines’ passion for press freedom

I WORKED WITH Nelly Sindayen far longer than anyone at Time magazine. We first teamed up when a basketball coach named Tommy Manotoc was kidnapped, which became the biggest story from the Philippines in years. The story broke, in fact, at Nelly’s apartment in the Ermita bar district of Manila on December 31, 1981.

The Philippines was a dictatorship under Ferdinand Marcos, and I didn’t know it very well. I was backstopping for an Asian Wall Street Journal Manila correspondent who was celebrating Christmas in the US, and I was grateful to get an invitation to Nelly’s place on New Year’s Eve. My wife and I were standing with beers, ready to celebrate Pinoy-style, when someone tapped me on my shoulder to say that a press conference was starting.

“Where?” I asked.

He pointed with his chin. “In Nelly’s bedroom.”

That was strange. And in Nelly’s bedroom we heard an even stranger tale from the kidnapped man’s relatives. They said that Tommy had secretly married the dictator’s daughter, Imee Marcos, a few weeks earlier in Virginia. Apparently the Marcoses didn’t approve, and then we heard of the couple’s final dinner at Las Conchas restaurant, the kidnapping of Tommy in his Mitsubishi Galant Sigma, a plea from the presidential palace, Malacañang, for the Manotoc family to stay silent, which they decided to disobey – to save their son’s life – by breaking the biggest story of the year in Nelly’s bedroom above a VD clinic on New Year’s Eve.

Only in the Philippines.

Even though we were competitors, Nelly and I joined forces the next day to track down the story. We went to Las Conchas to ask the waiters what the couple had eaten, stalked Imee Marcos at the University of the Philippines Law School, and finally went to Malacañang to tell Marcos’s information minister that we were about to break the story of the dictator’s kidnapped secret-son-in-law.

While we were in Malacañang, Nelly somehow got Imee’s private telephone number. We called. A male answered.

“We know about Tommy,” we said portentously, kind of muffling our voice.

The guy, a security man perhaps, was utterly unruffled. “Who’s we?” he asked.

That was a dud call.

Time has a very unfair system of bylines and credits in which the writer of the story – usually the rewriter – gets the big byline at the top and the reporters receive credits in miniscule type way down at the end. This is true even when the writer is in an office in the Time-Life building in New York, as far away from Asia as you can get. I have received a lot of those big bylines, but they’re unfair for three reasons. One: lots of people can write Time magazine style. Two: almost any correspondent or bureau chief or editor from Hong Kong can fly into Manila and ask questions in an interview with the president or a cabinet minister or the wannabe coup leader set up by Nelly Sindayen, and many did over the years, including me.

But very few reporters can score the difficult interviews, get the scoops, secure the private phone number of a dictator’s daughter whose husband has just been kidnapped by … well, according to Marcos, it was communist rebels. Nelly’s the only journalist I know who would get invited to a Makati society party in which a coup d’etat is being planned on speakerphone, as happened in Feb. 2006. And then publish that information, get in hot water with the government, and less than a week later, sneak into an army camp to talk to the rebel general who was conspiring on the speakerphone – even though he’s under house arrest. That was the role Nelly performed for Time, and better than anyone I have known in my business.

Nelly was a journalist who wasn’t afraid to tell the truth. No matter what the government threatened her with, which continues to happen long after the days of dictatorship. That’s the journalists’ job, that’s their passion, and that’s what Nelly will be remembered for by her colleagues and the young people who aspire to be the new generation of Nelly Sindayens. It’s a difficult job, a hazardous job, and I can’t imagine many people doing it with the joy, the friendships maintained, and the uniquely Philippine grace that Nelly had.

But I can easily imagine many generations of Filipinos doing it in any way – in fact, I can’t imagine otherwise. The Filipinos are a people that know the value of freedom. They’ve chosen it over a fuller rice bowl. God bless the Filipinos.

Now I want to get personal. A few years ago, Nelly and I were on an assignment and we stayed at the Manor hotel at Camp John Hay in Baguio. We agreed to meet at the piano bar at 6pm to make dinner plans. The piano bar at that hotel is just that: a white grand piano with stools around its perimeter and a jolly pianist who could play many songs without sheet music. As it turned out, we never went to dinner.

In the adjacent bar, a group of overweight guys were drinking heavily. It was Johnny Walker, and their tumblers were large and full. Nelly looked at them, looked away in her sphinx-like way, looked back dubiously, and muttered to me in that low sotto voce of hers, pointing with her chin: “Corrupt. Bad guys, Spaethie.” (I will note: she is the only person who has ever called me “Spaethie.”)

Ultimately, they joined us at the piano, and it turned out Nelly was wrong. They were good guys, our kind of guys, human rights activists, architects, etc. And they wanted to sing. Hey! We were around a piano. The pianist could play anything. The night was young – and as Nelly would say, “So are we, Spaethie!”
But the guys were drunk and, to quote the porter in Macbeth, the Johnny Walker provoked their desire but took away their performance. In terms of tune, certainly, but also with the lyrics: our lounge buddies didn’t know the words to any of the songs they desired to sing, or if they knew them, they were too drunk to remember.

As it happened, Nelly Sindayen knew the words to every song ever written, down to every last verse. She was a sashaying encyclopedia of lyrics. She loved the melodies deeply, but she truly adored lyrics. Some of her email messages to Time were composed almost entirely of lyrics from various songs. There was something very Filipino, colonial, and literate about this passion of Nelly’s. “Summertime” was her signature performance piece – she sang it huskily and with great control and beauty – and I don’t think I ever heard her sing another song in public. If you asked her a lyric, however …

This is a gift, if you reflect, for all of us who loved Nelly. I can’t think of one song I associate with my late mother. A handful remind me of my late wife Ritsu. But Nelly, oh lord: scores of songs will bring back her unforgettable voice, laugh, and that amazing smile. Nelly and I spent countless hours in cars in Manila, in the provinces, on helicopters, and from those long rides, and the Magic-Sing dinner parties and late nights at karaoke bars in Manila, I associate so many songs with her: “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” “Goldfinger,” “Kahit Isang Saglit,” “Lonely is a Man Without Love,” the theme from “The Valley of the Dolls,” “What Matters Most,” “That Old Feeling.” I could go on for a very long time.

So there we were in Camp John Hays at the white grand piano with stools around it, some pica-pica ordered, beer for me and Coke Light for Nelly and lots of Johnny Walker for the local guys who wanted to sing but didn’t have the words. Here’s how it went.

The pianist was at his instrument. One of the attorneys or architects stood to his right pawing a big tumbler of Scotch. Nelly stood on the left of the piano player feeding the lyrics in a low voice just before each line.

Nelly [from left, softly]: “In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking … “
One of the guys [from right, anything but softly]: “IN OLDEN DAYS … ”
Nelly: “Now heaven knows, anything goes.”
The guy: “NOW HEAVEN KNOWS, ANYTHING … ”
The piano player changes songs and Nelly’s helping the next guy.
Nelly: “Saving nickels saving dimes, working ‘til the sun don’t shine …”
The next guy: “ON BLUE BAYOU!”
Another guy. Nelly [from left]: “I’ve grown accustomed to the tune she whistles night and noon/Her smiles, her frowns, her ups, her downs …”
This went on for hours. “Some Enchanted Evening.” “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog.” “I Fall in Love Too Easily.” “Old Man River.”
The last time I saw Nelly, I mentioned that I had purchased a Linda Rondstadt CD of standards and discovered the song “I’ll Be Seeing You (In All the Old Familiar Places).” She knew it better than me, and we kind of sang along. That’s how we were. We shared the songs we loved. The two of us agreed that the song’s ending verse was lovely.
I’ll be seeing you;
In every lovely summer’s day;
And everything that’s bright and gay;
I’ll always think of you that way