by Shawn Levy
But if women in southern Europe had fewer outward privileges, they were, paradoxically, more venerated. A subtle matriarchy held sway in the home; Spanish men bore their mothers’ surnames in their own legal names. The veneration of women was so integral to the culture that speech and writing themselves were impossible to conceive without it: the very languages—the Romance languages—lent their name to the art of love. The first recognizably modern love poems—and, arguably, the very notion of idealized romantic love—came from the troubadours of Languedoc, who wrote in Provençal, which, like Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese, was more prolix and florid, more sensual on the tongue, than the rough, glottal idioms of the north. The very forms in which a fellow from the Mediterranean pitched woo had a dreamy sound to northern women who would have laughed heartily at the same sentiments expressed in their own languages.
There was a note of condescension in the association in the northern mind of the southern and the sexual: Latins, the stereotype held, were more passionate and impetuous, as befit people born closer to those exotic climes where civilization hadn’t yet gotten a firm foothold. There was a fear of miscegenation in this way of thinking, but the languid sensuality of Mediterranean life exerted an undeniable pull on northerners—the music, the wine, the food, the sultry weather, the sense that what happened there stayed there. The pasty, terse, beer-drinking Protestant boys back in London and New York didn’t, in comparison, stand a chance.
So in the 1910s the tango craze and in the ’20s the cult of Rudolph Valentino, the sloe-eyed seducer with the grace of a dancer who melted women the world over first with his films, then with the stories of his offscreen amours, and then with his pathetic death from blood poisoning at the age of thirty-one. For a period thereafter the Latin fad waned: The scourges of global economic depression and ghastly world war seemed to focus the attentions of women on the boys at home—the title of a famous and rather ludicrous article published in Esquire in 1936 declared without irony that “Latins Are Lousy Lovers.”
But with the ending of the war and the resumption of travel for pleasure and, indeed, of pleasure for its own sake, the love of things Latin—music, especially—was reignited. The international high life, the milieu of the playboy, resumed. And the likes of Doris Duke, rich and worldly and unafraid of gossip and fond of dark-skinned men, emerged back into the world like the bottles of vintage wine Parisians cellared away from the Nazis.
History, in short, was on Rubi’s side.
But Rubi was not alone.
Throughout postwar Europe and, in this newfangled era of commercial air travel, in such removes as Palm Beach, Hollywood, and Havana, casinos and nightclubs and polo pitches and resorts filled with well-dressed men on the make.
Some were born to privilege, like Aly Khan, Rubi’s friend and sometime rival, heir to the throne of his father, the Aga Khan, hereditary leader of fifteen million African and Asian adherents to the Ismaili sect of Islam. Technically per the precepts of his faith a god on earth—no lie—and a millionaire many, many times over, Aly fulfilled his dynastic duty by fathering two sons and attending various religious rites. But he barely otherwise comported himself like a holy man, running with and after the most beautiful women on earth (a true democrat, he paid little notice to their purses) and, incidentally, becoming an important breeder of thoroughbred horses. Like Howard Hughes, another noted aficionado of the ladies, Prince Aly had the means to lavish his attentions on whomsoever he chose. And after the war, and despite his wife and sons, he chose Rita Hayworth (despite, for that matter, the child she’d had with her former husband, Orson Welles); their marriage kept him more or less occupied so that he and Rubi could bond in rascal-hood over their shared tastes rather than compete for this or that hand.
Some of Rubi’s rivals were gangsters, raw thugs with deep ties to the most vicious sorts of power but who themselves possessed manners and wardrobes of unlikely refinement, ruthless murderers and thieves like Johnny Roselli, Pat DiCicco, Bugsy Siegel, and Johnny Stompanato who chased and sometimes caught actresses and models and heiresses and the like, sometimes satisfying themselves with the thrill of the hunt, sometimes with sex, sometimes with money. Through their hands passed the likes of Gloria Vanderbilt, Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner, Thelma Todd, Virginia Hill: a constellation of glittering desires dreamt and realized.
Actors and singers and other such celebrities counted in the ranks of playboys, of course, but so did their chums. The infamous Freddy McEvoy so resembled his fellow Aussie Errol Flynn that he helped quash a statutory rape case against the actor simply by standing up in court and revealing the accuser to be unable to say who exactly did what to her; McEvoy, a sportsman, adventurer, and pimp, bagged a couple of oil heiresses before drowning when his yacht, in which he was likely smuggling arms or drugs, broke up off the coast of western Africa.
On the strength of such big personalities and the relative calm of the postwar period, international playboyism became a kind of craze. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, dozens of fascinating new faces would swell the ranks. There was Francisco Pignatari, a Brazilian mining millionaire who dallied with a former queen of Iran and a few hot actresses and married a princess—and all that despite being widely known as Baby. There was Don Jaime de Mora y Aragon, descended, he liked to note, from fifty-six kings, the brother of Queen Fabiola of Belgium, a sometime nightclub singer and official greeter at the posh Marbella Club on the Costa del Sol, with a playboy act so polished and precise that it seemed almost a send-up of the species. There was Nicky Hilton, the hotel heir, who was Elizabeth Taylor’s first husband and gave his occupation as “loafer” when he was arrested for drunkenness—which was his curse—in Beverly Hills and died of heart failure at forty-two. There was Jorge Guinle from Brazil, who also inherited a hotel fortune and squandered it—if you can call it squandering—chasing after the likes of Jayne Mansfield and Janet Leigh and Hedy Lamarr and Veronica Lake and Anita Ekberg. There was Howard Hughes who, well, everything.
And there was—deep breath—Alfonso Antonio Vicente Eduardo Blas Angel Francisco Borija Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, Grandee of Spain, Count of Mejorada, Count of Pernia, Marquis de Moratalla, Marquis de Portago, and Duke of Alagon, who went, for obvious reasons, simply by “Fon.” He was, depending on how you counted, third in line for the Spanish throne, impossibly handsome and charming, and, wouldn’t you know it, a brilliant sportsman: Olympic-class swimmer and bobsledder and fencer, high-level steeplechase jockey, valued member of the Ferrari Formula One team—and, by all accounts, a swell fellow all around.
Yet even amid this pantheon of high livers and lover boys, Rubi stood out. For one thing, he was, like most Dominicans, Creole in heritage—partly African, in short; he was so naturally dark that he had to watch out for the sun lest he take on too negroid an aspect for the circles in which he ran, and he straightened his hair with the same sort of stuff with which black American hepcats konked theirs. Most people who knew him as a grown man thought of him as a Mediterranean Latin as opposed to Caribbean black. For another, he was from an obscure backwater that few, if any, of his chums and conquests could find on a map; indeed, like a Columbus-in-reverse, he was conquering the Old World from the New almost as if by accident of fate. And, perhaps most important, he had no money of his own and no prospects of making any. Women were drawn to Rubi for Rubi, not for the perks. And men—particulary those of his special ilk—found him fine company.
One night, probably in the 1950s, Rubi, Aly Khan, Baby Pignatari, and Juan Capuro, another South American mining heir with an eye for the ladies, found themselves stag at a Paris nightclub, drinking together. The maitre d’ was delighted with the assembly. “Tonight,” he crowed, “in my place are gathered the four most famous playboys in the world!” Everybody had a good laugh, but Rubi had the last. “Yes, that’s true,” he responded, “but there is a big difference between me and these other gentlemen: They all pay their women, and all my women pay me!”
And, so, what was it that
elevated Rubi from dictator’s son-in-law to movie star’s husband to the sort of man who might capture the hand of the world’s wealthiest heiress?
Well, there was his native charm.
People who knew him, even if only casually, even if they were predisposed to be suspicious or resentful of him, came away liking him. He picked up checks; he had courtly manners; he kept the party gay and lively; he was attentive to women but made men feel at ease; he was smoothly quick to rise from his chair when introduced, to open doors, to light a lady’s cigarette (“I have the fastest cigarette lighter in the house,” he once boasted): the quintessential chivalrous gent of manners.
The encomia, if bland, were universal. “He’s a very nice guy,” swore gossip columnist Earl Wilson, who stayed with Rubi in Paris. “I’m fond of him,” said John Perona, owner of New York’s El Morocco. “Rubi’s got a nice personality and is completely masculine,” attested a New York clubgoer. “He has a lot of men friends, which, I suppose, is unusual. Aly Khan, for instance, has few male friends. But everyone I know thinks Rubi is a good guy.” “He is one of the nicest guys I know,” declared that famed chum of famed playboys Peter Lawford. “A really charming man—witty, fun to be with, and a he-man.”
There were a few tricks to his trade. A society photographer judged him with a professional eye thus: “He can meet you for a minute and a month later remember you very well.” An author who played polo with him put it this way: “He had a trick that never failed. When he spoke with someone, whether man or woman, it seemed as if the rest of the world had lost all interest for him. He could hang on the words of a woman or man who spoke only banalities as if the very future of the world—and his future, especially—depended on those words.”
But there was something deeper to his charm, something irresistible in particular when he turned it on women. It didn’t reveal itself in photos, and not every woman was susceptible to it, but it was palpable and, when it worked, unforgettable.
Hollywood dirt doyenne Hedda Hopper declared, “A friend says he has the most perfect manners she has ever encountered. He wraps his charm around your shoulders like a Russian sable coat.”
Gossip columnist Sheila Graham was chary when invited to bring her eleven-year-old daughter to a lunch with Rubi in London, and her wariness was transmitted to the girl, who wiped her hand off on her dress after Rubi kissed it in a formal greeting; by the end of lunch, he had won the child over with his enthusiastic, spontaneous manner, full of compliments but never cloying. “All done effortlessly,” Graham marveled. “He was probably a charming baby. I am sure that women rushed to coo over him in the cradle.”
Elsa Maxwell, yet another gossip, but also a society gadabout and hostess who claimed a key role in at least one of Rubi’s famous liaisons, put it thus: “You expect Rubi to be a very dangerous young man who personifies the wolf. Instead, you meet someone who is so unbelievably charming and thoughtful that you are put off-guard before you know it.”
But charm would only take a man so far. Rubi was becoming an international legend not because he could fascinate a young girl but because he could intoxicate sophisticated women.
What was that secret?
In the mid-1950s, at the height of Rubi’s glory and success, the Cuban guitarist and composer Eduardo Saborit wrote a hit song that bluntly asked the musical question “¿Qué Es El Tuyo, Rubirosa?”—“What Have You Got, Rubirosa?”:
Rubirosa tiene una cosa,
Que yo no sé qué será,
Qué será, qué será,
Lo que tiene Rubirosa …
Rubirosa has something
I don’t know what it could be,
What it could be, what it could be,
That Rubirosa has …
What indeed?
Recall the testimony of Flor de Oro concerning her honeymoon: “When it was over my insides hurt a lot.” Another paramour, the Parisian floozie known as Manouche, who ran with gangsters and operated her own nightspot, put it this way: “It was long and pointed and it hurt … I suppose it hit my uterus.” One of his wives wrote in her diary that he was “priapic, indefatigable, grotesquely proportioned” (was that praise?). Another lover, famous worldwide for her men, put it more frankly: “He could have been a carnival attraction.”
There is no way around saying it out loud: The man was well-hung, hung, indeed, legendarily, his superhuman endowment a calling card that recommended him to circles into which he might otherwise never have gained admittance. Women heard about it, wondered about it, whispered about it, had to see it, hold it, have it—and who was he to deny them?
The stories were legion.
A fellow polo player once called on Rubi at home and was admitted to see him as he soaked in a tub. “All I can tell you,” he recalled, “is that when I saw it, I knew that if I ever tried to follow it, I’d be like a drunk in a corridor.” (Another acquaintance, also from the polo pitch, admitted to stealing one of Rubi’s jockstraps and nailing it above the door of the barn where he kept his breeding stallions as a good luck charm.)
The old saying held that no man was a hero to his valet; Rubi was. The Russian fellow who dressed and looked after him for years testified thus:
One afternoon when I thought Mr. Rubirosa was out of the house, I went into his bedroom to put away some shirts. He was there and he wasn’t alone. I had interrupted him at a very crucial moment. In his fury, he jumped out of bed and rushed toward me cursing like a stevedore. What a sight! I was stunned!
And then he cupped his hands and moved them up and down as if weighing melons. “E le ouve!” he declared, resorting to the Italian for “eggs” to describe the indescribable. “Le ouve! They were so enormous that they bothered him and he usually wore a jockstrap.”
Jerome Zerbe, a society photographer who snapped dozens of celebrities at New York’s famed El Morocco nightclub, was said to have gotten into his cups at the casino at Deauville and, on a dare, followed Rubi into the men’s room. He skittered out gleefully, the story went, with the intelligence, “It looks like Yul Brynner in a black turtleneck!”
Tabloid magazines brushed as close to the subject as they could, calling him the “ding dong daddy” after a phrase made famous in country and soul songs.
Truman Capote described it in Answered Prayers—without ever seeing it, of course—as “that quadroon cock, a purported eleven-inch café-au-lait sinker thick as a man’s wrist.”
A British journalist who interviewed Rubi in his suite at the Savoy reported that after she repaired to the powder room to freshen up she reemerged to find “a grinning Mr. Rubirosa in his boxer shorts, through which stood a donkey-style member. He threw me on his unmade bed and a wrestling match ensued as this grotesque thing swung about.” (She cooled him off, she said, and was impressed by how easily he took rejection: “He simply shrugged, looked in the mirror, patted his hair and returned to a business-like discussion of the interview.”)
Jimmy Cromwell, the sportsman first husband of Doris Duke, had seen or at least heard tell of it: He referred to Rubi as “Rubberhosa.”
And Doris, well, Doris never forgot or got over it. “It was the most magnificent penis that I had ever seen,” her godson Pony Duke recollected her saying. “There has never been anything like it since.” In Pony’s account of Doris’s description, it was “six inches in circumference … much like the last foot of a Louisville Slugger baseball bat with the consistency of a not completely inflated volleyball.”
His tailors were said to have had a job on their hands to hide the thing in the folds of his famously impeccable wardrobe. And his custom-made underwear, complete with monogram, proved a bonanza to his Russian valet, who cut up used pairs and sold the swatches around Paris as souvenirs. When Rubi found out about it, he acted the outraged patron and fired the fellow. But he quietly reinstated him a few days later; the moneymaking scheme, in point of fact, had been his own.
At the helm of this notorious weapon, Rubi was moreover reputed to be something of a machine,
able to forestall ejaculation almost indefinitely (in this, Aly Khan, who practiced a yogic form of control over his orgasms, was once again a peer). Rubi was said to be in a constant state of semistiffness even during the actual act of coitus, nicknamed Toujours Prêt—“Always Ready”—by Parisian gossipmongers. He was even believed to be unable to ejaculate, a full erection, they speculated, would cause him to pass out from loss of blood. (The baroque theory helped explain, to some minds, his lack of children despite the ample opportunities he’d had to conceive them.) He was rumored to have numbed himself with whiskey, marijuana, morphine, Japanese mushroom tea, meditation. But he couldn’t have resorted to any of those performance enhancers as often as he used his penis for pleasure. Rather, he applied his mind to the domination of his body. “It’s a muscle like any other,” he explained to his chum, fashion designer Oleg Cassini. “It can be strengthened.” And in this physical application, he was—as in other pursuits he undertook—simply a gifted athlete. If some of his lovers remembered him as rough and unfeeling, there were many others who remembered him as spectacular—and in a pre-Kinsey era when nobody spoke about sex, the fact that he was associated with it at all made him a sensation.
