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

  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 t
o 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, Anatole Litvak’s 1936 costume epic about the love affair between a married Hapsburg prince and a girl from a minor noble family. It was an international critical and commercial success (it won the New York Film Critics Circle prize for Best Foreign Language Film), and, opposite the lordly Charles Boyer, who had already begun making films in America, Darrieux made a brilliant impression: fetching, bright, and quick, as she had been in lighter fare, but capable of the melodramatic emotions the script called for.

  Universal Pictures, prodded by Henry Koster, requested her presence in Hollywood. They offered a multipicture deal and brought her, Decoin, and their pet Scottie, Flora, over on the Normandie in September 1937 (Cole Porter, who never did find a way to use Danielle’s mellifluous name in a rhyming couplet, was on board for that crossing, as was Sonja Henie). In California, the couple were introduced by Boyer to the small French colony of Los Angeles, and Danielle was tutored in English (she was quick) and the technical aspects of American film-making and PR. The studio mounted the traditional grooming-for-stardom campaign; she appeared on the covers of American movie magazines and in all the right newspaper columns; she was news. But her debut film was delayed because of problems in the script; she sat around, bored, collecting money but grousing.

  The film, The Rage of Paris, turned out to be a lightweight screwball comedy that presented Danielle to a mass American audience as a gold digger on the make for a millionaire husband. Directed by Koster and playing opposite Douglas Fairbanks Jr., she made another dazzling impression: Her long, elegant face, wavy hair, bright eyes, and wide smile photographed exquisitely; her English was more than passable and charmingly accented; her timing and rhythm were acute; she did some sleight-of-hand tricks (she had practiced for years) and ad-libbed verbal jokes and comic physical bits; she was slim and frisky and sexy and fetching.

  But the film—a harmless thing but hardly equal to the hype—did only so-so business, and Danielle and Decoin made it clear that they didn’t appreciate the protracted process or the result. Contract or no, they went home. A tumultuous welcome from the press and fans in Paris greeted their return, and they resumed their series of joint projects. In the fall of 1940, they were shooting a film called Premier Rendezvous, or, as it was known in its American release, Her First Affair.

  And at roughly that time Count de Limur decided to throw a cocktail party in her honor.

  It got so later in his life that Rubi was suspected of any and every subterfuge, and so rumors would swirl that he crashed the party to latch on to Danielle or that he turned his world upside down so as to live near her in Neuilly-sur-Seine.

  But the truth was that he’d lived in the same place since he was married to Flor, and his being invited to the party probably had more to do with his diplomatic standing than any occult plan he was hatching. That said, his reputation was genuinely dodgy. When the host asked Danielle if she would accept a lift home from Rubi, she demurred. When it was pointed out that they were virtually next-door neighbors, she changed her mind (“If it was a film no one would believe it,” she remembered). When another partygoer, the Mexican diplomat and high-liver Pedro Corcuera, noticed them leaving together and joked, “Careful, Danielle: This man is dangerous!” there was only nervous laughter all around—many a truth spoken in jest, and all that.

  As it happened, he behaved like a gentleman. And then a few days later, at L’Aiglon, a posh Paris nightspot, he happened to see Danielle and Decoin hashing out the dissolution of their increasingly rocky marria
ge over dinner; the combination of their age difference and his insistent control both on and off the set had proved impossible. Soon after this accidental encounter, Rubi was invited to an evening at Maxim’s and was on the verge of declining when his host mentioned that Danielle would be there; of course, he went. This time, he asked her out for an evening together and she accepted.

  It was the first of several dates. “This might have been an agreeable flirtation, a light episode of the sweet life, in the eyes of others,” he reflected in that perfumed persiflage he adopted when writing about amatory episodes. “But one day she said to me, ‘I’ll tell you, I think that this is very serious for me.’ ‘For me too, Danielle.’” In February 1941, she filed for divorce from Decoin, freeing her for whatever she and Rubi wished.

  From Rubi’s vantage point, Danielle was in most ways an improvement over Flor or La Môme Moineau or any of the fun-time gals that had filled his evenings of late.* She was gorgeous, she was spry, she had her own money, and, intoxicatingly, she was famous. “I was well-known in the night life,” Rubi said. “But Danielle was a real celebrity.” He felt a big man alongside her; they made an impression when they went places.

  Too much of an impression sometimes. In December 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Dominican Republic, along with many Caribbean nations wanting no part of the strife afflicting Europe and Asia, threw in with the United States and declared war on the Axis; as an official belligerent, Rubi would no longer be permitted to bounce freely back and forth between Vichy and Paris. Trouble was, he was in Paris when Trujillo, through his puppet president of the moment, declared war—and in terms that personally insulted Hitler. Rubi needed to return to his post in Vichy, but the German authorities in Paris instead decided to hold him as a hostage, collateral, in effect, guaranteeing the safety of their ambassador in Ciudad Trujillo. He protested the decision, arguing that it was the Dominican ambassador in Berlin who ought to be held, not he, and that, besides, he was only in Paris because of—get this—“an accident of love.” His arguments prevailed, and he was allowed to stay in Paris on the condition that he not try to leave without permission or face arrest.