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

by Shawn Levy

  A few nights after this reprieve, Rubi and Danielle were out at L’Aiglon, drinking and laughing in the presence of several Gestapo officers. From their glares Rubi could tell that they didn’t approve of a cocoa-complected fellow escorting a fair European, but he ignored them and kept at his partying. Eventually, in the spirit of the evening, he began breaking glasses after drinking from them, in the Russian fashion, and this proved to be the last straw for one of the Germans, who threw a glass at Rubi, striking him. Instinctively, Rubi set on the fellow and hit him, a proper ruckus ensued, the police were called, and then a senior SS officer stepped forward and broke the thing up before it got truly bloody. He took Rubi’s arm and walked him to the door, stating firmly through clenched teeth, “You shouldn’t have done that. I understand, but you don’t know who you’re dealing with. Get going quick. Quick!”

  It was a dumb thing to do, but, according to Danielle, within character. As she recalled, his diplomatic good cheer was a facade for a real loathing of the Nazis. “Rubirosa detested the Germans,” she said. “He screamed it loud and wide and he didn’t hesitate to lash out at them when he’d had a few drinks.”

  This time there would be no sympathy extended to these glamorous lovers whose stars had been crossed by war. Rubi was arrested at his home and taken to the Hessian spa town of Bad Nauheim, north of Frankfurt and hundreds of miles from the French border. The resort where the young Franklin Roosevelt, among other summering Americans, had taken the waters with his family had been filled since Pearl Harbor by hundreds of enemy diplomats and journalists—principally from the United States—and had developed a decadent wartime culture that would, seemingly, have suited Rubi nicely. “There were friends, women, girls, everything you would need to kill time,” he recalled. “They organized card games and social events. You could dance. We indulged in drunken parties with white wine.” It’s hard to imagine he didn’t find his enforced visit at least somewhat diverting.

  Eventually, though, his pining for Danielle outweighed these fleeting pleasures. “Bad Nauheim is a spa city where people with heart ailments recuperated, but the therapeutic effects didn’t work on me,” he moaned. And then, a month or so into his sojourn, the most astonishing telegram arrived, lifting him out of his pet: “I’ll arrive tomorrow morning on the 7:30 train. Tenderly, Danielle.”

  If a minor Dominican diplomat hefted no clout among the German authorities, a gorgeous French movie star did. Almost as soon as Rubi was taken from her, Danielle began looking into the possibility of joining him. Her stardom, her short tenure in the German cinema before the war, and the fact that she had a new film, Premier Rendez-vous, debuting in Germany meant that she had entrée not only to the Nazi state but to its ruling class. She went to Germany and … did something. According to the French Resistance, who took bitter note of the facts as they saw them, she performed for German troops; according to Rubi, she went on a publicity tour along with a number of French artists; according to her, she was still under contract in Germany and was required to present herself at the studio or suffer reprisals against her career. At any rate, she was certainly there, about that there would be no debate, and she certainly made the acquaintance of Joseph Goebbels, whom she charmed into the remarkable concession of a visit to Bad Nauheim and—again, it depended which story was true—the privilege to marry her interned lover.

  She arrived too early: Bad Nauheim detainees weren’t allowed to leave their quarters before 8 A.M., and her train got in just before that hour. Rubi reserved a hotel room and paid a bellboy to meet her train, holding up a sign that read “RUBI” and escorting her to their trysting place. He asked about the circumstances that brought her to him, and she told a story about charming Mrs. Goebbels with tales of her imprisoned lover and about how she was granted permission to leave Berlin for Bad Nauheim by the fearsome propaganda minister himself.

  “Do you have written permission?” Rubi asked her, knowing the esteem in which paperwork was held by the German bureaucracy.

  “No,” she told him, “just verbal.”

  He got a little queasy and took her to the authorities, who laughed in their faces at the claim that Goebbels would authorize such a whimsical visit. Danielle begged them to call Berlin, which they did … and the mood quickly changed. Goebbels had approved. The official who was minutes before mocking the couple was now groveling. “He signaled his compliance by making me a gift of a month’s worth of his ration tickets for butter,” Rubi remembered, “and in Bad Nauheim in 1942, tickets for butter were like bars of gold. From that moment, I helped myself to all liberties. I went everywhere in the city with Danielle on my arm. Those 10 days of happiness gave me new hope.”

  And they also made every other internee mad as hell: Why couldn’t their wives and lovers visit? The authorities had to choose between banishing Danielle or opening the floodgates to trainloads of tootsies—no choice, in other words. Regretfully, respectfully, with an anxious tone of “would you mind?”, they asked her to return to France—quickly, like the next day. She complied and they parted, tearfully.

  It would be another few months before negotiations between Berlin and Ciudad Trujillo were completed and the representatives of both governments were sent to Lisbon in neutral Portugal and freed to return home. “I passed the first two or three days without the sensation of walking,” Rubi remembered. “It was like I was floating, dumbfounded, enchanted.”

  He must truly have been in love, though, because he left the seat of this enchantment, this paradisiacal war-free zone, this Casablanca with better plumbing, for Vichy and Danielle.

  He must have loved her: It would be the only explanation. She had money and means, but not so much to make him independent, and she was gorgeous, but he was already having his way with her. Maybe she needed the sanctity of marriage to protect her career rather than endure scandal as a woman living openly with a foreign man. But the simplest theory covered the most contingencies: They really were in love.

  They wanted to get married straight away, but the paperwork for wartime marriage between a French citizen and a foreigner took so much time to process that they couldn’t stand the wait and made for the Riviera, where the agony of the delay could be mitigated by the scenery and the cushy lifestyle. At Cannes, where, of course, Danielle was recognized, they drew crowds everywhere they went, so they would leave their hotel early in the morning for Eden Roc, where they would swim and dine and laze until the evening, when they raced back to their hotel to see if word had come from the authorities. (That they were able to get about a war-staggered country and chose to be married in the collaborationist capital would count against them in the eyes of many French loyalists later on.) Finally, on September 18, they got the green light and headed back to Vichy to wed.

  It was all done, Rubi recalled, “very quickly, without publicity”—which wasn’t entirely true. The tabloid Paris-Soir was there and the next day spoke glowingly of the groom as “a brilliant chargé d’affaires … a fine young brown man sent to us by his country.”

  They were gorgeous together. He seemed taller beside her than he had beside Flor de Oro, and he had grown into his looks, sculpted, rugged, and confident where a decade before he had sported baby fat and a foolish, self-satisfied little smile. He was dressed in a formal wedding suit: cutaway morning coat with a dashing pocket square; striped pants; white tie, light vest, and high-collared shirt. She wore a heart-shaped hat that dwarfed her head to a somewhat unfortunate effect; her suit was dark and demure (though hemmed short); and the crown of her head barely reached his mouth even though she teetered on significant heels. But despite her drab outfit (there was a war on, after all), she shone, and in the photos in which she flashed that million-dollar smile she was absolutely the picture of a twenty-five-year-old in the full bloom of love. It was the best they would ever look at any of their combined eight weddings.

  The witnesses included the Brazilian ambassador, Luis Martins de Souza Dantas, and Mrs. Douglas MacArthur II, the wife of the famed gener
al’s nephew, who was himself second secretary of the U.S. embassy in Vichy. After the civil ceremony, a breakfast was held in the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs. Such was the fame of the bride that the New York Times carried a small item on the wedding, mistakenly reporting that the groom, of whose first wedding ten years earlier it had also taken brief note, was from San Salvador.

  It was an innocent mistake, and perhaps it was down to the fact that the Dominican Republic no longer had an embassy in Vichy, leaving Rubi with no work to do and no means of communicating with Ciudad Trujillo. Danielle was being courted by various filmmakers, but she refused to work until the French regained control of their film industry from the Nazis, so the newlyweds found themselves rootless. They honeymooned in Portugal, where Danielle, recognizable throughout Europe, was greeted with “La Marseillaise” at bullfights, restaurants, and cafés. Back in Vichy, though, things were more tense. “I decided to put some distance between us and the German army,” Rubi said. They considered fleeing for the Caribbean, and started off for Perpignan in the Pyrenees to contact a Resistance cell that might be able to get them to a boat in Spain. But Danielle got cold feet about meeting the Free French, and so they returned to Vichy, where Rubi continued to stew. Finally, he threw up his hands at the whole situation: “I couldn’t telegram the Dominican Republic. I couldn’t receive instructions from my government. And so I left.”

  And just where would a Dominican diplomat cut off from his country and married to a French actress who might be wanted by either or both the Germans and the Resistance go?

  Skiing, of course.

  They went to a chalet in Megève in the Haute-Savoie, a chic resort tucked into the corner where France, Italy, and Switzerland meet at the toes of Mont Blanc. The explanation was echt Rubi: “A number of my friends were there, supplies were easy to come by, Switzerland wasn’t far off, and the occupiers were principally Italian. It was said that the atmosphere was completely unique.”

  Charmant.

  With the permission of Vichy authorities, who asked only that he report daily to the local gendarmerie, they spent most of 1943 in the small town, skiing and otherwise disporting themselves, yes, but engaging, at least by Rubi’s claim, in anti-German activities as well. (Again, all of this gadding about in the midst of war—and the Nazis’ evident countenancing of it—led Allied intelligence officers to believe that Rubi was a Nazi agent; his name even showed up on a list of suspected Axis spies during the war.) However, when a Gestapo officer was assassinated by the local branch of the maquis, the French Resistance fighters, Rubi, who was by his own admission acquainted with the insurgents, was marked for reprisal by the Germans. As Danielle remembered, “One night we had to flee with just what we had on our backs.” (Her forged papers declared her name to be “Denise Robira.”)

  They wound up on a small farm that she owned near Septeuil, about thirty miles east of Paris. From one ironic setting to another: Instead of high life in the Alps, Rubi found himself living the sort of existence he would have thought of earlier as the most awful doom. “I became a peasant,” he remembered. “I bought a cow to get butter, pigs to make hams, sheep to make grilled chops. I learned how to herd cattle. Danielle saw to her chickens. Friends came to see us from time to time, bringing cognac and leaving weapons.”

  But truly there was no safe haven in a divided France in which various factions were seething over the many treacheries that had colored the war. Rubi was denounced in one newspaper as an enemy of Germany “in a perfectly repugnant article by a brave anonymous author who declared that I was a lackey of the judeo-marxist plutocrats and ought to be behind bars.”

  And it was actually worse for Danielle. The trouble began that winter, when a newspaper called Bir-Hakeim (after a ferocious battle the Free French had won under de Gaulle in the Libyan desert) wrote that she had been tried in absentia by the Resistance, who’d found her guilty of betraying her country with her activities in Germany and had sentenced her to die. It was so sensational a story that a version of it found its way into both the New York Times and the syndicated gossip column of Hedda Hopper. A movie star, a Latin diplomat, Nazis, a secret trial, assassins, a great scoop—and almost entirely untrue. BirHakeim was, in fact, an organ of Nazi disinformation, established to sow infighting among the Resistance and its sympathizers and to direct attacks on enemies of the Germans by painting them as enemies of the Free French: Just a month before Danielle was tarred with a false death sentence, a newspaper editor in Toulouse who’d been similarly framed was shot dead in the street. She had every reason to fear for her life.

  Where did she go for help? What did she do? She wrote a telegram to Hedda Hopper:

  I have read your Hollywood column of December 8th and really don’t understand where you picked this information STOP The reason of my trip to Germany was because I wanted marry [sic] my fiancé who was taken there as hostage and stay with him in same condition STOP I never entertained but Americans and Free French soldiers and I said no to the occupied movie pictures in 1942 and believe me it was rather dangerous with the Germans here STOP Trial is a big word there are no charges against me STOP I hope you will have the kindness to write the truth about me STOP would appreciate a cable from you addressed 7 Boulevard Julien Potin Neuilly Sur Seine STOP Happy New Year

  And, strangely, this earnest little appeal had some effect, at least in the United States, where accounts of the true nature of the alleged death sentence made their way into print. Hedda was particularly sympathetic in setting the record straight.

  Not, of course, that anyone in the Resistance was reading Hedda Hopper.

  After D-Day, life on the farm resembled less a restful country interlude than a dangerous game of cat and mouse. Somebody—Nazis? the Resistance?—was asking for them around the village, and they fled their home on bicycles, hiding in a friend’s barn for a few days. Soon after, an Allied plane was shot down by Germans and they attended a ceremony where the dead airmen were memorialized by the locals; again they were noticed and subsequently hunted. They ducked in and out of their home, seeking shelter with friends on nearby farms. One afternoon in August when they felt it was safe, they went into the village to visit the café.

  “A group of young men were talking loudly,” Rubi remembered. “One of them suddenly froze. He pointed at Danielle and said ‘Danielle Darrieux!’ in an American accent.” Handshakes all around and, Rubi being Rubi, a party ensued: “We invited him and his friends to dinner, where they reveled in fresh foods and we in American goodies.” In the coming weeks, as the liberation of Paris was awaited as an inevitability, a group of American journalists happened upon the French actress and the Latin diplomat in their rustic retreat. On August 20, a reporter named James McGlincy dropped in, shared a bottle of wine, and reported to the world that the vagaries of war were such that the glamorous Danielle was wearing blue slacks with a big patch on the seat. Four days later, Paris—and with it all the couture houses a desperate movie star could want—was liberated by the Allies.

  Finally they could live together as husband and wife.

  Or at least try.

  * * *

  * She died in 1978 at Beth Israel Hospital in New York, married to a ninth husband, cut off entirely from her family.

  * At this stage in his life, Trujillo was sprinkling the world with progeny like a dandelion gone to seed: After Flor and Ramfis, he added Odille, the baby Doña Bienvenida bore him subsequent to their divorce; two more children by Doña Maria; and four bastard children, all acknowledged. Of these nine, the most astounding were the two he sired with Lina Lovatón, Flor’s schoolmate and co-conspirator in the early stages of her affair with Rubi. In 1936, Trujillo had become enraptured with the girl and had her crowned queen of the carnival of Ciudad Trujillo to enormous fanfare; when Doña Maria grew aptly jealous, he relocated his young mistress to Miami, where she and her children lived in plush comfort.

  * By the mid-1990s Sosùa had become so synonymous with sex tourism and prostitution that the national p
olice shut down every bar in the town for a year, killing both the legitimate and illegitimate economies and scattering the sex workers and their customers to other locales.

  * Flor was, of course, across the ocean during the war, and so, indeed, was La Môme Moineau, who left in Rubi’s charge for safekeeping a valuable Delahaye motorcar while she sat out the hostilities in Puerto Rico with her husband.

  SIX

  AN AMBUSH AND AN HEIRESS

  There may never have been a greater ecstasy in a place that was better suited to host it.

  Paris at its liberation: Nazis on the run, Yanks and Brits pouring into town, hidden wine cellars unsealed, music and color and smiles and food and champagne and everywhere men and women finding in one another the perfect release for the stifling and suffering of the previous years. Paris traditionally closed for national vacations in August. That summer it was more wide open than ever.

  There were still signs of wartime scarcity—a curfew on electricity, for instance, and daily announcements about which bakeries would be operating that day. But those sorts of things felt like ancient history when so much was new or newly revived: Cafés were allowed to open every day of the week; English, American, and Russian movies showed up in newly reopened theaters; telephone service outside the city was reinstated; the lottery resumed, as did horse racing. Novelties intended to entertain the Allied troops made the world seem larger than it ever had been: exhibitions of baseball and football, soccer matches between British and French soldiers, Fred Astaire—the actual Fred Astaire!—was on hand to perform for the enlisted men. (The lucky Yanks and Brits could stay for a week in a room with a bath at the Grand Hotel for 150 francs—about three U.S. dollars.)