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Porfirio Rubirosa was the last great playboy: the rou? par excellence, a symbol of powerful masculinity, ubiquity, and easy-come-easy-go money.
The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa
Fourth Estate
September 2005
Featuring: Porfirio Rubirosa
368 pages
ISBN: 0007170599
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
At one gilded moment, his fame was so great that he was
recognized all over the world simply by his nickname: Rubi.
Pop songs were written about him. Women whom he had never
met offered to leave their husbands for him. The gigantic
peppermills brandished in Parisian restaurants became
known, for reasons people at the time could only hint at,
as "Rubirosas." Porfirio Rubirosa was the last great playboy: the roué par
excellence, a symbol of powerful masculinity, ubiquity, and
easy-come-easy-go money. "Work?" he shot back at an interviewer, scandalized at
being asked what he did with his days. "It's impossible for
me to work. I just don't have the time." His natural habitat was the polo field, the nightclub, the
Formula One racecourse, the bedroom. He had an eye for beautiful women, particularly when they
came with great wealth: He managed to marry in turn two of
the richest women on the planet. Rumor had him bedding
hundreds of famous and infamous women, including Christina
Onassis, Eva Perón, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, who gleefully posed
for paparazzi after he had blacked her eye in a fit of
jealousy on the eve of his marriage to another woman. But he was a man's man, too, a notable polo player and race-
car driver with a gift for friendship, chumming around with
the likes of Joe Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Oleg Cassini, Aly
Khan, and King Farouk. When above-board, heiress-type income was scarce, he
diverted himself with jewel-thievery, shadowy diplomatic
errands, and any other illicit scam that came his way. Whatever legitimate power he wielded came to him from the
hands of Rafael Trujillo, one of the most bloodthirstily
power-mad dictators the New World has ever seen. A nation
quivered at Trujillo's name for decades, yet Rubi flouted
his strictures without concern, as if Trujillo's iron grip
could never crush him. And he was right. When Rubi died at the age of fifty-six, wrapping his sports
car around a tree in the Bois de Boulogne, an era went with
him -- of white dinner jackets at El Morocco; of celebrity
for its own sake when this was still a novelty; of glamour
before it was available to the masses. In The Last Playboy, Shawn Levy brings Rubi's giddy,
hedonistic story to Technicolor life.
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