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

by Shawn Levy

  No wonder he sighed when he remembered his brother’s third marriage. “I’ll never understand why,” he muttered, “after getting his hands on somebody with hundreds of millions of dollars, he didn’t hang on to her.”

  Put it to that damnable Rubi restlessness. Or a fear of stability. Or—and why not?—the comforting knowledge that if billionairesses didn’t grow on trees, millionairesses did.

  A mansion, cars, clothes, polo, and a big brassy name: Who would want a wife to queer all that?

  NINE

  SPEED, MUTINY, AND OTHER MEN’S WIVES

  In the wake of a world war, at the dawn of an age of civilian jet travel, in an era of accelerating technology and increased leisure time, auto racing became a truly global sport. Once the province of an ardent but finite cadre—car wonks, R-and-D men at European auto companies, daredevils with money to burn, and burly-armed drivers who could control big, heavy cars—it was spreading in popularity, popping up everywhere, and organizing itself into a series of races that would constitute a true world championship.

  In 1947, one of the more colorful spots in the motor race circuit was Buenos Aires, where two newly inaugurated races, the General Juan Perón Grand Prix and the Eva Duarte Perón Grand Prix, were contested on a circuit in Palermo Park, where the national polo championship was decided in front of tens of thousands of fans each autumn. In 1948, when Rubi was installed in Argentina as an ambassador, the two races were dominated by Italian cars and Italian and Argentine drivers.

  But the best driver in the world at that moment was French—none other than Rubi’s best man at his wedding to Doris Duke, Jean-Pierre Wimille. There were approximately eighty-five Grand Prix races held worldwide between the end of the war and the dawn of 1949, and Wimille won ten of them, including the major races in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and France. There wasn’t yet a Formula One tour or an official world championship, but if there had been he would have won it handily three straight years.

  He was a bouncy, charming fellow, something of a rogue but not of Rubi’s stripe: By most accounts, his marriage to the French Olympic skier Christiane de la Fressange was a happy one. There was no brighter star in the French sporting firmament, and it wasn’t surprising that Rubi, who was becoming interested in a sport that still attracted as many gentlemen amateurs as it did young hungry gearheads, was drawn to him. It may, in fact, have been Rubi who convinced Wimille to enter the Argentine races in the winter of 1949—even though, having been removed from his post by Trujillo the previous autumn, he wasn’t there to watch them.

  As a result, he missed out on a catastrophe. On January 28, Wimille was steering his Simca-Gordini through a practice lap at Palermo Park when he either swerved to avoid spectators who had accidentally wandered onto the track or was blinded by sunlight as he turned a corner. His car crashed at nearly full speed into a makeshift wall of straw bales and launched into a sideways spin that ended when he smashed into a tree. His head and chest crushed, he was still conscious when he was pried from the vehicle and loaded, muttering, into an ambulance, but he died before he reached the hospital. His body was flown home to France, where he was posthumously awarded the Legion d’Honneur. A monument was raised to his memory, a multipurpose sporting center bearing his name near the Port Dauphine of the Bois de Boulogne; Rubi would have had occasion to remember his friend almost every day as he rode in the park or drove back and forth to the polo pitch.

  The memory of Wimille’s painful death didn’t deter Rubi from pursuing his nascent interest in motor sports. Like so many things, he simply put it behind him as he leaned forward into a world of anticipated thrills and pleasures. In late 1948, Trujillo reinstated him as an envoy in Rome—a precious anecdote had him showing up to present his credentials to the head of state with a trace of lipstick gracing his cheek—and during his stay in Italy he swapped the luxury cars he’d acquired from Doris for a pair of Ferrari road cars powerful enough to give him a taste of the professional thing.

  During the next fifteen years, Rubi would own at least a half-dozen Ferraris, both road cars and Grand Tourismo models. These latter were no mere production line sports cars but rather wicked little rockets, stripped of all nonessential luxury components (the upholstery was canvas, not leather, for instance), amped up with oversized carburetors, supplied with high-performance clutches and brakes. Access to these vehicles was carefully monitored by Enzo Ferrari, pasha of the auto dynasty, who wanted to assure that they would be owned and raced only by people who wouldn’t tarnish the name by losing in them—or by killing themselves in them (the blood-red paint job on those cars was no joke). Rubi, who knew Ferrari and his rival auto magnate Giovanni Agnelli from evenings trotting about Rome, was deemed to be qualified.

  That a Dominican should fashion himself a race car driver was a curiosity that distracted nobody. It wasn’t Rubi the diplomat, Rubi the charmer, or Rubi the lady-killer who was being put behind the wheel of Sig. Ferrari’s precious cars—though all of that certainly imparted an air of glamour to the sport. Rather, it was Rubi the daring polo player, who thought nothing of leaning off a careering horse and sticking his upper body in harm’s way in pursuit of a little ball. Grand Prix racing of the postwar era was—witness the fate of Wimille—a staggeringly dangerous enterprise. The tires were less than half as wide as those of passenger cars; the brakes wore quickly and even caught fire in the heat of action; the courses were improvised, often rocky or wet or uneven, and rarely equipped with barricades to separate the cars from spectators or roadside dangers; there were no harnesses or restraints to protect the drivers, who rode with their chests and heads above the chassis, protected only by goggles, tiny windscreens, and helmets that didn’t extend down to the tops of their ears. You needed money to get involved in this hazardous activity, yes, but you also needed hair-trigger reflexes and unblinking courage.

  Of his inner resources there was no doubt: Rubi’s daily heroics on the polo pitch proved his guts, even more when you considered he was engaged in them into his forties. But living on the leftovers of his wedding gifts and an annual alimony check that barely kept him in bespoke suits, he had to watch his fiscal resources scrupulously. As he acquired various racing and touring Ferraris in the coming years, he executed a number of fancy steps to eschew the steep duties on imported sports cars. He was close enough to Ferrari to prevail on the factory for help in evading taxes, identifying his new cars as his old ones—swapping the serial numbers on the paperwork—and making it seem to the revenuers as if he only had the one, aging racer. Likewise, he would occasionally pass ownership through a friendly straw man—usually Italian, again to circumvent import duties—who claimed ownership and, for races, sponsorship, of cars that actually belonged to Rubi: In some cases, he drove in competition cars that he was said on paper to have sold and which were subsequently said to have been sold to a third party.

  He ran his first race in Le Mans in June 1950, in a 2-liter Ferrari 166 MM with Pierre Leygonie, his other witness from the Duke wedding, as his partner in the twenty-four-hour marathon. By the eighth hour, they had made 44 laps of the 13.5-mile course—not exactly tearing it up—and then they had to withdraw because the clutch failed. Three years later, showing up in another 166 MM, a Series II Spyder Vignale, he and Leygonie weren’t permitted to enter at all due to an irregularity in his registration. In 1954, his new driving partner, the Italian Count Innocente Baggio, who, charmingly, raced in shirt and tie, crashed their 375 MM Berlinetta Pinin Farina Ferrari in the fifth lap. Rubi never tried Le Mans again.

  In Reims in July 1953, he and Leygonie showed up in that same royal blue-and-white Spyder Vignale that officials at Le Mans wouldn’t allow into the race a month earlier; in addition to the spiffy two-tone styling, the car bore the legend “Porfirio Rubirosa” in stylish script on the passenger side of the chassis. The car didn’t finish the race: another malfunction.

  The following winter, Rubi wandered into El Morocco in New York; the nightclub had been one of Doris’s favorite spo
ts and Rubi had become sufficiently chummy with owner John Perona that he was always welcome even without his billion-dollar bride. That particular night, Perona, a motor sport buff, was in colloquy with Alec Ulmann, the doyen of a Le Mans-style endurance race held each March at a disused bomber base in the central Florida town of Sebring. Ulmann and his fellow directors had launched their twelve-hour race just two years earlier and were still courting the major European race teams, whose entry would signal to the sport and the press that the event was legitimate. Ulmann had in his hands a letter from the Lancia Company, characteristically the least publicity-minded of the Italian manufacturers, proposing a four-car entry. There was much delight, but there was a hitch: Lancia could only supply seven drivers; Ulmann and company had to recruit an eighth of their own. Perona went to the club’s famous Round Table (or Wolf Table)—where playboys, married men, and other cats about town met up when stag of an evening—and asked Rubi over to meet Ulmann. It was quickly agreed that Rubi would copilot one of the factory cars.

  The field included entries from Ferrari, Maserati, Porsche, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Triumph, MG, and Austin-Healey; among the drivers were the Spanish playboy Fon de Portago; the German daredevil Harry Schell; the American racers Phil Hill, Carroll Shelby, and Briggs Cunningham; the great British drivers Peter Collins and Stirling Moss; and the magnificent Juan Manuel Fangio, the Argentine who had given Jean-Pierre Wimille the toughest battles of his career and had supplanted the late Frenchman as the best in the world.

  The Lancia team, which included Fangio, gathered in Palm Beach and were escorted by John Perona to the finest rooms at Harder Hall, the premiere hotel in the area. They were so supremely confident of their fame and skill that they actually insisted that Ulmann provide police escorts for them when they went anywhere—to keep away the autograph hounds and the like. Ulmann, who knew how little American fans knew or cared about the event, disbelievingly obliged.

  On race day, the Lancia team leapt out to a commanding lead and then started toying with their opponents. Rather than work as a four-car unit and ensure that they won the top spot, they began challenging each other to see who could achieve the best time for a lap. But the thing about endurance races was that they challenged the durability of the cars as much as they tested the drivers. One of the Lancias—the Fangio car—suffered a broken axle after 51 laps and dropped out. Another suffered brake trouble about 30 laps after that. That left two Lancias: one of which was well in the lead, and Rubi’s car, which puttered along gamely but well behind. Then, disaster: The lead Lancia was disqualified on a technicality. Rubi’s was the only car left on the imperious Lancia team.

  Rubi had gained steadily on the cars ahead of him as night had fallen and given the car a real chance of winning, but he was removed in the final laps for his more professional partner, the Italian Gino Valenzano, who pushed valiantly but was finally overcome by Stirling Moss and American Bill Lloyd, who completed 168 laps to the Lancia’s 163. (Moss, years later, rated Rubi’s driving as “only fairly good.”) It was the only time that Rubi would ever be sponsored by a manufacturer—all of his other races were as private entries—and it would be his best-ever result.

  From Sebring, Rubi went on to Mexico for the fifth annual Pan-American race—a multiday two-thousand-mile rally through some truly rough country; he didn’t finish. The following year, he put in a strong race at Santa Barbara and at the Governor’s Trophy race at Nassau in the Bahamas, where his copilot was Fon de Portago. In 1958, he entered the second Grand Prix of Cuba, an event best remembered for the absence of Fangio, who was kidnapped by Fidel Castro’s guerrillas two days before the race in a bold bid for attention from the world’s press.

  But over the years Sebring proved Rubi’s favorite track, if only because the race came in March, at the height of the nearby Palm Beach social and polo seasons. He returned in 1955, ’56, and ’58, each time at the wheel of his own Ferrari. In that second year, he was interviewed by sportscaster Barrett Clark for a recording that was released on an LP phonograph record. The announcer introduced their brief chat with a précis of the generally held impression of Rubi’s driving:

  Better known as a man about the world than as a driver, Rubirosa has achieved small success. His driving is nervous and unsteady. He seems more drawn to sand banks and oil drums than to the finish line. But he is on occasion very fast, which indicates that with more experience, he might well become a threat to factory teams.

  But there were no derogatory notes in their conversation. In a voice that bounced and sang in notes that could sound Spanish, Italian, and even French, Rubi shared some banalities about his car and the track.

  CLARK: Could you tell us a little something about the car that you’re driving today?

  RUBI: Well, I’m driving a two-liter Ferrari, and I think the car is in good shape. We had a little accident the day before yesterday—my copilot hit the gasoline drums. But we repair it, and everything is all right.

  CLARK: What do you think of the course?

  RUBI: I think the course is in very good condition. It’s harder than last year because they put some gasoline drums in the curve over there, and it makes it harder, more difficult.

  CLARK: Who are you driving with today?

  RUBI: With Jim Pauley, an American boy—evenly, three hours each. I start and he follow with the next three hours and then three me and he finish.

  CLARK: Are you worried about tire wear?

  RUBI: Well, uh, no, maybe we can finish the whole thing with one set of tires.

  Later, Rubi was among the voices commenting on the new American car, the Corvette, that was making its Sebring debut that year: “Well, I think it’s a fast car but maybe they are a little heavy for the small curves, you know, but, uh, they are fast enough.” (Fon de Portago, who also sat for an interview, was much blunter on the subject of the Corvette: “I don’t think they have any chance.”)

  In the race that followed the interview, Rubi finished tenth overall and top among the cars in his engine class; the following year at Sebring, in the last competitive race he ever ran, he finished eleventh overall and second in his class.

  Even if he wasn’t behind the wheel, he loved to attend races—he was captured by newsreel photographers in the grandstands and pits at several big events over the years—and he counted among his friends some of the best drivers in the world: Portago, Harry Schell, Count Wolfgang von Trips. Indeed, he was so associated with the racing world that he was filmed by newsreels as a spectator when he showed up for the big events and he even popped up as a character in Twenty-four Hours at Le Mans, a 1958 novel by Jean Albert Gregoire. But as he neared fifty, he limited his behind-the-wheel kicks to hair-raising high-speed rides home through the Bois de Boulogne after nights out on the town. “He had a Mini Cooper,” remembered his buddy Taki Theodoracopulos, “and he knew how to drift it. In those days you could make the car go sideways—you would accelerate and lose the back and then catch it. He used to do that in the park at five o’clock in the morning.”

  If you weren’t sponsored by a manufacturer—and but for that single race at Sebring, Rubi wasn’t—race driving was an enormously expensive sport: the cars, the maintenance, the travel, the entry fees. As when he played polo or picked up a check at a chic Parisian boîte, an uncomfortable question hung over him and permitted all sorts of dark innuendoes: Where did he get his money?

  There was the Duke money, of course, both the signing bonus he got on his wedding day and the alimony, which amounted to nearly $200,000 a year in 2005 terms. And there was his diplomatic salary of perhaps a tenth of that: not a lot of dough, but a considerable sum, especially considering how little he actually had to do to earn it. (Ramfis Trujillo Jr., grandson of the Benefactor, declared decades later, “My grandfather would send him a blank check whenever Rubi needed it,” although that could have been the grousing of an heir who felt that a chunk of his inheritance had been poached.) Profligate with money that came so easily, he had the habit of succumbing to d
ubious deals with shady partners, such as his $200,000 investment in some botched enterprise in Argentina proposed to him by Juan Duarte, Eva Perón’s brother. But there were a few credible investments in his portfolio: the plantation in the Cibao he received from Doris as part of his wedding goodie bag and a fishing fleet that operated off of the west coast of Africa, near the Congolese port of Pointe-Noire.

  Rubi was never particularly good with money—he didn’t trust banks, probably with good reason given what he knew about business practices in the Dominican Republic—and he always had piles of cash on hand; his luggage often included a suitcase crammed with bills. But the idea of trawling off the coast of the Congo to sell fish to the natives—who were even poorer than the most rustic Dominican peasants—was laughable; people left places like West Africa to find food and fortune. There was suspicion that the operation was some kind of smuggling scheme: When Rubi’s friend Freddy McEvoy died in a shipwreck off the coast of Morocco, it had been widely assumed that he and his crew were up to no good, probably running guns. But Trujillo kept Rubi on a leash sufficiently short to make any truly risky freelancing unlikely. No, it was far easier to believe that Rubi had simply bungled into a rum business deal with no conceivable upside.

  Well, at least one upside. In late 1951, Rubi’s phone rang, and someone named Alexandre Korganoff was on the line. Korganoff was a strange, ascetic little fellow—Rubi described him as “a man of perhaps 30 years who had an adolescent appearance … tall, svelte, fair, with very clear eyes and chapped lips”—with an expert’s knowledge of naval history, deep-sea diving, and techniques of treasure salvage. He had been busily working with maps and historical documents to pinpoint the likely locations of several fabled wrecks in the Silver Bank, a reef some 125 miles north of Hispaniola, and he had learned that Rubi was well equipped with ships and connections to the Dominican government and might be interested in doing a little treasure hunting. A few vessels from Rubi’s fishing fleet were in La Rochelle for repairs, and, as he put it, “I was, as they say, free and available.” The unlikely partners agreed to go find a fortune together.