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

by Shawn Levy

  If “El Caribe” is so fond of the figure and words of Porfirio, I suggest they interview Cesar, the other Rubirosa, about his experiences in Egypt and Greece.

  “Idleness is the mother of all vices” … how true!

  Pure Trujillo, attempting to put Rubi in his place by emphasizing his reputation as a profligate, his common origins, and the disreputable behavior of his brother.

  The note might have had some impact on the readers of Listín Diario, who perhaps thought slightly less (or maybe more) of Rubi after reading it. But it had none on Rubi, who left the country the morning it was published to play polo in Palm Beach and then returned to Paris. Indeed, it was more than a month before he saw the column and cabled a response from France:

  I read the Foro Publico of April 12 which says that I have contributed nothing to the external or internal knowledge of the progress our country has made in this luminous Era. I wish it to be known that as a great admirer of the great works of Generalissimo Trujillo I have told and continue telling more than anyone about the great works that our beloved leader has realized.

  If Trujillo didn’t believe a word of Rubi’s letter, he nevertheless allowed it to be printed. The public slap was meant more for Dominican eyes than as a genuine upbraiding. Indeed, as the exchange demonstrated, Rubi was unique among Dominicans in being granted the temerity of standing up to Trujillo, even if only in this modest fashion, because his international fame and éclat were true assets to the dictator and his regime. He was so celebrated and ubiquitous that he was suspected to be something more than a mere playboy—a key conspirator, surely, in some byzantine scheme of the Benefactor’s. There was an element of truth in this, to be sure, but not in the way that the mainstream press surmised. Argosy magazine sent a query directly to Trujillo’s office asking, “Will you either confirm or deny that Porfirio Rubirosa, while posing as a glamour figure of the international set, is actually a ‘hatchet man,’ as has been charged, in direction of a worldwide counter-movement against the Caribbean Legion underground?” This was a truly hilarious claim: If Rubi had had any role in countering the Caribbean Legion, a loose organization of mercenaries who hired out against various despots in the region under the rubric of freedom fighting, it wouldn’t have been the sort conveyed by the term “hatchet man”—unless there was some use for a hatchet in a nightclub or on a polo pitch. A functionary drew up the government’s incredulous response: “Congratulations. This is the 52nd time this question has been asked me, but this is the first time I will expose Rubi for what he is. Yes, Porfirio Rubirosa’s pursuit of well-heeled broads is actually a mere cover for his real role as head of our Anti–Caribbean Legion underground Boudoir Brigade.”

  Trujillo felt entitled to such a mocking stance because he was in the midst of celebrating himself in a massive jubilee marking the twenty-fifth year of the era that bore his name. A huge fair was planned with his youngest child, Angelita, as its queen and representatives from nations all around the world converging on the Dominican Republic for an exposition of the nation’s progress and achievement. Books were published—epic poems, histories, biographies, even an entire encyclopedia of trujillismo—and hundreds of thousands of dollars poured out of the national treasury into infrastructure improvements and beautification of the area around the fairgrounds. It was a mammoth expression of the Benefactor’s cult of personality … and a colossal failure. Though there was representation from elsewhere in the world, it wasn’t a diplomatic A-list, and the tourism that the event was meant to generate never materialized—and this at a time when Cuba, the neighbor island from which Trujillo always feared a hostile invasion, was becoming a favored vacation spot for big-spending, freewheeling Yankees.

  It was a hard blow against Trujillo, and he had worse coming. Just as he was indulging himself in monumental accounts of his triumphs, the Caribbean was turning into a tinderbox of cold war intrigue and international subterfuge. Trujillo had effectively squelched all opposition within his borders, but he was ever alert to the possibility that exiles and outside agitators could threaten his realm. He gave Johnny Abbes García and his cadre of thugs and saboteurs free rein to go after enemies of the regime, whether they were hiding in Cuba, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, or Nicaragua—and even to pry loose hostile governments, right from the top if necessary.

  And he continued to do away with anyone who criticized or fomented against the regime in the United States. In the fall of 1952, Andrés Requena, a dissident novelist and newspaper editor living in Manhattan, was lured to an unfamiliar address and gunned down in a dark hallway when he got there; no one was ever arrested for the killing. More spectacularly, four years later, Jesús de Galíndez, a Spaniard who fled his homeland after supporting the losing side in the civil war and who then spent years in the Dominican Republic working first as a bureaucrat and then quietly agitating for reform of Trujillo’s government, disappeared.

  Galíndez wasn’t, like Angel Morales, the intended victim in the Bencosme killing, a potential usurper of Trujillo’s seat. Nor was he, like Requena, a semipublic figure, rabble-rouser, and man-about-town with the ability to draw publicity to the anti-Trujillo movement. Rather, he was an egghead, the sort of malcontented wonk whom Trujillo would normally dismiss as not having hair on his chest. But he had been at work for years on a book—it would serve, in fact, as his dissertation at Columbia University—that tirelessly and exhaustively examined Trujillo’s abuses of power, human rights, international law, and economic justice. He had submitted it to his doctoral committee in February 1956, and had made plans to publish it, in Spanish, later in the year. Trujillo tried to buy him out—he offered him $25,000, much more than publication would have netted him—but Galíndez refused. On March 12, he gave a lecture on Dominican affairs at Columbia, accepted a ride to Central Park South from some students, waved good-bye at the top of the subway steps at Fifty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue, and was never seen again by anyone friendly.

  It was a few days before the quiet Galíndez was missed, and by then, of course, police were working from cold clues. But more than one investigator, news organization, and diplomat connected the dots between the vanished scholar and the Dominican despot, and the case quickly drew attention in more exalted places than the NYPD missing persons bureau. There was a rumor of a Dominican ship docked in Manhattan on the night of the disappearance, of a large parcel—perhaps a human body—being thrown into the boiler; it didn’t pan out. Another line of investigation, the possible involvement of Galíndez in intrigues involving the Basque separatist movement and the CIA, also turned out to be a dead end. The little bit police had—notes found in Galíndez’s flat, principally, and fears he had expressed to his friends—suggested a Dominican connection to the disappearance, but there was far too little to go on.

  That slim thread grew significantly more easy to follow, however, in the fall, when a car was found abandoned near an abattoir in Ciudad Trujillo. Its owner, Gerald Lester Murphy, a twenty-two-year-old American pilot, was missing and presumed dead by Dominican investigators. But Murphy was far more connected to the world than Galíndez had been. He had parents back home in Oregon who were sure there was more to his death than mere misadventure. He had a fiancée, a Pan Am stewardess, who had been in the Dominican Republic with him not long before he vanished. And he had a big mouth: He had been on a toot in the last few months, bragging about his newfound wealth, partly earned, he said, in his new job with the Dominican national airline, and partly earned, he hinted, after a secret mission he’d flown the previous spring—airlifting an invalid from Amityville, New York, to Ciudad Trujillo.

  The Murphys’ scrappy congressman, Charles O. Porter, spearheaded an inquiry into the incident—and, by extension, of Trujillo’s rule and the support Washington had given it; a lengthy investigation began into the United States’ policy in the Caribbean and the sorts of regimes which were benefiting from the American impulse to keep the peace in the region. At the same time, Galíndez’s book was p
ublished in Spanish throughout Europe, South America, and the Caribbean. Trujillo tried to explain away Murphy’s death with an unbelievable cover story—the pilot had been driving along with a Dominican army officer and made a homosexual pass at him, whereupon the officer killed him; ashamed at his action, he later hanged himself in his jail cell. The story naturally failed to mollify the Yankees and, worse, had a deleterious impact at home, where the friends of the dead soldier began mumbling about a coup. The Benefactor was being boxed in, and his enemies were encouraged.

  Rubi, on the other hand, had never been more free.

  Barbara’s money, Doris’s house, Trujillo’s imprimatur in Paris, the cars, the ponies, the clothes, the antiques, the plane (which always gave him trouble—grounding him once in Shannon, Ireland), the fishing interests in Africa (he never failed to mention these) and real estate in the Cibao, the worldwide reputation, the skills of diplomacy, seduction, sport, and high living all perfected. This was the sort of life that Hugh Hefner had in mind when he published that first issue of Playboy magazine a mere two months before the hurly-burly of Zsa Zsa/Barbara–gate. This was the male ideal that hadn’t been yet overtaken by the surge of rock-and-roll and teen culture that would soon swamp the world. This was what suburban men envied and their wives fantasized about, the mystique behind “¿Que Es Lo Tuyo Rubirosa?” Movie stars, sports heroes, heads of state: None of them could get away with what he could because he was uniquely allowed to enjoy at once the reputation that accrued to a scandalous life and the sort of earthly rewards those who lived above reproach secretly yearned for. He was playing life with house money—piles of it—and he was sufficiently deft to be resented for the fact only by prigs.

  And, of course, there were still the women. Always there were the women. Barbara wasn’t the end, after all, nor was Zsa Zsa. By the time he and his Hungarian soul mate ended their mad intercontinental caravan of sensations, he had dallied among the likes of Eartha Kitt and Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth and Empress Soraya of Iran.

  Eartha was in Paris dancing for choreographer Katherine Dunham when Rubirosa came backstage to pay his respects to the artistes; she stood with her back to the wall in a narrow hallway while he passed her, grinning politely. “Handsome?” she remembered, “God, was he handsome!” The next night, a note in her dressing room: “I will pick you up tomorrow night after the show for dinner at Maxim’s.” The following morning, a phone call from his valet confirmed details. Fearing Miss Dunham’s jealousy (she herself had dated Rubi), Eartha tried to beg out by explaining she had nothing to wear. Not a problem: “Mr. Rubirosa has given me instructions to take you wherever you want to go shopping for anything you want—at his expense, of course.” She chose Pierre Balmain and a little black silk dress with matching shoes and handbag. At dinner, a rose, a string of pearls, champagne, caviar, violins. “I felt the heroine of a romantic novel,” she recalled. And then he took her home. “Now came the payoff, I thought.” But no: a gallant good-night, she said, and another invitation every day or so for a couple weeks, another dress, another night on the town, another chaste adieu. He called her, she remembered “Fire and Ice.” And he drifted off after a while, upon which Orson Welles (who also didn’t touch her, she swore in her implausibly chaste memoirs) started squiring her around.

  Rita may have only been the invention of gossip columns, but he was her type, for certain, and they certainly knew one another when she was previously married to Aly Khan. They were spotted together at parties and such, just enough to start word circulating that there had been more between them. The rumor was that Rubi didn’t go through with it because Aly said he’d consider it a favor if he didn’t. That was the rumor, anyhow.…

  With Ava it would be harder to say. They were seen together at least twice and there was talk they would be seen together more when she was finally free of Frank Sinatra. (Her love of Spanish men had even been enacted in one of her most famous films; in The Barefoot Contessa she was involved with a fellow of the Rubi sort, an Argentine millionaire and sportsman.) She denied the whole thing up and down: “There is absolutely no truth in the report that I am to marry Porfirio Rubirosa. I met the gentleman once in Madrid and dined with him on another occasion in Paris with other people. These are the only two occasions on which I have ever seen him.” And Rubi backed her up, phoning Louella Parsons from Rue de Bellechasse: “I scarcely know her.”

  Perhaps. The thing was, so many famous and not-so-famous women had passed through his hands that he became a synecdoche for playboyism itself and fact and gossip about him blurred into a cocktail—and he did nothing to dissuade anyone from trafficking in what amounted to free publicity for his way of life.

  At the height of this season of fame and celebrity, a new girl came into sight. Sometime in the spring of 1956, he got a gander at her on the cover of Paris-Match. She was nineteen, with a wide smile, almond eyes, freckles, voluptuous curves, a mod hairdo: a chic, Left Bank sort of girl. She was a student at the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique along with older classmates Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Claude Brialy. Twice she had slipped the censorious eyes of her schoolmasters to make films under a stage name—one starred Brigitte Bardot and was shot in Vienna; the other starred none other than Danielle Darrieux.

  She was born Odile Berard—her paternal grandpa Jean Berard was a renowned physician in Lyon. She didn’t want to sully the name—or let the officials at the Conservatoire know that she was taking paying jobs—and so the acting trade was coming to know her as Odile Rodin.

  Odile had come to Paris at age five when her mother remarried after the untimely death of her first husband: another distinguished doctor, named Dupuy de Frenelle. There was a younger sister and a still younger half-sister. Even compared with the teenage Flor de Oro, there wasn’t much back story to her: She was a pretty, up-and-coming young girl of the stage, better bred and prettier than most, saucy, vital, spry.

  At a party after a polo match in Paris, she met Rubi, his neck still in a steel-and-leather brace after a nasty fall on the polo pitch. “I have heard a lot about you, Monsieur,” she told him as he kissed her hand. “None of it good.”

  He laughed at her high spirits and they chatted. “She was so young and fresh, so pretty,” Rubi remembered, “with a certain mystery in her gaze. I immediately monopolized her. I spoke of my country, the Caribbean, the sun beating down on the coral, the coconut groves. She listened to me smiling. The miracle is that she wasn’t ashamed, didn’t mock, didn’t ask if I spoke like this to all the girls who fell in my path. On the contrary, when I asked her questions, she spoke gently.”

  As she remembered, “I found him attractive, but I was not completely fascinated like the other ladies. He wasn’t good looking, but he had charisma. He was not very tall, not very perfect. He had a magnetism.”

  He proposed dinner. There was another night out and maybe even a third: dancing at the Elephant Blanc and New Jimmy’s (the old Jimmy’s, his haunt of choice, had relocated and was now being run by the famous hostess Regine). Her mother wasn’t happy about the business, warning her daughter away from the man she had read about so often in the scandal sheets. Rubi invited Mme. Dupuy de Frenelle to dine with them one night, and the older woman let him know frankly of her disapproval. “Odile is in the springtime of her life,” she told him. “You, on the other hand, are past your prime. You will never be able to keep up with her, and you will be made most unhappy in the end.” But Rubi easily deflected that salvo and countered with his patented brand of charm. “After she danced just one slow dance with him,” Odile recalled, her mother relented—or at least kept her reservations about the relationship to herself.

  Maybe she just reckoned it would fade away. Odile had snagged a plum stage role: The great playwright and director Marcel Pagnol had glimpsed her first on the screen and then in a café in Paris, where the sight of her eating a piece of fruit captivated him. “I was fascinated by the dainty way she was peeling that apple,” he later said. In his new play, Fabien, th
e story of a fairgrounds photographer out to seduce his wife’s sister, Odile would star as the object of lust. Rehearsals for the September premiere would keep her in town and busy while Rubi followed the racing and polo seasons.

  But during the summer holidays they wound up together on the Riviera. Rubi was staying with the Dubonnet family of distillery fame in their seaside villa at St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and Odile had been invited to stay with industrialist Paul-Louis Weiller and a large party that included Charlie Chaplin and his family. On the town in St.-Tropez, she learned that Rubi was around. She dumped her hosts, hopped into a motorboat, and sped off to surprise him at the Dubonnet house. And what a surprise! She showed up with her already sheer summer wear drenched by sea spray. “I made quite an entrance,” she recalled. “I must have looked like Ursula Andress!” Rubi snatched her up for the rest of her stay, sending a car to fetch her things from the Weillers’ house.

  This was where the romance really blossomed, she said. “During those ten days he revealed how he truly is: attentive, always happy to get going as soon as he awakes, capable of going out 10 nights in a row but equally capable of staying at home to read or watch TV. Rubi is a man who is deeply interested in the women he takes out. He isn’t satisfied merely to make a date, take her to some trendy restaurant, the theater and a cabaret. He discovers her intimately.”

  But what was he discovering? Pretty young girls he could have whenever he liked—he had the money, the cars, the clothes, the house, the name, the legend, the moves.… Odile’s family had no money; there would be no dowry of plantations and aircraft. Maybe—always the dark “maybe” with him—he needed a wife to keep his diplomatic posts, a beard, as it were, for his real behavior, a screen to make him seem more reputable than he really was. Or maybe she simply made him feel young. She was brash and newfangled in that postwar way that first caught on in France and Italy before popping up in England or the States. She was truly a breath of fresh air—particularly necessary in the wake of Zsa Zsa’s perfumed haze and Barbara’s medicinal gloom.