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

by Shawn Levy

  But clearly Rubi had something on his mind besides Barbara. He was either truly smitten with Zsa Zsa or he was too proud to be refused. Zsa Zsa always contended the latter, and it would certainly be the most sympathetic reading of the moment: He was willing to hold his nose and marry the neurasthenic millionairess only if his true love wouldn’t have him. But even if that was the case, his decision making was uncharacteristically erratic. With no firm agreement with either woman, in the glare of more publicity than he could have imagined, he was genuinely risking all the money that was waiting to be snatched up in New York by rushing out to Las Vegas.

  There, as when he joined Danielle Darrieux on the film set in Morocco, his presence was decidedly vestigial. The sisters didn’t appreciate having him around while they rehearsed, so he sampled the pleasures of the fledgling little Strip, where a mere handful of small roadside hotels—none with more than two hundred rooms—then stood. He took in shows by Lena Horne at the Sands and Marlene Dietrich at the Sahara. And he gambled. At baccarat. A lot. And poorly.

  By Sunday, he was well behind—as much as $50,000. And, as he was on the outs with Trujillo, who had just recently dismissed him from the diplomatic corps because of the ugly divorce scandals in which he’d been named, there weren’t very many places he could turn for the money.

  He told the casino managers that he was engaged to Barbara Hutton and suggested that they phone New York to confirm that she would stand for the debt. They did, and she said she would, asking to speak to Rubi and reassuring him: “Don’t worry, darling. I’ll wire them the money at once.”

  He said he wouldn’t sign anything indebting him to her.

  “Don’t worry, darling,” she repeated. “There will be no strings attached.”

  He had painted himself into a corner. There he was sniffing hopefully around Zsa Zsa’s hem, and he had just accepted a hefty chunk of Barbara’s money. He would have to return to New York and marry her, unless…

  The Gabors had finished their final rehearsal for Monday night’s premiere when Rubi found Zsa Zsa in her dressing room at the aptly named Last Frontier. With hangdog frankness, he explained himself. “I need $5 million,” she recalled him confessing to her, “and she’s offered it to me if I marry her. I’m broke, so I have to.”

  But he apparently held out hope that Zsa Zsa would rescue him from this doom, would leave Sanders and marry him, would conspire with him to forge a life, pay back the money Barbara had lent him, ride off together in connubial bliss.

  She wouldn’t hear of it. Aside from her increasing awareness that there was something dangerous about tying herself to a man whose principal employment was so vague, who seemed even more likely to be dependent on her than her current husband, the fact was that she still harbored feelings for Sanders, even after all his cruelties, even after that awful Christmas Eve surprise.

  “I still love George,” she told him.

  Booze; anxiety; anger; fear; frustration; desperation; beastliness; lust; dumb habit; all of that and more bubbled up in him and finally burst: He cuffed her.

  She took the blow in her right eye. Or maybe she fell away from him in such a way that her right eye hit something. No matter. She’d been rapped, and she had the mark to show it.

  “You beast! You’ve disfigured me!”

  He tried to apologize, but she wouldn’t have it, and he skulked off, even more desolate than when he’d gone to see her.

  She called for a physician. “She has a good shiner,” reported Dr. Edgar Compton. “Her eyelid is as black as the ace of spades.”

  She called for a lawyer. “It appears that my client has been pretty badly hurt,” reported Jerry Geisler, who was also handling her divorce. “It could be a criminal action or it could be a civil action for damages. I think my client is entitled to something.” One million dollars seemed about right to him.

  And, most important, she called for a publicist.

  All Sunday night and Monday morning, Rubi kept phoning to apologize, but she wouldn’t take his calls. So he went to Los Angeles and from there to New York and Barbara.

  Zsa Zsa, meanwhile, took the stage Monday night with her sisters, her eye covered in pancake makeup and partially hidden by a new hairstyle. It wasn’t an effective cover-up. She would need to wear an eye patch.

  But the world would know why.

  * * *

  * About $3 billion in contemporary terms.

  * Alexis would have gone on to more spectacular things yet, no doubt: By the summer of the following year he was engaged to marry Baroness Maud von Thyssen, the estranged wife of a German steel tycoon. But he drove his Rolls-Royce into a spin-and-roll, killing him and severely injuring the baroness. The following year, Alexis’s first wife, Louise, married his brother Serge … who was himself killed in a polo accident almost immediately after the wedding.

  * Of all the Rubi imitators the Dominican Republic would produce, de Moya was the most successful. A former model, dancing instructor, and Broadway chorus boy with fluency in several languages, he knew enough girls and tough guys and political clout – wielders in Europe and the Americas to be named by Trujillo as ambassador to the United States in the ’50s.

  * De Moya was on board as part of the Dominican delegation to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, a body that was to be headed by the Benefactor’s daughter, Angelita, until British authorities indicated that they would not recognize a fourteen-year-old as the head of a diplomatic mission.

  * And he dined out on the story of this adventure for the rest of his life. Not three weeks later, screenwriter Nunnally Johnson repeated Sanders’s tricked-up version of events—which included shaking hands with Rubi’s erect member—in a letter to a New York friend.

  TWELVE

  CENTER RING

  RUBIROSA, SPURNED BY ZSA ZSA,

  TO WED BABS HUTTON TOMORROW

  – New York Daily News, December 29,1953

  “DON’T DO IT,”

  HER FRIENDS WARN ALTAR-BOUND BABS

  – New York Post, December 29,1953

  Rubi arrived in New York on Monday night, the twenty-eighth, and walked purposefully past a little clutch of newsmen and photographers waiting to pin him down about his plans. He made his way via limousine to 26 East Thirty-eighth Street, where Leland Rosenberg was letting him bunk in his studio apartment.

  The next day, he woke before noon and sent his suit out to be cleaned and pressed. Still wearing his bedclothes, he was visited by Dr. Joaquin Salazar, the Dominican consul general in New York, and at least one reporter, to whom he confessed that he’d proposed to Barbara two weeks earlier and that they were finalizing their plans to wed. As always, he denied ever having intended to do the same with Zsa Zsa. “We have been friends and will remain good friends, I hope. As for marriage, Miss Gabor prefers her career.”

  By 4 P.M., he was dressed and on his way to the Pierre to work out the details of the wedding and the prenuptial agreement. The ceremony would be held in the afternoon of Wednesday, January 30, and conducted, like his marriage to Doris Duke, on Dominican soil, in this case the New York consulate in Rockefeller Center, with Ramfis Trujillo standing as his best man; to ensure that Dominican property laws would govern the union, the bride would be granted Dominican citizenship by special decree of the government in Ciudad Trujillo—which had suddenly seen fit to rename Rubi to his diplomatic post in Paris. Pursuant to a prenuptial contract, Rubi would receive a lump sum of $2.5 million.

  For Hutton’s friends and family in New York, it was a nightmare scenario. Twice in the previous year Rubi had been named a corespondent in truly messy divorce cases; just a couple weeks previously he’d been fired by his government for the disgrace he brought on it with his tomcatting; what was more, Barbara herself had practically been an invalid until recently, and it wasn’t widely agreed that she was in command of her faculties or was even sober enough to make such a momentous decision. “Barbara is going to fool around this way till she makes money unpopular,” groused one acquaintanc
e anonymously. Others, also from under cloaks of secrecy, deemed the upcoming nuptials “horrible” and “degrading”; her ex-husband Cary Grant, her uncle E. F. Hutton, and other friends and relatives urged her not to go through with it. Pointedly, none of Barbara’s relatives save Lance—wearing that perpetual moue—would be there. Jimmy Donohue, Barbara’s wild-card cousin, politely demurred and then made fun of his own politesse: “They asked me if I wanted to come and I said no, because they wished to have a quiet wedding. Quiet? What am I saying—with 400 newspapermen outside!”

  RUBI BLACKED MY EYE: ZSA ZSA

  – New York Daily News, page one, late edition, December 30, 1953

  I SAID NO, SO PORFY POKED ME: ZSA ZSA

  – New York Daily News, December 30, 1953

  While this tumult brewed in New York, Zsa Zsa called a press conference in Las Vegas. She had a black patch on her eye and a wild story to tell. She was hit “six or seven times”; she had “fierce headaches”; she was X-rayed and the procedure was photographed as evidence; she might have to skip one of her shows and ask Jolie to stand in. Her flak, Russell Birdwell, had raced into town from Los Angeles and immediately turned the ugly little spat into an international headline. “The Sheriffs office here is outraged,” he reported. “They say this is the Old West where men do not hit women.”

  Zsa Zsa was as scathing about Rubi as she had been about Sanders a few weeks earlier. “In Spanish, Rubirosa means a red rose,” she announced, “but to me it’s a black eye. He said to me, ‘If you do not marry me now I will marry Barbara Hutton.’ I said, ‘That is a smart idea.’ He said, ‘Why won’t you marry me?’ And I said, ‘If I must tell you the truth, I am in love with George.’ And so then Rubi hits me. But I am the luckiest woman who ever lived. He might have broken my head or my nose.”

  She made light of Rubi’s marriagability, explaining that he got angry with her because “it was the first time in his life he couldn’t marry the woman he wanted.” And she had some backhanded praise for his apparent new bride. “I’m better off than Barbara, even with a black eye,” she pronounced. “I think that Barbara’s very brave if she does marry him. For a rich woman he’s the very best pastime she could have.”

  The combination of Rubi’s quickie wedding to another heiress and a movie star with a black eye was irresistible tabloid fodder. And newspapermen weren’t alone in seizing on the outlandish events: The night of Zsa Zsa’s press conference, the dancers in Marlene Dietrich’s Vegas show turned up wearing eye patches; at several New Year’s Eve balls, the cheeky chic wore them as well, some bedecked with rhinestones or even real gems; when Zsa Zsa next flew to New York, she was greeted at the airport by a press corps each member of which sported a patch over one eye. It was no little wonder that Eva, Magda, and even Jolie felt that Zsa Zsa had turned the family’s theatrical debut into a one-woman show—and a freak show, at that.

  But that was nothing compared to what was going on in New York.

  RUBI SEES BABS ON WEDDING

  – New York Daily News, page one, city edition, December 30, 1953

  RUBIROSA HERE, WON’T’ TALK;

  NEITHER WILL MISS HUTTON

  – New York Herald-Tribune, December 30, 953

  RICHES? “SOMETHING DIFFERENT”

  ABOUT BABS SENDS HIM, SIGHS RUBI

  – New York Post, December 30,1953

  On Tuesday, as news of Zsa Zsa’s shiner made its way around the world, Rubi tried to pretend it was a bad dream and to focus on his wedding plans. But neither he nor Barbara could avoid questions about the incident. Barbara simply declared that she was “a lady” and refused to discuss her rival any further.

  That night, Rubi sat with Earl Wilson in a midtown bar in an effort to put his own spin on the story, but there was no point in trying: Gossip about the wedding was everywhere. Barbara had never really recovered from the PR catastrophe that engulfed her during the Depression and the renunciation of her American citizenship. And Rubi, though given a free pass when he married Doris and for all his escapades prior to that, had been splashed all over the papers throughout the year for the Zsa Zsa business, the divorce suits, and the loss of his diplomatic post. Combined, they were a lightning rod. Predictable snipers such as Walter Winchell and Hollywood gossip queens Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons took their shots, but comedians, too, got in on the sport: Bob Hope, George Jessel, and Eddie Cantor all had at them. A droll aphorism made the rounds: “In America, the poor get poorer and the rich get Porfirio Rubirosa.” Even on the street they were hounded: Rubi was making his way to Barbara’s apartment in the middle of it all when some New York wisenheimer recognized him: “Next time you’ll marry Ft. Knox!”

  You would think a couple of foolish kids could just get married in peace.…

  BABS WEDS RUBI–KEEPS MONEY/SAYS “Sí”

  AS DOMINICAN CITIZEN

  – New York Daily News, page one, December 31,1953

  RADIANT BABS YEARNS FOR A BABY;

  COUPLE PLANNING TO LIVE IN PARIS

  – New York Post, December 31, 1953

  RUBI MOVES IN HIS WARDROBE; HE IS STAYING

  – New York Daily News, January 1, 1954

  EVERYTHING LOOKS BLISSFUL AT PIERRE

  – New York Daily News, January 2, 1954

  On Wednesday, they awoke determined to put a happy face on whatever it was they were doing.

  By lunch, word had gotten around that the ceremony would be held not at the Dominican consulate but at Dr. Salazar’s home at 1100 Park Avenue. Prior to the event, the couple would deign to sit with the press for a brief while at Barbara’s suite at the Pierre.

  Leland Rosenberg, now described as an agent of the Dominican government, met the mob of one hundred or so newsmen in the lobby and escorted a party of them upstairs. They milled about sampling a few bottles of booze and trays of canapés, then Rubi strode in, affecting mock surprise at the size of the assembly—hands to his cheeks as in Edvard Munch’s Scream. His hair, perfection, was combed back in the usual left-to-right part and he was done up in his wedding day best: black suit, light gray shirt with a subtle black stripe, black-and-white-check tie. (Rosanno Brazzi eat your heart out.) He radiated such happy cheer that you could almost start to feel good about the thing.

  Then Barbara arrived, and that inkling of joy quickly vanished. She looked drawn and weak. And her outfit—black taffeta Balenciaga dress, deep purple velvet coat, and a black taffeta Dior hat with purple lining—gave her a funereal aspect. She almost stumbled into the room. “I feel as though someone hit me on the head,” she exclaimed. (One wag on the scene snickered, “For her fifth wedding, the bride wore black and carried a scotch-and-soda.”)

  In their brief tête-à-tête with the media, they revealed that they had been in love since Deauville in July. “He told me he loved me,” she remembered. “And I didn’t believe him. But I’d loved him from the first moment I met him—and I’d known him a long time, really.” She couldn’t understand, she added, that people didn’t believe it was the real thing: “No one will give anyone credit for liking me because I’m myself. And I love him so much.” She blamed the press for this perception, branding them “people who crucify people like me,” but she admitted, too, to having fed them fodder, namely “all the silly things I’ve done but didn’t think were silly at the time.” She seemed genuinely shocked when asked if it was true that the marriage proposal came over the phone—“I don’t think the telephone is a very good medium; do you?” Rubi perked up at this, patting the green settee on which they sat, averring that he’d popped the question “on this very sofa.”

  It all made for a disquieting spectacle. And Rubi didn’t exactly lighten it. Uncharacteristically brief with reporters, he categorically denied everything Zsa Zsa said about his slapping or wanting to marry her. (Years went by before he would admit to the incident: “Okay, we used to quarrel. And once, during a tiff, she received a black eye. Then she gave a party to show it off and have it photographed.”) Asked about why he had chosen B
arbara as his fourth wife, he couldn’t find words. “Miss Hutton has brought something into my life … ,” he began, and then turned to Barbara for a quick consultation in French. She finished his thought: “Call it sincerity.”

  Perhaps he was ashamed of the scene they were making, or perhaps, as he wrote, he was disturbed by the physical change that had come over her. Just the night before he had bragged to Earl Wilson about what great shape his bride was in: “I don’t like skinny girls—and she’s all right!” But when she turned up at the wedding, she was visibly altered for the worse. “I regarded her anxiously when I got to the Pierre Hotel,” he remembered later. “A new nervousness assaulted her. All the effects of the medical treatment had disappeared.”

  And yet he remained as committed to the task in front of him as if he were in a polo match or an auto race. With whatever moxie or greed he had, with all his tricks of suavity and his athlete’s calm, he would marry her, regardless, despite, in front of everyone: tíguerismo on an order to make even Trujillo blanch.

  He helped her up and out and through the throngs in the lobby and into a car for the quick trip uptown for the ceremony. There, they were greeted by yet another crush of newsmen—“Tell me,” Barbara gasped as she got out of the limo, “is this really happening?” In Dr. Salazar’s apartment, they were met by Ramfis Trujillo, Jimmy Donohue, who had apparently changed his mind about the business, a few Dominican officials, and a few friends. Adolescent Lance, suited and scowling, had, like Rosenberg, come along from the hotel.