Shawn Levy - The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa (Text Only)

FOR VINCENT, ANTHONY, AND PAULA,
WITHOUT WHOM THERE WOULDNT BE MUCH POINT

T his, he reckoned, must be what they called a joint.

Normally in New York he didnt 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, cafs and bars and clubs where you might meet a killer or somebody with an interesting business idea or a woman who would change your lifeor maybe just a few minutes of it. But this, this had something of the savor of a caf back home, one of the places along El Condean 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 didnt need the headache of answering questions and being stared at by gossips and trying to figure out who would talk to him and who wouldnt.

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 listenand 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 shouldnt 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 scotchscotchesand 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 Barbaras 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 dont count, he said sweetly. I dont need anybodys 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 didnt, 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 hed shown it. Not at all, shes the healthiest womanits fantastic! Yes, she was in Doctors Hospital, but only to rest. And now, my God, what a vitality! Shes 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 dont like skinny girlsand shes 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 dont think its ladylike.

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

The man seated across the table remembered who he wasa 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; shell know its all ridiculous. Shes one of the most intelligent women anybody ever met.

They returned to small talk: who would attend from the brides 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.

W hen 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 homelandrandom 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! Hes so little! shouted my mother. My father laughed. The night was gentle and sweet. I had the horses 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 establishedbut 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 EspaolaHispaniola in Englishthe sixth landmass it had encountered in the dozen weeks since departing the Canary Islands.