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

by Shawn Levy

  It was his first eyeful of Zsa Zsa Gabor.

  As it happened, sometime in the previous year, when she was in London visiting her husband, actor George Sanders, on a movie set, Zsa Zsa had had her first eyeful of him. She was dining, as she recalled, with Count John Gerard de Bendern at Les Ambassadeurs, the same club in which Rubi had his unfortunate encounter with Joanne Connelley Sweeney. That night, Rubi was in his usual stellar company: the Princess Hohenlohe (née Patricia “Honeychile” Wilder) and Ayisa, the Maharani of Jaipur. Zsa Zsa couldn’t help but notice.

  “That’s that Rubirosa guy,” the count told her.

  She checked him out. “Not my type at all,” she decided.

  In New York the following winter, however, things were different. This time, Sanders was off in Naples making a picture with Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, and, as was his practice, he had insisted that Zsa Zsa stay away. This time, Zsa Zsa herself was in the throes of fame and stardom: She was in New York for the premiere of her breakout picture, Moulin Rouge, a coronation that Sanders seemed almost deliberately to go out of his way to miss. This time she decided that Rubi might very well indeed be her type.

  Rubi didn’t know anything about all that; he just knew that he liked what he saw. He broke the ice: “Madame, what are you doing in New York?” He invited her to join him and Trujillo for a drink. She demurred; she had to dress for her premiere.

  As she told the story in two autobiographies and countless talk show interviews, the rest of the day was a dream out of a bodice ripper. She went to her suite for a nap; when she awoke, her room was filled with roses, dozens and dozens of blood red roses. Amid them, an engraved card reading “Don Porfirio Rubirosa, Minister Plenipotentiary, the Dominican Republic.” Handwritten below that, “For a most beautiful lady, Rubi.”

  The phone rang: him: “May I come over for a drink?”

  By this time, her hair was half done and she was working against the clock to get ready for the big show. Not a chance.

  “Perhaps later?”

  “His voice was low,” she remembered in a purple fog, “of such timbre that even over the telephone it seemed to me he was whispering in my ear.”

  And then he whispered something that gave her an uncanny sense of shock and thrill: “This is a world of strange coincidences. Would you believe it: we have adjoining suites.”

  Earlier when she had got off the elevator, he had stayed on, as if headed for a higher floor; while she napped, along with ordering the flowers, he had apparently switched rooms. She could palpably sense him on the other side of the door.

  No matter; she had things to do. And then—wouldn’t you know it?—just as she was nearly ready, she found that she couldn’t quite zip up her skintight couture dress. She was contorting herself in an effort to grab at the thing when the phone rang: Rubi again. This time she wanted to see him: “I hope you won’t think I’m silly, but I can’t zip up my dress, and there’s no maid. If you will be good enough …”

  He was over in a flash, zipped her up, helped her on with her coat: a complete gentleman. But the air between them was as thick and electric as before a thunderstorm. She extricated herself from the pregnant pause and made off for her premiere.

  When she got back, after a wild success, an invitation to join Rubi and a party that included Prince Bernadotte in the Plaza’s Persian Room awaited her. Rather than sit alone and stew over Sanders’s absence, she accepted. She watched as he conversed gaily in French and English. She listened as he described his homeland. She took note as he sent a bottle of champagne back as corked and as he walked with an intriguing spring to chat with somebody at the bar. She stole appreciative glances at his dark hair and deep eyes. And she felt his intensity, his purpose. “This is a primitive,” she gushed. “This man does not toy with a woman. He is all purpose. He plays for keeps.”

  When the party broke up, she later recalled, he escorted her to her door and asked if she would welcome him in for a brandy. She froze and he stepped nearer, eyes locked, hands still to himself.

  Then he stepped closer yet.

  “So,” she remembered, “it all began.”

  She was born in 1919. Or 1918. Or 1917. Or earlier. Whatever: As she put it, “I wasn’t born. I was ordered from room service.”

  She was Miss Hungary of 1936. Or 1938. Or 1937. But the first one ever, at any rate. Except she wasn’t: She had been snuck in among the official entrants, and, besides, somebody else won, despite the row and ruction her pushy mother put up in front of the judges.

  Her name was Sari. Really, it was.

  But history knew her as Zsa Zsa.

  Like her older sister, Magda, and the baby of the family, Eva, Zsa Zsa Gabor was groomed for grandness from birth by her mother, Jolie, who determined that her daughters would live the life of riches and fame that early marriage and motherhood had denied her. Zsa Zsa emerged as the aptest of the bunch. After her Miss Hungary fiasco, the cunning and gorgeous girl was discovered by composer Franz Lehar and singer-composer Richard Tauber in a Viennese restaurant and given the soubrette role in their 1934 operetta The Singing Dream. She made a splash but wound up back in Budapest nonetheless, where Jolie’s counsel was that she marry well as a means of doing well.

  First came a Turkish diplomat, Burhan Belge, who whisked her off to live in Ankara in a veritable seraglio. The Turk was much older and something of a brute, but he was a realist, and when she started wandering from her vows, he let her go. She went all the way to America—the long way, east, through India and Asia by rail, boat, horse. Eva was already there, working as an actress, and in 1944, in a very near thing, Magda and Jolie made it as well (papa Vilmos stayed behind to be forgotten but as a punch line or point of trivia).

  In Hollywood, Zsa Zsa pursued the business for which Jolie had bred her: the hunting of wealthy, powerful men. She was stunning: curvy, with a cascade of red hair and a clear-skinned face in the shape, wouldn’t you know it, of a diamond. At Ciro’s, the luminous Sunset Strip nightclub, she scored: Still in her early twenties (guessing at her age would turn from parlor game to necessity after a world war and the fall of the Iron Curtain rendered the vital records forever inaccessible), she locked eyes with Conrad Hilton, the fifty-four-year-old multimillionaire hotel magnate from Texas.

  The courtship was high melodrama. A devout Catholic, Hilton had divorced his first wife and lived in a cloud of guilt ever since, unable to take Communion; nonetheless he hoped that his aged, religious mother would approve of his new romance. Even that blessing, when it came, wasn’t sufficient to push him past the mere engagement. Before he could settle on a wedding date, he went off to a monastery in New Mexico so as to more clearly hear what his heart—or his God—was trying to tell him. It told him, apparently, to break things off, which is what he did … but only for four days. He begged Zsa Zsa to have him back, and she did. They wed in the spring of 1942 in Santa Fe.

  Married to a fortune, Zsa Zsa felt entitled to its fruits. But Hilton hadn’t inherited his millions; he’d built them out of a combination of smarts, daring, and obsession. Zsa Zsa may have been utterly sincere in declaring that she needed closets full of stylish clothes in which to lunch, to go to dinner, to attend nightclubs and social events, and to, of course, go shopping, but he didn’t see the need. He put her on an allowance: $250 a month. (This at a time when he was earning about $5 million a year.)

  Somehow Zsa Zsa managed. But what she hadn’t counted on any more than Hilton had her extravagance was his aloofness and absence. Hilton was constantly caught up in business plans, money matters, charitable activities, thoughts of religion. Zsa Zsa came to feel like an objet d’art brought from the Old World to the New at high expense and then shut away from the adoration that was her due. And when he finally decided that he needed to wrest himself legally from a marriage of five years to which he’d never truly committed himself, he sent a priest to tell her the news. They separated and made a few stabs at détente. But they had grown weary of each other, and it came
out in ugly ways: Hilton once, she said, dragged her to a brothel, and she claimed as well to have slept with his son—her stepson—Nicky Hilton, who would underscore his taste for the big and the brassy soon after by marrying Elizabeth Taylor.

  It was no wonder that this Grand Guignol drama wore her down; equally, it was little wonder that when she saw a doctor about her fatigue she found herself drifting into the classic Benzedrine-for-breakfast, barbiturates-at-bedtime cycle. It gave her the energy she felt she’d lost, but she grew unsteady and unpredictable. A brutal intervention followed; someone had her slapped away into a sanitarium. (Hilton was in on it, for sure, and Zsa Zsa always suspected Eva was involved, a charge that Eva vehemently denied: Gaborology would always remain an imprecise science.) The mental health professionals into whose clutches she fell subjected her to real snake pit treatment: straitjackets, insulin shots, physical and verbal abuse, total isolation from the outside world. A friendly night nurse took pity on her and asked her if there was anyone who might help. Zsa Zsa remembered some friends, and they sent a lawyer who got her released.

  Despite the sordid drama, Zsa Zsa managed to get pregnant (after Hilton’s death, she claimed that the conception had been an act of rape): A daughter, Francesca Hilton, the sole issue of the three Gabor sisters’ combined twenty marriages, would be born after the divorce. And the settlement itself was hardly a bonanza: a Bentley, a New York hotel suite as a home, a lump payment of $35,000, plus another $250,000 (each would be about nine times as much in 2005 terms) to be paid out in ten years of monthly payments … or until she married again. (Talk about hedged bets!)

  The din raised by her cacophonous divorce from Hilton had barely settled when Zsa Zsa found herself at a Manhattan cocktail party standing in front of yet a third older, jaded man of imperious standing and notable fame.

  “I have been wanting to meet you for so long,” she purred. “I have such a crush on you.”

  “How very understandable,” George Sanders purred back.

  Sanders was one of those brilliant actors whose demeanor away from stage or screen was virtually identical to the striking figure he cut when doing his job: in his case, debonair, cynical, worldly, wry, imperturbable, urbane. His voice was at once feline and serpentine, like velvet marinated in cherry brandy. His bearing was somehow both military and decadent. He could be so boldly aloof and condescending that those qualities, normally alienating, transformed to possess a kind of magnetism.

  He had been born in prerevolutionary St. Petersburg to English parents and raised after the age of ten in a working-class household in Birmingham. He tried to make a go of business but was a bust; his bearing and palaver were sufficiently impressive, however, that friends recommended he try acting. He was a natural. He made a few forgettable films in England and in 1936 arrived in Hollywood, where he impressed, usually as a villain. By the end of the decade he became a leading man in the role of Simon Templar in RKO’s series of thrillers based on Leslie Charteris’s novels about “The Saint.” Finally, in 1943, a real breakthrough: the Gauginesque lead in an adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, a role that combined world-weariness, decadence, artistic passion, and drollery as if it had been dreamt up with him in mind. By 1947, when he stared amusedly down his nose for the first time at the bombshell known as Sari Hilton, he was an international star. And the gorgeous divorcee in front of him was his perfect match in both physical appeal and glittering self-regard.

  Sanders was married at the time, yet he had no compunction about leaving the party with Zsa Zsa and spending the night eating caviar and toast at her penthouse apartment. That night he rechristened her—Cokiline, for a Russian cookie beloved in his youth—and they were presently a couple, even though his divorce was still only a matter of intent. They traveled together to Bermuda and Cuba; she moved into his Los Angeles apartment building. In September 1948, gossip queen Louella Parsons hinted that they might marry, and so they did, in April 1949, in a quickie ceremony in Las Vegas. After their first kiss as husband and wife, he gave her one of those down-the-snout glances and declared, “My dear, now that we’re married, I’m not sure if I will be able to make love to you any more.”

  He wasn’t kidding. He had warned her that years of psychotherapy hadn’t stopped him from being a real mess: “I don’t know what sort of fellow I’m likely to be at any given moment. I might make you miserable.” But Zsa Zsa was content to serve as his handmaiden, bringing him late-night sandwiches, cleaning his apartment, staying in evenings even as he made the Hollywood party circuit, sitting up with him to play chess—which was how they spent their wedding night.

  Soon, however, the unlikely hausfrau felt the need for larger quarters in which to make ham sandwiches and listen to the phonograph, and Sanders encouraged her to go house hunting. She found an estate that she adored: 11001 Bellagio Place, in the hills above the Bel-Air Country Club, with gardens, a pool, and fourteen rooms: a real Hollywood movie star pile. Sanders agreed she should have it … and then refused to contribute a penny toward its purchase or upkeep. He would retain his apartment—he required a lair to retreat to, he claimed—and he would outfit a suite in the house as his home away from home.

  The year after the wedding, Sanders was cast in one of those once-in-a-lifetime roles so aptly suited to his talent and demeanor that it couldn’t have been played by anyone else: Addison DeWitt, the viperous, Machiavellian theater critic in All About Eve, a character he could have played to perfection if he had sat bolt upright out of a coma. In the glory that accrued to him from his magnificent performance, including an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor, he not only ignored Zsa Zsa but he positively pushed her aside, refusing to let her participate in interviews or photo shoots even when they were conducted in the house that she’d bought with her settlement money from Hilton. At the same time, Zsa Zsa had reason to believe that he was philandering with his costars, who included Hedy Lamarr and Marilyn Monroe. Yet she always swore that she adored him, and so she endured his absences, moods, and slights.

  It got worse. He seemed to relish belittling her. He chided her for not being wealthy, even though by marrying him she had kissed off the bulk of her alimony. “The only sensible thing for a man of taste and intelligence is to marry a rich woman,” he declared, “and look how I’ve allowed you to thwart my purpose.” When they were invited to a party at Ciro’s, this complaint was amplified into a truly cruel insult; introduced to one of the hostesses, it became clear to Zsa Zsa that her husband had slept with her.

  It was Doris Duke.

  “That’s the woman I should have married,” Sanders sniffed. “There’s no greater aphrodisiac than money.” Zsa Zsa, blinded with rage, shot back at him with the only weapon she could summon. She knew that Duke had once been married to some man famous for his amours. “I’m going to have an affair with Rubirosa!” she screeched. As she said later, “Rubirosa was just a name to me, a face, not too clear, that I had seen in the newspapers.” But she saw that Sanders had been appropriately chastened by the threat, and, she claimed, “I never gave Porfirio Rubirosa another thought.”

  If that incident at Ciro’s revealed anything, it was that Zsa Zsa had a quick, sharp wit—something that Sanders’s brother, the actor Tom Conway, must have noted. Because when Bachelor’s Haven, a TV chat show on which Conway was a regular, found itself short a panelist at the last minute one day, he rang Zsa Zsa and asked her if she could sit in. George was overseas making a film; why not, she thought. The format suited her: Letters from lovelorn viewers were read aloud to the panel, who offered their advice.

  With her first two utterances, Zsa Zsa became a hit.

  “I’m breaking my engagement to a wealthy man,” read the first letter. “He gave me a beautiful home, a mink coat, diamonds, an expensive car, and a stove. What should I do?” “You must be fair, darling,” came that soon-to-be-familiar Hungarian mew. “Give him back the stove.”

  Huge laughs, capped by the expression on her face that made it seem a
s if she hadn’t even been trying to be funny.

  “My husband is a traveling salesman,” wrote another advice-seeker, “but I know he strays even when he’s at home. What should I do?”

  Another ad-lib: “Shoot him in the legs.” Bigger laughs.

  The producers had her back and then signed her as a regular. And director Mervyn LeRoy sought her out for a role in Lovely to Look At, an all-star musical. She was so beautiful and such a natural that LeRoy—who’d made such classics as Gold Diggers of 1933, Tugboat Annie, and Little Caesar—didn’t even bother with a screen test.

  She was signed up as well by Russell Birdwell, the publicist who had orchestrated the classic PR campaign around the casting of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind and who immediately got her on the cover of Life. She was cast in two more films: We’re Not Married, an anthology of romantic vignettes, and Moulin Rouge, John Huston’s big-budget biography of Toulouse-Lautrec, in which Zsa Zsa was cast in the crucial role of Jane Avril, the Parisian entertainer who was the painter’s muse.

  When he returned home to all this, Sanders wasn’t happy. There was supposed to be only one star in the family, and he was it. Not only had Zsa Zsa seemingly shot past him, the world committed the sin of reminding him of it: When they were out on the town, more people recognized her than him. His iciness grew in direct proportion to his resentment. Zsa Zsa thought he would be pleased that she had managed to occupy herself—and earn a living—in his absence; instead he grew more vicious than ever.

  The frictions between them hit a climax in November 1951, when they were scheduled to appear together on the radio show of the actress and high liver Tallulah Bankhead. At the rehearsal, Bankhead fawned on Sanders and completely dismissed Zsa Zsa; worse, the dialogue mocked their marriage in a way that Zsa Zsa didn’t quite understand.

  SANDERS: We’ve been married two years and I haven’t spoken to Zsa Zsa since she said yes.