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

by Shawn Levy

  Taki was one of the few in Rubi’s crowd who didn’t succumb to the modern fashion of actually having a career. All around, perfectly wealthy men felt the need to do something; not Rubi, and not Taki. “As the ’60s came on and more people were working, one of the few friends Rubi had who didn’t work was me,” Taki recalled, “and we became closer and closer. He was an interesting man to have as a mentor because he had a lot of style and great charm, and I learned a lot from the way he handled women—very gentlemanlike and no Hollywood bullshit.”

  The two bonded especially over sports. “We’d work the polo ponies,” Taki remembered, “and we’d box. I wasn’t allowed to hit him in the face, and I’d say, ‘For God’s sake, where can I hit you?’ And he said, ‘In the shoulder.’ And he was mad about boule—he had a gravel pitch in his garden for it and we would play all day.” At times, Taki actually lived with Rubi and Odile, even after he eloped with Cristina de Caraman, the daughter of a French duke who disinherited her for marrying this roguish Greek with no special standing. (After the wedding, Taki and Rubi continued to visit Madame Claude’s; “Rubi insisted these visits made for a happy married life,” Taki remembered. “The contrast was invigorating. It was like stepping into a sauna after a cold shower.”)

  An even more unlikely party pal at the time was Sammy Davis Jr., who spent a month in Paris in 1964 appearing at the Olympia Theatre in a one-man show. He had met Rubi through their mutual buddy Frank Sinatra and found in him a perfect tour guide to Parisian society and night life. “He could put a reading on anyone,” Sammy recalled. “He would just trim the fat off everything. People would come in and he’d go, ‘bullshit artist.’ He had unerring instinct.” Rubi steered Sammy toward the right people—who included Romy Schneider, with whom Sammy had a passionate, drunken affair—and away from the less desirable fawners and hangers-on who were drawn to his celebrity. He taught him how to kiss a woman on the hand with the proper Continental touch: “It is done more with the eyes than with the lips.”

  In particular, Rubi deeply impressed Sammy, who always sought to fashion a gentleman of himself, with his sartorial sense. “I have always cared about clothes, and I will go to any length to look good,” Sammy confessed. “But the way Rubirosa dressed made me feel as if I’d fallen off the garbage truck.” And he took him out on parrandas that even Sammy, whose drinking mates included such heroic tipplers as Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, couldn’t handle. Sammy recalled with a grimace a night of drinking whiskey with Rubi and the Spanish playboy Don Jaime de Mora y Aragon that ended at dawn with the American entertainer staggering, swearing, and spinning; that afternoon, Rubi called on Sammy at his hotel to bring him to a lunch date, and the singer could barely dress himself and crawl to their rendezvous point. “I struggled to get myself together,” Sammy remembered, “and when I got downstairs he was standing at the bar sipping a Ramos gin fizz like he’d gone to bed before the evening news.” Sammy had to know the secret. “Hanging from the bar to support myself, I implored, ‘How do you do it?’ He explained reasonably: ‘Your profession is being an entertainer, mine is being a playboy.’”

  Gunther Sachs was less a running mate of Rubi’s than an acolyte, the inheritor of a fortune—his full name was Gunther Sachs von Opel, as in the German automobile company—who skied with Rubi in St.-Moritz and, like Rubi, tooled about in high-end sports cars, although he never actually raced them. Sachs would go on to marry Brigitte Bardot, a triumph of the skirt-chaser’s craft that endured three years. His hero-worship led him into at least one sticky misunderstanding with his idol: Rubi had an idea for a business and was hoping for seed money from Sachs. The scheme was for a perfume with the ungainly name Mic Mac (the question of why he didn’t choose, say, Rubi, would go unanswered). It wasn’t as lunatic a notion as selling dried fish to starving Africans or diving for treasure in the Caribbean, but without the capital from Sachs, which never materialized, the concept died.

  Indeed, even as he claimed to have an income of as much as $5,000 a month,* Rubi was clearly living on his uppers. “Most men’s ambition is to make money,” he liked to joke. “Mine is to spend it!” That, though, was the boast of an earlier time. By 1965, things were different. “He was rather depressed,” Taki recalled. “He was running out of money.”

  He and Odile quietly sold off the antiques and works of art with which Doris Duke had filled the house on Rue de Bellechasse as a means of paying for their jet-set lifestyle: the Cannes-New York-Palm Beach-Deauville circuit on which they still traveled. He hit on a few moneymaking schemes, which failed to come to fruition: buying an interest in a hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico (his partner would have been, of all people, Felix Benítez Rexach, his old rival in the dredging of the harbor in Ciudad Trujillo), and appearing in a film alongside tough guy actor Eddie Constantine. But he was, and he knew it, an awful businessman, with no patience for the sort of details on which moguls thrived. When the Cassini brothers were planning their Sugarbush ski resort, Oleg took Rubi to a Chinese restaurant in New York to tell him the idea and allow him in on the ground floor; Rubi listened dutifully for a while and then brought the talk to an abrupt end: “Stop, Oleg, stop! I have a headache. This business talk is killing me!”

  The most visible effort he made to earn a living was the publication of his memoirs, which were serialized in a French magazine in 1964. While hundreds of women might have shuddered at the thought of what he would spill, he was rather chaste and tasteful—to the frank detriment of the work. Rubi spoke kindly of all his wives, including Barbara Hutton, never mentioned Zsa Zsa by name, allowed Odile an installment of her own, and generally bored where he ought to have titillated; as a result, no book publisher or movie producer came calling for the rights.

  Good thing he’d never had to rely on his business sense …

  Don Pedro Rubirosa had dreamed of stability in his homeland, and his dream had come to life in the nightmarish figure of Trujillo. For thirty years, the Dominican people feared Trujillo as a fifth horseman of the apocalypse—but they enjoyed peace, more or less, within their borders. During the four years since the Benefactor was gunned down, though, a sense of foreboding had hung in the air—and things were getting worse.

  After Ramfis fled the country at the end of 1961, a military authority was established with the promise of free elections in a year. Those were held—in December 1962—but Juan Bosch, the new president, took his reform movement too far for some tastes; in September 1963, he was overthrown in a coup by a military junta. A period of intense plotting followed, with Bosch, Trujillo’s puppet vice president Joaquin Balaguer, and some others jockeying to take control of the country. The United States—as it did in Don Pedro’s day—kept active watch on the situation. With Cuba right next door and Vietnam heating up, they would not lose the Dominican Republic.

  In 1965, leftist rebels hoping to topple the junta took over the national media and declared outright revolution against military rule, and the Yankees felt sufficiently provoked to land troops on Dominican soil for the first time since before Trujillo’s reign. Outright battles raged in the streets of Santo Domingo.* American interests were threatened—not only in the geopolitical scheme but in the flesh-and-blood-people-on-the-ground sense. On April 28, President Lyndon Johnson sent in the first 1,000 of what would eventually be a force of 30,000 U.S. marines. For the next four months, the Dominican Republic was a tinderbox, with skirmishes likely to break out at the least provocation and no clear impression of what shape an eventual government might take—if one ever managed to hold on to the country.

  Nobody in the American press thought to call Paris and ask Rubi about a situation that would have made his father heartsick. He had been a civilian for more than three years, but since his dismissal by the interim government in 1962, he had turned his back on his country. Indeed, he may have, in some way, thought of himself as more French than Dominican: He had lived only ten or so of his fifty-six years in his homeland, after all, and only the first of his five wives had been a compa
triot.

  The spring that found his country enmeshed in warfare was, for him, another lark. He and Odile cruised on Stavros Niarchos’s massive yacht; to give an impression of just how big the boat was, consider that the voyage served as well as the honeymoon for Taki and Cristina. In one of the more memorable episodes of the trip, the partiers decided to make their own parodic version of the hit film Goldfinger, with Rubi playing James Bond, Niarchos playing the titular tycoon, Taki as Odd-job, Odile as Pussy Galore, and Gunther Sachs as cinematographer; it was a drunken pastiche—nobody remembered lines and the camera failed to work—best remembered as an afternoon’s hijinks.

  And spring was, too, the start of the French polo season.

  July especially was big: the annual Coupe de France tournament at his home pitch, the Bagatelle in the Bois du Boulogne. Rubi and his Cibao—La Pampa teammates had enjoyed particular success in the Coupe de France in the mid-1950s, when he had the dough to bankroll a top-flight team: They won it three years running at one point. He was no longer up to that standard, quite, but he was still a hale player, if less adventurous than formerly. And it was one of the great social events of his summer.

  His new team—including two Frenchman and an Argentine—made a fine showing. In red jerseys with a broad white horizontal stripe across the breast, Cibao–La Pampa tore a path straight through to the final, where, on Sunday, July 4, they faced Laversine, another Paris-based team with Baron Elie de Rothschild as its captain. It was a bright afternoon and a lucky one for Rubi; in a closely contested final, Cibao-La Pampa won by a score of 2% to 2. A worn-out Rubi stood beside his teammates with a small smile during the award ceremony, one hand holding the bridle of his horse, the other dangling his red polo helmet.

  Rubi had maintained pretty good discipline during the tournament, but this called for a celebration. “Rubi used to like to go, as he would say, ‘todo líquido’—all liquid, all drinking, nothing to eat,” as Taki remembered: a good old-fashioned parranda. And the night of this unexpected victory would be one of those todo líquido nights. In the spirit of sportsmanship, Elie de Rothschild organized a party at New Jimmy’s to mark Rubi’s triumph. Both teams were present, as were the wives and many friends from all the worlds Rubi had managed to touch in his decades in Paris: restaurateurs, diplomats, young playboys, some minor royals. It was one of those evenings that more people claim to have attended than the place could have managed: Everyone who knew Rubi in Paris at the time seems to recall being there.

  Rubi and Odile had arrived in separate cars, she in the Austin, he in the Ferrari he bought in Belgium, and seemed not to be getting on in perfect harmony: not unusual at the time. The party raged on into the early morning hours and little by little the throng thinned—Rubi’s “ouvrier” buddies heeding the impending call to their posts the next morning. By 5 A.M., Odile had left for home, tired or bored or maybe just getting ready for a trip they would be making later in the day to Cap d’Antibes with some Brazilian friends. Soon after that, New Jimmy’s closed.

  Rubi wasn’t done, though. With a pair of Argentine polo buddies, he made for Le Calvados, the Spanish-themed nightspot near the Champs-élysées; Rubi was fond of the musicians there and liked to finish his up nights listening to them and chasing a sandwich with a beer.

  The trio got there at nearly 6 A.M. and found that there was already a party in progress: some Americans celebrating a birthday. Rubi and his chums joined in the festivities, singing Brazilian songs; Rubi got high marks for his comic impersonation of a rooster.

  He called home and got no answer.

  His friends left.

  He sat with a ham sandwich and an Amstel and floated on the gentle swell of the music.

  Sometime after seven, the headwaiter, Palomba, came over to him: “Rubi, don’t you want to go to bed?”

  “I’m fine here,” he answered. “There’s nice, soft music, I have my glass of beer. Why stir things up?”

  (He used to brag about always wanting to stir things up.)

  Then Palomba stopped to chat with Dany the waiter, and when he looked back Rubi was gone.

  Yves Ricourt was an engineer from Viroflay, near Versailles. He was in the habit of driving his white BMW into the Bois de Boulogne and sitting on a bench to read the newspaper before reporting to work. He found himself a perfect spot that morning on the Allée de la Reine Marguerite, about two hundred yards north of the Avenue de Hippodrome. By 8 A.M. of what was shaping up as a warm, dry summer day, he was immersed in his paper.

  Someone else was nearby: a bicyclist, heading north in the Allée de la Reine Marguerite.

  And then a third party came suddenly upon them.

  First to notice him was the bicyclist, who had just ridden past Ricourt’s BMW, which was parked on the right side of the road. Then he heard a metallic scrape behind him and turned to see a silver Ferrari with a black convertible top hurtling toward him at some eighty miles an hour; prudently, he bailed off his bike onto the bridle path.

  He didn’t see as the Ferrari careered another fifty yards or so down the road. He didn’t see as it hit a chestnut tree head-on.

  Ricourt missed the first sound—his car being clipped by the Ferrari and pushed onto the bridle path. But he heard the second—“a brutal crash”—and he looked around to see the dazed bicyclist picking himself up off the ground. “The Ferrari came by like an arrow a few centimeters from his bike before crashing into the tree,” Ricourt later explained.

  The two raced to the wreck to see if they could help the driver. The rear of the car was still in the roadway. The front end had struck the tree just right of center. The grill was crumpled; the hood had been forced up from its hinges and backward toward the passenger compartment.

  Ricourt and the cyclist approached the wreck to see if they could extricate the driver. Inside, a bloody mess: The fellow hadn’t been wearing a seat belt; he was crumpled over the steering wheel, which had been bent forward above and below the hub by the thrust of his body; half his scalp was gone; he was covered in glass from the windshield, which had shattered; he was moaning; he was wedged in.

  They dared not wrestle him out of the car. They dithered: What to do?

  After a few minutes, a miracle: An ambulance came down the road, transporting a sick man to—would you believe it?—Hospital Marmottan, the very place where Rubi was taken the night he was shot beside Danielle Darrieux. The witnesses flagged the ambulance down, and the driver got out to help them rescue the injured man.

  “It was difficult to extricate him,” the ambulance man, Georges Bosquet, said. “He was jammed between the seat and the instrument panel.” Barely conscious, he could do nothing to help himself.

  “He was alive when we arrived to pry him from between the seat and the steering wheel,” Bosquet remembered. “At one point I saw his lips move and I leaned forward. I heard him murmur a name. He said something like, ‘Odile, Odile, where are you?’ There was a look of pain on his face. When we placed him in the ambulance he lapsed into unconsciousness.”

  Bosquet secured him on a gurney and drove off. Ricourt stayed to see to his car and talk to the police and reporters. The bicyclist rode away without leaving his name.

  And by the time the ambulance got to Marmottan, barely a mile away, it was too late.

  Should he have withered? Developed a cancer? Grown old? Unthinkable.

  A flash of steel and rubber and noise and he was gone, just like that: Had he given a thought to his mortality, he would have wished for precisely such a finale.

  He was identified at the hospital and Odile was phoned. She raced to Marmottan with her Brazilian friends at her side.

  Soon word spread out of the hospital. A newspaperman called the house in Marnes-la-Coquette and spoke to the maid, Luisa. “Madame has left for the hospital,” she said. “Monsieur has had an accident. I don’t know anything. Everyone is calling for news. Just now it was Regine, you know, from the nightclub. But I don’t know anything.” Soon Regine came out to the house to relieve L
uisa, answering the phone and meeting whoever showed up.

  Manuel Pastoriza, a Dominican diplomat and friend of Rubi’s, was alerted to the calamity by a journalist, and he sent his wife to fetch a priest to meet Odile at the hospital. It was no easy task to find a clergyman willing to attend to such an unrepentant sinner, and in the coming days Rubi’s friends would fail to successfully negotiate for a funeral mass, settling instead for a simple, nonreligious remembrance.

  Another journalist managed that afternoon to get Odile to share a few thoughts with the Hearst news syndicate, which had always been kind to Rubi:

  It is better that it happened this way. A clean break with the life he loved. Neither he nor I could have endured the spectacle of him lingering on, a cripple, unable to dance, play polo or drive his car.

  If Rubi could have chosen the way he died, this is the way he would have gone. In his car, in the dawn, going fast as he loved to do. He loved speed. But he loved life even more.

  I remember when Aly Khan died. Rubi grieved for Aly, whom he considered one of his closest friends. Then he remarked to me, ‘If I must die this is the way I would like to finish—quickly, without pain.’

  Now I wish I had been with him. Perhaps I should have stayed with him. Perhaps he would have been more careful with me by his side. But even if he had driven as he always did, at Le Mans, at Sebring, anywhere, I would have liked to be beside him, even in death.

  “It was fate,” she told another journalist on the phone. “He believed in fate and I do too. Maybe it was better it ended this way than in some other more painful way.”

  His death made headlines all over the world: a front-page story in many American newspapers and the better part of a full page each in Time and Newsweek. Predictably, all the juicy yarns from his past were rehashed, and photos of all five of his wives—plus Zsa Zsa—were dug out. Only one of his exes, Danielle, gave a statement to the press: “He died as he lived and would have wished—fast and furiously.” There were testimonies to his sporting life, his joie de vivre, his personal magnetism and charm, his escapades as an international man of mystery and tiger of the boudoir seen, in retrospect, as harmless. It was often remarked that he wasn’t wearing a seat belt at the time of his death, and it was always laughed off as an impossible thought. “A Rubirosa wearing a safety belt to cross the Bois de Boulogne,” scoffed a friend. “That would have been perfectly ridiculous!”