Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976)

by Stadiem, William

  The sexual dynamo’s big break had come from the first of his five marriages, to Flor de Oro, daughter of the brutal billionaire Dominican Republic dictator Rafael “El Jefe” Trujillo, with whom Rubirosa stayed close even after his divorce from Flor. Trujillo had made “Rubi” the Dominican envoy to Paris, the scene of Rubirosa’s initial forays into world society. Back in Santo Domingo, the capital, Trujillo made his country a citadel of Franco-esque Spanish fascism in the azure Caribbean seas, now threatening to turn Russian Red. When Castro took over the Habana Hilton in 1959, he also seized the Cuban gambling empire of the American Mafia. Igor Cassini instantly envisioned the Dominican Republic’s capital Santo Domingo as the reborn Havana, the ultimate Jet Set playground, and one that would be totally pro-American.

  BROTHERS OF CAMELOT. Igor Cassini and Bobby Kennedy, before Bobby indicted him, 1962. (photo credit 8.1)

  To that end, the moment Castro took power, Cassini, using favorite son-in-law Rubirosa as his advance man, charmed Trujillo into hiring Martial to do public relations for the country. Cassini easily won the account, but this was one client he could not brag about. Trujillo may have been a scourge against Communism, but he was hardly a poster boy for democracy. Ridiculed sub rosa by his fearful populace as “Chapitas,” or Bottlecaps, because of the way he festooned himself with round, shiny medals, the dictator similarly festooned his entire nation with his motto, “Dios y Trujillo” (God and Trujillo). No Hollywood star was ever as megalomaniacal. No Roman emperor was as bloodthirsty. As a career military man who seized power at age thirty-eight in 1930, he quickly suppressed his mother’s mulatto background and then embarked on a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing against Dominicans with “Haitian blood,” the largely black descendants of the once enslaved denizens of the island. His genocidal body count was thought to be as high as 50,000 people.

  Trujillo didn’t confine his death wishes to blacks. God help his opponents. He did his best to murder his enemy, President Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela, a failed effort that would get his country expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1960. He was already in the Washington, D.C., doghouse for his successful 1956 ordered murder in a New York subway station of Jesús Galíndez, a Columbia University lecturer and brainy, credible critic of the Trujillo reign of terror. Because of Trujillo’s being blacklisted and because of his dreadful press, Cassini set up a Bahamas subsidiary, Inter-American Public Relations, with his and Martial’s name nowhere on the masthead, to do the job.

  Still, Trujillo was a “get” Cassini was thrilled to have gotten. So what that it might take a mésalliance between dictators and crime bosses to make the world safer for democracy? It was better than Khrushchev. If Cassini could bridge Hollywood and Washington, as he did by running interference (and beautiful starlets) between the Rat Pack and the White House, why not also create a spur to Little Italy? Wasn’t that just what Sinatra was trying to do for his beloved and feared godfather figure, Chicago capo Sam Giancana? Giancana was the brawn behind the Cuban gambling empire that had been masterminded by the Mob’s finance wizard Meyer Lansky. But Sinatra’s bridge to gangland was too obvious, too inflammatory. Everybody knew Sinatra had the Mafia taint. Igor Cassini, conversely, was beholden to no one. With his impeccable social links to JFK and Rubirosa, Cassini saw himself as the next Dean Acheson or John Foster Dulles. Forget Cholly Knickerbocker. Think Metternich!

  Great PR man that he was intent on being, Cassini immediately began cogitating how to play up the virtues of his new client. On the positive side of the Trujillo ledger, if such can be said to have existed, El Jefe’s desire to “whiten” his country had made it a haven before, during, and after World War II for European Jews, as well as many other displaced Europeans. Trujillo therefore was toutable by Cassini as a “friend of Israel” to Kennedy liberals, while redneck Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond Southerners could not so secretly admire his muscular racism. In any event, for all his evil, Trujillo was way preferable to Castro in post-McCarthy America, especially if the casinos got rolling. Hot hands made for short memories.

  Trujillo had two polo-playing playboy sons, very much in the mold of their brother-in-law and style mentor, Rubirosa. Star fixtures for years in the Cholly Knickerbocker column, the “dictator’s boys” were the toast of Paris. The brothers were named Ramfis and Rhadames, after characters in Aida, and they lived in pharoahonic splendor that provided Cassini tons of copy. Ramfis had cut a swath in Hollywood, dating Zsa Zsa Gabor after her divorce from Conrad Hilton, as well as Kim Novak and lots of other starlets. His generosity toward these women was unmatched. His gifts to Gabor of a Mercedes and a chinchilla coat, reported gleefully in Cassini’s column, prompted Congressman Wayne Hays of Ohio, who would have his own front-page sex scandal in the seventies, to denounce Gabor as “the most expensive courtesan since Madame Pompadour.”

  The Hays broadside was also dutifully reported in Cholly, as was Mother Jolie Gabor’s defense of her golden girl: “What should a man send a girl like my daughter? Flowers?” Ramfis shared Gabor’s favors with Rubirosa, in between his brother-in-law’s big-bucks marriages to Duke and Hutton. Again Cassini was all over it, selling reams of newspapers. After his Hollywood idyll, Ramfis had spent a long time getting electroshock therapy. Rhadames, no slouch in the starlet sweepstakes, hit his peak when he stole away Darryl Zanuck’s mistress Bella Darvi. Rhadames also was famous for trashing more five-star hotel rooms than Keith Moon of the Who. Wild and crazy guys, yes, but good clean fun compared to Daddy’s death squads.

  After a year of little success bringing either positive publicity or gambling interests to his still-blacklisted, secret-client country, Igor Cassini finally got the chance he’d been waiting for. The moment of diplomatic opportunity took place on a Palm Beach golf course, where Cassini was duffing with Joe Kennedy and the CIA head Allen Dulles, brother of Eisenhower’s secretary of state. Cassini contrived to bring up the mounting possibility, gleaned both from Rubirosa and from his own work for the country, that the Dominican Republic was ripe for a Castro-style uprising. He expressed his opinion that JFK would be wiser to fortify a right-wing regime than to risk it being replaced by a left-wing Comintern.

  While Joe Kennedy was more interested in the size of Rubirosa’s member and its gilded peregrinations, Dulles, all business, sparked to Cassini’s gambit and expertise and galvanized Joe into leaning on son Jack to take action, which he did. In April 1961, just after the CIA’s disastrously botched invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the president dispatched Cassini as a top-secret envoy to the Dominican Republic to sound out Trujillo himself about improving U.S./Dominican relations, both public and private. A measure of the seriousness of the Cassini mission was the company he was to keep. JFK chose as Cassini’s partner one of America’s most respected big-time diplomats, Robert Murphy, a former ambassador to Belgium and Japan and, most recently, Eisenhower’s undersecretary of state for political affairs.

  A superpro like Murphy was needed because there were a lot of affairs to improve. At first Cassini and Murphy’s mission appeared to be a success. They had productive meetings with the generalissimo and his puppet president, Joaquín Balaguer, so productive that Cassini later wrote he had visions of himself as the ambassador to the Dominican Republic, not to mention the millions he would make in pieces of the action at the new casinos he assumed he would do the PR for.

  But the best-laid plans of Cassini and Kennedy went even more astray than had the Bay of Pigs. In late May 1961, barely a month after their meeting, Trujillo, en route in his turquoise Cadillac to visit his mistress, was ambushed in a military coup d’état. He went down shooting, riddled with over two dozens bullets fired by a team of hit men assembled by a general who happened to be married to Trujillo’s sister. Alas, the coup turned out to be less bang than whimper, a Caribbean Keystone Kops farce that concluded with the general and his co-conspirators being imprisoned and tortured under orders of fils Ramfis, who assumed his father’s power, albeit behind the facade of frontma
n Balaguer.

  When Trujillo was killed, Ramfis and Rhadames had been in Paris, living their typical high life with their brother-in-law, Rubirosa, all playing on the same world-class polo team. When they got the news, they paid $27,000 to Air France to charter a 707 to bring them back to their country, where they quickly took control and the would-be plotters lost their nerve. Igor Cassini was never concerned that death might stop the Trujillos. The night of the coup, the first person called by CIA chief Allen Dulles was his golfing partner Cassini, who he believed knew more about the island than any other American. Cassini told Dulles to rest easy. The Dominican Republic would be business as usual. Nothing would change except for the better.

  Rubirosa redonned his old diplomat hat and became the official spokesman for this new version of the ancien régime. Giving him a forum in the Hearst papers was none other than Igor Cassini, who adored putting aside his Cholly Knickerbocker chores for this vastly more august Joseph Alsop routine. If the Dominican coup was Keystone Kops revolution, this was Keystone Kops journalism, Rubirosa playing statesman and Cassini playing pundit. Rubirosa assured Cassini, hence the world, that the political prisoners would soon be freed, the dictatorship was over, and American-style democracy was nearly at hand.

  It was the baldest display of insincere public relations imaginable, but it was enough to allow Cassini to transcend Trujillo’s death and secure for Martial a fat new secret three-year contract between the new Dominican regime and his shell corporation Inter American to continue working for the banana republic. The fee was $120,000 for the first year, a hefty sum in 1961, with annual increases, plus a big bonus as soon as the Americans and the Dominicans resumed diplomatic relations.

  Rubirosa, who allegedly got a finder’s fee for getting Cassini this contract, cut his own deal with Ramfis—who had effectively assumed his father’s dictatorship—that would net Rubi a cool $250,000 the moment Washington removed the country from the OAS blacklist. That cleansing seemed like a fait accompli now that Trujillo, the despot who had ordered all the hits, had been hit. The Trujillo Hit Parade seemed finally to be over. To cement the deal, Rubirosa’s shuttle diplomacy took him on several Kennedy–Rat Pack yacht trips, one to the Riviera, another off the New England coast.

  Even Fidel Castro found the Rubi-Frankie-Camelot triangle a bit much and denounced it on his radio broadcasts. Despite Cassini’s efforts to whitewash Ramfis, other investigative journalists began filing reports of Trujillo Junior’s reign of terror against his father’s assassins: hair-raising tales of torture that made waterboarding look like a day at the beach. There were eyelid slashings, genital electroshock, all sorts of truth serums, and as the pièce de résistance, a delicious blanquette served to one of the starving imprisoned suspects who, at the height of his satiety, was informed that its chief ingredient was the entrails of his son. The suspected assassin was reported to have died of a heart attack on the spot. Then there were rumors that Ramfis not only led his own satanic cult but possessed a private freezer stuffed with the decapitated heads of the lovers of his unfaithful mistresses, a kind of cold-storage trophy case. The presumptions of evil were harder and harder for Cassini to dispel.

  Ramfis must have felt the heat. In November 1961, in the dead of night, Ramfis and his entourage flew back to Europe on another leased Air France 707, filled to the gills with millions of dollars, plus jewelry, art, and stock certificates worth tens of millions more. He was given sanctuary in Madrid by fellow dictator Francisco Franco and resumed his playboy high life, blithely conceding that he never was cut out for politics. In January 1962, the Trujillo puppet, Balaguer, was overthrown by still another general, Rodriguez Echeverria, but the illusion of change was enough for the OAS to finally lift its sanctions.

  Now Cassini and Rubirosa should have been able to really cash in, but their deals were with the Trujillos, not the new government, which repudiated everything the Trujillos had done. So the diplomatic windfall the two men expected never came to pass. Rubirosa, who needed the money, was beyond furious at Ramfis and his Trujillo in-laws. He had played the diplomat for them, and now he was made to look like their fool. Retreating to Paris with his polo ponies and his Ferraris and his new young wife, Odile, for once neither a star nor an heiress, Rubirosa, now in his fifties, never spoke to the Trujillos, nor played polo with them, ever again. Cassini, who was too much of a comedian to mind playing the fool, was more upset that his chance to elevate his status turned out to be a pipe dream. What he didn’t realize was that the pipe dream would become the nightmare of his existence within a year.

  The route to Pennsylvania Avenue having been closed off, Igor Cassini focused on Madison Avenue as never before. If he couldn’t be a big diplomat, he had to become a big businessman. Even though Igor’s father-in-law, C. B. Wrightsman, had a fortune valued at over $100 million, there was no guarantee that Igor’s wife, Charlene, would get one cent. Hadn’t old C.B., as mean and nasty as an Okie cattle rustler, disinherited Charlene’s older sister for eloping with the scoundrel Freddie McEvoy? Igor was a scoundrel, too, in a different way, and he never felt secure with C.B. Actually, he never felt secure anywhere, given his displaced family’s past. And what journalist really felt secure? Even though he was earning more than his chief gossip rival, Walter Winchell, at this point, Igor felt the imperative to diversify, to get into business, real business.

  Hence he set out to make Martial the undisputed publicity top shop in all the media. Martial was necessary but not sufficient for Igor’s dreams of corporate grandeur. Cassini had another big plan in the works: to get into the global franchise business, using a vehicle that had never been franchised, the new French version of the nightclub known as the discotheque. Igor wanted to become an after-hours Conrad Hilton. In late 1961, right after the Trujillo sons fled the Dominican Republic, Igor, determined to recoup his Caribbean losses, founded Le Club, a snobby, doorman-rejecting-everyone, French-style discotheque that aimed to ape the wild success of two Parisian temples of pop-music-paced revelry, Régine and Castel. These clubs mixed old guard with new wave, tycoons with noblemen with movie stars—in short, the Jet Set as Igor Cassini wrote about it.

  For the New York take on the Paris model, Igor, with Oleg’s design help, found an old photographer’s studio off Sutton Place near the East River, decorated it in the taxidermic style of a baronial, high-ceilinged Austrian hunting lodge, and mounted a discreet “Members Only” plaque on the front door. The formula was El Morocco, Manhattan café society’s premier supper club, but without a coat and tie, and everyone doing the twist to Chubby Checker. Igor quickly enrolled 600 members for a space that could hold only 200, an instant guarantee of scarcity-based exclusivity. The roster included Kennedys, Vanderbilts, the Duke of Bedford, the Maharaja of Jaipur, actor Rex Harrison, producer Sam Spiegel, lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, writer George Plimpton—the same people who danced at Régine and Castel, Claude Terrail’s Tour d’Argent people, Igor Cassini’s Jet Set people. Le Club was their club.

  The brothers had done a successful dry run at this kind of Europeanization of American leisure several years before, when they launched an exclusive Swiss-style ski resort in Sugarbush, Vermont. Igor had introduced the place in his column as “El Morocco on the Rocks.” Why, he asked, go to Gstaad or St. Moritz when Sugarbush was a five-hour drive, much closer than the eight-hour jet to Zurich, and minus all those alpine roads? So they built it, and They came: the Kennedys, the Agnellis, those party-animal Greeks. This effort to Alpinize and glamorize the traditionally subdued, low-key Vermont winter sports experience was such a hit that the Cassinis were emboldened to try to reinvent New York’s midnight-hour experience. They saw themselves as the Pied Pipers of the leisure class dressed by Oleg and immortalized by Igor.

  Like Conrad Hilton’s chain of hotels, the Cassini ventures were financed with someone else’s money. Igor’s chief backer for Le Club was the man who provided the hardwood for the elegant dance floor that the power couples of the time, from Ari Onassis and Maria Callas
to Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor, were twisting and frugging and Watusi-ing on. But this floor man was strictly a penthouse dweller. Known as America’s floor king, he was the chairman of the Tennessee-based E. L. Bruce Company, the Rolls-Royce of hardwood. His factories may have been in the rural South, but his fast-lane life took him all over the world in the highest style. His name was Eddie Gilbert, and he was by far the most glamorous businessman in the country, a glamour created in part by Igor Casssini, who coined for the thirty-nine-year-old Gilbert the name “Boy Wonder of Wall Street,” just as he had coined the name “Jet Set” for Gilbert’s crowd.

  Eddie Gilbert was fascinating to the public because of his bold and acrobatic maneuvers, not only in corporate takeovers but also in social climbing. His remarkable success in both arenas made him one of the rare Jews in the upper reaches of the Jet Set; he was also the most colorful high financier in the business pages. Gilbert was living proof of the new mobility, both geographical and social, engendered by the jets. Fast and easy travel was opening up the world and breaking down once rigid class barriers. The old WASP establishment was beginning to crumble, replaced by a far less stratified and more permeable society defined by flash, glamour, and publicity. Instead of the Knickerbocker, always the most exclusive men’s club in New York, Le Club became the place everyone who was anyone wanted to join. All his energy and his wiles notwithstanding, Eddie Gilbert could not have gotten where he was without the promotional skills of Igor Cassini. Thanks to Igor’s efforts, Eddie Gilbert became the case study on how to rise to the top of the new 707-fueled social order.

  Cassini’s Martial had a very fat contract to do E. L. Bruce’s corporate public relations. But people, certainly the Cholly Knickerbocker people, didn’t think of floors when they thought of Eddie Gilbert. They thought of his lifestyle, which was probably unmatched among Fortune tycoons, and was certainly unequaled among men in their thirties, other than hereditary princes like the Aga Khan. Eddie Gilbert had palatial residences on Fifth Avenue, in Palm Beach, in Cap Martin on the Côte d’Azur. Although he was tiny (five-five), with receding hair, and evoked a bantam Jewish boxer, Eddie saw himself as his rich parents saw him, as a prince of the realm. All his trappings were princely even if he didn’t look the part.