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Isabel Rosario Cooper was a mixed-race Filipina actress who, amid scandal and political turmoil in the early decades of the 20th century, rose to fame in Manila before trying to make it in Hollywood. Cooper has mostly been lost to historical memory, but on the fleeting occasions when she does surface, she is usually accompanied by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The story goes like this: The beautiful, young Cooper falls in love with the towering military hero in a country on the brink of war. She follows him to Washington, D.C., where MacArthur puts her up in the lavish Chastleton Hotel, and they engage in a five-year affair. Unable to secure her lover’s fidelity, though, she dies by suicide decades later in Hollywood, a tragic victim of unrequited love. “This fiction has proven its durability,” writes Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, professor of American Studies at University of Hawaii, Manoa, in her recent book