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

by Shawn Levy

  Fit and dashing and chiseled, Eva’s son Jimmy was also tinged with the becoming patina of a wicked history: A noted roué, he had been married to the daughter of automobile mogul Horace Elgin Dodge and had blown his own family’s money in a utopian land scheme near Miami that bore the noxious sobriquet Floranada. In the summer of 1929, just months before the stock market crash that would create scores of Jimmy Cromwells with busted fortunes, he was on the make in Bar Harbor, Maine, and met Doris, not yet seventeen but plenty old enough for Cromwell’s purposes. In particular, he was aware that as the sole inheritor of her father’s interests in tobacco and hydroelectric power, she was, in plain fact, the richest girl in the world, with some $300 million to her name.*

  Doris’s father, James Buchanan “Buck” Duke, was born in 1856 to a family that was nearly wiped out by the Civil War but found salvation in the weakness of others and a certain ruthless cunning. Union soldiers had rampaged through the family seat of Durham, North Carolina, and when Buck’s father, Washington Duke, returned home there was nothing left him save his children and a little bit of tobacco. That crop would become the seed, literally, of the family’s new lease on the world. The tobacco business boomed after the war—Northern soldiers had acquired a taste for fine Southern leaves—and W. Duke, Sons and Company, propelled by the aggressive salesmanship and competitive savvy of young Buck, became one of its major concerns. With two wildly successful gambits—the use of cigarette rolling machines to create prepackaged smokes and the establishment of a monopolistic tobacco trust—the Dukes came to control the trade. By 1900, the Duke family controlled virtually all of the cigarette and snuff markets and more than half of the plug and smoking tobacco markets in America and Europe.

  Buck Duke was living in New York by then, and with his money, his business savvy, and his raw Southern ways he was considered at once a nouveau riche vulgarian and a man worth knowing—and, of course, marrying. Lillian Nanette Fletcher McCredy was the lucky minx who snagged him; an aspiring singer from Chicago who had already wed and cuckolded one wealthy New Yorker, she got Buck to sign on the dotted line in November 1904, and proceeded to treat her vows to him with the same disdain she’d treated the ones she’d made to Mr. McCredy. By 1906, they’d parted.

  Lucky for Buck, too, as he had spent a pile while married to her, chiefly on an ambitious estate in Somerville, New Jersey. Populated with exotic wildlife, dominated by a massive mansion choked with antique treasures from around the world, the three-plus-square-mile property included greenhouses, a racetrack, a clock tower, heated stables, vast flower beds, and a five-acre lake stocked with wildfowl and fish. In addition to serving as his personal kingdom, the estate also allowed Buck Duke—who’d acquired the nickname MegaBuck—to reincorporate his companies in New Jersey, which had more favorable tax policies than either North Carolina or New York. His fortune would multiply liberally in this bucolic redoubt.

  Soon after his divorce, Buck found a more suitable mate. Nannie Lane Holt Inman twice belonged to prominent old Southern families, once by birth to the Holt line, which failed to keep its fortune after the war, and once by marriage to William Henry Inman, whose family fortune in cotton had fared better. She first wed in 1890, when she was twenty-one, and had two children—only one of whom survived infancy—before her husband’s death in 1902 of complications of alcoholism. By the time she met Buck Duke at a North Carolina resort, she had taken to calling herself Nanaline, a Frenchified name that sounded a nice note in the moneyed circles in which she ran. They married in July 1907, and set about to work on two projects: a grand mansion on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street and a family of their own. The former, under the auspices of the lordly architect Horace Trumbauer, would take nearly eight years to complete and stuff with the booty of Europe. The latter, too, took time: Baby Doris, “the richest mite of humanity in all the world,” per one press report, arrived on November 22, 1912.

  The advantages Doris had were staggering, even by the standards of royal children or the offspring of arriviste American robber barons: bodyguards, nurses, governesses, nannies, tutors; piano and dance lessons; a thirty-two-room New York brownstone as a principal residence, its ballrooms, drawing rooms, and bedroom suites stolid masses of marble, gold, antiquities, Louis XVI furniture and precious rugs; a chauffeur-driven limousine (there was, of course, a fleet of cars: the limo was hers alone); a private train car named Doris; a Newport, Rhode Island, cottage, Rough Point; and yet another estate, a fifty-three-room Southern mansion near Charlotte.

  Buck doted on Doris shamelessly, going to extraordinary lengths to isolate her from germs and to buy her anything she ever hinted at wanting, however fine, rare, or dear. Even into her teens he called her “the baby,” and she reciprocated his tenderness, composing little love notes that he would keep in his pockets to moon over when he needed a boost. But if she was unusually close to her big, loud bear of a papa, Doris was somewhat remote from Nanaline. The girl was rangy and gawkish—an ugly duckling among the delicate swans of her set—and her gracelessness unsettled her fashionable mother. Doris was a good student during her years at Manhattan’s prestigious Brearly School—smart, sharp, funny—but she didn’t make friends easily. And as Nanaline controlled her wardrobe and her associations, she seemed never fully to emerge as herself.

  She grew shrewd and mistrustful. She watched with a cool eye as overindulged relatives on both sides of the family squandered their fortunes and, indeed, their lives. She read with studied indifference the bags full of mail she received daily—half beseeching loans, half threatening her for having the temerity to be born wealthy. She learned, oddly, to count pennies, expecting to be cheated because she had so much money and haggling with waiters and cabbies and shopkeepers over small sums.

  If there seemed too much Nanaline in the girl, perhaps it was because Buck Duke so rarely ceased in his aggressive accumulation of wealth and standing to put more of a stamp on her. In the 1920s, the phenomenon of hydroelectric power—“white coal”—took hold of his imagination and he began buying up rights to streams with waterfalls and rapids, slowly building a huge interest in the power grid that covered most of the southeastern United States and stretched up into Canada; Duke Power would become one of the country’s largest utilities. At the same time, Buck got involved with a small college in his hometown of Durham and endowed it with such huge sums that its name was eventually changed in tribute to the man who, in effect, built it—from Trinity College to Duke University.

  In September 1925, with these twin efforts consuming him, his floozy first wife reappeared to wage an ugly public challenge to the legal standing of their divorce. All of it—the bad press, the pressing against the clock to build his empire and legacy—seemed to drain him. He collapsed, anemic, probably stricken with leukemia. From the first episode of weakness he lasted barely two weeks. In October, he died, leaving virtually everything to his twelve-year-old daughter.

  If Doris had been sheltered, she was now positively quarantined. Her few school friends no longer saw her; she vanished into a world of international socialites and grown-ups. Her relations with her mother grew so tense that she actually sued Nanaline for sole possession of the various Duke houses, the provenance of which wasn’t made entirely clear in Buck’s will; Nanaline, fearful of losing everything, ceded ownership of the New York and New Jersey estates to Doris, while retaining the right to live in them, and kept the Rhode Island house as her principal residence. (The Charlotte property, like the private railroad car, was sold off.) At seventeen, Doris was presented at Buckingham Palace; that same year, she debuted in a massive all-night party in Newport featuring circus animals and three orchestras. At twenty-one, she inherited the first third of her father’s bequest and secured freedom from her scolding, superior mother. The stays were off, and she was determined to live in the world she knew was out there.

  That was the girl whom Jimmy Cromwell courted across two continents for the better part of six years, finally landing the prize in February 1935,
when he married her in a brief civil ceremony at the Dukes’ New York mansion, Doris defiant in the face of her mother’s stern glare. Nanaline had, correctly, sized Cromwell up as a fortune hunter, but the groom was determined to do more than spend his wife’s money. Yes, they traveled the world in grand style for a ten-month honeymoon that included not only a visit with Mahatma Gandhi in Wardha, India, but an idyll on Waikiki Beach, where Doris began construction of yet another palatial home. Yes, Cromwell kept up his amateur sporting life: boxing, golf, polo, sailing. But he kept earnestly at work, too, exploring serious business ventures and even a political career, finagling appointment as the U.S. minister to Canada in 1940.

  The marriage hadn’t ever been truly intimate—Cromwell, sixteen years his wife’s senior, referred to her as his “Frigidairess”—and both spouses had roamed frequently. Doris had spent long periods of time in Hawaii overseeing the construction of her house, and when she was there she engaged in a widely known affair with Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic swimmer and granddaddy of modern surfing. She was also seen around Europe and New York and Hawaii with Alec Cunningham-Reid, the British World War I aviation hero and rising Tory political star whom she’d met while touring the Continent as a debutante.

  Doris and Cromwell were almost brought together as a family—he had hoped that a baby would knit them even as he realized that it very well might be another man’s. But their only child, a daughter named Arden, survived just one day. After that, Ottawa would prove the last straw; with the world as her playground, there was no way Doris was going to act the quiet diplomatic wife in a frozen provincial capital. Not long after presenting herself as the new Madam Minister, she pressed Cromwell for a divorce.

  But Cromwell was relying on his marriage not only for financial support but because he believed that his connection to the Duke fortune would boost him in his quest to become a U.S. senator. He fought Doris’s efforts to free herself with all his political, financial, and emotional capacity; as his family’s wealth had dwindled, he was trying to hold on, he must have felt, to two legacies. But she outflanked him in all areas and, after purchasing a small home in Reno, Nevada, to establish legal residency there, she was granted a divorce in December 1941. Cromwell would over the coming years so vehemently contest her right to Nevada residency that Doris cannily held on to the Reno property just in case.

  Even more than freedom from Nanaline, the divorce launched Doris into the maw of the world—and this time a world that was newly at war. Although she had entertained but one thought when Pearl Harbor was bombed—“Did they destroy my swimming pool?”—she was determined to make a real contribution to the Allied effort. She joined the United Seaman Service, a kind of USO for merchant sailors. And then, seeking even more action, she went to Egypt. She lost herself in a series of affairs with, among others, playwright Charles MacArthur, gossip columnist Tex McCrary, actor Brian Aherne, and General George S. Patton. She made contact with the Office of Strategic Services, the fabled OSS, precursor to the modern CIA, and, befriended by OSS founder William Donovan (the same man who employed Rubi’s poker buddy Fernando Gerassi in Spain), she was granted privileges that allowed her to fly between Italy and Cairo. (She had no official duties, and it was widely assumed that she used these trips to follow a British officer with whom she was having an affair.) By 1945, she had lost her standing in the spy community but gained employment of another sort as a correspondent for the International News Service, for which she reported about conditions for civilians in liberated Italy.

  And it was as an INS reporter that she rang up Danielle Darrieux and met her husband, the recently appointed Dominican chargé d’affaires to Rome—who’d been waiting for her, in one way or another, his whole life.

  * * *

  * More than $3.15 billion in 2005 terms.

  SEVEN

  YUL BRYNNER IN A BLACK TURTLENECK

  You needed a good closet.

  You had to be proficient in at least one sport, the more dangerous and expensive the better.

  Languages were an asset—for blandishments if nothing else—and smarts: not bookishness so much as worldliness.

  It wasn’t necessary to be drop-dead handsome but you had to be charming, and you got extra points for a reputation for danger and good times.

  You had to dance well, it went without saying.

  A little money didn’t hurt, if only to get you into the right restaurants and nightclubs and casinos and hotels. (A lot of money didn’t, of course, hurt either.)

  Connections were essential, whether acquired through school or sports or socializing or business, if you were the sort who went in for business.

  And time. Time was, as the saying went, of the essence: time to travel and time to play and time to lounge and time to get fit and time to get fitted and time to dally and time to take your time while others, less certain of themselves and what they wanted, scurried.

  You had always to be on your guard; the least sign of ordinary sloth or slovenliness or boredom or fatigue or complacence could be a crushing turnoff, and you’d be through.

  It helped to have an equanimous sense of humor about yourself and what you were up to, both of which could look pretty ridiculous if the light was aimed just so.

  And taste, the je ne sais quoi that separated the vulgarian from the connoisseur: God help the fellow who went into this racket and lacked fine taste.

  No, no, laugh though people might, whisper and snipe and grumble and disparage, when it was totted up and taken as a whole, if the thing was to be done as it ought, there was nothing especially easy about the life of a playboy.

  Years later, when he was internationally famous for his women and his sporting life and his diplomatic postings and his gaudy adventures and his seeming ubiquity in the scandalmongering media, chic nightclubs, and enviable boudoirs, a journalist asked Rubi when he found time for work.

  “Work?” he answered. “It’s impossible for me to work. I just don’t have the time.”

  It was no joke. Gumption and pluck and guts and fortune he had in surfeit, but his chief employment, the thing that ate his time, was creating out of whole cloth the image of himself. He would become the most singular sort of juggler: twirling the hoop of Trujillo with one ankle, tossing the batons of his many women in his hands, spinning an active sporting life on top of his head, always well liked, always noticed upon arrival, always impeccable in dress, speech, mien, and manners, a marvel, a star.

  And yet, for all his uniquenesses, he was of a breed.

  Before the world spoke of playboys it spoke of Philanders, Romeos, Don Juans, Lotharios, Casanovas—men of monomaniacal sensuality and prodigious sexual achievement, all celebrated in letters, all but one fictional.

  Philander was a son of Apollo, suckled by goats and noted for his love of beautiful boys; his name, from the Greek philandros—or “fond of men”—was hijacked by English poets as the generic name for a predatory lover of women: a rake, a wolf, a tomcat, a lecher, a libertine.

  Romeo was, of course, Shakespeare’s model of the impassioned young heart, mercurial, yes (recall how quickly his affection flitted from Rosaline to Juliet), but when focused focused in whole: a swain, a suppliant, a suitor, a truelove, a slave.

  Don Juan, most famous of them all, came to the world through the pen of the Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina, whose El Burlador de Sevilla inspired two centuries of plays, operas, novels, and poems about the unrepentant seducer who goes so far as to flout Satan in his quest for physical pleasure: a profligate, a debauchee, a gallant, a lady-killer, a stud.

  Lothario was the antihero of Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent, a cruel user of women who ended up cruelly used himself, murdered in repayment of his desires: a roué, a letch, a goat, a satyr, a whorehound.

  Casanova really existed: Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, born in 1725 in Venice, a law student, monk, bureaucrat, violinist, translator, healer, gambler, pamphleteer, linguist, librarian, and, of course, lover, whose bedroom adventures scandalized and
titillated all of Europe upon the posthumous publication of his massive autobiography: a swinger, a reprobate, a dallier, a skirt chaser, a wanton, a dude.

  It wasn’t until a half century after the appearance of Casanova’s memoirs that the term “playboy” became part of this notorious word tree. As early as the eighteenth century it was an obscure term from the theater meaning “child actor”: a boy who performed in plays. By the late nineteenth century, it had also accrued the meanings of “musician” and “gambler” and perhaps with all of those implications taken together it gained currency in Ireland as another name for the devil or those who would emulate him: hence J. M. Synge’s 1907 comedy The Playboy of the Western World, one of the earliest instances of the word being applied, if ironically, to a ladies’ man. In the 1852 first edition of Roget’s Thesaurus, “playboy” doesn’t appear; by the 1920s, it was a standard term in most thesauri and dictionaries of slang.

  There had always been playboys, of course, but the specific use of “playboy” that would inspire Hugh Hefner’s naming of a magazine focused on his ideal of the modern male lifestyle came to its full meaning in the Jazz Age, when the word acquired all of the undertones that Hefner heard in it: a sensually inclined male, generally of financial means, who roves from woman to woman, party to party, thrill to thrill. It implied all the license and inconstancy that its predecessor synonyms held, but it had a jolly lightness that they lacked: “play,” as in fun; “boy,” as in innocent—the happy face of a dark and seamy business.

  But the 1920s were also, recall, a golden age for Latin men, when their music, manners, dark looks, and sultry ways were celebrated in the media—particularly the cinema—as the ne plus ultra of male sexual allure. The Latin Lover, as this subspecies of libidinous male came to be known, first entered the consciousness of northern Europeans through fictions from Shakespeare to Byron and was cemented as a type by the real-life experiences of young ladies who took the Grand Tour to Italy and southern France and found themselves the subject of unfamiliar but not necessarily unwelcome attentions. Beyond the predilections for female companionship and easy living stereotypical of the playboy and his brethren, the Latin Lover had some unique qualities of his own. The cultures of the Mediterranean (and of lands colonized by Mediterranean powers in the Caribbean and Central and South America) were, perhaps, more overtly sexist than those of northern countries; Latin men paraded peacockishly as if unconcerned that their virility would be doubted, and they kept their women determinedly under cover at home.