SHAWN LEVY
The Last Playboy
THE HIGH LIFE OF PORFIRIO RUBIROSA

DEDICATION

FOR VINCENT, ANTHONY, AND PAULA,

WITHOUT WHOM THERE WOULDN’T BE MUCH POINT

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

THE LAST PLAYBOY

ONE IN THE LAND OF TÍGUERISMO

TWO CONTINENTAL SEASONING

THREE THE BENEFACTOR AND THE CHILD BRIDE

FOUR A DREDGE AND A BOTCH AND A BUST-UP

FIVE STAR POWER

SIX AN AMBUSH AND AN HEIRESS

SEVEN YUL BRYNNER IN A BLACK TURTLENECK

EIGHT BIG BOY

NINE SPEED, MUTINY, AND OTHER MEN’S WIVES

TEN HOT PEPPER

ELEVEN COLD FISH

TWELVE CENTER RING

THIRTEEN CASH BOX CASANOVA

FOURTEEN THE STUDENT PRINCE IN OLD HOLLYWOOD

FIFTEEN BETWEEN DYNASTIES

SIXTEEN FRESH BLOOM

SEVENTEEN RIPPLES

Keep Reading

Inspirations, Sources, and Debts

Works Consulted

Searchable Terms

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

THE LAST PLAYBOY

This, he reckoned, must be what they called a joint.

Normally in New York he didn’t go into joints. The Plaza, El Morocco, the Stork Club, the Copa, “21”: That was the sort of thing he liked. He was in the city so rarely, he was only interested in the best of it.

In Paris, of course, he knew such places, cafés and bars and clubs where you might meet a killer or somebody with an interesting business idea or a woman who would change your life—or maybe just a few minutes of it. But this, this had something of the savor of a café back home, one of the places along El Conde—an air of abandon and indulgence and danger. It was dark, spare, ominous. He liked it.

Besides, the best places were, how to say it, a little chilly right now. All this talk: newspapers and the television and people on the street and the ones they called “the right people.” The snobs and the writers hated one another, but to him they seemed very much the same.…

He had nothing to fear, nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed about. But he didn’t need the headache of answering questions and being stared at by gossips and trying to figure out who would talk to him and who wouldn’t.

This place would do just fine, then: convenient, quiet, anonymous.

He had agreed to meet the newspaperman because he needed to get his own story out and he was assured by friends that he could trust the fellow. Earl Wilson he was called: owl-faced, a little thick in the waist, an easy laugher, a good listener.

Right now, he needed someone to listen—and then go and tell it in the way he wanted it told. All around New York the most horrible things were being said: He was a threat to his new wife; he was only interested in her money; he was some kind of villain or crook or gigolo. People knew nothing about them: He had known Barbara for years; she was charming, vibrant, delicate, cultured, creative; why shouldn’t he truly love her? And in Las Vegas, that madwoman with her press conferences and her eye patch and her ridiculous lies about what he had said to her and what he felt. No wonder people were giving him funny looks.

No, his own voice had to be heard, and for that he needed someone neutral, someone who would tell the truth about him: Earl Wilson, his new best friend.

They sat at midnight in a booth in the back of the Midston House bar on East Thirty-eighth Street, one freezing night, one of the last of 1953. They drank scotch—scotches—and he nibbled from the bowl of popcorn the waitress had put on the table when they sat down. “My bachelor dinner,” he joked.

Some pleasantries, and then the questions.

This was Barbara’s fifth wedding and his fourth. Why would anyone expect it to work out?

“Wonderful Barbara brought something new and different into my life,” he said, “and I will not be like her other husbands. I will make her happy at last.”

Next, Wilson wanted to know, like they all did, about the money: Barbara was said to have $100 million; was he after it?

“Riches to me don’t count,” he said sweetly. “I don’t need anybody’s money. I have plenty of my own. We will be married like civilized people under the law of separate property. What property she has is hers and what property I have is mine.”

He didn’t, of course, mention the prenuptial contract he had signed that very afternoon: $2.5 million on the barrelhead, plus future considerations, of which he also had plenty of his own. Let the great reporter find some things out on his own.…

“Is she ill?” Wilson asked.

“Ill?”—a laugh, with a little scorn in it, which he caught almost as quickly as he’d shown it. “Not at all, she’s the healthiest woman—it’s fantastic! Yes, she was in Doctors Hospital, but only to rest. And now, my God, what a vitality! She’s so strong that when she shakes hands I say, ‘My God, where did you get all that weight?’”

“But I thought she was slender from loss of weight.…”

“Oh, no. I don’t like skinny girls—and she’s all right!”

They laughed a little and Wilson wrote.

And what about this business in Las Vegas, Zsa Zsa claiming he had asked her to marry him and that he had hit her when she refused him?

Now he was impatient.

“Zsa Zsa is just trying to get publicity out of Barbara and me, and I don’t think it’s ladylike.”

The writer kept his eyes on his notepad, scribbling, silent.

The man seated across the table remembered who he was—a public figure, a glamorous consort, a world-famous lover, an intimate to power and wealth and sensation. He could breeze through it. He would have to get the smile just right.…

“Barbara is such an intelligent girl,” he continued. “She understands human nature so well; she’ll know it’s all ridiculous. She’s one of the most intelligent women anybody ever met.”

They returned to small talk: who would attend from the bride’s family, where would they honeymoon, where would they live.

And then, nicely buzzing, he rose and excused himself.

Tomorrow was going to be a big day.

How did they say it in English?

Like a zoo.…

ONE
IN THE LAND OF TÍGUERISMO

When he sat down and tried to remember it all, in the ’60s, near the end of his life, he began, naturally, with his childhood, as he could retrieve it: a series of brief scenes, like film clips, set in his intoxicating, perilous homeland—random moments, yet with a cumulative impact that shaped him irrationally, subliminally, imparting to him tastes and biases that he never lost. A man of the world, he forever defined himself by reference to a specific place.…

Rifle fire; early morning; a child springs up in bed. “At most,” he remembered later, “I was three years old.”

Not long after, in the dead of another night, the child startles awake once again, panicked to find himself alone. “I was in the habit of sleeping with a cat.” He leaves his bed to seek his feline bedmate, and is shocked to find strangers everywhere. “The house was filled with armed men asleep in the hallways.”

And maybe a year later still, a mounted rider approaches. “Without getting off his horse, he took me in his great big hands and pulled me up to its neck, in front of him. One click of his tongue, and we were off! ‘Careful Pedro, careful! He’s so little!’ shouted my mother. My father laughed. The night was gentle and sweet. I had the horse’s mane gripped in my hands. I heard his hard breathing. I wished the corral would never end.”

Gunshots; soldiers; a strongman; a horse; a shouting woman; the thrill of speed; the danger; the Cibao Valley of the Dominican Republic in its Wild West phase, circa 1913: the earliest flashes of memory in the mind of Porfirio Rubirosa.

In the early twentieth century, when a little boy was being imprinted by these memories, the Dominican Republic was, as it had been for centuries prior, a place where fortunes might be made and dominions might be established—but only after painful struggles that were not always won by the most honorable combatant. It was a place that tended to favor unfavorable outcomes. Indeed, despite the noble charge and historic pedigree of the first white men who stumbled on it, the first European to settle the island and live out his days there was, in all likelihood, a rat.

Just after midnight on Christmas Day, 1492, a Spanish caravel gently foundered onto a coral reef beside the large island that its passengers had dubbed Española—Hispaniola in English—the sixth landmass it had encountered in the dozen weeks since departing the Canary Islands.

By dawn, the ship had broken up and sunk.

At that moment, Christopher Columbus had a complete fiasco on his hands.

A nondescript Genoese merchant sailor who made his home in Portugal, Columbus had sufficiently gulled the queen of Spain with his outlandish theories about a sea route to Asia that she arranged a backdoor loan for his enterprise from her husband’s treasury. Isabella invested enough in his pipe dream for Columbus to acquire supplies, a crew, and three ships—the largest of which, the Santa María, had just become the first in several centuries of fabled Caribbean wrecks.

Gold Columbus reckoned he would find, and jewels and spices and a path to the riches of the other side of the world that would make trade with the hostile Moors unnecessary. But to date, he had gleaned significantly less than his own weight in treasure, and with the Santa María sunk, he was down to two ships for the trip home.

So he formed a landing party (which included at least one stowaway rat, whose bones—distinct from those of native species—would be discovered by archeologists centuries later), and he went ashore. There he shook hands with the leader of the native Tainos, accepted a few gifts, and founded a colony, named La Navidad in honor of its Christmas Day discovery. He looked around for a mountain of gold and, seeing none, packed up the Niña and Pinta and went home.

Ten months later, having raised enough capital to fund a fleet of seventeen ships, he returned, intent on exploiting the fonts of gold he believed the island nestled. In January 1494, he founded a second settlement, named La Isabela for his patroness, and used it as a base from which to explore the interior of the island.

Specifically, Columbus was curious about the Cibao, a highland valley that meandered eastward along a river from the northern coast through two mountain ranges and met the sea again in swamplands in the east. On his previous trip, he’d been told that the valley was home to fields where chunks of gold as large as a man’s head lay about just waiting to be gathered. He forayed inland and found the valley—he labeled it La Vega, “the open plain”—but there was no gold. He was nevertheless impressed: The soil was rich, the climate mild, the river navigable, the mountain ranges, particularly to the south, formidable. If he had been a settler and not a buccaneer, he might have colonized the place for ranching and farming. But his priority was raw wealth. He moved on.

Columbus would make two more trips to Hispaniola, still looking for gold, still luckless. He and his men would found the city of Santo Domingo on the southern coast, a deep harbor from which Spain would rule the Caribbean and the Americas. In the coming centuries, the island, genocidally cleansed of natives, would be a keystone of the Spanish slave trade and an important colony of plantations. The Cibao would yield real wealth—fortunes based in coffee, cattle, sugarcane, tobacco—but nobody would ever again venture there in search of treasure.

Indeed, those who did choose to settle there were often lucky just to keep their heads. For hundreds of years after Columbus, the island, despite its import as a staging ground, would be overrun by a continual string of colonial and civil wars and the never-ending scourges of disease, poverty, rapine, and neglect.

Hispaniola fell into ruin in large part because it was, uniquely, colonized by two European powers. The Spanish contented themselves with dominating the eastern side until the French established a foothold in the west in the mid-seventeenth century. The island, long neglected by Spain in favor of colonies that yielded more in the way of obvious riches, suddenly seemed a valuable commodity, a point of contention. Back and forth forces of the two rivals fought, trying bootlessly to vanquish one another until the island was split by treaty in 1697 into two nations: Haiti and Santo Domingo. The plantations of Haiti, under French guidance, prospered, while Santo Domingo lapsed into a tropical torpor more typical of Spanish rule: Slaves bought their freedom and married with Europeans; infrastructure, never the strong suit of Spanish colonialism, was neglected; the economy declined into stagnation. When the Haitian slave rebellion led by Toussaint L’Ouverture spilled eastward over the border in 1801, there was little resistance. Under a rampage of murder, rape, and butchery, Santo Domingo simply fell into French hands for twenty bloody years.

Then a hero arose: Juan Pablo Duarte, a homegrown nationalist who sought freedom not only from the Haitians but from Spain. Starting as a governor of the Cibao, he routed the Haitians and the Spanish, but he failed to bring true unity to the nation. From the expulsion of the Haitian forces in 1844 through the expulsion of the Spanish in 1865 and onward toward the new century, the Dominican Republic, as it had been renamed, was ruled by chaos. Presidents came and went in brief, nasty succession; unrest and poverty were epidemic; and a species of tribal warfare ground on. There were puppet heads of state, bloodthirsty chieftains, coups and battles and massacres and ambushes and ceaseless conflicts. It seemed the destiny of the country always to roil.

Into this quagmire, in San Francisco de Macorís, a small city of the swampy eastern portion of the Cibao, Pedro Maria Rubirosa was born in 1878. The Rubirosas were an educated family, with a tradition of public service. But in this wild era, public service meant choosing a side in the never-ending civil wars. Although he was well schooled, by the time he was in his teens, Pedrito Rubirosa was riding with bands of soldiers. And by the time he was in his twenties, he was leading them.

Half a century later, his son regarded a tintype of his father from these days: “In the photograph in my hands, my father already shines like an adult. With his strong cheekbones, his powerful head, his thick moustache, his gaze falls arrogantly from a height of five-foot-ten. He doesn’t seem at all an adolescent: he is a man by deed and right. They called him Don Pedro.”

Don Pedro, his son related, “was always in a campaign. It was the time of basements stocked with rifles and houses filled with soldiers. In effect, my father negotiated a ceaseless labyrinth of skirmishes, assaults, forays, and guerilla attacks.” And through a combination of personal qualities and historical accidents, he became, in the military algebra of the era, a general. In this context, mind, a general wasn’t a professional soldier promoted after of a long career of battle and governance. He was, rather, the smartest, luckiest, boldest in his troop, responsible for arming, feeding, and housing his men, and for strategizing and liaising with the other bands of soldiers with which they were allied. It was a position earned as much with guts as brains. “A general who didn’t march in front of his men didn’t exercise great dominion over them,” Don Pedro’s son said. “This explains why Dominican officers rarely died in bed of old age, like their European colleagues, and why rapid promotions permitted a youngster of 20 to become a general.”

But there was another quality to Don Pedro, even more important than his daring or his brains or the poor luck of his senior colleagues. As his son put it, “One had to be a tiger to command a group of tigers.”

Tiger: tigre in Spanish, tíguere in the local argot, in which the word came to represent the essential defining characteristic of the Dominican alpha male. The Dominican tíguere was, like the ideal male in all Latin cultures, profoundly masculine—macho, in the Castilian—but had dimensions unique, perhaps, to the Creole culture of Hispaniola. He was handsome, graceful, strong, and well-presented, possessed of a deep-seated vanity that allowed him the luxury of niceties of character and appearance that might otherwise hint at femininity. He could move with sensuality or violence; he was fast, fearless, fortunate. A tíguere emerged well from nearly any situation that confronted him, twisted any misfortune to an asset, spun a happy ending of some sort out of the most outrageously poor circumstance; he was able, being feline, to climb to unlikely heights and, should he fall, always landed, being feline, on his feet. The tíguere bore the savor of low origins and high aspirations, as well as a certain ruthless ambition that barred no means of achieving his ends: violence, treachery, lies, shamelessness, daring, and, especially, the use of women as tools of social mobility. A tíguere always married to advantage.

If there was an element of the outlaw or the delinquent in the tíguere, if only in his early days, he could hope to transcend it and reach the highest rungs of society—indeed, it was widely understood in Dominican life that an element of tíguerismo was essential to most success. To some degree, the Dominican male, if he was true to his blood and his culture, could be permitted virtually any impudence or trespass whatever. Adultery, theft, tyranny, violence, bellicose savagery, social cruelty, excesses of libido and appetite and greed: All could be ascribed to—and forgiven as—tíguerismo.

Pedro Maria Rubirosa clearly fulfilled the role of tíguere as a warrior and man of action. But he did so as well as a lover of women. “My father was a handsome man,” the son remembered. “His form was lithe, his eyes brilliant; he shone with every aspect of a gentleman. Women admired him.”

Among those admirers was a girl from his hometown, Ana Ariza Almanzar, granddaughter of a Spanish general who had fought in Cuba. At the dawn of the new century, Don Pedro took this well-bred young woman as his wife.

They began their family with tragedy, losing at least one child before 1902; then a daughter, Ana, managed to survive the perils of tropical infancy. Three years later came a son, Cesar. The tíguere now had a male heir to boast of and to train.

It was a flush time for Don Pedro. The tyrant Ulises Heureaux, who had ruled the Dominican Republic with a ruthless hand for two decades, had been assassinated in the summer of 1899, and a period of relative calm had descended. Don Pedro’s daring, loyalty, and intelligence had recommended him to the new government, and he was appointed as governor of a string of small cities—first San Francisco de Macorís, then the coastal city of Samaná, then El Seibo, each posting finding him assigned farther from home as the warrior-politicians of the Cibao peacefully extended their influence.

In El Seibo, where he arrived in 1906, Don Pedro allowed himself the pleasure of other women. (Ana, her son would offer by way of explanation, “got fat after her first children arrived.”) With a local woman and her cousin he fathered four children en la calle, as the saying went: “in the street”: bastards.

He acknowledged them, though only one took his name. And then his duties called him back to San Francisco de Macorís, where the last of his legitimate children was born, on January 22, 1909. They named him Porfirio.

It was such a sparkling name: Porfirio Rubirosa Ariza (the Ariza a technicality, following the Spanish convention of retaining the matronym for legal purposes).

The surname was, of course, a given, and it meant “red rose.”

The Christian name, however, was something of a fancy, not a family name like that of the baby’s sister or an obviously historical name like that of his brother. There were some obscure antecedents: an ascetic Saint Porphyry of Gaza; Porphyry of Tyre, a mathematician and philosopher of Phoenicia, noted to this day for his treatises on vegetarianism and named after the purple dye for which his home city was famous (at root, the word “porphyry” refers to a shade of purple that naturally occurs in feldspar crystals). But Don Pedro and Ana probably had in mind Porfirio Díaz, the autocratic president of Mexico under whose hand that nation modernized itself into the envy of the Caribbean—a strongman whose career, like Caesar’s, would be worth emulating.

Ironically, soon after the baby was baptized, the great Díaz found himself falling into a struggle to maintain his rule—just as Don Pedro once again found himself commanding men in the field when yet another civil war broke out in the Dominican Republic in 1911. This was the campaign that formed the young Porfirio’s first memories: the rifle shots at dawn, the soldiers sleeping throughout the house, the cat that crept away in the night.

The boy would grow to remember, too, a fearful, devout Doña Ana: “My mother, who was very pious, lived at prayer … I remember her often curled up in the darkest corner of the house, praying.” Doña Ana Ariza Rubirosa may have seemed a pushover: born to a family of soldiers, married to a soldier, countenancing her husband’s infidelities, burying herself in counsel with the Virgin of Altagracia, draped demurely in black, growing plump. But there was steel in her as well. Take the way she saw to the woman who was making time with Don Pedro and then ran, unopposed, for the presidency of the ladies’ club of San Francisco de Macorís. On the day of the vote, with all the notable women of the city assembled and prepared to anoint their new leader, the outgoing president announced that she was so sure that they all approved of her successor that the election would be conducted by acclamation. “No,” came a voice. All heads turned to face the speaker, Doña Ana. “This woman is my husband’s lover,” she declared. “Under these conditions, I don’t think it’s possible to make her our president.” Shock; murmurs; a hasty conference of officials; and a new presidential candidate was impressed and elected. Ana got in her carriage, according to her son, “and returned home without saying a single word to my father about the scandalous scene she’d made. And he, after being told about the incident a few minutes later, also remained silent.”

Perhaps the scandal she’d created with her outburst was too great; perhaps Ana feared in time of civil war for the safety of her children (“Careful Pedro, careful! He’s so little!”); perhaps Don Pedro, in his mid-thirties, had grown too comfortable, too encumbered, too secure to lead troops; perhaps his intellect was recognized by his colleagues as more useful to them than his bravery; perhaps he was in flight from enemies. For whatever reason, in 1914, soon after Doña Ana’s bold gambit, the Rubirosas found themselves sailing away from their bellicose, agitated little country. Don Pedro had been named to serve in the Dominican legation in St. Thomas, the Virgin Islands.

At the age of five, Porfirio Rubirosa had begun his lifetime of wandering.

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.

“I am the son of General Rubirosa.”

The bully stopped walking. “In that case,” he declared, “I cannot fight you. I served under your father.”

The episode became a local legend, spun in some versions with elaborate detail. But there was a bitter private irony to it: Don Pedro’s name might still have been big enough to ward off an angry man with a knife, but his body was failing. In 1930, just before the national elections, he moved to San Francisco de Macorís, ostensibly to run as a congressional deputy for the district but quite obviously to die in the tranquility of his birthplace.

He moved into the house of his father-in-law, a strange old bird who’d been an important local lawyer until he was accused, in 1895, of having embezzled public funds; he was proven innocent, but he was so offended that his fellow townspeople should doubt him that he became a hermit, isolating himself in his house. “He never left his study or library and he refused to see anyone besides his family and clients,” remembered Porfirio. “He never again put a foot in the street, and the only journey he made out of the house was in the hearse that carried him to the cemetery.” Don Pedro wasn’t quite so eccentric, but he was just as surely retreating from the world.

The gravity of his father’s condition impressed Porfirio, who left Santo Domingo for Don Pedro’s side and applied himself sufficiently to his studies to pass his baccalaureate and find work teaching French in a local school. He kept up his soccer, he took up competitive swimming, he traded lessons on the ukulele for guitar lessons from his cousin Evita.

And he sat patiently as Don Pedro, his voice weakened, told stories of his warrior days and shared his worries over the seemingly permanent chaos of Dominican governance. Indeed, even as Santo Domingo prepared for what was being billed as a free election, a rebellion against the government was brewing in—where else?—the Cibao.

Don Pedro knew the minds of both the government and the rebels. He had been offered positions of responsibility by both, refusing in each case because he saw the country’s salvation in neither. In particular, he had strong fears about the leader of the National Police, a cunning and unlikely arriviste who had diabolically made Don Pedro the offer of ruling the country after a coup. As he sat with his son reading a newspaper account of the brewing rebellion, Don Pedro pointed a feeble finger at a name in a headline and said, as his son recalled, “Here is the heart of the plot. The one in charge, in the shadows, pulling the strings, who has all the trump cards, is Trujillo.”

* In England and America, they came to be known as lounge lizards.

THREE
THE BENEFACTOR AND THE CHILD BRIDE

His uniforms were always immaculate, as were, when he could finally afford them, his hundreds of suits.

His manner careered unpredictably from obsequious to civil to icy.

His appetites for drink, dance, pomp, and sex were colossal.

His capacity for focused work seemed infinite.

He was a finicky eater.

With his thin little mustache, he looked a cross of Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and a bullfrog, always with his hair slicked back, always standing erect to the fullness of his five feet seven inches, always tending slightly toward plumpness (as a boy, he was mocked as Chapito: “little fatty”).

He had a massive ego that sat perilously on a foundation of dubious self-confidence.

He remembered everything and forgave nothing, though he might wait years to avenge a grudge.

He wasn’t above physically torturing his enemies and throwing their corpses to the sharks, but he had at his disposal more insidious schemes that involved anonymous gossip, public shunning, and other shames that cut deeper, perhaps, than any punishment his goons might mete out.

His scheming and brutality and cunning and shamelessness and greed and nepotism and cruelty and gall and paranoia and righteousness and delusions of grandeur verged on the superhuman.

He was one of the most ruthless and reprehensible caudillos, or strongmen, ever to hold sway in the Western Hemisphere—and one of the most enduring.

He was Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, and he formed an unholy bond with Porfirio Rubirosa that would crucially shape the latter’s life.

Trujillo was born in October 1891, the third of eleven children of a poor family from San Cristóbal, a provincial capital in the dusty south of the island. The town began as a gold rush camp, then settled into a long, hard haul as one of the island’s many centers for processing sugarcane. It was never an illustrious spot, but for several decades of the twentieth century, it was known by federal decree as the Meritorious City, simply because it was the birthplace of this one man.

By his sixteenth birthday, with only a grammar school education, Trujillo was working full-time as a telegraph operator—and perhaps doing a little cattle rustling on the side, though records of his activities in that sphere would one day disappear. (Likewise, he was convicted of forgery and at another time suspected of embezzlement, but in neither case could it be shown on paper after he’d established his domain over the nation and its historical records.)

By his twenty-second birthday Trujillo was married to a country girl named Aminta Ledesma who was pregnant with a baby daughter who would die at age one and, like her father’s criminal record, be erased from later accounts of his life. A second daughter, with a grander future, came the following year. They named her Flor de Oro—“golden flower” in English, “Anacaona” (the name of a warrior chieftainess of the Jaragua tribe) in the native Taino.

Trujillo first engaged with the hair-raising brand of Dominican politics in the mid-1910s, when he joined an unsuccessful rebellion against one of the nation’s fleeting governments and had to live on the run in the jungle until finally, ragged and starving and underfed and missing a few teeth, he threw himself on the mercy of the authorities. Granted amnesty, he came back home and turned to crime, as a member of a gang called the Forty-four. And then he found honest work in a sugar refinery, first as a clerk and then, providentially, as a security guard.

It was no rent-a-cop position. In the lawless Dominican Republic of the era, the policía of a thriving private business constituted, in many cases, the only local authority of any standing. These forces were charged with keeping the peace and guarding their bosses’ property from theft, but they also fought fires in the cane fields, protected payrolls, made sure workers didn’t defect to rival operations, and mounted and supervised such profitable side businesses as bars, brothels, and weekly cockfights.

It was a position that called for a calculating mind composed of equal parts soldier, accountant, psychologist, and mafioso. Trujillo was perfect for it.

He liked the work so well, in fact, that he decided to become a career soldier, applying at the end of 1918 to join the National Police, the only military force open to a Dominican during the American occupation. His letter requesting induction was a combination of bootlicking, braggadocio, and bald-faced lies: “I wish to state that I do not possess the vices of drinking or smoking, and that I have not been convicted in any court or been involved in minor misdemeanors.”

He was accepted, enrolling as a second lieutenant in January 1919. Within three years, he had attended an officers training school and been promoted to captain. The Yankees liked him: “I consider this officer one of the best in the service,” wrote one evaluating officer. And he continued to advance, sometimes in shadowy fashion. In 1924, the major under whom he served was killed by a jealous husband; most onlookers assumed that the offended party was put onto the scent of his wife’s affair by Trujillo, who eventually replaced the dead man in rank and duties. By the end of that year, with the North American marines having returned home, Major Trujillo was third in the chain of command of a military force that was virtually unopposed in ruling the land.

All that remained now was to take over.

But before he could ascend to full power, there was a domestic matter to resolve: namely, the peasant girl he had married, hardly a fitting wife for a man of his status. Sexually, Aminta had long since been replaced by a string of women, one of whom, Bienvenida Ricart, Trujillo had singled out as a likely next wife. Divorce by mutual consent was, curiously, legal in the almost homogeneously Catholic Dominican Republic at the time, and in September 1925 the Trujillos’ marriage was dissolved by civil decree. Trujillo was ordered to pay alimony, to provide Aminta with a house, and, to his frustration, to leave Flor de Oro to live with her mother—a detail he would revisit.

A full two years later, serving at the rank of brigadier general, he married Bienvenida. But by then yet another concubine had taken a special place in his heart: María Martínez, who in 1929 would trump her rivals by producing a male heir, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Martínez, a boy stamped for life with the nickname Ramfis, derived from his father’s love of Verdi’s dynastic opera Aida. Through the coming years, just as he navigated with Machiavellian deliberation the political waters of the nation, so would Trujillo manipulate these women, regularly discarding a lower-class mate for a higher as a means of fashioning his image and his fate: a proper tíguere.

He proved as decisive and ruthless in public life as in private. In the next two years, he moved gradually, in the shadows, to solidify a power base from which he might seize control of the country. In 1928, the National Police was transformed by law into a proper National Army, and Trujillo was named its chief. But he had additional resources at his disposal—thuggish gangs that enforced his wishes and maintained a cordon sanitaire of plausible deniability between his official position and the more brutal imposition of his will.

He patiently bided the ineffective presidency of Horacio Vásquez, the military man whose ascent back in 1924 had convinced the North American occupiers that the country could see to itself. As Vásquez’s health failed and his government weakened toward collapse, various groups jockeyed to replace him. Each knew that it would need Trujillo on its side. None, however, fathomed the deep logic of the situation as well as he or recognized that he had fancied himself the best man to rule the country.

Presidential elections were announced for 1930, and it wasn’t clear that Vásquez was out of the running; many notables—including, at times, Trujillo, at least publicly—declared an interest in his reelection. But at the same time, Trujillo hatched an audacious, sinister plan to usurp the presidency. In broad outline, he would confide in an ally in each opposition party his intention to support its cause by staging a rebellion of disloyal troops in—where else?—the Cibao; when Vásquez sent him to quell the rebellion, for he could turn to no one else, Trujillo would instead take command of it, leading it into the capital and overseeing a rigged election that would put his candidate—whoever that might be—in power.

What Trujillo told almost no one was that he was his own preferred candidate, that he was going to pull his support from whichever side came closest to power when it would be too late to stop him, seizing the top spot for himself. He shared his plans with the American diplomats who monitored Dominican politics from a judicious remove while wielding the threat of a second occupation as a means of influencing the nation’s affairs (the Yanks were still impressed with him, if less than enthusiastic about his plan). He also shared his plans with Don Pedro Rubirosa, who declined to take part.

The scheme was so risky that Trujillo hedged against failure by keeping a small fortune in cash at the ready should it fail and he be forced to flee. As it turned out, it went almost exactly as he’d planned. He found credulous dupes in each political camp and played them sublimely: Each man, in his own ambition to usurp the presidency, was certain he had the army’s support. He fomented just the right amount of faux unrest in the Cibao; when Vásquez felt himself nervously in need of a stronger military of his own, Trujillo was promoted to minister of national defense. A little more than a week later, as the phony revolt approached the capital, Vásquez, masterfully gulled, demanded assurances of loyalty from Trujillo and, mollified, directed him to stave off the impending coup. Trujillo sent a token platoon to oppose the insurrection—with orders, of course, to join rather than stop it—and then holed himself up with a more sizable and better-armed force in the chief redoubt of Santo Domingo, the Ozama Fortress. And there he sat implacably, insisting on his loyalty to Vásquez while the besieged president was forced to resign without a shot being fired in his defense.

Trujillo allowed his coconspirators in the opposition briefly to enjoy a show of control over the nation. And he equanimously allowed the presidential election to be held, with Vásquez’s party still permitted to run a candidate. But the whole thing was a dark farce. Everyone who might have taken power had been suborned by Trujillo into treason; no one could risk exposing his own deceit by stepping forward to claim the reins. Trujillo used frank acts of intimidation and violence to curb any dissent to his own puppet candidate, Rafael Estrella Ureña, and then simply strong-armed the man out of the race. The sham election was protested even before it occurred: An oversight board resigned en masse a week before the balloting. In May 1930, Trujillo was elected president by a near unanimous (and patently fabricated) majority that would have made the most megalomaniacal despot envious; in August, amid the high pomp he had felt was due him even in his days as a telegraph operator, he was inaugurated.

With epic tenacity and iron severity, Trujillo would so impose his personality on the Dominican Republic and its people that there would be no appreciable distinction between the man and the nation. Stalin, Mao, Castro, Amin, Ceausescu, Hussein, Kim Il Sung: none would have the same degree or depth of impact on the psyche of his people. In the course of time, every home in the country would boast a sign reading “God and Trujillo”—often right out on the roof in huge letters. Santo Domingo would be renamed Ciudad Trujillo; calendars would all be dated according to the Era of Trujillo, with 1930 as Year One; Pico Duarte, at ten thousand feet the highest peak in the Caribbean, would be renamed Little Trujillo—as opposed, of course, to the big one who sat, literally, on the throne in the National Palace; the first toast at any formal dinner, especially those at which he was not in attendance, would be to the health and honor of Trujillo; and he would be spoken of not as the President or the Generalísimo or the leader but, unironically, as the Benefactor.

These ritualistic incarnations of the cult of personality didn’t emerge immediately after Trujillo took power. No, before the tíguere Trujillo could metamorphose from soldier to god, certain parties reluctant to being held in his domain would have to be made to knuckle under. In particular, there was the refined circle of bourgeois families who dominated the social and cultural life of the capital. Educated, traveled, wealthy, born to relative privilege, they looked frankly down their noses at Trujillo with his mean roots, antiquated manners, and precise mien. In 1928, still merely an ambitious officer, Trujillo had stood for election to the Club Unión, one of Santo Domingo’s most elite social institutions, and was admitted because, as everybody who observed the process knew, somebody acting under his orders had tampered with the vote. That he nevertheless went ahead and joined and attended the club was the most desperate sort of social climbing; Trujillo felt the sting of having been forced to embarrass himself and filed it away for future vindication. His revenge was swift: In 1932, after filling the club with military officers, he was elected as its president, transferred the entire membership wholesale to a newly formed premises, and had the genteel old home of the Club Unión razed.

But Trujillo characteristically had another, more cunning scheme for gaining influence over the Dominican elite. If he couldn’t enlist the parents, he would enlist the children. And he found a perfect candidate with whom to begin his campaign: the feckless, French-educated, popular son of the estimable and recently deceased Don Pedro Maria Rubirosa.

In the autumn of 1931, Porfirio was out at a drinking party with friends at the Country Club, another of Santo Domingo’s swank gathering places, when he noticed Trujillo, in full, glistening uniform, presiding over a party of military officers across the room. It was an inauspicious time for the young man: Upon his death a year earlier, Don Pedro had left his son little more than the thin veil of a good reputation—for which, truly, Porfirio had no practical use—and a deathbed wish that he continue his legal education. With the household now dominated by his brother-in-law Gilberto Sánchez Lustrino, a dreary future seemed probable. Obviously the opportunity to return to Paris was negligible, and the seemingly unavoidable legal studies would clearly tear him from the sporting, leisurely life of the streets of Santo Domingo.

Sánchez Lustrino was a true Dominican bourgeois, more dedicated to shows of courtliness and refinement than Don Pedro had ever been, a born-and-bred member of that class of gentlefolk who sneered, sometimes openly, at the pretenses of the rustic new president. And, as Porfirio didn’t care much for his brother-in-law, he was particularly pleased when an aide of Trujillo’s came to the table that night at the Country Club and told Porfirio that the president wanted to see him.

As he approached the group of soldiers who, in contrast to his boisterous friends, sipped their drinks in tightly wound decorum, Porfirio observed that “one man dominated with his energetic mien, his dark and severe gaze, a certain hidden brutality and his impeccable uniform: Trujillo.” But when he was introduced to this forbidding man, a chameleonic transformation occurred before his eyes. “I was stupefied at the change that came over him,” he later recalled. “His severe expression disappeared, and he seemed very pleased to meet the son of an old friend.”*

Porfirio knew that Trujillo had attempted to lure Don Pedro into the byzantine scheme by which he gained control of the country and that his father, partly because of his ill health, partly because he genuinely desired that his nation’s future be decided democratically, demurred. So he wasn’t entirely surprised that Trujillo made mention of his grief at Don Pedro’s passing: “You know, I was very pained by your father’s death. Men like him are what we lack today.”

Likewise, Porfirio wasn’t surprised that Trujillo failed to be impressed by his choice of profession. “Students, always with their noses in books!” he snorted. “If we don’t advance more quickly, it’s because young men like you don’t participate in this great effort.”

But there was a surprise coming: Hard on that admonition, Trujillo gently suggested that Porfirio meet him at the National Palace the next morning to discuss his future, say 10 A.M. The matter agreed, the older man stood and, begging pardon, left the club, but not without a final invitation: “Sit here with your friends. Tonight you are the guests of the President!” Porfirio waved his chums over and they joined the soldiers, who slackened their rigid posture when Trujillo left and drank brandy and champagne with the young men until the early morning hours.

He returned home and prepared for his meeting, his head heavy from the night’s indulgences. At the palace, he found Trujillo characteristically alert, erect, immaculate, and direct.

“Did you enjoy yourself last night?”

“Thanks to you, Mr. President.”

“Very good. Now let’s get to more serious matters. I am going to make you a lieutenant in my Presidential Guard.”

There was no time—or, indeed, reason—for retort. Trujillo immediately sent a lackey to fetch an administrative official, to whom he announced, “I have just named Señor Rubirosa a lieutenant. I want to see him in uniform immediately. Take him to my personal tailor, my shoemaker and my gunsmith. Tonight he’ll enter the military training academy.”

As he was outfitted in the splendor that Trujillo demanded for himself and those closest to him, Porfirio tried to wrap his mind around the situation. “At 22,” he admitted, “this was a windfall … I was sufficiently vain to believe that my personality and the name of my family had occasioned this treatment by the General.” But he managed as well to plumb Trujillo’s deeper motives. Addicted to gossip—especially as a means of dominating its subjects—Trujillo had heard about Don Pedro’s popular boy-about-town and determined to use the young man’s social standing for his own purposes. Porfirio understood it instinctively: “He had resolved to get the golden youth of the island involved in the reform of his army. I seemed a young man well suited for this plan because of the prestige of my father and the esteem that my Parisian education had among young men of my generation.”

At heart, he understood Trujillo because the two were cut of the same material: “The General was a tíguere,” he recollected, “crueler than any of the other tígueres Santo Domingo had known before. This tíguere was smarter than a fox.” In time, their relationship would evolve into a complete symbiosis. Trujillo, capable of the most ruthless acts, would pass virtually all his life in the Dominican Republic to keep his iron fist on its affairs, would commit the most ruthless acts of violence and immorality to suit his pleasure and his power, but would always take especial care to maintain at least a show of public decency. Porfirio, who would eventually emerge as his country’s most visible emissary to the outside world, habitually engaged in a more extroverted and sensational form of tíguerismo, based not on the ruthless wielding of fear but on suavity, dash, ambition, charm, and magnetism. He would provide the sophisticated public face of a brutal regime while Trujillo would, in turn, provide a steely foundation for his stupendous adventures—a mutuality that Trujillo seemed almost to have planned from the start.

It began when, hung over and greedy, Porfirio swallowed the bait dangled before him, allowing yet another of the older man’s schemes to unfold exactly as it had been planned. “Just as Trujillo imagined,” he confessed, “many young men of the Dominican upper classes followed me.”

He didn’t care if he was being used. Military life, contrary to expectations, appealed to him. As he would recall, “Physical efforts filled our days: calisthenics, various sports, arms training, target practice, horseback riding. For a young man like me, it was paradise.” It was made for him: the smart, elaborate uniforms, the camaraderie of fellow junior officers, the freedom from the responsibility to feed or house himself or define his days.

He loved his uniforms, and he looked brilliant in them: pinch-waisted, sharp-jawed, muscular, whippy, with a tight crown of wavy hair, a broad forehead, dark almond-shaped eyes, wide cheekbones, and that café au lait complexion. He wore his hair longer than other soldiers and his boots were more suited to gentlemanly pursuits than to combat or training. If the elite society of Santo Domingo wasn’t yet prepared to accept Trujillo and his military, there were certainly young ladies whose eyes, and more, would readily be caught by the spectacle of this handsome, cultured young officer. He was in his glory.

His golden impression of his new life wasn’t shared at home. His brother-in-law asserted his domain over the household by refusing to allow a soldier to live under his roof. Porfirio simply moved into the barracks.

As a young soldier, he didn’t necessarily comport himself according to the strict standards of self-control that were so important to Trujillo. Having been promoted to first lieutenant and named a member of Trujillo’s personal staff, Porfirio was required to attend all of the deadly dull affairs of protocol of which the president was so enamored. Among these was a formal ball that would be attended by all of the civilian elite of Santo Domingo, a company by whom Porfirio was loathe to be seen in the role of aide-de-camp, a mere lackey. Ordered to attend in dress whites, he showed up instead in khakis, declaring that he hadn’t been told about the day’s dress code until it was too late and that his formal uniform was in the laundry. (“I still recall the look Trujillo gave me,” he would say more than thirty years later.)

With the other junior officers, Porfirio was ordered to stay put behind Trujillo, but he boldly strode over to where a young woman he knew was seated, and he took a chair beside her to chat. A nervous senior officer approached.

“Are you Lieutenant Rubirosa?”

“Yes.”

“The President has sent me to tell you that you may dance if you wish.”

The rest of Trujillo’s military corps gaped in astonishment as Porfirio enjoyed champagne and the company of the ladies for the rest of the evening. They had reckoned he’d be lambasted; instead, he had the time of his life.

That close call with the president’s anger wasn’t quite enough to scare Porfirio into the straight and narrow that was becoming the norm for trujillistos, as the most ardent followers of the president were known. In May 1932, he injured his knee in a one-car accident in San Pedro de Macorís, thirty miles east of Santo Domingo: As if he didn’t care how he’d comported himself he’d been speeding. “The distinguished young military gentleman,” as a fawning newspaper account referred to him, was attended in a local hospital and then transported by ambulance to the capital where he was seen by top military doctors. “The injury doesn’t apparently require additional care,” the report continued. “We are happy to wish him the quickest and most complete recovery.”

His first smash-up!

In July, Trujillo told Porfirio that his presence would be required the following day at the harbor, where a full complement of officers and a military band would greet the arrival of a ship that was returning the president’s daughter, Flor de Oro, from two years of school in France. Trujillo had special need for his audacious, French-speaking aide-de-camp at this particular reunion. “She knows Paris like you do,” he explained. And then, after a pause, he added, “Well, really, not like you do, I would hope.…”

The seventeen-year-old girl who got off that boat was, as she would later remember, “bedazzled” by her reception. “ ‘El Supremo,’” as she referred to her father, “stood there in an immaculate, starched white-linen suit, flanked by shining limousines and his handpicked aides. I noticed one lieutenant instantly—handsome in a Dominican uniform that had a special flair. Even the gold buttons looked real.”

It was, of course, Porfirio. And he, of course, noticed her noticing. “She was enchanting, with dreamy eyes and hair as black as night,” he later recollected in the florid style that overcame him when he wrote of romance.

No words were exchanged between the French-educated youngsters as Trujillo whisked away the daughter with whom he’d had virtually no contact since infancy. For Flor, riding with her father was quite nearly like making a new acquaintance. From the time the North Americans came to occupy the country, Trujillo had left his first wife and their daughter behind. “We knew little of what he did,” Flor remembered. “Three or four times a year, he’d come home, each time more and more overbearing. My proud job was to wash his military belt in the river for 25 US cents.”

Aside from such childish domestic chores, the girl served another purpose for her father: Trujillo spent Flor’s childhood offering different military or political bigwigs the chance to serve as his daughter’s godfather, a singular honor in a Latin family. But he never made the designation official, continually jockeying for a better and more prestigious candidate until the girl was almost fifteen years old and had either to be baptized or to be refused admittance to the French boarding school her father had chosen for her. (To get a sense of Trujillo’s relatively low standing at the time, the lucky winner of this sweepstakes was the family doctor; Flor, for her part, suffered the mortification of being the only baptismal candidate at that particular mass who walked on her own power to the altar rather than be carried as a babe in arms.)

When Trujillo failed to gain custody of the girl upon divorcing her mother, he moved them both to a small house in Santo Domingo and enrolled the adolescent Flor in a nearby boys’ military school. But she soon found herself among the students at the Collège Féminin de Bouffémont, a short distance from Paris.

It wasn’t necessarily a comfortable fit. “Naïve, thin, with legs long as a stork’s, unable to speak French, I was the shy tropical bumpkin,” she remembered, “the classmate of girls who included a princess of Iraq.” There were luxuries: her own thoroughbred horse to replace the burro she rode back home, summer in Biarritz, winter in St. Moritz, regular trips to Paris and the opera, the theater, the museums, and the shops. Still, she felt distant from her father; for most of her life, despite documentary evidence to the contrary, she claimed never to have heard a word from him in all her years away from home.*

Having been transformed, in her own estimation, into “that exotic hybrid, a French-speaking Dominican young lady,” she returned home not sure which father she would be meeting: the one who might hand her a $100 bill and declare “buy some toys” or the one whose volcanic temper aides warned her of in advance of their meetings. “Like the humblest dominicano,” she remembered, “I prospered and suffered under his rule and came to think of him as immortal. I had succumbed to the Dominican neurosis, a willingness to swallow anything because it came from Trujillo.”

The pomp of the greeting that summer morning at the port of Santo Domingo must therefore have reassured her, along with her father’s suggestion that she plan a coming-out party for herself, a major social event in a capital that had fallen increasingly under Trujillo’s sway in all its activities. Among those Flor hoped would attend but didn’t dare invite was that dashing lieutenant; years later she confessed, “It was love at first sight.” Eager to learn more about him, she quizzed her one Dominican friend, Lina Lovatón, a tomboy athlete who had been enrolled in the Santo Domingo military school with her. Lina knew little of Porfirio, and nothing further was learned at the party, during the whole of which the aide-de-camp stood stiffly behind the president, this time in proper uniform.

Soon Trujillo announced that the family and his personal staff would pass the rest of the summer at his estate in San José de las Matas in the western foothills of the Cibao. There, the attraction between the two young people escalated, though it would not always be clear in later years how exactly or at whose instigation. Flor would forever insist that they never spoke during this period, but Porfirio would recall idle conversations in French about Parisian landmarks and “the differences between the life one encountered in Europe and in the Caribbean.” That these initial contacts were, at any rate, fleeting they would both agree.

More was, however, suspected. The childless Doña Bienvenida, jealous of Trujillo’s attentions to this daughter of his first marriage, somehow got wind of the fledgling romance—Porfirio surmised that she overheard the two speaking French in the garden one evening—and warned her husband about the lieutenant’s impertinent behavior. Without a moment’s hesitation, Porfirio was reassigned to confined duty at the fortress in San Francisco de Macorís.

Again, what happened next would be in dispute: Either she wrote him to say that she was stricken at the thought of his departure, which assumes his story that they were already on close terms; or he wrote her, out of the blue, if her account of their merely polite relations is more accurate, to express his despair at being separated from her. (Years later, Rubi explained simply, “As in any good script, we found ways of getting letters to each other.”)

Whichever, the next step was indisputably hers. Learning that she would be attending a dance in her honor in Santiago—midway, more or less, between his new post and Trujillo’s ranch—she snuck off on horseback one afternoon and phoned the fortress to invite him. He accepted and, feigning a sore throat and the need to consult a specialist in the city, made his way to Santiago on the day of the dance.

She spied him first in the town plaza, fittingly enough having his boots blacked. Then at the dance, she was seated among the town’s elite when he walked confidently over and asked her to dance. Defying every principle of decorum, they danced together repeatedly—“five times in a row,” as she recalled—and compounded the sensation by speaking in French and then, during the open-air concert following the dance, walking slowly twice around the plaza, albeit under the vigilant eye of her chaperone.

As far as Porfirio was concerned, that was it: “From that moment I was in love, and Flor was as well.”

And that was it as far as Trujillo was concerned as well.

“The dance wasn’t even over when Trujillo heard,” Flor recalled. When she returned to San José de las Matas, she was met with a storm. Her father sent her directly to her room and began grilling his aides to find out who was responsible for the communications between Porfirio and his daughter and who was responsible for letting the banished lieutenant out of the fortress to attend a dance. Flor was terrified by the degree and intensity of his temper and cowered at the door listening as he sputtered to Doña Bienvenida, “She’s gotten herself mixed up with that good-for-nothing lieutenant!”

The next day, an even more dire fate awaited Porfirio: An officer marched into his quarters and announced that he was to be immediately expelled from the army and stripped of all his gear, including, to his special pain, “my uniforms, which I loved so well.”

This was a staggering blow, and he remembered it with high drama: “I was an outcast in my own country. Ignominiously dumped and rejected by the army. Marked on the forehead with the sign of infamy which no one could ignore.” He entertained the thought of exile but he couldn’t leave the island, he said in his most lugubrious voice, because “to leave would be to lose Flor. And to lose Flor would be to die. But to stay would also be to die.”

This was no exaggeration: Trujillo was entirely capable of having his onetime protégé eliminated and, in fact, he dispatched a team of hit men that very afternoon from his goon squad, who roamed the country in ominous red Packards doing the despot’s bidding.

Had he been stationed in any other city, Porfirio might not have survived the day. But San Francisco de Macorís was, of course, his birthplace, as well as the hereditary seat of both sides of his family. “My uncles and my grandfather united in counsel,” he recalled. “My uncle Oscar gave me a well-oiled pistol. A truck was obtained. It took me to a cocoa plantation owned by one of my uncles, Pancho Ariza, about 10 kilometers away.” For more than a week, he hid in an outbuilding on the farm, “staring into space, ruminating on this cascade of catastrophes.”

He was alone in neither his anguish nor his isolation. Before bolting to his hideout, he sent off a note to Flor describing his situation. The emissary who delivered it was tied by Trujillo to a tree and thrashed, while Flor watched in horror. She locked herself away from this frightening tyrant, refusing to speak with him, refusing meals, and writing letter after unsent letter to the young man who had suddenly come to dominate her dreams. Like the heroine of a pulp novel, she would love Porfirio to spite her father.

“Flor had the same strong blood in her veins as her father,” Porfirio would recall. “A will of iron and an indomitable courage guided her. She was the only one who could stand up to her father, even if he was in a state of fury.” When Trujillo sent an intermediary to speak with her, she replied, “Tell my father that I want to marry the man I love, and I will marry him. Otherwise I would not be worthy of being his daughter.”

At least that would be how Porfirio remembered it—or maybe how he imagined it. Flor’s memory was different: a cruelly imposed isolation; the ceaseless slander of the former lieutenant by her father and stepmother; a strange limbo, like being a nonperson.

In his hideaway, Porfirio grew impatient and decided, on instinct, that danger had passed. “It has always been one of my chief principles,” he later confessed. “I will risk everything to avoid being bored.” He rode back to his uncle’s home in town, shocking his family with his sudden appearance. “You don’t have a lick of common sense,” they admonished him.

But, in fact, the worst of it seemed to have passed. Indeed, the lull emboldened Doña Ana Rubirosa to visit Trujillo to plead for her son. As Porfirio recalled it, his mother stood up to the president by asking, “What secret mark is there against our family that Señor Trujillo cannot tolerate that a Rubirosa would dare put his eyes on his daughter?”

The meeting was barely a quarter hour along when Trujillo slapped his desk and declared, “That’s enough! They will marry right away!”

This was like tripping over a winning lottery ticket on the street. From disgrace and near-death, Porfirio was now slated to marry into the first family of the country. Maybe he was in love, truly, or maybe he was too scared to cross Trujillo a second time by refusing Flor, or maybe he was as bold a tíguere as the Benefactor himself. Whichever, he had heedlessly reached for the impossible by making eyes at the president’s daughter and, through charm, gall, and luck, had seized the prize. At twenty-three, he would be wealthier and closer to power than Don Pedro ever had been.

For Flor it was a stunning shock: “Five dances in a row, two circles around a park, an innocent flirtation, and I was to marry a man I scarcely knew!”

Still, marriage would liberate her, she hoped, from a man she knew all too well; as she admitted, she was “wild to leave my prison, to run like hell from Father, an instinct that was to propel me all my life.”

The nuptials were planned for early December at the fateful ranch house where the abortive courtship transpired. Trujillo orchestrated all the details: the invitations, the ceremony, the party. The best man would be the U.S. ambassador, H. F. Arthur Schoenfeld, whom the groom had likely never met. The ceremony would be performed by the archbishop of Santo Domingo. Flor was sent to the capital to have a dress made; her fiancé stayed with his family in San Francisco de Macorís—and was named, if only for the sake of having a title worthy of his entry into the president’s family, secretary to the Dominican legation in London.

On December 2, a caravan of trucks bearing flowers and bridesmaids wended from the capital to the wedding site. The groom was flown in on a military plane. The next day, after the civil and religious ceremonies in the town, the wedding party began late, at 4:30, on what turned out to be a rainy afternoon.

In the photographs of their wedding day, the newlyweds look frightened and tiny, despite their finery and the attendant pomp. Rubi stands with shoulders thrust back and tiny waist forward, a pompadour stiff on his head and a grin set in the baby fat of his cheeks. Flor is a head shorter, with wide-set eyes and a toothy smile; she holds a hand protectively across her breast, cradling her bouquet. They might be a prom couple on their first date.

As the photo attests, the wedding wasn’t a completely comfortable experience for the groom, who hadn’t once laid eyes on his prospective father-in-law since before being sent away for flirting with Flor. “During the ceremony,” he recalled, “I saw Trujillo again for the first time. Instead of his happy air, he was cold and quiet.” Nor was the bride entirely at ease, recalling that “Father hadn’t spoken to me since my engagement.”

But it was a lavish celebration nonetheless, with music, champagne, food, dignitaries, and a trove of gifts, which the bride said “would have filled a house.” (Conspicuously absent was the bride’s mother, still shunned by Trujillo as if dead.) By 7 P.M., the newlyweds were headed to Santo Domingo in one of their presents from the Benefactor, a cream-colored, chauffeur-driven Packard with their initials embossed in real gold on the doors.

Two days later, the capital’s most prestigious newspaper, Listín Diario, carried an account of the wedding written by someone whom the editors referred to as “an esteemed and distinguished friend of ours.” The author was, in fact, Trujillo, who would employ this and other newspapers throughout the tenure of his reign to carry, pseudonymously, compositions of his own, often using them to undermine or frankly smear someone who had fallen out of his favor. He could be vicious and snide in his writings, but this time, his tone was florid and precious:

Distinguished personalities of the country added to the glow of the nuptial ceremony … beneath the cool pines of the marvelous setting of San José de las Matas, an ambiance rich in exquisiteness.… The bride, who is a flower because of her perfumed name and because of the charms that flower within her, lit up a precious wedding dress.… It was one of the most aristocratic weddings ever recorded in the social annals of the Republic. The genteel couple have united their pulsing hearts in emotion. They have our most sincere and cordial wishes for their personal journey and their eternal happiness.

According to the report, the couple would live in “a handsome chalet within the bounds of the presidential mansion in the aristocratic and comely ‘faubourg’ of Gascue” in Santo Domingo—another gift from Trujillo.

But it was to a temporary home they retired that evening, their first as husband and wife and another experience that they would remember differently.

“When we left for our honeymoon,” Porfirio remembered, “I felt like the happiest of all men.”

Flor, on the other hand, was a nervous wreck. However much she had talked with her mother, her stepmother, or her older friends, she was entirely unprepared for the night’s activities. She wore a pink negligee into the bedroom and was startled into apoplexy by the sight of her husband’s erection. “I ran all around the house, and Porfirio chased me,” she remembered.

Somehow she talked him out of consummating the marriage that night, but she couldn’t keep him at bay forever. She let him have his way, however awfully. “I didn’t like it because I bled so much, and my clothes were ruined,” she confessed. “In time, he began to make love to me in different ways, but when it was over my insides hurt a lot. He was such a handsome boy and so charming that I let him do whatever he wanted. But he took so long to ejaculate that by the end I was a little bored.”

Et voilà the maiden marital bed of a man who would become famous as one of the great lovers of his time.

* A legend would evolve that the two men met after Porfirio had captained the Dominican national polo team to a victory over Nicaragua, but Porfirio’s equestrian life only truly began after he met Trujillo, and polo wasn’t played in the Dominican Republic, certainly not at the international level, until the 1940s, when he was himself instrumental in introducing it.

* Among the surviving correspondence was a letter from Flor de Oro at Bouffémont dated October 29, 1931, in which she thanked her father for his recent telegram and declared that she was looking forward to the fulfillment of his promise to bring her home for the coming summer. He responded three weeks later with a thoughtful and tender note in which he praised her maturation and indicated that he’d heard good things about her academic progress from the headmistress of her school.

FOUR
A DREDGE AND A BOTCH AND A BUST-UP

It was, by all objective standards, easy street.

In a house facing the sea in Ciudad Trujillo, the newlyweds lived in true splendor. Both had multiple servants; in addition to a valet and a masseuse, Porfirio employed a sparring partner—Kid GoGo, from back in his San Lázaro boxing promotion days—with whom he exercised daily in a ring he’d had erected in a spare room.

But the shadow of Trujillo obscured their horizon, and they were unable ever to forget the source of their good fortune. Flor recalled that their presence was required every day for lunch in the presidential mansion—“plain fare, rice and beans, no drinks, no cigarettes, no small talk: it was a bit like two slaves dining with the master.”

Along with all the gifts, Porfirio was given real work to do. Having decided against dispatching the couple to London, Trujillo appointed his son-in-law undersecretary to the president in April 1933, and then, the following July, undersecretary of foreign relations. In that post, Porfirio took charge of some genuinely sensitive responsibilities, such as communicating with Gerardo Machado y Morales, the Cuban president who’d been exiled to the United States after a coup in August; several rounds of correspondence between the two, with Porfirio gently dissuading the elder man from attempting to enlist Trujillo’s help in regaining his position, would survive. When foreign dignitaries came to the capital, Flor and Porfirio, the stylish, French-speaking face of the modern Dominican Republic, were trotted out to meet the visitors. A Haitian newspaper columnist was so charmed that he praised them as the “best-dressed, best-educated, most popular couple in town”; Trujillo, cross at having failed to be mentioned himself in a similar light, found in these compliments a slight, which he avenged by adopting a calculated iciness toward the couple.

There was phony work as well. In May 1933, Porfirio, who had never taken a course in business and had never had a bank account in his own name, was named president of the Compañía de Seguros San Rafael, an insurance firm established by Trujillo—like the other leading companies in virtually every field of Dominican commerce—as a false front for his private monopolization of the nation’s economy. The entire Trujillo family—the president’s many brothers and sisters, countless nieces and nephews and cousins—would be enriched through the years via such schemes. And not only blood relatives but in-laws and the relations of in-laws; Flor said of Porfirio’s kin, who’d so scorned the sight of him in his uniform barely a year earlier, “His family didn’t much cotton to Trujillo, but after the wedding they suddenly got big positions in the government.”

A lot of Dominican men would have been satisfied with this routine: the sinecures, the luxurious home, the servants, the prestige, the $50,000 bank account (controlled by Trujillo and in Flor’s name, but still). Not Porfirio. He was living within easy walking distance of his old haunts, the bars and brothels and clubs where he’d idled before he joined the army. He settled into a double life, half the time an obedient son-in-law, half a notorious rake participating in marathon drinking-and-whoring bouts: parrandas. When news of this behavior filtered back home, as it inevitably would, there were dustups with Flor. At least once Porfirio went so far as to hit her; she ran off to the palace, interrupting a meeting to tell her father of her husband’s violence; summoned by Trujillo, Porfirio mollified him by declaring that he’d struck her for failing to respect him under his own roof, a provocation with which any true tíguere would sympathize.

Even as he forgave that trespass, Trujillo harbored little warmth for his son-in-law. “I think that at bottom he never forgave me for marrying his daughter,” Porfirio surmised. “That his daughter could love someone other than him seemed impossible to him.” The president’s withering remoteness, coupled with Porfirio’s own restless inability to settle into the life of a bureaucrat, impelled him to ask for reinstatement to the Army, where he’d so enjoyed the life of vigor and male camaraderie. Trujillo consented, posting him at the rank of captain, assigning him no specific duties, and doing little to couch his disgust at Porfirio’s apparent contentment with his new station.

The source of the president’s contempt was, in Porfirio’s view, obvious: Little Ramfis had been commissioned as a senior officer in the Army the previous year; as Porfirio put it, “What sort of son-in-law would be content to be captain when [Trujillo’s] own five-year-old son was already a colonel?” (A letter from Robert L. Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” offices in New York would arrive on Trujillo’s desk in February 1936, seeking confirmation of Ramfis’s position in the Army and asking whether he wore full uniform and collected the appropriate salary for his rank. By that time, the young soldier had been seen beside his father at several official functions wearing elaborate military uniforms and partaking of champagne toasts.)

But Porfirio endured the Benefactor’s scorn because he simply wanted to be his own man. Without responsibilities as a soldier, he could look for private opportunities around the city. “I had very little to do,” he recalled, “and I wanted to learn about business.” But, as he should have known from his brief stint at the insurance company, nobody did business in Ciudad Trujillo without doing business with Trujillo. And it was a uniquely bold and crafty businessman indeed who could make a success at that.

Félix Benítez Rexach wore his hair to his shoulders, wasn’t too particular about washing or combing it, and habitually topped it with battered straw hats. His clothes weren’t much more presentable: He could show up at official functions in torn and muddy outfits as if oblivious entirely to protocol. He looked for all the world like a hobo, but it was a calculated guise. He was actually a millionaire engineer willing to stand up to gangsters and governments to see his business interests come to fruition. Born in Puerto Rico, he traveled widely and grew especially fond of France, where he owned homes in Paris and on the Riviera. There was suspicious talk about his sexuality, but he had two wives, the second being the onetime Parisian flower girl Gaby Montbre, who had a sort-of musical career as La Môme Moineau (literally, “the bratty sparrow”), a chanteuse in the vein of Edith Piaf. There was suspicious talk as well about his engineering credentials, but he had built himself a yacht from his own design (his wife would become more famous for being photographed by French magazines on its decks in sailing clothes than for her singing), and he had successfully overseen the creation of deep-water harbors in Puerto Rico, where he had additional interests in the resort hotel business.

Benítez Rexach showed up in Ciudad Trujillo in 1934 when Trujillo’s government announced plans to enlarge the harbor at the mouth of the Ozama River; until then, the largest ships arriving in the capital had to anchor a short distance out at sea and have their passengers and cargo ferried ashore. The project would require the use of a massive shipboard dredge—and whoever successfully completed the job could hope on doing further business with Trujillo at other ports around the country.

Benítez Rexach read all the implications of the situation, including the nepotistic nature of Dominican political and business affairs, and he sought a pry hole that would get him into the president’s good graces. He found one in Trujillo’s tomcatting son-in-law. He dangled his wife as bait in front of Porfirio, cynically affording him ample opportunity to sample her favors. (Flor knew about the affair and so, she claimed, did the whole city, including her father.) To tie the knot tighter, Benítez Rexach suggested a business partnership: If Porfirio acquired a dredge, and Benítez Rexach knew of one available in New Orleans, then the engineer would rent it for the duration of the job; they drew up an agreement.

For Benítez Rexach, it was politics: cozen the son-in-law to get to the real power. But for Porfirio and Flor, it was a lifeline—and a gamble. “Neither of us had much business sense,” Flor recalled. She and her husband “were alike in so many ways, neither of us really good-looking, both mixed-up Dominicans, in love with the high life, hungry for what money could buy, but unable to earn an honest living on our own.” Success in the harbor project, however, would mean autonomy from Trujillo’s money and influence. The risk was worth it.

The first obstacle would be getting the capital necessary to buy the dredge. Flor’s father still controlled the $50,000 dowry; would he be willing to open the purse for the project? Willing wasn’t exactly the word. “I don’t have much faith in second-hand machinery or in this investment,” the president told his daughter even as he agreed to her request. Rubi sent an emissary, cash in hand, to buy the dredge, a vessel called the Tenth of February, and bring it back to Ciudad Trujillo.

While he was risking his fortune and good name, such as they were, in this scheme, Porfirio was also upholding his share of the bargain he’d struck with Benítez Rexach, establishing a connection between the engineer and Trujillo. Eventually, the two men so bonded that an intermediary was unnecessary; Benítez Rexach sufficiently impressed Trujillo, in fact, that he was routinely forgiven the effrontery of strolling into the immaculate palace in his grubbiest condition and eventually enjoyed brief appointments from the president in the diplomatic service in France and Puerto Rico.

With these two in cahoots, it was only a matter of time before Porfirio was frozen out. The blindside was delivered with an assassin’s cunning. By the time the Tenth of February was in Ciudad Trujillo and ready to dig, Benítez Rexach had acquired a brand-new dredge of his own for the job and had convinced Trujillo of the superiority of his vessel to Porfirio’s. But Porfirio had the engineer’s signed promise to use his equipment, and he demanded that it at least be tested. In the coming weeks, Benítez Rexach submitted the Tenth of February to trials but sabotaged them at every turn: He claimed that the dredge wouldn’t function properly in the tropical weather; he insisted that it first be tried in the most ill-suited portion of the harbor; he whispered to Trujillo that its gas-powered engine might ignite and blow up the whole port.

Porfirio, suffering one of his father-in-law’s periodic silent treatments, couldn’t get a hearing. He could see that he was being shut out of the operation, and he was realistic enough to wish only to recoup the lease money he’d been promised so as to repay Trujillo for the dredge. Even that much Benítez Rexach refused, and so Porfirio took decisive action. In his full captain’s uniform, complete with sidearms, he rode a launch out to the work site in the harbor and accosted the engineer. “I leapt at him, grabbed him by the collar and shook him like a carpet,” Porfirio remembered. “‘Thief! If you continue waging war against me and don’t pay me right now what you owe me, I will destroy you!’ He was terrified. He collapsed. He promised everything I wanted.”

But as soon as Porfirio left, Benítez Rexach raced to tell Trujillo that he would have to quit working on the harbor improvements for fear that Porfirio would kill him. Trujillo offered reassurance: “Four officers of my guard will accompany you and let Captain Rubirosa know what it will cost him if he touches one hair on your head.” The operation continued without further hindrance while the Tenth of February sat unused and worthless. As a Dominican businessman—indeed, as a Dominican man—Porfirio was toast.

It would be hard to imagine a worse fall: from golden aide-de-camp to anointed heir to broke, disgraced nonperson in less than three years. With whatever money they could scrounge, Porfirio and Flor decided to leave the country and look for less dreary prospects in the United States. In the winter of 1934–35, they moved to New York City. Trujillo, perhaps to let them tumble further into his debt, let them go.

This was, in most ways, madness. In Ciudad Trujillo, even on the outs with the Benefactor, they had connections, prestige, resources. In New York, for which they didn’t even have the proper winter clothing, they were broke, they didn’t speak the language, and they were anonymous refugees living in a cheap Broadway hotel and, later, in Greenwich Village, where at least one associate would later remember Porfirio working, briefly, as a waiter.

“It was a nightmare,” Flor remembered. Her husband, as he had back home, “disappeared to play poker with Cuban gangster types while I waited in that dingy hotel room, watching the Broadway signs blink on and off.”

There was no money: “When he won, we ate; when he lost, we starved.”

And he had other interests: “He would come home at 6 a.m., his pockets stuffed with matchbooks scribbled with the phone numbers of women.”

They fought: “Angry, brutal, he shoved and hit me when we argued.”

It was utterly foolish to think of New York as a going prospect. They could count on no help from the consulate, which obviously answered to her father. There was a Dominican presence in the Latin American community in the north of Manhattan, but most of that contingent was made up of people who had fled Trujillo and were actively plotting his replacement—again, a dead end. The only significant contact they had was a mixture of comedy and menace: three cousins of Porfirio’s, sons of Don Pedro’s sister, who had been raised in the city since boyhood and had spent most of their grown years engaged in petty crime and worse. “When I saw ‘West Side Story’ I was reminded of them,” Flor recalled. “Good-for-nothings who had never worked.”

Among them was Luis de la Fuente Rubirosa, aka Chichi, who had been in trouble with the law since boyhood. In 1925, he had been arrested for burglary and sentenced to a spell at the New York Reformatory for Boys. In 1932, he was tried for assault and robbery and acquitted. He was short, maybe five-foot-six, with jug ears and a pinched face and sharp cheekbones, a wiry, dangerous little creep, plain and simple, with nothing to offer his cousin and his wife in the way of truly promising possibilities.

New York was coming to seem even more disastrous than Ciudad Trujillo. And then the most unexpected lifeline appeared: a telegram from the Benefactor announcing that Porfirio had been elected—elected!—to the national congress and that both he and Flor were required back home. Unable to explain what was happening, they were equally unable to resist.

Trujillo’s congress was a dog-and-pony show that fooled no one. The deputies were required upon taking office to submit signed and undated letters of resignation so that the president could remove them at any time for any cause; it wasn’t unusual for a man to return from lunch to attend the afternoon session only to find out that he had, without knowing it, quit his post during the recess. And when they did sit, the legislators were utterly impotent. “In every session,” Porfirio remembered, “the President read aloud a proposed law and we adopted it with a show of hands. There was never any question of discussing it.”

A nation conditioned by centuries of rebellion and despotism wasn’t especially outraged by this pantomime of a government. And Trujillo was modernizing the Dominican Republic in a way that no previous tyrant had: paying off its staggering national debt to the United States, paving roads, building an electrical grid, and so forth. Soon after he took power, the island suffered a devastating hurricane that virtually bowled it back to the Stone Age; the speed of repairs and, indeed, improvements under Trujillo’s firm hand made him a hero in the eyes of his countrymen.

As a result, Trujillo had no shortage of stooges who could fill the seats of this cardboard congress, so it wasn’t at all clear to Porfirio why he was so urgently needed. But in April 1935, he was called in to see the president—who suddenly seemed very happy to see his son-in-law—and given a delicate assignment. When he got home, he told Flor that he would be going back to New York the next day on official business.

On April 16, Porfirio disembarked from the S.S. Camao in New York and checked into the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South. Along with his personal effects, he had a suitcase containing $7,000 in cash.* A few days later, he toted that suitcase to the Dominican consulate on Fifth Avenue, where he met with a small group that included his cousin Chichi. On April 27, he left for Miami; from there he sailed for San Pedro de Macorís, his spare suitcase filled this time with new dresses and other gifts for Flor.

The following day, a Sunday, a group of Dominican dissidents met in Manhattan to discuss their plans for unseating Trujillo. Among them was Dr. Angel Morales, the most recognized Dominican statesman in the world. In the years before Trujillo’s assumption of power, Morales had served his country as minister of the interior, minister of foreign affairs, minister to Italy, minister to France (he was once Don Pedro Rubirosa’s boss), and minister to the United States. In the mid-1920s, he had been elected vice president of the League of Nations. In 1930, he had run in the rigged election that gave Trujillo the presidency; when he lost, he fled to New York for his life and was declared a traitor; all his property in the Dominican Republic was confiscated by the new government.

As an alternative to Trujillo, Morales had supporters not only in the Dominican exile community but in the U.S. government and among private parties in North America who sought to foster change in the island nation. But he so feared Trujillo’s ruthlessness and reach that he lived in New York like a hunted man. He shared a Manhattan rooming house flat with Sergio Bencosme, a general’s son who had served Trujillo’s rivals as a congressional deputy and minister of defense. The two lived on the proceeds from a small coffee importing business. And they tiptoed around the city in mortal trepidation: Morales was said to be hesitant to eat anywhere save at his landlady’s table for fear of being poisoned or attacked.

His fears were justified that Sunday night. When the dissident meeting broke up, Morales, in a rare feeling of well-being, went to dine out with friends. Bencosme returned to their apartment on the seventh floor of a Washington Heights walk-up and a supper cooked by Mrs. Carmen Higgs, their thirty-year-old Latina landlady.

At about 8 P.M., there was a knock at the door. Mrs. Higgs, who shared her lodgers’ fears, asked who was there.

“Open this door,” came the harsh reply.

She cracked the door to have a look, and a short, wiry man in a brown suit and brown hat pushed in past her, brandishing a .45 caliber pistol. Mrs. Higgs screamed and leapt back into the kitchen; fearing a robbery, she removed her engagement ring and wedding band and tossed them into a coffeepot that was percolating on the stove. The gunman looked into the kitchen and then moved down the hall, first into the living room and then into an adjoining bedroom.

Bencosme, shaving for dinner, his face covered in lather, heard the commotion, came toward the front door, and peered into the living room. Finding it empty, he went on to the kitchen to see what the screaming was about. From the rear of the apartment came a shout—“Die, Morales!”—and two shots struck Bencosme in the back; the bullets passed through his body and lodged in a bureau. The gunman ran through the hall—over the body and past Mrs. Higgs—and down the six flights of stairs into the street. Bencosme, staggering and in agony, made his way to the apartment of a neighbor who had a telephone and rang for help.

When police and ambulance drivers arrived, they couldn’t at first make out what happened. Mrs. Higgs was so frightened that she couldn’t bring forth any English and insisted that she’d been robbed until a detective found her jewelry brewing with the coffee. Bencosme, barely conscious by the time he was taken off to Knickerbocker Hospital, muttered that he was a political refugee. Only when Morales returned home at midnight to find the chaotic scene did a reasonable theory of the case emerge: Somebody had tried to kill him and had mistakenly shot Bencosme.

On Monday, forty known Trujillo supporters from among Manhattan’s Dominican community were rounded up and questioned by detectives of the so-called alien squad at the West 152nd Street station, but no arrests were made. On Tuesday morning, Bencosme succumbed to his wounds and died in the hospital, leaving behind a widow and two children in Ciudad Trujillo. Finally, Mrs. Higgs sat in a station house and looked at mug shots of Dominicans with histories of criminal violence. She looked at a 1932 booking photo and declared that the man pictured in it was the killer.

It was, of course, Chichi de la Fuente Rubirosa.

After going before a grand jury to present the known facts of the case, many of which derived from Morales’s own contacts and investigation, the New York County District Attorney’s Office filed an indictment in absentia for murder against Chichi on February 18, 1936. According to the charges, “Captain Porfirio Rubirosa” had been in New York immediately prior to the shooting and Chichi was, nearly a year after the shooting, living in Ciudad Trujillo as a lieutenant in the Dominican army despite his total lack of military training. Chichi’s extradition was sought through the State Department, but little hope was held out that the accused killer would be sent back to New York.

Back in Ciudad Trujillo, Flor knew nothing about the events in New York—the murder wasn’t exactly front-page news in the state-controlled local papers—but like everyone else in the culture of gossip that was coming to thrive under Trujillo, she heard things. She was only mildly surprised, therefore, to answer a knock at her door on a night when her husband and father were out of town to find Chichi standing there begging for help.

“I had to leave the States,” he explained. “They are pursuing me.”

For a while, Chichi lived with his cousin and his wife and sought work around the city; he even put in a spell on the harbor project that had driven Porfirio and Flor to leave home the year before. It wasn’t a promising situation, and Porfirio didn’t exactly relish it, especially as Chichi aggravated matters by hinting broadly around town that he had done Trujillo a great service and deserved to be at least a captain for his efforts.

He might as well have cut his own throat. “One evening,” Flor recalled, “we came home to find him gone. Servants said ‘strangers’ had surrounded the house and taken him away. We never heard from Chichi or saw him again—and my husband would not comment on the affair.” (When a year or so later Flor thought she saw Chichi on the street and pointed the look-alike out to Porfirio, he snapped back, “Don’t mention that name! Those kids were good-for-nothings!”) When the U.S. State Department inquired as to Chichi’s whereabouts, they were told alternately that no such person existed and that the fellow in question had died in a dredging accident in the harbor. But police and prosecutors in New York still wanted to talk to Porfirio—and they would be patient in waiting to do so for decades.

This drama did little to stabilize the marriage of Porfirio and Flor, which continued to be roiled by Trujillo. In the summer of 1935, they found themselves once again in the Benefactor’s confidence. He was suffering from a severe case of urethritis and required surgery. Because of his need to maintain a show of superhuman capacity, he arranged for a French specialist to be brought secretly to perform the operation. The doctor was put up—again, on the QT—at Porfirio and Flor’s home, where he conducted three operations on the president, using only local anesthetic. Trujillo was so weakened by the ordeal that rumors spread as far as Washington, D.C., that he was dying. To put an end to the gossip, he left his makeshift intensive care bed and had himself driven through the capital in a Rolls-Royce for an hour, long enough so that word of his good health would circulate. When he recovered, he returned to his own house without so much as a thank-you for his daughter and son-in-law.

At the time, Flor’s own health was of concern. She had been trying to conceive a child and was told by her physician to seek the advice of a specialist in the United States, where she underwent a surgical procedure designed to address her infertility.* When she came home hopeful of starting a family, she found her household had been the scene of one of Porfirio’s bacchanalian parrandas: There were women’s earrings in the swimming pool, and one of her servants confided that “all the whores in Santo Domingo have been here.”

She begged her father to help her do something about this nightmare, and he offered a unique solution: In July 1936, he named Porfirio secretary of the Dominican legation in Berlin.

They arrived at the height of preparations for the Nazi Olympics, an event that drew to the city a claque of idle rich scenesters from around the Continent: Porfirio’s crowd exactly. With almost no work assigned to him, he kept up the equestrian skills in the city’s parks, began to take a series of fencing lessons, and, in general, dove into a more luxe version of the life he had lived in Paris as a feckless teen. “Berlin suited me perfectly,” he admitted blithely. “I could ride, go to clubs, drive fast and dance at the afternoon teas at the Eden.”

Needless to say, those afternoon teas involved women—and not Dominican whores, either, but a breed of woman that intimidated Flor. “How could I,” she wondered, “still a provincial girl in her early 20s, unworldly, badly dressed, mousy, compete with these women?” She was particularly anxious about a certain Martha: “Soignée, blazing with diamonds, she was everything I was not.”

But there were other, nameless rivals. There was the time one of Porfirio’s afternoon teas turned into dinner and an overnight stay. He snuck home to the Dominican embassy at dawn, quickly showered and dressed for breakfast, and made his way to his dining room where Flor and the ambassador, among others, awaited him. He sat nonchalantly and then noticed a bouquet of roses in front of his place setting. Attached was a note written in a feminine hand, a paean to a night that had seemed never to end, like midsummer’s eve in Sweden. Whatever cock-and-bull story Porfirio had planned to offer vanished from his head: “My pretty German spoke of the Scandinavian summer. Breakfast proceeded like the middle of the Siberian winter. Since then, I can’t see a bouquet of roses without feeling a bit of a shiver.” But any chastening he felt soon dissolved, as when he had frightened his parents by spending the night out as a boy, and he presently resumed his rambles.

Official duties dotted the high life. Because of their relative worldliness, because they were relatives of the Dominican president, and because the Third Reich was courting Caribbean governments as part of its scheme of global expansion, Porfirio and Flor were granted a number of remarkable privileges. When the Olympics began, they were permitted to sit in Hitler’s box at the main stadium, where they observed the Führer’s caroms between childish glee at each German victory and rock stolidity when another nation’s anthem was played at a medal ceremony. They were feted by Hermann Göring, who took Porfirio aside during the evening and expressed interest in obtaining a particularly handsome Dominican medal. They were invited to the annual party rally in Nuremberg, where they gazed in stupefaction at an orgy of adulation on a scale of which Trujillo, with his own budding cult of personality, could only dream.

Despite such impressive shows, both young Dominicans were shocked by the outright anti-Semitism of the regime. Flor found herself secretly aiding a Jewish girl who had been her schoolmate in France, obtaining visas for her and her husband and seeing to their getting settled in the Dominican Republic and started in the tobacco business. Porfirio was staggered one day as he rode through a park and saw a young man wearing a yellow star and being humiliated by Germans. “Racism never occurred to me,” he reflected. Indeed, he had enjoyed a certain éclat for his Creole heritage, which was evident even though he was fair-skinned enough to pass for Latin as opposed to Negro. “In the Dominican Republic, blacks and whites were equals. At times they mixed. There were social differences, but in the most exclusive places one met people of color. In Paris as well, racial problems didn’t exist.”

But at the same time, neither of them had any inkling of how truly invidious the Reich was or would be. Dazzled, perhaps, by his good fortune to be living with money in a posh European capital, Porfirio reckoned that Hitler’s great shows of force “were no more than a bluff.” In retrospect he would feel some shame at his miscalculation. “I’m not a politician,” he would explain. But he noted, too, that the diplomatic corps of larger and more sophisticated nations were equally gulled by the Führer. If he had been fooled, he wasn’t alone.

Before he could fathom the truth of the Reich, however, he found himself transferred. Flor was so miserable living in Berlin with her rakish husband that she wrote to her father to express her displeasure:

I have learned a little German and seen a lot of the country, and I have admired the great work of Hitler. But nevertheless I’m not happy.… In diplomatic circles, most of the officials are on the left. They don’t invite us to their dances and I don’t have the chance to meet anybody. If it isn’t too much to ask, I’d like you to transfer us to Paris.… There, I’d have occasion to attend many conferences and get to know better the French literature that I like so well. Please let me know if you can comply with this request.

Indeed, he could, but first a royal interlude in London: On May 12, 1937, they represented the Dominican Republic at the coronation of George VI; Porfirio met the monarch in a private audience. Two days later, at the Dominican legation at 21 Avenue de Messine in Paris, the following note arrived from the undersecretary of foreign relations in Ciudad Trujillo:

It pleases me to inform you that the most excellent Señor Presidente of the Republic has seen fit to name Mr. Porfirio Rubirosa as Secretary First Class of this legation in substitute for Gustavo J. Henriquez, who has been designated Secretary First Class in Berlin in substitution for Mr. Porfirio Rubirosa.

This was far more like it.

Paris had changed in the decade since he’d last lived there: The tangos and Dixieland in the nightclubs had been swept away by a wave of Russian music and Gypsy-flavored hot jazz; the chic hot spots were now on the Left Bank of the Seine instead of the Right. But it was intoxicating to be there, to saunter into his old haunts in search of old friends, to pass by the erstwhile family house on Avenue Mac-Mahon, to delight in the new fashions favored by women in both couture and amour. When he stowed away on the Carimare and left France he was a child, as Don Pedro had despairingly declared; now he was a twenty-eight-year-old man with means and liberty.

“As soon as I arrived in Paris,” he remembered without shame, “invitations began pouring in. I was out every night, often alone. My wife objected … she could not keep up with me.”

In large part, his duties at the embassy would be, as in Berlin, ceremonial. He and Flor were presented to the general commissioner of the upcoming Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, and he found himself appointed to a panel of judges who would award prizes to various exhibits. It was a prestigious post. The exposition, a gigantic world’s fair celebrating global modernity, took over the area around the Eiffel Tower and Palais de Trocadero throughout the summer. It was a marvel of aesthetic novelties paraded by nations on the verge of global war: Albert Speer’s soaring German pavilion; Pablo Picasso’s searing Guernica in the Spanish pavilion; a Finnish hall designed by Alvar Aalto; illuminated fountains; exhibitions dedicated to the latest advances in refrigeration and neon light. The Dominican Republic couldn’t compete with those sorts of things, but they did share some exhibit space with other Caribbean nations, showing off native crafts and the work of the latest Dominican artists. Trujillo instigated dozens of letters between Paris and Ciudad Trujillo about the exposition; he was delighted to learn that the French artist and critic Alfred Lebrun “had formed an elevated new idea of the progress achieved by our country,” and he sent the eminent man a box of cigars in gratitude.

The Benefactor lived for this sort of thing, and he kept Porfirio busy with the most bizarre little requests to satisfy better his comprehension of the modern world and his nation’s place in it. He sent to Paris for atlases and diplomatic dictionaries; he hired a Paris-based Caribbean journalist to analyze the possibility of his being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize; he had framed photos of the legation sent to him, and signatures of foreign officials, with whom he also exchanged pens; relishing the opportunity to acquire foreign honors in exchange for those of the Dominican Republic, he ordered miniatures and reproductions of each new award he received. Porfirio served so well as the conduit for all this ephemera that he was promoted to consul in July 1937.

But at the same time that he put forward the shiny front of his daughter and son-in-law for Europe’s leaders, Trujillo was revealing his most atrociously dark side back home. He had spent the first years of his rule quelling—through political machination, bribery, and, especially, brute force—all internal opposition. Now he turned his attention to Haiti. It was a natural target for him: The border between the two countries was something of a fiction, having been drawn along no clear geographical or political lines and passing through remote districts whose residents truly might not be able to say which country they lived in or who its ruler was. Moreover, Trujillo, like every Dominican, had been bred with a fear and hatred of Haiti born of centuries of conflict, and he had, like every leader of both nations, harbored dreams of uniting Hispaniola under his hand. At the very least, he wanted clear autonomy over his own portion of the island, and Haiti and its citizens always seemed to be interfering with that prospect. Throughout the early years of Trujillo’s reign, Haitian encroachment on Dominican territory became burdensome in a number of ways: public health, cattle rustling, an increase in churches practicing a mixture of Catholicism and voodoo, Haitian infiltration into the Dominican sugar industry, and so forth. There had been some efforts toward a détente between Trujillo and his Haitian counterpart, Stenio Vincent. But as the grievances were felt chiefly by Dominicans, it was inevitably Trujillo who was the more vexed.

His frustration reached the tipping point in October 1937, when he gave a provocative speech about Dominican sovereignty and national purity. That very night, up and down the border and in the areas farther inland that were easily accessible to Haitian migrants, small cadres of armed men—some from the official military, others no better organized than the makeshift platoons that Don Pedro Rubirosa had once commanded—rounded up all the Haitians they could find and slaughtered them.

It was the most brutal sort of genocide. In a land where virtually everyone was of mixed blood, it was nevertheless assumed that Haitians were generally darker-skinned, meaning that many black Dominicans were swept up in the raids; a crude test of certain Spanish words that French speakers notoriously had trouble pronouncing was instituted. Have a dark enough complexion and say perejil (“parsley”) improperly and you were dead. It went on for several days: mass murder by machete and pistol. By the time it was over, some 15,000 to 20,000 people had been killed.

It took several weeks for word of the massacre to reach the outside world, and when it did, the bloody face of the Trujillo regime first became known globally. In France, the colonial fatherland of Haiti, the events were received with special outrage; Trujillo took out subscriptions to French newspapers to keep track of what they were saying about him. For some time, Trujillo managed to keep the world at bay by explaining the genocide as a spontaneous outburst of his people, who had grown tired of being inundated with and exploited by Haitians. That charade didn’t last long—the United States government, still keenly observing Dominican affairs, was particularly anxious to uncover the truth—and Trujillo finally submitted to mediation and a judgment against his government, which paid $525,000 in damages to Haiti. The reaction of the world to this ghastly event forever altered Trujillo’s political prospects. He had forced his way to the presidency in 1930; he had run unopposed for reelection four years later; but after the Haitian massacre he could never again hold the office, satisfying himself rather with strictly managing Dominican political and economic life through a string of puppet presidents he installed in the National Palace. As a sop, he had himself declared generalissimo, adding an unprecedented fifth star to his epaulets and another title to the encomia by which he demanded to be addressed.

While Trujillo was roiled by grisly events of his own making, his son-in-law prospered in small fashion. In August 1937, as the barbaric Haitian plot was forming, a letter arrived at the Foreign Ministry in Ciudad Trujillo from a stamp collector in Paris: He had seen in the collections of several local dealers whole sheets of uncanceled Dominican stamps and was wondering if he might buy such rarities directly from the source and avoid paying a markup to middlemen. Trujillo immediately wrote to the Parisian embassy notifying the ambassador that somebody in his charge was stealing stamps and selling them on the sly to philatelists around the city. After several weeks, a reply was sent declaring that the dealers had identified their source for this contraband as Porfirio’s brother-in-law, Gilberto Sánchez Lustrino, who had, in the way of things in the Trujillo Era, turned from snobbish disparagement of the Benefactor’s mean roots to groveling obsequy and parasitic dependence. In the coming years, Sánchez Lustrino would paint sycophantic word pictures of the Benefactor’s greatness in prose and verse, and as editor of the ardently proregime newspaper La Nación. In Paris, one of several foreign postings in which he would serve, he had obviously fallen in with Porfirio, whose delicate fingerprints would be invisible on this clever but short-lived enrichment scheme. In any case, no record of punishment for the thefts found its way into the diplomatic archives.

Perhaps Porfirio wasn’t guilty. But more likely his complicity was overlooked by the ambassador himself, the Benefactor’s older brother Virgilio Trujillo Molina, who would fill ambassadorial posts in Europe for decades. Virgilio was always frankly resentful of his younger brother, if for no other reason than the mere notion that he was older and yet less powerful. Dependent on his sibling, like all other Dominicans, for work, money, and even life and limb, he made a habit of cultivating his own cadre of acolytes and, on occasion, hatching his own financial and political intrigues. Virgilio found a sufficiently eager ally in Porfirio, for instance, that he overlooked the younger man’s infidelities against Flor, who was, after all, his niece. And he would continue to maintain friendly relations with Porfirio as the illustrious marriage of 1932 devolved into the domestic shambles of 1937.

Paris, alas, hadn’t, as Flor had hoped, proved an even ground where her familiarity with the surroundings would counterbalance her husband’s shamelessness. The couple had moved from the embassy to a home in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb just beyond the Bois de Boulogne. It should have been heaven. But, “unfortunately,” in Porfirio’s view, they were not alone: “A cousin of Flor’s was with us constantly.” The girl was Ligia Ruiz Trujillo de Berges, the daughter of the Benefactor’s younger sister Japonesa (so nicknamed for the almond shape of her eyes). “When I went to the embassy,” Porfirio recalled, “she didn’t separate from Flor for even a minute; in the evenings, she went out with us. She was in all our conversations, even our arguments, and this is no good for a couple. It’s possible to convince a woman of your good intentions or of the meaninglessness of a little fight; but two!”

Ligia had Flor’s ear and convinced her cousin that the marriage had degenerated irredeemably. She persuaded Flor to return to Ciudad Trujillo to seek her father’s help in corralling Porfirio and perhaps in making him feel sufficiently jealous or guilty or nostalgic that he would change his ways. Flor explained the trip by claiming that her father wanted her back home because of some family crisis (“She lied,” Porfirio declared with misplaced umbrage) and left France. When she arrived back home, she sent word of her true intent. “I feel life between us has become impossible,” he reported her to have said. “I want to see if I can live without you.” Then, he claimed, she visited his mother, Doña Ana, to solicit her help in repairing the marriage. Per Porfirio’s account, Flor sobbed to her mother-in-law, “Ask him to come find me. I love him. I know I’ve always loved him. Ask him to forgive me. Everything can go back to how it was.” Doña Ana, taking pity, relayed as much to her son.

But, he said, he balked. “Everything couldn’t be as it was. Nothing could ever be as it was. It’s true I erred as a husband, but there’s no doubt that I regretted this match. In the lives of men, as in the histories of nations, there are periods of acceleration, and I was living through one. The brake that Flor represented no longer worked. My mother’s letter didn’t move me.”

Naturally, Flor’s account of their separation would be different. The parent at whom she threw herself in her version of events was her own father, who coldly declared that he’d warned her about marrying such a wastrel and tried to mollify her with this consolation: “Don’t worry, you’re the one with money.” As proof, he tossed her a catalog of American luxury cars and told her she could choose one for herself; she picked a fancy Buick and tried to have it sent to Paris as a gift to Porfirio, hoping it would mend the breach; her father put a stop to that plan.

Indeed, not only wouldn’t Trujillo allow a car to be sent to his son-in-law, he wouldn’t allow his daughter to return to him. “I’ll never let you go back to that man,” he announced, and he had his lawyer begin writing up the papers necessary for a divorce.*

Flor claimed that the shadow of divorce evoked a new passion in her husband: “When I wrote that I wasn’t coming back, he sent letters pleading with me to return, threatening to join the French Foreign Legion if I didn’t.”

But Porfirio had a slightly different recollection of his impending bachelorhood: “Freedom in Paris was never disagreeable. I went out a lot.”

In November 1937, the decree was declared; in January 1938, the couple were officially divorced. Separated from Trujillo’s wrath by an ocean, protected by Virgilio and, perhaps, by his ability to implicate the Benefactor in the Bencosme affair, connected more to Paris than he was to his own homeland, Porfirio stayed put, chary but more or less safe and even eager. Having married the boss’s daughter and returned in luxe fashion to the city of his boyhood ramblings, he was ready to take huge gulps of the world.

* Figure $100,000 in 2005.

* The question of who was to blame for the couple’s childlessness would never be answered. Neither ever had children, despite the combined twelve marriages they entered after this first. It was long rumored that Porfirio was rendered sterile by a childhood bout with the mumps, and Flor occasionally hinted that one or both of them had been rendered infertile by a venereal disease Porfirio had contracted in one of his rambles and subsequently shared with her.

* Just the year before, Trujillo had passed a remarkably progressive divorce law that allowed a marriage that hadn’t produced children after five years to be dissolved by mutual consent of the spouses. It was a means for him to leave Doña Bienvenida, with whom he had no children, and marry María Martínez, the mother of Ramfis. Not long after he pulled off this legislative coup and took his third wife, however, he fathered a child—technically a bastard—with his just-divorced second wife.

FIVE
STAR POWER

On the one hand: liberty.

In divorcing Flor, Porfirio had unchained himself from an anchor, but he had also let go of a lifeline.

Yes, she behaved prematurely like an old Dominican dama with her petulant whining about his carousing and his other women, refusing to accept him for the type of man he was.

But: As the daughter of a powerful man, she was a direct conduit to money, security, and stature—and perhaps, given Trujillo’s incendiary nature, life itself. Losing her meant unmooring himself totally from the life he’d known since boyhood, a life implicated in the political goings-on of his homeland.

He lost everything. Before long, dunning letters began arriving at the Dominican embassy in Paris—saddleries and purveyors of equestrian clothing looking for payment on items he’d bought with a line of credit he no longer commanded.

By then, at any rate, he was no longer, technically, an embassy employee. Trujillo had expelled him from the diplomatic corps in January 1938. Virgilio, the generalissimo’s resentful older brother, managed to secure him a temporary appointment as consul to a legation that served Holland and Belgium jointly, but that expired by April. He held on to his diplomatic passport and was occasionally seen around Paris in embassy cars, but he was, literally, a man without a country. He wasn’t about to go home to the Dominican Republic, where his prospects for work were no better than in Europe and his prospects for play considerably worse. Plus, he had already heard from his mother not to risk the trip: Trujillo wanted his head; Paris was decidedly safer.

He was certain in his own mind that Flor hadn’t instigated her father’s fury. Indeed, he would declare that he always harbored warm feelings for her: “After this romantic catastrophe, we stayed good friends.” (They were widely said, in fact, to reignite their sex life whenever Flor, who’d apparently overcome her initial aversion to his lovemaking, was in Europe.) “And,” he continued, “I followed, with friendship, her life.” With friendship and, no doubt, amazement: after divorcing Porfirio, Flor would go on to take another eight husbands, including a Dominican doctor, an American doctor, a Brazilian mining baron, an American Air Force officer, a French perfumer, a Dominican singer, and a Cuban fashion designer. She had a short heyday as a diplomat in Washington, D.C., but during long periods of her life her father disowned her and even had her held under house arrest in Ciudad Trujillo. She would eventually come to dismiss her first husband with a shrug, answering interviewers who asked whether he was handsome or charming with a curt “For a Dominican.”*

And so what to do?

Another man might assess the situation and reckon it was time to think about settling down in France: a wife, a job, kids, a house, responsibility.

Not a tíguere, not with this sort of freedom, not at this time, in this place, with this thrilling sense of possibility and a titillating sense of impending catastrophe. “I was a young man in a Paris that the specter of war had heated up,” he remembered. “I lived a swirling life, without cease, without the pauses that would have allowed me the chance to think and make me realize that giant steps aren’t the only strides that suit a man.”

He spent time at Jimmy’s, a Montparnasse nightclub run by an Italian whose real name too closely resembled Mussolini’s to make for good advertising and who therefore took an American name as a PR maneuver. There, the comic jazz singer Henri Salvador became a friend. Porfirio sat in with his band for late night sessions—his little skill on the guitar and enthusiasm for drums were fondly received—and led parrandas of the musicians and clubgoers late into the night, retiring to this or that partyer’s flat for bouts of drinking and merrymaking that could last until the middle of the next day.

Of course, this sort of traveling circus required funding, and, as its ringmaster no longer enjoyed legitimate work as a diplomat, other strategies emerged. There was the familiar one of living off a woman. La Môme Moineau, the singing, yachting wife of Félix Benítez Rexach, was in Paris and available to him once again as her husband was off earning millions on his various projects in the Dominican Republic. Now, however, she had a fortune to spend on and share with her lover; he drove around the city at various times in one or another of her little fleet of luxury cars; occasionally, he would raise cash by selling off some valuable bijou from her jewel case.

This character—nightclubber, cuckolder, kept man, gigolo, scene maker, skirt chaser, dandy—was not so much a new Porfirio as an evolved one. Nearing thirty, freed of father, wife, and father-in-law—the living connections to his homeland that had thus far defined him—he was no longer an exotic, a Dominican in Paris, but, more and more, a Parisian with intriguingly Dominican roots. He had been an enthusiastic regular in the demimonde; now he was a staple of it. And, free of the constraints of decorum that adhered to him as the son of Don Pedro or the son-in-law of Trujillo, he no longer required so formal and elaborate a name as Porfirio Rubirosa. Anyone who knew him, truly knew him, in Paris after his divorce or, indeed, for the rest of his life, knew him as Rubi. Even more than his mellifluous given name, which he still used to dramatic effect and for official purposes, this new moniker captured his mature essence: the jauntiness, the rarity and high cost, the sparkle and the sharpness and sensuality and the bloody, cardinal allure.

Especially, perhaps, the bloody allure.

Over the years, he would—by virtue of his high living, his obscure origins, his association with Trujillo, his love of thrills and danger—almost inevitably be associated with shadowy events. Most of it was idle gossip. In some cases, such as the Bencosme murder, there were real reasons to think he was involved, albeit peripherally.

And then there was the matter of the Aldao jewels and Johnny Kohane.

For all the munificence of La Môme Moineau, Rubi wasn’t satisfied with his solvency. The life to which he aspired required real capital. He needed a score. In early 1938, while he was still holding, despite Trujillo’s injunctions against him, a diplomatic passport and temporary consular position, Rubi became involved in a scheme to smuggle a small fortune in jewels out of Spain. The goods in question belonged to Manuel Fernandez Aldao, proprietor of one of the most esteemed jewelry establishments of Madrid. In November 1936, when the Spanish Civil War had so turned that Madrid was under siege, Aldao had fled for safety to France and left a good deal of his wealth behind in the form of a safe filled with jewels guarded by an employee named Viega. Two years later, Aldao had need of his resources but was unable to retrieve them himself. He came into contact with Rubi, perhaps through Virgilio Trujillo, and hired him to go to Madrid and use his diplomatic pouch to transport a cache of jewels—and an inventory describing them—back to Paris.

In the time it took for the details of the operation to be worked out, another errand was added to Rubi’s schedule and another conspirator to the plot: Johnny Kohane, a Polish Jew who had also fled Spain without his fortune (some $160,000 in gold, jewels, and currency, he said), was introduced to Rubirosa by Salvador Paradas, who’d replaced him at the Dominican embassy. Kohane had need of his stash, and it was agreed that he would join Rubi on the trip using a passport borrowed from the Dominican embassy chauffeur, Hubencio Matos. In February, the two would-be smugglers got into the embassy’s Mercedes and drove across southern France and, through the Republican-controlled entry point of Cerbere-Portbou, into war-ravaged Spain.

A dozen days later, Rubi returned—alone.

He handed a sack of jewels over to Aldao—a smaller one than the Spaniard expected—and claimed that he’d never been given any inventory to go with it. And he told a hair-raising story about the bad luck he and Kohane had run into outside of Madrid when they were off fetching the Pole’s fortune. They were set upon, he said, by armed men, he wasn’t sure from which side, who chased them and shot at them, killing Kohane. He was lucky, he said, to get out of there with his own skin intact.

What could anyone say? He’d had the moxie to go get the jewels and to get back in one piece. As for Kohane, it was a war zone; he knew it was a dangerous proposition going into it. Suspicion was natural. The car in which Rubi claimed to have been ambushed evinced not a single scratch. But there was no tangible proof that the story, however far-fetched, wasn’t true. Aldao paid Rubi his agreed-upon fee—a platinum-and-diamond brooch—and stewed over the matter for years.

When the situation in Spain finally settled and it was safe to cross back through France, Aldao returned home and looked into the matter of the half bag of jewels and the missing inventory. He wasn’t pleased. There had been an inventory, and Viega had handed it to Rubi; a carbon copy of the original document still sat in the company safe. What the inventory showed was that the bag that left Madrid held jewels worth some $183,000 that never made their way to Aldao in Paris. What was more, a fellow who’d been enlisted to help the Mercedes cross the border swore that he’d never received the platinum-and-diamond bracelet that Aldao had instructed Rubi to give him.

Aldao wrote Rubi in Paris several times to inquire about the missing items but was repeatedly ignored. He sent a Parisian friend to confront Rubi and, as he later declared, his emissary was rudely rebuffed: “The result of the meeting was completely negative, and he was moreover very discourteous to my friend.” Finally, a few years after the fact, he wrote a letter of formal protest to Emilio A. Morel, the Dominican ambassador to Spain. It wasn’t the first Morel had heard of the case—an anonymous letter had found its way to him a year or so earlier, a note, he recalled as so “crammed with inside information” that he believed its author was “a compatriot of Rubirosa’s, actually a principal in the smuggling plan, who felt he had been double-crossed out of a commission from Kohane and took this method of seeking revenge.” Morel dutifully sent notice of these claims against Rubi to the Secretariat of Foreign Relations in Ciudad Trujillo; not only were his inquiries sloughed off, but he, a noted Dominican poet and onetime leader of Trujillo’s own political party, found himself, by virtue of making them, suddenly in the bad graces of the generalissimo. He left Madrid for New York, where he lived out his years in exile. And Aldao got nothing.

Rubi likely had the jewels—and all of Kohane’s assets as well. His finances seemed to have worked themselves out for the decided better. He had been so skint at the start of the year that he would on occasion feign illness so as to summon friends to his house with restorative meals—the only food he could, apparently, afford. After returning from Madrid, however, he spoke of opening his own nightclub and renewed his habit of forming an impromptu club wherever he went; the genius guitarist Django Reinhardt was soon among the players in his ever-expanding, never-ending, ceaselessly moveable feast. Deauville; Biarritz; the French Riviera; and all through the Parisian night: He was ubiquitous, a star. Old friends who encountered Rubi in Paris—among them Flor de Oro and his brother Cesar, now himself a cog in Trujillo’s diplomatic machine—found him exultant, even though they’d been led to expect he’d be sporting a more destitute aspect.

Perhaps news of his self-made success made it back to the Dominican Republic, perhaps he was vouched for by Virgilio Trujillo, but in the spring of 1939, the most amazing bit of fortune landed in his lap: a phone call from Ciudad Trujillo. “The President, who is beside me,” said the official on the other end, “would like to know if you could see after his wife and son, who will arrive in Paris in a few weeks. You’ll have to find a house of appropriate size, accompany them, show them around.”

“I was so stupefied,” Rubi remembered, “that I couldn’t answer straightaway. At first I wondered what sort of trap it was. I couldn’t see one.”

He hurriedly made arrangements to receive Doña Maria and ten-year-old Ramfis and met their boat in Le Havre, where he was startled to find the president’s third wife a full eight months pregnant. Rubi immediately arranged for her to be taken to a clinic where, in comfort, she gave birth to a daughter, Angelita, on June 10.*

In the weeks before and after the birth, Rubi engaged in a full charm offensive, presenting Doña Maria with gifts of jewelry (booty, no doubt, from the Aldao collection) and seeing that the awkward, friendless, unschooled Ramfis was kept happy; the two rode horses together, and it was likely around this time that they began tinkering at polo. As Rubi recalled, the campaign was a success: “Doña Maria wrote to her husband that I was useful, attentive, charming and courteous. Was it due to the sentiment that accompanies pregnancy? Was it due to the change of nations and distance? Trujillo warmed to me.”

The Benefactor had come to recognize that in Rubi he had a truly unique asset: a young, handsome, worldly, cultivated Dominican of notable suavity and negotiable loyalty. Doña Maria, who had no history with the young man, must have impressed her husband with tales of his social skills and tact. And, as Trujillo was soon to discover himself, no Dominican was as enmeshed in the manners and mores of the great European capitals than his scalawag former son-in-law.

The dictator made a grand official tour of the United States in the early part of the summer and then wrote to France to announce that he would be joining his family there. He had his yacht, the Ramfis, sent ahead to Cannes and then sailed to Le Havre himself aboard the Normandie. Rubi was at the dock to meet him. “In the place of a furious father-in-law and an autocrat exasperated by my impertinence,” he recalled, “I found a friendly and agreeable man.”

Trujillo wanted to see the grand sights of Paris—“the elegant Paris, without beans and rice,” as Rubi remembered. But he was perhaps even more interested in the louche part of the city that his former son-in-law, unique among Dominican expatriates, could show him. “Porfirio,” he pronounced, “do not leave my side. I want you to show me everything. You understand? Everything.” Everything included a trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower, where the generalissimo fell under the spell of a girl selling flowers and postcards (presently he courted and bedded her, Rubi remembered, “because he wanted to seduce the loftiest woman in Paris”—“loftiest,” geddit?). The visit included nights out at Jimmy’s, where the generalissimo, unusually in his cups, declared, “We need a Jimmy’s in Ciudad Trujillo, but much bigger, with four orchestras, gardens and a patio open to the sea.” They moved on to Biarritz, where Trujillo expressed a similar desire to re-create the local hot spots back home. And finally the entire Trujillo party relocated to Cannes and a Mediterranean cruise—all the way to Egypt, they hoped—at the launch of which the dictator whispered to his guide, “Porfirio, I am putting you in charge of this entire voyage.”

But it wasn’t to be. The war that Rubi hadn’t foreseen when he was sitting within a few feet of its architect in a Berlin stadium began in earnest. And although the Dominican Republic was still officially neutral in the boiling European conflict, events in the Old World seemed likely to upset the balance of power in the Caribbean. Trujillo felt he had no choice but to leave Doña Maria and the children in Rubi’s care and sailed home on the Ramfis. By the time he reached Ciudad Trujillo, Rubi had safely sent his family after him.

If Trujillo felt cheated out of his grand tour, Rubi was handsomely rewarded for the part he played in orchestrating it. Back in the dictator’s good graces, he was reinstated at the French and Belgian embassies as a first-class secretary.

It was a truly auspicious time to hold such a position. Trujillo, still stung by the beating his image had taken after the Haitian border massacres, had made a grand show of opening his country to refugees from the Spanish Civil War; it wasn’t a huge influx, but the PR bounce was good. When he became aware of the desire of European Jews to relocate to the Western Hemisphere, he saw an opportunity to ingratiate himself with U.S. interests. Although he reckoned Judaism to be synonymous with communism, he declared that the Dominican Republic would accept one hundred thousand European Jews on its soil and demarcated a territory where they would be allowed to settle: Sosùa, a beachside village on the northern coast; a large parcel of his own land would be given over to the enterprise.

Word that Trujillo was accepting Jewish refugees led to a run on Dominican consulates and embassies in countries not yet controlled by the Nazis. A chancer like Rubi, given access to papers that could liberate anybody he favored, was sitting on a gold mine. He sold visas on a sliding scale, getting as much as $5,000 a head, and never concerned himself with how or even if his customers got out of France, much less all the way to the Dominican Republic. As it happened, Trujillo’s offer was chiefly rhetorical: Fewer than one thousand European Jews made their way to Sosùa, and the projected Caribbean Jerusalem eventually became a resort with a little Jewish history sprinkled in.* But from the vantage of Paris, it didn’t matter: Rubi did a thriving business until the Nazis took the French capital. “He got rich selling visas to Jews,” shrugged his brother Cesar. “Didn’t everybody?”

The business wasn’t always pernicious. A Spanish journalist who feared Fascist reprisals against him managed to get a visa out of Rubi for free but had to pay him $5,000 for transport from Paris to Barcelona to Puerto Plata, where a train would take him to Ciudad Trujillo. “When I got to Puerto Plata I learned that there had never been a train from there to Ciudad Trujillo,” he recalled with laughter.

And sometimes the results were profound. Take the case of Fernando Gerassi, a Turkish-born Spaniard who came to Paris in the 1920s and, as an abstract painter in the mode of Kandinsky and Klee, chummed around with such Left Bank icons as Picasso, Sartre, and Alexander Calder. By the late 1930s, Gerassi had fought for the losing side in the Spanish Civil War and found himself living back in Paris under the uncomfortable threat of German ascendancy. And then he had a chance meeting with somebody who could help. According to Gerassi’s son, historian John Gerassi, the painter and Rubi met playing poker and hit it off and Rubi was able to help his new friend by hiring him as a secretary at the Dominican embassy. Then, when the Nazi threat grew more intense, he gave Gerassi a more prestigious title that resulted in safe passage out of Europe not only for him and his family but, as it turned out, for many others.

“My family was leaving Paris because the Germans were coming,” the younger Gerassi recalled. “Rubirosa gave Fernando the position of ambassador from the Dominican Republic, gave him the official stamp. Fernando, in turn, gave eight thousand passports to Spanish Republicans, Jews, whoever he could help, before the Germans caught up. My parents came to America as Dominican diplomats.” Not only did Fernando Gerassi save the lives of his family and the thousands for whom he obtained visas and passports throughout 1940 and 1941, he was, when the United States entered the war, enlisted in the OSS as an operative in Latin America and then Spain. In the latter operation, Gerassi engaged in disruptions of German military traffic, abetting the Allied landing in Africa and receiving commendation and a medal from the U.S. government. “Without your actions in Spain in 1942,” OSS founder William Donovan wrote to Gerassi, “the deployment of Allied troops in North Africa could not have taken place.” Thousands saved, Nazis frustrated, a painter become a humanitarian hero, and all because Rubi found lucrative use in the black market for his Dominican diplomatic privileges. It’s a Wonderful Life with an ironic coating of avarice.

It wasn’t long, though, before larger events scuttled Rubi’s get-rich-live-rich scheme. Starting in June 1940 when the Nazis finally did enter Paris, the status and even the location of the Dominican embassy shifted with disconcerting regularity. The Dominican Republic was still technically neutral in the European war, and it maintained diplomatic relations with the Nazis’ puppet government in Vichy, a liaison that was difficult to maintain as the Germans continually forced the Dominicans to relocate their base of operations: Twice before midsummer the embassy moved, first to Tours and then to Bordeaux, where Rubi was ordered to present himself. “A lady friend accompanied me,” he remembered in his memoirs, failing to mention that it was his partner in greed, lust, and social climbing, La Môme Moineau. “Officially, the Dominican legation was put up in a castle near St. Emilion. I presented myself there. It was filled with refugees—some crying old ladies, children with dirty noses, caged birds, kittens in baskets, and old men who had saved France in Les Esparges or Verdun.” This wasn’t exactly the duty he’d signed up for, and he immediately took advantage of the vacuum of authority—communication with Ciudad Trujillo had slowed to almost nil—and changed his and his companion’s situation: “I stayed in a pension for a few days and then returned to Biarritz.”

Eventually, a Dominican embassy was established in Vichy. Even though it enjoyed a prime location—it was situated in the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs directly across from the Grand Casino—the new embassy wasn’t to Rubi’s liking. “In Paris,” he explained, “life had recommenced. I was neutral. I returned to Paris and then went to Vichy. Paris—Vichy, Vichy—Paris: This was my itinerary during the fall of 1940.”

And so it was that when the French diplomat Count André Chanu de Limur invited him to a cocktail party in Paris that autumn he was available to attend. Truth be told, he might have made the effort to be there no matter where he’d been when he got the invitation: The guest of honor was just the sort of woman he would want to meet: the highest-paid movie star in France, “the most beautiful woman in the world,” as she was billed, twenty-three-year-old Danielle Darrieux.

At fourteen, there was a knowing depth to her eyes, and their audacity drew you to her soft, gamin face. By seventeen, she could play ten years older than she was and had learned how to steal scenes with such mature tricks as slowly unfurling her eyelids when asked a question. She was a bona fide natural, able to channel emotions—joy, sorrow, worry, hope—in such a way that the audience felt them instinctively through her. But she was at her best as a comedienne, with a delicious ability to squinch her features into a smile so that her eyes seemed two merry commas on either side of the aquiline exclamation mark of her nose.

She was a war baby, born in Bordeaux on May 1, 1917, to Dr. Jean Darrieux, a French ophthalmologist and war hero, and his wife, an Algerian concert singer. (Polish and American roots were hinted at in publicity biographies.) After the Armistice, her family relocated to Paris. By the age of four she was playing piano; later, she would take up the cello seriously. But her path toward the conservatory was hindered by two fateful events: In 1924, her father died, leaving her mother to raise three children with whatever income she could earn as a vocal instructor; and in 1930, Danielle was recommended for a screen test. “My mother was distrustful,” she recalled later. “At that time, the cinema was reputed to be a completely depraved world.” But she nevertheless relented and allowed the girl to go.

Danielle auditioned for director Wilhelm Thiele, one of those Viennese maestros so stereotypical of the silent film era: autocratic, high-minded, and lecherous (a few years later, he would pick Dorothy Lamour out of a chorus line). The film he was casting was based on Irene Nemirovsky’s novella “Der Ball” about a teenager whose social-climbing parents plan a grand ball but don’t include her; jealous, she tosses all the invitations into the river. To deal with the vagaries of the new technology of sound film, which still lacked the capability for dubbing dialogue, Thiele employed the then-common practice of shooting two versions at once—a German and a French, with distinct casts made up of actors from each country. Danielle got the part of the headstrong daughter in the French version.

The impression she made was strong enough to guarantee her a full five-year contract. In the next three years she made nine films, mostly comedies in which she appeared as a sparkling ingénue. (She made one crime film, Mauvaise Graine [“Bad Seed”], which was cowritten and codirected by Billy Wilder.) And she appeared on the stage in several productions throughout Europe: in Paris, Brussels, Prague, Sofia, Munich, and, fatefully, Berlin, where, in 1934, she signed a contract to make six films.

The first film covered by that agreement was L’Or dans la Rue (“Gold in the Street”), the French-language version of a German thriller coauthored by a German named Hermann Kosterlitz and a Frenchman named Henri Decoin. It was a fateful meeting of star and writers. Kosterlitz was a Jew who had engaged in a few unwise run-ins with German authorities and would soon be leaving for America, where, as Henry Koster, he would hit paydirt as the man who made Deanna Durbin a star and put Abbott and Costello in the movies; he would keep a savvy eye on Danielle as her star rose. Decoin was a former Olympic swimmer, World War I pilot, and knockabout journalist who had been working as a director and screenwriter for almost a decade; he would become, in 1935, Danielle’s first husband.

The age difference may have raised eyebrows—he was thirty-nine, she just eighteen—but it made sense when Danielle’s fatherless adolescence was taken into account. As she remembered tellingly, “I was always absolutely confident in him, and I obeyed him in all things.” More striking was the way in which they wed their careers, turning them into one of those classic director-actress couples who do their best work together. In a span of seven years starting in 1935 with Le Domino Vert (“The Green Domino”), Decoin directed his wife in six features, establishing himself as a capable hand in a variety of genres and cementing a directorial career that would last into the 1960s.

But Danielle became an international star largely on the work that she made between Decoin’s films; while he worked exclusively with her during this period, she made more than twice as many pictures without him. He gave her the confidence to take on meaty dramatic roles, and she did so brilliantly. The key step in her ascent was the romantic lead in Mayerling

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