by Shawn Levy
Virtually none of the obituaries made a connection between Rubi’s life and the contemporary crisis in the Dominican Republic, though the French left-wing newspaper L’Humanité managed to get off a potshot: “It wasn’t only a playboy of merry escapades and sensational days who died yesterday, but also the right-hand man of a tyrannical regime that profited him and which the Americans would like to restore today in Santo Domingo in the name of ‘liberty.’”
But much was made about the similarity to the Aly Khan tragedy of just over five years earlier (a few reports also invoked Portago). There were crucial differences between the deaths, though, that revealed something about each man. Aly had been driving with his sweetheart and a chauffeur and had been killed on his way to dinner in the suburbs, about a mile west of the Bois du Boulogne; Rubi’s accident involved only him and could be laid to the fact that at fifty-six and after a night of todo líquido he was simply exhausted and shouldn’t have been at the wheel. What was more, Aly had died in a Lancia sedan, not a proper sports car; for Rubi, however, it had long been a point of pride to drive a car very like the ones he had raced. “When I die, it won’t be in a Lancia Flaminia like Aly,” he told a friend once. “It would have to be at least a Maserati or a Ferrari.”
Among the people who talked about such things, there were other whispers, about the coincidence of Rubi’s death with that of Nina Dyer, an English model and onetime wife of Aly’s brother, Sadruddin. Nina was found that same weekend in her house near Rubi’s outside Paris, dead of an overdose of pills that may or may not have been accidental. She was only thirty-five and had once been married to Baron Heinie von Thyssen, another of the world’s richest men; for surviving that contentious ten-month union, she was awarded an island in the Antilles, two luxury cars, a fortune in jewels (among them a famous set of black pearls said to have a curse on them), and a private menagerie including a panther and a leopard. During her marriage to von Thyssen she had attended a party hosted by Aly Khan and then met his brother; two years later, they were wed in a grand ceremony befitting his princely status, and it lasted nearly five years—they divorced in 1962. Since, she had retreated into seclusion. Whisperers tried to connect the two deaths: Had Rubi been grieving for Nina, or she for him, to the point of suicide? Were the legendary black pearls somehow involved? Daffy, but the stuff of society gossip nonetheless.
The idea that Rubi was a suicide had currency in more sober speculation as well. Fifty-six, out of work, married to a bored, frisky girl half his age, with no prospect of a new matrimonial payday, high on an upset polo victory, dressed in impeccable nightclubbing clothes, living amid suspicions that you were broke: Why not put your foot to the floor and aim at something solid? It seemed out of character—who else had such a zest for pleasure?—but there were hints from old chums like Claude Terrail and Regine that Rubi had slipped into a morose moment every now and again. Odile hadn’t noticed—or hadn’t, after he was gone, wanted to admit to noticing.
And nobody was really digging: It was, in the words of the Times of London, “the mundane death of a minor diplomat from a tiny country,” another feckless playboy who pushed his luck once too often. In some senses, his death was a relief to those close to him: They could stop wondering what would become of him in another ten, twenty years. “We figured Rubi had about two years before his money ran completely out,” said a friend, “and he would have been very miserable living the life of a pauper. He knew how to live life and how to die.”
And it freed Odile, who was far worldlier at twenty-eight than she had been a decade earlier and who suddenly seemed a catch. Her future began even before Rubi was buried. “Jean Smith and Pat Kennedy [the sisters of the dead American president] arrived,” Taki remembered. “It was simply awful. They have this tradition of Irish wakes, but the Latin Americans who were there practiced this sort of vigil and were very angry with them. They arrived and one of them said, ‘Oh, God, Odile! Now you’re ready for Teddy!’”
On July 9, the day of the funeral, though, she wasn’t thinking of her future but her past. Heartbreakingly young to be the center of such an event, she watched the funeral from behind a black veil, her eyes weary from crying, her gaze half-empty. She was escorted through the day by Rubi’s nephew Gilberto, and an escort was called for, not only because the widow was so staggered but because the steady rain meant somebody would need to hold an umbrella over her head. The cemetery was almost right next door to their house; they could have walked if the weather had been fair.
There was no mass, nor was there a graveside prayer. At 10 A.M., some 150 people gathered on the uninviting morning to hear Gunther Sachs and Pierre Leygonie deliver brief eulogies—the usual assortment of royalty, poloists, socialites, playboys, club owners, and celebrities, plus a liberal sprinkling of Dominicans with the means to live abroad. There were others, as well, nonboldface names: “Rubi had a lot of French friends who weren’t in the jet set,” said Taki. “I’d never seen them before: very bourgeois, solid, with good war records.” People took note, of course, of all the women. “This could be a sultan’s funeral,” said one wag on the scene, “practically every woman present has shared his bed at some time.” None of his previous wives was there, but the two Kennedy sisters were, and Claude Terrail and Regine, and Genevieve Fath and Helene Rochas, and the director Serge Marquand, and the actress Dany Robin, and the industrialist Paul-Louis Weiller, and Baron Elie de Rothschild, and the Dominican ambassador, Jose Puig. There was a huge bouquet of lilies from his Cibao–La Pampa teammates, and there were two hearses full of wreaths. By eleven-thirty everyone had filtered away.
Nobody wanted Odile to sit in the house in Marnes-la-Coquette and grieve. “My friends decided that the best thing for me to do was to leave my house in the country and go somewhere very far so I could forget about the whole thing,” she remembered.
She went to the Kennedy compound on Hyannis Port, urged on by Patricia Lawford and Jean Smith, who took on, briefly, the roles of surrogate big sisters.
She needed their help more than she knew. “I went out to the airport and tried to cash a check,” Odile said of her journey to Massachusetts. “Pat asked me where my checkbook was. I told her that I never had a checkbook. It was very embarrassing.”
That she had only previously visited Hyannis Port in Rubi’s company seemed not to weigh on her. Bobby’s family was there, the sisters, Teddy, Rose, and old Joe. She sat amid the bustle of a Kennedy summer—sailing, touch football, tennis, movies, noisy meals, high spirits—and she felt better. “It was very good for me,” she said. “I was so lost because Rubi was my husband and my love. He was a very good lover, as everybody knows. Everybody says that I was the great love of his life. So for me, I lost everything.”
Other friends looked in on her and tried to divert her from her grief. “Gunther Sachs and Gerard de Clery came and spent the last weekend with me in Hyannis Port,” she said. “We then went to New York. They both took me back to Europe on a cruise. We went to the Greek islands.”
Finally, she put it behind her—“it took me about a year”—and moved on to Italy, to Brazil, to another playboy husband, Paulo Marinho. She was a familiar face at discos in New York, Rio, and Paris in the 1970s. Twenty years after that, she was living in New England, with an American husband, reluctant to remember her sensational first marriage.
Rubi had happened to her, as he had to so many other women, a whirlwind, a tidal wave, a flush, and then her life had gone on.
The long good-bye had never been his trademark.
* * *
* Nor could the Dominican government get its mitts on him. In February 1962, the new authorities in Santo Domingo requested that the French government extradite Rubi, Ramfis, and some of Ramfis’s coterie; a blank refusal followed.
* One long-brewing rumor suggested that a New Jersey mobster named Joe Zicarelli had sold arms to Trujillo and had arranged the assassination of Andreas Requena and the kidnapping of Jesus de Galíndez.
* The Kennedy sister w
as separated from actor Peter Lawford and would divorce him at the beginning of 1966. Rubi was also rumored to be interested in Mellon heiress Peggy Hitchcock, who proved her swinging 1960s bona fides by providing Timothy Leary with a Milbrook, N.Y., haven for his psychedelic studies.
* About $360,000 a year in 2005 terms.
* The capital had regained its traditional name in 1962 after the Trujillos fled.
SEVENTEEN
RIPPLES
The day after the funeral, the myth of Rubirosa began at once to fix itself and evanesce.
In Santo Domingo, where civil war was still raging, there were no obituaries: All of the daily newspapers had ceased publication during the hostilities. In their place were little partisan handbills and pamphlets, which carried spotty doses of news and rabid opinion—particularly the latter. On July 9, one of these, the right wing La Patria, carried this stirring notice:
We lament the death of Porfirio Rubirosa, and we lament his death because in Cuba, when the bandits of July 26 seized power and the Fidelist scourge began to persecute Cubans with criminal rage, this noted Dominican saved many lives by offering asylum in the embassy. Among those Cubans saved from falling into the hands of the red rabble was our brother Alberto Rodriguez.
To be grateful is a virtue of the well-born. For that reason, we are pained by the death of a friend who knew how to return friendship.
Rest in peace, Rubi, envied by many, a man in every sense of the word.
Rubi as political hero!
That same day, in the New York Post—then an oasis of liberal views—the poet Langston Hughes offered a commentary entitled “Playboys.” He began by remembering an autumn day when he saw a crowd milling about an elegant Manhattan town house. A door opened. “Down the steps to the street in a straight back topcoat, with a discreetly gay scarf at his throat, came a handsome suede-gloved very well groomed young colored man. He was Porfirio Rubirosa.… A front-page face out of international news, one of the famous playboys of the Western World. And not white!”
To Hughes, mainstay of the Harlem Renaissance, it was obvious that Rubi was of mixed blood—a fact that no mainstream obituary mentioned and that was, indeed, never really discussed in his years of marrying rich and famous white women and running in the most elite circles in England, France, and the United States. For Hughes, his race made Rubi something of a wonder, an instance of a culture free of racial divides who managed to carry his birthright liberty into any world in which he circulated:
In his youth Rubirosa was a handsome colored boy. In middle age he was still good-looking, dashing and dynamic. He must have possessed the same sort of personality attraction for women as does our Congressman from Harlem Adam Clayton Powell, who, although Negro, is several shades lighter in complexion than was Rubirosa. Mulatto Latins, however, in their own Caribbean or South American lands, are not classed as Negro in the U.S.A. sense of the term, especially if their tongue is Spanish.… Had he been an American citizen by birth, the headlines would probably have read: NEGRO PLAYBOY DIES.
Rubi was, Hughes concluded, a breath of fresh—and racially liberated—air: “I am all for colorful gentlemen of color adding color and excitement, romance and the light touch to this rather grim world of wars, poverty and racism in which we live.”
Rubi as civil rights icon! Rubi as hedonist liberator!
He was barely dead a year when he—or, rather, a barely fictionalized version of him—appeared as the hero of a door-stopping novel by Harold Robbins. The Adventurers was the story of Dax Xenos, son of a morally upright lawyer/soldier from Corteguay, a fictional Latin American country that had been taken over by a ruthless mercenary who slaughtered everyone who dared oppose his cult of personality. Dax was raised in Europe, where he played polo, drove sports cars too fast, and bedded countless women: society girls, rich men’s wives, and, finally, the world’s wealthiest girl, whom he married. His one true love, though, was the dictator’s daughter. Among his decadent European friends was a White Russian fashion designer. Dax’s was a world of incalculable wealth, depravity, and boredom. But when his father mysteriously died back home, he determined to rid Corteguay of its evil leader.
The book was, predictably, overheated and a drag—an endless eight hundred or so pages of pulp sensation. Naturally, it was a massive hit. And, naturally, Hollywood came calling. In 1970, a megabuck version of The Adventurers starring an international all-star cast was released to universally derisive reviews. Ernest Borgnine; Candace Bergen; John Ireland; Olivia de Havilland; Rossano Brazzi; Fernando Rey; Anna Moffo; Charles Aznavour; Peter Graves; Jaclyn Smith: They all dirtied their hems in director Lewis Gilbert’s hilariously off-kilter, sprawling mess of a movie. Most sullied, though, was Bekim Fehmiu, the thirtysomething Yugoslavian heartthrob cast in the role of Dax. With thick lips and protruding brows, he looked a degenerate cross of Ringo Starr and Jean-Paul Belmondo—and without the acting chops of either. The endless three-hour film was sexually explicit—chunks of Gilbert’s clumsy flesh-flashing had to be cut for the U.S. release—and explicitly awful: strictly for Bekim Fehmiu completists.
Rubi as turkey!
In Mexico in 1972, the editors of the comic book ¡Asombro! (“Amazement!”) saw fit to publish an entire issue telling the life story of “El Famoso ‘Play Boy’ ” Rubirosa. It began with the “conquista” of Flor de Oro Trujillo (the two were illustrated as if almost middle-aged), continued with his marriage to Danielle Darrieux (drawn as a platinum blonde), introduced Zsa Zsa as a lover during the Doris Duke years, depicted him as a great poker player and master bullfighter (and breeder of fighting cocks, complete with full Mexican costume), credited him with winning an auto race that he lost, and had him happily honeymooning with Barbara Hutton in Spain and Venice. At the same time, it entirely ignored his life as a diplomat, his activities during World War II, his service in Argentina and Cuba, his relationship to Trujillo’s tyranny, and all the potentially nasty business he engaged in throughout his life. Whether it was adhering to conventions of Mexican comic books or was just a quick piece of hackery, it was a magnificently bizarre simulacrum of his life.
“You are the most agile journalist I’ve ever known,” he tells Doris over dinner at Maxim’s. When he first kisses Zsa Zsa, he thinks to himself, “She doesn’t kiss badly, but she could improve with me,” and then he watches appreciatively as she performs a drunken striptease on a nightclub table. He encourages Barbara to drink the freshly spilled blood of a goose at the Tour d’Argent restaurant, which has been relocated to the French countryside.
Rubi as opium dream!
And then he truly did begin to fade.
A decade and more after his death, his name ceased circulating other than when people he knew died or places and pastimes associated with him came to an end. When Ramfis Trujillo wrecked his car in Spain in 1967, killing his female passenger, Rubi’s name was inevitably mentioned. Ditto three years later when, again in Spain, Ramfis drove headfirst into a Jaguar driven by the duchess of Albuquerque; the duchess died at the scene; Ramfis lingered for a week before his injuries took him. When Doris Duke died in 1993, ghostly and weird and gulled by a bullying butler who made off with her fortune far more ruthlessly than Rubi had dipped into it, she was said still to have a photo of her second (and last) husband by her bedside; she had tried to contact him through mediums, and she’d never parted with the ruby-encrusted jewelry he’d given her.
In Florence, Italy, some enterprising lads opened a successful night spot and called it Porfirio Rubirosa; it was popular for years. In Washington Heights, the Dominican neighborhood north of Harlem, some equally enterprising lads opened a men’s boutique called Rubirosa that didn’t last. Hugo Boss designed a line of suits and called it Rubirosa; a Dominican cigar concern called itself the same.
His name popped up in works of fiction: Philip Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, regarding himself in the mirror before going out, decided he was “neatly attired, but no Rubirosa”; in press materials promoting the film of B
rett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, homicidal yuppie Patrick Bateman was said to own a rose gold Rolex that was once Rubi’s; Rubi made a cameo in the thoughts of the aged Trujillo in Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat, while his penis made a cameo in Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers. Russell Baker and Groucho Marx got laughs by dropping his name, the latter with an almost pathological frequency. Auto sports enthusiasts collected expensive little scale-models of some of the Ferraris he raced.
Always there was talk of a movie: In the 1980s, Julius Epstein, one of the twin brothers who wrote Casablanca, produced a massive, sprawling, and largely incoherent version of his life; a Dominican company persisted into the 2000s on their own effort. There was a radio play, a “mock-heroic epic comedy” entitled The Splendor and Death of Porfirio Rubirosa, and a musical entitled, yes, Rubirosa! The Musical. The one time he did appear in a film as a character was in Too Rich, a TV miniseries about Doris Duke; he was played with oily iciness by Michael Nouri, who had something of Rubi’s dark mystery.
In 1984 in a stark bedroom at the Betty Ford Clinic in Rancho Mirage, Peter Lawford, months away from death, submitted to one of the mandatory steps in his recovery from drug-and-alcohol addiction: writing letters expressing his remorse to people who were gone from his life. Among these was a note to his former brother-in-law, John F. Kennedy. First he told the dead president about himself, about contemporary politics, about the state of his health and the condition of their families. And then he turned his attention to JFK and what his existence in the afterlife must have been like: “Are you Pres. of anything? A garden club or bowling team perhaps! You must be running something.… How are Marilyn, Bobby, Rubirosa? Give them my love. If you should run into Steve McQueen or Vic Morrow, give them my love.…” A glorious, debauched party in heaven and—drat the luck!—Lawford not yet able to attend.
