The Mansions of Limbo

by Dominick Dunne

  Polo claimed that the United States had cooperated with the governments of Haiti and the Philippines in revealing what assets were held in this country by the recently deposed Baby Doc Duvalier and Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. He stated publicly that he thought President Reagan was throwing Duvalier and the Marcoses to the lions, and that PAMG investors deserved more discreet treatment than the U.S. government was offering. He sent a letter to his clients saying that Swiss banks offered them greater secrecy than other banks.

  Several former associates have different views of Polo’s quick move to Europe: “If you have more than fifteen clients that you are giving advice to, you need a license with the SEC. If the SEC had come to investigate after he bought the house on East Sixty-fourth Street, they would have known.” Or: “He may have thought that by moving to Switzerland he could hide under the Swiss secrecy laws.” Or: “He had placed some time deposits in savings and loans in Maryland that went bankrupt. Jumbo CDs. The SEC was investigating those S&Ls.”

  Before leaving New York, Polo presented a Marisol sculpture to the Metropolitan Museum. He also did what had been in the cards for him to do for years: He entered the world of fashion. The dress designer Polo had always admired most was the brilliant and ill-fated British-American Charles James, whose dresses he thought of as pieces of sculpture. In James’s declining years, when he was living in near destitution in the Chelsea Hotel, Polo had sent him $200 a week.

  In December 1985 he purchased the fashion house of a designer named Miguel Cruz, a fellow Cuban whom he had met through Maria Felix. A second-echelon but respected designer with a faithful following, Cruz had been established in Rome since the 1960s. When he approached Polo to borrow money from him for his business, Polo is supposed to have said, “I don’t lend money. I’ll buy you.” Fashion had always been a business that fascinated him. Now it became the business that would destroy him.

  In Paris, he bought a fourteen-room apartment at 27 Quai Anatole-France which surpassed in elegance and grandeur the house on East Sixty-fourth Street. A Marisol sculpture of Rosa and Marina stood in the hallway. A Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Dongens, Fragonards, and Bouchers lined the walls. Following in the steps of such other Latin American collectors who had lived in Paris as Arturo Lopez-Willshaw, Antenor Patino, and Carlos de Beistegui, Polo filled his apartment with the rarest of rare furniture, including pieces that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette. He tried to charm his way into French society with gifts and flowers, and he took tables in restaurants for fifteen or twenty people. Rosa became best friends with the wife of the antiques dealer Jean-Marie Rossi, who is the grand-daughter of the late General Franco of Spain.

  Polo hired the fashion consultant Eleanor Lambert to advise him on the buyout of the Miguel Cruz company. Cruz was paid a salary of $120,000 a year and a royalty on gross sales, although Polo claimed in an interview with Women’s Wear Daily that he paid Cruz a minimum annual salary of $500,000. His intention was to vault Cruz into the ranks of the elite international designers of expensive ready-to-wear and to rival the houses of Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace.

  To launch the venture, Polo made an agreement with a retailer named Scarpa to turn her shops in Venice and Milan into Miguel Cruz boutiques. Scarpa received merchandise on consignment. Polo made a similar deal with a boutique owner on the island of Capri, and he paid $300,000 for the renovation of the shop. By the time the business opened, Polo had three boutiques, an office in the General Motors Building in New York with a rent of approximately $12,000 a month, and a showroom and warehouse in Milan. In spite of this huge overhead, Polo decided to launch an enormous advertising campaign. In the first season he spent $700,000 for media (media means buying space) and $30,000 on production. For the spring 1986 collection, there was an $800,000 advertising budget. For the fall 1986 collection, Polo spent $900,000 on advertising.

  Consider, now, PAMG’s contract with its investors: PAMG received a fee of one-half of 1 percent for managing an account. So on a $1 million account the annual fee would be $5,000. On a $100 million account, the fee would be $500,000. Therefore, people who worked for PAMG naturally began to wonder where the money was coming from to run the Miguel Cruz dress business as well as to cover Polo’s continued buying of art and jewelry.

  From the beginning, Polo played an active part in advertising and promotion, hiring the models, flying them to New York to be photographed, even staging the fashion shows. Fashion experts say that the campaign didn’t work commercially, even if the photography was sometimes great. Like so much about Roberto Polo, his advertising sent out mixed signals; there was confusion as to whether he was selling his wares or his models. He claimed that he would make the name of Miguel Cruz known through the shock value of the ads. “We’re living in a society that wants to be shocked,” he told one interviewer. A Robert Mapplethorpe photograph for the Miguel Cruz men’s line showed the back of a seated naked man removing a sweater over his head. For the women’s line, a two-page ad showed a dimly lit female model in a black jeweled evening dress with one fully lit naked man behind her and another sitting on the floor in front of her.

  It enraged Polo that while no one questioned the propriety of Calvin Klein’s massively nude advertising campaign, which was going on at the same time, his own campaign was labeled prurient and offensive. “They object to my ads but not to Calvin Klein’s.” The advertisement showing the bull’s-eye picture with the male rump may have offended one segment of the public, but a more lurid segment bombarded the New York office for copies of it.

  Polo always knew more about everything than the experts. Soon he started directing Mapplethorpe’s photo sessions, and Mapplethorpe, a bit of a prima donna himself, resented the interference. Eventually there was a falling-out, and Mapplethorpe resigned the account. Not to be topped, Polo wrote the photographer a letter firing him, and sent copies to several prominent people in New York.

  Despite all the fanfare and hype, the Miguel Cruz line was a disaster almost from the beginning. The clothes were often badly made, delivery dates were missed, and orders were canceled. “I don’t care about your four pages in Vogue—the clothes are not in my store” became a common complaint. It got to the point where the company was doing $1 million in advertising and only $100,000 in sales. In the fall of 1987, when all the collections of all the designers in Paris, New York, and Milan were showing skirts above the knee, Miguel Cruz was showing skirts down to the ankle. At that point Polo stepped in to give Cruz artistic advice on how the clothes should look, and he began writing memos telling him what colors and fabrics to use.

  Unlike Polo’s art acquisitions, which could be sold at a profit, the Miguel Cruz fashion venture was a bottomless pit. It is estimated that Polo lost between $12 million and $15 million on it, but he remained adamant in his belief that the clothes were beautiful and that the company was going to be a big success. He didn’t want anyone to tell him the truth. He had a blind spot about Miguel Cruz, and he could not accept criticism. He thought that if he spent an enormous amount of money on advertising he should be rewarded with good reviews. He wrote irate letters to Polly Mellen of Vogue and Carrie Donovan of the New York Times threatening to pull his ads when they criticized the collections, and he had to be restrained from mailing a mocking letter to Hebe Dorsey, the late beloved fashion editor, demanding a retraction because she had mistakenly said Miguel Cruz designed in Rome in the fifties when she meant the sixties. He had the idea that American editors could be bought. One of the most powerful women in fashion, who asked that she not be identified, told me that on the morning after one of the collections was shown in Milan she received in her hotel room a box containing a full-length black coat lined in sable. She tried it on, modeled it in front of a mirror, wrapped it up again, and returned it to Roberto Polo at the Miguel Cruz office. A former employee told me that Hebe Dorsey had returned many such gifts.

  Peter Dubow, the owner of a company called European Collections Inc., was hired by Polo as a consultant to use his retailin
g contacts to penetrate the American stores. Dubow, who, like a lot of Roberto Polo’s employees, is still owed a great deal of money in salary and expenses, says, “The easy speculation is that Roberto didn’t care if the collections weren’t good, that he was simply getting dirty money back into circulation. But he did care. He cared passionately.”

  One day in Paris, in the magnificent apartment on Quai Anatole-France, Dubow said to Polo, “We need someone to stage the fashion shows. We need an art director for the advertising.”

  “That’s what I do,” replied Roberto quietly.

  Trying another tack, Dubow said about the latest collection, “It’s not good enough. It’s totally lacking in commerciality.” He even went a step further. “It is ugly, Roberto.”

  Polo said, “How many Fragonards do you own?”

  “None,” replied Dubow.

  With a gesture, Polo indicated his possessions in the drawing room where they were seated. “Do you own furniture like this?”

  “No,” said Dubow.

  “Well, I think Miguel’s collection is beautiful,” said Polo, in his superiority, settling the matter. “I cannot imagine how ready-to-wear can be any more beautiful than this.”

  It is a curious quirk of Roberto’s business sense that he gave priority to the evening dresses he presented as free gifts to society women in New York to wear to publicized social functions at a time when stores he depended on for business were not getting their shipments on time and orders were being canceled. To set things right, Roberto hired his brother, Marco, to be chief of production for the fashion house. There had always been a rivalry between the two brothers, particularly for the affection of their mother, and it was she who asked Roberto to take Marco into the company. Marco had wanted to go into the investment side of Roberto’s business, not the fashion side, because he thought he knew more about banking than Roberto did. “When I was a kid, I used to beat the shit out of my brother, and now he’s this big man ordering me around,” Marco complained to an American employee of the business. At Miguel Cruz, Marco did a good job of putting the business in order, but the quality of the workmanship remained poor and orders were rarely delivered on time.

  Late in 1987, at a party in Milan for the opening of a collection, Polo met Fabrizio Bagaglini. A sometime actor, sometime model, the twenty-five-year-old Bagaglini became a dominant figure in the life of Roberto Polo over the next seven months, right up until Polo’s actual arrest in Viareggio. Shortly after meeting Fabrizio, Polo hired him to do his public-relations work, although Bagaglini was not known to have any experience or skill in that field.

  In an interview conducted before the warrant went out for Polo’s arrest, but published after, Nadine Frey of WWD wrote, “As a last gesture, [Polo] gave a mini-tour of his apartment, as Barry White blared out of a speaker somewhere and a handsome Roman aide de camp hustled out to make a lunch reservation.” Roberto showed off Fabrizio as if he were a painting. He told people that he wanted to make Fabrizio the vice president of the perfume company he was planning to start, to be called Le Parfum de Miguel Cruz. Bagaglini began wearing Roberto’s wristwatch, an eighteen-karat-gold Breitling, and Polo gave him a Ferrari Testarossa, worth $134,000, at a time when the unpaid bills and salaries at the Miguel Cruz office in New York amounted to $600,000. On several occasions, Polo said to his friends, “I have had three passions in my life: my wife, Rosa, my daughter, Marina, and Fabrizio.” However, he persistently claimed that the friendship with Fabrizio was no more than a friendship.

  Glamorous pictures of the glamorous Polos began appearing in all the fashionable magazines in France, usually showing them elegantly posed amid their museum-quality possessions. Elsewhere in the world, meanwhile, Mexican, Latin American, and European investors in PAMG were demanding to know where all the Polo money was coming from. “Roberto took too high a profile. He was too much in the papers, lived on far too grand a scale. His investors didn’t like it, especially as he was living on a far grander scale than they,” said Alfredo Ortiz-Murias, Polo’s associate. Ortiz-Murias had at one time been Roberto’s superior at Citibank. He had left the bank to form his own money-management firm, but, according to Polo, it had not done well, and he later joined PAMG, bringing his own clients with him. Ortiz-Murias claims to have introduced Roberto Polo to everyone in New York, but Polo says otherwise. The former associates are now bitter enemies.

  Polo’s behavior became more and more extreme. According to an employee of Miguel Cruz’s men’s wear in Milan, “The stories he told about himself became more and more fantastic, brilliant strokes of genius—how he had bought things at one price and sold them a short time later at enormous profits, like a pearl he bought for half a million dollars and resold for a million. He said, ‘I always have $10 million in cash on hand.’ ”

  Once, he showed up in the lobby of the Hotel Palace in Milan and requested twenty-five rooms for important people he was flying in to see the Miguel Cruz collection. The hotel, part of the CIGA hotel group, owned by the Aga Khan, was totally booked for the fashion week of the Milan collections and therefore unable to provide these accommodations. Polo made a loud scene. “Get the Aga Khan on the telephone!” he screamed indignantly.

  He met Grace Jones and signed her up as a runway model for three shows. At a time when the company was in serious trouble, he offered her $50,000 for each appearance. Jones wisely insisted on being paid in advance before each show.

  He became a confider of intimate secrets, assuring each confidant that he or she was the only person he could trust. “I find that I wake up in a different bed each morning,” he told an associate, who later discovered he had shared the same intimacy with his publicist and a number of friends. In October 1987, during the collections, he called several people, some he didn’t even know very well, sobbing, saying he was getting a divorce. Rosa was said to be jealous of the female models in the shows, and at one point she packed and left Milan for Paris. There she remembered she had left her jewelry behind in the hotel safe, so she returned, and everything was all right between them again.

  One observer told me that Polo got “weirder and weirder.” He dieted down to 145 pounds and began to dye the hair on his chest.

  Last February, amid persistent widespread rumors of imminent financial troubles, he appeared at a sale in Monte Carlo with Fabrizio Bagaglini and a whippet dog and paid $500,000 for a pair of chairs by the French furniture-maker Sene, chairs so rare that they could not be taken out of France.

  That same month, Pablo Aramburuzabala, who had been Roberto Polo’s first major client and who had a sort of father-son relationship with him, flew from Mexico to Paris to confront him about all the rumors. “The investors were nervous and not happy hearing all the publicity he was getting, being described as a Cuban-American millionaire,” he told me. “He didn’t have time to make that kind of money unless he was doing something wrong. People start to do little things and get away with it, and then start to take more and more. I gave him his chance. My wife is the godmother of his daughter. I met Roberto at Citibank. Then he started being money manager with me. It was just a matter of calling several banks to see which bank gave the best interest. I would see him four times a year, and he would tell me how my portfolio was. In February I asked him, ‘Do you have financial problems?’ He said no. He said that Mr. Ortiz-Murias was making trouble. I said to him, ‘I don’t think you have that kind of money.’ I never authorized him to deal with art. He said that he had a syndicate of people for buying art. He told me he was managing a billion dollars. When I commented on Rosa’s jewels, I was told that some of her jewels were lent by jewelers as a way of advertising. I said to him, ‘I need some money. You have to give me some money back.’ After a while I received part of it, not even 30 percent of the amount. Later, another small part, even smaller than the previous payment. I realized that things were in terrible shape. He promised to come to Mexico to straighten things out, but he never came.”

  The New York office of Miguel Cruz was
run on money that was sent each month from Geneva. It took approximately $200,000 a month to keep the New York end of the business going, and more often then not only half that amount was sent. Salaries and bills went unpaid. By the end of 1987 there were bills in excess of $1 million. “A lot of people have been hurt by the unpaid bills, including Miguel Cruz himself,” said Peter Dubow. “Miguel always paid his bills, and the matter was highly embarrassing for him.”

  In the fall of 1987, Roberto Polo made his biggest play for social recognition, as well as a last-ditch bid to promote the flailing fashion line, by underwriting two famous balls, the Save Venice ball in Venice to help restore the Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, followed seventeen days later by the Chantilly Ball in France to benefit the Institute of France. They attracted the crème de la crème of international society. With rumors everywhere that he was financially strapped, Polo spent over $600,000—some say closer to a million—on the two events. In addition, it was reported in society columns that he flew guests from ail over the world by private jet to attend the parties. The talk of the Save Venice ball was Rosa Polo’s jewels, in all the colors. She swam each day in the swimming pool of the Hotel Cipriani in a different bathing suit with a necklace of precious stones to match. Meanwhile, the people in the warehouse in Milan had to pass the hat to pay for the gasoline to get the collection to the Chantilly Ball. After that they sent the collection to New York for the fashion week there, but the New York office didn’t have the money to get it out of customs.

  Polo’s hope, apparently, was that his new perfume company would rescue his collapsing empire. At a cost of nearly $1 million, he built a new office for Le Parfum de Miguel Cruz on Avenue Marceau in Paris. He hired as the president of the company Jacques Bergerac, the fifties movie star, who had been married to Ginger Rogers and Dorothy Malone, and who had more recently—before the takeover by Ronald Perelman—been a high-ranking executive at Revlon. He also hired the New York architectural and design firm of de Marsillac Plunkett to design the bottles and packaging. He himself played an important part in choosing the scents for the perfume. The perfume business, however, is considered a seven-to-one shot for success, and it usually takes two to three years before profits begin to show. To finance Le Parfum and perhaps to settle with his disgruntled investors, who were beginning to demand their money back, Polo is reported to have sold $22 million in jewels between February and May.