by Shawn Levy
Still, if he wasn’t a world-class player, he was one of the only international celebrities associated with polo in the public eye. And he proselytized for it. He introduced Ramfis Trujillo to the game, and Ramfis brought it to the Dominican Republic, where it would be played ever after, a curious rebuke to the general poverty of the nation but utterly in keeping with the imperial self-image and bread-and-circuses mystique that the Trujillo family so scrupulously cultivated.
Rubi also introduced the Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski to the sport, which the author would play and write about for years. In the early ’60s, Kosinski was wintering in Florida and happened to attend a match at the Royal Palm Beach Polo Club, after which he met some of the players. Rubi immediately assumed that Kosinski played as well.
“Of course, as a Pole, you must love horses.” I said I wasn’t sure I did. “How can you say you are not sure whether you love horses? How can a man not love horses?” “I guess it all depends on the man’s past,” I replied. “No,” said Rubirosa, “It all depends on his horse.… In polo you forget about everything else—but not the horse!”
Polo became such an obsession that it bled into all aspects of his life. At least that’s how he explained the strange turn he next took. As a reward for marrying into one of the world’s great fortunes, Rubi recollected, Trujillo offered him his choice of diplomatic posts. Italy held no particular allure for him, and because of his service in Vichy he was still unable to hold the chief spot in Paris. “Argentina is the Mecca of polo,” Rubi wrote. “I asked him to give me Buenos Aires … the heart of the world of polo.”
It was an especially apt place, all things considered. If there was outside of the Dominican Republic a single country in the Western Hemisphere with a cult of personality dominating its political and cultural life, it was the Argentina of Juan Perón. Like Trujillo a former soldier who had come into power on the strength of a coup that promised stability, Perón was an object of Trujillo’s envy and even fear. He was genuinely popular, in no small part because of the mass appeal of his wife, the former Eva Duarte, adored as Evita, champion of the descamisados—“the shirtless ones,” the poor of Buenos Aires; with such an asset, Perón didn’t need to impose the same cloud of fear over his people that Trujillo found essential to his rule. As well, Perón commanded the largest army in South America and was sufficiently distant from the United States to operate without a superpower breathing down his neck.
The two men shared a mutual esteem that would last throughout their tenures as leaders of their respective nations. But each as well sought to secure wider influence in the region, and in this their ambitions clashed. In 1946, a group of more than one thousand Dominican exiles led by the writer and politician Juan Bosch amassed a force in Cuba with the aim of invading the Dominican Republic; they were armed, in large part, with weapons they had purchased for a mere $80,000 from Perón. Trujillo accepted the Argentine leader’s claim that he had helped the aborted rebellion only inadvertently, but he determined at the same time to keep a closer eye on his fellow caudillo. Rubi would serve as that eye; on October 25, 1947, he was named ambassador to Argentina; two weeks later, he was accepted by the host country. He would move there before Christmas.
And he would do it alone. While he endured a forty-eight-hour plane journey from Paris to Buenos Aires, via Lisbon, Dakar, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, and Montevideo, Doris went to the United States to wrangle with the State Department and her legal and financial advisers. All of them were determined to drive a wedge between her and her boy toy husband from the land of Trujillo; they had gone so far as to refuse to grant her the visas she would need to accompany him to Argentina. She was sat down and told about the most sordid aspects of Rubi’s past: the Bencosme murder, the Aldao/Kohane affair, his ties to the ghastly regime in Ciudad Trujillo. Threats flew willy-nilly: “She has let her country down,” whispered an unnamed friend in a gossipy newspaper account, “and faces a life-and-death fight with Washington, which is thoroughly displeased with her and may refuse to allow her to go to Buenos Aires. It may even use its influence with the Argentine to have Rubi refused accreditation.” None of it mattered. Doris probably understood that the threats from officialdom were composed more of bluster than muscle. She wanted to be with Rubi, and she would be with him; she flew down in mid-December, meeting a plane that bore the servants from Paris and her furniture and china (a couple of their cars would follow by boat); once again, despite herself, she was an ambassador’s wife.
And once again she didn’t care for the way things went. Much of the time he was in Argentina, Rubi was off playing polo or scouting horseflesh or watching wild polo matches among gauchos, the raw Argentine cowboys who—young and poor, like he liked ’em—were the best players in the world. In Buenos Aires, he did his dancer’s best to juggle the demands of Trujillo with the strange pressures of life around the Peróns, Evita, in particular, with whom it was widely suspected that he had more than just a traditional statesmanlike relationship. He certainly knew how to finesse the divalike first lady: One evening, Doris and Rubi attended a reception for one of Evita’s charitable enterprises prior to attending a formal dinner; as a litany of speeches glorifying Evita’s good works droned on, Rubi put the honoree’s nose out of joint by continually glancing at his wristwatch. Evita upbraided him in a stage whisper for what she called his poor manners; everyone heard. The next day, Rubi presented her with a check for her charity in the neighborhood of $1,500 (reckon nearly ten times that in 2005 dollars). That gesture was enough, apparently, to mend the broken fence, but it did nothing to enhance Rubi’s reputation among his fellow diplomats. Evita continually brought up Rubi’s largesse as an admonitory example to other ambassadors who had failed to match his generosity; word of the gift even found its way into the New York Times. One of the fellows who was browbeaten with the tale finally found the silver lining in all the scoldings: “We’ll be able to boast to our grandchildren,” he told his fellow diplomats, “that we assisted at an unprecedented event—the only time in recorded history that a pimp ever gave money to a harlot.”
The atmosphere in Argentina brought out an aspect of Rubi that he rarely, if ever, revealed in Europe. Vilallonga, who accompanied him on his horse-buying journeys into the countryside, looked on as he engaged in a wild folk spectacle called pato, a primitive variation on polo in which players, mounted on horses with neither saddle nor stirrups, chased a live duck with their hands. The game wasn’t, like polo, imported from Asia, but rather of genuinely local origin—and strictly against the law. Watching Rubi pursue furiously a squawking mass of blood and feathers, Vilallonga saw into his friend’s core: “This man, so polite and charming in daily life, was transformed into a savage covered in blood, willing to risk his life so as not to submit to defeat.”
With all this chasing of ducks and polo ponies and presidents’ wives, Rubi managed to awaken the ire of both Doris and Trujillo. The latter was outraged at the dearth of inside dope that Rubi was providing from Buenos Aires and recalled him to Ciudad Trujillo—the sort of summons from which people more important than Rubi never returned. Cleverly, Rubi brought Doris along with him on the trip: Starstruck, Trujillo not only failed to upbraid his prodigal ambassador but he feted the couple in Ciudad Trujillo and at his private ranch. Rubi escaped with his scalp—but lost his post in Buenos Aires, which probably suited him just fine.
From there, however, Doris and Rubi parted: He went directly to Paris, she to New York. By March, they were back together on Rue de Bellechasse and, increasingly, miserable with one another: the bickering George and Martha of the Left Bank.
There were his women, a nonstop train of floozies, grandes dames, and whores—anyone he could get his hands on, really. With all the money in the world at his disposal, he gave himself over to his animal instincts more, perhaps, than ever. With waitresses, showgirls, old flames, there was a stream of quickies and one-nighters abetted by the subtle machinations of Victor, the Russian valet and sometime sparring partner whom he
’d hired when he acquired the house. With capital and an in-house enabler, Rubi lost all sense of self-control; he had landed the most enviable prey in the entire sport of fortune-hunting, and he was acting, perhaps with the encouragement of his wife’s confessions of obsession with him, as if he could do nothing to lose his grip on his catch. He was shameless, as if daring her to expel him from her graces.
One evening, Doris was feeling ill and sent for the doctor, who prescribed a regime of sulfa; Rubi was sent for it, but driving around looking for an all-night pharmacy, he was distracted by the sight of Tabou, one of his favorite nightspots, and stopped in for a drink; he didn’t get home until dawn. Another time, when they were on vacation on the Riviera, Doris sent Rubi for cigarettes; in the hotel lobby he ran into Manouche, the gangster’s moll and club owner who, like Doris, so vividly recalled his sexual singularity; he didn’t return with the smokes for three days. It was as if he was playing pato with his marriage, risking his neck to prove his independence and catch a few kicky thrills.
As if this wasn’t enough, the house on the Rue de Bellechasse became a kind of hotel and crash pad for their respective retinues of friends. Gilberto Sánchez Rubirosa, Rubi’s nephew by his sister Ana and her newspaper editor husband, stayed for months, witnessing a string of marital squabbles; Cesar Rubirosa, now working in Switzerland as a diplomat for Trujillo, stayed there whenever he was in Paris. Rubi, of course, had his string of hangers-on and partiers who followed him home for reverie and eats after his bouts of nightclubbing. And Doris, drawn increasingly to the world of jazz, had her own coterie, musicians and pianists whom she courted and supported and even took piano lessons from.
One of Doris’s musical acquaintances particularly irked Rubi. “She was a jazz musician who gave piano lessons and to whom Doris was deeply attached,” he groused. “A strange American woman, bossy, who always had something to say and who felt that my presence stood between Doris and her own whims.” As in when he was with Flor de Oro, his wife’s friendship with a woman who might have some insight into his marriage caused him to bridle. In Rubi’s view, the woman’s meddling too closely echoed the way Flor de Oro’s cousin had torpedoed his first marriage, and it magnified what might otherwise have been harmless marital disputes into real trouble.
“The tone of our little quarrels grew angrier,” he revealed. Sometimes Doris would simply leave the house and move into a suite she kept at the Hotel George V across the river near the Champs-Élysées. And then she’d make her way back home, lonely or horny or hopeful or contrite or a combination of them all.
One afternoon in the early summer of 1948, in the company of the nosy piano teacher and her friend, a French attorney, a lunchtime disagreement turned into a full-blown shouting match. As Rubi recalled, he and Doris childishly escalated to a fateful climax: “Doris spoke of divorce … ‘Fine,’ I said brusquely. ‘Perfect. Fortunately this gentleman is here. For once he’ll be of use. Let’s divorce.’ Doris, who never once failed to contest a point, answered, an octave higher. Three minutes later, the pens were drawn, the documents signed. The same afternoon, Doris left the house and returned to the U.S.”
The paperwork wasn’t filed, but Doris made sure Rubi couldn’t smooth-talk her out of their rash decision. She decamped for Hawaii, where she spent the better part of a month before returning, via New York, amid gossip reports that they were finished. (Rubi was once again on a tear in Paris—it was even rumored that Flor was in town, though she later denied it—and word of his escapades fueled speculation.)
In July, Doris sailed back to France on the Mauritania to see if it would be possible to mend things. Rubi met her boat and they had a warm reunion, but the troubles that impelled her to leave hadn’t disappeared in her absence. Indeed, for someone like Doris who believed in signs and omens and the paranormal, things were worse. In September, the B-25 she’d bought him and which had been christened La Ganza (“the wild goose”) and outfitted with a kitchen, full bathroom, and several sleeping areas, crashed in a marsh in Teterboro, New Jersey; Doris wasn’t aboard and no one in the crew was hurt, but the idea that she might have died terrified her. Soon after, she was, according to whispers, hospitalized for a nervous breakdown after an attempt at taking her life.
The situation was quickly devolving from an amusing bit of Feydeau to an ugly slice of Hitchcock, and the people who had all along advised Doris against the marriage finally prevailed. In October, she took those divorce papers that she and Rubi had so heatedly signed and moved to the house in Reno that she’d never sold. Three days later, not quite fourteen months after their whirlwind wedding, she gave Rubi the house on the Rue de Bellechasse and a promise of $25,000 a year in alimony until he should remarry, and they were divorced.
But it hardly ended there.
As Rubi said, “We had divorced realizing we didn’t really want to be apart.”
Within a few weeks of the decree, the phone rang in his Paris bedroom. It was Doris.
“What are you doing, Rubi? Are you bored?”
“No.”
“Are you in a bad mood?”
“No, I’m doing fine.”
“Are you angry?”
“Why would I be?”
“Well, then come see me.”
“If you wish.…”
And so he went—to Hawaii via New York, his first visit to American soil since he’d snuck out after giving his cousin Chichi the order to kill Angel Morales. And after a few days, he was back in Paris. And then she rang him again. And this time she visited him. They went to Mexico together, the Riviera, Italy, Doris’s various homes. The back-and-forth lasted far longer than their one year of marriage.
During all that time, Rubi remembered with painterly melancholy, “I did nothing but break up with Doris, reunite with her, break up again, reunite, all in a tumult of planes that dragged me from Europe to the United States and back. When I was in Palm Beach, nothing seemed more beautiful to me than the fading light on the Île St. Louis. When I encountered the gray light of autumn in a Paris that was still recovering from the war, I wanted nothing more than the sun of California.”
Tragique, no?
From Doris’s vantage, if it no longer could be called true love—she was spending time in Hawaii with her old flame Duke Kahanumoku and was said to be seeing other men—then it was certainly passion, maybe even obsession. And, too, there was a genuine fondness: Rubi gave her gifts (the only one of all the men in her life, she later said, who ever did so) and was always reliably good company. There was enough sentimental attachment for her to race to Egypt to be at his side in 1950 when he injured his neck playing polo in matches organized by his new chum and poker buddy, King Farouk; the estranged couple were photographed together at the pyramids after his recovery, he astride a camel, she atop a donkey.
For him, though, it would be one more of the clean breaks he was always able to make in his life. He spoke fondly of Doris and, indeed, of the marriage, at least in the abstract: “She was gay, elegant, charming—and rich. I had everything a man could desire: a car, a home—and an allowance.” But he admitted that he was too easily distracted: “In the end, other women began to attract me again.”
Of course, he hadn’t waited until the end to act on those attractions. And he could get involved as deeply as she, even during this phony second marriage. For several months, he carried on an affair with Christina Onassis, wife of the shipping magnate, who was actually in his bed one afternoon when Doris showed up unannounced at Rue de Bellechasse. Victor the valet, startled, sounded the alarm and helped avert catastrophe: “Mr. Rubirosa flung on a dressing gown and took the stairs at a giant leap. He held the señora down in the hall while Madame Onassis put on some clothes so that I could hustle her through the garden.”
Would Doris have forgiven the faux pas of catching her ex-husband and on-again-off-again lover with the wife of a man almost as rich as she? She may well have, according to one of the frequent guests in that eccentric household. “She was by far the ni
cest of any of Porfirio’s wives,” reflected his brother, Cesar, years later. “She had a sense of humor, which is more than can be said for Danielle and her successors, and she was fabulously generous with him.”
Cesar had good reason to wax nostalgic about the time he spent at Rue de Bellechasse. Soon after Rubi and Doris split up, he found himself in a massive pickle of his own owing to his lack of funds. Although he was periodically employed by Trujillo at the Dominican legation in Berne, he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in Athens and fined $200,000 after being convicted in a smuggling scheme.
Apparently the golden aura of his little brother’s fabulous life—which he had sampled vicariously when he was occasionally mistaken for that Mr. Rubirosa—had inspired Cesar to attempt his own simulation of it. He was married with a couple of kids, yet Greek authorities had caught him trying to leave their country with $160,000 in cash in the company of one Yvonne Neury, a French national who was pregnant with his child. Cesar at first pled diplomatic immunity, but, as he wasn’t accredited by the Greek government, he was refused. Then he tried to sneak out of the country but was caught—once again with contraband: a cache of luxury watches that he had purchased, so rumor had it, with money fronted him by his brother. When he was finally convicted in December 1948, he declared that he hadn’t the means to pay the fine, so the authorities created a schedule whereby he could live it off, as it were, slashing a percentage off the debt for every month he spent living in a kind of house arrest in Corinth. There, on a salary of about $50 a month earned as a teacher of French and English, he supported yet a third woman—a Greek—whom he eventually married. (Neury, who bore him a son, served a three-month sentence and had a $70,000 fine levied on her.) Only the steady devaluation of Greek currency against those of other countries kept him from living out his days in his quixotic Hellenic prison to the slow, drip-dropping rhythm of drachmas.
