The irrepressible Dewi Sukarno
Who can forget Dewi Sukarno after she made headlines for slashing the face of Minnie Osmeña with a champagne flute at a posh party at the Aspen Club Lodge in Colorado in 1992? Now at age 84 and living in Tokyo, she continues to court controversy, recently slapping a fellow guest at a TV show and flying to war-torn Ukraine in violation of the Japanese government’s travel restrictions.
The former First Lady of Indonesia, when she was married to President Sukarno in the early ‘60s, she moved to Paris then to the US after her husband was deposed, jet-setting and partying in the same circle as Minnie, granddaughter of former Philippine President Sergio Osmeña, who supposedly called the Japanese socialite a whore. The London Sunday Times reported that she actually called her “a minuscule little snail from nowhere.” What was portrayed as a “catfight between two gorgeous, Asian social lionesses” by New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams, was called “an assault case, a crime” by the Filipina, who added that “It really irritates me that she wants to drag me down to her level.”
After being questioned by the police, Dewi said it was an accident and nonchalantly declared, “I should be able to go back to the party.” Instead, she was arrested, sashaying to the patrol car in a full-length sable coat and dangling diamond earrings. She was sentenced to 60 days in jail for the attack that required 37 stitches. The prosecutor believed that Dewi showed no remorse, while her attorney said, “It was an unfortunate, stupid response. She lost it.”
“Aspen, alas, was not her first scandale,” said one of many socialites who recalled several outbursts like a 1977 dispute with Régine, the nightclub impresario who banned Dewi after she slapped another patron. At Le Privé, the Baroness Helene de Ludinghausen who was sitting with Manuel de Miranda, a young coffee king from El Salvador whom Dewi had dated, remembers how “first she threw a bucket of ice all over us. Then she scratched his face, until she drew blood.” Another victim of an ice and champagne dousing was the Duke de Sabran, who got it from her in the mid-Seventies while seated with a date and in 1980 at Castel’s with Beatrice Barclay. Dewi was even seen waiting for the Duke with a gun outside the home of the Duchess de La Rochefoucauld on Avenue Montaigne. Luckily, a guest of the party came down, saw her, and brought her back to her senses.
“She’s a woman for men, that’s why perhaps she sees other women as competition,” said the Duke to explain her fits of jealousy. There was no man identified in the Dewi-Minnie feud, although common friends speculated that the two may have been envious of one another: Minnie, of Dewi’s international fame; and Dewi, of Minnie’s recent multimillion-dollar divorce settlement from her third husband, Carnation milk heir Dwight Stuart. Minnie’s version is that President Sukarno’s relationship with another Filipina, Amelia Dela Rama, who became his last wife before he died, was the reason for Dewi’s hostility. Amelia was married to a cousin of Minnie’s mother, who was born into the Dela Rama shipping family.
Sukarno actually had many wives and liaisons: Siti Oetari in 1921, whom he divorced in 1923 to marry Inggit Garnasih, whom he divorced in 1943 to marry Fatmawati; Hartini in 1943; Maharani Wisma Susana Siregar in 1958; then divorced in 1962 when he married Dewi, whom he met as a 19-year-old Japanese hostess Naoko Nemoto at the Copacabana in Tokyo. She worked at the club to make ends meet after her father, a carpenter, passed away when she was 15, leaving her to support her sickly mother and younger brother, who both died the year before her wedding—her mother, against her marrying a foreigner; and her brother, committing suicide. Converting to Islam for their marriage, she was renamed Ratna Sari Dewi Sukarno or “the jewel essence of a goddess.”
Dewi claims she was never jealous: “It did not matter if he was married before, if he still had other wives. If I would compare his lifework with building a monument, I would be happy to just be one of the stones in the foundation.”
Although Dewi had to contend with the jealousies of the previous wives, and her marriage was even kept a secret for a time because she was a foreigner, Sukarno was crazy about her. After a year, she assumed the role of First Lady and was brought to state functions. She was known to have enchanted General Charles De Gaulle as much as Jacqueline Kennedy had.
Her reign did not last long, however, since Sukarno was deposed by Suharto in 1966, despite her attempts to broker a compromise between the two. Pregnant with their daughter, Kartika Sari, she flew to Tokyo to give birth. When articles about Sukarno’s corruption reached the Japanese press and activists started protesting outside her house, she had to leave for Paris, where she heard that her husband was under house arrest and was close to death. Flying back to Indonesia was ill-advised but she went anyway in 1970, saying “If I will be killed, I will be killed proudly and God help me, give me a few seconds to kill my daughter first. I don’t think she will survive in their hands.” Sukarno was in a coma when she arrived and when she returned the next day, he was dead.
Dewi returned to Paris, where she had an apartment on fashionable Avenue Montaigne, in the same building where Marlene Dietrich lived. Although there were rumors of Sukarno stashing millions in Swiss bank accounts for her, she claims that she left Indonesia “with only six maternity dresses and two pairs of false eyelashes” and that her husband’s supporters in Japan set up a fund for her to live off the interest.
“She was a woman with every door in Paris open to her when she arrived,” said Sao Schlumberger, “because the French love an exotic beauty. She was very beautiful, very soignée, had great style. But she couldn’t handle it.” Feted by the likes of President Georges Pompidou, the Aga Khan, Marie-Helene de Rothschild and the Vicomtesse de Ribes, she dressed in haute couture by Marc Bohan of Dior, Pierre Cardin and Valentino and was a favorite of Paris Match and Vogue who photographed her at all the right parties—from Capri to Gstaad—and escorted by the likes of Lord Patrick Lichfield and Prince Vittorio Massimo.
In the early ’70s, she was engaged to a handsome young Spaniard, Francisco Paesa, with whom she partnered for a private bank and lived together in a house in Geneva, but this didn’t work out so she moved on to her usual London-Paris-Rome circuit with a succession of glamorous escorts like Fabio Testi, John Bentley and some Saudi princes. “She seemed to be searching for a handsome Onassis, while developing a reputation for jealousy fits,” said Cindy Adams. She thought the Duke de Sabran was the one, but he was too much of a womanizer.
She remained controversial even after the Minnie incident, publishing a 1993 photo book of herself in the nude, which was banned in Indonesia. She had a hair-pulling tiff with Kaethe Schuchter at a Halloween party in New York in 1997. She moved back to Tokyo in 2008, where she runs a cosmetic business, does part-time work as a host on Japanese television and judges beauty contests like the Miss International which went viral on social media when Filipino pageant aficionados claimed that she was biased against Miss Philippines because of her past history with Minnie and Amelia.
She actually came to Manila for Imelda Marcos’ 80th birthday celebration in 2009, presenting the former First Lady with a photo of their time together in New York with Farah Diba, another fellow exile. That same year, when protesters stormed her home because of comments she made regarding a North Korea satellite, she threw two plant pots from her balcony in response.
At a 2014 TV show, she slapped a fellow guest but settled things before a lawsuit was filed. It wasn’t all petty disputes, however, since she would always comment on relevant political and social issues and do volunteer work for the Japanese Red Cross Society and the United Nations Environment Program. She even braved the war in Ukraine, going there in 2023 despite travel restrictions by the Japanese government, to deliver relief supplies. She also took advantage of the publicity to call on the government “to be more proactive in providing support to Ukraine.” She shows no signs of slowing down—still courting controversy but at least using her fame effectively to get things done for causes she believes in.