When we got there on a rainy afternoon, we understood why Donnie didn’t even bother to give us his street name. The guard pointed to a house and said, "That’s his house". It’s the only house that stands in an entire development whose lot owners include big names in business and Manila society. A solitary house surrounded by empty lots filled with trees. As the homeowner says, "You can run around here like Adam and Eve."
Donnie has been spending his weekends for the past three years in this house and he likes the solitude just fine. He never really feels alone anyway. At night, you can hear cicadas singing, watch fireflies flutter about, and hear the wind howling from Mt. Makiling. He can take a long walk on a clear morning to enjoy the views and not encounter another person except for the maintenance people regularly trimming the grass on the empty lots.
Some years ago, when he was looking for a weekend house in the Laguna-Tagaytay area, he heard of this development by Brittany Corp. When he went there he saw a house on a 600-sq.m. lot being built. It was just a shell of a house, but he fell in love with it.
"It was meant to be the model unit of the village," PR man Donnie Ramirez explains. "There was no fence or landscaping yet. I said, I’ll take it if you’re willing to sell it to me."
They were willing to sell, so he made some changes in the blueprints, adding a covered second kitchen and laundry area, and walk-in closets for all the rooms.
"A lot of my friends tell me they also bought properties here for investment and when I tell them I live here, they say, ‘But there’s only one house there.’ I say, yeah, that’s mine."
It was three months before Christmas three years ago when he moved in, and when he held his first Christmas party, he realized he hadn’t informed his guests just how cold it was at night. So, out came the sweaters and jackets from his closet. The following year, his invites had an addendum: Please bring a sweater.
The furniture inside Donnie’s house is a mix of old (from his former house in Better Living, Parañaque) and new. The new ones were sourced from Cebu, and stores like Dimensione, Old Asia and the old Sogo warehouse on Pioneer St. in Mandaluyong. "I had a lot of help from my designer friends like Jiro Estaniel, former president of PIID; Cocoy Cordoba who did one of the rooms; Jojo Mapa of Old Asia; and architects James Jao and Boy Restubog."
A frequent traveler, Donnie loves the Amalfi Coast and makes it a point to visit whenever he can, and also Canada because most of the members of his family have settled there, "coast to coast, from Vancouver to Toronto." He has collected a lot of knickknacks through the years, including miniature horses and crystal pieces. From a rummage sale in Canada, he found a delicate turn-of-the-century plate. It cost only Canadian $12, but he considers it his best find. "Unfortunately, it broke recently, which broke my heart. In Rome, there are flea markets every Sunday and I would always be on the lookout for plates, whether they’re hand-painted, hand-blown or whatever."
Though he loves contemporary design, Donnie is partial to Asian touches. One of the two guest rooms in his house was decorated by Cocoy Cordoba around a bamboo motif with some Thai and rattan accessories. The same goes for the artworks. He has two large paintings done by a Vietnamese artist and an early Ibarra de la Rosa, dating back to the 1950s.
Donnie grew up in a landed family from Cavite and is one of the very few people who would say his house is not from his own sweat but from his "parents’ hard work and not from my PR business."
Here’s a quick lesson on how to edit the things in your house from Donnie Ramirez: "A lot of the things are accumulated from years past. I have disposed a lot of things already and just retained the ones with value and memories," he says.
Memories, he has a lot of indeed. Because even when he insists that he is a loner, that he "just stays in one corner" at parties, Donnie has attended some of the glitziest events and is privy to the scandals that routinely break out in Manila society, from the ‘60s era when "parties were really exclusive and mothers would cross out names from guest lists just because" to the ‘90s ballroom craze when matrons-turned-benefactors lavished gifts on their dance instructors – or in some cases, married them – which sent tongues wagging in all directions, to gun-toting children of matrons out to protect their fortunes. He is mum on the names, but you know that if he decides to write a book about the Manila social scene, it’s going to be one hell of a read. After all, this is the guy that helped launch one of the most successful discos in the country, Faces, and shook his booty from Par Avion to Mars to Stargazer.
"I guess it’s a contradiction when I tell you that I’m a simple, solitary fellow because people know me as a party man," he says. "In the ‘60s, Gilbert Perez used to organize all these colegiala parties, the debuts, and the mothers were such snobs. Today, the social circle has expanded a little, but not much. You see the same faces at every event, but what can you do? They are the ones that organize these parties."
Donnie says that today, one gets a sense of "old rich versus nouveau riche" in society. While Manila’s 400 may have hung their disco shoes, they simply put on another pair for the clubs, and the old stereotypes and sniping have remained. "I always say I am for the nouveau riche because without these women, there will be no social life in Manila today. People always look down on them, but these people today will be the old rich tomorrow."
The whole class war reminds one of what Kevin Spacey’s Jim Williams said in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: "I’m what they call ‘nouveau riche,’ but then, it’s only the ‘riche’ that counts."
You wonder about the snobbery that goes on in Manila society – and the ridiculousness of it all. In the end, of course, what draws your interest is the stories – mostly true and all of it deliciously evil.
Before he established his PR firm in the 1980s, Donnie worked in the advertising and promotions department of Levi’s, overseeing the Southeast Asian affiliates and subsidiaries. For a time, he lived his life out of a suitcase in Bangkok and Hong Kong, enjoying expat privileges and creating innovations in window and floor displays in retail stores.
He left Levi’s after seven years "because I thought that at the time there was no room for growth, that no local could be a country manager." After Levi’s, he took a sabbatical for two years, went traveling and ended up in London, where he studied the public relations practices there with the firm Barston and Marsteller, one of the biggest PR firms in the world. "I did a commercial in New York for another jeans company. When they knew I wasn’t working with Levi’s anymore, they got me. I did one commercial in Pennsylvania and for the first time experienced how it is to shoot abroad where they hire a mile-long mobile home for the location shoot."
In the mid-1980s, Donnie took a leap of faith and established his own PR firm, DCR. It didn’t feel like it was the right time, what with Ninoy’s assassination, the rallies and political instability, but then again when was the country ever stable?
"DCR was supposed to be just public relations, but people in the industry started calling me up to take care of their window displays nationwide. My orientation really was marketing, that was my field of expertise, and also garments. At Levi’s I had to take up pattern making in Slims, di ako natuto! I had to do all this even when I was handling marketing – that was the kind of training Levi’s gave me. PR is just one of the things that I do. I like to create a total package, from inception to marketing."
He is thankful that he’s breached the divide between Manila’s young society and the not-so-young. ("Don’t call them ’old society‘, magagalit sila," he warns me.) "Sometimes I’m the only old guy in a press conference," he says with a laugh. "Young society is basically trends – they’re into fashion, music, etc. Of the young set, Tim Yap is really a phenomenon."
Manila may still be the swinging scene it was in the old days, and while Donnie still enjoys it, he’s found that sometimes, it’s good to turn down the noise, step back from the party scene, and just settle in bed with a good book in a solitary house surrounded by nothing else.