by Shawn Levy
If there could be said to be an acme of his profession, he had reached it.
Meanwhile, across Fifth Avenue, Barbara wore her exorbitantly expensive outfits and sat in darkened rooms, chain-smoking, sipping drinks, gossiping in a low voice, sobbing, making plans: a broken thing.
“Now everyone thinks I’m crazy,” she told a reporter. “Do you think so?” And then she drifted into disconnected thoughts about her son, her previous marriages, an old flame.
By late June, she was traveling as Barbara Hutton and he was in Ciudad Trujillo placing the public newspaper notice that was the requisite means under Dominican law of initiating a divorce proceeding. It wasn’t entirely clear that Dominican courts had jurisdiction over the union—technically, they may never have officially been married—but as everybody simply wanted the thing to go away, that was that. A year later, at the end of July 1955, they were entirely quits.
She wasn’t done with that yearning search of hers. There were affairs—one with James Dean, she claimed, about a year after Rubi. There were two more marriages—homosexual German tennis champion Gottfried von Cramm (never consummated) and Raymond Doan, a bizarre, inscrutable Laotian artist for whom she purchased the title Prince Vinh Na Champassak—and another grand home, a folly: an authentic Japanese palace in Cuernavaca.
Lance, ever the kid turned on to fast cars by Rubi (“he seemed like a terribly nice guy,” he swore), became a pretty good gentleman amateur racer in an era that was faster and more competitive than Rubi’s. His mother was sickened by the danger, and she offered him opulent bribes to quit the sport, one of which was an L-shaped house in Beverly Hills with a then-one-of-a-kind indoor-outdoor pool. (He was twenty when he got it; he also owned a farm in Surrey.) He shared Barbara’s poetic restlessness but had a ripple of his father’s steel in his heart; it suited the occupation he shared with Rubi: oblivion through speed, competition, and women. He married Jill St. John in 1960, and they split three years later, and then he married a former Mouseketeer. He ran with the fastest crowd on the Sunset Strip in its frothiest days, and he financed the legal defense fund of the kids arrested in the Sunset Strip riots. He formed a company to build his own car, the Scarab; it won a big race once at Riverside.
His Cessna went down in Aspen in 1972. He was thirty-six.
Barbara was living mainly in hotels by then. She had never paid a lick of attention to her finances, and, in her indifference, leeches, some with the most genteelly beguiling aspects, bled her white. When she died at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel seven years after Lance, she had her homes and precious objects, and her name and repute, but there was a mere $3,500 in cash in the bank: at age sixty-seven, picked bare.
She always hated when people called her “poor little rich girl.”
Turned out it was true.
With the charade of Rubi and Barbara’s marriage over, it was left for Zsa Zsa and Sanders to throw in the towel on their own farcical union. In January 1954, Zsa Zsa had counterfiled against Sanders, charging him with inflicting “grievous mental cruelty, distress and anguish” on her. On April 1, their fifth wedding anniversary, she sat in Santa Monica Superior Court and convinced Judge Stanley Mosk to approve an uncontested divorce. Wearing a black veil, Zsa Zsa testified for ten minutes to the effect that Sanders “does not want to be married; he wants to be a bachelor.” She explained that he had several times moved out of the house or gone to Europe without her “because I spoiled his fun.” When her attorney, Jerry Geisler, asked her if Sanders maintained a separate residence throughout the marriage, she finally broke down sobbing: “He says he had to have some independence.” (To be fair, at least one newspaper reported that she was already in tears as she posed for photos before entering the courtroom.) Also testifying was her secretary, Cathy Kalt, who corroborated her employer’s words and described Sanders as “very moody.” Sanders himself didn’t appear, and after about twenty minutes Judge Mosk granted the divorce request, announcing that it would become effective, per California law, after one year.
Her third divorce in a decade secured, Zsa Zsa wiped away her tears and headed to Cannes for a film premiere—via New York, where Rubi was still ensconced at the Plaza Hotel pouring his heart out to the press. She decided that she, too, had best hold a press conference so that the world would know that she had no designs on him.
Would she be seeing him in New York? she was asked. That wasn’t her intention. What about France? “I don’t own the airline,” she replied. “I can’t control who the passengers will be. I don’t know whether he will be in Europe. How do I know if I may bump into him in a nightclub.” (He had his own way of addressing the matter: “My marriage is finished and certainly I cannot be expected to stay home alone!”)
Of course, they were together already. Jolie had vacated her apartment and helped Rubi sneak in, giving the couple several days alone. When reporters got wise and started camping out on the doorstep, he was trapped. Jolie devised a ruse: She left and returned to her house several times in a large overcoat and concealing hat, as if she was trying to avoid prying eyes; then, against his protests, she dressed Rubi in the same get-up and he was able to skulk in drag through the pack of photographers unmolested.
The following week, Zsa Zsa was in Paris, and he was right behind her. And she called yet another press conference—so that the world would know they were still together. “When he married Barbara it was easy to predict the marriage wouldn’t last,” she said. “Now he is coming back to me.” And would they marry? “Who knows whether I will marry him. I don’t know myself. I am still sore from this divorce I just had with George. It cost me a fortune. It hurt my feelings besides. If things between us stay as they are a year from now, we’ll get married. He loves me more than I thought he did. He always comes back.” But what about the shiner she got in Vegas? “That was a publicity stunt that went too far,” she confessed. “I fired my publicity man after that. [True.] Especially as it inspired a lot of silly people to imitate me. One starlet even wrote to me suggesting that I get into a fight with her which would give us both publicity.”
Rubi dove into the thing unbridled, with enough of a nest egg that he didn’t especially care how it looked. “Was it callous of me to rush at once to the lovely Zsa Zsa?” he asked a reporter. “I suppose so, but that’s the kind of man I am. If a thing is over, it’s over. That’s how it is, whether it’s a marriage, a love affair or a business deal.”
On April 9, just eight days after her divorce hearing, they were out on the town, hitting all the usual spots. When they arrived at Jimmy’s, his Montparnasse haunt, they had a full coterie of reporters and photographers in tow. He got testy with them: “You will not take any pictures of me with Miss Gabor.” That wasn’t, apparently, the way she saw it. She posed; they had words; she cried; he hollered, “Get out! I don’t need you!”; she raced away. The next day, with all the tabloids in Paris splashed with accounts of this fracas, they rode horses together in the Bois de Boulogne: all better.
They went to Cannes; they went to New York. When they got off the plane there, reporters noticed that Zsa Zsa was wearing a diamond ring; the story went out on the Associated Press wire. She insisted they weren’t engaged: “When we are free, then we will be engaged.” Someone asked Rubi if they’d marry. “I hope,” he said. “Why not?” And Zsa Zsa chimed in: “We don’t speak of marriage. We’re petrified of marriage.” So, a reporter wondered, is this just “a nice platonic friendship?” The two of them burst out laughing.
On to Los Angeles, where she had to shoot the pilot for a comic TV western tentatively titled Zsa Zsa the Kid (as she had been warned by her agent, film offers were drying up because of the adverse publicity she was garnering with Rubi). They landed in the B-25 in Burbank after a twelve-hour voyage that included stops in Memphis and Phoenix (Rubi had listed Zsa Zsa as a “stewardess” on his flight manifest). As their twenty pieces of luggage were unloaded, Zsa Zsa explained that the jewelry that everyone was asking about was her “working diamond” and n
ot an engagement ring. “We’re engaged,” she said, “but we cannot speak of marriage because neither of us is yet free.”
In fact, all they did was speak of marriage, and it was all anybody else seemed to talk about. Edith Sitwell, the avant-garde English poet and eccentric, was living in Los Angeles at the time and somehow bumped into the couple. She thereafter gossiped about the affair with surprising zest. “He must be a charming man,” she surmised to a reporter. She called him “Porfirio the Persecuted” and compared him to Lord Byron as a figure of unwarranted public rebuke. “What a pity he doesn’t read more,” she concluded. (Rubi, who prided himself on his vast knowledge of the life of Napoleon, took great umbrage on hearing this: “How the hell does she know how much I read?”) In a letter to another reporter she declared of Rubi; “What an appalling man! So awful as to be enthralling!”
(So awful, too, as to be chasing other women still: Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno, the Mafia stoolie, recalled a competition with Rubi at this time for the affections of one Celine Walters, a New York socialite, would-be actress, and amour of Paul, King of the Hellenes. “This Rubirosa was trying to fuck Celine but she wouldn’t give him a tumble,” the Weasel said. “Rubirosa can’t give her the royal treatment I give her in these joints. All this bowing and scraping, these broads eat it up. They like the best table, to be with somebody who’s respected. That Rubirosa’s a big shot, but he don’t get this kind of reception.”)
In June, Rubi and Zsa Zsa flew to New York, shaking off a gaggle of press men at the airport. “It is unfair to come out to meet us so early in the morning,” Rubi mewled.
From there, they went back to Paris and then down to Le Mans for the Grand Prix, during which Rubi’s codriver crashed their Ferrari in only the fifth lap; prior to the race, Zsa Zsa had been hanging around in the pits, causing one French mechanic to hoot admiringly, “Et voilà un chassis!”—“Now, there’s a chassis!”
Then they flew back to Los Angeles on a commercial jet.
Thousands of miles and scores of hours in airplanes in a matter of weeks. They had ample time to put their heads together and make plans. And what did they come up with? A movie plot. Inspired, perhaps, by Zsa Zsa the Kid, they decided they would make a western together.
Zsa Zsa set about commissioning a script from Andrew “Bundy” Solt, a family friend from the Budapest days who had become a screenwriter with such pictures as The Jolson Story, In a Lonely Place, and Little Women to his credit. Western Affair, as his finished work was dubbed, was a story about love between rival saloonkeepers in Deadwood Gulch, South Dakota—a French showgirl and a Spanish nobleman.
In Los Angeles, Rubi dedicated the summer to perfecting a western twang, practicing quick draw tricks with pistols, and learning how to act under the tutelage of Michael Chekhov, a nephew of Anton Chekhov and an actor and acting guru in his own right. He did cowboy bits wherever he went; when he met Gary Cooper at a Hollywood party, he greeted him with “Howdy, pardner,” to which the actor replied, “Why you ol’ ornery buzzard!”
“I had never seen him so enthusiastic,” Zsa Zsa remembered. “Somewhere inside him was a man who desperately wanted to achieve something for himself.” (Years later, she reflected, “He hated being a kept man. George Sanders wanted to be a kept man, but Rubi hated it.”)
Insanely, Republic Pictures, the B-movie studio where so many cookie-cutter westerns had been made through the years, thought enough of the project to throw a little development money at it and sign Rubi to a contract for $1,500 a week—if he could get a work visa out of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In July, through attorney Michael Kohn, Rubi sought a special disposition that would allow him to make the film. His request was denied, according to Herman R. Landon, the INS district director in Los Angeles, because “the conditions that would permit such employment have not been met.” But Landon was, by his own admission, leaned upon by morality watchdog groups who didn’t want to see the likes of Rubi sully America’s movie screens. “There have been expressions of opinion against Mr. Rubirosa and his plan to make the film,” he said. “While these protests were not the controlling and deciding factor in the case, they were considered in the decision to reject Mr. Rubirosa’s request.”
Rubi’s lawyer appealed the decision. “We’re just shooting in the air with our appeal,” Kohn admitted. “We have no knowledge of the reason why the request was denied, but our brief will take into consideration the reasons similar applications have been turned down in the past—lack of unique ability and the possibility that an American actor will be deprived of a job.” But it was for those reasons precisely that, in September, the INS issued a final denial of the petition.
That ended the film as far as Republic was concerned. For a few months, Zsa Zsa kept alive the tiny hope that it could be made, perhaps in Mexico, where the work visa would not be an issue; she even got it into her head that they could get surrealist auteur Luis Buñuel, who was then living in Mexico and whom she seemed only to know for his recent film of Robinson Crusoe, to direct the thing. But—perhaps justly, perhaps to posterity’s loss—it was never to be.
By then, she was en route to Germany to make a film (in which Rubi was rumored falsely to have been offered a small role) and they were still dropping hints to the press about marriage. But their hearts didn’t seem in it quite so much. The back-and-forth between Paris and Los Angeles kept interrupting their work responsibilities, such as they were.
“In Paris now they are having their last farewell,” Jolie Gabor confided to a journalist in the spring of 1955. “She can’t marry Rubi, the darling boy, because he’s so jealous. This time it’s over. She will be a very big shot in Hollywood and in television. She would have to give that up to marry Rubi. He is so jealous of Zsa Zsa he is even jealous of me.”
And they themselves would constantly reveal a deep-seated ambivalence about tying the knot. “Marriage could not increase our happiness,” Rubi said, fairly enough. “I am going to have to start running because I don’t want to get married,” Zsa Zsa told a friend, only half joking.
He was, as ever, looking at other women: He was linked in the coming months with Ava Gardner, Empress Soraya of Iran, and Gregg Sherwood Dodge, the onetime pinup girl who married an heir to the American automobile fortune. He was back in Los Angeles in October 1955, and again two months later. Reporters caught him at the airport both times.
But in the spring of the following year, Zsa Zsa announced her engagement to building magnate Hal Hayes, who sealed the deal with a 20-karat diamond ring. Deeply moved by this new love, she—what else?—called a press conference. “I heard from Rubi about a week ago from Florida,” she said. “He calls me all the time. He wanted to marry me but I never wanted to marry him. Rubi lives an entirely different life. He lives all over the world and I like to live in Hollywood and act. I like hard work and being an American.” A week or so later, she sat with reporters again: “I was in New York last week and Rubi was in the same hotel. He was very broken up and he wanted me to forget Hal and marry him. He is a wonderful man—much nicer than the newspapers picture him. But I could not marry Rubi. He wants me to give up my career and live with him in Paris. I could never give up acting. It is my life.”
And that was about it: three years, two marriages, a mountain of newspaper clippings, at least one disastrous holiday eve, an airplane, a pile of eye patches, an ocean of gossip, a true love that was truly not meant to be.
Jolie, who counseled her daughter repeatedly not to forge a union with Rubi, took all the credit. “It is my fault that they never married,” she boasted. “I was dead against it although I liked Rubi very much.”
Zsa Zsa went on to appear in B-movies and TV shows and sit beside Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson countless times—and to marry again and again and again: Six poor souls followed Sanders to her side at the altar of marriage.*
Rubi, for his part, was philosophical and perhaps even wiser. “Zsa Zsa is very gay and wonderful company,” he mused to an interv
iewer. “She will make the right person a good wife. But I am going to think very hard before I marry again.”
* * *
* As a silly denouement, Rubi was actually offered a part in Three Ring Circus by producer Wallis, who thought he could get a cheap laugh at the end by having Rubi pull up to Zsa Zsa’s character at the end of the story and ask her, “How about hopping in and taking a ride with me, baby?” Less vulgar heads prevailed and it never came close to happening. But the B-25 actually did appear in a movie. In 1969, its then-owners leased it to the producers of the film of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, who required an entire fleet of authentic World War II aircraft; by all accounts, Rubi’s was far and away the most luxurious of the lot.
* Well, there was Leland Rosenberg. Having passed from Lance Reventlow to Rubi, he attached himself to Trujillo, who deemed him an extraordinarily helpful fellow, gave him Dominican citizenship, and appointed him to a series of governmental and diplomatic posts, including a legislative seat and the ambassadorship to Iran. In the course of his work for the Benefactor, Rosenberg grew wealthy, and Rubi was once overheard asking him for a taste of the bounty he’d accrued on the strength of the introduction to the Trujillos Rubi had made for him.
* Sanders, perhaps even more befuddled, married Zsa Zsa’s older sister Magda in 1970, for about six weeks; he killed himself in Barcelona two years later, leaving behind a note that read, in its gist, “I am bored.”
THIRTEEN
CASH BOX CASANOVA
“Must a man be assertive?”
“He must never paw a woman. A woman does not like to be pawed. She likes to be … ah … liked.”
