Dolly Anne Carvajal Will Always Be Inday Badiday’s Daughter

In the ‘60s, out of fear that she would embarrass her upper-middle-class family of public servants, diplomats, lawyers, and academics by dealing in “working-class proclivities” like movie stars, then budding broadcast reporter Lourdes Jimenez Carvajal had to go by a pen name: Inday Badiday.

Inday or Ate Luds, “well-dressed, well-combed, and well-behaved” — “well, sometimes!” as the late entertainment journalist Ricky Lo described her — had the great idea to put gossip columnists in front of the camera rather than letting them hide behind bylines.

And so, tsismis would have stayed within private spaces, an affair of two or more sets of ears and mouths, not a national pastime, if not for the woman who pushed showbiz reporting, once seen as frivolous, even taboo, from print to radio, to television.

In a column remembering the talk show titan who passed away in 2003, the Philippine Star columnist Butch Francisco, short of including himself, recalled, “She made television hosts out of Cristy Fermin, Nap Gutierrez, Lulubelle Lam Ramos, Anselle Beluso, Aster Amoyo, Jun Nardo, Eugene Asis, and even her daughter Dolly Anne Carvajal.”

Much like her age, which remained secret until her death, the existence of a daughter born in a taxi cab and named after the Filipino word “madalian” (Ma. Dolly Anne is her full name), meaning “in haste,” was initially unknown to the public. The world Inday moved in demanded she maintain an image of a single woman in a comic love triangle with German Moreno and Ike Lozada. A child had no place on her plate. That was until one day, six-year-old Carvajal slipped up.

“Parang may reporter yata sa bahay?” Carvajal recalls in a story that illustrates just how embedded showbiz was in their family life. “Basta nag-slip up ako, natawag ko siyang Ate Mommy, e dapat ang itatawag ko lang sa kanya ay Ate Luds.”

Production sets became their second home, where, surrounded by stars like Nora Aunor, who rose to fame at the same time as her mom, a young Carvajal would do homework. “They were very close, as in dadatnan ko si Ate Guy sa bahay in the wee hours of the morning. Until now, when I see Ate Guy, nag-re-reminisce kami about the good old days when mommy was still around kasi sabay talaga silang sumikat. They helped each other,” Carvajal fondly recalls. Aunor passed away a week after this interview.

She was born into it, but was initially resistant to follow in the footsteps of the Inday Badiday. “I made a conscious effort to veer away from the world of my mom,” she says. In an attempt to carve out her own path, she took up Linguistics at the University of the Philippines Diliman and studied briefly in Paris, thinking perhaps that dealing with words in a manner different from the one her mom pioneered was enough to establish some distance.

But even as this path of resistance led to a daughter of her own (she told her mom she was graduating cum laude and was four months pregnant in the same breath), entertainment journalism loomed. She would go on to write a column called “Dollywood” for the Philippine Daily Inquirer for 30 years, and in a turn of events not unlike her mother’s, have a child who pursued a career as a talk show host (albeit short-lived) in IC Mendoza.

Carvajal, with her elfin features, is now 61. She’s so far outlived her mother by two years. “Dollywood” has since become “Hello Dolly,” her weekly entertainment column now in the Philippine Star. In a way, she has successfully stepped out of the shadow of her mother, but also out of the prevailing style of celebrity reportage at the time: sensationalist, riddled with blind items, and, by today’s standards, far from progressive — justifying, for example, outing someone with the public’s right to know about the lives of these public figures.

“I always say that these larger-than-life personalities are, first and foremost, persons. We have to respect din na may boundaries sila,” the columnist, who, by virtue of her job and being the daughter of the Queen of Talk Shows, has cultivated showbiz relationships (Cesar Montano is one of her closest friends), says. “I always say, friendship first. I’m not too much of a columnist to be a friend to them.”

Makeup DOROTHY MAMALIO
Hair UNO ANTHONY

Read the rest of the story in the second print issue of Rolling Stone Philippines, out now on select newsstands and on Sari-Sari Shopping, or read the e-magazine here.