Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper

by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

In Empire's Mistress Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez follows the life of Filipina vaudeville and film actress Isabel Rosario Cooper, who was the mistress of General Douglas MacArthur. If mentioned at all, their relationship exists only as a salacious footnote in MacArthur's biography—a failed love affair between a venerated war hero and a young woman of Filipino and American heritage. Following Cooper from the Philippines to Washington, D.C. to Hollywood, where she died penniless, Gonzalez frames her not as a tragic heroine, but as someone caught within the violent histories of U.S. imperialism. In this way, Gonzalez uses Cooper's life as a means to explore the contours of empire as experienced on the scale of personal relationships. Along the way, Gonzalez fills in the archival gaps of Cooper's life with speculative fictional interludes that both unsettle the authority of “official” archives and dislodge the established one-dimensional characterizations of her. By presenting Cooper as a complex historical subject who lived at the crossroads of American colonialism in the Philippines, Gonzalez demonstrates how intimacy and love are woven into the infrastructure of empire.

Genres: History

232 pages, Paperback

Published February 26, 2021

Reviews

[Jiewei Li · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful exploration of the intricacies of relationships and empire. How Asian women in media (particularly from countries that the US colonized) slotted into specific roles.

[Livia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great exploration of how what is left in or out of an archive obscures entire patches of history and essentially rewrites it; I love how in the first chapter Gonzalez says "Because this story is not about the general, it begins with him in order to move him out of the way." It's a needed defiance that Isabel Cooper is defined by so much more than her affair with MacArthur – because there's no record of if/what letters she sent back to him, it seems like she held a lot of the emotional power in their relationship, which is totally backwards from how she's painted in history, as his docile Asian mistress whose primary duty was to "prop up MacArthur's insecure masculinity." Great blending of how the confusion of genres this is written with depicts her mixed-race identity, her cosmopolitan life as an actress, her tendency to change her name, age, identity, to bury her old self.

Side note, since Gonzalez is adamant that there is no romance to be found here, but I think peak romance to book lovers has to be love letters... Like what is possibly more romantic than having a stack of old love letters that you can reread forever. They should destroy iphones so we can all go back to that.

[io · Rating 4 out of 5]

Her life was a continual series of departures and arrivals. If someone were to map on her path on this earth, it would be a dizzying line that crisscrossed the globe, sometimes doubling back, taking an odd detour. she could barely tack herself in the world.

She was not a woman who stayed or perhaps it was more that she did not know her place.

A biography of Isabel Rosario Cooper, a vaudeville performer, turned into Gen. Douglas MacArthur's querida.

Isabel was a mixed-raced beauty aspiring to become a successful Hollywood actress. Perhaps, she was born in the wrong place and time that her dream seemed hopeless. In this biography, she was more than Gen. MacArthur's submissive mistress. Here, Isabel was a person driven by her dreams. Bold and ambitious but naïve.

It depicts racial and gender inequalities that give a profound history that shaped the star of her own story, Isabel.

Reading Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper, was heartbreaking.

[Sheehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting examination of how you might tell a more fulsome story of a person's life and the historical effects of Empire on a life, than the salacious canned narrative of being MacArthur's paramour. The author addresses the very real impacts of being a marginalized person in history, you are quite simply not recorded, you do not exist except as a foil to other more central Empire players; so how do you reconstruct a meaningful history of a life unrecorded?

This book does a phenomenal job moving Isabel Cooper from the margins to the center exposing the ways history and empire conspire to disappear whole swaths of human stories and reinforce their lack of value in the present. Fantastic book and interesting lens used to shine a light on the unseen, unconsidered lived experiences of those who are not the "winners" of the historical narrative.

[Kate Coleman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definite top 3 of 2024 (so far) another class book but such a quick, interesting read

[Nandini · Rating 2 out of 5]

no. this would’ve made a great vanity fair article or something but there simply was not enough material here for a book so i just read the same thing over and over and over again.

[Isabella · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a read! i've been hooked on isabel rosario cooper ever since february, and this book delved deep into that mystery really, really well. istg i wish i could make this into a movie!

[Amanda (°▽°) · Rating 4 out of 5]

ENG160
Liked the mixed media writing, incorporations of government documents, film stills, magazine posters. In all, provides an in-depth and engaging study of Isabel Cooper's (and her various identities) life. Investigates what she had to do to survive in the political climate of 1930-40s America.