The Irresistible Mr Wrong

by Jeremy Scott

  Genevieve is outraged – ‘How can he do this to you?’ – and wants to call the police. She cleans up Zsa Zsa’s bloody face, while the victim begs her not to and dissuades the prince from going after Rubi to kill him. The three are still absorbed in the drama when the front doorbell rings.

  It was three in the morning. Genevieve … begged me not to let him in. But I had no choice. Rubi owned me, I had lost my will, I was a part of him and no longer belonged to myself… He knelt in front of me and asked for my forgiveness. Then the next minute we were making love…

  In the autumn of that year George Sanders files for divorce.

  CHAPTER 10

  BARBARA HUTTON DEAUVILLE, AUGUST 1953

  The day sparkles bright, the warm breeze smells of the sea. The sun shines on fresh green turf and crisply laundered young men, glossy ponies and the colourful clothes of the spectators as Barbara Hutton, wearing a Chanel suit, wide-brimmed hat and very dark glasses, watches her son Lance playing polo this summer afternoon in Deauville. She looks delicate, even fragile; what you can see of her face is wan. She has been named one of the ten best-dressed women in the world, her suit comes from this spring’s collection, yet she does not seem really to be a part of the animated crowd talking and laughing in the stand. There is a separateness about her as she sits with her stoned gaze turned toward the game, glassed-off, composed and still. Calm – as she can be when the mix of speed, barbiturates, codeine and alcohol circulating in her bloodstream is exactly right. She is in Deauville because of Lance, she is performing her duty as a mother. This is his summer vacation. While with her here he is studying for his college entrance – that anyway is the theory. Aged sixteen, blond, burly-handsome, owner of a sports coupé and already dating starlets, he is aiming to be a racing driver. What need has he for academic qualifications?

  Barbara Hutton © Press Association

  Deauville is a favoured stopover for the international set in season. The town has classy chic and a handful of good hotels, but bars and nightclubs are few. Lance has with him his roommate Leland Rosenberg, and one evening while the two are trawling this limited circuit they are befriended by a stranger here to compete in the international polo tournament; indeed his team is favoured to win the Coupe d’Or prize. And not exactly a stranger, for though the boys haven’t met him before they well know who he is. They have watched him playing and are aware of his reputation, as is anyone who reads a newspaper.

  Rubi is now forty-four, and for a couple of teenagers hanging out in a bar to be picked up by a well-known (and unequivocally heterosexual) playboy who is a six-handicap polo player, boxer, fencer, racing driver and lover of famous women (including currently the showgirl Zsa Zsa Gabor, with him in Deauville) who buys them drinks, listens to what they have to say and treats them as equals is an exhilarating and flattering experience. They are at the heart of the action in a sexy adult milieu.

  Leland Rosenberg, who is unrich and hasn’t been around so much as Lance, is particularly warmed by Rubirosa’s friendship. And friendship it seems to be not merely a casual encounter, for next day, by pure chance – oh yes? – Leland runs into Rubi again, who is as amiable as the night before. They chat. Rubi gives good chat, he causes the sixteen-year-old to feel hip and experienced as himself as he speaks about a world the boy has glimpsed through Lance but which otherwise is unknown to him. Leland is thrilled by the lifestyle Rubi reveals and especially impressed by his casual mention of the people he mixes with: Errol Flynn, Sinatra, Dean Martin, Aly Khan, King Farouk, the Kennedys, the Citroëns, the Rothschilds, the Peróns… It sounds to Leland the sort of life he’d like to lead himself.

  And then, as though the notion has just occurred to him, Rubi mentions how curiously opportune it is that he and Leland should encounter each other so fortuitously when they are in a position to perform a personal service for one another. Lightly but quite specifically he proposes a devil’s contract. He will sponsor the young man as a protégé in that glitzy world he knows; Leland’s part in the deal is to set up a date for him with Barbara Hutton.

  Barbara had been launched upon the world aged eighteen at her debut ball in December 1930, one year after the Wall Street Crash. A blizzard was howling down Madison Avenue that evening, snatching at the clothes of poorly dressed people, most of them women, who stood in a crowd of several thousand outside the entrance to the Ritz-Carlton hotel. It was the worst winter in America anyone had known. In Manhattan a third of the city’s working population was unemployed. Banks had failed, factories closed, dockyards shut down; farms had been repossessed across the country and families evicted from their homes. In bleak city streets men with slack expressionless faces shivered in soup-lines in the bitter cold while old women bundled up against the driving snow grubbed for food in garbage cans.

  RICHEST GIRL IN THE WORLD COMES OUT TONIGHT AT

  FABULOUS RITZ DINNER DANCE. New York Mirror.

  This was a singular moment to choose to throw so magnificent a party, or one so conspicuously visible. Black limousines coasted through the slush-covered Madison Avenue to draw up before the Ritz-Carlton, as police held back the crowd. Men in tailcoats partnered by women in ball gowns stepped from the cars onto the red carpet which led into the building. The guests were a pampered bunch accustomed to the best, yet many would recall this evening as the most spectacular junket they had ever attended. The shouting and abuse which greeted them on arrival was upsetting, of course, but their disquiet lasted only for an instant before it was magicked away by the hallucinatory impact of the domain they had stepped into. Father Christmas was there to welcome them – Maurice Chevalier inside the scarlet tunic. Costumed dwarfs swarmed merrily around his thighs, distributing small gold caskets containing a diamond, emerald or ruby as amuse-bouches to set the tone. And then the guests moved on…

  It was like entering an enchanted forest, a scene from fairytale. Teams of men had been working in shifts day and night to transform the hotel into a winter wonderland. Snow lay deep upon the ground but it wasn’t the sort to make your feet wet. The air was warm and fragrant with perfume and cigarette smoke, and the strains of dance music drifted from the ballroom which was roofed by a sky of dark blue gauze glittering with stars and a lustrous moon. There were four orchestras, 1,000 guests and – though this was Prohibition and America was dry – 2,000 bottles of champagne.

  In the storm of real snow outside, a Cadillac limousine emerged from the murk to pull up at the kerb. The crowd stirred, pressing closer to the barriers while those in front fought to keep their position. A doorman opened the car’s door and a girl emerged wearing a fur coat over her white silk dress, a plump blonde kewpie doll with pink cheeks and big curiously blank blue eyes. For a moment the crowd fell silent at the sight of her, then as she started up the red carpet came the first catcall to cue the jeering and abuse that accompanied her walk into the hotel as the photographers ducked and crouched, firing off their pictures while the mob shrieked insults and waved their fists.

  This was Barbara Hutton’s introduction to the public; its response to her was established then. Here was the image, with various shadings, that would remain with her all her life. It was celebrity for sure, but in the guise of infamy. To achieve public fame through admiration and love takes time, hatred delivers the goods on the nose.

  She was cast in melodrama while still an infant, and it was the press who cast her. Her mother Edna had been driven to frenzy by her husband’s flagrant infidelity, over the years her humiliation had grown unbearable. The terminal insult came when a photograph of Franklyn appeared in the New York Sun. Snapped at a party, he was dancing with his latest flame, the Swedish actress Monica von Fursten. Edna dressed carefully for her parting gesture, then swallowed strychnine. She was wearing a white lace dress and a double strand of pearls when her body was found sprawled on the red carpet of the family suite at the Plaza Hotel. The one to find her was her daughter Barbara. She was four years old.

  Such was, such is, the power of vast wealth, there
followed no autopsy, no inquest, no stories in the press beyond the bare announcement of her passing and the coroner’s verdict: cerebral thrombosis. Barbara was sent to live at Grandpa Woolworth’s gloomy country house on Long Island, from which a car drove her every morning to school in Manhattan where she made friends with Doris Duke, the same age as her, whose future life would intersect often with her own. But at weekends and on vacation Barbara had no friend. The sombre mansion echoed with the sound of organ music as Grandpa crouched at his Wurlitzer flashing with coloured lights, playing up a storm while Grandma rocked in her chair, lost to the world and mewing softly in the fog of dementia.

  Grandpa was the workaholic farm boy who had opened America’s first 5-cent store with $400 worth of borrowed goods. At his death Barbara’s share of the estate was $28 million (equivalent to $400 million today) when she inherited it, aged twelve. The money was held in a trust fund administered by her father until she was twenty-one. She was enrolled in a boarding school in northern California. ‘She was a lovely little girl,’ her school house-mother recalls, ‘but she just never seemed to have a chance. She had so much money but no one to guide or listen to her. She was lonely and very shy… No one ever came to see her at the school, not even at Christmas.’ After one year there she was taken in by her rackety Aunt Jessie Donahue (her mother’s sister) and her hard-drinking husband. They had two sons around her own age, one of them, Jimmy, who became her dangerous lifelong playmate.

  At her new boarding school in Connecticut other girls were distrustful of her aloofness and expensive clothes. It took her a while to identify the barrier that separated her from other people. ‘Can’t we give it all away?’ she asked her father but was told that was not possible. Even before his remarriage she saw him rarely. Their encounters were fraught with bullying incomprehension on his part, and on hers naked hostility. She could not forgive him for her mother’s death; she hated him and wanted to make him suffer. And she would.

  The Donahues, with whom Barbara was billeted during vacations, were – thanks to Grandpa Woolworth – good and loaded. Life with them was untrammelled by restraint, and Barbara’s adolescence accustomed her to luxury and a habit of travel which would remain with her always. At the age of seventeen she was in Biarritz with her father’s friends the Fiskes when she first came to the notice of the notorious fixer and publicist Elsa Maxwell. Barbara was discarded as inadequate material. ‘I saw a short, plump girl whose hands and feet were too small for a rather clumsy body and whose dress was a trifle too tight.’ Another acquaintance of the time describes her as a ‘butterball’.

  Biarritz then was a resort as fashionable as Cannes, the smart set was there in force. Despite her inarticulacy, awkwardness and shyness, Barbara was invited to lunches and parties. At one of these she ran into a man she knew. Prince Alexis Mdivani was a polo-playing adventurer engaged to her friend Louise van Alen. Barbara had been writing to him throughout the past year, pouring out her feelings, her hopes, her fears. ‘And I had the most wonderful letters from him. There wasn’t even the suggestion of a love affair … he was in love with Louise. But he made himself the only person I could trust with my thoughts. He was kind, he was gentle, and he listened to me without being bored…’ Alex wasn’t in the least bored. He was about to get married, but heiresses were his revealed vocation and Barbara was an investment.

  She and Tiki, her maid, left Biarritz to join Franklyn and her stepmother Irene at the Carlton in Cannes. There she lost her virginity to the tennis coach. ‘It was my first experience with a man who devoured me… It is like being captured and drained. It is not altogether pleasant, and it certainly isn’t very graceful.’ Back in New York at the end of summer Franklyn hired a bodyguard to watch over his increasingly wayward daughter. She seduced the man. ‘He was rampant as a bull… We made love repeatedly for hours. I was black and blue and torn and tattered and covered with stickiness.’ By telling her stepmother Barbara made sure her father got to know of it. ‘At first he said nothing at all to me, he just looked at me as if I were an insect of some kind. Then he wanted to know if I’d ever been with a man before, and of course I lied and said I hadn’t. “Why a security guard?” he said. “Why not a chimney sweep or a garbage collector or the husband of the chambermaid? You have such elegant taste, my dear.”’

  One day Barbara went into a music store on 57th Street to choose some gramophone records. A young clerk came up to serve her. The selection and purchase of the discs involved a few minutes of talk at the end of which Barbara asked, ‘Tell me, what do people like you do when you go out in the evening?’

  The clerk, who had recognised her, was outraged by such condescension. But he was trained for deference and answered in a tight voice, ‘Well, we do what most ordinary people do. We can’t afford to go to the Central Park Casino, but we go to smaller places we know, and we dance and walk through Central Park.’

  But it was clear that he was angry. ‘Don’t be cross, please,’ Barbara said, ‘I really wanted to know. I’ve got a date with a young man who works in a garage, and he doesn’t know who I am. I just honestly wanted to know what to say when he asks me what I want to do tonight. That’s all.’

  She had no understanding at all of the real world. How could she, she’d never lived in it. The only advice she received was from her father – a toxic source she automatically rejected. Yet the media’s treatment of her from the start must have taught her something. If she had wished, her debut at the Ritz-Carlton could have been staged elsewhere, at very least could have been cloaked by discretion and some restraint as was Doris Duke’s. No – she wanted it how it was, and she must not only have foreseen the consequences but chosen them. She invited punishment: smack me, I’m bad!

  That December evening in 1930, when she reigned as princess over the enchanted winter wonderland while a shivering mob shrieked abuse in the trampled slush outside, made news. Barbara was a story, and from that moment the press would not leave her alone. She would spend the rest of her life exposed to public view, she would never have privacy. She had become a symbol of riches, self-indulgence and excess, an image calibrated to make people detest her. And – here was the wonder of it, the modern marvel – all this plus the emotion it aroused could be conveyed in a newspaper photograph. The caption below it was hardly necessary, merely an add-on to the established story.

  Most articles written about Barbara then and later were hostile. Yet because of the extravagance of her behaviour and opulence of her settings these pieces had an undertone of unwilling awe. Her life looked and sounded so very glamorous. She thought it so herself when reading of it. Despite the cruel remarks some journalists made about her, she found the attention profoundly gratifying. She’d never received attention from her father or anyone else while growing up, never been acknowledged or listened to; never had the chance to develop her identity through relationship with others. Now she had found these opportunities with the press. She recognised that the woman who lived so fully on the page was her.

  Celebrity is a drug. For some, the first line sets the taste. It was so for Barbara. In the months that followed she acquired an addiction contracted by all who yearn for publicity, the taste for a transaction giving both pleasure and torment but without which they do not, cannot live. Hurt comes with the experience, anger, shame, the pain of denial and suffering of withdrawal, yet an addict will always pay the price. It is better to be written about with malice than not at all.

  She loved to see her photograph and read about herself; it confirmed her identity – that was the person she was. She needed an audience in order properly to exist; the spotlight of public attention transfigured her. She was – she remains still – an archetype of value-free celebrity, famous not for any accomplishment but simply for being there. Celebrity was her destiny … and, despite the competition, she will become one of its most spectacular global casualties.

  CHAPTER 11

  BARBARA HUTTON, DEAUVILLE, 1953

  It is 2.30 a.m. on a summer morning
in Deauville and Barbara Hutton is asleep alone in her suite in the Hotel Normandie, overlooking the sea.

  The small dinner party set up by Leland Rosenberg duly has taken place two days ago, where Porfirio Rubirosa was seated next to Barbara. She’s met him before when he was married to Doris Duke, but never alone – Doris was quite careful of that. She knows a lot about him, as does everyone, from her daily study of newspapers, magazines and gossip columns. He’s recently featured as co-respondent in two high-profile divorces, in one of which Barbara’s earlier suitor Robert Sweeny cited him in his split from Joanne Connelly, the Texas Oil heiress. Barbara is also well aware that Rubi has had affairs with Tina Onassis, Eva Perón, Joan Crawford, Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe, and is currently involved in a tempestuous romance with Zsa Zsa Gabor. What she does not know is that the adverse publicity resulting from the two divorces and his own from Doris Duke has so displeased President Trujillo that once again he’s fired Rubi from his diplomatic post and cut off his salary. He’s unemployed, low on funds and operating on credit.

  Barbara finds Rubi to be charming and attentive; he demonstrates an almost feminine sensibility. He gives no sign of the flamboyant party animal he is reputed to be, instead shows himself quiet and solicitous. He makes no move on her but remains faultless in consideration and, rather irritatingly, in restraint.

  Barbara always sleeps poorly and never without pills. It is so tonight, but in the early hours of the morning the sound of pounding music seeps through her stupor to rouse her. Groggily she comes awake – and the music is still there, loud and raucous with a driving beat. Irritated, puzzled, at last she is impelled to get out of the bed, go to the French window and step out on her balcony to establish its origin.