by Shawn Levy
The Benefactor would never have countenanced such capricious cruelty—not to mention the publicity it generated once the story emerged. But the set around Ramfis was far more goonish than the crowd with which Trujillo surrounded himself. Rubi increasingly kept a polite distance, sensing that Ramfis was less than in control of himself and his posse. But there was no way Rubi was going to miss the bash that introduced Ramfis to Hollywood society.
In April, Zsa Zsa orchestrated a truly all-star gala. Everybody, but simply everybody, was there: the Jimmy Stewarts, the Gary Coopers, the James Masons, the Robert Taylors, the David Selzniks, the Kirk Douglases, the Charles Vidors, the Robert Mitchums, the Van Johnsons. On hand were two of Rubi’s rivals in the international playboy sweepstakes: Jorge Guinle, the Brazilian hotel heir, and Baby Pignatari, the Brazilian mining tycoon. There were swell dames: Shirley MacLaine, Jeannie Crain, Maureen O’Hara, Ann Miller, Kathryn Grayson, Rhonda Fleming. There were odd couples: Along with her ex, George Sanders, with whom she had recently acted in the film à clef, Death of a Scoundrel, Zsa Zsa invited Rubi and Odile (a photo of Rubi trying not to notice while Zsa Zsa and Odile greeted one another with plastered smiles would appear in Life). And there was Kim Novak, Ramfis’s dream girl, beside him for much of the evening in a floral gown while he wore a big dumb grin atop his tuxedo.
Ramfis and Kim had already met before the big night: Zsa Zsa had arranged a dinner at her place. They had begun dating, making him the latest in the string of amours, public and private, that had been part of the publicity machinery concerning the rising star. She had been linked to Frank Sinatra and John Ireland (and, secretly, Sammy Davis Jr., until Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn had his mob buddies threaten him away for risking her career to a miscegenation scandal); there had been a fling with Aly Khan and another with Italian tomato magnate Mario Bandini; there had been directors and doctors and businessmen. She was, sigh, famously unlucky in love. And now there was the son of a dictator—a prince in all but title; it was something of a dream come true. They dated regularly; they drove about in his coupe; and he even came thisclose to proposing marriage. He carved their initials into a tree in a Beverly Hills park one night to prove his sincerity.
Ramfis once again combined courting with shopping. He gave Kim a lavender $8,500 Mercedes (lavender was her color, per Columbia’s publicity campaign, down to the rinse in her blond hair), as well as a $3,500 diamond-and-black-pearl ring, a set of $1,500 diamond earrings, and the promise, it was whispered, to back a Broadway show in which she would star. Zsa Zsa, for her work as hostess and matchmaker, got a knee-length empress style chinchilla coat valued in newspaper reports at $17,000 (she was just about to buy it for herself, she said; imagine her surprise when the furrier told her that Ramfis had picked up the bill!).
All this spending could get a fellow noticed—and not just by salesmen at car dealerships and jewelry shops. There was the little matter, recall, of Jesús de Galíndez and Gerald Lester Murphy and the ire incited by their disappearances in Congressman Charles O. Porter. While Ramfis was busily buying up cars and jewels and furs for Hollywood honeys, Porter and his colleagues were investigating the actions of the Trujillo government and, in particular, the money the United States annually gave the Dominican Republic in aid pursuant to the two nations’ joint Military Assistance Treaty. Congressional investigators had gotten word from Kansas about Ramfis’s spending, and now they were reading in the gossip pages about these even more gaudy instances of his free way with money. In fact, some people involved with the inquiry began to wonder aloud whether Ramfis’s spending in the United States wasn’t exactly equal to the amount of money that the United States had sent to his father’s government.
In May, Congress was set to debate a $2.95 billion foreign aid bill representing disbursements to more than one hundred countries, including $600,000 in military equipment and training personnel for the Dominican Republic (down from $1.3 million in similar aid in preceding years). Porter and his Republican colleague Wayne L. Hays of Ohio were determined that the money wouldn’t get to Ciudad Trujillo without a full inquiry into the operation of the government there—and of Ramfis and his cohorts in the United States.
“The fact that Trujillo gave his boy a million dollars a year to play with while attending the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College is not only ridiculous,” fumed Porter, “it is downright humiliating to America.” He was just getting started: “Perhaps this federal aid should be paid directly into the bank accounts of Zsa Zsa Gabor and Kim Novak. At least that way we could get taxes on the money. Those ladies, at least, are U.S. citizens. Wouldn’t it be better than paying them through General Trujillo?”
Hays (who would resign in disgrace from Congress eighteen years later when it was discovered that he kept his mistress, Elizabeth Ray, on the federal payroll) thundered particularly against Zsa Zsa, taking to the floor of the House to decry her as “the most expensive courtesan since Madame de Pompadour.” When it was argued to him that money sent abroad helped create goodwill, Hays countered, “It seems to me that young Trujillo is restricting his goodwill to too small a clientele.” Yet another congressman, Barrett O’Hara of Illinois, chimed in, “If it can be established that foreign aid funds are being used to buy mink coats or fancy automobiles for anyone, it’s wrong, and any girl who accepts and is bragging about it is certainly indiscreet.”
Among the allies of the Dominican regime in the United States, Walter Winchell was particularly keen to defend the Trujillos, for which the Benefactor sent him a telegram of gratitude (and, likely as not, a check). But for the most part, editorial writers and politicians piled on the little nation, demanding to know what was going on down there with the fruit of American’s generosity.
The outbursts caused genuine concern in Ciudad Trujillo, where the government was quick to issue the sort of explanations of Ramfis’s fortune that merely served to raise more questions. “He is one of the wealthiest young men in the world,” said a spokesman, “and he will continue to spend his money as he wishes. It is his own personal money. He owns sugar mills and has a dairy farm.” What’s more, another statement continued, “the Dominican Republic has never received any outright cash grants from America.” The contretemps got so out of hand that the Benefactor began looking into the hiring of an American public relations firm to repair the damage and put a bright face on his rule and his land.*
In Hollywood, the responses were equally hasty and panicked. Zsa Zsa, characteristically, shot right back at these attacks. Her attorney released an angry statement: “I would like to challenge Representative Hays to come out from behind the Congressional walls of immunity and repeat his statement.… I will sue him.” A few weeks later, she was in Washington for a nightclub engagement and reporters asked her what she would say to Hays if she met him. “First I have to see if he’s young and handsome,” she replied.
More quietly, she sat at a desk at Conrad Hilton’s Hotel Statler and wrote a letter to Ramfis’s mother, Doña Maria, assuring her that media accounts of the situation were simply out of control. First of all, she insisted, she and Ramfis weren’t involved with one another. “You also must understand that I am not in love with him, nor is he with me. Our relationship is more that of a brother and sister. And I can only tell you one thing. If I should ever have a son, I could only wish that he would be exactly like Ramfis.” And second, she should understand why Ramfis was being spoken about so harshly by the press: “A man like Ramfis, handsome, intelligent, and having wonderful parents like you, is bound to arounse jealousy in many small people. On the other hand, the right people, the ones that we are concerned with, admire him greatly.”
Zsa Zsa’s mother, Jolie, didn’t have to be so careful about the business. Reached for comment on Ramfis’s munificence at her jewelry shop in Manhattan, she replied, “So what do you expect—for him to send flowers to a girl like Zsa Zsa?”
Rubi, who’d returned to Paris before the storm hit, issued no statement but sent Ramfis a tele
gram upon hearing reports of the younger man’s notoriety: “My god, you have replaced me!”
And Kim—Kim blundered big time.
The story broke when she was in San Francisco to promote Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which was shot there. The publicity office of Columbia Pictures, where she was a contract player, whisked her back to Los Angeles, where the press managed to find her almost immediately. First, she said that the car was Ramfis’s and she was just keeping it safe in her garage. Told that the vehicle was registered in her name, she acted shocked, shocked: “It must be some kind of a secret gift. Honestly, I know nothing about it being mine. Anyway, a gift like that to Rafael [she used his given name] is like a trinket to other men, like a bracelet, I mean a novelty bracelet.” She then went on to anatomize his qualities to the assembled gentlemen of the press. “Everything he does is of international importance,” she explained. “He is a goodwill ambassador for his country. He is a wonderful gentleman and an honor to his great father, who is doing a world of good for his country. It is a shame to bring his name into a story like this about giving cars to all the pretty girls in Hollywood. Let them pick on movie actresses, but don’t let them pick on such a goodwill ambassador as General Trujillo.”
Then they told her something that Ramfis hadn’t mentioned in their many chats—namely, that he was married. She excused herself from saying anything more.
Columbia Pictures, still cross with her for the way she had carried on openly with Sammy Davis Jr. the year before, whisked her off to New York to do publicity for Bell, Book and Candle—which wasn’t supposed to open for another seven months. She sat in a hotel room and received visitors from the press—and refused to talk, pointing toward a nearby Columbia spokesperson whenever she was asked a question.
She returned to Hollywood and two weeks of dodging questions. Ramfis holed up in his house and refused to speak to the press, either, claiming he was still laid up with the sinus troubles that had brought him out west. Good job, too, as he would have had more embarrassments than ever to address. Seven members of his entourage had rented a Pan Arn jet to fly from New York to Los Angeles at a cost of $15,000 (which included gourmet food and drink service) and had filled the plane with wrapped packages. The same day, his spokesman Victor Sued was stopped for erratically driving a new Cadillac late at night in Torrance, south of Los Angeles, and booked on a drunk driving charge; he tried to claim diplomatic immunity out on the roadside, and the cops slapped the cuffs on him.
Finally, Ramfis had to go back to school—by train, he explained as he boarded a private railcar at Los Angeles’s Union Station, because his sinus condition wouldn’t allow him to fly. Kim came along to bid him adieu and was swarmed by paparazzi. “Goodness,” she declared as the lightbulbs popped, “I’ll probably get fired for this!”
When Ramfis arrived back in Kansas on the Super Chief, though, it was, ironically, he who was given the boot. He was told that he hadn’t met the requirements for his military course and wouldn’t be able to make up what he’d missed. If he wished, he could attend the graduation ceremony and accept a Certificate of Attendance, which nobody in the audience would be able to distinguish from a proper diploma. Instead, he thanked the officer who gave him the news (and to whom he seemed to be on the verge of tears) and made plans to leave Kansas once again for Los Angeles, where the Angelita would meet him and serve as a movable home away from home.*
He tried to see Kim some more, to explain that he and Octavia had filed for a divorce in Mexico (which may or may not have been true) and to insist that she was still the queen of his affections; he gave interviews to the press in which he professed his love for her. But the studio once again sent her to New York, where, this time, she was allowed to speak and managed with some grace to slip out of the whole tawdry thing. “I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again,” she sighed. “If I’d been asked a couple of months ago whether I planned to date him I’d have said, I’d be delighted, I can’t wait to see him. But now that he’s been painted as a villain it has spoiled everything. Our romance was stopped before it had a chance to get started. If I went out with him now people would say we were going to get married. All the publicity has ruined the whole thing.”
If she was done with Ramfis, Ramfis wasn’t done with Hollywood. First Zsa Zsa announced that she was throwing another party for him, and the papers all went to town. After she’d gotten headlines with the story for a few days, he recognized her for the bad news she was and cut her off. Then he gave up the lease in Holmby Hills and moved onto the Angelita.
If that was meant to dissuade people from noticing him, fat chance. The Angelita was no mere pleasure vessel but a four-masted, 350-foot museum of luxuries, with fireplaces, marble, king-sized beds, hi-fi equipment, bars, a bandstand (a twelve-piece orchestra was available at all hours, along with a crew of dozens); it was probably the largest privately owned ship in the world, originally built in Germany in 1931 for (circles within circles) stockbroker E. F. Hutton and his wife Marjorie Merriwether Post, Rubi’s erstwhile aunt and uncle by brief marriage. Because it carried a pair of small deck guns, which it used for ceremonial salutes and to launch landing lines, it qualified as a man-of-war and didn’t have to pay harborage fees in American ports; Ramfis saved a cool $380 a week through this bit of frugality.
Throughout the summer, the Angelita was the scene of loud, debauched parties, of girls driving up in taxis late in the night or being whisked away by other taxis early in the morning, of a fake bomb scare phoned in by a drunken longshoreman who thought the cops guarding the pier looked bored and needed something to do. It traveled between Santa Monica, San Diego, Catalina, Long Beach, and various Mexican ports, drawing a bevy of pressmen and rubberneckers wherever it docked.
Ramfis stayed on the boat, growing sullen with booze and boredom. He managed to rouse himself to make a stab at another Hollywood starlet, Debra Paget, who came aboard with her mother and listened to his plans to produce a film of Don Quixote and cast her as Dulcinea; he drank the whole while until his thought muddled and he scared them off. Other, less well-known young ladies came by to be assessed for the role of the Dominican Princess Grace.
Finally he got lucky.
Lita Milan was a few years into being groomed by the Hollywood machine when she boarded the Angelita in a red dress and dark veil and set off a frenzy of pressmen trying to figure out who she was. She had been born twenty-five years earlier as Iris Lia Menshell to a Hungarian furrier and his Polish wife in Brooklyn; she’d been schooled some in Europe and attended some college and had a knack for languages; she spent time as a Vegas showgirl and saved her dough to move to Hollywood. From the get-go, she was lucky in landing jobs: With her long black hair and pretty, peasant girl aspect, she was described as “Magnani-esque” and often cast as a Latina or Native American. In her first three years in town, she appeared in eleven movies and ten dramatic TV series episodes, rising with such speed as to play the female leads in films as diverse as the psychological western The Left Handed Gun (opposite Paul Newman) and the crime story I Mobster (opposite Steve Cochrane). Studio publicists depicted her as a quirky bohemian who surfed, designed fabrics and furniture, did her own cooking, dug modern jazz, read existentialist novels, and disdained makeup, high fashion, and old-time mores. A Look magazine feature story published in the spring of 1958 depicted her reading poetry to jazz accompaniment at a Hollywood nightclub and doing scene work in an acting class with a fellow student named “Steven” McQueen.
After several visits to Ramfis on his yacht, Lita was clearly marked as a favorite, and when she flew with a girlfriend to meet the boat in Mazatlán, it was even rumored that they tried to marry but were frustrated because the prospective groom couldn’t offer evidence of having divorced his first wife. There were several more cruises—Mexico, Catalina, San Diego; Ramfis kept declaring that he was leaving town and then turning back to California. Finally, he issued a statement to the press and left. “This talk of romance with professional actresses le
ading to possible marriage is nonsense and very insulting to me and my nation,” he protested. “When my divorce is granted, then I shall seriously consider taking a wife. But she must be suitable to my position and acceptable to my father, the Generalissimo.”
The Angelita departed. Lita waited a few weeks and then flew to Nicaragua to join it on the final leg of its return voyage to Ciudad Trujillo. Somewhere en route, on the high seas, they were married by the captain of the ship, taking no pains to confirm whether the wedding was, in fact, legal.* When the yacht finally arrived at its home port, the Benefactor planned to meet his son with an elaborate ceremony at the dock. Formally uniformed, with full official entourage, he boarded the vessel for the ceremonial reunion. In the ship’s salon, he found Ramfis and his comrades so plastered on booze and whatnot that they couldn’t rise to greet him; Ramfis needed a shave and fresh clothes; the ship looked like it had passed through a squall. Trujillo walked wordlessly to a table, poured himself a glass of brandy, and made a toast: “I drink to man’s labor, the only thing that dignifies humanity and brings it close to God.” Then he turned on his heels and left; he had no further use for such a son.
