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

by Shawn Levy

  Paris, alas, hadn’t, as Flor had hoped, proved an even ground where her familiarity with the surroundings would counterbalance her husband’s shamelessness. The couple had moved from the embassy to a home in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb just beyond the Bois de Boulogne. It should have been heaven. But, “unfortunately,” in Porfirio’s view, they were not alone: “A cousin of Flor’s was with us constantly.” The girl was Ligia Ruiz Trujillo de Berges, the daughter of the Benefactor’s younger sister Japonesa (so nicknamed for the almond shape of her eyes). “When I went to the embassy,” Porfirio recalled, “she didn’t separate from Flor for even a minute; in the evenings, she went out with us. She was in all our conversations, even our arguments, and this is no good for a couple. It’s possible to convince a woman of your good intentions or of the meaninglessness of a little fight; but two!”

  Ligia had Flor’s ear and convinced her cousin that the marriage had degenerated irredeemably. She persuaded Flor to return to Ciudad Trujillo to seek her father’s help in corralling Porfirio and perhaps in making him feel sufficiently jealous or guilty or nostalgic that he would change his ways. Flor explained the trip by claiming that her father wanted her back home because of some family crisis (“She lied,” Porfirio declared with misplaced umbrage) and left France. When she arrived back home, she sent word of her true intent. “I feel life between us has become impossible,” he reported her to have said. “I want to see if I can live without you.” Then, he claimed, she visited his mother, Doña Ana, to solicit her help in repairing the marriage. Per Porfirio’s account, Flor sobbed to her mother-in-law, “Ask him to come find me. I love him. I know I’ve always loved him. Ask him to forgive me. Everything can go back to how it was.” Doña Ana, taking pity, relayed as much to her son.

  But, he said, he balked. “Everything couldn’t be as it was. Nothing could ever be as it was. It’s true I erred as a husband, but there’s no doubt that I regretted this match. In the lives of men, as in the histories of nations, there are periods of acceleration, and I was living through one. The brake that Flor represented no longer worked. My mother’s letter didn’t move me.”

  Naturally, Flor’s account of their separation would be different. The parent at whom she threw herself in her version of events was her own father, who coldly declared that he’d warned her about marrying such a wastrel and tried to mollify her with this consolation: “Don’t worry, you’re the one with money.” As proof, he tossed her a catalog of American luxury cars and told her she could choose one for herself; she picked a fancy Buick and tried to have it sent to Paris as a gift to Porfirio, hoping it would mend the breach; her father put a stop to that plan.

  Indeed, not only wouldn’t Trujillo allow a car to be sent to his son-in-law, he wouldn’t allow his daughter to return to him. “I’ll never let you go back to that man,” he announced, and he had his lawyer begin writing up the papers necessary for a divorce.*

  Flor claimed that the shadow of divorce evoked a new passion in her husband: “When I wrote that I wasn’t coming back, he sent letters pleading with me to return, threatening to join the French Foreign Legion if I didn’t.”

  But Porfirio had a slightly different recollection of his impending bachelorhood: “Freedom in Paris was never disagreeable. I went out a lot.”

  In November 1937, the decree was declared; in January 1938, the couple were officially divorced. Separated from Trujillo’s wrath by an ocean, protected by Virgilio and, perhaps, by his ability to implicate the Benefactor in the Bencosme affair, connected more to Paris than he was to his own homeland, Porfirio stayed put, chary but more or less safe and even eager. Having married the boss’s daughter and returned in luxe fashion to the city of his boyhood ramblings, he was ready to take huge gulps of the world.

  * * *

  * Figure $100,000 in 2005.

  * The question of who was to blame for the couple’s childlessness would never be answered. Neither ever had children, despite the combined twelve marriages they entered after this first. It was long rumored that Porfirio was rendered sterile by a childhood bout with the mumps, and Flor occasionally hinted that one or both of them had been rendered infertile by a venereal disease Porfirio had contracted in one of his rambles and subsequently shared with her.

  * Just the year before, Trujillo had passed a remarkably progressive divorce law that allowed a marriage that hadn’t produced children after five years to be dissolved by mutual consent of the spouses. It was a means for him to leave Doña Bienvenida, with whom he had no children, and marry María Martínez, the mother of Ramfis. Not long after he pulled off this legislative coup and took his third wife, however, he fathered a child—technically a bastard—with his just-divorced second wife.

  FIVE

  STAR POWER

  On the one hand: liberty.

  In divorcing Flor, Porfirio had unchained himself from an anchor, but he had also let go of a lifeline.

  Yes, she behaved prematurely like an old Dominican dama with her petulant whining about his carousing and his other women, refusing to accept him for the type of man he was.

  But: As the daughter of a powerful man, she was a direct conduit to money, security, and stature—and perhaps, given Trujillo’s incendiary nature, life itself. Losing her meant unmooring himself totally from the life he’d known since boyhood, a life implicated in the political goings-on of his homeland.

  He lost everything. Before long, dunning letters began arriving at the Dominican embassy in Paris—saddleries and purveyors of equestrian clothing looking for payment on items he’d bought with a line of credit he no longer commanded.

  By then, at any rate, he was no longer, technically, an embassy employee. Trujillo had expelled him from the diplomatic corps in January 1938. Virgilio, the generalissimo’s resentful older brother, managed to secure him a temporary appointment as consul to a legation that served Holland and Belgium jointly, but that expired by April. He held on to his diplomatic passport and was occasionally seen around Paris in embassy cars, but he was, literally, a man without a country. He wasn’t about to go home to the Dominican Republic, where his prospects for work were no better than in Europe and his prospects for play considerably worse. Plus, he had already heard from his mother not to risk the trip: Trujillo wanted his head; Paris was decidedly safer.

  He was certain in his own mind that Flor hadn’t instigated her father’s fury. Indeed, he would declare that he always harbored warm feelings for her: “After this romantic catastrophe, we stayed good friends.” (They were widely said, in fact, to reignite their sex life whenever Flor, who’d apparently overcome her initial aversion to his lovemaking, was in Europe.) “And,” he continued, “I followed, with friendship, her life.” With friendship and, no doubt, amazement: after divorcing Porfirio, Flor would go on to take another eight husbands, including a Dominican doctor, an American doctor, a Brazilian mining baron, an American Air Force officer, a French perfumer, a Dominican singer, and a Cuban fashion designer. She had a short heyday as a diplomat in Washington, D.C., but during long periods of her life her father disowned her and even had her held under house arrest in Ciudad Trujillo. She would eventually come to dismiss her first husband with a shrug, answering interviewers who asked whether he was handsome or charming with a curt “For a Dominican.”*

  And so what to do?

  Another man might assess the situation and reckon it was time to think about settling down in France: a wife, a job, kids, a house, responsibility.

  Not a tíguere, not with this sort of freedom, not at this time, in this place, with this thrilling sense of possibility and a titillating sense of impending catastrophe. “I was a young man in a Paris that the specter of war had heated up,” he remembered. “I lived a swirling life, without cease, without the pauses that would have allowed me the chance to think and make me realize that giant steps aren’t the only strides that suit a man.”

  He spent time at Jimmy’s, a Montparnasse nightclub run by an Italian whose real name too closely resembled M
ussolini’s to make for good advertising and who therefore took an American name as a PR maneuver. There, the comic jazz singer Henri Salvador became a friend. Porfirio sat in with his band for late night sessions—his little skill on the guitar and enthusiasm for drums were fondly received—and led parrandas of the musicians and clubgoers late into the night, retiring to this or that partyer’s flat for bouts of drinking and merrymaking that could last until the middle of the next day.

  Of course, this sort of traveling circus required funding, and, as its ringmaster no longer enjoyed legitimate work as a diplomat, other strategies emerged. There was the familiar one of living off a woman. La Môme Moineau, the singing, yachting wife of Félix Benítez Rexach, was in Paris and available to him once again as her husband was off earning millions on his various projects in the Dominican Republic. Now, however, she had a fortune to spend on and share with her lover; he drove around the city at various times in one or another of her little fleet of luxury cars; occasionally, he would raise cash by selling off some valuable bijou from her jewel case.

  This character—nightclubber, cuckolder, kept man, gigolo, scene maker, skirt chaser, dandy—was not so much a new Porfirio as an evolved one. Nearing thirty, freed of father, wife, and father-in-law—the living connections to his homeland that had thus far defined him—he was no longer an exotic, a Dominican in Paris, but, more and more, a Parisian with intriguingly Dominican roots. He had been an enthusiastic regular in the demimonde; now he was a staple of it. And, free of the constraints of decorum that adhered to him as the son of Don Pedro or the son-in-law of Trujillo, he no longer required so formal and elaborate a name as Porfirio Rubirosa. Anyone who knew him, truly knew him, in Paris after his divorce or, indeed, for the rest of his life, knew him as Rubi. Even more than his mellifluous given name, which he still used to dramatic effect and for official purposes, this new moniker captured his mature essence: the jauntiness, the rarity and high cost, the sparkle and the sharpness and sensuality and the bloody, cardinal allure.

  Especially, perhaps, the bloody allure.

  Over the years, he would—by virtue of his high living, his obscure origins, his association with Trujillo, his love of thrills and danger—almost inevitably be associated with shadowy events. Most of it was idle gossip. In some cases, such as the Bencosme murder, there were real reasons to think he was involved, albeit peripherally.

  And then there was the matter of the Aldao jewels and Johnny Kohane.

  For all the munificence of La Môme Moineau, Rubi wasn’t satisfied with his solvency. The life to which he aspired required real capital. He needed a score. In early 1938, while he was still holding, despite Trujillo’s injunctions against him, a diplomatic passport and temporary consular position, Rubi became involved in a scheme to smuggle a small fortune in jewels out of Spain. The goods in question belonged to Manuel Fernandez Aldao, proprietor of one of the most esteemed jewelry establishments of Madrid. In November 1936, when the Spanish Civil War had so turned that Madrid was under siege, Aldao had fled for safety to France and left a good deal of his wealth behind in the form of a safe filled with jewels guarded by an employee named Viega. Two years later, Aldao had need of his resources but was unable to retrieve them himself. He came into contact with Rubi, perhaps through Virgilio Trujillo, and hired him to go to Madrid and use his diplomatic pouch to transport a cache of jewels—and an inventory describing them—back to Paris.

  In the time it took for the details of the operation to be worked out, another errand was added to Rubi’s schedule and another conspirator to the plot: Johnny Kohane, a Polish Jew who had also fled Spain without his fortune (some $160,000 in gold, jewels, and currency, he said), was introduced to Rubirosa by Salvador Paradas, who’d replaced him at the Dominican embassy. Kohane had need of his stash, and it was agreed that he would join Rubi on the trip using a passport borrowed from the Dominican embassy chauffeur, Hubencio Matos. In February, the two would-be smugglers got into the embassy’s Mercedes and drove across southern France and, through the Republican-controlled entry point of Cerbere-Portbou, into war-ravaged Spain.

  A dozen days later, Rubi returned—alone.

  He handed a sack of jewels over to Aldao—a smaller one than the Spaniard expected—and claimed that he’d never been given any inventory to go with it. And he told a hair-raising story about the bad luck he and Kohane had run into outside of Madrid when they were off fetching the Pole’s fortune. They were set upon, he said, by armed men, he wasn’t sure from which side, who chased them and shot at them, killing Kohane. He was lucky, he said, to get out of there with his own skin intact.

  What could anyone say? He’d had the moxie to go get the jewels and to get back in one piece. As for Kohane, it was a war zone; he knew it was a dangerous proposition going into it. Suspicion was natural. The car in which Rubi claimed to have been ambushed evinced not a single scratch. But there was no tangible proof that the story, however far-fetched, wasn’t true. Aldao paid Rubi his agreed-upon fee—a platinum-and-diamond brooch—and stewed over the matter for years.

  When the situation in Spain finally settled and it was safe to cross back through France, Aldao returned home and looked into the matter of the half bag of jewels and the missing inventory. He wasn’t pleased. There had been an inventory, and Viega had handed it to Rubi; a carbon copy of the original document still sat in the company safe. What the inventory showed was that the bag that left Madrid held jewels worth some $183,000 that never made their way to Aldao in Paris. What was more, a fellow who’d been enlisted to help the Mercedes cross the border swore that he’d never received the platinum-and-diamond bracelet that Aldao had instructed Rubi to give him.

  Aldao wrote Rubi in Paris several times to inquire about the missing items but was repeatedly ignored. He sent a Parisian friend to confront Rubi and, as he later declared, his emissary was rudely rebuffed: “The result of the meeting was completely negative, and he was moreover very discourteous to my friend.” Finally, a few years after the fact, he wrote a letter of formal protest to Emilio A. Morel, the Dominican ambassador to Spain. It wasn’t the first Morel had heard of the case—an anonymous letter had found its way to him a year or so earlier, a note, he recalled as so “crammed with inside information” that he believed its author was “a compatriot of Rubirosa’s, actually a principal in the smuggling plan, who felt he had been double-crossed out of a commission from Kohane and took this method of seeking revenge.” Morel dutifully sent notice of these claims against Rubi to the Secretariat of Foreign Relations in Ciudad Trujillo; not only were his inquiries sloughed off, but he, a noted Dominican poet and onetime leader of Trujillo’s own political party, found himself, by virtue of making them, suddenly in the bad graces of the generalissimo. He left Madrid for New York, where he lived out his years in exile. And Aldao got nothing.

  Rubi likely had the jewels—and all of Kohane’s assets as well. His finances seemed to have worked themselves out for the decided better. He had been so skint at the start of the year that he would on occasion feign illness so as to summon friends to his house with restorative meals—the only food he could, apparently, afford. After returning from Madrid, however, he spoke of opening his own nightclub and renewed his habit of forming an impromptu club wherever he went; the genius guitarist Django Reinhardt was soon among the players in his ever-expanding, never-ending, ceaselessly moveable feast. Deauville; Biarritz; the French Riviera; and all through the Parisian night: He was ubiquitous, a star. Old friends who encountered Rubi in Paris—among them Flor de Oro and his brother Cesar, now himself a cog in Trujillo’s diplomatic machine—found him exultant, even though they’d been led to expect he’d be sporting a more destitute aspect.

  Perhaps news of his self-made success made it back to the Dominican Republic, perhaps he was vouched for by Virgilio Trujillo, but in the spring of 1939, the most amazing bit of fortune landed in his lap: a phone call from Ciudad Trujillo. “The President, who is beside me,” said the official on the other end, “would lik
e to know if you could see after his wife and son, who will arrive in Paris in a few weeks. You’ll have to find a house of appropriate size, accompany them, show them around.”

  “I was so stupefied,” Rubi remembered, “that I couldn’t answer straightaway. At first I wondered what sort of trap it was. I couldn’t see one.”

  He hurriedly made arrangements to receive Doña Maria and ten-year-old Ramfis and met their boat in Le Havre, where he was startled to find the president’s third wife a full eight months pregnant. Rubi immediately arranged for her to be taken to a clinic where, in comfort, she gave birth to a daughter, Angelita, on June 10.*

  In the weeks before and after the birth, Rubi engaged in a full charm offensive, presenting Doña Maria with gifts of jewelry (booty, no doubt, from the Aldao collection) and seeing that the awkward, friendless, unschooled Ramfis was kept happy; the two rode horses together, and it was likely around this time that they began tinkering at polo. As Rubi recalled, the campaign was a success: “Doña Maria wrote to her husband that I was useful, attentive, charming and courteous. Was it due to the sentiment that accompanies pregnancy? Was it due to the change of nations and distance? Trujillo warmed to me.”

  The Benefactor had come to recognize that in Rubi he had a truly unique asset: a young, handsome, worldly, cultivated Dominican of notable suavity and negotiable loyalty. Doña Maria, who had no history with the young man, must have impressed her husband with tales of his social skills and tact. And, as Trujillo was soon to discover himself, no Dominican was as enmeshed in the manners and mores of the great European capitals than his scalawag former son-in-law.