MANILA, Philippines -- Volunteers sorting through the belongings of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos at Malacanang Palace are finding proof of an outlandishly excessive life style -- including 500 black brassieres and 2,200 pairs of shoes.
'This is really too much,' said Maur Aquino Lichauco, the sister-in-law of the Philippines' new president, Corazon Aquino, as she carried boxes of designer cosmetics. 'I've never seen anything like this in my life.'
'She really had a fetish for soap.'
Baskets of soap in the bathroom -- in cabinets and along the whirlpool -- bottles of perfume, hundreds of dresses and boxes of jewelry are being inventoried and displayed in the quarters of the former first lady for all the Filipino people to see.
The Malacanang Palace -- home to Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos for two decades -- will open for the first time to the 'poorest of the poor' Friday on orders of Aquino, who assumed power two weeks ago when Marcos fled the Philippines in the face of a military-led revolt. Aquino has decided to make Malacanang a museum.
'We owe it to the people to see the extravagance so they know why they're so poor,' said Maria Theresa Roxas, a prominent socialite coordinating some 100 young women who will volunteer as guides.
Imelda's dressing room, a huge bedroom with two queen size beds pushed into one, her personal vault, a spacious sitting room and a bathroom the size of most New York apartments also have been put in order.
A volunteer flung open a cabinet. 'There are 500 black brassieres here,' she said. 'Somebody counted them.'
Down a staircase is a large room dubbed 'mini-Rustans' after Rustans Department store where Imelda kept most of her hundreds of dresqes and 2,200 pairs of Bruno Magli, Gucci and Evan Picone shoes inventoried by the SGV auditing firm.
Roxas' husband was a member of the government of President Diosdados Macapagal until Marcos took office in 1965. She has known the palace since the days of President Manuel Roxas after World War II and before Imelda Marcos remodeled it in 1977.
'It's lost all its ambiance,' she said Monday.
'There used to be wide open verandas along the river. Now it's all enclosed and air conditioned. There used to be fresh flowers every day. Now they're all artificial.'
More than 80 boxes of records, gold and silver commemorative coins and precious jewels left behind by the Marcoses have been turned over to the Central Bank and the Commission for Good Government, which is probing the ex-ruler's wealth.
What is left is an extraordinary monument to an excessive lifestyle.
Beatrice Zobel, in charge of preserving the palace, opened a basement door into what she said was once a barbershop and beauty parlor that the Marcoses turned into a storage room. Inside were scores of Sony tape recorders, still factory packed.
'They just bought things by the hundreds,' she said. 'They lost a notion of reality. They forgot there were 50 million people living here.'
