Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez Gina Benavidez Gonzalez, Vernadette Vicuña. Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. In Empire's Mistress, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez weaves together the beautiful narrative of a mixed-race woman's struggle to define herself against the waves of empire in the early twentieth century. From her early vaudeville stage days in the Philippines to a fleeting romance with General Douglas MacArthur, the life of Isabel Rosario Cooper has typically been identified as one of tragic heartbreak and defined only by her relationship with MacArthur. However, in her later life she also remarried, pursued acting in the United States, and tried to forge her own path. Born to an American father and a Filipina mother, Cooper was not only a product of empire but also a participant in its currents as she performed onstage for the cosmopolitan audience of twentieth-century Manila before trying to launch a Hollywood career in Los Angeles. Facing failure after failure, from romances to job prospects, Cooper's name faded away from the spotlight until she killed herself, with speculation that she died of a broken heart. Gonzalez successfully brings Cooper's life back to the foreground, relying on trace archival documents to tell her story independently of MacArthur, with very little mention of their story aside from the relevant historical details. The book includes many of these documents, including birth certificates, death certificates, and newspaper articles along with images and film stills of Cooper herself. The fragments of the archival puzzle that Gonzalez uses to piece together Cooper's life brings a microhistorical approach to the work, adding to the [End Page 239] engagement of the reader and depth of the piece. Gonzalez, who researches transnational cultural studies, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies, among other specialties at the University of Hawai'i, demonstrates her expertise in the intersections of gender, tourism, and militarism between Asia and the Pacific. She follows a mostly chronological order, organizing the chapters by different stages of Cooper's life. Gonzalez situates her story within the imperial twentieth century, after Spain's loss of the Philippines in 1898 and during the US occupation through World War II. She begins with the story of Cooper and MacArthur "in order to move him out of the way," while tracing their five-year relationship from Manila to Washington, DC, in the 1930s (15). She then takes the narrative back to the early twentieth century, as American Isaac Cooper meets and marries Cooper's mother. Already a product of empire, their daughter Isabel is born in Maricopa, Arizona, but moves back to colonial Manila, "a city being made comfortable for family-friendly imperialism," as her mother remarries (55). In Manila, young Cooper begins a stage career, eventually headlining as "Dimples" in her teen years at a vaudeville club. She makes a name for herself as the first Filipina to kiss onscreen, acting in three small movies by the time she meets MacArthur. After their romance ends, Cooper remains in Washington and remarries, but does not disappear into obscurity as she eventually moves to Los Angeles to pursue acting once again. The book's strength lies in the final chapters, when Gonzalez analyzes the minuscule roles Cooper is hired to play in postwar Hollywood. Cast most typically as an extra and a woman of Asian descent, Cooper plays a Siamese wife, a Chinese secretary, a Native American woman, and a variety of war nurses—all roles haunted by the real-life echoes of empire and, in some cases, MacArthur himself. Cooper even plays roles in movies that take place in the Pacific Theater during World War II, following MacArthur's historical moves. As Gonzalez notes, for Cooper "the constant and swift transformation of real-time events into cinematic material blurs the line between fact and fiction and illuminates the strange intimacies at the heart of imperial war" (121). A potential drawback for some readers lies in the writing structure of the book, as it departs from a traditional historical monologue and includes a higher degree of first-person narrative along with a variety of...