Lolit Solis is hard to find on Instagram. Instead of a profile, a warning against child sexual abuse pops up on the Explore page. Her detractors on Reddit attribute this to collective action — digital karma they believe the gossip veteran deserves for decades of talking trash about their favorite stars.
They wish digital karma worked that way. Searches for “Lolit Solis” are flagged by Meta because the name resembles “lolita,” a search term for content featuring underage girls. It doesn’t help that @akosilolitsolis tags her photos with #classiclolita. Then again, at 78, she’s not exactly a social media whiz. She has an iPhone — its font size so large that someone having a blowout at Bambbi Fuentes Salon, where we met for this interview, could read it from two chairs away — but beyond calls and texts, she doesn’t use it for much else.
For this online misstep, Solis might be forgiven. As for her other worldly sins, only God knows.
Since she was diagnosed with a kidney problem some years ago, twice-weekly dialysis treatments have become her life. They make her lethargic. Still, the entertainment journalist and talent manager finds time to post introspective Instagram quote cards straight out of Thought Catalog with captions like, “Dasal ko kay God, sana mapatawad niya ang mga nagawa kong kasalanan,” always prefaced with a greeting to an omnipresent “Salve.”
Salve isn’t an invocation of the divine. It’s literally her sending captions to her entertainment editor at Pilipino Star Ngayon and de facto confidante, Salve Asis, who posts on her behalf. Her health has impaired her speech. Her days of mile-a-minute thank-you spiels on StarTalk (remember “AlokBati”?) are over, but her mind remains sharp, even quicker than her mouth. So she returns to what she does best: writing.
“Sana mapatawad [ni God] ang mga nagawa kong kasalanan.”
Before she was a celebrity columnist, the University of the Philippines alumna was a ‘70s police beat reporter in a miniskirt. “Day, tuwing may ni-re-raid kaming prostitution house, ako ang unang hinuhuli ng mga pulis kasi nga naka-micro mini ako kalandian ko.” Thinking she was a liability, her editor often left her out of assignments. That’s when Douglas Quijano, who ran the entertainment pages at the Philippine Star, took her in. When her first celebrity story came out, her mother, who never read her crime stories, bought everyone in the neighborhood a copy to show off her daughter, the celebrity writer.
With a little prodding from the revered TV director Al Quinn, her mother’s star writer wasn’t just in print anymore. She was a TV talk show host, too, a role she flourished in until the last decade. “Sabi ko, ‘Hindi ako marunong mag-host.’ Sabi sa akin ni Direk Al Quinn, ‘Lolit, you being there, sitting there, ma-e-excite na ang mga tao dahil ikaw, bigla-bigla kung anu-anong lumalabas sa bunganga mo.’”
Solis, with her big mouth, didn’t stop at just writing or talking about stars. By the 1980s, she was managing them. It started when Regal Films’ Lily Monteverde asked Quijano to manage newcomer William Martinez, who had a rivalry with Gabby Concepcion, another “Regal Baby” (emerging talents under Regal Entertainment) “Sabi ni Douglas, ‘Halika, Lolit. Hahawakan ko si William, hawakan mo si Gabby.’ Sa gano’n, makakapag-isip kami ng gimik para doon sa dalawa. Kunwari magkaaway, ganyan.”
Pretty soon, celebrities were begging for her stern guidance: Tonton Gutierrez, Christopher de Leon, Lorna Tolentino, Rudy Fernandez, Bong Revilla. But they all knew she loved one of them more than the rest. Solis loved him so much, she did the unthinkable, nearly costing her everything.
Read the rest of the story in the second print issue of Rolling Stone Philippines.
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