by Shawn Levy
As its very first action, the Council of State fired Rubi from his post as inspector of embassies.
After thirty years of pomp, travel, machinations, and skulduggery, he was truly done with the Trujillos—and, more than likely, with his homeland.
* * *
* One of the others appeared, driven by a jewel thief wearing a gorilla suit, in the film The Pink Panther (1963).
* Another odd coincidence: In January 1960, another pillar of Left Bank life, a sporting man from a colonial country, would die in an auto crash about forty miles southeast of Paris: the Algerian-born novelist and philosopher Albert Camus.
* Tagle would himself die in a car wreck in Mexico in 1961.
* Producing a column of that sort was a labor that no one person, not even a Cassini, could handle alone. Among his assistants over the years would be a young journalist from Texas named Liz Smith who always remembered her dervish of a boss with fondness.
* The airline balked at first, not sure about the economic or publicity ramifications of cooperating with a Trujillo—or, for that matter, a country on the outs with the OAS—but a combination of Ramfis’s money and Rubi’s personal connections prevailed.
* Conspicuously absent was the Benefactor’s eldest child. Flor de Oro. Estranged from her father and living in exile in Canada at the time of his death, she hadn’t been able to attend the funeral because authorities there and in the United States refused to allow anyone named Trujillo passage to the Dominican Republic; by the time she was granted a visa, her father had been buried.
SIXTEEN
FRESH BLOOM
A reporter with a pencil and a pad: “Hey Rubi, don’t misunderstand this question, but did you ever kill anybody?”
A pause, a quizzical look, a forced smile, a bark of laughter: “No! Oh God, no!”
Dozens of reporters and photographers and cops and standers-by were watching. Another show, another unlikely pass.
January 9, 1962: Subzero temperatures had been punishing New York for a week, and Rubi had ridden in a taxi from the St. Regis Hotel to the Criminal Courts Building in lower Manhattan. He was, for the second time in four days, attending to the bidding of New York County district attorney Frank Hogan, whose office was putting questions to him about the deaths and disappearances of various Dominican exiles in the city.
Hogan’s men had pounced on Rubi within twenty-four hours of his loss of diplomatic privileges. Egged on by anti-Trujillo voices in the city, encouraged by State Department reports, they had two murders and a missing persons case they thought he might know something about: Bencosme, Andres Requena, and Galíndez. And they had waited years—decades—to grill him. Back when he was splashed all over the newspapers beside Barbara Hutton, Rubi had sent an attorney to the DA to say that he was willing to answer questions under the cover of his diplomatic shield, but Hogan’s men had balked; they wanted him unprotected or not at all. Now, however, he had no special privileges and he could be made to talk or suffer penalties for his silence.
On January 2, Rubi was staying with his old Cuba pal Earl E. T. Smith in Palm Beach when a U.S. marshal appeared at the door with a subpoena demanding his immediate presence in New York. He signaled his availability and made plans to travel north straightaway. “I am sure I can clear myself of any suspicion,” he told a reporter. “I know this is an attempt by [Dominican] opposition people to create a scandal.” He explicitly denied any accusation of involvement in the Bencosme murder: “I had nothing to do with that. I know they used it in an attempt to embarrass President Trujillo when I was his son-in-law. I don’t know why it has come up now. I hope to find out.”
He flew to New York with Odile, checked in at the St. Regis, and reported to Hogan’s office on January 5 in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, begging off reporters’ questions as he made his way to his appointment.
They put it to him for three hours. When he emerged, the press asked him what he had told the DA’s men. “I could not tell them anything because I don’t know anything,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, the matter is finished.” He hopped back into the Rolls and drove away.
Privately, Hogan had already told the FBI that “they really didn’t have anything on Rubirosa but he was not very well liked and they were going to question him further.” The DA’s office wasn’t happy with Rubi’s testimony, telling the Justice Department that he “was not cooperative and answered questions at best in a vague, non-specific and uninformative way.”
Reporters learned from Alexander Herman, the assistant district attorney in charge of the Homicide Bureau, that the matter was far from over: After dancing around questions all afternoon, Rubi had been handed a subpoena to appear before a grand jury in three days.
This time Rubi arrived in a taxi—and again without a lawyer. He walked into the Criminal Courts Building without a word to the press, and reporters settled in to see what sort of fireworks would result.
It wasn’t a long wait: Ten minutes after he arrived, Rubi was dismissed.
Hogan’s people had wanted to question him on the record and under the condition that he waive his immunity against self-incrimination. In their scheme, anything that he said could be used against him in a potential future prosecution. Rubi refused to sign the waiver, signaling his defiant determination to risk prosecution for perjury or contempt or obstruction of justice. As a result of his truculence, he was told by Alexander Herman, “In that case, you’re excused. You can leave.”
Outside the courthouse, his hatless head exposed to the biting cold, Rubi declared that he was “offended” that the DA’s office wouldn’t accept his word as a gentleman that he had nothing to do with any of the cases they were investigating. “I felt it was an insult,” he said of the subpoena. “I told them Friday the truth. Why should I have to repeat it before a grand jury?”
A reporter wondered if he was truly done with questions. “I cannot stay here all my life,” Rubi said. “I must leave to my home in Paris in the next two or three days. I know nothing. I have absolutely nothing to fear. I can’t waste time here. They should believe what I say. They should take my word.”
And then some joker in the press asked him if he’d ever killed anyone, and he looked shocked and amused and made his stock denial and then got into a taxi and went uptown to tell Odile what had happened. “I’m coming back for Easter,” he told the reporters as he pulled away.
The following day, Murray Kempton reviled Rubi in his New York Post column as “the first house guest of the President of the U.S. ever to refuse to sign a waiver of immunity before a New York grand jury.” But like Hogan and his men, all Kempton could do was snipe.
He would, in fact, never again be questioned by American authorities. J. Edgar Hoover never gave FBI agents permission to interview Rubi, and the New York County DA stopped investigating him, in part because both organizations felt that coming on too strong with him would result in embarrassment—for them: Imagine the American government being publically snubbed by the likes of Rubirosa! “It is firmly believed,” Hoover wrote in a memo that spring that took note of Rubi’s connection to Igor Cassini and his Cholly Knickerbocker column, “that any interview of Rubirosa would be subsequently reflected in some fashion in that column.” They kept watching his comings and goings and phone calls and business dealings, but from a distance.*
Rubi gave them ample opportunity in the coming years to watch him, flitting in and out of the United States several times each year seeking business opportunities. He spent the end of 1962 and the dawn of the following year in the United States and Mexico, with neither an heiress nor a dictator looking out for him, hoping to put some business deals together and enjoying the camaraderie and generosity of friends. On January 3, he and Odile flew from Acapulco to San Diego with Frank Sinatra on the singer’s private jet and then visited his Palm Springs home alongside a fairway of the Tamarisk golf club.
That spring, the seed of that visit nearly came to fruit in the form of a connection between Rubi and Sam
Giancana, the Chicago mob boss whose friendship with Sinatra had driven a wedge between the singer and the White House. The mob had never gotten over the loss of its lucrative Havana operations to Castro and had always resented the Kennedy administration for its failure to rid the Caribbean of the Communists and get those glittering casinos back into the rightful, crooked hands. They had, however, realistically accepted the fact that they would have to seek new pastures, and they turned their collective sight on the Dominican Republic. Trujillo had never been averse to doing business with American gangsters;* perhaps the people who ran the country in his wake would see the wisdom of the same.
In June 1963, an FBI wiretap captured Giancana stating that he would soon be traveling to Paris to see Rubi about the possibility of a casino business in the Dominican Republic. This so alarmed the Justice Department that it ordered an unprecedented surveillance of the mob boss: FBI agents literally began lock-stepping him, following his every move from just a step or two behind him—even when he entered men’s rooms or hit the golf course. The routine of G-men using tee-boxes and urinals beside him so infuriated that Giancana had no time or energy to think about a new Caribbean venture, and the idea—and Rubi’s chance to turn a profit off it—died unhatched.
Rubi was back at Sinatra’s Palm Springs digs the following September, and this time Sinatra managed to coax his Dominican chum into doing something he’d never done before—swing a golf club. Famed attorney Louis Nizer was a witness: “Rubirosa, poor man, thought he could transfer his athletic skill to golf. If he could hit a speeding ball with a mallet while riding full speed on a pony, plunging against other ponies, how ridiculously easy it would be to strike a stationary ball from a standing position while no one harassed him. He couldn’t believe it when he failed to make contact at all, swinging right over the mocking ball.” Before long, Rubi was hitting balls into ponds and woods and patches of desert and exploding semiregularly in a white fury. “He was jumping up and down and screaming in exasperation,” Nizer recalled. (Sinatra, to be fair, was no better.)
Nizer was on hand to take a deposition from Rubi in an astounding case that had resulted from the botched efforts of Rubi and Cassini to recover the Dominican Republic’s good standing with Washington. Journalists had learned about Robert Murphy’s secret missions and the role of the playboy-diplomat and the gossip columnist in them, and they had further connected Cassini to the PR contracts that his subsidiary firm had signed with Ramfis and the interim government. When word of this backroom maneuvering made its way to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, he exploded: In his view, Cassini had lied to the president and his father about his connections in Ciudad Trujillo and profited from the falsehoods. When he learned that neither Cassini nor his subsidiary company had officially registered to do business in the United State as agents of the Dominican government, Kennedy filed a four-count indictment against them in February 1963.
The prosecution didn’t have much of a case: No money passed to Cassini or Martial & Company as a result of the Dominican contract with the subsidiary; neither Cassini nor his office did any lobbying or publicity for the Dominican Republic; and the status of the Dominican Republic as an ally of strategic importance meant that its agents didn’t have to register themselves. But Bobby was furious at what he perceived as Cassini’s cheek, and he was determined to press on. The publicity surrounding the indictment crushed Cassini. He resigned from his post as Cholly Knickerbocker, and one by one his public relations clients slinked away. His wife, who had once nearly become engaged to Jack Kennedy, wrote a pleading letter to her former beau seeking leniency and, indeed, pardon for what even the Justice Department was acknowledging to Cassini’s lawyer, Nizer, was at worst a failure to comply with a technicality. But she was too anxious to wait for a reply: She had recently lost her mother and had developed an addiction to painkillers in the aftermath of a skiing accident. The president was appropriately moved by her plea and wanted to do something to mitigate the situation, but he took too much time: On April 8, 1963, she begged out of a social engagement, sending Igor along; then she swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills and died of heart failure.
Nizer worked the case doggedly, procuring exculpatory testimony from the likes of Rubi, who went on the record to say that neither Cassini nor Martial worked for or profited from the Dominican Republic. The Justice Department insisted that a single, technical count remain in place, though, and in November Cassini stood before the court a broken man and pled nolo contendere to it. He was sentenced to a $10,000 fine and two years’ probation, after which he left the United States to work in Italy for his brother’s fashion house.
In Paris, his world shrunken, Rubi puttered.
For so long an icon of the night life, of the never-ending party, of the gay old time, he grew fond of staying in Marnes-la-Coquette, tending to the grounds, reading, playing with his Chihuahua. He spread his nights out more judiciously, giving himself a chance to recuperate from his parrandas. Daytime hours were still given over to polo and polo practice, and sometimes in the afternoon there would be a visit to the discreet brothel run by Madame Claude above a bank near the Champs-élysées, but in the main he was more settled, more staid than ever before.
“I have at last discovered my vocation,” he declared to a friend, “the regular, bourgeois life.”
“I like home life,” he told a journalist. “I like setting up a home and arranging the garden, and I like helping my wife to choose furniture.”
Odile wasn’t overly fond of the change that had come over him. Now in her mid-twenties, she was worldly and energetic enough to have her own impulse to party and travel. The society dinners of the polo set weren’t nearly fast enough for her. But she suggested that she was trapped in his world.
“Rubi never let me make a decision,” she said. “He was the master. He would always ask me to be on time, be beautiful and charming. I never had friends of my own. I never made a decision on my own for dinner or anything. I never made out a check. He always gave me cash. I knew nothing about life.”
His eye for women’s fashion, noted by Zsa Zsa years earlier as one of his most remarkable attributes, became for his young wife a kind of straitjacket. “He counseled me on my hair (he loves chignons),” she said, “on which jewelry I should wear (he prefers simple), on my outfits (these are very important to him). Since we began our romance, I haven’t bought a suit, an outfit, a coat in which he hasn’t accompanied me to counsel me and give me his judgment.” Specifically, she felt, she was being coached into being the anti–Zsa Zsa, more natural than put-together. “He would put me under the shower if my hair was too lacquered.”
But she found ways around his conservative tastes, such as going without underwear beneath her couture outfits. And for all her complaining, most of their mutual friends assumed that she managed to skip around his watchfulness just as he had hers. Observers of their fast-moving Paris set wondered openly about Rubi’s ability to control his young wife.
Oleg Cassini, was among those who noticed. “Odile had the power over him that he had, all his life, wielded over others,” the fashion designer remembered. “She exhausted him and made him jealous.” He claimed that Rubi admitted in a weak moment, “All my life I have controlled women—every woman I’ve ever met, except this one. She is under my skin.” His confusion over her was noted by other observers. Zsa Zsa, who had a stake in making Rubi’s marriage look a sham, acknowledged that Odile was “a clever little thing,” but insisted that Rubi “was very unhappy. Odile ruined his life.” And there were hints that the marriage may have been on thin ice. “There were big rumors that Rubi was going to spring another surprise and marry Pat Lawford,” remembered Taki Theodoracopulos. “But he was very secretive.”*
The fact that his Parisian friends were settling into middle age actually served to keep Rubi and Odile together. Increasingly, he grew irritated with the lack of freedom that kept his chums, with their responsibilities to their families and workplaces, from palling around
with him. “Are my friends all of a sudden ouvriers [‘laborers’],” he thundered to Odile after being frustrated in an effort to get some afternoon liveliness together. As a result, he was more drawn to a younger set of playmates—Taki, Juan Capuro, Gunther Sachs: men who idolized Rubi for his notoriety, his way of life, his unapologetic hedonism, his brilliant style.
Running with these young men, he was still taken as a symbol of pleasure-seeking, a label that he actually defended in the press. “What’s wrong with pleasure?” he snapped at a reporter. “Why can’t you go out at night and twist and get drunk and still do your job properly? What’s wrong with marrying rich women? Those little bastards who criticize me don’t understand. Imagine what they would have done if they’d been married to such wives. I took them simply as women. And what’s wrong with taking presents from a woman? I give them, too, even though I give a ring and she gives a bomber. So what? An airplane is not the moon. It’s a toy. If you can have a little Austin, you have it. If you can have a bomber, you have it. So what? I have never broken up a marriage, never talked about my affairs, and never quarreled with a woman.” (That wasn’t entirely true, and he wasn’t always so defensive; answering a similar query another time, he smiled and said enigmatically. “The difference between a gigolo and me is that all of the rich women I have married have been even richer when we parted.”)
What young man making his way in Parisian society wouldn’t be drawn to such a daring character? Taki was sharing a Paris flat with two Argentine polo players when he fell under Rubi’s tutelage. The two had met years before in Palm Beach when Taki was a kid and Rubi the king of the world who nevertheless took an interest in a younger man. Now, meeting each other again on the pitch at the Bagatelle, they were more truly equals, and Rubi embraced him fully, introducing him to his favorite nighttime haunts such as New Jimmy’s and Le Calvados and to Madame Claude’s, to which he sent him with the brotherly warning against rowdiness, “Ce n’est pas un bordel, mon vieux” (“It isn’t a bordello, old man”).
