by Shawn Levy
“What happens when you meet a girl? Does she look at you and do you look at her and—zing?”
“Yes. Zing!”
“Then what?”
“I ask her out. If she likes me, she says yes.”
“Do you send her flowers the next day?”
“Yes. I send her flowers and a little note.”
“A love note?”
“No. Something like ‘Thank you for last night.’”
“And when you take her to dinner, is it a fancy one? Are you a gourmet?”
“Yes, I love good food. If she likes that, we have a good dinner. But some girls don’t care. If she likes hot dogs, I buy her a hot dog.”
“How about dancing?”
“I take them dancing a lot. Women like to be gay. I like to be gay. They want to be happy. I try to make them happy.”
“Does it require something special to marry a wealthy girl?”
“No. They are like everybody else.”
“Would you marry a poor girl?”
“Yes. Rich girls are too difficult.”
– Radio interview, 1955
It was the Eisenhower 1950s, mind, before Elvis and the Rat Pack and JFK. Some things were not done. And Rubi did them, frankly, in public, for money, with a smile and a smooth word. He became a real fascination, and the facts were as exciting as the whispers.
The day after Rubi married Barbara, Jimmy Jemail, the Inquiring Photographer of the New York Daily News, walked around midtown asking random passersby, “What does Porfirio Rubirosa have, anyway?”
“Latin charm,” advised Karal Lindbergh, a (female) Manhattan cosmetics executive, “is appealing to many Anglo-Saxon women.”
“He is a diplomatic Mike Hammer,” bubbled Kim Wiss of the ad biz. “It’s like the fascination of the cobra.”
Confided Cornelius Joyce, a racetrack official from New Hampshire, “My doctor friends tell me it is a form of atavism” (he neglected to add why he had sought medical insight into the question).
And Susan Webb, student of Glen Cove, sagely opined, “It seems to be human nature for women to be attracted to the wastrel. He seldom has any trouble getting along. Women go out of their way to help him. Rubirosa is in this category. He has charm and physical appeal. He’ll go through life without any trouble.”
Thanks to Barbara, he had been named one of the Tailors Guild’s Ten Best-Dressed Men just that winter, his youthful love of handmade uniforms having evolved into a mature, internationally recognized eye and sense of style. Oleg Cassini would, shortly, solicit Rubi’s opinion on the design of men’s shirts; fashion-conscious European and Caribbean acquaintances would often admire some detail of his formal or, especially, informal wear and adopt it as a look: jeans and a sports coat; shoes without socks; ascots; a crimson polo helmet that made its owner impossible to miss amid other players’ bobbing white heads. His physique in his mid-forties was still lean, firm, narrow-waisted—drenched, his five feet nine inches never topped 170 pounds—he could still race and ride and swim and fence and play tennis and dance and be up all night and do whatever else was required (he took judicious naps to maintain this rigorous schedule). He was careful with his skin, wearing broad-brimmed hats in the sun and applying lotions and even honey to his face when he played polo. His hair was impeccable: tastefully flecked with gray, immaculately groomed by such high-end crimpers as Jerry Spallina at Madison and Fifty-seventh in Manhattan. He was considered such a connoisseur of women that he was twice selected as a judge in the Miss Universe pageant, in 1954 and 1958. He had improved on the guitar and drums. He could speak at least five languages, three fluently.
He was an ideal of the part, the very image of the Latin lover. And the world ate it up.
His operatic folly with Zsa Zsa and Barbara may have been played out beneath the cloud of American censoriousness: McCarthy, Hoover, the Hollywood Production Code. But it found its way into the mass consciousness not only through the mainstream press but through a new breed of publication that was beginning to seep through the wall of censorship meant to keep decent Americans from accounts of such men and such deeds: Whisper; Hush-Hush; On the Q.T.; Inside Story; Exposed; Uncensored; Exclusive; Sensation; and the biggest and boldest of them all, Confidential.
They offered their readership—a curious coalition of aficionados of movie magazines, men’s true-life stories, girlie mags, and women’s romances—a blend of celebrity gossip, rumors about international society, political smears, news of the weird, and, on occasion, real journalism: muckraking articles about airline safety, the Red Menace, the dangers of cigarette smoking, and the fixing of TV quiz shows. Monthlies composed with low-fi graphics on cheap paper, they screamed out to readers with titillating headlines:
“THE SKELETONS IN RED SKELTON’S CLOSET”
“WHY SINATRA IS A TARZAN OF THE BOUDOIR”
“ARE GALS MAKING GLEASON GO-GO-GO FOR BROKE?”
“THE STRANGE ORGY OF SHELLEY WINTERS”
“THE IMMATURE WORLD OF VICTOR MATURE”
“OPERATION HOLLYWOOD: CUSTOM-TAILORED BOSOMS”
“THOSE PHONY BEGGING NUNS”
Sometimes based on scuttlebutt that had been around for years but never printed, sometimes being told for the first time by sources such as private eyes, hookers, hotel maids, and others shocked or disgruntled by their brushes with the rich and famous, these stories were written with a terse, lingo-rich voice cribbed from the likes of Mickey Spillane and Walter Winchell, writers whose through-the-keyhole style and attitude the scandal rags avidly appropriated. Articles referred to women as “chicks,” “pigeons,” “dames,” or “dishes”; gay men were “limp-wristers”; prostitutes were “pay-for-play” or “loot-for-lovin’” girls. And much of the writing was done pseudonymously by their small staffs or by otherwise legitimate writers out for a quick payday or unable to unload some especially salacious story anywhere else: A cursory once-over of a representative selection of tables of contents reveals such outré noms de plume as Jacques du Bec, Truxton Decatur, Harper Genus, Horton Streete, J. Shirley Frew, and Chumley Yorke.
Confidential, a virtual blueprint for the others, was founded in 1952 by a crew that included a publisher of such soft-core girlie mags as Titter and Wink, an editor from the Police Gazette, and another editor who had made a name for himself as a repeated friendly witness for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red-baiting Senate committee. The magazine took a famously heedless tack against movie publicists, politicians, and the social elite, publishing every damning thing it could and daring those it exposed to sue. It operated under a ruthless cloak of practical necessity: When, famously, Confidential amassed proof of Rock Hudson’s homosexuality, its editors struck a bargain with Universal Pictures, Hudson’s studio, which provided in exchange for their silence on Rock the dirt on Rory Calhoun, a lesser star who had amassed an extensive criminal and jail record as a juvenile in Oklahoma. By the mid-1950s, the lawsuits started coming—Doris Duke filed a big one for the magazine’s insinuations about her relationship with an African prince—and the Hollywood community was trying to encourage prosecution for charges ranging from obscenity to what would in a later day come to be known as stalking.
By then, Confidential and its brethren had made a mainstay of Rubi:
“CASH BOX CASANOVA”
– Confidential, March 1954
“SECRETS OF A SUCCESSFUL LOVER”
–Bold, June 1954
“THE GIRL WHO SAID ‘NO’ TO RUBIROSA”
–Sensation, July 1954
“RUBI’S GREEK SECRET!”
– Exclusive, August 1954
“… UP IN ZSA ZSA’S BEDROOM”
– Confidential, September 1954
“THE GLAMOUR DEB WHO MADE RUBI RUN”
– Confidential, January 1955
“HOW RUBIROSA PROCURES HIS WOMEN”
– Inside Story, April 1956
(and much later, but irresistibly)
“WHO DONGED THE DING-DONG DADDY?”
�
�� Confidential, April 1962
A surprising amount of the material these magazines dug up on him was true and even newsworthy: the story of the Bencosme murder, complete with photos of the rat-faced Chichi Rubirosa; the story of the Aldao jewels; the story of brother Cesar’s woes in Greece; George Sanders’s amazing Christmas Eve raid on Zsa Zsa’s house. Some was of far lesser interest and intensity—accounts, mainly, of women who got away. And a good deal of it was merely punched-up versions of his well-rehearsed life story, such as it could be researched, confirmed, and written on minuscule budgets of time and money.
In January 1957, when they were still feeling their oats sufficiently to publish articles like “Joan Crawford’s Back Street Romance with a Bartender” and “Girls! Beware of Elvis Presley’s Doll-Point Pen,” the editors of Confidential found a new way to work Rubi into their pages. “The Vine that Makes You Virile,” screamed the headline on the cover, teasing an article about a tropical elixir called Pega Palo. According to the story (written by the magazine’s editor A. P. Govoni under his actual name), Pega Palo grew abundantly and was widely and cheaply for sale in the Dominican Republic. One simply had to clean it, chop it into chunks, and steep it for a few days in liquor; after that, a mere jigger of the stuff worked as both an aphrodisiac and a pick-me-up; the beneficial effects, it was said, could last two days; Rubi, it was said, enjoyed two jiggers a day—there was even a photo of him with a glass in his hand.
The whole business was news to Rubi. “The photo was taken in some bar somewhere,” he remembered, “and what I was drinking was without any doubt an ‘Americano’—a whisky.” In fact, he said, he wasn’t interviewed and had absolutely no idea what Pega Palo was or how he came to be associated with it.
The stuff called Pega Palo was actually known more commonly as funde (digitaria exilis or digitaria iburua) and was originally brought from West Africa into the Dominican Republic, where it grew abundantly, back in the Columbus days; it was imported as a cereal for porridges. But now, with the inadvertent imprimatur of the world’s greatest stud, it was enjoying a new currency in the American marketplace of chatter as a liquid aphrodisiac. Indeed, currency was the key word; not long after Confidential’s Pega Palo article, the vine was being bottled in the United States as Fortidom, a wild night in a bottle.
Made with Dominican funde, packaged and sold by the Bridges Company of Houston, Texas, Fortidom was, out of the gate, a $1 million business—and, as Rubi knew, nobody could do business on that scale in the Dominican Republic without the significant involvement of Trujillo. Soon after the article appeared, Rubi was in Ciudad Trujillo trying to finagle a slice of the deal. He approached the minister of health, who was all wrapped up in the business. “How can you use my name in all these deals,” he wanted to know, “without asking my permission and without offering me any participation?” The bureaucrat gave him a look that indicated that they both knew how it had happened, and declared, “You know who the only person is who could give such orders.”
As it turned out, the Dominican source for the Bridges Company’s funde was a plantation and refinery owned wholly by Trujillo, who had ingeniously devised a moneymaking scheme out of his former son-in-law’s sexual notoriety. Rubi was beaten at this particular game before he’d even sat down at the table, and he knew it. “I went to Paris,” he said. “A few days later, I received generous compensation in the form of a dozen trial bottles of Pega Palo.”
There was an additional irony in the crossing of the interests of Rubi and the Benefactor in the pages of Confidential. In the United States during the heyday of scandal rags, celebrity gossip served as a kind of cognate to the more chilling sort of whispers and lies associated with McCarthyism and the Red Scare—lips loosened in the direction of select ears could and did sink lives. At the same time, in the Dominican Republic, gossip was used even more brazenly as a tool of civil control. And, as in so many other things, Trujillo was a master at the nefarious business of death by scuttlebutt.
Listín Diario, then the most important daily newspaper in Ciudad Trujillo, was, like every other key component of Dominican life, controlled, through puppets and discreet dodges, by Trujillo. And its public letters page, the “Foro Publico,” was used by the dictator to cow, denounce, and expunge anyone who fell short of his approval—and not just in their work, but in their private comportment as well.
Trujillo was one of those fastidious sadists who placed the highest premium on personal grooming, polite manners, and moral uprightness. Never mind that he was the sort of tyrant who preyed on young girls throughout his country (legend would have it that some Dominican families deliberately hid their daughters away or even scarred them so they wouldn’t in mid-puberty be set upon by the Benefactor); everyone in his circle had to conform to his courtly ideals of appearance and decorum.
His punctiliousness puzzled and frightened everyone—in no small part because Trujillo literally had the power of life and death over his countrymen. By the 1950s, some twenty years into his reign, he had massacred and raped and emptied the pockets of tens of thousands. He had a secret police force, the SIM, run by a half-German, half-Dominican named Johnny Abbes García, a pudgy, vicious killer who oversaw a variety of operations of intimidation, extortion, murder, and torture both at home and abroad to protect trujillismo from its oceans of enemies (the SIM killed with both an electric chair and a block-and-tackle suspended over a vat of boiling oil). And he had, as well, his pen—and access to all media distributed in the country. With the tools of physical and psychological terror, he forced the entire country to knuckle under. And it would be hard in some cases to say whether the tortures inflicted by Abbes García or the genteel tyranny of the “Foro Publico” were more degrading.
Each day in the pages of Listín Diario there would be letters from a variety of citizens who had only the best interests of the nation and its people and its leadership at heart. Some of these would be praising this or that bit of modernization and progress. And perhaps rightly so: If nothing else, Trujillo certainly brought the Dominican Republic into the twentieth century, constructing for the first time in most of the nation such basic public works as roads, sewage systems, electricity, waterworks, telephones, schools, hospitals, and the like, not to mention profitable industries that, to be fair, were so monopolized by him and his inner circle that they constituted an entrepreneurial rather than a national empire.
But the majority of these letters were of the poison pen variety—and were certainly more widely and carefully read than any of the accompanying paeans to macadam roads and flush toilets. Correspondents to the “Foro Publico” would wonder aloud what the world was coming to when this or that minister or military officer or bureaucrat was drinking too much at a social occasion or speaking inappropriately about something or other or was seen going into a house not his own in the middle of a workday. Readers would pore over these missives with their sweet teeth bared and the hollows of their stomachs poised to tighten. Because as everybody knew, the author of most of these censorious letters was Trujillo, writing under a variety of pseudonyms, male and female. Those whose ways had offended him found themselves criticized and, often, stripped of position or livelihood or liberty or even life itself, as if the very hand of God had wrought a gossip column that did double duty as an inventory of the damned.
Rubi made his sole appearance in the “Foro Publico” in this period, when his international fame had eclipsed Trujillo’s to a degree that the dictator couldn’t abide.
In the spring of 1955, the famous playboy sat in the choicest bungalow at the Hotel Jaragua, the most modern and luxurious resort along the Malecon, Ciudad Trujillo’s charming seaside boulevard, and spoke with a journalist from Listín Diario—one of the few truly in-depth and far-ranging chats he ever had with a reporter. He was happy to offer his opinions to a Dominican organ, he said, because the media in that country was so decent to him, particularly in comparison to the American press. “In Paris, the journalists don’t bother you like in the
U.S.,” he explained. “I arrive in Paris? One photo and it’s done. North Americans meet you in a mob and ask the most ridiculous questions. This is why I come here. Here I can really have a vacation.”
He spoke about Zsa Zsa and the movie project, Western Affair, about his impending divorce from Barbara Hutton, about Danielle Darrieux’s visit to his posh internment camp at Bad Nauheim, about his law school days. He discussed motor sports and polo and cock fighting and his taste in food and wine and his love of history and the fine arts (“I like French and English theater. The Italian cinema has reached a surrealism that’s beyond reason. You want to dream a little. Mexican cinema is beautifully shot”). He griped a little bit about being too much in the sun of the media. “I don’t seek publicity as you might think,” he said. “Any woman whatever can call a journalist and say she has been with me and they’ll publish it!” And he insisted that he was not a fortune hunter: “I don’t divorce to acquire millions. If that’s what I wanted, it’s logical that I wouldn’t divorce.”
Fluffy, harmless stuff.
The next day, the “Foro Publico” lashed out at it.
He hasn’t done the least thing to make known in the outside world—and as little here—the prosperity, progress and improvement that in all ways, material, moral and cultural, this country has enjoyed in this luminous Era.
I was also surprised to read, a few days ago in “El Caribe” [a competing newspaper], a caption under a photo of Rubirosa, declaring his statement that he had never before seen a cock fight, whereas in the hallways of his paternal home in San Francisco de Macorís there were [cock fighting implements] celebrating the victories in the nearly daily battles.