by Shawn Levy
It finally had a life of its own, this legendary member, long after the man who was attached to it was gone: More than three decades after Rubi was buried, an otherwise sober writer for Vanity Fair magazine found himself asking women with firsthand memory of it to compare it to his size-11 shoe. And cheeky waiters at Continental restaurants would celebrate it perennially, if not always knowingly, referring in knavish fashion to the largest peppermill in the house as—what else?—the “Rubirosa.”
So it was on the strength of a prodigious banality that he rose, and rose audaciously. His gifts couldn’t be discussed in newspapers or polite society, but he didn’t depend on the press or proper people for his success. His career was based on a secret, on a fluke of genetics, on a whisper, on a myth. And it elevated him steadily.
When he married Flor de Oro Trujillo he was nobody: an upstart.
When he married Danielle Darrieux he was a mystery man, not easily placed—vide the New York Times declaring him Salvadoran—but somebody, or at least that was the sense you got.
But when Doris Duke zeroed in on him, he became front-page news and his name became synonymous with adventure and high life and intrigue and flamboyance and—as much as anyone in that delicate time could speak of it out loud—sex. He became famous just as the era of audacious-celebrity-for-its-own-sake was blooming. And the genius of it was that the reason for his celebrity, even if it were known, couldn’t actually be spoken of—not firsthand, not out loud.
Anyone anywhere could understand why the world’s most desirable women would date wealthy men like Aly Khan or a Baby Pignatari or a Fon de Portago.
But Rubi?
“Qué será, qué será, lo que tiene Rubirosa,” indeed.
EIGHT
BIG BOY
On September 24, 1947, in an account of a society wedding published in the Washington Times-Herald, an unnamed friend of Doris Duke’s declared of Rubi that “the FBI is said to have a bulging dossier on him.”
The sentence was highlighted twice by one particular reader who clipped the article and added a note at the bottom in a cursive hand before sending it to a subordinate:
What do we have on
Rubirosa?
—H.
The following day, pursuant to this request from the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, which had taken no formal notice of Rubi to date, opened a file on him with that annotated article as its first entry. Eventually it would swell to nearly eleven hundred pages.
Since skipping out of New York on the eve of the murder of Sergio Bencosme twelve years earlier, Rubi had assiduously avoided setting foot in the United States. And as the FBI had apparently demonstrated little interest in that shooting, there was no specific reason for it to monitor his activities or dig around in his past. But Hoover, of course, was a famous collector of gossip, and by the fall of 1947 Rubi was an up-and-coming superstar of gossip. If he had heard anything about Rubi’s particular physical genius, Hoover would certainly have hoarded dirt and secrets with real relish.
But he had a more pressing need for information about Rubi, and several branches of the United States government shared his urgency: On September 1 in a quick, informal ceremony at the Dominican legation in Paris, Rubi and Doris had wed.
The courtship had been both brisk and peripatetic. They were seen together in Paris and Rome and the French Riviera throughout 1946, at restaurants and nightclubs and golf courses and resorts. “We had a lot of tastes in common,” Rubi recalled. “We loved Paris, the subtle poetry of the Left Bank, music. We often went to Cap d’Antibes, where we sported in the sun and the shining sea.” Doris, who was possessed of a considerable libido, found herself as if drunk on the magnetic power of his massive organ. And he was held in a death grip by thoughts of getting hold of a game girl with one of the largest fortunes in the world.
Indeed, such were their respective stocks at the time—she an aloof and rangy girl of attractive energy but no great beauty, he a studly mystery man in his physical prime rebounding from a passionate marriage to a renownedly gorgeous actress—that the calculus of the relationship seemed transparent: She was in it for the sex, he for the money, and he had far more to gain from the relationship than she.
It was easy to see Rubi’s devotion to Doris in the least flattering light. In the south of France, the couple visited a resort where British actor Stewart Granger and American producer Mike Todd were vacationing. Granger saw something almost pathetic in Rubi’s attentions to the heiress. “Poor Ruby [sic] was in there really pitching,” he wrote later. “She used to keep him waiting around at all hours to take her to lunch or dinner, and both Mike and I were amazed that any man would stand for it.” The movie men decided to make sport of Doris’s interest in them and asked her to dinner while Rubi looked on. “Poor man,” recalled Granger. “With us it was all fun. With him it was business.” Finally, they let her alone and made amends to Rubi: “We apologized for our behavior and swore we wouldn’t interfere with his romance any more.”
While Rubi worked on Doris, Doris worked at a job. In March 1947, when Rubi was in Paris seeing to the dissolution of his marriage with Danielle, Doris was there as well in her new position as a correspondent for Harper’s Bazaar. The two were seen constantly together, and the air buzzed with talk of marriage, but Doris wasn’t the sort to confide in people, and Rubi wouldn’t dare open his mouth for fear of queering the deal.
But the State Department—perhaps alerted by Doris’s contacts in the OSS—wanted to make it clear that they didn’t approve of the heiress’s choice of beau. When earlier she had been running around Rome with a shady lot, the U.S. government saw fit to demand she turn over her passport and return home; she submitted the document but stayed in Italy where, for a time, lacking the proper credentials, she had been unable to travel, to secure ration books, or even to visit the Correspondents Club. It took some judicious string-pulling for her to get her papers back, but she eventually did, and, emboldened, she pointedly ignored warnings that Washington didn’t care for Rubi. (Whether race played into the equation wasn’t clear; the authorities probably didn’t care about Rubi’s bloodline so much as his connections to the Dominican government.)
Yet if Doris was headstrong—or simply lust-sick—she was also shrewd, particularly when it came to her money. She may have refused to back away from her man when threatened by Washington, but she would fight ruthlessly to protect her prodigious fortune. When plans for the wedding were being finalized, Rubi cagily insisted on holding the ceremony on Dominican soil and under the aegis of a Dominican authority—consul general Salvador Paradas, one of the men who had steered him toward the Aldao jewels. This would, of course, mean that Dominican law, which followed the Napoleonic code granting authority over communal property to the husband, would pertain. Rubi would have his fingers on hundreds of millions—and Trujillo, at that judicious remove from which he preferred to do his dirtiest work, would have indirect control through Rubi over Duke Power and the electrical grid of the southern United States.
Officials of the State Department and OSS were apoplectic, but they had no sway over Doris. Rather, it was, ironically enough, in the world of haute couture where she found her best counsel. She wandered into the offices of Harper’s Bazaar and, announcing she was planning to marry, spurred editor Carmel Snow to set into motion a plan to protect the Duke millions. Lawyers were called; contingencies were considered; a prenuptial agreement was drawn up.
All that remained was to tell the groom.
They waited until the wedding ceremony.
Rubi arrived at the embassy that morning in what might very well have been the same suit in which he married Danielle: striped pants, dark cutaway coat, pale vest, white shirt, shiny tie. He had selected as his witnesses two friends from the world of motor racing, which had come to consume him in the months of his courtship with a woman who could fund such an interest: Jean-Pierre Wimille, the ace driver of the Alfa Romeo team, and Pierre Leygonie, like Rubi one of the gentleman amateurs who
had begun buzzing around auto sports after the war.
Ana Rubirosa Sánchez, the groom’s sister, had moved to Paris to school her son, so she was there, but there were few other guests, mainly Doris’s acquaintances from Harper’s Bazaar. The bride herself arrived in a green taffeta Dior New Look dress and chic dark hat, an artificial rose pinned to the right of her décolletage. She fought through a throng of reporters on the street—this wedding, compared to the couple’s previous nuptials, would be a truly hot story—and then disappeared into the embassy.
Inside, a bare-bones reception awaited the guests, who amused themselves at the bar while … something went on behind closed doors. Few had taken note of the two men with briefcases who met Doris on her arrival, but they were as important to the proceedings as the bride and groom themselves: They were lawyers from the Franco-American law firm Coudert on hand to present Rubi with the bad news.
The groom had begun celebrating a little early, perhaps, the finishing line so close he could feel the tape across his chest. He’d been sipping whiskey highballs and chatting amiably. His mood changed when he got wind of the lawyers and their purpose. “He looked like one of those fierce Miura bulls about to charge a red cape,” said an eyewitness. “I’ve never seen anyone madder.”
The prenup was painfully clear: Rubi would renounce all claims to Doris’s fortune and her holdings in the various companies and trusts her father founded in exchange for cash and gifts. He kept drinking as the impossibility of his situation became patent. Other than walk away with nothing, what could he do? He signed, no doubt harboring the thought in the recesses of his mind that there would be time later to get his hands on the mother lode.
After all the delay, the brief ceremony proceeded as something of an anticlimax. Rubi tried to play the gallant, laughing and drinking and lighting up a cigarette which he held in his hand through the vows. (A waggish observer, having heard about the sucker-punch prenup, said of the groom, “He refused the blindfold but accepted the cigarette”; a New York headline read “Doris Duke Weds Smoking Latin.”) She promised to love, honor, and obey in English; he took his oath in Spanish. They exchanged rings: Hers to him was a traditional gold number that some observers thought resembled a handcuff; his to her was a delicate gold band laced with rubies (he gave her several lavish presents through their courtship and marriage, often ruby-encrusted, and she held on to them her whole life). The proceedings were muted and swift. And then Rubi, drunk or anxious or angry or overcome … fainted. “Big boy passed out in my arms,” Doris laughed.
But he got back at her exactly where it hurt. They had been intending to honeymoon in Hawaii but went instead to the Riviera, where Rubi revenged himself on Doris for her secret wedding day maneuvers by withholding his favors: no sex. Even with all the gifts she eventually coughed up—the cash, cars, suits, polo ponies, a plantation in the Dominican Republic, a B-25 bomber fitted out as a private airplane—he made sure that she remembered that he had assets of his own.
Back in Paris after that brief, chaste honeymoon, they moved into yet another manifestation of Doris’s munificence, a massive hôtel particulier on Rue de Bellechasse in the Seventh Arrondissement, midway between the buzzy cafés of the Boulevard Saint Germain and the courtly hush of the Invalides. Bought at a cost of $100,000 from Princess Chavchavadze, née Elizabeth Ridgeway, the American-born wife of a Georgian prince and concert pianist, the three-hundred-year-old house presented a blunt aspect to the street but was singularly sumptuous within. Passing through a courtyard—where Rubi eventually installed a pair of stationary bicycles and a mechanical bull for sharpening his taurine skills—visitors entered a massive three-story home furnished by the celebrated interior decorator Henri Samuel at a cost of a half-million dollars with antiques, artworks, marble, rosewood, silk, gilding, and the like. The top floor was rebuilt so that Rubi could have a gymnasium and boxing ring installed, as well as storage for polo trophies and tack.
Doris was used to such grandeur—she had four other homes at least as big and plush—but for Rubi this new life was heady, even if he’d long reckoned himself entitled to it. He filled his days with more pleasure than seemed possible.
His nights went on forever: dinner out; clubbing at Tatou or the Vieux Colombier or Jimmy’s or some other of the chic new spots—at once swank and bohemian—that dotted the Left Bank; back home with a coterie of musicians, dancers, hangers-on, women, demanding hot food from servants who’d been jolted from their beds; not thinking about going to bed himself till morning roused.
But that wasn’t a daily routine. More important even than his evening parrandas were his daytime rituals—so important, in fact, that he would limit his exhausting nighttime bacchanals to two or three a week. Nearly forty, he came to value his sleep because he so valued his mornings, which were given over to polo, his latest passion. Under the tutelage of French champion Pierre Dobadie, who put him through his paces on the pitch at the Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne, the game became the single most constant passion of his life.
He had been drawn to riding since his father scooped him up in the Cibao night and rode him briskly through a paddock; now, addicted to polo, he envinced the slight bowlegs of the inveterate horseman. (A fellow polo player, the Spanish writer José-Luis de Vilallonga, met Rubi and his new wife at around this time and observed dryly, “I always wondered if it was the love of horses that made Rubirosa marry Doris Duke or if the equine spectacle of her femininity made him so fond of equestrian sports.”)
But dressage, steeplechase, hunting, and other horsing sports didn’t quite evoke the same sense of competitiveness or danger that this Dominican general’s son relished. In his memoir, which barely took a deep look at anything, Rubi paused for a few earnest pages to tell the history of polo and pay homage to the way Argentine fans celebrated the great teams and players their country boasted.
It was an auspicious time to take up the sport. In England and the United States, polo had fallen off following a pair of golden ages that roughly bracketed World War I, but Continental polo, particularly French polo, thrived after World War II. Major tournaments were held in Paris and Deauville each season, attracting teams from throughout the world. Indeed, the latter was an unofficial world championship—the Coupe d’Or—that drew an international field and the high livers and hangers-on who made polo not only a sport but a social spectacle.
Rubi loved that part of it, recalled a fellow player: “He always brought the prettiest girls to the party after a game, and not just one, but two or three. He danced with them all and made sure they were all happy. We would party until 7 or 8 in the morning.”
The gilded aspect of polo, and, especially, polo as it was played in such places as Deauville—with its trappings of casinos and seaside chateaus and luxury cars and bored rich women—would have made it attractive enough to him; even if he’d never played, Rubi might well have been a habitué of the grandstands and boxes. But he found he had the game in his blood. As he explained it, “The physical force that a match required, the risks you ran, the peaceful reenactment of savage rituals, it all suited my temperament perfectly.” Polo was a terrifically perilous, expensive, and hallowed pursuit—those traits appealing to him in something like that order. Mounted on horses bred for quickness and agility, surging forward at thirty-five miles per hour, swinging at a four-ounce ball with a four-foot-long bamboo shaft with a slender tapered headpiece, ranging over a pitch the size of ten football fields, coordinating attack and defense with a team of only three other players, it combined the precision of golf with the nonstop activity of soccer and the determination-in-the-face-of-physical-peril of boxing. It was the nearest thing to war he ever experienced, and, considering the equipment, the time, and the multiple mounts it required, was nearly as expensive.
“To play polo well,” he told Vilallonga, “you should be young and poor. Young because to be truly contemptuous of danger, you must be an idiot. Poor because if you really want to give everything you have nothing to lose.”
Laughing as he said it, he reckoned himself well suited on both scores.
As a player, Rubi was aggressive and moderately talented—very good for a gentleman but not quite up to professional standards. The sport was governed by a handicap system of ranking players: ten goals denoted a world-class superstar, while numbers below zero were used to indicate the players who paid for teams and insisted on riding with them but truly didn’t belong on the pitch. Over the years, Rubi was anywhere from a two-goal player to a five (as in golf, players often lied about their handicaps for reasons of vanity and to sandbag rivals into bets). In Paris, where rankings were more lenient, he could be handicapped very high. “He was a three,” remembered his frequent polo partner Taki Theodoracopulos, “but he could play a four or five. But he was a good three. He really played his position. You could rely on him. He might have got up to five for a moment, but he was a good three.”
In friendly matches in Paris, Rubi would often be his team’s best player, always recognizable in the red helmet he wore—a little touch of Rubi color. For serious tournaments, he organized and sponsored a team called Cibao—La Pampa—named for his birthplace and for the Argentine home of the sport—and was often the weakest player on his own side. He kept up with the Argentine pros he hired, but he didn’t truly rank with them. Instead, he made his place by pampering them with gifts and money and rode with them to victories throughout the 1950s and ’60s, most notably the 1951 Coupe d’Or at Deauville. The team took championships in Italy, the Caribbean, and France, especially Paris, where it owned the Coupe de France for a dominant run of three years starting in 1953. Later in his career, Rubi limited his tournament play and most often competed in amateur matches in Paris. Even then, “at the head of a team of fat bankers,” in the words of Vilallonga, “he acquitted himself without shame.” And as late as 1961, at the age of fifty-two, he bragged to the New York Times about his handicap, by then, he claimed, two goals.