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

by Shawn Levy

  BANKHEAD: Doesn’t Zsa Zsa speak to you?

  SANDERS: Only in Hungarian.

  BANKHEAD: Do you understand Hungarian?

  SANDERS: Not this one.

  One line really got Zsa Zsa’s goat.

  SANDERS: She’s deliriously happy. After all, she can catch fleeting glimpses of me as I walk in the garden or dive into the pool and we do have a certain intimacy. We do share the top drawer of the dresser.

  Bad enough to make light of their marriage: But the house was hers, bought and paid for, and for Sanders to joke about his domain over it was infuriating. Zsa Zsa refused to read the few lines she was given; in fact, she bared her claws on Bankhead, stomped out of the studio, and refused to be on the show at all. Sanders, to save face, moved his few possessions out of the house and told the papers that he was splitting from his wife: “I have been discarded like a squeezed lemon,” he whined to the Hollywood press. “My wife took the lines personally and thought I was to blame for them. When we got home, she asked me to move out.”

  Again, she fought back. When asked if this behavior wasn’t to be expected from Addison DeWitt, she retorted, “I’m his wife. I won’t have him talk to me, even in a radio script, as he talks to other women.” And she laughed at the thought that he would leave her. “The last three things he packed before he left home were my photographs,” she told Louella Parsons. “He’ll be back.”

  In response, he whinged some more: “Like all women, my wife resembles the queen bee who ultimately extinguishes her mate. Her pattern is perfectly clear. She’s caught me. She’s breaking me, and when she has utterly cowed me, she’ll trample on me.” But there were her charms, and those midnight snacks, to consider. He came back but by the spring, divorce talk was still in the air. “Living with the Gabors is like living in a perfumed whirlpool,” Sanders sighed.

  He had no idea.

  During this back-and-forth with her husband, on the first morning that she woke up beside the minister plenipotentiary of the Dominican Republic at the Plaza Hotel, a cable made its way to Zsa Zsa: “Am in London I miss you terribly I love you I love you George.” Stupefied by what seemed his uncanny intuition about her behavior, she returned home to Los Angeles, where Rubi peppered her with phone calls from all over the world. (He had code names by which he identified himself to her: Mr. Perkins was a favorite, for some reason, and he also used M. Bellechasse.)

  She heard again from George; he was in Italy, where he’d become ill with food poisoning; she rushed to join him. Then she raced to Las Vegas, where her agents had managed to put together a curious little show around her at the Flamingo. (Rubi flew from Paris to join her there for a single night—the trip made her certain he loved her, she said.) Then she went back to Rome and Sanders.

  In Italy, as she endured her husband’s usual hot-and-cold temperament, a telegram arrived from Rue de Bellechasse: “No word from you. Miss you and love you much. Wire me. Rubi.” Sanders read it first and made a grand, mocking show of delight: “Cokiline, what a conquest! The great Rubirosa! He’s in love with you! Now that’s really an achievement!” Belittlingly, right in her face, he himself composed a response—“Mon Cheri, I love you too and cannot wait to see you again, Zsa Zsa”—and sent it off, triumphant in his scorn.

  And then, fatefully, she was offered a part in a gangster comedy starring the French music hall great Fernandel. It would be shot in Paris. She accepted.

  For the next several months, she and Rubi were inseparable. Zsa Zsa made a show of propriety by staying at a hotel, but they were on the town together constantly and she found herself addictively drawn to him. A few years later, she and a ghost-writer depicted her as the heroine of a drama of forbidden love.

  He had such power over me that I had no will of my own. I remembered myself not once but many times putting on a black skirt and a huge black wool sweater so that no one would recognize me and slipping out the side entrance of my elegant hotel and into a cab. I could not help myself. How many times in my black sweater and skirt I stood before that house just before dawn, and touched the bell … knowing how loudly it rang inside, that it was heard everywhere, that neighbors’ windows lit up and faces stared out to see who stands at Rubirosa’s gate.

  She adored the house: the aromas of leather and tobacco, the juxtaposition of ancien regime décor and polo gear and trophies, the deliciously piquant spices of the Dominican food he served her and which reminded her of the Hungarian meals of her childhood. She respected his aesthetic. “He is the only man I’ve known whose taste extends to women’s clothes,” she said. “He has an unfailing eye for the right color, the correct line, the becoming curve. If he says, ‘Zsa Zsa, take that hat off, it doesn’t suit you’—I do!” She loved the way he bore himself when they were out on the town: the vivacity with which he could fill a nightclub, the trance into which he seemed to fall as he joined a band in drumming, the way he merrily insisted that the party continue on into the dawn, paying the musicians to follow him to another spot or even to his house for a ham-and-eggs feast.

  And, not surprisingly, considering the regal men she had already married, she quietly loved the way he seemed so smitten with her that he was prone to angry fits of jealousy. One night they dropped off another couple after a bout of nightclubbing and Zsa Zsa kissed the gentleman good-night and got back into the car. “Rubi turned the key in the ignition,” she remembered, “then suddenly, without warning, his eyes blazing like hot coals, slapped me hard.” Another time, they entered a restaurant and she bade hello to a lady friend. Rubi grabbed her by the arm: “So now you like women too, eh?” And yet another time, as they drove through Paris and she stared out the window daydreaming, she was jolted by a smack: Rubi presumed she was spooning after some young man on the street. “But I was thinking about my taxes!” she protested. (Beastly behavior, but she perversely read into such acts proof of affection. “A man only beats a woman if he loves her,” she explained.)

  She was drunk on him. Her mother tried to get her to see how ill suited they were for one another: “Rubi is not for you. He drinks a lot. At the most you have a wine spritzer. He loves nightclubs. You don’t smoke. You hate nightclubs. For a husband he is not good.”

  “Yes,” Zsa Zsa admitted, “but for a lover, he is the most exciting.… Rubi is a disease of the blood. I cannot be without him.”

  And besides, Jolie was wrong: They were perfect for each other—maybe too perfect. If there was ever a female tíguere, it was Zsa Zsa, clawing her way to the top and landing on her feet no matter how outrageously she tempted fate. And if there was ever a male Gabor, it was Rubi, flamboyant and exotic and laughable in his bald ambition but deadly serious about what he wanted from life. Their ambition and zest and greed and passion and shamelessness and obviousness all meshed. Zsa Zsa remembered it with exquisite slashes of purple.

  We were like two children: pleasure-seeking, hedonistic, perhaps spoiled and selfish, but full of an unquenchable lust for life and an insatiably strong appetite for excitement.… Rubi and I both suffered from the same curse: Life held too many possibilities for us. It was as if there was too much potential surrounding us, too much love, too much excitement. We were too greedy for life and too greedy for each other.

  And why not? They were gorgeous specimens: he with his temples graying and his physique still lean and his face now chiseled with the becoming gravity of his forty-five years; she impossibly lovely and curvaceous and impeccably styled in just the fashion of the day. (A tailor dropped by Rue de Bellechasse to fit them for matching outfits for some party and came away reeling from proximity to her body: “She stood wearing a flimsy brassiere and the tiniest panties embroidered with sequins. She was a shattering sight.”)

  Even Doris Duke wasn’t as well matched with Rubi—not counting, of course, the inestimable difference-eraser of her fortune. Was there truly such a thing as soul mates? Rubi and Zsa Zsa may well have been a perfect instance of the species. (“They reminded me of two flames shooting toward each other—y
et having no control over their flight,” observed society columnist Elsa Maxwell.)

  Despite Sanders, inseparable in the heat of their affair, they traveled together openly as his diplomatic duties, her acting jobs, the polo and race car seasons, and the ebbs and flows of society demanded: Deauville, Rome, Cannes, where they were seized upon by reporters there to cover the film festival and word of their affair finally made its way back to America. When autumn came, she went back to Los Angeles, a blizzard of telegrams and telephone calls from Rubi following her, beseeching her to leave her husband for him.

  She tried to ignore his pleas—she swore she loved Sanders—but she couldn’t get him out of her head: “Rubi was a sickness to me.”

  She hemmed and hawed, and in August he wrote her with an ultimatum: “I love you darling but after reading your cable I see that you are not willing to separate and come here. So be frank and decide once and for all.”

  She couldn’t do it; she had to do it. She would meet him in New York; she wouldn’t see him again. He would come to see her; she would forbid him to come.

  Enough: He went to Deauville for the polo championship and tried to put her out of his mind.

  Maybe he could lose himself in some distraction.

  ELEVEN

  COLD FISH

  As his brother Cesar had despairingly noted, Rubi had failed to hold on to Doris and her hundreds of millions. But there was one woman out in the great big world with a fortune nearly as large and a marital history even more checkered: Barbara Hutton, or, more properly, at the time Rubi bumped into her at Deauville in the summer of 1953, Princess Barbara Hutton Mdivani Haugwitz-Reventlow Grant Troubetzkoy—something like that.

  As that ungainly string of names indicated, Barbara was a serial bride, with four husbands already in her wake by the time she cut into her fortieth birthday cake. And although it was hard to say afterward whether she had used her men or vice versa, there was no doubt that she could afford to be profligate with them: When her grandmother died in 1924, Barbara, then eleven and a half, had inherited a cool $28 million.*

  The money came from two streams. As her name indicated, she was a Hutton. Her father, Franklyn, was the younger brother of Edward Francis Hutton, the Wall Street tycoon who founded the famed brokerage firm that bore his name, E. F. Hutton. But Franklyn Hutton was the black sheep of his family, a boozer and skirt chaser who was kept on at his brother’s business out of nepotistic kindness. The real money came from Barbara’s mother’s family, and a fortune with even more resonant fame than the Duke billions.

  Edna Hutton was born in 1883 Edna Woolworth, the middle of three children, all daughters, of Frank Winfield Woolworth: that Woolworth. Four years before Edna’s birth, F. W. had opened his first five-and-ten-cent store in Utica, New York, and promptly saw it close within two months for lack of custom. In a demonstration of true American stick-to-it-ive-ness, he went ahead and opened another store later that year in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. This time he had a hit. By the time Edna was taking her first steps, there were 25 Woolworth stores in five states; by 1917, Woolworth’s company was grossing $100 million a year (nearly $1.5 billion in 2005 terms) from 1,000 stores—a massive fortune built literally on the nickels and dimes of consumers all over North America and Western Europe.

  Old F. W., a humble son of Rodman, New York, only partly shared MegaBuck Duke’s vaunting ambition to remake the world and himself in it. True, when he moved his family and his corporate headquarters to Manhattan, he settled in increasingly grand houses; He owned a sizable chunk of property at the Fifth Avenue and East Eightieth Street portion of Millionaires’ Row, where he lived in a four-story, thirty-six-room palace near smaller homes he had built for his daughters and servants. But he maintained only one other residence—sixty rooms in Glen Cove, New York—and, unlike Duke, didn’t invent whole new fields of business. Rather, he merely built the world’s tallest building and named it for himself: 792 feet of gabled neo-Gothic rectangles rising above lower Manhattan an oversized copper finial, a sandstone cathedral pointing a splinter into the sky: the Woolworth Building was the tallest building in the world for nearly two decades.

  Barbara was born the year before the building was finished, in November 1912, an only child who arrived eleven years after her parents first met and four after they wed. Her birth may have been well planned, but more likely it was a stab at salvaging a rocky marriage. Edna hadn’t the constitution to keep up with Franklyn’s vices. He publicly escorted various women, yet still she stuck to him, eating away at herself until she finally took her own life in May 1917: strychnine. Four year-old Barbara found the body.

  For some time, Barbara bounced among aunts and uncles until Franklyn married a flowsy but kindly former beauty parlor operator from Detroit. The newly reshaped family resettled in the wealthy San Francisco suburb of Burlingame. By the time Barbara was old enough to be sent back to New York for proper schooling, old F. W. and his wife were gone, and she had inherited, as her late mother’s only child, a third of their estate, establishing the foundation of her fortune. Naturally, she entered society, introduced by her family, among them her aunt, the regal Marjorie Merriwether Post, wife of E. F. Hutton, and her cousin, the outrageous Jimmy Donohue, with whom she would be close for life. She attended parties thrown by socialite and columnist Cobina Wright; she met Doris Duke, starting a lifelong acquaintance—and contest for the title “poorest little rich girl.” And she got interested in men, both in America and, when she first traveled abroad, in Europe.

  Among the first to catch her eye was Prince Alexis Mdivani. At least he said he was a prince. Like his brothers, Princes David and Serge, Prince Alexis claimed to be the fruit of a noble Georgian bloodline (Mdivani, with a silent “m,” was said to be a reference to a divan, or throne, and indicated, they said, their elevated heritage). In reality, they were just a White Russian family who seized on the confusion of the times in such matters to claim a lineage that didn’t even exist; their father joked that he was the only man ever to have inherited a title from his children. The boys and their sister proved notably ambitious in their private lives: Despite having neither money nor careers (not even ambassadorships!), David had managed to marry Mae Murray, the wealthiest and most popular actress in Hollywood; Serge had equaled the feat by snatching up silent screen siren Pola Negri; sister Roussie had pilfered the muralist José Maria Sert from his wife (and still managed to keep her as a friend!); and Alexis had lined up a fortune in the guise of Louise Astor Van Alen, a teenage heiress descended from several fine American families.

  The Marrying Mdivanis, as they were called in the tabloid press of the 1920s, were brilliantly successful at their chosen craft despite their insolvency, their shady business practices, their phony history, and even their queerly exotic looks: David a dark, sinister Harpo Marx; Serge with a lantern jaw and large credulous eyes; and Alexis, with the tough, broad features of a movie hoodlum or a veteran cop. In latching on to their various spouses they got their hands on fame and real fortune—boats, houses, touring cars, polo ponies, oil fields—not to mention entrée into the sort of society in which they might meet other, richer prospects for conquest.

  Alexis was already established in select European circles, an exemplar of the fallen noble (in this case, faux) on the make for an heiress wife. Hence Louise Van Alen. And hence Barbara Hutton, who, despite the plump, mousy, drab appearance she cut as a teenager, caught his eye on her visit to France. At the time, she was too young to be considered for marriage, and Alexis had already seen to his immediate future, anyhow. But he proved a patient sort.

  Barbara debuted at a formal party for one thousand held at the Ritz-Carlton in New York and costing an estimated $60,000—a bigger fiesta by a considerable shot than had declared the formal arrival of Doris Duke into grown-up society. Then she was whisked off to London to be presented at court and then to Paris, where Alexis finally put the moves on her. Brazenly, with his wife about, Barbara let him; they were literally caught in flagrante at a h
ouse party near Barcelona in the summer of 1932. Alexis’s missus got a divorce, and plans were made for a big Mdivani-Hutton wedding in Paris the following spring.

  Doris Duke’s two weddings were hushed, hurried, discreet affairs. Barbara’s first marriage would be celebrated as if she truly were a princess (and why not: Franklyn’s family had invested wisely enough to turn her money into $42 million by the time she legally inherited it soon after the wedding). The ceremony was held in Paris at the Russian Cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky; the massive display of wealth and antique ritual drew enormous crowds of reporters, photographers, and onlookers. And it nauseated a lot of people: at the height of the Great Depression, an American girl spending all that money and making all that noise—and marrying a foreigner to boot. Compared with relatively tasteful Doris, Barbara was seen as showy, supercilious, a wastrel. With the wedding she began a lifelong struggle to be treated kindly by the press, a battle in which she was very often her own worst enemy.

  Indeed, though she was in a superficial sense prettier than Doris, the other of “the Gold Dust Twins” as the press called them, Barbara was far less suited for world in which her wealth made her susceptible to predators, temptations, and infinite—and often dangerous—choices. She was more fragile—physically and emotionally. She was restless like Doris, but with a more nervous air and an undercurrent of sadness. In some key ways, she was more refined than her friendly rival: She was less prone to outré enthusiasms; she had a finer eye for art, architecture, collectibles, and fashion; and she wrote poetry—publishing two slim volumes over the years, in fact. But she broke down more often and was more easily swayed by even moderately powerful forces—a more tragic if not quite so sympathetic figure on the whole.

  Take the matter of her body. The story goes that Alexis took advantage of his wedding night to declare, “You’re too fat.” Crushed, she punished herself to lose weight, devising a coffee-only diet that whittled more than forty pounds off her body and initiating a lifetime of bulimia and crash diets that sapped her vitality.