Remembering MVS

Today I yield my space to excerpts from the biography of our former publisher, written by one of his close friends, veteran journalist Nelson Navarro.

“Maximo V. Soliven: The Man and the Journalist” will be launched next Thursday, Nov. 10, at 11 a.m. at The Peninsula Manila’s Rigodon Ballroom. The book is published by La Solidaridad, which is owned by one of my favorite writers, National Artist F. Sionil Jose.

“Boss Max” was a journalist of the old school who believed that a newsroom is the last dictatorship. He could be a real despot, but he also had a soft spot. Whenever I saw him I would ask him for merienda money for the newsdesk, and he always gave me all the bills in his wallet – usually a few thousand bucks.

He was a man who loved writing, who loved the Philippines and the world and celebrated life. Even in his final months, he refused to let his many ailments dampen his spirit. 

Boss Max’s daughter Sara picked these excerpts from the book:

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The Star is Born

“Mom didn’t want to put up another paper,” says Miguel Belmonte, the youngest of Betty’s three sons and now chief executive of the paper, of what had led to the founding of The Star. “The competition was formidable. The Bulletin was up there and the Inquirer was already ahead. It took a long time for Max and Art to convince her.”

Betty would change her mind, Miguel says, because of a peculiar family trait Betty took from her father, the Filipino-Chinese publisher Jimmy Go Puan Seng… He would start the day or make a decision by opening the Holy Bible and pointing a finger to a verse from which he would interpret God’s will…

Pressed for a decision on setting up another newspaper in May 1986, Betty Go-Belmonte opened her Bible and her finger landed on a passage about “three kings visiting the manger.” She saw that as a good omen, noting that Max, Art and Tony Roces – “three kings” – had come to urge her to join their proposed newspaper venture.

Betty’s decision was crucial to setting up what would become The Philippine Star. The three men were working journalists with no substantial savings or capital to go into any business.

What the three potential partners had was sweat capital, mainly sterling credentials as journalists of competence and integrity…

What Betty had to offer was crucial to the three men’s dream: two small printing presses in a dilapidated building that had given the Inquirer its initial home and operating base…

And that’s how The Star came into being: by replicating the Inquirer experience in exactly the same place and same circumstances of improvisation and sheer luck…

Betty and her eldest son, Isaac, a University of the Philippines journalism graduate, were original partners of The Star, along with Max and Art. The Belmontes owned a clear majority of the shares. Max got 15 percent and Art about 10 percent…

“Max wanted to be an owner, not an employee,” Miguel says of Max’s substantial stake in the paper. “His ambition was to be at the top, to be in the position to dictate.”

But Betty was no pushover. A University of the Philippines graduate, she held a master’s in American Literature from California’s Claremont College and had learned the ABCs of publishing from her father, whose Fookien Times had been the leading Filipino-Chinese newspaper. She had the business acumen and the sense of the practical that Max, more of a dreamer, acknowledged he did not have.

Above all, Betty had a religious zeal and bedrock values of ethics and morality that Max always deferred to.

“All our meetings were run by Betty who was the chairman,” Max would lovingly say of Betty after she had passed away in 1994, “and before that, we would all have to pray. Everyday, Betty and the prayer leader would round up all the people in The Star. They would hold hands and pray, except for Soliven, because Soliven would always arrive late. I represent the sinners at The Star.”

Betty’s unorthodox leadership would become legend and keep the paper going through its shaky and formative years. “It may violate every management principle and tenet,” says Doreen Yu, a senior editor who has been with the paper from the beginning, “but this has turned out to be a winning formula.”

Perhaps it was The Star’s team spirit and the tenacity of its founders that made the difference. In one of his later columns about the early days, Max says the paper was the 23rd to enter the market, which was so volatile many fell by the wayside within weeks. For about a year, there was no advertising, the paper only raising money out of street sales. “It was the only paper run by God,” says Max. “Prayer and faith were the foundations of its operations. We almost went bankrupt. We kept on calling for money from investors. We had to borrow a lot…”

Although Max seldom went to the Port Area offices, spent his day meeting with people at the Mandarin or Peninsula hotels in Makati, and wrote his columns in his Greenhills office, he was nonetheless an eternal and much-feared presence at The Star…

Isaac Belmonte, who would become editor-in-chief in 1999, would agree. “Max always had his way,” he says. “My role was to make sure the guy Max ordered fired was no longer around when Max came in…”

What prompted him towards Betty was the idea, as Miguel Belmonte would delicately put it, of owning a newspaper. It was obvious he had no resources or stamina to be sole owner, but in Betty he found a co-owner who would not stand in the way of his running a newspaper the way he wanted to. This would be the culmination of his career as a journalist, to be the boss of his own newspaper.

Max Soliven knew, of course, that he could not always have his way even with a most sympathetic and generous partner like Betty Go-Belmonte. There would have to be a give-and-take relationship, a mutual accommodation of dreams and responsibilities. In this regard, Max and Betty found a perfect match in each other. Under their joint inspiration and leadership, The Star would creep out of the shadows and lay claim to being the Philippine newspaper of the future.