Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Number Seventy-Two

Succès de scandale!
Porfirio Rubirosa

“Porfirio Rubirosa is a name likely to be unfamiliar to anyone born after 1960, but he certainly made a name for himself in the 1950s--as a playboy par excellence--and his life story proves well worth the telling.” ----Jay Freeman

“Polo player. Jewel thief. Part-time diplomat. Ill-gotten millionaire. Male consort to the richest and most beautiful women of his day (and pretty much any others available). Daredevil amateur race car driver. Treasure hunter. Punch line. Idol.  Not a bad resume, if one ignores the lack of marketable skills. No matter what anyone said about Porfirio Rubirosa—and people said plenty during his three-decade run as high society’s most notorious lover, fashion icon, “sportsman,” and international man of mystery—they never accused him of being boring.  And indeed, the Dominican came with the thinnest of obvious qualifications. (Or at least visible qualifications. Levy’s book graphically details that the playboy’s anatomy achieved such whispered renown that some Paris waiters still call the biggest pepper mill in the house a “Rubirosa”).

Rubi was the son of a minor diplomat, who owed both money and fame to his way with the ladies. He climbed the social ladder with short marriages to Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, the richest American heiresses of their day. There was a wartime marriage with ultra-chic French actress Danielle Darrieux, a later liaison with Zsa Zsa Gabor (quite a hot ticket at the time) and countless other hookups (including a rumored affair with Eva “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” Peron).

“You can’t get a DVD that shows you what Rubi was good at,” Levy says. “You can’t go to a museum to see it. You sort of have to take people’s word for it.” ----Zach Dundas

“His suave manner and rugged good looks came with a prodigious male appendage and sexual prowess, both subjects of much gossip. Truman Capote described his male organ as “an 11-inch cafe au lait sinker as thick as a man’s wrist”. To this day, large pepper grinders are commonly referred to as “rubirosas”. He was linked romantically to Dolores Del Rio, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Soraya Esfandiary, Veronica Lake, Kim Novak, and Eva Peron. He dallied with his ex-wife Flor during his marriage to Doris Duke, and with Zsa Zsa Gabor during his marriage to Barbara Hutton. He was named a co-respondent in at least two divorces, the husbands charging adultery.” ----Wiki

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Biography: The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa by Shawn Levy Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER SILVESTER

We have not yet reached that stage of human civilisation when we will cease to be fascinated by penises of prodigious proportion. The Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa (1909-65) was possessed of such an attribute, but lived during a time when it was a widely and archly advertised thing of mystery. “He became famous just as the era of audacious-celebrity-for-its-own-sake was blooming,” explains Shawn Levy in this excellent, gossipy study. “And the genius of it was that the reason for his celebrity, even if it were known, couldn’t actually be spoken of — not firsthand, not out loud.”

Halfway through his book, Levy devotes a lengthy passage to consideration of this priapic marvel. The homosexual photographer Jerome Zerbe followed Rubi into the gents one day, emerging to describe it, in a vivid phrase, as resembling “Yul Brynner in a black turtleneck”. His third wife, Doris Duke, reported it as “six inches in circumference . . . much like the last foot of a Louisville Slugger baseball bat with the consistency of a not completely inflated volleyball”. The former husband of one of his wives called him “Rubberhosa”. Furthermore, his vast, pendulous testicles required him to wear a jockstrap at all times. But those with organs of more modest dimensions can rest assured. His first wife later vouchsafed that “he took so long to ejaculate that by the end I was a little bored”.

Rubirosa himself found boredom unbearable. “It has always been one of my chief principles,” he confessed, “I will risk anything to avoid being bored.” He risked his life by eloping with Flor de Oro, daughter of his patron, the vicious Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. What followed was far from dull: his subsequent marriage to Danielle Darrieux, the French film actress; his laid-back war years, spent under light arrest in the German spa town of Bad Neuheim; his marriages to two of the world’s great heiresses, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, each of whom gave him money and a B-25 aeroplane; his torrid, knockabout romance with Zsa Zsa Gabor; his last marriage to a young French actress, Odile Rodin, who tamed him (“Odile had the power over him that he had, all his life, wielded over others,” said the fashion designer Oleg Cassini. “She exhausted him and made him jealous.”) Then there was the endless round of Paris, Palm Beach, Hollywood, Las Vegas, New York, polo, motor racing at Le Mans; and, finally, his death by Ferrari (seatbelts are for wimps), dressed in his evening clothes, after an all-night celebration of a polo victory. It is hard to overestimate the dazzling impression that Rubi’s exotic, carefree life made on the American and British press of the 1950s. “Work?” he said in reply to a journalist. “It’s impossible for me to work. I just don’t have the time.”

Yet there was the secret working life of a diplomat from a minor Caribbean dictatorship: as a courier, he took money from Trujillo to New York and paid the assassins of a Dominican political exile; he was posted to Paris and, later, to Buenos Aires; he sold Dominican visas to Jews wishing to flee Europe; he made efforts, encouraged by JFK, to sway Trujillo into liberalisations, although this was overtaken by the dictator ’s assassination. Rubi needed patronage, but most important from Trujillo’s point of view, his colourful gallivantings put Dominica on the map for reasons other than its record of political repression.

Levy, who wrote an engaging book about the Sinatra Rat Pack, has a kinetic prose style. He likes the occasional one-line paragraph and sentences that begin with “and”. And he has a Runyonesque penchant for antique phrases such as “awaken the ire”. (You get the point.) It is unforgivable that his publisher has chosen not to include a single photograph of Rubirosa, apart from the one on the cover, even though there are plenty of good pictures available. The omission is all the more absurd given Levy’s final assessment of the publicity-seeking Rubi: “he had given himself over to sensation, he created sensations, he ended in sensation”.

Parisian waiters may still refer to over-sized pepper grinders as Rubirosas, but apart from that Rubi is a will-o’-the-wisp figure. “The world was there for him,” concludes Levy, “not vice versa.” But now, Levy’s luscious, shimmering and titillating portrait is there for the world.

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Next entry: Number Seventy-Three Previous entry: Number Seventy-One