The Irresistible Mr Wrong

by Jeremy Scott

  CHAPTER 15

  BARBARA HUTTON, NEW YORK CITY, 30 DECEMBER 1953

  Five days after Christmas a tree still stands in a corner of Barbara’s suite in the Hotel Pierre. The room is decorated with festive baubles, a log fire burns in the hearth and there’s a hint of Floris’s Essence des Pins to brace the warm conditioned air.

  Barbara in Balenciaga and diamonds is posed on a settee with her fifteen-year-old son Lance as she receives the press on this, her wedding day. Her hair is up, her back straight, but there’s an underwater slowness to her movements. She is now wholly dependent on drugs and can’t live without their help. They fill the vacuum of boredom and hold reality at bay, allowing her to inhabit an artificial paradise. But she might as well be sleepwalking: her perfectly made-up face is blank of expression, her eyes glazed, they look like boiled sweets. The mask is held in place by astringent lotion and willpower alone. Pilled-up and fortified by champagne, she maintains poise but it’s precarious and risks cracking at any moment. Beside her, the teenage boy is desperately uncomfortable at being here; his body language is painful to watch.

  The door to the suit opens and Rubi comes in, accompanied by Leland Rosenberg. Lithe, suave, perfectly groomed, a storm of flash surrounds him as he enters.

  Barbara waves a languid hand, ‘Rubi darling, here we are.’

  He takes his place on the sofa beside Lance and the questions start. ‘Barbara, are you legally free to marry? Is it true you’ve refused a blood test? Are you marrying under NY State law?’

  The wedding will take place in the office of the Dominican Consul, she tells them. She is marrying under Dominican law.

  ‘Does that mean your property belongs to your husband?’

  She is vague, ‘I don’t know, I don’t think so, legally I’m still a Danish subject.’

  Rubi interrupts to resolve the point, ‘In my country her money belongs to her and my money belongs to me. Anyway, I don’t need her money; I have enough of my own.’

  ‘Barbara, are you aware Zsa Zsa Gabor plans to sue Rubi for assault? That she says he’s now worth suing, but without you he’s not worth the shirt on his back. What is your comment?’

  Even within the hazed cavern of her mind she will not be drawn, ‘I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know the lady.’ She can still manage a put-down.

  ‘When did Rubi propose to you?’

  ‘When we were in Deauville he told me that he loved me. I didn’t believe him, it’s awful to have money. I could never give anyone credit for loving me for myself…’ Then her voice cracks, ‘I hate to look at myself in the mirror because I’m so ugly. I used to be beautiful, but I’m not anymore…’

  Rubi takes it on himself to protest, ‘Barbara is beautiful. She will always be beautiful.’

  She stares at him blankly then rises unsteadily to her feet. She stumbles … one of the journalists catches her before she falls. Shrugging him off she heads for her bedroom, there to pop another pill, repair her face and put on a full-length black velvet coat and hat for the ceremony.

  All her friends had been appalled when they’d learned from the columns of her intention to marry Rubi. Graham Mattison, Cary Grant, Aunt Jessie, even Jimmy Donahue had done their utmost to dissuade her. But nothing can deflect Barbara from her disastrous impulse, she is as she has ever been – wilfully self-destructive. To marry in New York State requires a licence and a blood test – which Barbara knew she must avoid for sound reason: drugs. Rubi has helpfully suggested that to marry in the Dominican consulate would solve the difficulty. He has flatly refused to sign a prenuptial agreement for less than $5 million. Graham Mattison negotiated with him, assisted by Jimmy Donahue, who, despite his love of mischief, is truly concerned about the catastrophe Barbara is headed into. Working together, they got Rubi down to $2.5 million, payable up-front: his bottom price for making the earth move for Barbara.

  She emerges from her bedroom in the Pierre with a black picture hat framing her pallid face. The wedding group descends to two limos waiting outside the hotel and, followed by the press, the caravan moves on to 1100 Park Avenue and the nominal Dominican soil of its Consul General’s office on the seventeenth floor.

  Rubi’s best man is Ramfis Trujillo. Close friends are absent from the ceremony but Barbara has invited all the media in New York and the place is heaving. The rite is conducted in Spanish and the couple exchange rings. Then it’s back to the reception at the Pierre and more champagne. At the ceremony she was hardly able to stand up, now she sits swaying gently on the sofa beside her husband. Few fail to report the sound of ice cubes rattling against the rim of the highball glass she clutches in her trembling hand. She slurs her words as she speaks, ‘I feel as though I’ve been hit over the head. I’m so tired I could die.’

  Very soon she has to be put to bed. Rubi goes out, leaving the party to continue without its hosts. He spends the night on the town celebrating with Leland Rosenberg, who has joined his staff as PA – a pay-off for his role as the sly cupid who brought bride and groom together. They end the night with two showgirls in Rosenberg’s apartment on East 38th street.

  CHAPTER 16

  BARBARA HUTTON, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YEAR’S EVE 1953

  This is day two of Barbara’s marriage to Rubirosa. When she wakes in their suite in the Pierre it is past noon; she is alone in bed. She rings for her maid, already reaching for the bottle of pills on the night table.

  Tiki comes in. Quiet and caring, she rearranges the pillows, sits her up and orders breakfast. Barbara tries a sip of black coffee. The cloying sweetness makes her retch. She lies there trying not to throw up, waiting for the pills to kick in while Tiki lays out her clothes.

  Barbara is on a lot of pills by now: for her health, to restore her beauty, amphetamines to wake her up and keep her functioning, valium to calm her nerves, barbiturates to sleep; all invariably taken with alcohol.

  In twenty minutes the speed has entered her bloodstream, and a delusive spasm of energy quickens through her veins. She swings her match-thin naked legs from the bed, pauses then pushes upright to walk a slow deliberate line to the bathroom. Closing the door, she starts for the lit-up vanity console. She falters, the leg muscle fails. With a cry she goes down hard on the marble floor.

  The Rubirosas are scheduled to host a select group of guests to supper at the Pierre to see in the New Year, but for the second evening in a row Barbara is unable to attend the occasion. Her ankle is broken and has to be set in plaster.

  Did she fall … or was she pushed? For the press there is no option. RUBI BIFFS BABS is the tabloids’ greeting to 1954.

  Barbara embarks on her honeymoon with Rubi in a wheelchair. Her fall in the Pierre – if fall it was – has broken her ankle. Rubi is depicted in the press as a wife beater; the tabloids rerun photographs of Zsa Zsa’s black eye. ‘A man only beats a woman if he loves her,’ Zsa Zsa is quoted as saying, adding that her husband George Sanders ‘beat me like a gong’.

  For the honeymoon Barbara has taken a three-month lease on the Maharajah of Baroda’s house in Palm Beach. The newly-weds fly there in a chartered Super Constellation with a staff which includes Rosenberg, the elderly Tiki plus another maid and a medical nurse. Barbara’s leg is encased in plaster from foot to hip.

  In Palm Beach the nurse sleeps in her room. Rubi has his own bedroom in another part of the house and rents an apartment in town where he can entertain his dates. He is out every evening and seen in all the trendy night-spots, always with a different girl. He makes no attempt to conceal his activities. Discretion does not enter into it, and Barbara has report of these sightings both in the columns and from her friends.

  When not playing polo or womanising, Rubi is out shopping. David Heymann reports that while in Palm Beach he acquired sixty suits, twenty pairs of shoes, fifty pairs of silk pyjamas, dozens of sweaters, shirts, pants, sports jackets… And made it into the Best Dressed Men’s list of 1954. Meanwhile, despite the way he is behaving, Barbara dowers him with gifts, including a twin-motor B25
converted bomber – he’d broken the one Doris Duke gave him – which cost her the inflated price of $250,000 (the real price was $200,000). On his forty-fifth birthday she asks him what his heart desires; he tells her a 400-acre orange plantation in the Dominican Republic. The price is $500,000 and she gives him the money to buy it.

  Why did she continue to reward him while he was behaving so vilely and presents made him no more agreeable? That she was compulsively generous is hardly an adequate answer. And why for heaven’s sake did she marry him?

  Because he knew how to do it right? But she didn’t have to marry him for that, she could have had him on hire and retained control. He was broke and open to an expedient transaction. Was it part of a necessary delusion she was loved and wanted, a fantasy sustainable only with drugs? In effect, wedding him put an end to sex. So what was Barbara’s motive for marriage? Dean Jennings lists some answers to the question. ‘Because it was her own damn business and she felt like it,’ said Cary Grant. ‘Because he seemed like a terribly nice guy,’ said Lance. ‘Because I jilted him and he was available,’ said Zsa Zsa. But the most insightful answer is provided by the physician, Dr Randolph, who looked after her for years in Hollywood.

  It seems simple to me, it is merely a question of Barbara wanting to take something from someone else. Zsa Zsa had him. Barbara wanted him. Doris Duke had had Rubirosa once, and that made him a catch. Barbara has always envied Doris Duke. She’s jealous, and if Doris had him Barbara wanted him too. She would want the best that money could buy.

  The ‘best’ in this case represents spectacular bad value. The honeymoon, the details of which are gleefully relayed by columnists, is lampooned on radio and television. Rubi is caricatured as a Hispanic conman, but she is mocked as a loopy self-chosen victim. The expensive campaign to rebrand her as a mature caring human being has served for nothing. Her image in the eyes of the public has been stripped of all dignity. Her marriage is a farce and she has become a laughing-stock to the world.

  It’s bad as it can get. Rubi is the worst disaster yet in a chain of marital disasters and it’s a sorry chapter that is now ending, but she brings it to a close with style. Her ankle has mended and she is walking without crutches when she gives a dinner at the Moulin Rouge for a dozen friends. She and Rubi are barely on speaking terms by now. They sit at opposite ends of the table in the lively restaurant and the atmosphere between them is frigid. Rubi has invited his guitar-playing Dominican buddy Chago and instructs him to sing. The musician strums a chord and obligingly strikes up the number ‘Just a Gigolo’. Barbara is very silent at the end but Rubi rocks back in his seat and roars with pleasure. ‘Play it again!’ he calls to Chago.

  When he’s finished the number Barbara remains sitting in silence. After a long wait she gets up and, moving with slow deliberate gait, walks the distance separating her from her husband. Drawing back her fist, she swings at him and socks him so hard in the face she knocks him off his chair. Total silence falls upon the crowded room. She does not pause, but in the same unhurried trance-like pace continues to the exit and walks out on her marriage.

  Next day she moves to the Everglades Club and surrenders the lease to Baroda’s house. And Rubi shrugs, tells his valet to pack his extensive wardrobe, and clambers into the pilot’s seat of the B-25 she has given him and takes off to join Zsa Zsa in New York in an aircraft he can pilot but still has not bothered to learn how to navigate. The marriage has lasted just fifty-three days.

  To relate and, I hope, to read Barbara Hutton’s life story to its end – which it has not yet reached, though it doesn’t promise well – is fascinating, because it represents so exemplary a case study. She is a prototype of value-free celebrity, now a common species. The sums of money she flung around in the course of a useless life are breathtaking when translated into their present-day equivalent. Her excesses grab the attention – how we might have used them if dealt such opportunities – but as her story declines toward its sad close our feeling ultimately is depression. What misuse of life.

  Perhaps she was destined to be as she was, so needy, so bored, so desperate. Conditioned not genetically but by her upbringing. She felt abandoned when her father died. She craved attention. She received it aplenty, mostly expressed in fury and censure, yet still she needed it. Without it, she did not believe she existed. She did so only because she saw on the page that she was there. She had a role in people’s lives because she was the coin of their daily gossip. She was under pressure to deliver in an ongoing drama. Meanwhile her own need for an affirming audience was unrelenting, for media exposure required continuing exposure to validate itself and fill the hole of incompleteness that she’d sought to fill with celebrity from the beginning. But recognition did not bring peace, the satisfaction was only momentary before the need resumed. In Barbara’s case the analogy of celebrity to a drug holds good through her entire life cycle. But what a desolate epitaph it provides: What waste.

  CHAPTER 17

  ODILE RODIN, PARIS, JUNE–OCTOBER 1956

  Paris, which suffered no bomb damage or wholesale looting, was the first European city to recover fully after the Second World War. It had always been possible to obtain an excellent dinner in a first-class restaurant, even during the worst of times, but with peace, food, entertainment and pleasure were freely available to anyone with the cash to pay for them.

  The city had never lost its rating as the capital of chic – the leading couturiers had continued to show their new collections throughout the war. Paris contained the most luxurious hotels, finest restaurants, smartest clubs, widest range of high-end boutiques and the best-dressed women … but now a new caste has asserted its presence on the scene. More than a caste, perhaps a new species, for they have reinvented themselves wholly different from their parents, even in appearance. They are the post-war student young.

  All are thin. The males dress in black shirts open at the neck, and narrow trousers; they smoke gitanes, drink a great deal of coffee, hang out in jazz clubs and talk earnestly into the night. The pale slender girls with them wear no make-up except for dusky eyes, straight hair, casual clothes and never heels, but otherwise behave exactly as the boys. They are existentialists, followers of the philosophy preached by Jean-Paul Sartre. Rejecting the pieties and conventions of their parents, they have defined themselves in opposition to their values: I am – and it is I who determine how I act. They sleep with each other freely and apparently without jealousy, but they are rather serious in their pleasures and don’t laugh a lot.

  Albert Camus, the writer who has voiced their alienation, can be seen dining in the Brasserie Lippe, as can their high priest Sartre, whose lizard skin is stained sepia by nicotine. There he reigns surrounded by disciples, among them invariably a special one being groomed to share their marriage bed by his wife, Simone de Beauvoir, herself a prophet of the intellectual and sexual liberation which is now the attitude du jour.

  These, the students’ mentors, are middle-aged, yet exempted from that unfashionable crime by the reverence in which they are held. The defining characteristic of the existentialists is their disdain for those older than themselves: Never trust anyone over thirty. They feel scorn for the old and all they represent. The old are put out by such disrespect, hurt and bewildered that these, their children, show nothing but contempt for the bourgeois values they hold dear. Parents have gone through the deprivation and suffering of a war to resist Nazi tyranny and pass on to their children a civilised world … and the kids don’t give a toss. They think the old, together with all they stand for, ridiculous. They’re something else, this upcoming generation: highly visible, loudly audible, so sure of themselves many of their seniors regard them as a hostile tribe.

  As for the flagrant sexuality displayed by the young, the old are outraged – particularly by the girls. They form an upstart breed, these young women. Confident, contemptuous, and impregnable in their youth, they can be daunting. They make no effort to please. Spurning coquetry and fashion, they have created their own
mode. They are candid, artless, clear-eyed and unimpressed. They’re not prepared to do anything that bores them and unafraid to be frankly rude.

  Odile Rodin is nineteen, with blonde hair, liquid brown eyes, generous mouth and a cheeky smile. She is studying drama at the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique, as are fellow students Jean-Paul Belmondo and Claude Brialy. She has already played small parts in two films, one with Brigitte Bardot, the other starring Danielle Darrieux.

  © Press Association

  She is introduced to Rubi at a party in Paris in 1956. He is forty-seven years old and incapacitated. While leading his team Cibao La Pampa in a polo match he’d taken a bad fall. His neck and shoulder are encased in a surgical brace; he cannot move his left arm.

  He takes her hand, bows and kisses it in an old-fashioned way that makes her smile. ‘I’ve heard much about you, monsieur,’ she tells him. ‘None of it good.’

  She has, she’s well aware of his history and has had the opportunity of studying one of his previous wives, who emerged from the experience to remake a successful career. Now here he stands smiling at her, greying at the temples, a little heavier than before, only marginally taller than herself and disabled by a cast. She is not overwhelmed. ‘I found him attractive, but I was not completely fascinated like the other ladies. He wasn’t good-looking, but he had charisma. He was not very tall, not very perfect. He had a magnetism.’

  If you can disregard his back-story – though who can? – Rubi at this moment represents something of a catch. He owns the splendid Paris townhouse in Rue Bellechasse Doris Duke gave him, with the furniture and paintings she bought for it. There he lives in some style, for he has not scaled down on staff, personal pugilist etc. He has the status of an international diplomat. He possesses an official car and chauffeur plus his own Ferrari and the plane Barbara Hutton gave him; he’s still cash rich on money obtained from her. He has not modified his lifestyle with middle age. He plays polo, races his sports car, parties, drinks hard, screws around indiscriminately. He’s still a rake and an established legend in the columns. Whoever his new liaison, it’s good for an item, and there have been plenty of women to provide the accompanying photograph beside him in restaurant, club or ski resort, many of whom rate tabloid mention of their own: Eartha Kitt, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Queen Soraya of Persia. In the glitzy jungle which forms their mutual habitat he is as much the prey as they. Both there to score, each collects a scalp and ticks a box. By now his reputation is such that he needs make little effort to score. His friend Igor Cassini (the columnist Cholly Knickerbocker, who soon will be appointed public relations consultant to Trujillo) reports on his technique at this period: