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

by Shawn Levy

  The newspapers couldn’t report it all, literally. Paper was so scarce that most published as a single folded sheet—four pages total—and were dedicated to serious matters such as the progress of the war and the arrests and purgings of Nazis and collaborators from all parts of liberated France.

  So some stories were missed altogether.

  Such as the mysterious events of the early hours of Saturday, September 23, which were never reported in Paris but made headlines elsewhere.

  Somebody had thrown a party for some international big shots who were in town—William Randolph Hearst Jr. among them—and Rubi and Danielle were, naturally, on hand. Late at night, they bummed a ride home from Spiro Vassilopoulos, a press attaché of the Greek embassy, who was accompanied by his wife, Edmée, and a young man from Switzerland. Vassilopoulos, and his wife sat up front and Rubi, Danielle, and the Swiss took the backseat, with Rubi in the middle.

  They were headed northwest along Boulevard Malesherbes with the windows closed against the early autumn air when Vassilopoulos heard the trill of a whistle and, thinking it was a policeman, slowed down.

  Then Danielle heard something.

  “That’s a shot …”

  The car stopped.

  “A veritable hailstorm exploded behind us,” Rubi remembered. “Edmée let out a shriek. A bullet had hit her. At the same time I felt as if I had been whipped on the back. But it didn’t hurt much. Then I had the feeling that a hot object had lodged itself deeply within me. I didn’t say anything because the poor woman was shouting. She was bleeding everywhere. In a minute, her seat was covered with blood. Vassilopoulos took his wife in his arms and shouted, ‘My love, don’t die!’”

  In contrast to the drama in the front seat, Rubi played the stoic in the back. “I opened my collar. I breathed with difficulty. I felt sweat cover my body. I murmured, ‘There’s no point in yelling here. I’m also wounded.’”

  Danielle hadn’t even noticed that her husband had been hit, and the news launched her into a panic of her own: “What’s wrong? Where are you hurt?”

  But he couldn’t answer. “It was a struggle to breathe,” he recalled. “I had the impression that something was escaping from me—my life, without a doubt. And at that very moment I felt within myself an extraordinary resolve.” He muttered a single word: “Marmottan.”

  The tiny Hospital Marmottan was just blocks from his old family home on Avenue Mac-Mahon; he’d passed it a million times as a boy. It was no trick, even in his distress, even with Edmée screaming bloody murder, to direct Vassilopoulos, who had gathered himself sufficiently to take the wheel again, to the front door.

  “We made a striking entrance,” Rubi recalled. “Edmée didn’t stop screaming.” He felt just the opposite urge. “I felt like sitting down, because my legs wouldn’t support me.” He found a room where a few American servicemen were drying out after a night of binging. And for the first time he began to feel truly anxious. He blurted out to Danielle, “If they leave me here, I’ll die.”

  Marmottan was, as he knew, a charity hospital, staffed with young doctors—interns and residents. He wanted his own physician, and asked Danielle to call him. She got on the phone and painted the most urgent scene she could—“Rubi has at least four bullets in him!”—but the doctor advised that they let the attending physicians see to him.

  “For a moment,” Rubi said, “I thought he hadn’t come because he thought I was a hopeless case. But he had made a clever assessment of the situation. If we had waited for him, I would have died before he got there. But I nevertheless died a bit when I learned he wasn’t coming.”

  He was uncomfortable sitting up so he slouched onto the floor for relief. He was so nonchalant, in fact, that he hadn’t been noticed at all by the staff.

  “Edmée was already in the operating room,” he said. “The way she was yelling, they saw to her immediately. On the floor, I smoked a cigarette, convinced it was my last. Nobody paid me any attention.”

  Finally, a passing nurse noticed that he was in discomfort.

  “What are you doing there?”

  “I have a bullet in my back.”

  “And you didn’t say anything? I’m going to get Dr. Adam.”

  They whisked him off for an X ray, and Dr. Adam whistled with amazement when he saw what it revealed. Rubi was rushed into a two-and-a-half hour operation to remove a slug from his right kidney. He made it through the night, but from there it would be a touch-and-go business.

  If the shooting of a minor Caribbean diplomat couldn’t be squeezed into the meager pages of the Parisian newspapers of the era, even if the bullets narrowly missed a major film star, mention of the incident did find its way into the New York Times. And in Ciudad Trujillo, it was frontpage news, not in the least because it was the first time in years that anybody knew for sure that Rubi was even alive. Since he had quit Vichy in late 1942, he’d been entirely incommunicado. But the Dominican newspaper La Nación (edited at the time by Rubi’s brother-in-law Gilberto Sánchez Lustrino) carried a full report of the shooting, including this telegram sent from Rubi’s convalescent bed to his erstwhile father-in-law:

  I’ve been liberated from German internment by Allied forces. Find me in Paris awaiting your orders. Found in a Greek car, I was gravely wounded Sept. 23 by shots aimed at that car. I believe I’m out of danger after surgery.—Rubirosa

  (The newspaper declared, upon this evidence, that Rubi’s “first thoughts” upon the liberation of Paris “were of his country, his relatives and his protector, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.”)

  The following day, another telegram from Paris found its way into the paper.

  I have the good fortune to inform my family and friends in America that I’ll soon be fine. Danielle has carried herself bravely. She has been at my side night and day from the moment I was injured.

  Again, this was a pretty brave face to put on things. The operation may have been a success, but recovery was hardly a given. Edmée, it turned out, had merely, for all that screaming, suffered a flesh wound to the ass. Rubi might yet die. For several days, in vivid pain, he hovered in danger of infection in a convalescent hospital near his home in Neuilly.

  “I began to weaken,” he recalled. “The pain increased. I grew delirious. As if I had a cold, I coughed, and with each coughing fit I felt 20 bayonets in my body. I died of thirst, but they gave me nothing to drink; they only allowed me to lick a spoon of water that Danielle, who never left my side, offered me, trembling and in tears. I didn’t stop running my hands over my body. I fought. I felt young. I didn’t want to die so quickly and so stupidly for nothing.”

  As he lay there, he remembered a visit he had made to a fortune-teller in Berlin in 1936. “She told me that I would divorce within two years and that within eight years I would suffer a grave injury by firearms: ‘Everyone will believe that you’ll die, but you’ll be saved.’”

  She was right on both accounts. Fit and hale at thirty-five years of age, he made it through those crucial first five days without infection and would fully recover.

  So who did it?

  After the trouble over Danielle’s wartime visit to Germany, there were suspicions that it was Resistance gunmen avenging themselves against a perceived collaborator. Another supposition lay the blame at the feet of Nazis or Nazi sympathizers still lurking in the city and seeking to stir up trouble. As Rubi was one of the injured parties, it seemed almost inevitable that rumors would circulate—jokes, really—that the assailant was a jealous husband.

  According to Rubi, the Swiss lad in the car, perhaps because he came from a neutral nation, was able to follow up the incident and get to the bottom of it. The shooters, said the Swiss, were members of a group known as the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, a splinter group of the Communist Front National, which formed to fight the Nazi occupiers in 1942. They were patrolling Paris trying to beat any lingering Germans out of hiding when the car sped past them in the night.

  “They weren’t devils,” Rubi reflected.
“They were young men who had begun fighting around the time the war ended and sought to make a mark.”

  When asked why they attacked the car, they said, “We asked for papers and you didn’t stop, so we thought you were Germans and we fired.… We realized that we’d done something stupid and we beat it.”

  Typically philosophical, Rubi responded to this account with a shrug: “There’s nothing to say to that.”

  But typically as well the brush with death inspired him in a way that recalled his reaction to Trujillo’s anger after that fateful dance in Santiago a dozen years earlier: “There emerged in me a greater appetite for life and lively people than ever.”

  Danielle, in other words, had reason to keep her eyes open.

  They passed part of his convalescence on the Riviera, where Rubi found himself under attack by an unjustly jealous husband at a party thrown by Aly Khan, another sportsman and playboy with a burgeoning global reputation. Right there in the luxe setting of a fine restaurant, the fellow challenged Rubi to a duel, slapping him on the cheek and swearing he would avenge the honor Rubi had allegedly stained. “Why should I fight you?” Rubi asked. “I haven’t done anything wrong.” (In fact, the fellow’s wife, a fiftyish Argentine matron, had pursued Rubi doggedly to no avail.) Into the breach stepped Danielle, arguing that the man was mistaken and defusing the situation. Rubi watched placidly, enjoying the spectacle of his tiny tigress fighting for him.

  When he was fit enough to resume work, Rubi was proposed for a position at the newly reestablished Dominican embassy in France. But the new French government was making a point of refusing to recognize diplomats who had been accredited by the Nazi-sponsored government in Vichy, and so an alternative commission fell his way: Rome, where he was named to the all-purpose post of chargé d’affaires in January 1945.

  Danielle, having been cleared of charges of collaboration by a committee established to weigh guilt and innocence, was still waiting for the French film business to resume and her career to recommence. So she joined Rubi on his trip to Rome to present his credentials.

  The arrival of a major French movie star in Italy was big news, and it would be reported not only locally but internationally by wire service correspondents and even freelancers looking around the Italian capital for colorful stories. One in particular made an impression.

  “A journalist showed up the day after we settled into our hotel,” Rubi remember. “We lunched together. She struck me as vivacious and jovial, with that certain something that Americans can have.” She was, he recalled, “a typical enough journalist except for the fact that she was the richest woman in the world.”

  Her name was Doris Duke.

  There was a certain audacity in wooing the daughter of a bloodthirsty despot. There was a thunderbolt fortune in winning the heart of a gorgeous and well-to-do film star. But sitting at lunch with your wife and turning the charm on the single wealthiest woman on earth—a recent divorcée, to boot—was brash even by Rubi’s brazen standards. Doris wasn’t nearly in Danielle’s league as a beauty, although she possessed a kind of long-limbed, squared-jawed sexiness. But her hundreds of millions of dollars could have the same effect on the libido as a night of drinking and dancing and a bartender’s shout of last call: All physical imperfections were magically transformed into comely assets—and she had neither a vengeful daddy nor a controlling husband to circumvent.

  And more even than greed or the overweening nature of his inner tíguere was this: In Doris Duke Rubi finally confronted somebody as large as himself in spirit and self-image and appetite for life and sense of unlimited boundaries. They were kindred in a way that he hadn’t been with either of his wives or any of his lovers. They deserved each other.

  Of course, he was already married. But Danielle’s career took care of that inconvenience in the short run. By spring she was in Paris working on her first film in nearly four years, leaving Rubi in Rome to see to his diplomatic and other tasks. Whatever, if anything, happened between Rubi and Doris in Rome after Danielle left—some said that the American heiress was satisfied with declaring frankly that he should look her up when he was done with Danielle, others that they had already made their plans and she had made a down payment of as much as a half-million dollars against future considerations—the groundwork was laid for a rollicking ride.

  Danielle went back to work, making two films in France while Rubi dallied at diplomacy in Rome. After being together for more than five years, they were drifting apart. “Little by little,” Rubi related in a poetic moue, “something besides 1000 kilometers came between us, something like absence, separation, different lives, social circles the other didn’t know, the habits one picks up over time, day by day, living without your double, your echo.”

  He dutifully commuted to see her when he could—perhaps because Doris was too big and unlikely a catch for him to feel satisfied that she was well and truly hooked. But Danielle wasn’t fooled: She saw things and heard things and had plans of her own. She signed to make a film in Morocco, Bethsabée, a flimsy modern updating of the story of David and Bathsheba. Rubi offered to visit the set, but she warned him off, saying there would be nothing for him to do and that he’d grow bored. He came anyway.

  Big mistake.

  “Danielle was right,” he admitted. “My presence was useless. We had a long talk. Not one of those scenes where love and passion are translated into violent words and angry shouts. A long, slow, quiet, sad talk. I came to realize that she had noticed all my little madnesses, my deviations from strict conjugal orthodoxy. Nothing had escaped her.”

  Among other things, Danielle revealed that she, too, had found someone else—an actor named Pierre Amourdedieu who went by the screen name Pierre-Louis. They had performed together before the war when he had a bit part in one of the films she made with her first husband, and he had a small feature role in Bethsabée.

  As she recalled, “Sometimes you need distance to really see somebody, to know what you really have.” And apparently she wasn’t crazy for what she had. According to Rubi, she said, “I waited until I was sure of myself to tell you all this. To be sure that I could live without you, sure that I wouldn’t feel myself drawn back to your side. Now I can tell you goodbye.”

  He said he took it well: “I listened silently, without reaction, without argument. I still loved her, but I didn’t defend myself or make excuses.”

  When she returned to Paris in February 1947, Danielle made public their mutual decision to part and agreed with his assessment of his behavior: “I made known to him my intention. He accepted like a gentleman.”

  But after the divorce became final on May 21, things changed in her mind. First Pierre-Louis backed out of the intended marriage. “Too much mother-in-law before the wedding,” she groused. “His mother said I am a woman with a past, and Pierre obeyed her orders forbidding the marriage.”

  Then the press started to ask her questions about their five years together, and the happy veneer she had tried to put on the divorce cracked. “That man has ruined me,” she told one reporter. To another, she revealed, “One woman is not enough for him. A man like him needs a harem.”

  (Years later, Rubi himself put a bittersweet varnish on the matter: “It was a very big love, and we had said from the beginning that the moment it stops being such a big love we will separate. We will not ruin this thing. So we separated.”)

  After a while, Danielle stopped talking about it altogether, refusing to answer questions about him in interviews and acting as if his name meant nothing to her. But she knew that people were aware of their whirlwind life together, and when she chose she could use the fact to her advantage. A decade after their split-up, she was appearing in a benefit performance in which the comic actor Fernandel used her as the target for a trick shooting act. The crowd seemed concerned for her safety, but she assured them that she’d be fine: “Nothing frightens me. Remember, I was married to Rubirosa.”

  And how did he, the man at the center of this tumult, succor
his wounded heart?

  “I returned to Paris,” he sighed, allowing that “with the sadness of a break-up mixed the joy of recovered liberty.” Of course, he had help through this arduous recovery: “Doris was there, happy, elegant, enchanting.” (And rich.)

  The waters of Lethe had nothing on this treatment for melancholy.

  Throughout the nineteenth century and after each of the catastrophic wars that roiled it in the twentieth, Europe hosted a lot of Doris Dukes: American girls with money who visited the Old World in search of culture, refinement, and social standing and found themselves swarmed by gigolos, bounders, cads, and studs-for-hire. Some of these fellows were real catches, of a breed: scions of old families, some titled, whose ancestral fortunes had disappeared in wars and revolutions; for the price of a dowry and an allowance, they bestowed the gilding of their lineage on arriviste American girls whom they took as wives. Others more resembled the nightmares of rich daddies hard at work back in the States: outright fortune-hunters (as the male species of the gold digger is known) who offered good times and fast times and painless removal of token portions of their trust funds. Warnings against this predatory type were spelled out in boldface, but the combination of willful girls and dashing men produced inevitable sparks. A man with the right clothes, right connections, and right line of palaver might make a career out of a string of dalliances if not marriages.

  Doris Duke knew the type. Indeed, back home she had been married to one, Jimmy Cromwell, one of the subspecies of bounder who sought to marry money even though he came from it. Cromwell (and he was descended from the Oliver Cromwell) was the coddled son of Eva Roberts Cromwell Stotesbury, a gold digger par excellence who married twice for money and whose social climbing, elbow rubbing, and vulgar excesses raised eyebrows in bastions of old American wealth in Washington, D.C., and on Philadelphia’s Main Line.