The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa (Text Only)

by Shawn Levy

  On Monday, forty known Trujillo supporters from among Manhattan’s Dominican community were rounded up and questioned by detectives of the so-called alien squad at the West 152nd Street station, but no arrests were made. On Tuesday morning, Bencosme succumbed to his wounds and died in the hospital, leaving behind a widow and two children in Ciudad Trujillo. Finally, Mrs. Higgs sat in a station house and looked at mug shots of Dominicans with histories of criminal violence. She looked at a 1932 booking photo and declared that the man pictured in it was the killer.

  It was, of course, Chichi de la Fuente Rubirosa.

  After going before a grand jury to present the known facts of the case, many of which derived from Morales’s own contacts and investigation, the New York County District Attorney’s Office filed an indictment in absentia for murder against Chichi on February 18, 1936. According to the charges, “Captain Porfirio Rubirosa” had been in New York immediately prior to the shooting and Chichi was, nearly a year after the shooting, living in Ciudad Trujillo as a lieutenant in the Dominican army despite his total lack of military training. Chichi’s extradition was sought through the State Department, but little hope was held out that the accused killer would be sent back to New York.

  Back in Ciudad Trujillo, Flor knew nothing about the events in New York—the murder wasn’t exactly front-page news in the state-controlled local papers—but like everyone else in the culture of gossip that was coming to thrive under Trujillo, she heard things. She was only mildly surprised, therefore, to answer a knock at her door on a night when her husband and father were out of town to find Chichi standing there begging for help.

  “I had to leave the States,” he explained. “They are pursuing me.”

  For a while, Chichi lived with his cousin and his wife and sought work around the city; he even put in a spell on the harbor project that had driven Porfirio and Flor to leave home the year before. It wasn’t a promising situation, and Porfirio didn’t exactly relish it, especially as Chichi aggravated matters by hinting broadly around town that he had done Trujillo a great service and deserved to be at least a captain for his efforts.

  He might as well have cut his own throat. “One evening,” Flor recalled, “we came home to find him gone. Servants said ‘strangers’ had surrounded the house and taken him away. We never heard from Chichi or saw him again—and my husband would not comment on the affair.” (When a year or so later Flor thought she saw Chichi on the street and pointed the look-alike out to Porfirio, he snapped back, “Don’t mention that name! Those kids were good-for-nothings!”) When the U.S. State Department inquired as to Chichi’s whereabouts, they were told alternately that no such person existed and that the fellow in question had died in a dredging accident in the harbor. But police and prosecutors in New York still wanted to talk to Porfirio—and they would be patient in waiting to do so for decades.

  This drama did little to stabilize the marriage of Porfirio and Flor, which continued to be roiled by Trujillo. In the summer of 1935, they found themselves once again in the Benefactor’s confidence. He was suffering from a severe case of urethritis and required surgery. Because of his need to maintain a show of superhuman capacity, he arranged for a French specialist to be brought secretly to perform the operation. The doctor was put up—again, on the QT—at Porfirio and Flor’s home, where he conducted three operations on the president, using only local anesthetic. Trujillo was so weakened by the ordeal that rumors spread as far as Washington, D.C., that he was dying. To put an end to the gossip, he left his makeshift intensive care bed and had himself driven through the capital in a Rolls-Royce for an hour, long enough so that word of his good health would circulate. When he recovered, he returned to his own house without so much as a thank-you for his daughter and son-in-law.

  At the time, Flor’s own health was of concern. She had been trying to conceive a child and was told by her physician to seek the advice of a specialist in the United States, where she underwent a surgical procedure designed to address her infertility.* When she came home hopeful of starting a family, she found her household had been the scene of one of Porfirio’s bacchanalian parrandas: There were women’s earrings in the swimming pool, and one of her servants confided that “all the whores in Santo Domingo have been here.”

  She begged her father to help her do something about this nightmare, and he offered a unique solution: In July 1936, he named Porfirio secretary of the Dominican legation in Berlin.

  They arrived at the height of preparations for the Nazi Olympics, an event that drew to the city a claque of idle rich scenesters from around the Continent: Porfirio’s crowd exactly. With almost no work assigned to him, he kept up the equestrian skills in the city’s parks, began to take a series of fencing lessons, and, in general, dove into a more luxe version of the life he had lived in Paris as a feckless teen. “Berlin suited me perfectly,” he admitted blithely. “I could ride, go to clubs, drive fast and dance at the afternoon teas at the Eden.”

  Needless to say, those afternoon teas involved women—and not Dominican whores, either, but a breed of woman that intimidated Flor. “How could I,” she wondered, “still a provincial girl in her early 20s, unworldly, badly dressed, mousy, compete with these women?” She was particularly anxious about a certain Martha: “Soignée, blazing with diamonds, she was everything I was not.”

  But there were other, nameless rivals. There was the time one of Porfirio’s afternoon teas turned into dinner and an overnight stay. He snuck home to the Dominican embassy at dawn, quickly showered and dressed for breakfast, and made his way to his dining room where Flor and the ambassador, among others, awaited him. He sat nonchalantly and then noticed a bouquet of roses in front of his place setting. Attached was a note written in a feminine hand, a paean to a night that had seemed never to end, like midsummer’s eve in Sweden. Whatever cock-and-bull story Porfirio had planned to offer vanished from his head: “My pretty German spoke of the Scandinavian summer. Breakfast proceeded like the middle of the Siberian winter. Since then, I can’t see a bouquet of roses without feeling a bit of a shiver.” But any chastening he felt soon dissolved, as when he had frightened his parents by spending the night out as a boy, and he presently resumed his rambles.

  Official duties dotted the high life. Because of their relative worldliness, because they were relatives of the Dominican president, and because the Third Reich was courting Caribbean governments as part of its scheme of global expansion, Porfirio and Flor were granted a number of remarkable privileges. When the Olympics began, they were permitted to sit in Hitler’s box at the main stadium, where they observed the Führer’s caroms between childish glee at each German victory and rock stolidity when another nation’s anthem was played at a medal ceremony. They were feted by Hermann Göring, who took Porfirio aside during the evening and expressed interest in obtaining a particularly handsome Dominican medal. They were invited to the annual party rally in Nuremberg, where they gazed in stupefaction at an orgy of adulation on a scale of which Trujillo, with his own budding cult of personality, could only dream.

  Despite such impressive shows, both young Dominicans were shocked by the outright anti-Semitism of the regime. Flor found herself secretly aiding a Jewish girl who had been her schoolmate in France, obtaining visas for her and her husband and seeing to their getting settled in the Dominican Republic and started in the tobacco business. Porfirio was staggered one day as he rode through a park and saw a young man wearing a yellow star and being humiliated by Germans. “Racism never occurred to me,” he reflected. Indeed, he had enjoyed a certain éclat for his Creole heritage, which was evident even though he was fair-skinned enough to pass for Latin as opposed to Negro. “In the Dominican Republic, blacks and whites were equals. At times they mixed. There were social differences, but in the most exclusive places one met people of color. In Paris as well, racial problems didn’t exist.”

  But at the same time, neither of them had any inkling of how truly invidious the Reich was or would be. Dazzled, perhaps,
by his good fortune to be living with money in a posh European capital, Porfirio reckoned that Hitler’s great shows of force “were no more than a bluff.” In retrospect he would feel some shame at his miscalculation. “I’m not a politician,” he would explain. But he noted, too, that the diplomatic corps of larger and more sophisticated nations were equally gulled by the Führer. If he had been fooled, he wasn’t alone.

  Before he could fathom the truth of the Reich, however, he found himself transferred. Flor was so miserable living in Berlin with her rakish husband that she wrote to her father to express her displeasure:

  I have learned a little German and seen a lot of the country, and I have admired the great work of Hitler. But nevertheless I’m not happy.… In diplomatic circles, most of the officials are on the left. They don’t invite us to their dances and I don’t have the chance to meet anybody. If it isn’t too much to ask, I’d like you to transfer us to Paris.… There, I’d have occasion to attend many conferences and get to know better the French literature that I like so well. Please let me know if you can comply with this request.

  Indeed, he could, but first a royal interlude in London: On May 12, 1937, they represented the Dominican Republic at the coronation of George VI; Porfirio met the monarch in a private audience. Two days later, at the Dominican legation at 21 Avenue de Messine in Paris, the following note arrived from the undersecretary of foreign relations in Ciudad Trujillo:

  It pleases me to inform you that the most excellent Señor Presidente of the Republic has seen fit to name Mr. Porfirio Rubirosa as Secretary First Class of this legation in substitute for Gustavo J. Henriquez, who has been designated Secretary First Class in Berlin in substitution for Mr. Porfirio Rubirosa.

  This was far more like it.

  Paris had changed in the decade since he’d last lived there: The tangos and Dixieland in the nightclubs had been swept away by a wave of Russian music and Gypsy-flavored hot jazz; the chic hot spots were now on the Left Bank of the Seine instead of the Right. But it was intoxicating to be there, to saunter into his old haunts in search of old friends, to pass by the erstwhile family house on Avenue Mac-Mahon, to delight in the new fashions favored by women in both couture and amour. When he stowed away on the Carimare and left France he was a child, as Don Pedro had despairingly declared; now he was a twenty-eight-year-old man with means and liberty.

  “As soon as I arrived in Paris,” he remembered without shame, “invitations began pouring in. I was out every night, often alone. My wife objected … she could not keep up with me.”

  In large part, his duties at the embassy would be, as in Berlin, ceremonial. He and Flor were presented to the general commissioner of the upcoming Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, and he found himself appointed to a panel of judges who would award prizes to various exhibits. It was a prestigious post. The exposition, a gigantic world’s fair celebrating global modernity, took over the area around the Eiffel Tower and Palais de Trocadero throughout the summer. It was a marvel of aesthetic novelties paraded by nations on the verge of global war: Albert Speer’s soaring German pavilion; Pablo Picasso’s searing Guernica in the Spanish pavilion; a Finnish hall designed by Alvar Aalto; illuminated fountains; exhibitions dedicated to the latest advances in refrigeration and neon light. The Dominican Republic couldn’t compete with those sorts of things, but they did share some exhibit space with other Caribbean nations, showing off native crafts and the work of the latest Dominican artists. Trujillo instigated dozens of letters between Paris and Ciudad Trujillo about the exposition; he was delighted to learn that the French artist and critic Alfred Lebrun “had formed an elevated new idea of the progress achieved by our country,” and he sent the eminent man a box of cigars in gratitude.

  The Benefactor lived for this sort of thing, and he kept Porfirio busy with the most bizarre little requests to satisfy better his comprehension of the modern world and his nation’s place in it. He sent to Paris for atlases and diplomatic dictionaries; he hired a Paris-based Caribbean journalist to analyze the possibility of his being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize; he had framed photos of the legation sent to him, and signatures of foreign officials, with whom he also exchanged pens; relishing the opportunity to acquire foreign honors in exchange for those of the Dominican Republic, he ordered miniatures and reproductions of each new award he received. Porfirio served so well as the conduit for all this ephemera that he was promoted to consul in July 1937.

  But at the same time that he put forward the shiny front of his daughter and son-in-law for Europe’s leaders, Trujillo was revealing his most atrociously dark side back home. He had spent the first years of his rule quelling—through political machination, bribery, and, especially, brute force—all internal opposition. Now he turned his attention to Haiti. It was a natural target for him: The border between the two countries was something of a fiction, having been drawn along no clear geographical or political lines and passing through remote districts whose residents truly might not be able to say which country they lived in or who its ruler was. Moreover, Trujillo, like every Dominican, had been bred with a fear and hatred of Haiti born of centuries of conflict, and he had, like every leader of both nations, harbored dreams of uniting Hispaniola under his hand. At the very least, he wanted clear autonomy over his own portion of the island, and Haiti and its citizens always seemed to be interfering with that prospect. Throughout the early years of Trujillo’s reign, Haitian encroachment on Dominican territory became burdensome in a number of ways: public health, cattle rustling, an increase in churches practicing a mixture of Catholicism and voodoo, Haitian infiltration into the Dominican sugar industry, and so forth. There had been some efforts toward a détente between Trujillo and his Haitian counterpart, Stenio Vincent. But as the grievances were felt chiefly by Dominicans, it was inevitably Trujillo who was the more vexed.

  His frustration reached the tipping point in October 1937, when he gave a provocative speech about Dominican sovereignty and national purity. That very night, up and down the border and in the areas farther inland that were easily accessible to Haitian migrants, small cadres of armed men—some from the official military, others no better organized than the makeshift platoons that Don Pedro Rubirosa had once commanded—rounded up all the Haitians they could find and slaughtered them.

  It was the most brutal sort of genocide. In a land where virtually everyone was of mixed blood, it was nevertheless assumed that Haitians were generally darker-skinned, meaning that many black Dominicans were swept up in the raids; a crude test of certain Spanish words that French speakers notoriously had trouble pronouncing was instituted. Have a dark enough complexion and say perejil (“parsley”) improperly and you were dead. It went on for several days: mass murder by machete and pistol. By the time it was over, some 15,000 to 20,000 people had been killed.

  It took several weeks for word of the massacre to reach the outside world, and when it did, the bloody face of the Trujillo regime first became known globally. In France, the colonial fatherland of Haiti, the events were received with special outrage; Trujillo took out subscriptions to French newspapers to keep track of what they were saying about him. For some time, Trujillo managed to keep the world at bay by explaining the genocide as a spontaneous outburst of his people, who had grown tired of being inundated with and exploited by Haitians. That charade didn’t last long—the United States government, still keenly observing Dominican affairs, was particularly anxious to uncover the truth—and Trujillo finally submitted to mediation and a judgment against his government, which paid $525,000 in damages to Haiti. The reaction of the world to this ghastly event forever altered Trujillo’s political prospects. He had forced his way to the presidency in 1930; he had run unopposed for reelection four years later; but after the Haitian massacre he could never again hold the office, satisfying himself rather with strictly managing Dominican political and economic life through a string of puppet presidents he installed in the National Palace. As a sop, he had himself
declared generalissimo, adding an unprecedented fifth star to his epaulets and another title to the encomia by which he demanded to be addressed.

  While Trujillo was roiled by grisly events of his own making, his son-in-law prospered in small fashion. In August 1937, as the barbaric Haitian plot was forming, a letter arrived at the Foreign Ministry in Ciudad Trujillo from a stamp collector in Paris: He had seen in the collections of several local dealers whole sheets of uncanceled Dominican stamps and was wondering if he might buy such rarities directly from the source and avoid paying a markup to middlemen. Trujillo immediately wrote to the Parisian embassy notifying the ambassador that somebody in his charge was stealing stamps and selling them on the sly to philatelists around the city. After several weeks, a reply was sent declaring that the dealers had identified their source for this contraband as Porfirio’s brother-in-law, Gilberto Sánchez Lustrino, who had, in the way of things in the Trujillo Era, turned from snobbish disparagement of the Benefactor’s mean roots to groveling obsequy and parasitic dependence. In the coming years, Sánchez Lustrino would paint sycophantic word pictures of the Benefactor’s greatness in prose and verse, and as editor of the ardently proregime newspaper La Nación. In Paris, one of several foreign postings in which he would serve, he had obviously fallen in with Porfirio, whose delicate fingerprints would be invisible on this clever but short-lived enrichment scheme. In any case, no record of punishment for the thefts found its way into the diplomatic archives.

  Perhaps Porfirio wasn’t guilty. But more likely his complicity was overlooked by the ambassador himself, the Benefactor’s older brother Virgilio Trujillo Molina, who would fill ambassadorial posts in Europe for decades. Virgilio was always frankly resentful of his younger brother, if for no other reason than the mere notion that he was older and yet less powerful. Dependent on his sibling, like all other Dominicans, for work, money, and even life and limb, he made a habit of cultivating his own cadre of acolytes and, on occasion, hatching his own financial and political intrigues. Virgilio found a sufficiently eager ally in Porfirio, for instance, that he overlooked the younger man’s infidelities against Flor, who was, after all, his niece. And he would continue to maintain friendly relations with Porfirio as the illustrious marriage of 1932 devolved into the domestic shambles of 1937.