Cover Loida Nicolas Lewis, at the maiden launch of her book Why Should Guys Have All the Fun?
Loida Nicolas Lewis, at the maiden launch of her book Why Should Guys Have All the Fun?
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Finally! Loida Nicolas Lewis has finished her memoirs, albeit a delay of two decades spent promoting her husband’s book
Katherine Meyer Graham (1917-2001), publisher of the family-owned The Washington Post, wrote her autobiography when she turned 75. One of the many whom she inspired was then 60-year-old Loida Nicolas Lewis, who made it a personal goal to do the same 15 years hence. The 75th birthday, however, came around but nothing happened.
For the past 25 years, Loida spent the time going everywhere promoting Why Should All the White Guys Have All the Fun? (How Reginald Lewis Created a Billion Dollar Business Empire), the autobiography of her husband Reginald F Lewis who died in 1993 without finishing it, leaving the task to his widow.
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Above Loida with the Nicolas family
Above Loida with former president Barack Obama
Loida with the Nicolas family
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“The book is a best-seller,” Loida tells Tatler at her well-appointed apartment in Manhattan’s Upper Eastside. It has seen several interpretations pocketbook, e-book, audiobook—and though she does not present her invaluable efforts to get her husband’s book to where it is now, the success of Reginald’s book is clearly to the credit of Loida’s great marketing skill. This same asset served her well when it was her turn.
In December 2022, Loida marked her 80th birthday. At the start of that year, she decided it was time to finish her book, which had been on the back burner for 25 years while she attended to her husband’s book. So, she called up the writer and friend Blair Walker. “Blair, help me with my book. You know one-third of my story. Help me with the parts before I met Mr Lewis and after Mr Lewis died.”
And another very important call she had to make. “I did not even have to get a literary agent. I called up Wiley, the publisher of Why Should All the White Guys Have All the Fun? in 1995. I told them that they made my husband’s book a best-seller so now, they can do the same with my book,” she says, recalling the sales Reginald’s book had made, to date. “There were 50,000 who bought his book. So, why can I not tap into that?”
Above Blair Walker, a friend who helped write
both Reginald’s and Loida’s books, joins the latter at the book signing in Barnes & Noble Tribeca
Blair Walker, a friend who helped write both Reginald’s and Loida’s books, joins the latter at the book signing in Barnes & Noble Tribeca
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The publisher agreed, paid her an advance, and gave her a deadline of August, just five months away, to finish so that it could be out in the market by March 2023, Women’s History Month. “I stayed in Easthampton for two months just to write, write, write,” she shares, introducing to the conversation her house by the beach in The Hamptons. Finally, on March 28, 2023, at the Barnes & Noble in Tribeca, Loida’s 200-page autobiography was launched.
This lawyer and philanthropist, a pillar of the Asian-American community in New York, chose the chronological approach for her book because “it’s easier to remember events this way”.
The author cannot pick a most memorable part or a most enjoyable one to write. “As I wrote it, I lived it. It’s very much my voice,” she says. “I had fun writing all of it.” One memory, however, would always make her tear up. “It’s when my husband died,” she mentions. Even when everything was finished, and the book ready to launch, she reread the part and “I cried again”.
A bit of a discussion happened regarding the title, subtitle and the design of the dust jacket. “The first suggestion for the title went something like From Mrs Lewis to CEO. Now, who would want to read that?” Loida says. In a brilliant move, she chose to tweak the title of her husband’s book into Why Should Guys Have All the Fun?, organically adding positive marketing concepts like recall and fun. The book also carries the subtitle “An Asian American Story of Love, Marriage, Motherhood, and Running a Billion Dollar Empire”, to which Walker commented:
“Aren’t you limiting yourself to just the Asian-Americans?” This first Filipina to pass the New York bar without attending a law school in the United States gave her defence: “Especially with cases of Asian hate, I want people to know that an Asian-American has the same life story, tragedies and trials, disappointments, regrets, failures, and successes. We are as American as they are. So, keep the ‘Asian-American’ there.”
Above A portrait of the Lewis family taken in 1991;
A portrait of the Lewis family taken in 1991;
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For the photo on the book’s dust jacket, Loida suggested one with Reginald’s portrait behind her “because my marriage determined the trajectory my life would take”.
This time, she allowed herself to be overruled. So, the old photo of herself and her husband is with her beautiful shoulder shot but smaller, like an inset, with a Sampaguita twig on its upper right-hand corner. After the March launch of Why Should Guys Have All the Fun?, Loida’s calendar easily filled up with book tours arranged by her able assistant, niece Lora Nicolas Olaes, PR assistant Carissa Villacorta and Rocio Nuyda who organises the California tours. From May to October this year, 20 cities in the US, Canada and Europe were scheduled. The book is in all the New York bookstores, and available on Amazon Global. Loida doesn’t have the complete data of sales yet because a lot of booksellers are going straight to the publisher. But the fact that the book hit its third printing just three months after its launch is proof enough of its early success.
Lightly made-up and simply dressed in a tribal-inspired blazer, Loida does not look a year over 80 at all. “Six hours of sleep and power naps! That’s her secret!” Olaes shares.
“I weigh myself every day and I walk 4,000 steps going to church every day. You really have to do something otherwise your bones will atrophy,” Loida adds. She is still very much into her advocacies, a favourite of course is her school in her hometown Sorsogon, which she describes as the “cheapest but best private school in the city”. Loida says that most of their graduates have found employment in the fields of education and IT, the school’s strong suit. In New York, she had let go of several chairmanships except that of the Children’s Orchestra Society.
Over a healthy lunch, Loida finished a huge salad, an entire pompano and dessert. “I don’t eat rice anymore but I still eat bread,” Loida offers. What’s on her plate going forward are two campaigns. The first is to lobby at the US Congress to allocate funds for the Amerasians who will be born to Filipino mothers by US servicemen.
“The Philippines and Japan were eliminated from the Amerasian Act which allows anyone who can prove paternal parentage by an American from any of the US bases to become US citizens because we both did not fight with them during the Vietnam War,” Loida says. Now that the EDCA (Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement) has been renewed by Presidents Biden and Marcos, there will be nine bases in the Philippines. She extends her influence to the Philippines for her second campaign: to lobby for the prevention of the contract of Malampaya, set to expire early next year, from going back to the private sector. “The Philippine government should nullify that contract and take over,” she strongly believes.
From all indications, there is no slowing down for Loida. One really wonders where all that energy is coming from. Of course, this grandmother of five from two daughters would easily suggest it could come, too, from her one-a-day malunggay oil, a modern concoction of the traditional cure of malunggay oil plus coconut oil for fever in the poor households of Sorsogon. Loida may have reached the top, with her name known far and wide, but she will always go back to Chapter 1 of Why Should Guys Have All the Fun? and be, as its title reads, “The Girl from Sorsogon”.
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A journalist of more than 30 years, Chit has had varied exposures in this field, both in hard news as well as in soft news, and brings everything she has learnt to the production of the magazine. When not writing or editing, Chit is deeply involved in her chosen service organisation, Rotary International.
