The Irresistible Mr Wrong

by Jeremy Scott

  The mansion formerly belonged to Princess Chavchavadze, an American heiress. The place is already elegant but Rubi is seeking a tone of swanky opulence. He installs rosewood panelling, and silk hangings on the walls. The house is decorated in the style of a high-class brothel of the Belle Époque, offset by manly touches. He wants a gymnasium, a boxing ring, a sauna. In the secluded courtyard he installs two exercise bicycles and a mechanical bull, which Doris rides while wearing the tiniest of shorts. Her long legs are quite her best physical feature.

  Rubi is excited as a child with his new toy and Doris is happy to indulge him. He is good company. He possesses unlimited energy and appetite for life; he loves to eat, to drink, to party and to dance. He’s stimulating, witty and makes her laugh. She seems to have overcome her natural stinginess and enjoys spending her money – though not as much as Rubi does. He delights in throwing it around to create a good time for all.

  Things are well between the newly married couple and Doris is happy to be seen about with her husband, who represented a must-have to so many women in the past and still does. She watches him closely, there are warning signs. On one occasion while passing a few days in Cannes, Doris asked him to get her a pack of cigarettes. In the lobby of the hotel he ran into Manouche, a lover in his past, who suggested a coffee.

  She provides her own slant on his widely discussed apparatus: ‘It was long and pointed and it hurt … It was nothing for ce cher Rubi to take on two or three women in a night. By late at night, when he was good and drunk, he didn’t give a damn what kind of legs were opening.’

  Three days later, Rubi returned with Doris’s cigarettes.

  She is at first forgiving of these lapses and conceals the discomfort they occasion in her. They are both worldly, though Doris is much less jaded than he. But the couple are aware of the strains imposed by constant togetherness. Deliberately, they take up individual pursuits. For Rubi it is polo, for Doris jazz. Rubi’s sport, which he played before in the Dominican Republic, is a great deal more costly than his wife’s. He has ridden since infancy, he has an affinity with horses, and polo ponies are the princelings of horseflesh. At their mettlesome best, he reveres and loves them. Although he drinks heavily and goes to bed late, by 10 a.m. Rubi is at the Bagatelle Club in the Bois de Boulogne, where the French champion Pierre Dobadie is coaching him in the game. Though now forty, his body is fit and hard. He is quick and recklessly brave. Courage is necessary, it is a dangerous sport and it suits him perfectly.

  It is while Rubi is absorbed in this rediscovered passion that he receives a letter from Ramfis Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. The dictator’s eldest son, and Rubi’s ex-brother-in-law, is heir to his father’s fortune and dominion. Created an army colonel when he was six, he’s been looked after by servants and bodyguards all his life, indulged and spoilt rotten. He is now a teenager, and pining for a wider life than the island can provide. Alert as ever to the main chance, Rubi invites him to stay with them in Paris, where he introduces him to polo and much else. He becomes once again the youth’s mentor, showing him the scene and teaching him the moves.

  It is an expedient exercise. Rubi is a glamorous figure to Ramfis, a model of how he’d like to be himself. His letters to Papa speak well of his hosts and his guided entrée to a sophisticated European côterie. In the twenty years Rubi has worked for Trujillo the dictator more than once has come close to firing him, he has sacked and banished many of his court. But, among the several devils that possess Trujillo, one is a particular idiosyncrasy: however displeased he is with someone, he hates for them to leave him. It bothers him not to control them. However, he’s elated by Rubi’s marriage to such a wealthy woman and wishes to make use of the connection. He offers Rubi the post of ambassador to Argentina, heading up the Dominican embassy in Buenos Aires.

  Trujillo’s desire to be seen as a significant global figure has prompted him to set up embassies in several capitals, though, apart from maintaining secret files on key individuals, their function is slight. Buenos Aires is one of the larger of these establishments. Trujillo fancies himself to have much in common with Juan Perón, the strongman ruling Argentina. The problems they both face in dealing with the USA, their near-neighbour, are similar, though Argentina is a very much bigger and richer country than the Dominican Republic, and its profile is higher in the world. This is largely due to Perón’s charismatic wife, Eva. Born illegitimate into provincial poverty, a bastard child in a strictly Catholic country, she was marked down from the start. Uneducated, she is intuitively acute to a very sharp edge. Highly attractive and an aspiring actress, she has climbed to the position she now enjoys on a ladder formed by ascending rungs of men. First Lady, married to the man who came to power eighteen months ago, she’s as dedicated to politics as her husband and has embraced as her cause the country’s poor, who venerate her as an almost saintly figure.

  Trujillo’s reasoning is that appointing an ambassador to Argentina whose own wife is an international celebrity, will generate coverage that will raise the prestige of the republic, in both the host country and globally. Whether he has sufficiently considered the snags inherent in having two big-time female personalities sharing the same stage is doubtful.

  Trujillo wants to secure Doris as an ally, to draw her close. By marrying Rubi on Dominican soil she’s become a citizen of his country, he believes, though she’s retained her US passport. Trujillo is perennially in need of hard currency, but just now especially so. He is aware of the prenuptial agreement Rubi was obliged to sign but is confident he will in time obtain control of her fortune. Possibly he will get her to revoke the agreement and even if he doesn’t Doris is mortal, is she not? Life is uncertain; she might meet with an accident. In the moral universe Trujillo inhabits, accidents happen quite often. And if Doris dies, her millions will go to her husband.

  Rubi flies to Buenos Aires to take up his new appointment, but Doris cannot accompany him. The State Department has stepped in to deny her a diplomatic visa. Both the CIA and J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, have a fat file on Rubi – his goes way back – and another on Doris. Hers is one of the most substantial stockholdings in the US. Duke Power provides electricity to millions of homes, factories and government buildings across the land. The possibility that an unstable despot on a remote tropical island might be in a position to shut down supply is a worst-case nightmare. A newspaper reports, ‘She has let her country down and faces a life-and-death fight with Washington, which may refuse to let her go to Buenos Aires. It may even use its influence to have Rubi refused accreditation.’

  Nevertheless with her usual ingenuity, she finds a way to get to Buenos Aires and moves into the well-appointed residence that goes with the post. Rubi is now ‘His Excellency’ and she gives him a present to mark the appointment. He receives his own B-25 twin-engined bomber, which Doris has had upholstered in leather and fitted out as a luxurious private plane to accommodate a handful of passengers. Rubi is overjoyed by the gift and loves to fly it with his wife and others. He can’t be bothered to learn navigation, sometimes gets lost and runs out of petrol, so the number of willing passengers declines, but Doris enjoys the ride with its casual risk and doesn’t mind in the least.

  Rubi’s job involves almost no actual work, but his and his wife’s social duties are demanding. Curiosity about Doris is high, very many people want to say they know her; the couple are stars of the diplomatic community. She finds its company superficial and bland as she did politicians’. She has never enjoyed parties and only likes bohemians, musicians or artistes of some kind. She loved talent and creativity in individuals and was herself classless and devoid of prejudice – except against pretension, as displayed here. The diplomatic wives are competitive and dressy, preoccupied by fashion and gossip; the men guarded and insincere. She has no talent in social nicety and little patience.

  But Rubi enjoys his job hugely. His prodigious energy enables him to party all night and still get up to ride in the morning, but Doris flags on the remorsel
ess circuit. Often he goes out alone at night, and there is always a professional reason to do so. Such gatherings, when she does attend them, can be embarrassing. Women glance at her then at one another, and whisper behind their hands. She wonders which and how many of them Rubi has slept with. There is one particular rival Doris is very conscious of: Eva Perón.

  Eva understood Rubi from the instant she first met him. She has considerable experience of macho Latin American males, and the two of them have much in common. He’s come up by the same ladder as she, manipulating the opposite sex. Both enjoy glamour and shiny toys. He likes airplanes, she likes diamonds – what’s the difference? Not least in their resemblance, both have dabbled in the same swill. During the war she made her fortune from selling Argentine passports. Rubi’s customers for Dominican nationality were Jews, hers were Nazis aware that Germany was going to lose.

  Eva knows she can get Rubi anytime she wants but she dallies with him, making him wait until he comes up with a donation of $1,500 for her pet charity, the Shirtless Ones. A fellow ambassador observes that it is ‘the only time in recorded history that a pimp ever gave money to a harlot’.

  Then the wife of a senior diplomat passes a night with Rubi and loses her reason entirely, along with all discretion. She pursues him relentlessly, causing public scenes. He is obliged to fly to Paris to escape her, but she follows him, now vengeful in her incontinent passion. Newspapers get hold of the story, which becomes a scandal in BA. It is impossible for Rubi to continue in the post. Trujillo is furious, recalling him. With great generosity of heart, Doris accompanies her errant husband on his summons to the headmaster’s study. Going out of her way to soothe and flatter the dictator, she manages to preserve a relationship between the two men, fraught though it is.

  Afterward, the couple return to their house in Paris – Rubi’s house – but Doris is unhappy. Rubi is unemployed, though he busies himself in his usual hyper fashion, ‘I find it impossible to work, there’s just no time.’ He sets up his own polo team, Cibao La Pampa. He and Doris resume their life in the French capital, but it is not the same as it was. She fills the house with musicians, sometimes their impromptu jazz sessions continue all night. In the early hours of the morning Rubi usually comes home with a gang of hangers-on picked up in the last nightclub, rousing the servants and calling for food. Ramfis Trujillo arrives for an extended stay. Thanks to Rubi, he’s familiar with this city, particularly its seamy side which offers opportunity unavailable at home. He’s already a drinker, now he discovers drugs. Then Rubi’s shady brother Cesar and nephew Gilberto turn up to stay. They bring girls back to the house, which becomes a ritzy garçonnière with Doris as its reluctant chatelaine.

  Sometimes Rubi does not return until the next morning, and she senses the jagged edge of a previously unknown torment. Her first love and model of masculinity was her father, who loved and valued her but died when she was twelve. Buck had been dominant and forceful, sometimes tyrannical. He was larger than life, he had an aura. He was a hard act to follow and none of her lovers – certainly not her husband Jimmy Cromwell – have matched up to him. Rubi has an aura.

  Rubi equals her father in these dominant-male characteristics but he has no regard for marriage – none. In result, Doris suffers. She was raised as a loner. In childhood she was awkward, plain, too tall, at school mocked. Yet, armoured by wealth, she developed into a mature and self-confident, if wary, woman. She knows to hold off, to give little of herself, never to show vulnerability. She controlled her marriage to Jimmy, she controlled all her relationships. At the start with Rubi the reins were firmly in her grasp and it had been a great ride, she’d enjoyed life as she never had before. She’s overcome her stinginess and found pleasure in spending and pleasure in Rubi’s pleasure.

  She’d been in charge. She isn’t now. She had gone into this with her eyes wide open. She’d had no illusions about Rubi from the start. But she was a big girl – she thought she could handle it. And now she finds she can’t.

  To marry Rubi had been an affirmation. Rubi as a husband validated her as an attractive woman; at his side she could believe she was. She could read the envy, rivalry, hatred in other women’s eyes and it thrilled her with satisfaction. But Rubi – so like her father in his brand of maleness – is utterly deficient in other crucial aspects that existed in Buck. Rubi values her, but only for her money; he does not love her, he has no interest in protecting or taking care of her.

  Rubi had won her and Doris has been unable to conceal the fact that she is in thrall to him. She’s lost the initiative, and with it control of the relationship.

  For Rubi the thrill is in the pursuit and seduction; conquest is the climax. Afterwards, he’s bored – the rest is merely maintenance and expedience. Now it is not he who has changed, but Doris. She has developed a dependency and, fatally, her need and desperation has begun to show. Her validation has been withdrawn and she is bereft. She’s unable to conceal her pain, even while aware that expressing it is to drive him away. He is programmed to back off. He has endless experience of clingy women who, in response to a single night of lovemaking and series of knee-buckling orgasms, have pinned the entire cargo of their emotional needs upon him. He is predetermined to dump them.

  Such is the unhappy state of affairs in the couple’s marriage in 1948 when two events occur in swift succession. Rubi’s B-25 crashes while taking off in New Jersey. He is not on board and none of the crew is injured – but Doris was scheduled to be on the flight; she’d changed her plans only hours before.

  The second incident possibly has connection with the first, but if the crash is the trigger for it the cumulative reasons are already set in place and their weight is crushing her. Doris cuts her wrists in a bathroom in the Paris house. A maid finds her; the room is splashed with blood. She is rushed to hospital and given a transfusion. No word leaks to the press. Discharging herself, she checks into a sanatorium in Italy under a pseudonym to recover.

  In October 1949 Doris is granted a divorce from Rubi in Reno, Nevada.

  CHAPTER 8

  ZSA ZSA GABOR, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YEAR’S DAY 1953

  Snow is falling heavily and the sidewalk is a trampled froth of slush. It’s only a short walk from where she’s parked the car on Central Park South to the Plaza and Zsa Zsa is well wrapped up in furs, but the hike through the melting sludge does nothing to improve her mood. The drive to Idlewild, where she put her husband George Sanders on a plane to Rome, and the journey back into the city through a blizzard was a nightmare.

  Zsa Zsa is often discontent, her full lips set into a sulky pout – part of her charm, she’s been told – but just now she is seriously furious with George. Such disrespect and lack of consideration.

  It’s true though that George has never pretended to be a dutiful husband. At the marriage ceremony on April Fools’ Day three years ago he’d forgotten to buy a ring, they’d had to use one given her by a previous husband – now aged thirty-four, already she’s got through two. George is neglectful and stingy, he even makes her buy her own cigarettes. He kept his own apartment when he moved in with her. All he brought to the marriage were two suits, a painting she’d given him and his own ashtray; when he moved out following a row – and there were many – he took these with him. He dislikes possessions, he feels trapped by them, he claims.

  But the reasons for Zsa Zsa’s discontent as she crosses the Plaza’s ornate lobby – which is a busy hive of activity rimmed by elderly female residents perched on gilt chairs observing those who sashay in and out, in lieu of a life of their own – is more specific than general dissatisfaction with her husband. The movie she’s recently completed, Moulin Rouge directed by John Huston, is about to open in Manhattan but George has chosen to leave for Italy to work on a picture with Rossellini. It’s not the first of such slights; more than once she’s been driven to fury by lipstick on his handkerchief or coming upon a scrap of paper with a scribbled telephone number. Once, hysterical with jealousy, she’d yelled, ‘I hate you, I�
��ll get even with you! I’m going to have an affair with Rubirosa!’

  Zsa Zsa Gabor with Rubirosa

  But, although Rubi was notorious for his sexual exploits, George knew she’d never met him and only laughed.

  Zsa Zsa stands at the bank of elevators with flecks of snow melting on her fur coat as she waits impatiently for one to arrive. She’d begged George to take her with him to Rome but he’d refused, ‘No, my dear, you’ll spoil my fun.’ Awaiting the elevator, blonde, beautiful, exquisitely dressed though glittering with specks of moisture, Zsa Zsa is seething with resentment.

  Ping … the door to one of the elevators draws open. The passengers get out and she steps into the interior, aware that someone has followed her in. The door closes and the cabin lifts off. A man’s voice enquires, ‘Madame, what are you doing in New York?’

  Zsa Zsa turns to look at him. Captive with her in the small space, he smiles. It is Rubirosa.

  She is tired and overwrought, for a moment uncharacteristically speechless. He repeats the question.

  ‘Why, to open my picture Moulin Rouge…’

  ‘A pleasant coincidence, is it not? I am here with my President, General Trujillo. It would be an honour if you would join us for a drink…’

  She’s wrong-footed by the suggestion. She’s slept little the night before, is tired and out of sorts, and the slick riposte which normally comes so easily to her is lacking.

  ‘I really don’t know…’ The elevator brakes to a stop on the tenth floor. She steps out and the door slides shut behind her. She continues to her room, throws herself fully dressed upon the bed and is asleep in moments.

  When she wakes the room is filled with red roses, dozens of them, arranged by the maid while she slept. She examines the small card engraved: