“If it isn’t passion, if it isn’t burning, if it isn’t on fire, you haven’t lived,” so said the legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland about what she considered the greatest thing, without which, “what have you got?”

In 2014, as the late Cherie Gil played Diana Vreeland in the staging of Mary Louise Wilson and Mark Hampton’s one-woman play Full Gallop in Manila, I felt extremely blessed to have had the opportunity to be up close and personal with the editor who might have influenced me to want to become an editor myself. 

Full Gallop was Cherie’s first venture as a producer through her My Own Mann Production, in collaboration with Bart Guingona, who directed the solo two-act play and who gave Cherie every reason to suffer to reinvent herself for this iconic performance. 

On the stage of the Carlos P. Romulo Theater at the RCBC Plaza, everything was in flames, blazing red-hot. If the only indication that Vreeland, despite her famous exaggerations, were true to her words, it was Cherie’s riveting performance of a dream that lived on, in flesh and bones albeit in theater, long after the dreamer died in 1989, along with the era that she not only defined but helped create. 

On the set, designed in Vreelandesque (read: exaggerated) proportions by Joey Mendoza to transport the audience to Vreeland’s very red garden-in-hell Park Avenue apartment in New York in 1971, four months after the editrix was fired from Vogue, all dreams of glamour and pizzazz came alive and, for about 90 minutes, with no one on stage but Cherie playing DVnation, I forgot how ordinary my life had become ever since Grace Mirabella took over Vogue and, ditching her predecessor’s obsession with fantasy, busied herself and the pages with real lives, real women, reality or the truth, “a hell of a big point with me,” as Vreeland said. “Now I exaggerate—always.”  Lest I be misunderstood, may I clarify that nothing is wrong with reality, it just is, except that, like a dress whose sole purpose is to clothe a woman, it is so disconnected with fantasy. Doesn’t make my heart leap.

Watching Cherie impersonate Diana, however, my heart was jumping all over the place that I kept sitting up straight, craning my neck, unbending my spine in my orchestra center seat, to make sure I wasn’t missing any detail, any word, any flick of Cherie’s hands that stretched out like a fan and fluttered with red lacquered fingertips. 

In the limited run of Full Gallop in Manila, Diana seemed to have been in town, to have come back to life. Cherie was D.V. all right, and I was there in that famed sitting room while she colored my world with glimpses of a world I only read in books, much of it from her biographies and her memoir D.V., a world inhabited by the stranger-than-fiction lives of the likes of Coco Chanel, Helena Rubinstein, and Balenciaga. Ah gossip then was a vast history of style, of lives lived to the full, lives of pure fantasy!

Before Full Gallop, Cherie also performed in Masterclass, also a one-woman play in which she was Maria Callas, the doomed diva of world opera, also of that world, of that past that seems to be more glamorous and less bland than now, at least for me. 

Cherie died in 2022, a big personal loss for me, as her friend and as her fan, but just as big a loss for the industry, both the movies and theater. 

And so she too is now of that past, like Diana Vreeland, and my encounters with her, in her movies, such as Oro Plata Mata (1982) and Sonata (2013), both of which were directed by Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes, in theater, such as Masterclass and Full Gallop, and in person, as we became closer and closer as friends, are now only memories.

Now Cherie to me is like Diana Vreeland, whom I had never met, whose eloquence in metaphors and whose dazzling, larger-than-life personality I escape to whenever I feel the need to leap into the realm of fantasy and return to the facts of life with heightened senses.

Ah, why does the past always seem more glamorous and less banal than now?