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

by Shawn Levy

  The ceremony was conducted in Spanish—both principals answered “Sí” when taking their vows—and seemed unnecessarily protracted to onlookers unused to the formality of Hispanic rituals. Rubi slid the usual gold band set with rubies onto her finger and a plain gold band onto his own. The entire wedding contract was read aloud and four copies were signed. Barbara was so flustered that she inadvertently put down “B. Troubetzkoy” as her name.

  They posed for pictures. Barbara turned to her new husband: “Aren’t you going to kiss me now? The press has waited for so long.…”

  Nice.

  They stopped for the press once again in the lobby, and then they went back to the Pierre for a champagne reception, joined by the witnesses, Dr. Salazar and his family, and a few more friends and family members: no more than two dozen merrymakers, or less than a quarter of the press contingent that was waiting downstairs. Jessie Woolworth Donohue—Barbara’s aunt and Jimmy’s mother—stayed for a decent interval and even allowed the groom to kiss her hand, but she left quickly enough, fulfilling her duty but making her point. Barbara, whom everyone referred to as Mrs. Rubirosa, sipped champagne and repeatedly announced how out of sorts she felt: “I could die I’m so tired!” And she babbled to a guest that she wanted to have a child: “Oh, I would like to have another baby … a child for my wonderful husband … it would be such a great thrill … but I am probably too old … I’m 41.”

  There was little feeling of festivity, and in less than two hours the guests all departed, Rosenberg going downstairs to tell the reporters there’d be no more show that night.

  In Manhattan, anyhow.

  At airports in New York and Los Angeles, reporters managed to buttonhole ex-inamoratas of both newlyweds, Bob Sweeney and Marianne O’Brien Reynolds; both wished the couple well and moved briskly on.

  But in Las Vegas, Zsa Zsa laid on another press conference. With an eye patch and a photo of the wedding as props, she went wickedly to town. “See how unhappy they both look,” she laughed. “I give them six months.”

  On second thought, she reckoned, it would be even quicker: “In a couple of weeks this man will be after me again. He certainly did not jilt me. Ten days ago he sat in my mother’s New York shop and begged her to get me to marry him. He even tried to get my attorneys to hurry up my divorce. But I never wanted to marry that man.”

  And she got in one final slap of her own: “I love George; Rubi loves me; Barbara loves Rubi; but who loves Barbara?”

  (That would be Hungarian for “meow.”)

  MRS. RUBIROSA BREAKS ANKLE

  – New York Times, January 8, 1954

  RUBIROSAS CHARTER AIRLINER

  – New York Times, January 13,1954

  RUBIROSAS FLY TO FLORIDA

  – New York Times, January 14,1954

  In the coming days, the Rubirosas sorted out details of their honeymoon and mutual future. They had considered a trip to Ciudad Trujillo, where the swank Hotel Jaragua along the seafront had reserved its best suite (Rubi kept a bungalow there as his only true Dominican home). But they settled instead on Palm Beach, where the social season was at its height, complete with top-flight polo and the auto race at Sebring in which Rubi would drive for the Lancia team. Their base would be the Ocean Drive villa of the maharaja of Baroda, a palace boasting a full-time staff of six. Rent was a cool $10,000 a month; they took a three-month lease.

  Before they could get down there, however, Barbara took a tumble in the bath and broke her ankle. Rumors flew: Rubi, blacker of Hungarian actresses’ eyes, had beaten her; Barbara, shocked at the spectacle of Rubi’s wedding night arousal, had fled and tripped. Whichever: She was in a wheelchair, and travel would be a nightmare. So they rented a plane—a whole eighty-eight-passenger Constellation from Eastern Air Lines, $4,500 one-way—and headed toward the sun, with an entourage that included the talented Mr. Rosenberg and Barbara’s miniature Doberman, Cocotte. (Lance had already flown off to California and his classes at Pomona College, declaring to reporters en route that he and his new stepdad “have been good friends for a long time.”) One last audience with the press, at Idlewild Airport, and then they were Florida’s problem.

  Once again, they proved a circus.

  They kept different quarters in the maharaja’s home and kept to themselves largely (at least one witness to the business suggested that there was no sex, and Rubi would later hint that such whispers were true: “How could I? She was on drugs!”). Rubi played polo, drove, hit the nightclubs, and shopped: By one account, he added several dozens each of suits, shirts, sweaters, slacks, sports jackets, and pairs of pajamas to the trousseau he had assembled at Dunhill’s and the $1,370 he spent outfitting himself at the A. Sulka boutique in Manhattan. Barbara barely left her rooms, much less the house, still hobbled by that bum ankle, still rattled by the ghosts she could never shake.

  She blamed her injury: “It’s disgusting. My husband is going to play polo and I will have to sit and look at the sea.” And, indeed, his native restlessness made it virtually impossible for him to sit solicitously by her side, holding her hand. “Darling,” he was said to have told her, “I don’t drive a car which has a broken wheel or take out a lame horse.”

  But, truly, he didn’t have to convince her to stay home. She had no interest in the sporting life that consumed him, only showing up once to watch him play. (The Trujillos were there, too, both Ramfis and the Benefactor, and the older man wasn’t impressed with his former son-in-law’s latest conquest. “You’re losing your touch,” he sneered. “Look at who you’ve married. She’s an old hag.” Rubi answered, “Yes, but …” and made the universal sign of money by rubbing his right thumb back and forth over his fore and middle fingertips.)

  There was some sun in this grim scene. One week after they arrived in Florida they celebrated Rubi’s forty-fifth birthday at the Moulin Rouge restaurant. Along with some friends and the Cuban guitarist Chago Rodrigo, who served Rubi as a kind of roving accompanist, they had what everyone described as a lovely evening. The bride’s gifts to her husband, echoing those he had received from Doris, included jewelry, a string of polo ponies, a plantation in the Cibao, and, most spectacular, a B-25 even more elaborate and luxurious than the one that Doris had bought him and had been wrecked in New Jersey. With its massive propellers and wingspan, the World War II – vintage bomber was a stunner in its own right. But even more amazing was its interior: All traces of its original purpose had been removed, and it had been retrofitted with brass, mahogany, gilt, leather sofas, coffee tables (one with a built-in radio), green broadloom carpets, reclining arm chairs with beige upholstery, and a bedroom area complete with closet and leather-paneled bathroom. It stupefied people, and, at an estimated $250,000, it better have.

  But mostly the honeymoon was given over to Rubi running off and seeing to himself while Barbara fermented in her signature low, anxious hum. Rubi put a melancholy veneer on his account of the times, “This marvelous place, which could make a couple happy, was, for us, a clinic. Barbara failed to follow faithfully the course that had, with discipline, been her treatment. There was no honeymoon. She didn’t leave her room. She refused this world of sun, light, sport and happiness. This attitude made a common life difficult.”

  That was the positive spin—such as it was. The darker version, provided amply by Barbara’s old friends in the Palm Beach colony, was that Rubi ran roughshod over her, chasing women brazenly (one glamour gal got a shiner from her husband simply for chatting with him) and bringing them back to a trysting spot that he kept in a discreet complex of garden apartments on Peruvian Avenue. He made quick trips to Ciudad Trujillo and to Miami, where Ramfis Trujillo had repaired after the wedding ceremony to stay on his massive yacht, the Angelita (named for his kid sister) and was engaged in polo and epic parrandas: booze, music, floozies. This dark Rubi frankly terrified his neurasthenic wife of less than a month: Cobina Wright reported that she found Barbara weeping quietly in a corner at a party. “It’s Rubi,” the new bride explained. “One
of these days he’ll do me in.”

  There was no dramatic explosion of tensions, no epic scene in which this mockery of a marriage burst apart so that everyone could know. One day in February, Barbara simply packed her things and left the house, moving in with her aunt Jessie Donohue, she whose hand Rubi had kissed just weeks prior, at the exclusive Everglades Club.

  “Barbara is definitely through with that disgusting man,” Jessie pronounced.

  Almost. Almost.

  Phoenix in the winter of 1953–54: sunny days, cool nights, few locals, fewer tourists, the exclusive suburbs that would in later days draw snowbirding socialites still taking shape: a perfect spot to get away—a quick vacation, maybe, or a project you’d prefer to undertake out of the glare of big city attention.

  The latter was what brought Zsa Zsa there in January: a film, Three Ring Circus, a gigantic production starring the comedy team of Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin and featuring the Clyde Beatty Circus, which wintered in Phoenix in preparation for its touring season. The film’s title could well have described the atmosphere surrounding the shoot: After eight years together, Martin and Lewis had been feuding both with each other and with producer Hal Wallis in the months leading up to their arrival in Arizona, and people were astounded at the hostility they expressed toward one another. It was all Wallis could do to keep the peace.

  So perhaps it was the desire to concentrate on her work and her failing marriage and keep clear of the press who were poking around her feuding costars that made Zsa Zsa decide not to stay at the Arizona Biltmore with the rest of the principal cast and crew but to bunk at the Jokake Inn, an upscale dude ranch in nearby Scottsdale. Or maybe it was because she was traveling with tumult of her own in her wake. Rubi, playing at piloting with the same seriousness with which he played at auto racing, hired a copilot and flew his new plane to Phoenix one misty night to conduct a reunion.

  Zsa Zsa would later claim that she begged him to stay away. But Rubi found her readily enough and there was already a cover story in place: A room in the name of William Perkins—his old pseudonym—had been reserved at her hotel. That little service was provided by Mary Lou Hosford, a wartime disc jockey and New York scenestress who had, like Joanne Connelley, been “discovered” by Ted Howard (he got her name in the papers by encouraging such stunts as riding a horse to El Morocco). Married to an heir to the John Deere fortune but with her eyes on a bigger prize, namely Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, whom she would marry in a few years, Hosford was something of a genius at simultaneously dazzling the press and keeping them at bay. “Tell them everything,” she famously aphorized, “but don’t tell them anything.” She was herself staying at the Jokake Inn while supervising the construction of a winter home in Scottsdale, and she was obviously delighted that her boredom would be interrupted by a bit of glamour, scandal, and skullduggery.

  When he arrived, Rubi was whisked from the airport to Zsa Zsa’s side. The next day, the two went along with Hosford to watch the sunset and eat a picnic dinner at her home site: chicken, roasted peppers, a bottle of wine: ordinary folks. When they headed back to the hotel it was dark. The women walked ahead on the narrow pathways with Rubi contentedly following.

  Out of nowhere, a flash of light, a clamor of voices: a knot of reporters: Word was out.

  “Is Rubi here, Zsa Zsa?”

  With his athlete’s instincts, Rubi bounded into the bushes bordering the path. Zsa Zsa screamed a denial, insisting that she would never allow herself to be involved with a married man. Hosford pushed through the pack of pressmen to enlist the hotel manager’s help in getting rid of them—and, more important, in seeing that Rubi wasn’t discovered. She and the manager came up with a plan. Arthur Wilde, a publicity man working on the movie, would drive out to the hotel, walk through the lobby, and then hop in a car with Zsa Zsa and Hosford; the reporters, mistaking the dark, handsome Wilde for Rubi, would certainly follow; when they did, the hotel manager would drive Rubi to Hosford’s unfinished house.

  As the plan hatched, and Zsa Zsa walked along with her little pack of newshounds, Rubi stayed in the shrubbery and got soaked by sprinklers. Eventually, the publicist arrived, and the decoy was put into motion; as predicted, the reporters followed on what turned into a wild-goose chase around the city and the surrounding desert. Rubi and a change of clothes were taken by the hotel manager to the rendezvous, where he had a couple hours to brood over the indignities of the evening.

  When Zsa Zsa and Hosford finally shook the press and joined him, he wasn’t happy: “Where the hell were you?”

  The next day, he got back in his flying palace and returned to Palm Beach and Barbara.

  Talk that he’d been in Phoenix didn’t die, however. A reporter reached him and he acted utterly dumbstruck by the question. “How did this start?” he asked. “I have just been down to my Dominican farm in La Vega. Be sure to get that right—La Vega, not Las Vegas. I’ve been talking to my wife every day by telephone from there. She wasn’t worried.”

  Zsa Zsa denied everything as well. But the press dug and they pretty much had the story; there was no record of Rubi flying in or out of Miami International Airport, but a man answering his description was confirmed by three Phoenix airport employees to have arrived and departed on a private flight.

  Busted.*

  RUBIROSAS SEPARATE

  – New York Times, March 14,1954

  Barbara was back in New York by St. Patrick’s Day.

  Officially: “We regret that we have mutually decided that it is wisest for us to separate. Our separation is entirely friendly and any public statement giving a different impression is completely incorrect.”

  That was how she tended to characterize her bust-ups: happy events.

  It sat like that for about a week, and then Rubi sailed into town, too, taking a suite at the Plaza, just a block from Barbara’s bat cave at the Pierre.

  And he called reporters round to share the state of his heart.

  They photographed him spooning out a window toward a view of Central Park. “Never again will I marry a woman of wealth,” he sighed. “Perhaps it is better that I marry a poor girl. This is what I will do.”

  He complained gently of the differences between himself and his soon-to-be-ex. “We are very different people. I am very active and I like to go out at night. She wanted to stay home at all times and read books. This is a very boring life. If she had led a normal life, I would have been very happy. But she wanted to stay home all the time. She liked to stay in the house all day, and I like outdoor sports.”

  He swore it was all meant to be different. “I married her because I loved her.… It may have been conceit, but I really believed I was the man who could change her into the lovely, intelligent, elegant woman she can be.… Almost on the day of our wedding I knew it could not be.… There was nothing I could do to beat off the sickness and sadness that engulfed her.”

  He insisted that he’d been faithful to her, that he never visited Phoenix, that he took nothing from the marriage save a framed photo of his wife of less than three months. He wished his new ex-wife well—“She is a very, very nice girl, and I hope she can find a man she can keep around the house”—and ended with words of wisdom: “Don’t marry too young. A man should be 35 before marrying. I was but 23 when I began. It was too young.”

  It would be the deepest his thinking on the matter would get. But it wouldn’t be his final word.

  That, amazingly, would come in a huge newspaper story at the end of March, a confessional ghostwritten by James D. Horan and Jeffrey Roche of the New York Journal-American and the Los Angeles Examiner, two of the chief outlets of the Hearst media empire.

  In it, Rubi once again anatomized Barbara’s condition: “I do not think that Barbara is a sick girl, but for some reason she does not want to participate in an active life.” But this time a note of revulsion seeped in. “I am horrified at the thought of a healthy person who stays in bed all day as Barbara did. I like to go out with my wife and enjoy life.”<
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  He hoped she could be cured of her malaise: “I truly wish that my wife, Barbara Hutton, would abandon her way of life. Then with her poise, beauty, education and enormous wealth she could well become one of the leading ladies of her country.”

  And he declared himself to be outraged by suggestions that he had been anything but a loyal husband: “This, of course, is to throw the lies back into the mouths of the gossips and the whisperers who insisted that I was spending my evenings with ladies other than my wife. Let me emphatically emphasize at this time that this was not true.… I am sure that there are plenty of people who would prefer to believe that I escorted beautiful young ladies to chic night clubs and that I left Barbara home while I led a very gay life.” But that wasn’t it at all, he said. “It was simply a case of a vigorous life failing to fit in the pattern of a quiet one. Surely it has happened before to other people and undoubtedly will happen many times to still other people.”

  In the end, he invited the world to blame him for the whole thing. “For my final word, let me say that I am sorry. Let’s say it’s all my fault. But I couldn’t trade the polo field, the excitement of the racing car competitions, the open air and the zest for a full life—for the reclusion which she preferred.”

  Of course, he could afford to take the blame. They had been married about seventy-five days. He had the $2.5 million cash payment, the plane, the plantation, the clothes and jewelry, the polo ponies, plus incidentals. Call it $3.5 million (about $24 million today).

  It was disgraceful. And it was an audacious success: Having publicly and crassly latched on to Barbara and her money, he was, for all purposes, immune to every possible drag on his progress. He could live with the ill repute he had cultivated in certain circles because he had the money and, frankly, the standing. He had hurt Barbara, probably, but she had been warned amply and, besides, he was hardly the first. He could even afford to sit with the press and muse about the whole business with a poker-faced brass that any politician would envy. No tíguere ever had such gall, reach, and fortune.* And on top of it he was world famous.