The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa

TWO

CONTINENTAL SEASONING

In a one-room schoolhouse—a large hut, really—the teacher bent down to address his new pupil, who spoke neither French nor English, and handed him a small violin. It was time for the school orchestra to practice, and everyone took part.

But this slim little boy didn’t know how to play. He took his instrument and dutifully joined his classmates, who included his older brother and sister. He stood in the back. The others, following the teacher’s directions, began to saw away at their music. The boy began to cry.

The teacher spoke to him kindly: “Act as if you can play, that’s enough.”

And the child, mollified, did just that.

And he thought to himself, “Is the world of grown-ups, perhaps, a world in which appearances are all that matters?”

St. Thomas, where Porfirio Rubirosa learned how not to play the violin, was an Antillean idyll for Don Pedro’s family. For less than a year they lived in a small house in the middle of a sugarcane plantation while Don Pedro saw to his ministerial duties. Back home, the situation was still dangerously unstable: Haiti too had fallen into turmoil, and the United States, to which the Dominican treasury owed a sum it couldn’t possibly repay, had taken a more active interest in the rising chaos on the island. Fewer than twenty years earlier the Yankees had driven Spain out of Cuba; now events in Europe—where a continent-wide war had been set off—made the securing of the Caribbean a matter of increasing import in their eyes.

From St. Thomas it was impossible for Don Pedro to read the subtleties of the power struggle back home. So he chose, in a sense, to turn away from it. In 1915, he accepted another diplomatic appointment, one that would have an indelible impact on himself and his family. He would represent his country at its embassy in France.

This new charge meant more than just uprooting his wife and children. Don Pedro was being sent to the most prestigious posting in the world by a government he couldn’t be sure would exist from week to week and at a time when his new home was itself embroiled in war. Even as he could anticipate with zest a new life in Europe, the onetime warrior of the Cibao sobered at the weight of the prospect. And Porfirio, sensitized by his musical experience to the language of appearances in the adult world, noticed the metamorphosis. “My father had changed,” he recalled later. “No longer did he wear a pistol in his belt or a saber between his shoulder blades. He was now Chief of a diplomatic mission.”

And not just any diplomatic mission, of course, but Paris—the capital of the world insofar as it had one. “We have perhaps forgotten,” Don Pedro’s son would write, “that before the war of 1914, the prestige of France throughout Latin America was immense. From the other side of the Atlantic, France seemed the ideal marriage of the style of the ancien régime with the dynamism of revolution.”

Getting there was a fantastic adventure. The family sailed on the Antonio Lopez to Gibraltar, where they were greeted not with flags and salutes but with gunfire; British authorities suspected that among the ship’s passengers was a German spy disguised in frock and wig. Again the young boy’s imagination was fired by the strange simulations of the grown-up world: “The mustached warriors of the Caribbean had been succeeded by Europe and spies dressed as women!” After a search, the Antonio Lopez was permitted to disgorge its passengers. The Rubirosas headed north by train. Ana and Cesar were left in Barcelona, the nearest important Spanish-speaking city to Paris, to continue their schooling. Porfirio continued on with his parents.

The city to which Don Pedro had been posted was a wonder to his son. There were strange new creature comforts, like the kidskin coat he wore as a redoubt to the astonishing cold. There were the impressive signs of war: cannons encircling the Arc de Triomphe, soldiers in the streets and the cafés. And there were glamorous sensations of the sort never seen in San Francisco de Macorís. On the first full day the family spent in the city, Don Pedro took his son to a cinema, where the boy sat in awe watching the great star Pearl White in The Mysteries of New York, a movie serial filled with barbaric cruelties, thrilling chases, impossible situations miraculously escaped from, and a fiendish villain, the Clutching Hand, who preyed on the beautiful heroine for occult reasons only he fathomed. One image would linger in the youngster’s mind for decades: Pearl White trapped in a tube that slowly filled with water, threatening to drown her.

The family made its home first in temporary quarters on Boulevard Saint Germain and then within shouting distance of the Arc de Triomphe at 6 Avenue Mac-Mahon, an address that would exert a nostalgic pull on Porfirio throughout the decades in which he would live in Paris. The house sat in the true symbolic center of the city, which perhaps accounted for the number of times the Rubirosas found themselves collaterally involved in aerial bombardment by German planes, which regularly cut through the sky, flaunting their black-and-white crosses. Most French families fled underground at the sound of enemy aircraft, but Don Pedro reasoned that this would be a terrible hideaway, a lair of death by crushing or suffocation or slow starvation. Rather, he insisted that they stay above stairs, where they endured the occasional air raids and the accompanying thunder of bombs with stoicism the English would have admired: Don Pedro reading his newspaper, Porfirio playing with toys, Doña Ana saying her rosary. Only after the house suffered a truly astonishing concussion one afternoon when a bomb hit the nearby Avenue de la Grande Armée did the brave tíguere rethink his policy and direct his family to belowgrounds safety.

These close calls exerted an accumulative toll, and the Rubirosas soon moved to the coastal city of Royan, less than two hundred miles north of Spain on the Atlantic coast. There, Cesar and Ana rejoined the family and Don Pedro received some shocking news: The civil war back home had so escalated that marines from the United States had occupied the Dominican Republic.

Don Pedro had foreseen as much, according to Porfirio. “My father,” he remembered, “realized that this constant civil war would only lead to catastrophe—the loss of national independence or dictatorship.” But preparing for such a blow didn’t lessen its impact, turning Don Pedro permanently from a man of action into a man of words, ideas, and policies. “Suddenly,” Porfirio noted, “with the decisiveness that characterized him, he changed into a quiet man and began to study, with the help of a professor who came to the house, the worlds of economics, politics, international relations and languages.” He was particularly taken with the law, and built a small library in his house of the imposing legal volumes published by Dalloz. It was, in his son’s eyes, a poignant metamorphosis: “In my childhood, I never saw my father without a Smith and Wesson at his side; in my adolescence, in turn, I never saw him without a Dalloz under his arm.”

Despite the example of his father’s study, young Porfirio realized that he wasn’t cut from quite the same material. “Books didn’t find in me a very faithful friend,” he confessed, “nor did the professors find a conscientious student. The only things that interested me were sports, girls, adventures, celebrities—in short, life.”

Once the family was back in Paris after the end of the war, Porfirio—who watched the victory parade along the Champs-Élysées from the prime vantage of the roof on Avenue Mac-Mahon—attended a string of schools, making no impression in any of them save as a goalkeeper in soccer, a skill that he maintained into his twenties. He was enrolled in some of France’s finest seats of youthful learning: l’Institut Maintenon, l’École Pascal, and the lycée Janson-de-Sailly, all in Paris, and l’École des Roches in Verneuil-sur-Avre, some sixty-five miles east by train. Nothing took. He lived only for the spectacles of Parisian life, for thrills and novelties and chums and escape … and to get out of his short pants.

Almost more than his first shave or sexual experience, the privilege to wear long pants on a daily basis was a symbol of achieving manhood for a young teenager of the era—a sartorial bar mitzvah for the Little Lord Fauntleroy set. At school, Porfirio had become chummy with a Chilean boy, Pancho Morel, and a boy named Jit Singh, youngest son of the maharaja of Karpathula. They were younger than Porfirio, but they didn’t have the protective Doña Ana as their mothers and had not only begun wearing trousers but had worn them into nightclubs in Montmartre, lording their mature adventures over their bare-kneed Dominican pal. He seethed.

Finally, when her son was sixteen, the painstaking Doña Ana allowed him the dignity of long pants. And as soon as he buckled his belt, he was off. From the first night he steeled his nerve and sauntered into a Montmartre nightclub, Porfirio Rubirosa was at home.

“I had a racing heart and boiling blood and a delicious impatience throughout my body,” he confessed later. “I remember the doorman, the music that came in waves, the diffused light that imparted mystery to the faces.… More than 30 years have passed since that night, and I still see the wet lips opening on white teeth and the eyes that shone like lights, and I hear the laughs that merged into one single strident trumpet blare.”

He wandered home at dawn, drunk on the atmosphere and the possibilities—as well as the libations. His parents had been up all night, worried sick, more grateful for his safety than angered at his presumption. Porfirio was chastened, and resolved privately never to frighten them again. But presently he realized that, truly, he felt only the slightest bit contrite: “I am, and will always be, a man of pleasure.”

And why not? Fate and history had brought him to come of age in one of the great seats of pleasure the world would ever know. “Those who didn’t know Paris in the ’20s,” he declared with certainty decades later, “don’t know what a nightclub is.” The interwar demimonde into which he flung himself was the stuff of legend. The Montmartre of the 1920s was no longer the bohemia of starving artists that it had been before the Great War; Pablo Picasso and his adherents had moved across the Seine to Montparnasse and founded a new enclave that would soon draw the Lost Generation of American writers and free spirits. In their wake, the neighborhood that sported such venerable outposts of debauchery as the Moulin Rouge, Le Chat Noir, and the Folies Bergère as well as such lower-rent cousins as Tabarin, Monaco, La Perruche, Zelli’s, Chez Florence, and Le Grand Duc, had become increasingly associated with a blend of criminality and pleasure that lacked the éclat of arty bohemianism. It was no longer an aesthetic wonderland but rather a carnival world of low life lived hard—no place for innocents.

And yet its denizens looked favorably on this ambitious Dominican boy. Latin men were, at the time, enjoying a unique cachet. The tango craze that had begun before the war was booming and had, indeed, been amplified by other musical fads imported from the Caribbean and South America, including the Dominican merengue. Latin musicians and idle young Latin men were everywhere, and they drew to their hangouts a clientele of slumming locals, many of them women; from afternoon on into the early morning hours, the clubs of Montmartre hosted a stream of Parisian matrons led provocatively around dance floors by younger Latin men who were paid for their time: gigolos (from the French word for a loose-moraled dancing girl, gigolette). These hired guns of the boites were glamorous in a sinister fashion that gave additional luster to their reputation as men employed for pleasure.* None other than the great Rudolph Valentino, who died of a perforated ulcer during the days of Porfirio’s induction into Parisian night life, had voyaged to America from Italy as a tango specialist and was said to have made his first living in New York as a gigolo. A young Latin man couldn’t help but admire and aspire.

But crazes, of course, are designed to fade. And although the Latin vogue was wearing out, Porfirio was still in luck. The new fascination in the Parisian demimonde was with American hot jazz and black musicians, singers, and dancers. The area of Montmartre below the Butte was the Parisian Harlem, teeming with African-American expatriates and dotted with hotels, bars, cafés, and nightclubs that catered to them. Once again, a boy from the Caribbean, of mixed blood, with café au lait skin and hair described as somewhere between wavy and kinky, would blend easily into such an environment, acquiring a liberal education in sensation and reckless living that would, obviously, ingrain itself in his spirit far more deeply than anything going on at school.

In this sexy, dangerous world, the game young Porfirio more than fit in, he was a hit. But his love affair with Parisian night life would prove, at least for the time being, a dalliance. Once again, in 1926, Don Pedro’s work called for the family to move. Another tottering government had been established in Santo Domingo—this one installed by the Americans, who had pulled out their troops to allow the locals a chance. The new regime assigned Don Pedro to its embassy in London; Porfirio would be schooled relatively nearby, in Calais.

As evinced by his decision to move the boy closer to where he himself would be, Don Pedro had some concerns about this boy who seemed more dancer than warrior. Porfirio was thin, wasp-waisted, coltish. And although he had an undeniable knack for sports, there were no obvious bulges of muscle on him, nor had his mettle ever been truly tested. Don Pedro arranged for him to be tutored in boxing. “The man of action still lived beneath the diplomat’s clothes,” he later explained, “and he wanted a solid son with quick fists.”

Porfirio did no better in his studies at his new school than he had at any of the others. But the boxing was another matter. Springy and quick, he was a natural. And even better, the gym was located in a louche part of town where the young man’s eyes were caught one afternoon by a sign reading Piccadilly Bar.

He went in. He ordered a drink. He made small talk. He had a good time. He came back. “I quickly became a regular,” he later boasted, “celebrated for my youth, my free way with money, my Dominican nationality, a taste for strong cocktails and a strong hunger for the ladies.” As in Paris, his race got him noticed and his cool, breezy, agreeable manner made him popular.

The taste of notoriety went to his head. He soon felt sufficiently full of himself to accept the challenge of a fight against a local champion named Dagbert. On the big night—the humming crowd, the smoke-filled room—a sense of grandeur infused the young fighter. For a round or so, he used his training, his wile, his wits to keep Dagbert safely at bay. Then he reckoned he could grab the advantage and got cute. Dagbert saw an opening and pasted him squarely. “I got hit right in the Adam’s apple,” he remembered. “I couldn’t breathe, I was suffocating, but I was saved by the bell. But by the end of the rest period, I still hadn’t recovered. Despite the shouting, I quit the fight. The thrills of the Piccadilly were less dangerous.”

It was the last proper boxing match in which he would ever take part, and, indeed, he quit his formal training soon after. But he didn’t quit leaving campus for lessons. He simply told the authorities at school that he was off to the gym and made a beeline instead for the Piccadilly, where he delved deeper into his cups until finally he was found dead drunk one evening by his scandalized schoolmaster. It was a terminal offense: He would not be permitted to return to the school after the summer holidays.

That was just as well, because by then Dominican politics had yet once more yanked at Don Pedro, pulling him from London back to Santo Domingo, where a seemingly stable government had been installed and was working toward elections. Don Pedro, now a seasoned international diplomat and legal mind, was thought more valuable at home than in foreign courts. He returned home and, with the chimerical hope that his wayward youngest son would straighten himself out in his absence, left Porfirio in France to finish his baccalaureate studies.

The freedom provided by his parents’ absence was absolutely intoxicating. Porfirio passed most of that summer partying in Biarritz with his wealthy schoolmates. “The images that come to my mind,” he recalled “are pictures of a brilliant sea beneath the sun, sports cars tearing through little towns, thés dansantes with women who acted like girls. Everything was the pretext for a dare: swimming, drinking, racing, love. Naturally, when we returned to Paris, we tried to extend the crazy atmosphere of our vacations. This was made easier for me because of my father’s absence.”

Don Pedro hired a tutor—“friendliness personified” as Porfirio remembered him euphemistically—but the boy was a confirmed debauchee by this point, as he gladly confessed. “I only opened the books that appealed to me, and those weren’t many. The only geography I was interested in was the geography of Paris’s night life.” He naturally failed to graduate.

And then he went home to Santo Domingo: “a brutal break from what I referred to at this time as ‘the life.’”

The exact details of his removal from Paris would prove a blur. The grown-up Porfirio would claim that he had been living with the family of his Chilean schoolmaster Pancho Morel and, upon failing his baccalaureate, received a telegram from Don Pedro ordering him to Bordeaux, where transit home had been booked for him on the Carimare. He claimed the boat docked in the Dominican port of Puerta Plata and that he traveled by car from there southward through the Cibao to join his family in Santo Domingo.

But another account emerged from a witness less disposed to putting a pretty shine on things. Leovigildo Cuello was a doctor who lived in Santiago, the chief city of the Cibao, and was friendly with Don Pedro. His widow, Carolina Mainardi di Cuello, would remember years later that a frightened, hungry, filthy Porfirio showed up at her doorstep unannounced and unexpected one day in 1928. His clothes were spotted with engine oil, and he had a fantastic story to tell: Having been cut off by his parents for his excesses and failings, he had spent several months in Paris living hand to mouth as a member of a Gypsy dance troupe that busked for money; summoned home, he stowed away in the engine room of the Carimare—hence his disheveled state—and needed some help to make his way to his family. The Cuellos cleaned and fed and clothed him and, despite his entreaty “please don’t let my father know,” phoned Don Pedro, who was visiting nearby San Francisco de Macorís and came to Santiago to fetch him.

It was hardly the happiest of reunions.

“I was wrong to leave you alone in Paris,” Don Pedro declared. “I took you for a man, and you’re just a ruffian.” He announced that he would bring his prodigal youngest son to Santo Domingo where a “double dose of studies” would be administered to him by a brace of teachers: a tutor for his baccalaureate exam, and a new member of the family—his sister’s fiancé, the attorney Gilberto Sánchez Lustrino—to prepare him for law school.

That was disappointing news. But it wasn’t nearly so deflating as Porfirio’s impression of the man who delivered it: “My father, in one year, had aged a great deal. Once so tall, he was doubled over. His cheeks had fallen. And his gaze was filled with a profound sadness.” At barely fifty, Don Pedro was falling into moral despair and was further cursed by a weak heart. He managed to engage himself in the affairs of the capital, but the process taxed him, to his son’s concern: “My father’s aspect worsened more each day. Nothing is sadder than the sickness and aging of a man who has asked much of his body and received it.”

To his surprise, Porfirio found Santo Domingo an agreeable successor to Paris.

For one thing, even though he’d left the island some fourteen years earlier, he felt its stir still in his blood. “I wasn’t more than a baby when I left my homeland,” he reflected, “but the echoes of infancy, on top of the stories told me by my parents, exerted an extraordinary force.”

The family lived in a three-story house on the corner of Calle Arzobispo Meriño and Calle Emiliano Tejera, in the midst of the city’s colonial zone. It was not the capital of the world, that was plain. In lieu of grand boulevards there were narrow streets whose gutters teemed with garbage that was hosed toward the sea several times a day. The great monuments of Columbus’s era—cathedrals, convents, hospitals, palaces—lay in untended ruin. Rather than nightclubs, there were impromptu dances in plazas or in private homes, from which music and light would spill out onto dark cobblestone streets in magnetic pools. The jeweled, befurred, painted, perfumed women who gave Paris such an erotic charge were replaced by damas straitjacketed by a nearly medieval propriety and their daughters, repressed into crippling shyness. Instead of the dizzying savor of modernity, there was a stolid adherence to old ways. The latest cars, clothes, music, ways of living: completely unheard-of.

And yet that didn’t mean there wasn’t some semblance of “the life” to be found. There was an agreeably languid pace to the Caribbean—the siestas and paseos and macho camaraderie. Porfirio was naturally drawn to the groups of raucous young men who gathered on street corners, in plazas, and in parks. A friend who met him at that time, Pedro Rene Contin Aybar, remembered Rubi as “tall, of good build, with an energetic face, thick lips, curly hair, an intense gaze and an agreeably deep baritone voice.” His acceptance among this new crowd was facilitated by his exotic pedigree as a Dominican raised in Paris: “I had a lot to tell them. They envied my free comportment, of course. And after the free life I had known, I took a certain wicked delight in scandalizing this closed society a little bit.”

At the head of a fast bunch, he whored, he drank, he showed off his sporting and terpsichorean skills—he was noted for something called an apache dance—and his small talent with the ukulele. It was the era when the merengue, the indigenous folk music of Hispaniola, blossomed into a jazz-influenced sound suited to the dance hall; some of the most infectious music ever produced in the Caribbean was being played nightly, live on stage for Rubi and his chums, and they adored it.

In the midst of this, Rubi evinced an entrepreneurial streak, establishing a boxing ring in the small plaza in front of the church of San Lázaro, in a lower-class neighborhood of the capital; admission to the fights, which featured such local phenoms as Kid GoGo and Kid 22–22, was a few pennies.

And he put his natural audacity and European sophistication to comic use among his chums. There was the day, for instance, when they were all standing on a corner of Santo Domingo’s busiest shopping street, El Conde, making mock-heroic protestations of chivalric devotion to passing girls who, in the manner of the day, wouldn’t even make eye contact with boys to whom they weren’t related. Porfirio approached one and took the bold initiative of snatching a notebook from her hand. The startled girl shrieked and ran off to a nearby tavern, only to emerge a few minutes later with her uncle, a local bully known as Suso García. He walked up to the boys on the corner and demanded to know which of them had so affronted his niece. Porfirio allowed that it was he, and the belligerent fellow came rushing at him. But with the footwork he’d learned in Calais, he sidestepped the attack and countered with a solid right hand to the big man’s chin, sending him reeling backward to trip over a curbstone.

As García gathered himself and wandered off, dazed and ashamed, Porfirio accepted his friends’ acclaim with sarcastic pomp. (“I preened,” he recalled.) But a minute or so later, García was back, this time wielding a knife and demanding satisfaction. Porfirio agreed to a duel, and the two set off down El Conde in search of a blade of equal size and weight. Failing that, García suggested they find a pair of matching pistols; again, the younger man agreed. As they walked along, García made small talk, and asked Porfirio who he was.