The Irresistible Mr Wrong

by Jeremy Scott

  Trujillo was out of the Chevrolet, firing his revolver from cover of its open door. His left arm hung useless. His wounded driver returned fire with both the automatic rifles. The Chevy beams were full on and its police siren wailing above the gunshots. A bullet creased the driver’s skull and he went down.

  The assassins saw a figure coming toward them, blundering in and out of the dusty beam of the headlights. In uniform, hat still firmly on his head, he was waving a gun aimed drunkenly at them. The three shotguns fired at almost the same instant. Trujillo’s body spun, arms flailing as it toppled. One of the assassins went forward and used his boot to roll the corpse onto its back. He administered the coup de grace by a final bullet to the head. They threw the bloodied body into the trunk of the sedan and drove off at speed.

  By pure chance another army officer, loyal to the regime, was driving on the coastal highway and came upon the scene of carnage only minutes later. Recognising Trujillo’s bullet-ridden car, he drove at once to his commanding officer – a certain General Roman – to report what he’d found and accompany Roman to the Palace to take over control. Swept up by circumstance and with notable irony, Roman was escorted into power not by the rebels but instead by loyal army officers.

  Thrown by this turn of events, the plotters called off their attack upon the Palace. The planned coup did not take place.

  On landing at Ciudad Trujillo, Ramfis assumes control of the army with Rubi as his adviser and right-hand man. After a lifetime of waiting, Ramfis has been catapulted into the hot-seat of power and called upon to resolve a crisis. He’s in poor shape to do so. Despite several ‘cures’, he’s heavily dependent on drugs, and the event has sent him manic. His model in the use of power is his ruthless and deranged father, to whom vengeance was a creed.

  At once the police are ordered to bring in the assassins. Within three days over 400 men and women have been arrested and are under interrogation and torture. A dozen others have been shot resisting capture. When General Roman’s involvement is discovered he is ordered to report to the San Isidro army base, site of another notorious torture chamber, Kilometer Nine. There for days he is made to suffer, with eyelids stitched to his eyebrows. He is beaten with baseball bats, drenched with acid, exposed to swarms of angry ants, castrated and shocked for hours on end in the electric chair. Finally, while still twitching convulsively with life, his torturers discharge their weapons into his body, which disintegrates in the hail of fire.

  In Miami, Flor receives word that Ramfis is ‘Muy malo, worse than Trujillo.’ Low on funds and concerned about her inheritance, she flies to Ciudad Trujillo where one of Ramfis’s generals fetches her to meet him. On the short drive to his fortified beach house the car is stopped ten times at roadblocks by armed soldiers demanding identification.

  She finds her brother holed up with a German showgirl from the Paris Lido. He is drinking, on medication and in a high state of nerves. He tells her, ‘Those Americans are impossible. I can do nothing, be nothing. Everyone is trying to impose ideas on me. Even my mother is driving me crazy.’

  In the luxurious beachfront villa Ramfis is attended by Flor’s ex-husband Rubi and his polo team, now become Ramfis’s henchmen. All of them are wearing civilian clothes. His yacht Angelita is berthed at the nearby dock, engines fired-up, captain and crew on duty.

  Flor is here to seek reassurance about her legacy. Can she have $25,000 in advance? Ramfis promises she will receive the money within days and she returns to Miami.

  On 19 November Ramfis’s nerve gives way. He cracks. Boarding the Angelita, already loaded with art-works and booty, he takes with him his father’s body. Accompanied by his gang – though not Rubi, who is now back in Paris with Odile – he sails for Guadeloupe. From there the party catches a plane to Paris, instructing the Angelita’s captain to sail for Cannes. On landing in Paris, Ramfis flies on to Brussels where he is admitted as a patient to the clinic where he has stayed before. It is announced that he is receiving ‘sleeping treatment’.

  Not until he wakes up days later does Rubi learn that the Angelita has been intercepted by a Dominican gunship. The treasures it contained have been confiscated, but Trujillo’s body was put on an Air France plane to Paris.

  Rubi is incensed at the lily-livered way Ramfis has bottled out of power. He’s invested years of his life in this jerk, taught him everything he knew. Odile and he (and all his earlier wives) have put the creep up, fixed him up with women, launched him on society, provided food and drink, endured his loutish company. For what? For this? For Rubi to lose the plantation Barbara Hutton bought him on the island, to lose his job as ambassador, to lose the car and driver, the first class travel, the perks, the diplomatic status… Seething with anger Rubi calls a press conference – well attended because the Dominican Republic is news. With Odile at his side he calls Ramfis a loser and junkie retard, ‘the most cowardly man in the world’.

  Meanwhile the Benefactor completes his final journey to land in France. During his lifetime he’s been accustomed to honour and respect but his reception at Orly is sadly lacking in ceremony – indeed in any dignity. Not a soul is there to meet him and claim his coffin. He’s put in a freezer to await collection.

  CHAPTER 20

  ODILE RODIN, PARIS,

  INDEPENDENCE DAY, 4 JULY 1965

  This polo match is the last in the series. Other teams competing for the Coupe de France have been knocked out and this game between Baron Elie de Rothschild’s team and Rubi’s Cibao La Pampa will decide this year’s champion. It’s a bright sunny afternoon and the elegant wooden stand of the Bagatelle Club in the Bois de Boulogne is filled by men wearing light suits and women in colourful dresses and hats.

  The competing sides, mounted on ponies that can accelerate from zero to thirty-five mph in seconds, are dressed in white breeches, team colours and white helmets. On the large field it is not always easy to distinguish the players from one another, but Rubi stands out. He wears a red helmet, as he always has.

  Odile is seated in the clubhouse stand in a small group that includes Oleg Cassini, Igor’s couturier brother. She and Rubi have continued to enjoy the good life since his involuntary retirement from Trujillo’s service. They’ve divided their time between Paris, Deauville, Cap Ferrat, New York and Palm Beach. They’ve become members of a classy circle. Igor has been pals with the Kennedy family for years and Oleg is the designer chosen to dress the First Lady. The Rubirosas have sailed with them in the presidential yacht and been invited to the family compound of Hyannis Port. Lem Billings, a friend of Kennedy since Choate prep school, says,

  Only once did I see Jackie lose her composure because of another woman. It was over Odile Rodin, the young wife of Porfirio Rubirosa… Jack and Rubi had been introduced by Igor Cassini. They had one thing in common: a burning interest in women. They became friends; Jack and Odile became better friends. Rubi, never particularly prone to the vagaries of jealousy, didn’t seem to mind; Jackie minded a great deal… Jack could be shameless in his sexuality, would simply pull girls’ dresses up and so forth. He would corner them at White House dinner parties and ask them to step into the next room, where they could hold a “serious discussion”… it was typical of how he dealt with women.

  It takes money for a couple to follow the international lifestyle chosen by the Rubirosas and to keep up with its competitive milieu. And it requires a fortune to maintain your own polo team, that’s a hobby for the likes of the Aly Khan and Elie de Rothschild. Rubi still had cash but he was not rich. There is no money coming in now, no embassy to which he can charge his household expenses and the limo when required. He’d never saved money, his business was spending it.

  The couple did not cut back on the extravagance of their way of life, but he did spend more nights at home sparing his liver and resting up. There were usually a handful of chums hanging around the house and Odile was free to go out with them if she wished. Oleg Cassini says, ‘Odile exhausted him and made him jealous. In a weak moment he admitted, “All my
life I’ve controlled women – every woman I’ve ever met, except this one. She is under my skin.”’

  As a couple what media attention they received was an occasional listing among guests who were there, but as actors in a marriage in trouble they rated a mention. The columnist Suzy ran a blind item about an ageing playboy sipping hot milk in front of the TV while his wife was on the town having an affair with one of his young friends. ‘Odile ruined his life,’ says Zsa Zsa Gabor.

  At the Bagatelle Club that afternoon, Cibao La Pampa are the victors in the hard-fought match with a score of 2½ to 2. They gain the Coupe de France and the triumph demands a special celebration, for which traditionally the leader of the losing team will pick up the tab.

  Odile and Rubi drive home to shower and change. He tells her what to wear for the evening ahead. She says, ‘He counselled me on my hair (he loves chignons). On which jewellery I should wear (he prefers simple), on my outfits (these are very important to him). I haven’t bought a suit, an outfit, a coat in which he hasn’t accompanied me to give me his judgement. He would put me under the shower if my hair was too lacquered.’ But she found ways to defy his fogyism, such as going out without knickers beneath her couture dresses.

  They leave the house taking two cars, Rubi the Ferrari, Odile the Austin. It is not a dinner party they’re headed for but a rout at New Jimmy’s, the in-club of the moment. They pitch up around 10 p.m. when the joint is already roiling. This is the party of the night, the A-list throng the bar and space around the tiny dance floor. There is loud music, good-looking couples dancing the Twist, a crowded room with people shouting to be heard above the din. This is Rubi’s scene, the habitat where he’s on show, on form, most alive and most himself.

  At 4.30 a.m. the crowd has thinned but the revel is still kicking and when Odile says she’s going home he’s not ready to leave. Oleg Cassini is still there, ‘Champagne was being poured into the championship cup; everyone was laughing, drinking. I remember looking at him. He was trying to smile but the fun had gone out of him. His eyes were dead. He said to me, “Oleg, let’s go out. We’ve had enough of this. Let’s go and have a drink or two.”’

  They go to Calvados, open all night. Rubi has sunk a lot by now yet Oleg says, ‘He could hold his liquor better than anyone I knew.’ But drink has turned sour in him, he’s gone flat. ‘I’m not happy,’ he tells Oleg. ‘It’s always the same thing. I don’t have any money. I don’t know if I can sell my house. I don’t know what’s going to happen… Odile is impossible.’

  Oleg tries to cheer him and Rubi rouses himself to say, ‘Hey mon vieux! Come back and stay with me at the house. We can have another glass of champagne and talk.’ But Cassini has a meeting early next morning and refuses. ‘I remember thinking I should go with him.’

  At 7 a.m. the Allée de la Reine Marguerite, which cuts through the Bois de Boulogne in a straight line, is almost empty of traffic. A Frenchman on his way to work gets into his parked car, either glances or fails to check his rear mirror, and pulls out. A Ferrari sports car travelling fast clips his bumper and rebounds. Its front wheels hit the kerb and it takes off to ram into a tree.

  The Frenchman runs to the crash. The driver is slumped forward, his chest crushed into the steering column. He’s struggling to extract the unconscious figure from the wreckage before it explodes when by pure chance an ambulance passes. He flags it down. The paramedics help free the driver and rush him to hospital. But it’s already too late, Rubi’s spine is broken and he is dead on arrival.

  CHAPTER 21

  AFTER RUBI

  After such knowledge of Rubi, what forgiveness? In the instant of his sudden death five wives and Zsa Zsa became widows-in-law, bonded by their relationship to the once-loved one. How did they feel about him?

  He had played a seminal role in all their pasts, been a lead character in their lives – though perhaps not the leading character. One cannot but be struck by the dominant father figure looming over most of their childhoods.

  Flor Trujillo had been twenty-two when she divorced Rubi. In the following years she ran through eight further husbands. She’d been in Montreal when she learned of her father’s assassination. ‘I wept tears of love and bitterness. I felt that I myself was dying, for I had no existence, no personality apart from Trujillo.’ When she got home the island was in chaos. Hysterical people swarmed the streets wailing, ‘The father of all of us has been killed.’ Ramfis was back with Rubi at his side. He’d seized power, and her ex-husband was about to tour the country with his own entourage to announce the ‘New Program’. Flor was filled with scorn. ‘Feckless playboy Rubi a politician? The very idea was comic… And it was high comedy to see Rubirosa riding his horse up George Washington Avenue, where once Trujillo had promenaded nightly, flanked by twenty or so henchmen.’

  Flor’s tone of contempt is clear, but it is the sole instance of it. Neither she nor any of his wives spoke badly of him afterwards. And neither did they repine or show bitterness at the financial cost and damage he’d done them, as many might in the circumstances. Partly this may be because these women all possessed wealth and an international circle of friends. They were not lonely in rejection, nor short of invitations. A variety of would-be lovers and would-be husbands stood available. Riches are a solace to the afflicted, you do not have to languish. As with other surgical operations, wealth can fix a broken heart.†

  Despite the humiliation she suffered in her five-year marriage, Flor recovered her spirit when she broke free from Rubi. She’d married him to get away from her father, but it is inescapable to conclude that he was only a substitute for her monstrous parent, the Great Benefactor, and from that relationship it would seem she never escaped, even after his death.

  For Danielle Darrieux, when aged twenty-four and married to a much older husband who had become a father figure, Rubi appeared on the scene at the right moment. She was ready to make a gesture to assert her independence and he was perfectly suited for the situation. The role was there for him, she invited him to step into it. For a while he filled it well, but then she fell in love with him…

  The day she learned of Rubi’s death she was filming Les Demoiselles de Rochefort with Gene Kelly and Catherine Deneuve. She had paid a high price for marrying him. Obtaining his freedom from imprisonment cost her her reputation and career. For over two years she lived in fear of reprisal and death. In 1948 she wed the writer Georges Mitsinkides, remaining happily married to him until his end in 1991. Following her pardon, she’d resumed work immediately. Between 1945 and 2008 she acted in seventy-eight movies, thirty-five stage plays, and twenty-eight TV productions. She was a trouper who played her part nobly to the end of her career.

  After divorcing Rubi, Doris Duke picked up Joey Castro, a Mexican pianist at the Mocambo Club in LA, telling the barman to put him on her tab. She’d been thirty-five when she married Rubi, in personality as dominating as her father Buck, yet incapable of love or care. There was nothing naïve about Doris, she was a journalist and she’d researched him thoroughly. She knew he was a crook, a thief, had been involved in murder. She believed she could handle the relationship as she had with Buck, she was in charge and held the chequebook. But in Buenos Aires and later in Paris the frequent humiliation, gossip and ridicule wore her down to the point where she slashed her wrists.

  Following separation from Rubi, Doris embraced the services of the first of a series of Indian yogis she hoped would restore her youth and cure a skin condition that increasingly troubled her. Joey Castro was said to be ‘neurotic and volatile’, he hit her over the head with a bottle and later broke her jaw. When she learned of Rubi’s death she was with another lover, Edward Tirella, who records, ‘She said Barbara Hutton had always been jealous of her. Rubi was the love of her life and Barbara stole him. “We could never get along but I still love the man.”’ Tirella himself Doris accidentally ran over and killed – he was planning to leave her.

  A new lover, Moroccan Leon Amar, reported, ‘She hated being what she was
. She said the only family she had was her dogs.’ Neither dermatologists nor Indian healers could cure Doris’s skin problems. Her body was disfigured by white blotches, though it did not prevent her pursuing sex. The doorman to her New York block said, ‘She brings these young studs in here and they’re up there fifteen or twenty minutes. I don’t know what she pays them.’

  In 1971 she legally adopted Chandi Heffner, a follower of Hare Krishna whom she believed to be a reincarnation of her dead daughter. To please her, Doris bought a Boeing 737. Its pilot said, ‘She went along with everything Chandi wanted … I think it was fear.’ In 1991 Chandi was dumped without notice. When Doris had a fall and broke her hip, her butler Bernard Lafferty began to make himself indispensable. Doris’s housekeeper says, ‘In March 1993 Lafferty told me she had suffered a stroke and was dying. I was asked to witness a codicil… Doyle [her lawyer] pushed her hand along the page, guiding the hand.’ Doris’s nurse says, ‘Dr Kivowitz told me it was time for Miss Duke to go.’ She was put on a morphine drip and given an injection. The cause of death was stated to be pulmonary oedema. She was eighty-one years old. Lafferty was left $5 million. He took to wearing her clothes and jewellery, cut and dyed his hair in her style and ordered her maid to make up his face in the same manner. He even started speaking in the same whispery voice as his dead mistress.

  In the fall of 1957 Barbara Hutton called a press conference at the Paris Ritz to announce her sixth marriage to Baron von Cramm. Three weeks later she returned to the hotel one afternoon to find him on his knees servicing a room-service waiter. She chose her last husband in Raymond Doan, half Vietnamese, an amateur painter. An impoverished Laotian family was induced to adopt him, giving him their ancestral title, and in 1964 Barbara became Princess de Champassak.