Rose: The unauthorised biography of Rose Hancock Porteous

By Robert Wainwright

For two decades, Rose Hancock Porteous has fascinated Australians. The Filipina housekeeper who became the lover and then the wife of her millionaire employer has regularly created headlines, but behind the facade of the colourful socialite there is much that has not been revealed about this fabulously flawed woman.

This is Rose's story - thorns and all - beginning with her childhood on the Philippine island of Negros, where the heritage that promised social prominence and financial security mostly delivered family infighting and shame. Rose went from college into a violent and unhappy marriage and onto the dusty streets of Ermita, where she sold goods on the black market to survive. She has done laundry in Madrid, tended bar in Manila and strutted the fashion catwalks of Milan - always leaving a trail of suitors in her wake. Her third marriage, to the aging iron ore magnate Lang Hancock, finally gave her the unparalleled wealth and opulence she desired.

Journalist Robert Wainwright has followed Rose's turbulent life and loves since 1984, when her relationship with Lang Hancock became public. He documents how a besotted Lang allowed his flamboyant wife to spend $30 million in six years, and reveals exactly what happened behind the iron gates of Prix D'Amour in the last days of the millionaire's life. Was Rose a gold-digger, or was she a woman misunderstood by the values of two vastly different cultures?

Bizarre, compelling and insightful, Rose is the roller coaster story of a woman who began life as a small town girl but became one of Australia's wealthiest and most eccentric socialites.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Release date: Nov 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781743439371

Robert Wainwright

Robert Wainwright is a well-known journalist and the author of several topical books. Fascinated by characters and what drives them, he has written books about Rose Porteous, Caroline Byrne, Martin Bryant, Sheila Chisholm, George Ingle Finch and Ian Thorpe. The author of the bestselling Sheila: the Australian beauty who bewitched British society, he lives in London with his wife, Paola Totaro, and their family.

Book preview

life

The old man was close to death. His once proud body lay withered between the pressed bed sheets, shrunken grotesquely into a shell that bore little resemblance to the once feared businessman and political renegade. A bull-headed warrior who had hailed brave victories and bitter defeats in equal number over the decades, his heart had finally given out, exhausted from a lifetime battling business and political adversaries.

The old man lay helpless, on a makeshift bed in a twilight world—a crippled, decrepit state filled with nightmares and last-minute regrets. He was helpless. Casting his tired eyes around the room, he could not recognise the blurred faces which peered silently; he did not know who patted his hand and spoke in tiny whispers he could not quite hear or understand. He knew they were family, or at least assumed they were, but the faces and voices were jumbled. Who was comforting him in his final hours? Was it friend or foe? Was he loved or despised?

And therein lay the old man’s inner turmoil. The ego that had driven him to wealth and power beyond the dreams of his peers lay as shattered as the body which had carried it through the hot interior of his beloved island and the boardrooms and palaces of Asia and Europe. His creation—a kingdom carved from the rough, unforgiving land whose riches he had discovered—was decimated. It was already being picked over by vulturous, warring relatives who cared nothing for the land or the future. And the old man knew he had no-one to blame but himself. In his desire to play the odds and beat any government or tax intrusion into his riches, the lands and their royalty streams had long ago been passed to his family. He was a man who had always controlled his surroundings with an iron will, yet his recklessness was now apparent. He had thought he was buying peace of mind, but he had placed his destiny in the hands of less abled men. Where once there was a legacy that would have stretched, like his name and deeds, through the generations, the old man could no longer vouch for the financial security of his grandchildren, let alone their offspring. How could he have let this happen, not foreseen these embarrassing, public family feuds which would almost certainly escalate with his passing? He cursed quietly at the bitter realisation that his own obstinacy had led to an estrangement from a much-loved child.

Thoughts turned to his wives; firstly, the sweet, stoic woman who had withstood the eccentricities of her husband for more than 30 years, then to the flamboyant concubine known as Rose—a woman half his age, whose exotic beauty had inflamed his passion to the extent that he ignored the public ridicule and innuendo their union had sparked. Had he provided for these women and their children fairly? As the shadow of death approached, he hoped his efforts would be enough.

The thoughts trailed off . . . the eyes closed, slowly and finally; the anguish was gone.

Aniceto Lacson—sugar baron, military general and first governor of the Philippines Republic of Negros—was dead.

The sound reached the street swiftly followed by the little girl who had made it—a piercing shriek like a frustrated, angry hawk circling its evasive prey. Neighbours stopped to look as the waif-like figure in her prim white dress appeared, running from the Lacson home. The girl stopped as she emerged from behind the gates, looking up and down the quiet street past the sprawling kalachuchi trees, their fallen blossoms carpeting the ground, to assess her audience. It would do. She squealed again, as if calling her class to order. She wanted their undivided attention to deliver a message: ‘My mother is beating me; somebody help,’ the tiny creature screeched angrily, barely stopping herself from stamping a foot encased in white socks and white sandals.

But this was a tantrum, not the plea of a fearful child. Whether her story was true or not, the creased determination on the pixie-like face told the stunned onlookers that her cries were aimed at exacting revenge, not gaining protection. No-one moved. The girl tried again: ‘Somebody please help me; my mother is beating us with a stick. It hurts.’ Still no-one moved. Her show wasn’t convincing; she would have to move on to find a more sympathetic crowd.

It ended there. Another figure, that of a skinny teenage boy, slipped out from behind the same gate, clearly under orders to retrieve the little rebel before she caused too much trouble. The boy snatched up the protesting child and disappeared back into the house. The angry screams, now more like those of a howling seagull that had lost a tussle over stale breadcrumbs, slowly receded.

The street again assumed its tranquil demeanour.

Seven-year-old Rosemarie Lacson—granddaughter of the late Aniceto Lacson—may have failed to convince the neighbours of her terrible plight inside the white stone walls, but it would be the last beating she would get from her mother. Amparo Lacson would not risk the merest whiff of a scandal, not in Bacolod with its bilious small-town talk. She had a social position to protect; the family’s name, already pushed and pulled by rivalry and jealousy, had to be protected. The guava branch and leather belt—symbols of this authoritarian matriarch—were put away for good. Rosemarie, dark eyes gleaming in triumph, had won an important victory.

The year 1955 was drawing to a close, and the mood in Bacolod was happy and relaxed; the citizens were still reflecting on their annual charter celebration—the Masskara Festival, festival of smiling masks. It was always held in the third weekend of October to showcase the legendary happy disposition of the people of Negros, one of 7107 tropical islands which make up the country known as the Philippines. The festival was a joyous, carefree occasion where the rich feudal sugar barons and their subsistence-level workers, who made up most of the island economy, mingled in the streets, watching masked revellers leaping and dancing to the heady beat of drums.

For Rosemarie it was always a double celebration. The festival preceded her birthday by a few days each year, and the carnival atmosphere would still be lingering in the hot, damp air by the time she opened her presents on 26 October.

But nothing was going to make her happy this year. Not only had she and her large family—she was one of nine children—moved into a detested new house in the middle of the town, but her gentle father, Nicolas, had changed jobs and was managing a timber mill far away in the rugged, mountainous jungles of this island. The mill was eight hours away by car. No longer could she wait at the gate to greet her father as he arrived home each night from the car dealership he had managed in the town. This new job took him away for days at a time.

Instead, the younger members of the family, Rosemarie—nicknamed ‘Day-day’—her brothers, Salvador and George, and little Margaret Rose, were forced to stay inside this new, forbidding house with their mother.

Amparo Lacson was a mystery to Rosemarie. Cold and aloof, she was sterile, like a hospital. She even smelled that way, unnaturally clean with no distinct body aroma other than soap. The house was as cold and clinical as its manager. Amparo ran it like a prison where cleanliness ruled and play was restricted to approved children around the neighbourhood. The parade of housekeepers seemed endless; they were driven out by Amparo’s demands. This was her palace, and appearances were paramount, right down to the stiff, pressed linen. Even the sweeping had to be handled in a specific manner.

In a house of so many children, the size of the daily laundry load was a problem, even without Amparo’s exacting regime. Driven by her phobia about germs, she forced the children to change every time they came into or went out of the house. The dirty clothes mounted during the day. Everything had to be hand-washed, starched, ironed and folded by 6 p.m.

But it was her mother’s coldness which really affected Rosemarie. Amparo was an extremely controlling woman whose first instinct if one of her children hurt themselves was not to comfort them and treat their injuries but to beat them for their stupidity. Salvador limped home one day with a rusted nail sticking out of his right foot. Instead of telephoning for a doctor, Amparo whipped him with a belt. She would never touch or hold her children unless they had just been bathed, and often told the rough-and-tumble Rosemarie that she was disgusting and dirty. If the children ever cried during a beating, Amparo would whip them harder. Rosemarie learned to stop crying.

It was bath time she and her siblings hated most of all. Their mother scrubbed them red raw, as if she believed the dirt from their rough-housing had managed to creep beneath their skin and needed to be rooted out. If Rosemarie was sick or injured, it was her father who would patch up scratched knees and make her feel secure.

Years later, Rosemarie would look back and wonder about the enigma that her mother presented, a woman intent on appearances yet seemingly devoid of the human emotions a large, clannish Filipino family needed to make it function properly. The proud heritage and sheer size of the Lacson family should have welded its members. Instead, they would constantly be at odds with each other.

There were some explanations for Amparo’s distance. She was plagued by nightmares as a result of witnessing her father being stabbed to death when she was a young woman. She was further troubled by a bitter feud with her older sister that would keep them apart for more than twenty years.

Decades later, Rosemarie would defend her mother’s use of beatings, holding them up not as a weakness but as a sign of strong parenting. She would say they had helped to shape her into a strong and independent woman and served her well in later years when times got tough. Others around her would disagree.

Though she adored and was in awe of the men in her family life, like her father and grandfather, it was Rosemarie’s mother who would shape her life and emotional makeup more than anyone. And the psychological consequences were far-reaching.

The one bright point in Rosemarie’s childhood were summer holidays, when Nicolas took his wife and four younger offspring with him to the sawmill town in the mountains. The forest was a paradise for children, with its waterfalls, caves, mountains, rivers, springs and valleys. Here they enjoyed a freedom not only to roam but also to escape their mother’s strict, social rules about the youngsters with whom they could play. In this rural wilderness, away from the prying eyes of the Bacolod wives, Amparo managed to turn a blind eye if they wanted to gambol with the children of mere millworkers.

Prior to 1955, Nicolas Lacson and his wife and their brood had lived happily in a big white house with a green roof—a place of vast expanses of lawn and verandahs designed to catch the river breezes that cooled the evenings in this hot, tropical climate. The nearby river was a focal point for the sprawling household. So, too, were family events on weekends, when the younger children would paddle small boats, or bancas, watch Walt Disney movies or play in the giant sandpit, which usually ended in sibling squabbles and fights.

For a young, gangly tomboy who considered herself to be an ugly duckling, the freedom to roam and the endless supply of playmates was heaven. But little Rosemarie was also dazzled by the lights and social whirl of the Friday night dances her parents often hosted. Even at the age of four she would demand to be allowed to sit on the stairs leading to her bedroom so she could watch her older sister, Lavinia, dance below. Much of the time the determined mite won out against weary elderly relatives, who sighed at her obstinacy and let her stay up till well after her bedtime.

To the impressionable child, the big house, parties and the scores of elegantly attired relatives all fell neatly into the family lore of wealth, privilege and power. The stories were fed like chocolate drops—delicious, sweet anecdotes of how, in 1898, her awe-inspiring grandfather, Aniceto Lacson, had helped command a great revolutionary uprising against Spanish oppressors and establish the Republic of Negros. According to these tantalising tales, the mighty and brilliant general’s reward in victory was not only land and wealth but the political power that comes with respect. He became a champion of republicanism and the first president of the island republic of Negros—a feudal lord who owned the island, body and soul, from its acres of sugar plantations to its production mills and even its workers. Everything he touched turned to gold, yet he also understood the land and loved the soil.

A towering man, he was a king of the hacienda system which flourished on Negros, where rich sugar families, mostly of Spanish ancestry, took care of their people from the cradle to the grave. They fed and clothed them, paid for education and medical treatment; they even served as godparents in this strictly Catholic society. In return, they demanded and received complete subservience from their workforce. Whether it was through love or fear, Aniceto was idolised by the people of his growing empire.

As far as little Rosemarie was concerned, this was better than any fairytale. In her eyes, Aniceto Lacson was a real king and, best of all, she was his granddaughter. Rosemarie’s mind bent and enlarged the bedtimes stories until they became her own illusory memories—fields of waving sugar cane stretching in the bright sunlight as far as the eye could see, broken only by the giant azucareras (sugar mills) or spindly watchtowers from within which security men kept a look out for petty thieves. Her fantasies grew in their detail. Sacadas (fieldworkers) in cool, loose clothes peered from slits beneath broad brims which protected their eyes from the searing sun. They worked in sweltering conditions, spending long, hot days bent at the waist, hacking with razor-sharp machetes at the tough, three-metre-high stalks. Still, they would find time to respectfully raise their hats as Rosemarie and her father inspected their dream kingdom. After harvesting, the raw cane would be loaded onto the backs of steam engines—iron dinosaurs—whose tracks wandered their way through the hectares of cane fields. Once at the mills, the cane was ground through giant rollers to squeeze, drop-by-drop, the precious juice from its strands. The liquid was cooked in cauldrons, then poured into moulds to make molasses. It was an exacting, laborious process. At other times her imagination manufactured scenes in which she, at the age of twelve, would be helping Nicolas negotiate sugar contracts with barons and bankers. It was a fantasy life of magic and promise.

She watched her older sisters, and their dalliances with men, and began to dream of her own adulthood. Rosemarie knew one thing for certain; she wanted to be rich—so rich, she told older brother Norman one day, that she would be able to wear a shirt once and throw it away. Norman, the second oldest, who knew the tales of wealth were an unhealthy façade, dismissed the dreams as silly child talk. But even as a child, Rosemarie Lacson was not someone to be dismissed lightly.

Norman knew the truth. He had lived in both worlds. When he was born, the estates of Aniceto Lacson still existed, though split among family members. He could remember living in a house so big that he and his brothers and sisters could ride their bikes inside. But the house was not owned by his father, and the lands belonged to others. At best, they could describe themselves as middle class. Like most fairytales, there were grains of truth sprinkled among the blossoms of embellishment. And there were also dark, dark family secrets.

When the vast estates of Aniceto Lacson had been divided between his eighteen warring children, culture and religion conspired to ensure that Nicolas Lacson would fare worse than any of his siblings. Above all, Aniceto’s infidelity had considerable legal ramifications. There were eight children by his wife, Rosario Araneta Lacson, with whom he lived on his prized estate, Mata-bang. But Aniceto had fathered another ten children with Rose, the beautiful Magdalena Torres—the mother of Nicolas Lacson.

Magdalena, the daughter of a Spanish lieutenant, was nineteen when Aniceto spied her during a fiesta on the nearby island of Igbaras. He was struck by her dark Spanish beauty, which contrasted so starkly with his small Chinese-Malay wife, Rosario. Aniceto was twice her age, but that made no difference; he wanted this woman for his own. Neither would he be deterred by the fact that she was already married to another man, Ramon Altura. In a daring midnight raid by armed henchmen, Aniceto had her kidnapped and taken back to Negros.

In a bizarre coincidence, some seventy years later, her granddaughter, Rosemarie, would suffer the same fate. Unlike her, the woman known as the ‘Rose of Igbaras’ went willingly. She would never return to her home or her husband but lived as a concubine near Aniceto’s estate for the rest of her life and raised their children. Even with the death of Rosario in 1924, she would never know the social respectability of marriage.

Nicolas was the eldest son of this bastard line—the thirteenth child of the illustrious Aniceto Lacson, a child of the Philippines and Spain. Under Philippines law, Nicolas and his siblings could not inherit when Aniceto died because his parents were not married. To get around this, before his death Aniceto divided one of his newer estates, named Bantud, between Magdalena and her ten children. This would have ensured a secure future for Nicolas but everything came unstuck for him when he announced in 1930 that he wanted to marry his second cousin, Amparo Lacson.

Amparo was a quiet, studious woman who shunned the social life of Bacolod, such as it was, and served as an accountant to her father’s business affairs. No-one really knew how the young couple got together, although a friendship had developed between Nicolas and her younger brother, Arsenio. The proposed union stirred emotions that would have drastic ramifications for the rest of their lives. Both sets of parents were against the marriage. Neither thought the other family was good enough for their child or, more importantly, family lineage. But in a drama worthy of a Shakespearean play, Nicolas defied his father and insisted he would go ahead with the marriage. In a fit of rage Aniceto demanded his son sign a waiver to disinherit himself, effectively forever cutting him off from the last vestiges of any family wealth.

Nicolas and Amparo Lacson were on their own. As the torrential rains of May began to fall, the couple were married by a local parish priest in ceremony held at six o’clock in the morning, rather oddly. In yet another parallel with their daughter’s future misery, no family from either side attended the wedding.

Less than a year later, Aniceto lay dying in his hacienda, Cadiz, at the northernmost tip of Negros. When he died on 3 February 1931, his once vast fortune also died.

Seventeen years later, Nicolas and Amparo added yet another child to Don Aniceto Lacson’s considerable blood-line. Rosario Magdalena Teresita Lacson, or Rosemarie, came into the world, an 8 lb bundle of black curls—the result of an unplanned pregnancy and named after her paternal grandfather’s wife and mistress.

The tiny plane rocked violently, threatening to plummet as the lightning ripped through the dark purple sky. The man at the controls of the tiny single-engine Auster Aristocrat fought to hold his fears in check. The gritty 43-year-old prospector knew he had to get clear of the vortex if he was to survive the fury of the desert storm which raged around him. The physical and mental effort did not permit Lang Hancock time for the slightest reflection on his foolhardy decision to risk the weather forecast and make this aerial dash from the white asbestos mine at Nunyerry, in the Hamersley Ranges of Western Australia’s vast interior, to the coastal capital of Perth, just as the annual wet season peaked in November 1952.

Hancock dipped the plane’s nose lower, trying to ignore the rain rattling on the flimsy windshield and the shrieking wind which threatened to rip off the doors, tear him from his seat and fling his body into the outside turmoil. He had to get as low to the ground as possible. His flimsy plane did not have the power to climb through the clouds and get above the storm. Besides, he was only trained to fly by sight—not blindly, using the instruments on the panel in front of him. Taking off had already been enough of a risk, though it was his only option if he wanted to avoid being trapped by floodwaters for the next two months.

Hancock could see the Turner River below, water sparkling courtesy of the shafts of bright sunlight which pierced through the menacing clouds above and behind him. The river gorge would offer an escape path from the storm. The water grew closer as the plane dropped towards the ochre earth below with its dotted outcrops of stumpy grey trees. The landscape in this harshest of terrains was forbidding. The colour of the flat ground contrasted sharply with the brilliant reddish tones of the giant cliff faces which forced the river to snake its way slowly to the coast beyond the horizon. The difference struck Hancock as an optical illusion, but as he zoomed into the river valley and levelled out the plane, Hancock realised what he had just seen—iron ore, masses of it, embedded in the cliffs above the Turner River.

Hancock’s mind raced. Years of prospecting by air—a skill he had developed in order to cover the stupendous scale of the outback he surveyed—had taught him to recognise the characteristics that surrounded various mineral deposits. This could be spectacular; he could be wrong, and only proper analysis would confirm what he saw, but the gorge walls appeared to be made of solid iron.

He made a mental note of the hidden treasure trove. After the wet season he would return to realise the discovery of a lifetime—a vein of iron three times the official size of Australia’s total reserves, and purer than the ore used to power the giant steel furnaces of the United States. It was to mean riches beyond his dreams.

As he followed the river out of the path of the storm, it dawned on Hancock just how close he had come to death. To his left, Hope, his wife of six years, sat silently. In the race against the storm and the excitement of his discovery, Hancock had forgotten she was there. His grim features softened. They were soulmates, blooded to the harsh lands of the Pilbara, where both grew up as children of pastoralists. He wanted a future with this woman, and that meant a family. Just over a year later—on 9 February, 1954—their daughter, Georgina Hope Hancock, would be born.

As Lang Hancock was mapping his discovery in the Western Australia winter of 1953, a tousle-haired youngster in the Philippines was eagerly preparing for her first day at school. Rosemarie Lacson could hardly wait. The days had been lonely since Salvador, who was three years older, had started school, leaving her only her baby brother, George, to play with. Her mother would not let her play with the children of the fieldworkers who roamed the riverbanks near the house.

At the Casanova School it would be different. Not only would she have Sal to play with again but she would be allowed to make lots of new friends among the children of the city’s old families that her mother kept talking about. Rose loved her new surroundings, particularly her teacher, Miss Koroning, who would seat the class around the piano and teach them English through simple songs like ‘Farmer in the Dell’. At first, the lyrics meant nothing amid the confusion of translating Spanish as well as the local Visayan dialect, which most of the children spoke.

And then there was Aunt ‘Choleng’, her mother’s elder sister, who helped found the tiny school when the Japanese occupied the Philippines during World War II. Soledad ‘Choleng’ Lacson-Locsin was subsequently given the licence to run the school after the US liberation in 1946, two years before Rosemarie was born. It was re-established in the heart of Bacolod, inside the Capitol subdivision, and English was taught as the first language and Spanish as the second. The local dialects did not feature on the curriculum, which was adopted from the Calvert School in Baltimore.

For an inquisitive child, the Lacson household was a place of mystery and secrets. As much as the adults spoke grandly of heritage, pride and wealth, they were also hushed and angry when questioned innocently about family relationships and unexplained changes in visiting habits.

Rosemarie could not understand, for example, why weekend visits to the home of Aunt ‘Choleng’ and her husband, Aurelio Locsin, who was editor of El Civismo, a Spanish language newspaper published in Negros, suddenly stopped when she was six. Her parents never gave reasons, but the mere mention of their names was banned, and she was not allowed to mix with her cousins. The feud between the two sisters lasted for more than twenty years. It would later be clear that the rift, like everything else in a family dominated by pretence and petty jealousies, was to do with money and status. And the person most implicated—the one whose demands for attention always seemed to be over-whelming—was Amparo Lacson. Rosemarie’s days at Casanova became