Who is Katy de la Cruz, dubbed as the 'Queen of Bodabil and Jazz'?

Owning the stage for several decades, bodabil and jazz queen Katy de la Cruz also influenced the change in the bias against women, making her an icon of the modern feminist Filipina

Bodabil was introduced in the Philippines by American and European travelling vaudeville troupes in the early 20th century. The variety show that presented classic and contemporary American songs and dances, magic numbers, circus acts with or without animals, and comedy skits patterned after their American originals initially served as a powerful (because pleasurable) instrument for the Americanisation of the Filipino heart and mind. But like the komedya, sinakulo, sarsuwela, and other dramatic forms introduced into the country under Spanish rule, the bodabil inevitably indigenised. More creatively, it provided some Filipino artists with a progressive worldview and value system that allowed them to transform some long-held, albeit regressive, beliefs of Filipino society.

Above Katy in her teens

One such artist was Katy de la Cruz, acknowledged in her time as the Queen of Jazz and, later, Queen of Bodabil. By internalising bodabil’s modern temper, Katy quietly challenged the traditional beliefs of her time, especially concepts of the “ideal” woman. By retooling American ditties and singing original Filipino songs, she gave bodabil an inflexion that was feminist and Filipino.

Born on February 13, 1907, Katy was baptised Catalina Mangahas de la Cruz, the daughter of church singer Juan de la Cruz and pasyon-chanter Infanta Mangahas. According to Katy, she was small, short and dreamy-eyed like the statue of Cupid her mother loved so much, at the garden of the Intendencia in Intramuros, where her father worked as concierge. She spent her childhood in the Walled City and, by age 7, was learning how to sing American songs by listening to the records their neighbour played on the Victrola phonograph. She performed in plazas during fiestas, and was earning about five pesos a day, a significant addition to the family budget when her father earned only 30 pesos monthly. These earnings also helped convince her father not to force her to attend school, which she hated (she flunked first grade three times), and instead, allow her cousin to coach her on the English lyrics of American songs.

Above She wowed Filipinos and foreigners alike with her striking looks and performances

Sometime in 1916, the American businessman Harry Brown heard Katy perform. He was so impressed by the girl’s talent and personality that he offered her a job at the prestigious Cine Lux, to sing and dance during the intermissions while films were being rewound. The nine-year-old Katy performed songs and dances, and as the youngest performer, she earned 25 pesos a month for two daily performances—at 3 pm and at 9 pm.

When she turned ten, Katy was invited by performer and impresario Sunday Reantaso to the Cine Savoy, a major bodabil theatre in Manila. She spent her teenage years performing more American hits as well as dressing up and looking like a grown-up by smearing her lips with red papel de hapon, defining her eyebrows with a piece of burnt cork, and applying melted crayon to her eyelashes to achieve that wide-eyed Greta Garbo look that was the rage in America.

Katy became one of the respected professionals in bodabil. She was known as the local Sophie Tucker because she scatted like Tucker and came on as a “red hot mamma”. By 1925, Katy was at the peak of her career, a pert and pretty torch singer earning 150 pesos a week at a time when a house rented only for 30 pesos a month.

Above Katy de la Cruz

At the Savoy, she was wooed by the pianist who accompanied her, Jose “Peping” Yoingco. Katy’s parents objected to the match, but when she turned 18, she eloped with Peping after her last show.

Because she was already a big name in bodabil, radio stations invited her to have her own radio programme. Through radio, Katy reached more audiences but she struggled with the medium because she was used to interacting with a live audience, watching their mood and reacting accordingly. After this stint on the radio, Paramount invited Katy to perform in hotels in Hong Kong, Singapore and other Asian countries for nine months.

In the 1930s, Katy’s name had become a byword around the American communities in colonial Manila. Businessman Walter Robb gushed over Katy: “Catalina de la Cruz, her name, five feet the height, one hundred and five buxom pounds the weight, dark olive the skin, hell’s embers the eyes, Bulacan the blood—and that will be enough, thank you, served hot.” Katy appreciated these compliments, which she considered sincere. In 1966, she told the writer Jean Pope, “When people liked you, you were made. When they loved you, they showed it. Nobody looked down on stage personalities. You felt flattered and honoured when men sent flowers to your dressing room. You knew then that they were only showing their approval instead of angling for a date. When your name went up in lights, it was because people liked you, not because some producer gave you his illicit support.”

By internalising bodabil's modern temper, Katy quietly challenged the traditional beliefs of her time, especially concepts of the "ideal" woman

- Nicanor G Tiongson -

After the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in 1942, filmmaking stopped because the Japanese forbade the importation of film stock and other products from the US. This started a golden period for theatre, specifically the stage show, so Katy continued performing on stage throughout the Japanese Occupation. This was interrupted when she had to bring her husband to Bulacan to recuperate.

For Katy, the post-war years were “years of dejection”. She had a feeling the public was weary of her singing, while the producers gave top pay and billing to white artists because the public allegedly preferred them to Filipino artists. Just the same Katy could not afford to quit; she had a family to feed (by then she was estranged from her husband.) She first appeared in the stage show sponsored by the Fil Amerikana of Misses Murphy and Gregory, and later, for the United Stage Artists of Poncho de los Reyes and Lamberto Avellana. To augment her income, Katy joined Pugo and Togo in Palaris productions of Fernando Poe. But again, her stint in film was interrupted, this time by a contract which invited her and Pugo and Togo to do a series of performances in Honolulu.

Above The Queen of Jazz and Bodabil Queen

In one of these performances, the president of Honolulu’s Royal Amusements, Herman Rosen, saw Katy perform and asked her to audition before Mr Matsuo, the Japanese owner of the Waikiki Lau Yee Chai nightclub. Katy and Matsuo did not like each other at the start; she had sworn she would spit in the face of the first Japanese she met after the war; but he hired her for 125 dollars a night anyway. The enmity turned to friendship after Matsuo saw what Katy could deliver on the stage. Her original contract of three weeks was extended to 20 weeks.

The bandleader Harry Owens also noticed Katy and invited her to San Francisco to sing at the Forbidden City nightclub of Charlie Low. She was billed as Katy Lee from China, all made-up and wearing a gorgeous gown adorned with a band of cattleyas. In all her performances, Katy, who was also called “the exotic brunette beauty and the torch singer of the blues,” was always requested to sing two Philippine songs, Planting Rice and Balut. Eventually, she decided to introduce her real self: Katy de la Cruz, a Filipina, to her American fans. They loved her as well. She cried when she realised how much easier it was to be appreciated in a foreign country than in one’s own.

Two years later, Katy returned to Manila and started performing at the Clover, now with an added lustre to her name because she had been acclaimed as a singer in the US. The pay was good, but she was unhappy with the new crowd that was so hard to please, “so fickle, so demanding, so quick to exhibit displeasure”.

You don't even have to sing. You just have to stand there to make people notice you

- Sammy Davis, Jr -

But even while she worked for the local stage and film, Katy readily accepted offers to perform abroad. The biggest contract came in 1961 when Katy was asked to grace The Steve Parker Show in the Las Vegas Dunes Hotel. American showbiz celebrities watched the show and applauded Katy. Sammy Davis, Jr kissed her hand and said, “You don’t even have to sing. You just have to stand there to make people notice you;” while Nat King Cole told her, “When you sing, you own the world.”

By the late 1960s, the stage show as such was in the final stage of a period of decline with the spread of movies that could talk and sing in the 1930s and worsened when more films, local and foreign, inundated the theatres of Manila in the 1950s. Hastening the decline was the rise of a new medium of mass communication, television, which stole the few remaining devotees of the stage show.

But even as the lights went off on the stage shows one by one, enduring artists like Katy de la Cruz were not quite ready to retire. In 1966, 59-year-old Katy, was still full of laughter, good faith, and an overwhelming desire to work, and so she worked, but in another medium, film. The stage show, as she knew it, was gone, with many of its artists either already dead or retired or performing in film, radio, and television. Lamenting, but also accepting, the demise of the show that was her life, Katy quietly retired and joined her children who had migrated to the US earlier.

Above Katy with bosom buddies Pugo and Togo

The memories of the Queen of Bodabil lingered for many more years among those who had seen her scintillating performances. She was recognised with lifetime achievement awards from the Ten Outstanding Women in the Nation’s Service (TOWNS) in 1961, the Lou Salvador Sr Memorial Award from the FAMAS in 1977, and the Tandang Sora award in 1975. She graciously agreed to participate and perform in two productions that tried to revive the bodabil or stage show namely, Bata Pa si Sabel, directed by Raul Silos at the Rizal Theater in 1975, and Bodabil at Iba Pa, directed by Behn Cervantes for the Metropolitan Theater in 1989.

Perhaps the most meaningful tribute to Katy’s extraordinary life and achievements was the staging of Jose Javier Reyes’ musical, Katy, the Musical!, with music by Ryan Cayabyab and direction by Nestor Torre Jr, in 1988 at the Rizal Theater. The musical traced Katy’s eventful life, from her Intramuros childhood to her salad days as Queen of Bodabil, with Banig and Mitch Valdes portraying the young and mature Katy, respectively. Katy came home for the tribute and, after the show, stood on stage—body straight as a rod, elegant in a gown and snow-white hair—to thank the artists for remembering her and her contributions to bodabil. Katy died on November 10, 2004, in San Francisco, California but the paeans continued. In 2013, she was honoured by another production of Katy, with Isay Alvarez in the eponymous role.

No one can deny that bodabil and stage show served as catalysts for the rapid spread of American culture among Filipino urban audiences. In fact, the compliment “plakang-plaka” or sounding exactly like the recorded song, meant a job well done.

Above Poster for Katy, 2013

Katy, however, was one bodabil artist who went beyond mimicry and appropriated the foreign to transform the local. This process is seen in what she did to these three songs.

In I Don’t Know Why I Love You Like I Do (Fred Ahlert and Roy Turk, 1931), a woman asks why her man no longer wants her “romancing” and touches her only when they are dancing. Into this basic situation, Katy attached a Tagalog narrative. The woman suspects her husband having an affair with another woman named Pacing. When he comes home very late without the banana he promised to bring her, she suspects that he passed by Pacing’s house again, and left there the banana intended for her. The sexual innuendos in Katy’s version were not lost on the audience, and neither was the woman’s bold expression of her sexual desire.

In A Tear Fell (Burton and Randolph, 1956), Katy’s narrative in Tagalog uses an older woman advising a younger one why her man lost his interest in her—because the younger one has already given him her virginity; that it would have been better had she remained a spinster just hugging a pillow at night. Yet, in a sudden turn around the older lady advises the young one to forget virginity because it is more important for a woman to enjoy the pleasures of sex. The song questions the obsession with virginity per se and endorses sexual satisfaction, not repression, for all women.

Above Portrait of Katy by Patrick de Koenigswarter, 1987

Balut (singer and composer Jerry Brandy, 1930) is about an ambulant female vendor selling balut, the fertilised but unhatched duck egg. She speaks of the benefits of this wonder egg, including giving strength to your knees (“pampalakas ng tuhod”). Katy turned the original phrase into “pampatigas ng...tuhod”, meaning it will give stiffness to your...knees. With her naughty winks and pregnant pauses, Katy insinuated that the balut is an aphrodisiac. The delightful ditty became her signature song.

Katy will always be remembered for her contribution to the Philippine stage and for helping change the bias against women. The modernity in her songs directly contradicts the traditional concepts of women, facilitating the gradual liberation of women from the moral standards created by a male-dominated society. Through the transformative worldview and values that bodabil introduced and the feminism engendered by these, Katy and her songs have contributed to the definition of the new Filipino that she embodied—modern, feminist and, unmistakably, Filipino.

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