by Jeremy Scott
Rubi had his own special way to conquer a lady. Certainly not the intellectual or even the romantic type, he didn’t waste much time in conversation. He went right to the point, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that he made the lady get to it. An attractive English fashion lady told me of her first and unusual encounter with the famous Dominican lover. It was during a Paris dinner party and Rubi was seated next to her. They had hardly exchanged a few words when Rubi grabbed her hand under the table, and without preamble placed it on his hard cock. As she relates it, she was so stunned that she sat there frozen with that thing in her hand. It was a while, she guesses, before she politely withdrew. Rubi had made his move. From then on it was up to the lady, take it or leave it! He performed the same trick on the dance floor; no wonder he’d only dance slow numbers. His secret weapon, of course, was the perpetual hard-on.
On the face of it Rubi is doing good in the mid-1950s. But he does have certain problems of which Odile and the public are unaware. These centre on his patron and employer, Trujillo. The Dominican Republic under his continued reign has become a pariah state; his blatant misrule is now an open scandal. The genocide he inflicted on Haitian immigrants, his refusal to acknowledge the atrocity or pay reparations has resulted in world-wide ostracism. At home his despotic regime has no regard for human rights, which are not recognised to exist. Dissenters and political opponents are eliminated at source. Under his head of secret police, Johnny Garcia, snatch squads operate in countries providing refuge to Trujillo’s enemies. These are either assassinated or, if their crime is seen as particularly heinous by the Benefactor, especially rendited for interrogation in the notorious torture chamber of La Cuarenta in the capital, where ultimate punishment is dispensed either by electric chair or stringing up the offender by block and tackle over a vat of boiling oil.
In particular affront to Trujillo’s patron the US, Dominican agents have kidnapped Jesus Galindez, a Spanish professor teaching at Columbia who was about to publish a book exposing the bloody history of Trujillo’s regime. He was snatched in broad daylight in mid-town Manhattan after lecturing at the university. Police established that his unconscious body, strapped to a stretcher, was loaded onto a plane at Amityville, NY, and flown to Ciudad Trujillo by a 22-year-old American charter pilot, Gerald Murphy. Some days later Murphy’s car was found abandoned near an abattoir outside the capital; he himself had disappeared. His parents in Oregon, aware of his ‘hospital’ flight, were understandably suspicious, obtaining the support of their Congressman, Charles Porter, who took up the cause and instituted an enquiry.
Due to its sensational nature, the case results in a great deal of publicity. Trujillo is already in the dock, his country under sanctions imposed by the US. Now his bank loans are cancelled and his funding cut off by Congress. The Dominican Republic’s sugar exports have lost their market and Trujillo’s dream of turning the island into a swanky resort has come to nothing. No cruise liners with free-spending passengers berth at the new deepwater port, the marina for the yachts of the rich lies abandoned and incomplete, reeking with effluent. The island’s investors have been scared off by corruption and extortion and the treasury is empty.
In Ciudad Trujillo the Benefactor rules from the heavily guarded presidential compound high above the town, where the air is sweeter. Despite the efforts of numerous contractors, the sewage problem has not been solved. Now no one will attempt it for fear of the price of failure.
He is fully informed on his situation. Internally by the creepy but ruthlessly effective Johnny Garcia, externally by his embassies – particularly those in Washington and New York. His lobby of suborned politicians and staffers has proved ineffectual in whitewashing his regime; some are under investigation themselves due to their links with him. Yet the US Government has been his supporter from the start, and his extreme right-wing dictatorship is a bastion against Communism in the area. America maintains a missile base and high-tech listening station on the island. The government might have been prepared to continue to turn a blind eye to tyranny within his own country but the kidnapping of a Columbia professor in the heart of the Big Apple and blatant murder of a US citizen cannot be ignored.
Trujillo is isolated and friendless, except for his cabal of cronies, whose lives depend on his continued rule. He is moreover a disappointed and embittered man. His donation of a Jewish homeland has gone unrewarded; no Jewish investment resulted from the benefaction. Worse, much worse, his pride has been damaged by a gross insult to his person only last year, in 1955. He’d conceived a grandiose scheme to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of his rule with a Jubilee, a giant fair celebrating his achievements, which would be attended by world dignitaries and crowds of overseas visitors. Millions of dollars were spent on the site and its various pavilions. The elaborate spectacle was staged under his personal direction, assisted by his PR advisers from New York … and it was a total flop. The pageant attracted no notice, nobody came.
The Benefactor does not take setbacks well. Someone else is always to blame and must be punished. By now his moods have become particularly unstable. At any hour of the day or night an order can go out to his cabal of generals, police honchos and spymasters to report within the hour to the presidential Palace. He is driven down the hill in armed convoy, wearing full uniform. His court awaits him, some roused from bed and hastily dressed, some drunk – but woe betide any who are absent. He harangues them while they tremble in his presence, trying not to attract attention. He can shift from icy control to towering rage in an instant. The sagging face swells red, his eyes bulge in fury. The least misunderstanding can produce a spitting torrent of insult and abuse. His tempers are uncontrollable.
In Paris Rubi is distant from Trujillo’s levées by 3,000 miles, but word of the Benefactor’s alarming behaviour has reached his brother the ambassador, Rubi, and the rest of the embassy staff – though of course it cannot be discussed. Any incautious remark risks to be reported. Rubi is well informed on his employer’s erratic conduct but it does not affect him personally until he receives a cable instructing him in the dictator’s latest whim. He is ordered to take the necessary steps to ensure that Trujillo is awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Rubi is obliged to confront the disturbing fact that the boss has gone mad.
‘I’ve heard a lot about you, monsieur, none of it good,’ Odile remarks on meeting Rubi for the first time.
He grins. His reputation has never proved a disadvantage in the past, though at the moment with a quarter of his body sealed in a cast he scarcely represents a sexual threat.
He is instantly struck by her, ‘She was so young, so fresh, so pretty.’ She is still a teenager; her bearing and manner are very unlike the sort of women he’s gone with in the past. There’s a frankness and boldness to her, an absence of pretension. She’s not expensively dressed and she’s neither rich nor famous. But there’s an unconformity and individuality about her, and she stands in awe of no one.
He invites her to dinner and she accepts, not because she’s physically attracted but she’s amused by the idea, and why not? He’s well-practised in the ritual of dinner, the whole choreography of choosing, ordering, discussion with the sommelier about the wine… Top restaurants are his stage, one among his several stages. He doesn’t hit on her – he’s in no shape to in his cast. For the first time in his life he’s physically vulnerable. Instead they talk.
‘I spoke of my country, the sun beating down on the coral, the coconut groves. She listened to me smiling… When I asked her questions she spoke gently.’
He’s charmed by her. He asks her out again while still in his cast, and again when he’s free of it. He too is gentle with her, he doesn’t act in the gross fashion described by Igor Cassini. He’s every inch the gentleman. Those impressive inches remain decently contained, dormant within his trousers, but Odile’s mother is aware of the legend, as is everyone who scans the tabloids. Odile may be an existentialist but she comes of solid bourgeois stock; her father who died when she was y
oung was a surgeon, as is her stepfather. Mother objects strongly to the liaison.
Rubi invites both mother and daughter to dinner, an uncharacteristic move on his part. He’s never before sought to meet the parents of his conquests; there are already quite enough people in the world who want to shoot him.
Mother is forthright: ‘Odile is in the springtime of her life. You, on the other hand, are past your prime. You will never be able to keep up with her, and you will be made most unhappy in the end.’
Then Odile – still at drama school – is offered a leading part in a new play by Marcel Pagnol, to open in Paris in September. Before rehearsals start, she goes to stay at the St Tropez villa of wealthy industrialist Paul-Louis Weiller, as one of a large party that includes Charlie Chaplin and his family. At a bar in town she learns that Rubi is also on the Côte d’Azur, staying at the Dubonnet house on Cap Ferrat. On impulse, Odile rents a Riva speedboat and roars off to call on him. The sea is choppy and on the high-speed ride her light summer dress is soaked by spray. Arriving at the villa’s private jetty, she walks up to the terrace where the house party is assembled, with see-through wet silk clinging to the contours of her body. ‘I made quite an entrance,’ she says.
Odile is welcomed to the Weillers’ house, where she remains a guest. A car is dispatched to St Tropez to collect her clothes.
There, her affair with Rubi blossoms. She is a teenager, as was his first wife Flor when he married her. She has a teenager’s vivacity and enthusiasm, a spontaneous joie de vivre. She’s not an innocent as Flor was, but infinitely more knowing and self-aware; in touch where Flor was naïve, both prettier and brighter. And, crucially, no history of parental bullying and domination. She is her own person.
The Weiller house is casually luxurious, its setting and the weather perfect. By the pool and at the lunch table others are always present, but some evenings they go out à deux. There is a rapport between them, both talk at length. Odile says, ‘During those ten days he revealed how he truly is: attentive, always happy to get going as soon as he awakes, capable of going out ten days in a row… Rubi is deeply interested in the women he takes out. He isn’t satisfied merely to make a date… He discovers her intimately.’
At the end of the vacation he has to return to the Dominican Republic, where his older sister is dying of cancer, but he gets back to Paris for the first night of Fabien. Her performance in the role of a knowing ingénue, who breaks up her sister’s marriage to snare her husband, is singled out in the notices. The play looks to be a hit. She leaves its celebration party to dine alone with Rubi at Maxim’s. A few days later she moves out of the family home to live with him in Rue de Bellechasse. ‘I was a baby. 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.’
Less than one month into the play’s run Odile and he are married at an unannounced ceremony at the mairie of Sonchamp, a small village just outside Paris.
CHAPTER 18
ZSA ZSA GABOR, LOS ANGELES,
EASTER 1957
Zsa Zsa has always valued the big gesture. She is alive to its effect on herself and well aware of the impact it has upon the press. This party she is throwing will be simply the best. The purpose of the imminent bash is both social and political. It is to introduce Ramfis Trujillo (twenty-four) to the US media and to launch him on the A-List as heir to an independent state firmly allied to God’s Own Country, and sharing its democratic values and ideals.
This is a project many PR agents might well have blanched at; the public image of the Dominican Republic is appalling. It is of course Rubi who has persuaded Zsa Zsa to work with him in this presumptuous PR venture, and to host the Hollywood party. Despite the fact that he is now married to Odile Rodin, whom Zsa Zsa has never met, and regardless of their violent past relationship, there is no resentment or barbed wire between them. Neither bore rancour, such is not their nature. So alike in character, they understand each other perfectly.
In his letter to Zsa Zsa, Rubi wrote, ‘My Darling, for the sake of our wonderful memories – I cannot think of them for they still make me sad – I ask a favour…’ Rubi describes Ramfis as ‘my President’s son and my dearest friend’. He has always made a point of nurturing Ramfis, who hero-worships him. And this relationship is now vital to Rubi, for Trujillo is not only certifiably mad but has been subject to two assassination attempts. If the next succeeds, the country will be up for grabs. Rubi has invested his starter marriage and twenty-five years of his life in the regime. Despite his fraught relationship with the President, he stands close to the centre of power. Ramfis is heir in line to the country and the only contender to back following the Benefactor’s death.
Ramfis, now a tall dark-haired personable young man holding the rank of general in the Air Force, is currently studying at Army Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Texas, but now is Easter vacation and he chooses to make his entry to America in his yacht, Angelita, which happens to be the largest private vessel in the world. Accompanied by a party of friends, a Caribbean band and a large uniformed staff, he arrives in New Orleans for Mardi Gras.
It is a conspicuous advent, but the image that captures the front page next day is a shot of Zsa Zsa, snapped in the powder room of the Roosevelt Hotel, with the headline: ZSA ZSA IS HERE. BUT WHERE? IS SHE VISITING ON THE TRUJILLO YACHT?
The mayor of New Orleans, Chet Morrison, and his wife are invited to a lunch on board. He invites Zsa Zsa and Ramfis to attend the Carnival Ball that evening as his guests, adding, ‘You would need to wear white tie or your uniform.’
Ramfis says his uniforms are in Texas.
‘Then we’ll rent you a white tie,’ the mayor proposes.
Ramfis is incredulous at the suggestion. ‘Rent me a white tie?’ He turns to the aide beside him, ‘Call up Kansas. Charter a plane and have them fly my uniform to me.’ Everything he’s learned of style has come from Rubi.
Shortly after Mardi Gras, Ramfis flies to California (accompanied by his PA, his personal minstrel and his Alsatian dog) for a sinus operation in a Los Angeles hospital. He stays on afterward for the party Zsa Zsa is setting up to launch him on movie society. He wants to meet Kim Novak (who would be Hitchcock’s star in Vertigo). Zsa Zsa fixes him up with a date.
Next, Ramfis wants to meet Joan Collins. Zsa Zsa says, ‘Joan was always very beautiful but no one wanted to marry her … she was a strange mix of very tough and very insecure. She was always complaining to me, “I can never hold onto a man”.’
This time it is Rubi who proposes the date to Joan. Her response is, ‘I only want to meet him if he gives me a beautiful present.’
Tactfully, Zsa Zsa conveys the message to Ramfis, who shrugs and says, ‘OK, call up Van Cleef and Arpels and order a diamond necklace.’ Zsa Zsa obliges and the date is duly arranged.
A few days afterward, Rubi asks how the date went. Ramfis’s response is curt, ‘I picked her up in my yacht in Miami,’ he said tersely. ‘She was so boring that I put her ashore in Palm Beach.’
Zsa Zsa adds, ‘I concluded that the clever Miss Collins had taken the diamond necklace and then proceeded to make herself so boring she didn’t have to do anything with Ramfis afterward.’
The launch party for the Dominican dictator-in-waiting is sumptuous. Zsa Zsa has transformed her Bel Air home for the event by gift-wrapping the entire property: garden, trees, flower-beds, shrubbery and swimming pool are all encased in cellophane. The house’s dining room is an enormous bar, a dance floor has been laid in the library and there are two orchestras. The guests are drawn from the Rich List and the Hollywood elite: Conrad Hilton (with whom Zsa Zsa has remained on good terms), the David Selznicks, the Kirk Douglases, the Gary Coopers, the James Masons, the Charles Vidors, the Van Johnsons, Shirley MacLaine, Jeanne Crain, Beatrice Lillie, Spike Jones, Baby Pignatari; and of course the acid-tongued gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons.
The guests number over one hundred and Zsa Zsa, a skilled hostess, ha
s not omitted to include a louche refractory element there to make the evening memorable. Errol Flynn is exuberantly present, flying high on drugs, as is Robert Mitchum who enlivened a recent Hollywood party by stripping off his clothes, smothering his person in ketchup and announcing, ‘I’m a hamburger – eat me!’
Ramfis has flown Rubi and Odile from Paris to attend. The two women exchange a swift appraising glance, then Zsa Zsa, who is assisted in the receiving line by George Sanders, finds herself introducing Rubi to him. Very correctly so, for though the two have met before when George burst in through the window to discover him naked in his wife’s bed, they had not then been properly introduced. ‘They shook hands so heartily that for a moment it seemed they might be joined together forever. George broke the spell by pouring his scotch down my dress. Rubi and Odile walked away. I was left talking to Conrad and George. Whereupon David Selznick came over and whispered, “You are the only woman alive who could have two ex-husbands and a famous ex-lover to the same party.”’ An apt comment and probably no more than the truth.