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

by Shawn Levy

  Back in Paris, they kept the romance kindled but relatively hush-hush. Rubi made a visit to Ciudad Trujillo, where his older sister, Anita, was dying of colon cancer at age fifty-four. “It was a melancholy separation,” Odile remembered. “I was very much in love. He too, I believe, because as soon as we were apart he didn’t stop calling me, writing me, sending me telegrams as long as novels.”

  He made it back home in time for the opening night of Fabien. “Porfirio was more nervous than me,” Odile said of that debut. “Always so optimistic, he was sad. He told me later he feared the worst catastrophes: memory lapses, tripping, prop failures, cabals.” But she was a hit, as was the show, and the cast, crew, backers, and friends of the play were out celebrating at Drouant’s when Rubi pulled up and whisked her away for a private dinner at Maxim’s. Not long after that, Odile moved out of her family home and into Rue de Bellechasse.

  “I was a baby,” she remembered. “I wanted to have fun. I didn’t want to get married. I wanted a career. But by the end of one month I was totally fascinated by him.”

  In early October they called in a few friends from the press to announce their engagement.

  “Miss Rodin and I have decided to get married,” Rubi declared. “The wedding probably will take place within one month. It will be quiet and, I hope, secret. That’s all I have to say.”

  Odile chimed in: “I’m lucky in the theater, and I’m lucky in my private life. Now, I’m so happy.”

  They were questioned about the rumors that they were shacked up. “I have been living here with Rubi for the past week,” Odile admitted. And when she was asked why she sported a bandage on her hand, she explained, “I cut myself when I changed his razor blades this morning.”

  No, she didn’t cook for him, she said, and she started to explain what the servants did when Rubi interrupted, “Please, Odile.” Then to the press: “There will be no more questions. We are going to marry soon and, believe me, ladies and gentlemen, you will not be invited.”

  On the way out, a reporter asked, “Will it last?”

  “Sure,” Rubi said. “I love her.”

  It wasn’t what her mother had been hoping for. When the press caught up with her, Mme. Dupuy de Frenelle would only say, “That is my daughter’s personal affair. She has gone her own way for quite some time.”

  Talk, of course, was everywhere.

  Rubi had been so rapacious in his dealings with Barbara that he had no chance of marrying another fortune, gossips said. And Odile was simply climbing her way into a sensational position: Why not marry a vigorous man twenty-eight years her elder if it meant international attention, not to mention sharing the life of luxury he had created for himself through years of marrying up.

  At the end of October, after a performance of Fabien, she mentioned backstage that she was getting married the next day, but nobody took her seriously. After all, none of them had been invited to a wedding. But, true to her word, on October 27, she and Rubi stood in the mairie of Sonchamp, a village some thirty miles southwest of Paris, and exchanged vows before a small contingent of friends that included Aly Khan, fashionista Genevieve Fath, the duke of Cadoval, Count Guy d’Arcangues, and shipbuilder Armand Boyer, Rubi’s polo buddy and best man. The groom gave the bride the usual gold band speckled with rubies. They went back to town for a small champagne reception, and she made her curtain that evening.

  “That night,” she remembered, “I presented myself at the theater as if nothing had happened. But I must confess: the discipline I had put into Fabien had left me.” She told her producers that she was feeling unwell, a cold, and then raced off to London with Rubi for a weekend getaway. While they were dancing in Les Ambassadeurs, one of the producers walked in, gave Rubi the fisheye, and said dryly to Odile, “So this is the cold.”

  As he had with Zsa Zsa, Rubi pressed her to choose between marriage and a career, and lacking the Hungarian’s mettle, she caved. “Rubi made me cancel my contract with my impresario,” Odile remembered. “He told Rubi, ‘You are doing the most foolish thing because Odile would have a great future.’”

  But leave she did, going with Rubi to the Dominican Republic for a honeymoon. They stayed on tropical beaches, walking, swimming, riding; he cooked Creole food for her and started teaching her Spanish. He had plucked her from one stage, but he was determined to groom her for another.

  FOURTEEN

  THE STUDENT PRINCE IN OLD HOLLYWOOD

  He was looking at fifty.

  He had money in the bank.

  He had a beautiful young wife and lots of friends and fast cars and horses and a lovely house and plenty of clothes; gossip columns referred to him by instantly recognizable nicknames; Groucho Marx told jokes about him.

  He was a star; he had no worlds left to conquer.

  And his symbolic daddy, Trujillo, had similarly maxed out and perhaps leveled off—and might even be said to be in decline. His attempts to export his strong-arm tactics around the Caribbean were blowing up in his face, and the U.S. government was still interested in finding out just what had happened to Jesús de Galíndez and Gerald Lester Murphy. Trujillo was even older, of course, than Rubi, with all that that implied in physical decay and the stiffening of prejudices, fears, and resolve. But he was defiant in maintaining his rule—just ask anyone who’d had a visit from the SIM, which patrolled neighborhoods with listening devices, ever at the ready to swoop down on dissent. And he had hopes to extend his reign through means that Rubi could never emulate: namely, dynastic succession.

  Rubi had his women and his polo and his theme song.

  Trujillo had Ramfis, his replacement-in-training, the scion who would carry forth the Trujillo name and dynasty into a new century, a chip off the old block, an apple that hadn’t fallen far from the tree, the living image of his father in act and deed.

  Except he wasn’t.

  Where Trujillo was the raw stuff of a tíguere, clawing his way to the top, scratching his ascent over a pile of dead men and live women, nimble and cunning and ruthless, Ramfis was a despondent drag, a pouty brat who took pleasure only in the releases of parrandas and polo. Where the father was all comportment and propriety, Ramfis was a debaucher. Where the father calculated his progress through the world with steely precision, Ramfis was given to mood swings and lethargy. Trujillo could respect someone like Rubi, whose life, outwardly, Ramfis seemed to emulate: Rubi, like the Benefactor, rose in the world through discreet application of his ruthlessness and talents. Ramfis, on the other hand, was weak, uncertain, childish; had he been any other man’s son he would have lived out his days in ignominious obscurity.

  But he wasn’t any other man’s son; he was Trujillo’s—and, moreover, his firstborn. He was going to be groomed for excellence, respectability, and greatness even if nothing in him suited the role. A colonel at age four (with a $350-per-month salary), he had been promoted to brigadier general at age nine. Graciously, he was demoted to cadet upon entering the Dominican military academy at fourteen, but he continued his meteoric rise after his aborted schooling: lieutenant colonel at twenty-one, colonel at twenty-two, and then, that same year, general once again. He was given a law degree. He was named commander of the tiny Dominican air force—even though he couldn’t, at the time, pilot so much as a crop duster.

  In most regards, he was a disappointment—not that Trujillo or anyone around him or, indeed, in the country would say so. While attending school in the United States as a ten-year-old, he fell into a depression and was sent to a psychiatrist; at the time, the diagnosis was simple homesickness, and he returned to Ciudad Trujillo. But it was the start of a lifelong routine of mental health care. In his manhood, he was taller than his father and more slick in appearance, but his weak chin and tiny mouth tended to give him the aspect of a pimp—and the way he did up his wavy hair and dressed far too finely for almost every occasion only bolstered that impression. He was a little musical; he would often break into song during an evening’s festivities. And he was said by those sympathet
ic to him to have a retiring nature—which, however, was usually read by outsiders as diffidence and even contempt.

  At eighteen he wed the pretty Octavia Adolfina Ricart, and they produced a brood of six children within the first decade of their marriage. But domesticity did nothing to keep him from whoring or drinking or ignoring his home life or building around him a coterie of pampered sons of privilege, among them Rubi’s nephew Gilberto Sánchez, Rubirosa and Luis León Estévez, the cocky little colonel who married Angelita Trujillo and was snickered at behind his back as “Chesty” for his full-of-airs mien.* With this posse of sneering upstarts, Ramfis had no time or interest to spend on his nominal duties, preferring to play polo (he was said never to have lost a match in the Dominican Republic—imagine!) and visit Miami and Palm Beach for orgiastic holidays.

  He was, in short, something like the combination of the worst of his father and the worst of his former brother-in-law, Rubi, who introduced Ramfis to many of the pursuits that consumed him but stayed a judicious distance from him as well. One Trujillo at a time, Rubi learned from his first marriage, was plenty. He steered Ramfis with a ginger hand but rarely wedged himself into a place alongside him; the one sure way to reap the Benefactor’s wrath was to meddle in his plans for his golden child.

  Chief among Trujillo’s boasts was Ramfis’s reputation as a soldier. As evinced by the absurd string of promotions Ramfis was granted without ever serving a day in any branch of the service, Trujillo was infatuated with the trappings of military glory. (His own official list of titles, honors, and citations ran to several single-spaced pages.) In 1957, he determined to initiate Ramfis into the elite echelons of the global military fraternity by enrolling him at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, an advanced training school for the highest-ranking officers from around the world. It was a grueling course in logistics, strategy, theory, and even nuclear policy designed for senior soldiers from the United States and its allied countries, and admission was strictly limited to those invited by the U.S. government. As the Dominican Republic was seen as a stable friend in the Caribbean in the view of those who implemented the Eisenhower administration’s Good Neighbor Policy, Trujillo was extended an invitation to fill a position, and he naturally chose Ramfis for the role.

  The American government wasn’t too terribly thrilled with this decision. A State Department memo of a few years earlier described the younger Trujillo as “a logical product of the environment in which he was raised … very spoiled, headstrong, and utterly ruthless with anyone who opposes his whims. He has a close group of friends who act in the nature of a gang of bodyguards. The group as a whole is carefully avoided by persons who do not feel inclined to be completely subservient to Ramfis.” Another document told the extraordinary story of how Enrique García, one of Ramfis’s circle, fell out of favor at a parranda: “When García fell asleep in his chair, Ramfis poured a glass of brandy down his throat, and García, reacting instinctively, swung on Ramfis and connected beautifully. Ramfis’s bodyguards then gave García a working over so thorough that they had to take him to a hospital for repairs. García, upon recovering consciousness, escaped from the hospital and sought to take asylum at an undesignated embassy. He was unsuccessful in doing so. He is now reported to be under detention in a local hospital.”

  It was with these sorts of reports in mind that the State Department denied the request from Ciudad Trujillo to grant Ramfis diplomatic status during his matriculation at military school. Rather, upon arriving in Kansas in September, Ramfis enrolled as a colonel (as a general he would have been the senior officer in the whole facility, an anomaly even Trujillo couldn’t support). But that would be virtually the only concession he made to protocol or propriety. For his nine-month sojourn, Trujillo gave Ramfis a gift of $1 million plus another $50,000 in monthly allowance. * His retinue included the usual gang of secretaries, aides, and hangers-on, as well as Octavia and the five oldest children. They all lived in a $450-per-month rented house in Leavenworth (gussied up with air-conditioning and hi-fi equipment) and, on weekends, in $100-a-day accommodations in Kansas City—the entire top floor of the town’s best hotel. He had a full-time staff of seven; the Student Prince of operetta fame was a parvenu in comparison.

  Ramfis had everything, it happened, save the slightest bit of interest in the work he’d been sent to Kansas to do. His course was a six-hour-a-day grind with copious amounts of reading and writing involved. His English was sufficient to the task and so, by the accounts of his instructors, was his aptitude. But he had no ganas, no desire: He skipped classes or busied himself writing letters during lectures. He didn’t get along well with his fellow students; “he made everyone feel as though he thought we were after his dough,” said one. He rarely smiled or chatted, didn’t rise from his chair when introduced to fellow officers’ wives, walked about in his absurdly elaborate Dominican uniforms as if encased in a protective shell.

  He seemed rude, but mainly he was mopey, so much, in fact, that he started seeing another psychiatrist, probably one connected to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka. Through interviews with Ramfis the doctor reckoned that the young man’s father was an outright psychotic and that several relatives on both sides of the family suffered mental disease. Ramfis was diagnosed with clinical depression and mild hypomania and put on a regimen of medication: among the pharmacopoeia, Miltown for his nervous anxiety and Doriden for his sleepless nights. (The former proved so useful to his son that the Benefactor sped its introduction into Dominican pharmacies, declaring it “the happiness pill” and creating a fashion for it among the tiny elite of the country.) Ramfis, heedless, habitually chased his diet of pills with his father’s favorite sedative, Spanish brandy, which amplified the effects of his medication in some ways and negated them in others. He was given to broody, boozy torpors; he was a mess.

  When the school shut down for Christmas, he went home to Ciudad Trujillo with Octavia and the children; then he left them there and returned to the States to finish his course of study in a slightly different style. The first sign of change arrived in the form of the single most unlikely visitor to the Great Plains: Rubi. Perhaps sent by Trujillo to see what was bugging young Ramfis, perhaps alerted by his nephew, Gilberto, to the wingding that was sure to ensue in the absence of Ramfis’s wife and kids, Rubi showed up and helped jump-start the party. The rented ranch house was already the scene of late-night drinking bouts, with loud music and raucous laughter keeping the neighbors up. But Rubi pointed Ramfis toward yet more fun and distraction: Why waste so much energy on Kansas, he counseled, when America held far more glittering attractions?

  Rubi dressed him for the part—some $7,000 in fine clothes from a New York tailor—and then provided a truly invaluable service: He called Zsa Zsa in Bel-Air (like the decadent former lovers in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, they remained friendly after their affair had died) and asked her to introduce Ramfis to Hollywood, in particular to some of the actresses over whom he’d been swooning in movie theaters recently, dropping the piquant detail that Ramfis was thinking of divorcing Octavia and seeking a bride—perhaps minting a Dominican Grace Kelly in the process.

  Zsa Zsa had met Ramfis on a trip she’d made to Ciudad Trujillo with Rubi and then again in New York. She reckoned she could be of help. She suggested that Ramfis come to Hollywood so that she could throw a party, and he immediately dispatched Gilberto to California to lay the ground for his arrival. When he visited Zsa Zsa, Gilberto insisted that she get on the phone to Ramfis in Kansas and reassure him that everything would go well.

  “I die here,” he moaned. “I don’t know a soul. I am like a fish out of water. I can hardly wait to come there.”

  She told him of her plans for a big bash.

  “Will I meet all your friends? All the stars?”

  “Of course you will.”

  “I have a terrible crush on Kim Novak. Will I meet her?”

  “She’s one of my best friends,” Zsa Zsa ad-libbed. “Of course you’ll
meet her.”

  The two made further plans. Ramfis had ordered that his yacht, the Angelita, be sent to Miami so that he could use it as a base during his school breaks. Zsa Zsa helped him pass those holidays by arranging for a guest to meet him there: Joan Collins, then known leeringly around Hollywood as the British Open, a sex kitten currently between marriages, love affairs, and movie roles. “He was good looking in a glossy, black-haired, olive-skinned Latin way,” La Collins recalled. And he was catching her at just the right time. “I had never before slept with anyone unless totally carried away by passion or love. This time my motivation was mental and physical exhaustion, mixed with gratitude for a consolation missing from my life for months.” As a token of his esteem, Ramfis gifted her with a choker from Van Cleef and Arpels—about 25 karats total. She protested that the $10,000 bauble was too much. But she kept it.

  A bit later, the Angelita was docked in New Orleans and Ramfis invited Zsa Zsa herself to come join him for Mardi Gras, which she did. She, too, stayed aboard the boat. And when she got back to Los Angeles, she, too, found herself the recipient of a surprise gift: a $5,600 red Mercedes convertible roadster with black leather interior. (She never protested its richness.)

  Back in Kansas, Ramfis was barely attending to his studies and finally complained to his superiors that he had developed a problem with his sinuses. They suggested he see a military doctor but he applied for and received two months’ leave to see a specialist.

  In California.

  The ensuing circus began, literally, with a splash.

  A sometime actress named Lynn Heyburn—pretty, slender, twenty-three—came by the house that Gilberto had rented for Ramfis at 243 South Mapleton Drive in Holmby Hills, the celebrity enclave adjacent to Beverly Hills (the rent—on top of what he was paying in Kansas—was $2,500 per month). She had made a movie in Ciudad Trujillo a few years prior, she said, and she thought she could make contact with a niece of Trujillo’s who befriended her there if she paid respects to Ramfis. On her first visit, she was met by Ramfis’s spokesman, Victor Sued, along with Gilberto; they told her that Ramfis was still indisposed with the ill effects of his sinus treatment; they invited her to a party that evening; she declined. She came back the next day when, she claimed, Gilberto and his uncle Rubi met her and led her into the backyard—where they pushed her into the deep end of the swimming pool. A young woman who was apparently staying at the house ran to help her and found her a towel to wear while her own clothes dried; she holed up in a bedroom while, she claimed, Rubi and Gilberto tried to get in to see her. Her clothes were ruined; her dignity was dented; she would sue—or at least have a chunk of the Dominicans out of court. It all dragged on for months until a quiet settlement was reached.