Shawn Levy - The Last Playboy - The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa

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.