Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021. 219 pp. (B&W photos) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-14400-3.
Vernadette Gonzalez’s Empire’s Mistress offers a welcome correction to the common practice of colonial subjects being written out of history. This fascinating book engages with careful archival research—an uphill battle, considering the scarcity and unreliability of sources—to bring attention to the forgotten biography of Isabel Cooper, a Filipina vaudeville and screen actor who acquired a marginal reputation as the temporary mistress of General Douglas MacArthur. Traditionally, Cooper’s marginal inclusion in history accounts mostly serves a clichéd Orientalism, bestowing upon MacArthur an image of colonial mastery and exoticism.
Gonzalez’s book is decidedly not interested in framing Cooper’s biography through the lens of MacArthur, although some sections explain their relationship and eventual breakup. Instead, Cooper is shown as the resourceful colonial subject, making the best of the type of interracial relationship commonly practiced during the US occupation of the Philippines. When MacArthur eventually abandons her after four years of a not-so-secret relationship in Washington, DC, she manages to intervene in the general’s libel suit against a journalist by offering up his love letters, forcing MacArthur to drop his suit and pay out US$15,000 to avoid a public scandal as the chief of staff of the US Army. Gonzalez stresses here the resilient agency of the belittled mistress who will not go away quietly.
After the initial and perhaps required account of Cooper’s reputation as MacArthur’s mistress, the book opens into wider contexts of US colonial history in the Philippines. Cooper’s father, a white Midwesterner, is drawn to the adventure of US colonial expansion and enlists in the army shortly after the acquisition of the Philippines in 1898. He serves US military interests in the pacification of the colony, joining other soldiers who hunt rebels during the day and fraternize with Filipina prostitutes at night and thus defy the existing racial barriers on the US continent. Moreover, prostitution is overseen by the military to regulate the risk of sexually transmitted diseases as an integral part of the military industrial/entertainment complex.
Gonzalez places the formative period of young Isabel Cooper into the context of Manila’s post-WW I modernization, the emergence of the women’s movement in the Philippines, and its growing entertainment culture emulating Hollywood. Her father, Isaac Cooper, eventually returns with his mixed-race family to Arizona. After a brief stay in the US, her mother Protacia decides to return with Isabel to the Philippines and immediately marries another American soldier. According to Gonzalez, this unexpected decision represents an ironic reversal of the arranged overseas sham marriage, letting US soldiers off the hook upon returning to the US. Gonzalez views the mother’s self-determination as making a crucial impression on the young Isabel and her own attempts to retain her independence in an environment marked by a colonial economy of desire, sex, and acquisition.
Isabel Cooper, not misled by the fantasies imposed by the colonizer, embarks on a career as a vaudeville performer in her early teens, entertaining troops with thinly veiled sexual innuendos in coyly delivered songs such as “Has Anybody Seen My Kitty?” Her stage name Dimples underscores a transgressive sexual fascination with young teens, turning Manila’s night life into a lurid male fantasy, with Dimples knowingly serving as its mirror. Dimples is eventually discovered by the pioneer of Philippine cinema, José Nepomuceno, and stars in three films, most notably Nepomuceno’s Ang Tatlong Hambog (1926), featuring a scandalous first on-screen kissing scene.
Whereas the first part of the book highlights Isabel Cooper’s savvy engagement of the native colonial terrain and the reality of US military occupation, the second part shows her to be less successful in securing a career in Hollywood, culminating in her tragically committing suicide at age 46. Propelled by her nascent success in Philippine cinema, Cooper sets out for Hollywood in 1927 hoping to be discovered, but to no avail. It would have helped Gonzalez’s account to spell out directly the predominant practices of racial casting in Hollywood: namely the substituting ethnic whites for people of colour as demanded by existing Jim Crow laws. For example, despite her international fame, Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American movie star, could not secure lead roles in the US. Once the Hays or Motion Picture Production Code (1922–1945) was fully enforced in 1934, along with its explicit banning of miscegenation, the doors of Hollywood shut down almost all opportunities for significant ethnic or racial casting for people of colour. That year also marked Cooper’s break-up with MacArthur.
One can only wonder how Cooper’s talent would have evolved on the cinematic screen in her native country had she not left for the US with MacArthur in 1930, later finding herself sidelined in minor roles and extra parts in Hollywood and having to perform dutifully the clichés of screen Orientalism. Her final significant film, I Was an American Spy (1951), tells the story of a Claire Philipps, an American Filipina, spying for the US during the Japanese occupation of Manila. The lead part, not surprisingly, goes to the director Ann Dvorak and is done in muted yellowface. Cooper is predictably given the subservient bit part of Lolita, the maid.
Cooper, who maintains a critical distance to the colonial exploits of the US military, it appears, finally succumbs to the mirage of Hollywood losing out to its firmly embedded white power structures. Gonzalez’s book provides no definitive answers about her tragic end but speculatively engages the excavated materials, such as newspaper clips and publicity write-ups, letters, birth, death, and marriage certificates, as well as beautiful screen stills and promotional photos, on the levels of biography and colonial history. The book is structured in a variation of styles in its attempt to present Cooper’s biography creatively rather than just factually. In this fashion, it constitutes a fascinating account of a minor biography intersecting with a major biography and historical events as seen from the colonized periphery.
Delia Malia Konzett
University of New Hampshire, Durham