The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa (Text Only)

by Shawn Levy

  Among those admirers was a girl from his hometown, Ana Ariza Almanzar, granddaughter of a Spanish general who had fought in Cuba. At the dawn of the new century, Don Pedro took this well-bred young woman as his wife.

  They began their family with tragedy, losing at least one child before 1902; then a daughter, Ana, managed to survive the perils of tropical infancy. Three years later came a son, Cesar. The tíguere now had a male heir to boast of and to train.

  It was a flush time for Don Pedro. The tyrant Ulises Heureaux, who had ruled the Dominican Republic with a ruthless hand for two decades, had been assassinated in the summer of 1899, and a period of relative calm had descended. Don Pedro’s daring, loyalty, and intelligence had recommended him to the new government, and he was appointed as governor of a string of small cities—first San Francisco de Macorís, then the coastal city of Samaná, then El Seibo, each posting finding him assigned farther from home as the warrior-politicians of the Cibao peacefully extended their influence.

  In El Seibo, where he arrived in 1906, Don Pedro allowed himself the pleasure of other women. (Ana, her son would offer by way of explanation, “got fat after her first children arrived.”) With a local woman and her cousin he fathered four children en la calle, as the saying went: “in the street”: bastards.

  He acknowledged them, though only one took his name. And then his duties called him back to San Francisco de Macorís, where the last of his legitimate children was born, on January 22, 1909. They named him Porfirio.

  It was such a sparkling name: Porfirio Rubirosa Ariza (the Ariza a technicality, following the Spanish convention of retaining the matronym for legal purposes).

  The surname was, of course, a given, and it meant “red rose.”

  The Christian name, however, was something of a fancy, not a family name like that of the baby’s sister or an obviously historical name like that of his brother. There were some obscure antecedents: an ascetic Saint Porphyry of Gaza; Porphyry of Tyre, a mathematician and philosopher of Phoenicia, noted to this day for his treatises on vegetarianism and named after the purple dye for which his home city was famous (at root, the word “porphyry” refers to a shade of purple that naturally occurs in feldspar crystals). But Don Pedro and Ana probably had in mind Porfirio Díaz, the autocratic president of Mexico under whose hand that nation modernized itself into the envy of the Caribbean—a strongman whose career, like Caesar’s, would be worth emulating.

  Ironically, soon after the baby was baptized, the great Díaz found himself falling into a struggle to maintain his rule—just as Don Pedro once again found himself commanding men in the field when yet another civil war broke out in the Dominican Republic in 1911. This was the campaign that formed the young Porfirio’s first memories: the rifle shots at dawn, the soldiers sleeping throughout the house, the cat that crept away in the night.

  The boy would grow to remember, too, a fearful, devout Doña Ana: “My mother, who was very pious, lived at prayer … I remember her often curled up in the darkest corner of the house, praying.” Doña Ana Ariza Rubirosa may have seemed a pushover: born to a family of soldiers, married to a soldier, countenancing her husband’s infidelities, burying herself in counsel with the Virgin of Altagracia, draped demurely in black, growing plump. But there was steel in her as well. Take the way she saw to the woman who was making time with Don Pedro and then ran, unopposed, for the presidency of the ladies’ club of San Francisco de Macorís. On the day of the vote, with all the notable women of the city assembled and prepared to anoint their new leader, the outgoing president announced that she was so sure that they all approved of her successor that the election would be conducted by acclamation. “No,” came a voice. All heads turned to face the speaker, Doña Ana. “This woman is my husband’s lover,” she declared. “Under these conditions, I don’t think it’s possible to make her our president.” Shock; murmurs; a hasty conference of officials; and a new presidential candidate was impressed and elected. Ana got in her carriage, according to her son, “and returned home without saying a single word to my father about the scandalous scene she’d made. And he, after being told about the incident a few minutes later, also remained silent.”

  Perhaps the scandal she’d created with her outburst was too great; perhaps Ana feared in time of civil war for the safety of her children (“Careful Pedro, careful! He’s so little!”); perhaps Don Pedro, in his mid-thirties, had grown too comfortable, too encumbered, too secure to lead troops; perhaps his intellect was recognized by his colleagues as more useful to them than his bravery; perhaps he was in flight from enemies. For whatever reason, in 1914, soon after Doña Ana’s bold gambit, the Rubirosas found themselves sailing away from their bellicose, agitated little country. Don Pedro had been named to serve in the Dominican legation in St. Thomas, the Virgin Islands.

  At the age of five, Porfirio Rubirosa had begun his lifetime of wandering.

  TWO

  CONTINENTAL SEASONING

  In a one-room schoolhouse—a large hut, really—the teacher bent down to address his new pupil, who spoke neither French nor English, and handed him a small violin. It was time for the school orchestra to practice, and everyone took part.

  But this slim little boy didn’t know how to play. He took his instrument and dutifully joined his classmates, who included his older brother and sister. He stood in the back. The others, following the teacher’s directions, began to saw away at their music. The boy began to cry.

  The teacher spoke to him kindly: “Act as if you can play, that’s enough.”

  And the child, mollified, did just that.

  And he thought to himself, “Is the world of grown-ups, perhaps, a world in which appearances are all that matters?”

  St. Thomas, where Porfirio Rubirosa learned how not to play the violin, was an Antillean idyll for Don Pedro’s family. For less than a year they lived in a small house in the middle of a sugarcane plantation while Don Pedro saw to his ministerial duties. Back home, the situation was still dangerously unstable: Haiti too had fallen into turmoil, and the United States, to which the Dominican treasury owed a sum it couldn’t possibly repay, had taken a more active interest in the rising chaos on the island. Fewer than twenty years earlier the Yankees had driven Spain out of Cuba; now events in Europe—where a continent-wide war had been set off—made the securing of the Caribbean a matter of increasing import in their eyes.

  From St. Thomas it was impossible for Don Pedro to read the subtleties of the power struggle back home. So he chose, in a sense, to turn away from it. In 1915, he accepted another diplomatic appointment, one that would have an indelible impact on himself and his family. He would represent his country at its embassy in France.

  This new charge meant more than just uprooting his wife and children. Don Pedro was being sent to the most prestigious posting in the world by a government he couldn’t be sure would exist from week to week and at a time when his new home was itself embroiled in war. Even as he could anticipate with zest a new life in Europe, the onetime warrior of the Cibao sobered at the weight of the prospect. And Porfirio, sensitized by his musical experience to the language of appearances in the adult world, noticed the metamorphosis. “My father had changed,” he recalled later. “No longer did he wear a pistol in his belt or a saber between his shoulder blades. He was now Chief of a diplomatic mission.”

  And not just any diplomatic mission, of course, but Paris—the capital of the world insofar as it had one. “We have perhaps forgotten,” Don Pedro’s son would write, “that before the war of 1914, the prestige of France throughout Latin America was immense. From the other side of the Atlantic, France seemed the ideal marriage of the style of the ancien régime with the dynamism of revolution.”

  Getting there was a fantastic adventure. The family sailed on the Antonio Lopez to Gibraltar, where they were greeted not with flags and salutes but with gunfire; British authorities suspected that among the ship’s passengers was a German spy disguised in frock and wig. Again the young boy’s ima
gination was fired by the strange simulations of the grown-up world: “The mustached warriors of the Caribbean had been succeeded by Europe and spies dressed as women!” After a search, the Antonio Lopez was permitted to disgorge its passengers. The Rubirosas headed north by train. Ana and Cesar were left in Barcelona, the nearest important Spanish-speaking city to Paris, to continue their schooling. Porfirio continued on with his parents.

  The city to which Don Pedro had been posted was a wonder to his son. There were strange new creature comforts, like the kidskin coat he wore as a redoubt to the astonishing cold. There were the impressive signs of war: cannons encircling the Arc de Triomphe, soldiers in the streets and the cafés. And there were glamorous sensations of the sort never seen in San Francisco de Macorís. On the first full day the family spent in the city, Don Pedro took his son to a cinema, where the boy sat in awe watching the great star Pearl White in The Mysteries of New York, a movie serial filled with barbaric cruelties, thrilling chases, impossible situations miraculously escaped from, and a fiendish villain, the Clutching Hand, who preyed on the beautiful heroine for occult reasons only he fathomed. One image would linger in the youngster’s mind for decades: Pearl White trapped in a tube that slowly filled with water, threatening to drown her.

  The family made its home first in temporary quarters on Boulevard Saint Germain and then within shouting distance of the Arc de Triomphe at 6 Avenue Mac-Mahon, an address that would exert a nostalgic pull on Porfirio throughout the decades in which he would live in Paris. The house sat in the true symbolic center of the city, which perhaps accounted for the number of times the Rubirosas found themselves collaterally involved in aerial bombardment by German planes, which regularly cut through the sky, flaunting their black-and-white crosses. Most French families fled underground at the sound of enemy aircraft, but Don Pedro reasoned that this would be a terrible hideaway, a lair of death by crushing or suffocation or slow starvation. Rather, he insisted that they stay above stairs, where they endured the occasional air raids and the accompanying thunder of bombs with stoicism the English would have admired: Don Pedro reading his newspaper, Porfirio playing with toys, Doña Ana saying her rosary. Only after the house suffered a truly astonishing concussion one afternoon when a bomb hit the nearby Avenue de la Grande Armée did the brave tíguere rethink his policy and direct his family to belowgrounds safety.

  These close calls exerted an accumulative toll, and the Rubirosas soon moved to the coastal city of Royan, less than two hundred miles north of Spain on the Atlantic coast. There, Cesar and Ana rejoined the family and Don Pedro received some shocking news: The civil war back home had so escalated that marines from the United States had occupied the Dominican Republic.

  Don Pedro had foreseen as much, according to Porfirio. “My father,” he remembered, “realized that this constant civil war would only lead to catastrophe—the loss of national independence or dictatorship.” But preparing for such a blow didn’t lessen its impact, turning Don Pedro permanently from a man of action into a man of words, ideas, and policies. “Suddenly,” Porfirio noted, “with the decisiveness that characterized him, he changed into a quiet man and began to study, with the help of a professor who came to the house, the worlds of economics, politics, international relations and languages.” He was particularly taken with the law, and built a small library in his house of the imposing legal volumes published by Dalloz. It was, in his son’s eyes, a poignant metamorphosis: “In my childhood, I never saw my father without a Smith and Wesson at his side; in my adolescence, in turn, I never saw him without a Dalloz under his arm.”

  Despite the example of his father’s study, young Porfirio realized that he wasn’t cut from quite the same material. “Books didn’t find in me a very faithful friend,” he confessed, “nor did the professors find a conscientious student. The only things that interested me were sports, girls, adventures, celebrities—in short, life.”

  Once the family was back in Paris after the end of the war, Porfirio—who watched the victory parade along the Champs-Élysées from the prime vantage of the roof on Avenue Mac-Mahon—attended a string of schools, making no impression in any of them save as a goalkeeper in soccer, a skill that he maintained into his twenties. He was enrolled in some of France’s finest seats of youthful learning: l’Institut Maintenon, l’École Pascal, and the lycée Janson-de-Sailly, all in Paris, and l’École des Roches in Verneuil-sur-Avre, some sixty-five miles east by train. Nothing took. He lived only for the spectacles of Parisian life, for thrills and novelties and chums and escape … and to get out of his short pants.

  Almost more than his first shave or sexual experience, the privilege to wear long pants on a daily basis was a symbol of achieving manhood for a young teenager of the era—a sartorial bar mitzvah for the Little Lord Fauntleroy set. At school, Porfirio had become chummy with a Chilean boy, Pancho Morel, and a boy named Jit Singh, youngest son of the maharaja of Karpathula. They were younger than Porfirio, but they didn’t have the protective Doña Ana as their mothers and had not only begun wearing trousers but had worn them into nightclubs in Montmartre, lording their mature adventures over their bare-kneed Dominican pal. He seethed.

  Finally, when her son was sixteen, the painstaking Doña Ana allowed him the dignity of long pants. And as soon as he buckled his belt, he was off. From the first night he steeled his nerve and sauntered into a Montmartre nightclub, Porfirio Rubirosa was at home.

  “I had a racing heart and boiling blood and a delicious impatience throughout my body,” he confessed later. “I remember the doorman, the music that came in waves, the diffused light that imparted mystery to the faces.… More than 30 years have passed since that night, and I still see the wet lips opening on white teeth and the eyes that shone like lights, and I hear the laughs that merged into one single strident trumpet blare.”

  He wandered home at dawn, drunk on the atmosphere and the possibilities—as well as the libations. His parents had been up all night, worried sick, more grateful for his safety than angered at his presumption. Porfirio was chastened, and resolved privately never to frighten them again. But presently he realized that, truly, he felt only the slightest bit contrite: “I am, and will always be, a man of pleasure.”

  And why not? Fate and history had brought him to come of age in one of the great seats of pleasure the world would ever know. “Those who didn’t know Paris in the ’20s,” he declared with certainty decades later, “don’t know what a nightclub is.” The interwar demimonde into which he flung himself was the stuff of legend. The Montmartre of the 1920s was no longer the bohemia of starving artists that it had been before the Great War; Pablo Picasso and his adherents had moved across the Seine to Montparnasse and founded a new enclave that would soon draw the Lost Generation of American writers and free spirits. In their wake, the neighborhood that sported such venerable outposts of debauchery as the Moulin Rouge, Le Chat Noir, and the Folies Bergère as well as such lower-rent cousins as Tabarin, Monaco, La Perruche, Zelli’s, Chez Florence, and Le Grand Duc, had become increasingly associated with a blend of criminality and pleasure that lacked the éclat of arty bohemianism. It was no longer an aesthetic wonderland but rather a carnival world of low life lived hard—no place for innocents.

  And yet its denizens looked favorably on this ambitious Dominican boy. Latin men were, at the time, enjoying a unique cachet. The tango craze that had begun before the war was booming and had, indeed, been amplified by other musical fads imported from the Caribbean and South America, including the Dominican merengue. Latin musicians and idle young Latin men were everywhere, and they drew to their hangouts a clientele of slumming locals, many of them women; from afternoon on into the early morning hours, the clubs of Montmartre hosted a stream of Parisian matrons led provocatively around dance floors by younger Latin men who were paid for their time: gigolos (from the French word for a loose-moraled dancing girl, gigolette). These hired guns of the boites were glamorous in a sinister fashion that gave additional luster to their reputati
on as men employed for pleasure.* None other than the great Rudolph Valentino, who died of a perforated ulcer during the days of Porfirio’s induction into Parisian night life, had voyaged to America from Italy as a tango specialist and was said to have made his first living in New York as a gigolo. A young Latin man couldn’t help but admire and aspire.

  But crazes, of course, are designed to fade. And although the Latin vogue was wearing out, Porfirio was still in luck. The new fascination in the Parisian demimonde was with American hot jazz and black musicians, singers, and dancers. The area of Montmartre below the Butte was the Parisian Harlem, teeming with African-American expatriates and dotted with hotels, bars, cafés, and nightclubs that catered to them. Once again, a boy from the Caribbean, of mixed blood, with café au lait skin and hair described as somewhere between wavy and kinky, would blend easily into such an environment, acquiring a liberal education in sensation and reckless living that would, obviously, ingrain itself in his spirit far more deeply than anything going on at school.

  In this sexy, dangerous world, the game young Porfirio more than fit in, he was a hit. But his love affair with Parisian night life would prove, at least for the time being, a dalliance. Once again, in 1926, Don Pedro’s work called for the family to move. Another tottering government had been established in Santo Domingo—this one installed by the Americans, who had pulled out their troops to allow the locals a chance. The new regime assigned Don Pedro to its embassy in London; Porfirio would be schooled relatively nearby, in Calais.

  As evinced by his decision to move the boy closer to where he himself would be, Don Pedro had some concerns about this boy who seemed more dancer than warrior. Porfirio was thin, wasp-waisted, coltish. And although he had an undeniable knack for sports, there were no obvious bulges of muscle on him, nor had his mettle ever been truly tested. Don Pedro arranged for him to be tutored in boxing. “The man of action still lived beneath the diplomat’s clothes,” he later explained, “and he wanted a solid son with quick fists.”