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

FOR VINCENT, ANTHONY, AND PAULA,

WITHOUT WHOM THERE WOULDN’T BE MUCH POINT

Cover

Title Page SHAWN LEVY The Last Playboy THE HIGH LIFE OF PORFIRIO RUBIROSA

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

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.…

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.…