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

by Shawn Levy

  The ship they were looking for was Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, a galleon of forty guns that had left Havana in September 1641 with a huge cargo of Mexican silver, plus some gold and precious stones. Nine days out of port, the lumbering fleet of six in which the ship was sailing was smacked with a hurricane; the damaged vessel tried to limp toward Puerto Rico, but it hit an uncharted reef north of Hispaniola and broke apart. In 1687, one of the survivors assisted a North American colonist named William Phips in recovering more than thirty tons of silver and a little gold, a mere lagniappe.

  The wreck wasn’t deep—perhaps one hundred feet—but the waters around it were treacherously pocked with reefs that could founder a ship or rip it to shreds. As a result, nobody had successfully reconnoitered the site in the centuries since. Korganoff was convinced there was plenty of treasure that Phips hadn’t found and that he knew where it was and how to bring it up. Rubi was persuaded, and he had one of his ships, the Ile de Re, fitted out for the expedition, which was to employ a cache of six hundred kilos of dynamite, an old-style diving cage, and a newfangled drilling device that could pierce a ship’s hull underwater. As a crew, Rubi had hired ten men from La Rochelle who were experienced in diving in the rugged conditions of the North Atlantic.

  In February 1952, the ship sailed for the Dominican Republic; Rubi flew ahead, preferring his accustomed luxurious mode of first-class travel to weeks at sea with Korganoff and the French sailors and divers. They would rendezvous at Puerta Plata, not far from Columbus’s first footfall on Hispaniola. In the intervening time, Rubi would be in Ciudad Trujillo petitioning the Benefactor for the right to salvage the treasure. By Dominican law, dibs on anything brought up from the Silver Bank went to Trujillo’s brother José, known as Petán (“the bomb” or “the fart”), a onetime chicken thief, cattle rustler, and hooligan who had, under the aegis of his older brother, become a rich man with a monopoly on plantains and control of the propagandistic national radio station. Rubi won a concession from Trujillo—likely in exchange for a bigger taste of the action than Petán would have shared with him—and got the green light, Petán cursing him and wishing his expedition the worst as he made for Puerta Plata.

  Petán apparently had some real pull with powers greater than his brother: Virtually every step Rubi and his cohorts took was disastrous. As the Ile de Re left Puerta Plata for the diving site, it nearly collided with a sloop and got tangled with its anchor line; the chief diver at first refused to go down to extricate the vessel and had to be threatened with loss of his portion of the proceeds. It was a telling flash of attitude: The French crew proved truculent and even mutinous as the expedition wore on. The captain was homesick for his sweetheart; the rest of the crew drank heavily of the red wine they’d brought along, heedless of the heat and sun, while Rubi wisely stuck to the beer he kept in a cooler on his launch, El Pirata; the Caribbean sharks so frightened the divers that Rubi had to stand guard with a rifle to scare off the predators while the men were in the water; the diving cage was too bulky and clumsy to use in the coral reefs; the divers and sailors swore at Rubi and Korganoff and gambled and laid about with hangovers and wicked sunburns. Worst of all, the Concepción was nowhere to be found: The French maps Korganoff had consulted turned out to be so old that they were nearly useless, thanks to several centuries’ growth of coral since the site had last been explored. Now and again, thinking they were in the right place, they would blast a reef with a bit of dynamite, but the treasure continued to elude them.

  After a period of fruitless, agitated searching, Rubi was faced with a crisis: “I quickly realized that for the expedition to have any chance of success, which every day seemed more doubtful, it was imperative to rid ourselves of this awful crew immediately.” He directed the Ile de Re to shore, where the crew angrily demanded advances on their salaries. But Rubi didn’t have any money to pay them: He had reckoned their shares would come out of the back end, when the treasure was recovered; there was no cash on hand.

  What did he do? Why, he rode El Pirata up the coast a few miles to a little beach town and encamped in a tavern beneath the palms to drink beer and brood. “I needed to be alone to think and get some clarity on this mess,” he explained.

  Two days later, an alarmed Korganoff found him. As Rubi recalled, he had a riot on his hands. “ ‘Come quickly,’ he said. ‘It’s mutiny. They’re going to kill themselves. They’re crazy on booze.’” When he arrived in Puerta Plata, Rubi saw that the crew had somehow found the means to get loaded on rum and were threatening to blow up the harbor: The lead diver, Rubi remembered, “displaying a courage he hadn’t previously shown, amused himself by throwing detonators among the explosives.” Rubi cut all connection to the anarchic scene, explaining to the harbormaster that the crew had been infiltrated by Communists and had mutinied, scuttling the expedition. The C-word elicited the expected response: Trujillo’s militiamen seized, incarcerated, and “interrogated” the sailors, then sent them back home via Martinique.

  Rubi hired a second crew—Dominicans—but found that the French sailors had sufficiently damaged the Ile de Re that it would have to be put in dry dock and repaired in Ciudad Trujillo. It never got there. Hobbled—and well insured—it sank en route, with all hands saved. Rubi went back to Paris. And the diving cage, left on the dock in Puerta Plata after the fracas, fell into the hands of a local pig farmer who used it as a feeding pen for his hogs.

  End of fiasco? Not exactly. Korganoff, having come this far, went back to the presumed wreck site and continued his search. After a couple weeks, he found it: the Concepción, visible from the surface under a calm sea. Rubi returned and hired a small ship and a new crew, and they went out one more time. But when they reached the spot, the wreck was no longer visible because the sea was no longer calm; indeed, all signs indicated that a brutal storm was kicking up. They turned tail for the harbor, but they were hit with motor trouble. As a wicked squall approached, they dropped the anchor, but it didn’t hold. They fought the weather to get away from the reef and into the open sea, then battened down for the duration of the tempest. When it passed, they tricked the engine alive and rode through the night to land. As Rubi recalled, “The sailors thanked the heavens. ‘The depths didn’t want us to get their treasure. We will never again, for anything in the world, return to the Silver Bank.’”*

  And Rubi returned to more familiar means of uncovering fortunes.

  He gadded for a while: polo in Paris, Deauville, Palm Beach, Ciudad Trujillo, and Argentina (he ran into his old chum Aly Khan there, also buying horses, and they partied with Gene Tierney and a Hollywood crew filming a gaucho western); the motor racing circuit; the high life of the French Riviera; a very little work in Rome and then, in jobs of low enough rank that they didn’t violate the ban against diplomats who’d served in Vichy, in Paris. He ran into King Farouk in a casino and became a chum of the prodigal monarch whose zeal for life made him so much less ominous and nerve-racking than Trujillo; Rubi took several whirlwind trips with the king and visited Egypt as his guest.

  Wherever he went, he played, as always, the big man. One night in Monte Carlo he was introduced to an American businessman and made a great show of his pleasure at meeting the fellow. The next night, in a nearby restaurant, the two bumped into one another again. “He came over to the table,” the Yank told a journalist, “and shook hands all around. Somehow I’d got the notion that he was a freeloader. I thought, well, I’ll have this suave bum on my hands the rest of the evening. But all he did was nod to everybody in my party and then go on to a table of his own. Later, imagine my surprise—and shame—when I called for the check and found he’d picked it up for my party.”

  And his legend as a lover grew exponentially. From the moment in 1947 he hit the papers as Doris Duke’s new husband, he entered a rarefied company of pseudocelebrities known chiefly for their sexual escapades—if only to a select demimonde of international gossips. To some degree, it was the fame of the women he was linked to that fanned his legend:
actresses such as Gene Tierney, Dolores Del Rio, and Veronica Lake; the great Portuguese fado singer Amelia Rodrigues; no-name showgirls in London and Paris; the wives and girlfriends of his polo and race-car driving peers; women from noble circles such as the Contessa Nicola-Gambi of Italy, Countess Marita of Spain, and Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia. (“Rubi,” an old friend joked, “has become a baron by a process of bedroom osmosis.”) An exhausting retinue—and one with the most unexpected benefits in the form of widespread renown: At a party at a ski resort, for instance, a friend watched in astonishment as a woman to whom Rubi had only just been introduced declared with no trace of irony, “I will leave my husband for you.”

  Rather than recoil at news of Rubi’s exploits, Trujillo and his government saw his fame as a valuable public relations coup for the Dominican Republic. “Few people had ever heard of the place until he came along,” confided Rhadamés Trujillo to a reporter. Another relative of the Benefactor’s concurred: “He was the best public relations money could buy for the regime.” Concluded an official in Ciudad Trujillo, “The only way Rubi can fall from favor in the Dominican Republic is if he loses his sex appeal. I don’t think that’s going to happen for a long time. In our country, we have a saying that Rubi is so virile his sex glands will go on functioning even after the rest of his body is dead!” And Trujillo himself managed to put the matter concisely and undebatably: “He’s good at his job,” the Benefactor liked to say, “because women like him and he’s a wonderful liar.” Few resumes could compare.

  But for all his glorious successes, Rubi behaved as if he were compelled to sex beyond any aesthetic or romantic sense or even profit motive, recalling nothing so much as Vilallonga’s description of him covered in blood and chasing after a wounded duck in Argentina. There were whores, either in discreet brothels or picked up on the street, and hardly exclusively of the high-class breed; there were casual one-off encounters that couldn’t even be counted as one-night stands since they didn’t last nearly that long (“Come on, let’s do it and just forget about it in the morning” was, a friend recalled, one of Rubi’s staple come-ons for a quickie in a handy bathroom or closet). And when he had been drinking—and his valet claimed that he could drink so much that he would piss himself before he got home—he wasn’t necessarily a choosy lover. He spoke of the petit cochon, the “little pig,” inside his head and blamed it for some truly satyric behavior: Manouche, his lover of the 1930s, revealed that Rubi sometimes took his sport in her restaurant after the customers went home with a hag who worked there; a British diplomat recalled the astonishment that struck him and his colleagues at a formal event when it became clear to onlookers that Rubi had completed a discreet tryst with the wife of a Swedish official, a woman so unappealing that she was known in embassy circles as “the diplomatic bag.” He was known for his sexual prowess, and he careered forward acting on it as if to endorse his own publicity. He was licensed, in effect, to indulge his lowest urge or most capricious whim, an exemplary tíguere whose successes and graceful comportment forgave the most galling tactlessness or shabbiness.

  This sort of carrying-on inevitably provoked consequences, even in the jaded world in which Rubi lived, and in 1953 he had occasion to learn just what those consequences might be. In two high-profile society divorces, Rubi was named as a corespondent by wealthy men seeking to separate themselves from the young, beautiful, and not entirely faithful women they had wed. This was the sort of notoriety that came with a payment-upon-receipt notice, and Rubi would be made to pay.

  In 1946, tobacco heir R. J. Reynolds Jr. married Warner Brothers contract player Marianne O’Brien after extricating himself from a previous marriage with a $9 million handshake. The new couple’s happiness didn’t last but a few years, despite the birth of a son. To be precise, Marianne felt herself trapped in a gilded cage: “I was standing on the deck of one of the largest boats in the world,” she told her son years later, “wearing a beautiful gown and some of the world’s best jewelry. But I was a prisoner on that yacht because every night by five your father had passed out.” Rubi happened to turn up a few times where the Reynolds yacht was docked and caught the scent of the former actress’s boredom; he pursued her. “When Rubi kept calling me, asking me to dinner and the casino, by God I went,” she declared. The romance was consummated in Paris, by which time Reynolds, realizing something was amiss, had hired detectives to track down his wayward wife. The proof they provided of her infidelity saved Reynolds from a second hefty chunk of alimony in less than ten years.

  An even more sensational bust-up befell the marriage of champion golfer Robert Sweeney and his celebutante wife, Joanne Connelley. Sweeney had cut a wide swath through the world in the thirty-eight years before he met his bride: He won the 1937 British Amateur golf tournament and had squired Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, for several years before she dumped him for Cary Grant. In the late 1940s, he found himself, like much of New York, enchanted by the lovely blond Connelley when she was thrust into the spotlight by publicist Ted Howard, who met the girl when she was an eighteen-year-old department store clerk out of whom he reckoned he could fashion a superstar. Because Connelley’s father and stepfather were both on the fringes of New York society, she was eligible to be a debutante, and Howard banged the drum so loudly for her that he got her on the cover of Life magazine. Sweeney sought her out and they married six months after they met.

  Two daughters followed, and Connelley presently found herself bored by the dull languors of Palm Beach, where Sweeney’s set sported in the winter (“She was like a well-decorated cake,” one of the older women in the circle sniffed, “good to look at, but nothing of substance”). Inevitably, she fell prey to the attentions of a number of fast men, Rubi among them. The story goes that they met in London at the chic Les Ambassadeurs club and Joanne asked Rubi for a lift home, then to walk her to her door, then for a nightcap and then … “She returned in a negligee that truly was negligible,” Rubi remembered. But he swore that he made a chaste getaway, rushing past a chambermaid who was arriving with fresh towels. Even if nothing did happen, one needn’t have been a smutmonger to put a seamier spin on the evening, and Sweeney successfully divested himself of his wayward wife by mere recourse to the maid’s story. The suit was brought in London and uncontested by the bride; the court decreed that Rubi, as corespondent, was responsible for the costs of the proceedings.*

  These scrapes made headlines, and Rubi genuinely hated all the adverse publicity. “I’ve become a fad,” he complained, “like Mah-Jongg or miniature golf. Wives that I’ve never heard of swear that I call them long distance and make love to them. It’s getting so that when they can’t think of whom to blame for a divorce or break-up in a love affair, they name me.” But what was worse than the ill repute was the crushing recompense it reaped for him: In December 1953, Trujillo dismissed him from his diplomatic position in Paris, declaring in a press release that “complaints received in connection with the personal conduct of Señor Porfirio Rubirosa have led to the cancellation of his appointment.”

  Crucially, Rubi was still in possession of his diplomatic passport when this grave edict was declared. He would need it, after all, if he was to hunt down a reason for Trujillo to allow him back into his good graces.

  And, as it happened, he had just such a plan.

  * * *

  * In 1978, explorers discovered the wreck of the Concepción and salvaged a small fortune in gold, jewels, and antiquities. Other expeditions continued to turn up silver on the site until the end of the century.

  * During the divorce, Joanne found comfort in the arms of Jaime Ortiz Patino, a Bolivian mining heir whom she married within weeks of the final split with Sweeney. That alliance lasted barely three years, as Joanne became hooked on prescription drugs and Patino sought to have her committed as an addict. That divorce, preceded by many months of nasty back-and-forth, came down in June 1957, and one month later Joanne was dead at age twenty-seven of a self-induced drug overdose that the coroner m
ercifully called a heart attack.

  TEN

  HOT PEPPER

  In January 1952, Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo visited the United States on a goodwill mission. He hadn’t been his country’s president since the mid-1930s, finding it more comfortable to operate the government and his myriad businesses from a remove (his youngest brother, Héctor, known as “Negro” for his dark complexion, was the current puppet of choice). In fact, Trujillo was merely traveling as special ambassador at large for the Dominican Republic. But despite his well-known cruelties, he was treated like a head of state. He was feted by official Washington in January, and he showed up in a stunning display of pomp at the United Nations in February, serving for that month as a delegate and bestowing upon the International Children’s Emergency Fund a check for $50,000. On his voyage home, he was scheduled to sign a treaty at the State Department and stop off for a chat with President Eisenhower (for those meetings, he was briefly named secretary of state for foreign affairs).

  It was a first-class show all the way. And it demanded first-class accommodation for the generalissimo, his wife, Doña María, their youngest son, Rhadamés, and an entourage of more than a dozen staff members, aides, and bodyguards. In Washington, the party stayed at the Mayflower Hotel. And in New York, they encamped at the Plaza Hotel.

  For that portion of the trip, Rubi was in tow (he hadn’t yet been named in the divorce suits and still enjoyed the Benefactor’s good graces). And one afternoon during his visit, Rubi got into the elevator and found himself agog: “Her blonde hair was swept up,” he recalled. “She was wearing a mink coat and leading two poodles. She was a staggering sight.”