Daniel “Danny” Vazquez, businessman, real estate developer and onetime physician, personified the elegance, urbanity and decorum characteristic of Manila’s old rich.
In a rare interview granted a week before he died of cardiac failure, the 93-year-old demonstrated ultimate gallantry. Asked what he considered his one outstanding achievement, he replied, “I don’t think I made a single enemy except …”
He proceeded to name a former occupant of one of the Vazquezes’ homes. The legal battle with said occupant and a few other court cases had been widely written about, given his social status. On the day of our meeting, however, he sounded as if he had put everything behind him, including all manner of blame.
Vazquez was more often associated with Molito Lifestyle Center in Alabang, Muntinlupa, than with another of his known real-estate assets, Everest Hills Memorial Park in Tunasan, in the same city. Over lunch in his apartment, he was so charming and engaging that we quickly got past the slurred speech and the randomness of stories juggled from his memory.
We tried to steer the conversation toward his upbringing in an environment of utmost civility, but he preferred to reminisce on fragments of social history. It was quite challenging. There were lapses in the details of his medical education/career and his life in the United States. Pressed for specifics and chronology, he hit a blank wall.
In any case, the story ended up sounding as friendly as it was private, an unguarded conversation with one of Manila’s very few remaining aristocrats.
Crème de la crème
Vazquez said he had been privileged with a patrician upbringing. He was born on May 12, 1927, to Dr. Antonio Daniel Vazquez, a dashing general surgeon who was also a businessman and one of President Manuel Quezon’s closest friends, and the genteel Carmen Earnshaw, a former member of the Board of Censors. He was christened Daniel Isidro Labrador; his older brother, Luis Cosme. They lived in that era when Spanish was the language spoken in elite households.
The Vazquez home stood on Malate’s millionaires’ row. It was built by Fernando Hizon Ocampo, considered the father of modern architecture in the Philippines. A street traversing two barangays would be named after the patriarch decades later: A. Vasquez. (Vazquez is spelled with a double “z.”)
Antonio and Carmen circulated with the crème de la crème. Carmen was close to the Ortigas family. Her best friend was philanthropist Mercedes Zobel McMicking, whose husband Joseph was a managing partner of Ayala Corp. after the war. The McMickings established Ayala Foundation Inc. and Ayala Museum.
On top of his involvement in several businesses, Antonio was surgeon general of the army and head of surgery of the Philippine General Hospital. He went to work every day in a barong, came home at noon and changed into house clothes, took his lunch and had siesta. Fully freshened up at 2 p.m., he put his barong back on and returned to the office. His son Daniel would adopt this routine as a working grown-up, except for the siesta.
When Daniel was a toddler, the family took a long trip overseas. He recalled visiting the Peninsula Hong Kong, the most luxurious hotel in that British colony, during a brief stop. Among their destinations was Portugal, where they spent 11 months while his mother recuperated from pneumonia.
He also remembered frequently sailing around the country with President Quezon and his wife, Aurora, and their son Manuel Jr., his playmate.
His father’s word
The young Daniel’s education at De La Salle School was disrupted by World War II. To keep him busy, his parents enrolled him in typing and stenography classes.
He said he developed his business acumen when GIs he had befriended taught him how to make American gasoline. He added cotton and charcoal alternately to the bluish-green Japanese gasoline until the mixture took on a reddish hue. “Everybody in Manila wanted to buy my gasoline,” he said.
Even as the war was ending, he continued to make so much money that he saw no need to return to school.
Still, upon his father’s insistence, he took the government exams for college education. “My father’s word was the law,” he said. “I never questioned it.”
He was accepted to the University of the Philippines but he wasn’t sure what course to take. He went from architecture to engineering to business, and then to medicine.
Ising
At about this time, Maria Luisa “Ising” Madrigal and her older sister Consuelo, daughters of industrialist Vicente Madrigal, were stuck in Shanghai with President-elect Manuel Roxas’ daughter Ruby. Roxas asked Don Jacobo Zobel to have the girls picked up, Vazquez said. He and Ising met at Roxas’ inauguration in 1946.
After completing his medical course, his father sent Vazquez to New York. He stayed with Carlos P. Romulo, who had just finished his term as president of the United Nations General Assembly and was poised to become ambassador to the United States.
Romulo used his clout to find Vazquez a spot in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital and Medical Center, an academic and sectarian hospital. In that setting, Vazquez pointed out, his conduct was further refined.
Vazquez and Ising were married in 1956. His older brother was married to Consuelo. He said, chuckling, “People started saying that Vazquezes did things wholesale, not retail.”
Don Vicente found his younger son-in-law to be very dependable. When the patriarch suffered a stroke, Vazquez was tasked to assist the primary physician, Dr. Antonio Sison, consultant to many prominent families, including the Romulos.
Don Vicente also sent Vazquez to the United States to scour the army camps for documents on the extent of war damage in the Philippines, so that he could help collect insurance claims for his father-in-law’s assets, including the ships.
Hard habit to break
“Do you mind if I have a scotch?” Vazquez asked politely before starting his meal. He related a parallel memory: “Those camps didn’t serve coffee, only scotch. I would arrive at 10 a.m. At the end of every single day I would have taken eight double scotches. I just got used to it.” (Everybody knew he was more of a social drinker.)
When Don Vicente died in 1972, Vazquez took care of Ising’s inheritance. “These were conjugal properties,” he maintained, “not paraphernal (a married woman’s separate property).” The properties were placed under several corporations that he headed, since he was both family planner and executor.
“Ising came to work every day but I ran the businesses. We both played the stock market,” he said. “I tried to make it easy for the employees. I took care of them, raised their salaries often. But I never tolerated foolishness.”
He met every challenge with determination. “I always looked for, and found, a way out.”
His medical career seemed like a big blur in his memory. When asked about it, he reverted to business or family history.
Perfect gentleman
In 1975, Daniel and Ising met Pacita “Baby” Cruz in Hong Kong through Italian designer Giovanni Sanna. Cruz was playing the quintessential corporate wife, entertaining associates and friends of her husband Jess, a banker. The two couples frequently traveled together after that, even if they were 20 years apart in age. Ising and Baby became inseparable, and eventually went into business together.
When Ising’s health started to fail, Vazquez took her out to breakfast, lunch and dinner in different restaurants for many years until she became bedridden. Throughout 60 years of marriage, Vasquez was the perfect gentleman.
During Ising’s final months, Vazquez started confiding in Cruz, who had been widowed for 20 years by then (Jess Cruz died in 1986). Ising died in April 2016. Vazquez and Cruz were married six months later.
With Baby, Vazquez willingly walked the line between chivalry and equality since she was an independent-minded woman. He doted on her. Post-Christmas 2020, he gifted her with boxes of rare Baccarat crystals.
Something else mattered for Baby: “Danny did his best for his family. I will always think of him as a fair and good man, despite what other people said. He constantly thought only of what was beneficial.”
Toward the end of our lunch, we asked how Vasquez saw the rest of his life moving forward. His reply sounded ominous: “I just want a peaceful death. I don’t want to suffer.”
A week later, on April 3, he was gone.
Close friends are bound to remember his diligence, persistence, resolve and generosity. They will also remember him, for sure, as Debonair Danny with his aristocratic ways and bearing. —CONTRIBUTED INQ