Sharon Cuneta Philippine Tatler

The Philippine Tatler

Far from the Madding Crowd
It’s an elegant home. Finished by the architect Ramon Antonio in 2005, the modern structure leans towards minimalism and is ruled by neutrals. Wall to-wall and ceiling-to-floor of beiges, ecrus and off-whites are broken in spurts and flashes by oranges from a Malang painting, dull teal in a striped sofa and dark browns of chair legs and wooden tables. A few big pieces of furniture from Paris, where eldest daughter Kristina Cassandra, or KC, studies, are conversation pieces: the sunburst frame of rays and cherubs in matte gold at the foyer, and the long antique dining table in ivory finish with fleur-de-lis carved on its four corners. Well-selected paintings by modern and old masters provide interesting accents, including a collection of ancient lambskin parchments inscribed with notes of a Latin hymn, all framed and filling up the wall behind the grand staircase leading up to the second floor. There is no life-size painting or photograph, thank god, of the star in residence, not on the ground floor at least.

Is her home a rebellious statement against the glitter of her celebrity world? Or is it a conscious effort to separate make-believe from reality? Psycho-analyse or romanticise away, but the explanation may not be as complicated: Sharon is, simply, as clean, as structured and as orderly a person as her home.

A couple of hours before a scheduled audio-taping for a commercial, Sharon sits for this interview. She is already dressed to go out in a beige top over black pants and shod in black Havaianas. Her hair is tied back in a short pony-tail and her face has no makeup. “This is how I dress up every day even when I am going somewhere,” she says, as though there was a need to explain such un-celebrity manner. “But I enjoy getting dolled up for pictorials, like fantasy dressing.”

Without her saying it, Sharon has verbalised that she has no problem divorcing her celebrity status from her real persona. She admits it when asked. “Since I was young I have known which was real and which was not. I have always prepared for the eventuality that all this fame will be gone.”

But not for now. In January this year, when Sharon turned 40, she reaffirmed her status at the top after a long hiatus due to a difficult pregnancy with her youngest, Marielle Daniela Sophia or Miel, now a precocious two-year-old. In contrast, she hosted her weekly television show till her ninth month of pregnancy with her second daughter, Simoun Francesca Emmanuelle or Frankie.

Sharon celebrated her birthday with the launch of an album,Isn’t It Romantic, which is going on its platinum record now, or selling a million pieces in the record stores. She revived her weekly television show, Sharon, with a new format, an Oprah-like talk show but with the host rendering a few songs of course. And she has not one but four movies lined up for production next year.

For her personal development, she has enrolled in an Associate Arts course at the University of the Philippines’ Open University. This is a distance learning program where Sharon takes her courses via the Internet, except when taking her exams where physical presence is required.

OBSESSIVELY ORGANISED
When Sharon came down to sit with us in this anteroom, she was carrying two books, a planner and a pouch that resembles a makeup kit but which reveals as many pens as it can carry, in all the colours of the rainbow.”I have two pouches like this,” she says. “I am a list-person, you see. I like to list down everything. It lowers my stress level, I think.”

She has two more of her planners brought down and each one is, indeed, filled to the edges with her writings. In her daily organiser, she lists things to do, things to remember. Her Christian planner is for beautiful passages from the Bible or from inspirational books. And another notebook is for all the beautiful text messages from friends and fans alike. “I like to read them especially when I am feeling sad or am low on encouragement. They lift up my spirits,” she says.

Sharon has a beautiful penmanship. As such, her notebooks are visual delights with paragraphs alternating in various colours. Like a baroque artist, she leaves no space unfilled. “I feel bad when my hand and wrist begin to ache and I can’t write anymore even as my mind still wants to,” she says.

“Even my chequebook is filled with different colours - green for deposits, red for withdrawals, and so on,” she adds. “I could really be OC [obsessive compulsive] with certain things.” Expectedly, she is very particular about pens. She is always on the lookout for the fine points that she prefers; her current favourite being a sign pen that comes in many colours but which, however, she gets only in Bangkok.

“When I was about nine or 10 and Daddy was mayor, he would regularly get book donations from the United States and whenever they arrive, I would just spend the days reading everything I could,” she recalIs.”My mother would frantically look for me and I would be found squat on the floor and reading in our library which was in a secluded part of the house.” She says she really gets very upset if someone borrows a book or a magazine and loses it.

Her current obsession is wrapping all her books in plastic. At the studio of the photographer Jun de Leon the next day for her pictorial, Sharon talked away while the stylist Fanny Serrano began doing her makeup, all the while neatly covering a book that she just bought. When she was asked to keep still as Serrano was already going to do her eyes, the star put away her book, took out her iPod, dutifully closed her eyes and started listening to an audio-book about Donald Trump. “I have two iPods,”she says, “one is for music and the other is for audio-books.”

She could be as obsessed with another passion: baking. “I am so secretive of my recipes,” Sharon says. She has been collecting these and some are about 20 years old. She says her carrot cake, turtle cake and banana bread are her best in the bakery department, while roast beef and pasta are the favourites of family and friends in the cooking department.

Recipes, magazines, books, journals, mementoes, odds and ends - Sharon has a hard time throwing these, and many other things, away. “I am a very sentimental person maybe,” she says.” And I am also always scared of needing something and not having it.”

GREATLY GROUNDED
Sharon credits her parents with keeping her head on her shoulders and her feet on the ground. She was born into the parallel worlds of politics and entertainment; anybody with a weaker foundation would have easily lost a grasp of reality. But her father, the late Pablo Cuneta, who served the city of Pasay as mayor for 41 years until he retired in 1998, constantly reminded her of his humble beginnings. “He would always tell me how he had only one pair of shoes and in order to keep it good and usable, he would go to school every other day in slippers,” she says. Mayor Cuneta died in 2000.

Her mother Elaine Gamboa, on the other hand, would also keep her in check with down-to-earth remarks. Sharon recalls, “Once she told me, ‘What is this X-factor they keep saying? Is this what you have and why you are such a big celebrity? There are others who are more beautiful, who can sing and act better. But you are such a bigger star than all of them. Maybe you really have this X-factor.’”

Her life has always been an open book, and itself a good plot for a movie. Daughter of a powerful and rich father, a celebrity singer at 12, a mega star in her teens, married at 19 and separated at 21 with one child, and remarried at 32 - the story has been told and retold. And in each retelling, the common perception that seems to form is that she is a rich girl who got everything the easy way.

“Nothing could be farther from the truth,” Sharon says. “I think I even had to work twice as hard as most aspiring singers at the start as I had to prove more and convince my detractors that they are wrong.”

When her first marriage failed, Sharon worked hard again to prove to her parents this time that she can survive and take care of her daughter from that first marriage. “Remember, they did not like my first husband very much. So they were proved right. I could not go home, even if they were asking me to, and live off their generosity,” she says. Only after eight years of living on her own and taking care of KC all by herself did Sharon go back to live with her parents, her pride intact, She has raised her daughter very well up to this time and has proved to her parents that she could stand up from a mistake.

Such strength of character must have been moulded in her growing-up years when values like hard work and sharing were taught her through both words and deeds.

“My parents were unbelievably generous,” Sharon says. “I cannot recall any calamity or occasion when my parents did not take care of the needs of our people.”There would always be a perennial assembly-line in our house for packing donated goods and I would always join.”

She believes that charity work is in their blood, especially that of her mother. “Imagine, she would give away foods and medicines even in Baguio where we had a summer house. If she had political motives, what purpose would charity work serve in Baguio? My parents had no political ties or interests over there and yet they would be as generous.”

Then she relates one experience she can never forget that really proved to her how great her father was. On location outside Manila, she was approached by a simply clad man maybe in his mid-fifties. The man said he mustered all his nerve to approach her and tell her of how her father saved his life. The man used to live in Pasay City. One day, his house was being repossessed by the bank for failure to pay his loan. That would put him and his family of four out into the streets. He went to the Pasay City Hall, got an audience with Mayor Cuneta, explained his problem and showed his papers. The mayor did not personally know him but had the papers checked by the legal department. When Mayor Cuneta saw that the man was telling the truth, he paid off the entire loan out of his own pocket and gave the title to the man.

“I’ve never heard this story before,” Sharon says, “and maybe my father had even forgotten all about it. But here was one family he saved. When I got home, I immediately went inside his room and embraced him.”

NATURALLY NICE
Many times during the interview at her home, Sharon would say “thank you” to her help or her secretary Penny whenever they would come and bring her something. During her pictorial at the studio, she would often stop to greet a staff of de Leon or of Serrano by their first names. The photographer and the stylist are known to be the only ones Sharon is comfortable working with. This has been true through all these years and so, the star has become very familiar with the retinue that came along.

“It’s so much easier to be pleasant,” she says. Sharon admits that she is, by nature, very friendly even as she does not give her trust to people immediately. But this friendliness or this trust has been compromised and abused so many times that she had also learnt to be wary of people. These unpleasant experiences have etched deep scars that now she has to take care that her heart doesn’t harden too much. “The hardest thing is to keep myself from being cynical,” she says. “I might miss someone who is a diamond.”

PRECISE PLANNER
Apart from being an award-winning actress, she is also a top singing star, a highly rated television host. She cannot, however, pick one skill over another. “They are like seasons for me. There are times when I have a lot of singing projects, then times when I have a lot of movies to do. TV hosting, in fact, is like my rest,” she says.

Even Sharon did not expect to last long in show business. “I thought I would be retiring by the time I reached 30,” she says. But at 31, she scored a grand slam of four movie awards for her role in Madrasta. When she had to join her husband in Boston in 1997-98 as he was enrolled the John F Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University, it broke her heart to leave an 11-year-old television” and a father who was sick. She thought she would already be forgotten by her public but while away, all her commercials began showing that it seemed like she did not leave at all. And when she made a comeback at 40 after lying low to raise her third daughter, she was immediately given weekly television show.

“Everything is by the hand of God,” she says. “He has taken me this far.”

Though she surrenders to God’s will, Sharon is, however, far from exhibiting blind faith and relying on God for everything. “I am the type who has not just a plan B but a plan C as well. I always have a fallback position,” she says.

Such a fallback she makes sure she has especially when she bids goodbye to show business. “I have prepared for a life out of show business ever since I was in my teens. The words of my father still ring in my ears, ‘Nothing lasts forever,’” she says.

This attitude plus the fact that Sharon is genuinely happy being alone make her all the more prepared to shed off her celebrity status when the time comes. “I do not mind attention,” she admits, “but I do not hunger for it.”

Her only wish is for her exit from show business to be by choice, not by consequence. “I would like to be able to get out before they shoo me out.”

Well, Sharon need not worry about that. Nobody seems to be shooing her out; everybody seems to be shooing her in.