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

by Shawn Levy

  After formal schooling in the gentlemanly pursuits of riding, fencing, skiing, tennis, dancing, etiquette, languages, and the rudiments of the liberal arts (among their classmates was Oleg’s future friendly rival in the rag trade, Emilio Pucci, or, more properly, the Marchese Emilio Pucci di Barsento), the brothers separated. Oleg went to Paris and art school, quickly segueing into fashion design; Igor went to New York and Columbia University. By the mid-1930s, they were known on two continents as gay blades with wit, verve, style, and talent. By the end of the decade, they had wed American socialites and had launched professional careers.

  Several marriages followed for each Cassini, and sensational professional episodes to match. After a disastrous first union, Oleg was married for more than a decade to Gene Tierney and made his name as a designer with the gowns he produced for her to wear in such films as The Shanghai Gesture, The Razor’s Edge, and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Igor first made a splash when, as a rookie columnist for a Washington, D.C., newspaper, he so ran afoul of prominent local families that he was beaten by thugs in their employ. By the mid-1940s, he had assumed the Cholly Knickerbocker column from its originator, the viperous Maury Paul, and was wooing eventual wife number three, Charlene Wrightsman, the daughter of oil baron and scion of New York and Palm Beach society Charles Wrightsman. The two brothers’ careers coincided in 1948, when Igor identified as his “Deb of the Year” Jacqueline Bouvier and became friendly with both the girl and her family, including her future in-laws, the Kennedys. Oleg, of course, went on to become Jacqueline’s favorite designer, but Igor became a true friend: The Palm Beach estate owned by his father-in-law was adjacent to the Kennedy grounds, and Igor was a regular golf partner of papa Joe Kennedy and his more sporting sons, Joe Jr. and Jack.

  By the 1950s, the Cassinis were ubiquitous, Oleg with his prominence in the world of fashion, Igor with his column and, for one mad winter, a TV series, The Igor Cassini Show, on which he chatted with celebs and swells. The brothers both had a visionary side that turned their passions into business opportunities: Oleg dreamed up and created the Sugarbush ski area in Vermont, and the two brothers collaborated in opening Le Club, one of the first European-style discotheques in New York City. But their careers were crucially different: Whereas Oleg had to judge precisely the tastes of his clientele and the fashion press, Igor soared on gusts of his own words, opinions, connections, and legend; he had an estimated twenty million readers; he was a newsmaker and a star.* And perhaps that was why he saw nothing wrong when he branched out from writing about newsmakers to shilling for them: In August 1956, he began a new enterprise, Martial & Company, Inc., a public relations firm.

  Yes, that’s right: a newspaperman with his own flack factory.

  Over the years, Martial’s clientele would include such diverse entities as the Brazilian Coffee Bureau, the Tourist Bureau of Mexico, Fiat Automobiles, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the Lanvin perfumery, Harry Winston jewelers, Buitoni pasta, and, of course, Oleg Cassini Inc. Wisely, he rarely took on individual personalities as clients—that would have been an obvious conflict of interest for a man whose bread and butter was writing gossip about famous names. Rather, he concentrated on corporations and foreign countries. “That,” he reflected years later, “was where the money was.”

  The intricate dealings of Martial weren’t always easy to sort out. Because some accounts weren’t seemly for him to assume, Cassini diverted them to a second company created for the purpose and run by a close family friend, attorney Paul Englander. Among these dicey accounts was, for a one-year contract signed in 1959, the Dominican Republic, which had tried several means of improving its image in the United States since the Galíndez-Murphy case and Ramfis’s tear through Hollywood. At the time the deal was struck, Martial was doing business with a number of anti-Trujillo interests in the Caribbean and South America, and Cassini felt it would be best if the Benefactor’s PR campaign be handled by Inter-American Company, the subsidiary that he vouched for but neither operated nor profited from directly.

  The contract didn’t get renewed after the first year, but during negotiations for it and throughout its tenure, Cassini became familiar with Dominican affairs and the Trujillo family. And that, in all likelihood, was why over dinner not long after John Kennedy was elected president, Rubi spoke to Cassini about his concerns for the state of his country should the Trujillo regime—as looked increasingly likely—tumble. Soon after, playing golf with CIA director Allen Dulles, Cassini mentioned Rubi’s fear that the Dominican Republic might go Red (as the sons of a White Russian, the Cassinis were staunchly anti-Communist). And that chat was immediately followed by a conversation between Cassini and Joe Kennedy, who promised to alert his son, the president, about the situation and then immediately changed the subject to Rubi, whom he’d met briefly on the Riviera the year before: “Is he really the stud they say he is?”

  Whatever Igor told the old goat worked, because almost immediately Rubi became a Kennedy family favorite. Well, a favorite of all of them but Bobby, the prig, who was always looking down his nose at friends of his father and brothers who shared those spirited gentlemen’s tastes, and Jackie, who didn’t care, frankly, for the cut of Odile. “Only once did I see Jackie lose her composure because of another woman,” remembered Bobby’s lifelong friend Lem Billings. “It was over Odile Rodin.” As Billings recalled, Igor had introduced Jack and Rubi, and the two bonded: “They had one thing in common: a burning interest in women. They became friends; Jack and Odile became better friends. Rubi, never particularly prone to the vagaries of jealousy, didn’t seem to mind; Jackie minded a great deal.” She certainly had opportunity to mind: Rubi and Odile had the habit of popping up around them almost from the time Jack won the White House. On New Year’s Eve, for instance, just weeks before the inauguration, the Rubirosas and the Kennedys and a couple hundred other merrymakers attended a big Palm Beach bash. A photo of Odile twisting the night away appeared on page one of a local paper the next day—and no mention of the presence of the first couple-elect was made; Jackie noticed.

  But far more important than a potential catfight between their wives was the acknowledgment by Jack Kennedy and his advisers that Rubi was right: The Dominican situation was a potential firestorm of trouble, and it seemed to be getting worse as the weeks wore on. A pirate radio station had been set up to broadcast antiregime propaganda. A cadre of conspirators kept asking Henry Dearborn for CIA aid in removing Trujillo and received caches of American weapons that had been shipped into the country under the guise of diplomatic material. In the spring of 1961, Thomas Reilly, an aging, American-born bishop newly installed in the Dominican Republic, drafted a Pastoral Letter decrying the greed and cruelty of the Trujillo regime and ordered parish priests to read it aloud at masses. The Benefactor had then tried delicately to silence dissent from the church, but eventually he lost his patience: In April, plainclothes military officers and policemen raided Bishop Reilly’s church and rectory in San Juan de la Maguana and fairly trashed the place; Reilly, charged with incitement of treason, fled to the safety of a girls school in the capital and steadfastly continued to defy Trujillo’s will and rule. It was a tinderbox that could easily turn into another Cuba, which nobody in the United States wanted to see.

  Rubi thought that Trujillo could be swayed into liberalizations by a direct appeal by President Kennedy or, barring that, his father: old goat to old goat. But both scenarios presumed too cozy a picture of the relationship between the two governments. Rubi subsequently proposed a meeting between Ramfis, as his father’s representative, and the new American president. No dice. Rather, in February, the White House called on Robert D. Murphy, a legendary figure in diplomatic circles who had liaised with the Free French during World War II and served as the first American ambassador in postwar Japan and then as undersecretary of state in the Eisenhower administration. Murphy had recently retired from public service and was working as vice president of the Corning Glass Company. But he was also an unoffici
al adviser to the new administration on foreign intelligence, and he seemed like a good choice to shuttle between Washington and Ciudad Trujillo.

  In March, Ramfis was in New York and met several times with Murphy, who explained to him that the U.S. government would only reestablish financial and diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic if a series of economic, legal, and social reforms were begun. If genuine progress was made in these areas, it wouldn’t be necessary for the Benefactor to leave the country or resign from office (indeed, as he hadn’t actually served as president for more than twenty years, during which time he managed the country through puppets, he didn’t have an office to quit).

  Murphy’s hopes didn’t exactly materialize. In part this was because the veteran diplomat really didn’t grasp Caribbean affairs as well as he did European and Asian matters. And in part it was because Ramfis had left Ciudad Trujillo after yet another angry falling-out with his father, this time over some military appointments that didn’t go to the chums Ramfis had lobbied for. Ramfis and his entourage wouldn’t return to the Dominican Republic to convey Murphy’s counsel but rather headed to Paris and the spring polo season. And the fact that his father had looked old and frail to him at one of their last meetings—“I told my mother that I had a presentiment that I wouldn’t see him alive again”—did nothing to stop him from going off in a snit.

  No, if the Kennedy administration was to deal with the Dominican situation, even if through a back channel, it would have to be in the person of the Benefactor himself. In April, the White House sent Murphy to Ciudad Trujillo to convey its desire for reform to the government. And, unofficially, bizarrely, Igor Cassini went along for the trip.

  For two days, Murphy and Cassini met with the then-current puppet president, Joaquín Balaguer, and other officials; by their account, Trujillo only dropped in once, briefly, to taste the flow of the discussion. Murphy explained the American government’s belief that reform was necessary to ensure a smooth transition in power upon the sad eventuality of Trujillo’s giving up the reins—whether through retirement or, God forbid, illness or death. Trujillo cagily insisted that it was Balaguer who was running the show, not he. But he was sufficiently realistic about his perilous situation to listen to the diplomat’s advice and cut a new deal with Cassini to produce more positive press for his country—with a bonus written into the contract should the United States once again recognize the Dominican Republic as a result of the publicity campaign. Murphy and Cassini came back to Washington to report that progress seemed possible and that even more good could be expected if the president or his father were to meet with Trujillo.

  Unfortunately, nobody in the White House was listening to them. On the very days that the unlikely American emissaries were trying to broker an entente with Trujillo, a ragtag army of American soldiers and intelligence officers and exiled Cubans had attempted to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro by launching an invasion on La Playa Giron—the Bay of Pigs. In the wake of that unmitigated military, diplomatic, and public relations disaster, the Kennedy administration lost its stomach for nation-building in the Caribbean. Cassini, who stood, at least indirectly, to gain from seeing warmer relations develop between Washington and Ciudad Trujillo, sought to reassure the Benefactor that there was hope of good news from the White House. But in reality the Dominican situation had been put on the back burner.

  It wouldn’t stay there long.

  On May 30, the American president and his wife boarded a plane for Paris and a state summit that would mark a major step in the cultural and political renaissances of both Europe and the United States.

  Rubi and Ramfis were already in the French capital, enjoying a particularly successful run of polo matches with Rubi’s Cibao–La Pampa team; on the thirtieth, they claimed their fourth victory in a row, a 6–4 win at the Bagatelle over a team called Mousquetaires. The celebration was relatively low-key, not a full-scale parranda. Rubi had some drinks in town with the boys and then went home to rest up for a horseback ride he and Ramfis had planned for the following morning. Ramfis retired to Neuilly-sur-Seine and a night of boozing with his crew, which included his brother Rhadamés (who was in town but kept his own digs and didn’t play polo), the mysterious Leland Rosenberg (by then the Dominican ambassador to Iran and husband to a niece of the shah), Rubi’s nephew Gilberto, and a few other polo-playing soldiers and relations from back home.

  The next day, Rubi arrived promptly at 10 A.M. wearing a black riding outfit.

  The house was buzzing with dark energy. Earlier in the morning, first Rhadamés and then Ramfis had been awakened by agitated phone calls from their mother, Doña Maria, urging them to return home but not saying why. Ramfis had reacted by calling his brother-in-law, Chesty Estévez, in Ciudad Trujillo, whom he found equally vague and adamant.

  “Is everything under control?”

  “Everything is under control.”

  “Where is my father?”

  “You must come home immediately. Everything is under control, but your presence is absolutely necessary. Do you understand?”

  Ramfis wasn’t sure sure, but he knew. He hung up the phone and turned to Lita Milan: “They’ve killed my father.”

  He had no idea how it had happened or what the condition of the country was or whether the man to whom he had just spoken could be trusted. But by the time Rubi arrived, the decision had been made that a small group of them would go to the Dominican Republic: the Trujillo brothers, Rubi and his nephew, Leland Rosenberg, and the other Dominican soldiers on hand. Rosenberg had been sent with a bag of cash to lease an Air France jet and crew (at a cost of $27,000) to transport a total of seven of them to Ciudad Trujillos.* They arrived at Orly Airport not long after Air Force One alit with its cargo of Kennedys.

  Rubi was still in his riding clothes. When he’d left the house, Odile was at the hairdresser’s, and he hadn’t yet been able to reach her. He managed to make contact before the plane took off. “When I arrived at Orly I called her at our home,” he told a reporter. “She had just arrived and immediately broke into tears when I told her where I was going. I could not wait for her—or do much explaining. The plane was leaving.” By lunchtime, the nine-hour flight home had commenced.

  They sat in first-class, dined lightly, refrained from drinking, focusing their attention on the cockpit radio, which they could hear through a door that they insisted be left open. As they crossed the Atlantic, they heard a bulletin: Pierre Salinger, the spokesperson for President Kennedy, had announced that Secretary of State Dean Rusk wasn’t in France but had stayed in Washington to monitor the situation in the Dominican Republic following the death of Generalissimo Trujillo.

  Now they knew. But none of them could say what the situation on the ground was. As they neared Puerto Rico, air traffic controllers there tried to force them to land, declaring the airspace over the Dominican Republic unsafe for an unregistered charter flight. The pilot wanted to put down in San Juan, and Rubi tried to persuade Ramfis that it would be a wise course. But Ramfis switched off the radio and insisted that they press on to Ciudad Trujillo. As they approached the airport there, they reopened communications and found Chesty Estévez installed in the control tower and reassuring them that it was safe to land. The pilot passed over the landing strip, which was lined with tanks and columns of troops, and changed his mind. “You may have paid $27,000 for this plane, but it’s worth $8 million,” he told Ramfis. They nevertheless convinced him that the amassed forces were friendly, and he safely put them down.

  With their hands on their sidearms, Ramfis and Rhadamés stood by as the door to the plane was opened. “We didn’t know if there would be shooting, shouting or worse,” Rubi remembered. Rosenberg made as if to step forward first, and Ramfis grabbed him by the shoulder. “In this place, I go first.” He stepped out and descended to be greeted by Estévez and a coterie of military aides and drove off to find a uniform and take control of the situation.

  It had been an ambush, and though the job got do
ne it had been a botch: A group of perhaps a dozen conspirators had plotted to gun the Benefactor down and then take the palace with a cadre of the army under the control of General Roman Fernández, husband of one of Trujillo’s sisters. They’d been goaded by decades of repressed anger, the proddings of the Catholic church, the encouragement of the CIA, and, in many cases their own advancing age, which lent a now-or-never urgency to the plot. They had planned to assault the generalissimo in an isolated location along the seaside road that wended out of the capital westward toward the Benefactor’s country estate, Estancia Fundación, a cattle ranch dominated by a dark, grotesquely furnished home known as Las Caobas. On the night of the thirtieth, after hurried preparation, eight of the conspirators, several of whom were high enough in Trujillo’s military and security forces to know all of his movements, lay in wait for the chauffeured Chevrolet bearing their quarry.

  The first shots hit the car from the side of the road about a mile outside of the city. Trujillo’s driver heard the report of the guns and sped up, but he was chased down by a second car, which also opened fire. He turned to see the back windows shattered and Trujillo in obvious pain.

  “Please stop, I’m wounded,” the Benefactor told him.

  The driver could see another car approaching his directly. “It’s better to turn back. There are too many of them.”

  “No! Make a stop now! We have to fight!”

  The driver did as he was told, and he commenced firing from the front seat with his own machine gun, wounding at least one of the assailants. Despite being wounded himself, he managed to crawl out of the car and roll toward the side of the road and the safety of cover. Behind him, Trujillo stumbled from the backseat, to be met with a hail of gunfire from two directions. The driver watched as Trujillo shot wildly with a .38 pistol and was staggered by a rain of bullets. The assassins, forgetting in their panic the chauffeur, dragged away their wounded companion and sped off.