The Irresistible Mr Wrong E-Book

Jeremy Scott

• Herausgeber: The Robson Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 375

Beschreibung

Why do women go for bastards? Not all women certainly, but an identifiable number of them - including almost all heiresses - find themselves drawn to, even marrying, a thoroughgoing wrong'un who steals their money, cheats on them and sometimes beats them up. Why, to these educated, rational, rich and otherwise balanced young women, is Mr Wrong irresistible? What is it about him, what is it in them? In short, what is the nexus between wealth, celebrity, sex and self-destruction? The Irresistible Mr Wrong is the serial biography of five women who were all serially married to the same man: Porfirio Rubirosa. From the Jazz Age to the mid-sixties, through Café Society, Hitler's Berlin, occupied Paris and the post-war fleshpots of the Jet Set, Jeremy Scott charts the glamour and tragedy of the wives and mistresses of the ultimate playboy.

Leseprobe

It is presumptuous of me, an aged male, to attempt to write about these six women with empathy. I would not have dared to do so without the help of three women editors who have guided me in those pathways of the heart denied me by my gender. This book is gratefully dedicated to them: Marcelle D’Argy Smith, Nina Risoli and Jaime Brahms.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Chapter 1: Flor Trujillo, Dominican Republic, 1932

Chapter 2: Flor Trujillo, Dominican Republic, 1932–37

Chapter 3: Danielle Darrieux, Paris, 1940–41

Chapter 4: Danielle Darrieux, Paris, 1941–45

Chapter 5: Doris Duke, Caserta, Italy, January 1945

Chapter 6: Doris Duke, Paris, September 1947

Chapter 7: Doris Duke, Paris, 1947–48

Chapter 8: Zsa Zsa Gabor, New York City, New Year’s Day 1953

Chapter 9: Zsa Zsa Gabor, New York City, January 1953

Chapter 10: Barbara Hutton, Deauville, August 1953

Chapter 11: Barbara Hutton, Deauville, 1953

Chapter 12: Barbara Hutton, New York City, November 1953

Chapter 13: Zsa Zsa Gabor, Los Angeles, Christmas Eve 1953

Chapter 14: Zsa Zsa Gabor, Las Vegas, Christmas Day 1953

Chapter 15: Barbara Hutton, New York City, 30 December 1953

Chapter 16: Barbara Hutton, New York City, New Year’s Eve 1953

Chapter 17: Odile Rodin, Paris, June–October 1956

Chapter 18: Zsa Zsa Gabor, Los Angeles, Easter 1957

Chapter 19: Odile Rodin, Paris, 1957–61

Chapter 20: Odile Rodin, Paris, Independence Day, 4 July 1965

Chapter 21: After Rubi

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Sources

Copyright 

What’s wrong with marrying rich women? Those little bastards who criticise me don’t understand. I took them simply as women.

And what’s wrong with taking presents from a woman? I give them too, even though I give a ring and she gives a bomber. An aeroplane is not the moon, it’s a toy. If you can have a bomber you have it. So what?

Porfirio Rubirosa

INTRODUCTION

Why do women fall for scoundrels? Not all women certainly, but an identifiable number of them – including almost all heiresses – find themselves drawn to, even marrying, a thoroughgoing bastard who cheats on them, steals their money, abuses them physically and mentally, then dumps them. Why, to these otherwise balanced young women, is Mr Wrong irresistible? What is it about him, what is it in them, that causes it? In short, what is the nexus between wealth, celebrity, sex and self-destruction?

This is the serial biography of five women who were all serially married to the same man: Porfirio Rubirosa. All, plus Zsa Zsa Gabor, the Hungarian adventuress who did not wed him, were advantaged and privileged individuals. They shared one characteristic: power. The father of the first, Flor Trujillo, owned a whole country; Danielle Darrieux was a movie star by the age of sixteen; Barbara Hutton, the ‘poor little rich girl’, was extravagantly wealthy; Doris Duke the richest woman in the world; Zsa Zsa was endowed with beauty, wit and glamour; Odile Rodin with looks, talent and youth. All were ‘born in a happy hour’ and gifted by good fortune. They had – on the face of it – choice in how they ran their lives, together with control.

Rubirosa was vulnerable only in one way: he had no money. There, except for Odile, the women held the material advantage. Yet without hesitation they abjectly yielded that power to a dominating male with no conscience in exploiting them.

Flor at seventeen was an innocent and Rubirosa an unknown quantity (perhaps even to himself then), but the women who followed her as his successive wives were fully aware of his nature and his past before they married him. They knew he was a boozer and hell-raiser, compulsively promiscuous, a jewel-thief and unscrupulous crook, that he exploited and beat up women, and had been involved in two murders. He’d concealed nothing from them and enjoyed his reputation as a cad. Yet nothing could deflect them from their focused determination to capture him as a husband. Why should they elect to make such a choice, for which they paid so extortionate a price both emotionally and financially?

He was known to everyone as ‘Rubi’ and, displayed in the shop window, his image was alluring. To look at, he was an attractive item. Although not tall (5ft 8in), he had dark wavy hair and a permanent tan; he was either one quarter or one eighth black, resulting in an enviable skin tone. His nose was broad (he would have it fixed) and his lips thick in a high-cheek-boned handsome face. His body was slim, fit and well-muscled; he moved with an athlete’s grace, fully at ease within his own skin.

For a woman meeting him while in his thirties – by which time his early macho brashness has long been replaced by the confidence he can have any woman in the world – he represents a desirable sexual proposition, if one to be approached with caution. He is a ‘playboy’ and predator, a creature of his time and place and social circumstances, a man who has been created by women and defined by the lovers who made him famous: Christina Onassis, Ava Gardner, Eva Perón, Gene Tierney, Countess Maritza of Spain and Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia, plus countless others.

He possesses looks and sex appeal, a quick smile, good teeth and bedroom eyes. An adolescence passed on the fringe of the in-crowd in Paris has gifted him with social ease, wit, and opportunistic guile. He can converse engagingly in several languages. He is romantic, bold in his wooing, generous and impulsive; he never bores. His technique has proved irresistible, for he listens with his whole attention on the woman confiding in him. He remains mindful, sensitive, sympathetic; she believes he understands her.

These characteristics form the basis to his persona, but it is enhanced by a number of worldly skills. He is an able horseman, a boxer and a fencer; he dances, skis and plays tennis well. He is a rated polo player, knows how to pilot a plane and handle a racing car nimbly as he can a pony. All these pastimes which so well suit him cost money, and here lies the fundamental flaw in Rubi’s world. His image is without solidity. He possesses the tastes, energy and appetite for the life of a celebrity playboy – but he lacks money. He’s blithely indifferent to it except as a necessary resource; he has no desire to amass capital, only to have fun and spend freely.

Rubi also lacks something less tangible than cash. He is an entirely social animal and, as a fish in a bright-lit aquarium, entirely dependent on his artificial environment to give him life. He is alive only among others in the setting of bars, restaurants, resorts, in a glossy milieu composed of glamour, gossip columns, photographers, seductions and escapades. With Rubi, what you see is what is, he has no inner resources. If he’s alone in a room there is no one there.

Perhaps to compensate for this existential lack of substance, providence has gifted him with a singular and outstanding attribute. In the 1960s the giant pepper grinders brandished by waiters in fashionable trattorias were named ‘Rubirosas’. His third wife Doris Duke states that ‘he had the most magnificent penis I had ever seen’. Her godson, Pony Duke, quotes her saying, ‘There has never been anything like it … six inches in circumference … much like the last foot of a Louisville Slugger baseball bat.’ The society photographer Jerome Zerb, who followed him into the men’s room in Deauville casino, reports, ‘It looked like Yul Brynner in a black turtleneck.’ And Truman Capote wistfully eulogises about ‘that quadroon cock, a purported eleven-inch café-au-lait sinker, thick as a man’s wrist’. In the fashionable world it had the nickname and reputation toujours prêt – always ready.

Yes, Rubi was phenomenally well-endowed, and certainly this formed part of his attraction but, as many hundreds of women could testify, you did not have to wed him to sample it. It was on offer to any female bidder and for the right price it was available for rent. Rubi possessed more. He had an air of natural entitlement, a charismatic presence and with it charm, which worked not just on women but also (most) men. He behaved as he felt like behaving and saw no reason not to do so. Yet he was no braggart and happily told stories against himself. He was worldly, suave, he had an air of mystery and reeked of danger. Twenty-five years before the invention of James Bond, he set the prototype – except that Rubi served no country but himself.

No woman in her right mind wants to marry James Bond. That’s not what he’s for. To marry Rubi was an equally misjudged self-destructive act. To understand why these particular women took that mortal step it is perhaps necessary not so much to scrutinise him as examine them.

CHAPTER 1

FLOR TRUJILLO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, 1932

Homesick is how you get when you have to return there.

That, anyway, is how it is for Flor as she stands in her First Class cabin watching the steward gather together her many items of luggage, twenty minutes before the liner’s arrival at the dreaded shore of home.

Rather than the single dollar bill the boy would have got from other passengers, she tips him a five (worth around $100 today, but even a trainee celebrity is obliged to exceed), instructing him to bypass Customs on arrival – ‘Tell them who I am’ – and to load the bags directly onto one of the presidential limos he will find drawn up behind the quay. She checks her appearance for the last time in the mirror, which reflects the image of a slender seventeen-year-old girl with bobbed black hair in a small cloche hat and short-skirted linen suit, then quits her cabin to come on deck when the liner is still a mile from shore.

Even with the trade wind ruffling the surface of the sea, the heat and blaze of light strikes her like a blow. She pulls down her dark glasses to shade an all-too-familiar view that evokes nothing but abhorrence. In the distance the close-packed buildings of the capital swarm up the flank of the mountain in rambling disarray. From the monumental sixteenth-century cathedral at its base rises a terraced maze of streets whose first tier is made up of the once-grand but now crumbling public buildings of the Zona Colonial; above these spread ascending levels of church towers, forts, roofs of rose-coloured tiles then, higher yet, a warren of clapboard houses and ramshackle old wooden mansions, painted in pastel shades of blue, pink and red, faded by the sun which washes out all colour from the scene.

Flor Trujillo© Press Association

The dilapidated city expanding up the mountain rests upon a shoreline rimmed by the Maleçon, a tree-lined boardwalk stretching as far as the eye can see toward the outer barrios and the shanty town, obscured by distance and the fume of charcoal cooking fires. A dark green band of mangrove swamp grows beneath the paseo, varied by the alluring glimpse of white sand beach.

Flor Trujillo stands glaring at the idyllic view with fierce resentment. Many would have seen that sunlit prospect of palm trees, beach and lushly forested mountains as a tropical paradise; she knows it to be a prison. The picture-postcard scene fills her with revulsion. This was the stifling cage she grew up in, more restrictive than any convent … and she, little fool, believed she’d escaped it. What delusion, what naiveté to imagine so when no one escaped Him, least of all his first-born daughter.

But for the past two years the fact is she had eluded him. She’d petitioned her father to allow her to go to school in France. Of course he’d been reluctant, but he wanted her smart and savvy and cosmopolitan as he would have liked to be himself. It had taken persistence and timing, but eventually he had yielded. So, with paternal acceptance if not approval, she had escaped into another existence she’d only read and dreamed of, thrilling in its liberty and promise. She had come to know the City of Light with its galaxy of worldly pleasures – not all of these though, for she was chaste and, even in Paris, closely chaperoned. Though not invariably, for vacations were spent with school friends and their parents in Biarritz, or skiing in Megève and St Moritz. At the exclusive girls’ academy, initially she’d felt a misfit. ‘Naïve, thin, with legs long like a stork’s, unable to speak French, I was the shy tropical bumpkin, the classmate of girls who included a princess. Now I, who had only ridden a burro, had a thoroughbred horse of my own…’ But she is quick-witted and adapts fast. Gawky and unsure at first among such sophisticates – the black girl from wherever – then with growing confidence in her looks, Flor learned how to play the game as it’s played in this world and run with its bratpack, gaining casual acceptance as a cadet member of the international set with her own mestizo style.

Meanwhile in the course of that two-year span – during which she received no word from her father – she had changed, altered beyond recognition by experience, by association and self-assurance, but also physically. She had developed from a gauche Creole adolescent into a young woman in the flower of her youth, with the blood’s sap running in her veins, bold and aware of herself and what she wants from life. And this is not it. The liner she is aboard has slowed to quarter-speed to enter port and she is about to step ashore onto the island where she least wants to be in all the world. But what choice has she? Conscious that in France his daughter was slipping away from him, he had yanked on her string and she had obeyed him, as all obeyed him – or else. The Great Benefactor had sent for her and she was coming home.

Now close to land, the surface of the sea is smooth, sheltered from the breeze by the mountain, and the smell of the island steals across the water to embrace her: the fragrance of spices, flowers, fruit, with ever-present beneath it the whiff of rotting garbage and human effluent. Her gorge heaves at the familiar stench, she almost gags. She will never be free of this stinking hole till someone shoots him.

As if on cue, as the liner clears the harbour beacon, altering course to come into port, his is the first image she sees before she even registers the crowd upon the quay. A giant poster of the Benefactor occupies the full height of the customs warehouse. Wise guardian of the people, unsleeping in his devotion, his watchful gaze scrutinises them unblinking – and seems to look directly at her. The portrait is an immense version of that same icon that hangs in the place of honour in every home throughout the island. By it, and spanning the full width of five houses on the waterfront, stretches a banner with scarlet lettering six feet tall: GOD AND TRUJILLO. The President recently has considered reversing the order of the two priorities.

Great Dictators, whether building a memorial to their rule or exterminating their enemies, do nothing by half-measures. A homecoming must be a homecoming, a first-born’s welcome a state occasion. The harbour quay is usually a marketplace where turbaned women in the shade of brilliantly coloured awnings lord over stalls heaped with pyramids of tropical fruit; it is always busy. Now the place is a roiling mob of people jigging in the harsh glare of the sun. A military band is playing, its members’ shiny black faces throttled by the collars of their gold-frogged uniforms. To the flash of brass and crash of noise, the crowd in their brightly varied rags are shifting to the sound, calling out and rocking to the blare in a rising fog of dust kicked up by their stomping feet.

Behind the crowd, in the shade of the Customs House, stands a platform elevated to shoulder-height above the tumult. The stage is occupied by some twenty men grouped around their principal figure. All are in uniform. Two or three are older, their chests spattered with medals and coloured ribbon, the rest in their early twenties, some even younger. Their white tunics, worn above breeches and highly polished riding boots, are broad shouldered, tight fitting, nipped in at the waist. They express swagger and machismo – which might be expected, for they have been designed by the President himself for his bodyguard with the same close attention as he has selected the youths who wear it. All are slim and fit, handsome, white or pale of skin, and all are aware they are on parade.

At the centre of this cadre of young officers rises a dais, upon it a piece of furniture Flor recognises. The President seldom travels anywhere – even the short distance from Palace to harbour front – without the throne chair in his baggage train. It raises him head and shoulders above those attending him and its tall backrest conveys imposing dignity, while the elevated step where his pygmy feet rest remains unnoticed – along with the fact that the Benefactor, though the ideal of Beauty, Wisdom and Truth to all his people, wears built-up shoes and has unusually stunted legs. But this is a subject which, among many others, is never discussed aloud on all the island.

The ship has disengaged its engines, drifting to a stop. A tugboat butts it through a narrowing gap of oily water choked with splintered crates, rotting fruit, garbage and small dead fish. From the deck, Flor’s glance passes over the Guard surrounding their Leader and is drawn ineluctably to the personage at their centre. Unwillingly, in a stew of emotions that includes aversion, fear, pride, awe and ambivalent love, her gaze focuses in upon the occupant of the throne chair. Clothed in a starched white linen suit, with eyes hidden behind dark glasses, her father stares back at her, his mouth pursed in a customary moue of murderous discontent.

A shiver passes through her, despite the heat. She flinches, her look slides away… abruptly coming to rest, startled, on one of the young officers who stands by him. ‘I noticed him instantly,’ she says later. ‘Handsome in a uniform that had a special flair, even his gold buttons looked real.’ Electricity pricks across her nerves as she becomes aware he is looking directly back at her. The crowd and everyone on the quay are gazing at her, but his look alone has caught and held her. For a long moment, which while it lasts feels endless, their glance extends and a signal flashes between them, what the French call a touche. ‘It was love at first sight,’ she explains afterward.

Flor’s welcome home is warmer than she had feared. Her father, absolute despot of his country, is unpredictable in his moods. The President could be a monster, terrifying in his rage. At other times his face would light up on seeing her, he’d draw her close, embrace her, stroke her hair; press a wad of $100 bills into her hand, urging her to buy toys, clothes, another pony, anything her heart desired.

Today, following the harbour-front reception and back home in the presidential mansion above the town, the President is in unusually benign paternal mode. Pride shows in his face as in his shrill high-pitched voice he examines the daughter who has returned to him no longer a schoolgirl but a young woman, slim, chic, spirited and sexually attractive. He is proud of his possession. Flor is questioned closely on her studies, on the classmates with whom she has passed her vacations, who she has met and connections she has made, on the wealthy and international milieu of which she has become a part.

His interest is more than fatherly. For Trujillo his daughter is an ambassador for the country – a country so obscure that most in the wider world are wholly unaware of it and, if they are, only as a backward slum rotting somewhere among the islands of the Caribbean. Trujillo has a passionate ambition to rebrand that image: to put his country on the map and entice here the beautiful, rich and famous – that glitzy côterie known as Café Society who follow the seasons with their yachts and retinues; to attract capital, investment, development and publicity to the tropical island which he rules as his private fiefdom.

The President is pleased and gratified by all Flor tells him of how she has spent the last two years. He instructs her to throw a lavish party, inviting all her friends.

Her true friends are in France. She canvasses those she knew in the Dominican Republic when she lived here. Some have moved to America – those permitted to do so. Others receive the invitation with unconcealed alarm, explaining that in the interval their families have fallen out of favour and they would not be welcome at the Palace. Some have fathers who have disappeared; their offspring became non-persons, dangerous to know. They, too, cannot come to the occasion. When the evening arrives the guests mainly are children of the generals and colonels composing Trujillo’s staff. Most Flor knows only slightly, many not at all. Only one girl, Lina Lovaton, who had attended the same military school as herself, can really be called a ‘friend’. This is not her party but her father’s. Everything in sight belongs to Him – and even her friendship with Lina will one day be appropriated by the dictator when she becomes his mistress.

The soirée creaks awkwardly into being, stiff, formal and frowsty. In France she has grown used to more sophisticated and vibrant occasions than this; she’d forgotten how dreary such events here were. The tin-pot republic exists in a time warp, governed by antiquated Spanish protocol. Fashion and modern manners have not penetrated this provincial backwater. Her father’s circle of cronies is made up of sycophantic functionaries, with wives who are either frumps or vulgar show-offs, every one of them obese as their husbands. Their children, her peer group, are hicks, the girls graceless and subdued beneath the watchful gaze of their duennas. Only when dancing do their straitjackets loosen to the merengue, native rhythm of the favelas. While it plays their bodies shuck and bump within their starched outmoded dresses, supple in the negro beat… only to freeze when the number ends and, in silence, they return meekly to the custody of their chaperones perched on small gilded chairs around the walls.

As always the President maintains his own space in the large high-ceilinged ballroom, encircled by his cabal and attended by a handful of the personal Guard posed stiffly behind him. Soon after his late arrival when the party is already under way – his appearance signalled by the opening bars of the national anthem while all rise respectfully to their feet – Flor’s glance seeks out the faces of these crisply uniformed youths. And there among them she sees him again, the young officer she’d noticed on the quayside at her arrival. As then, he is staring directly at her. She drops her glance at once… then looks back. For the second time a touche passes between them. 

From her few friends at the party Flor ascertains what she can of him, though none of them knows Lieutenant Rubirosa personally. What she learns – from Lina – amplified by what she gleans later, is that he’d been born into a respected and cultured family. His father served as ambassador of the Republic in Paris during the First World War. As an adolescent Rubirosa had been schooled in that city, like her, and he’d remained there after his father had been recalled to the island. However he failed his baccalaureate and was in turn summoned home in some disgrace. Enrolled at the capital’s best law school, he had played polo, boxed and led an active social life during which, at a party at the Country Club, he’d been noticed by Trujillo and summoned to present himself. Rubirosa had been invited to join the great man’s table where, it seemed, he passed the unspoken test, for the following morning he was called to the Palace and given – not offered – a commission as lieutenant in the Presidential Guard… and directed to the President’s own tailor to make his uniform, and to his personal shoemaker for riding boots with spurs – a look Trujillo favoured in the young men he elevated to attend him.

This evening at Flor’s party Lieutenant Rubirosa remains dutifully in his place, close to the person of the Leader. Neither he nor she finds an opportunity to speak to the other.

The heat and humidity in the capital grow intolerable in full summer, when the trade winds cease and not a drop of rain falls for weeks. No breeze stirs in the narrow streets of tottering gingerbread houses where the air lies choked below awnings and overhanging balconies festooned with heavy creeper. Mules’ hooves clop against the cobbles, shouts and cries bounce off bare walls and tiled floors. The uproar never ceases: carts, motors and horns, children and stray dogs. Doors and windows stand open to the street, Mexican music crackling from the radio in every house along with the smell of sweat and old clothes, cooking goat’s meat and the fume of charcoal.

Ninety-eight per cent of the population remains trapped by poverty in their steaming barrios, but those who can escape the city. The President removes his family and entourage (including Rubirosa) to his country estate. There Flor rides out on her thoroughbred Arab stallion, accompanied by a groom, and passes the rest of the time in decorous idleness, watched over either by family or a duenna.

But ‘as in a good script, we found ways’, Rubirosa will explain later. More was communicated by glance than word, though once the two were caught speaking together in French by Dona Bienvenida, Flor’s spiteful stepmother, who had replaced her own mother as the dictator’s wife. She reported the incident to her husband. Trujillo was livid, his reaction immediate. Rubirosa was banished to duty at the military fortress of San Francisco de Macoris, where he was restricted to barracks.

So the two undeclared lovers find themselves separated in the traditional predicament of medieval romance – which they solve as young lovers have always solved, by ingenuity, subterfuge and smuggled notes.

A ball is due to be staged by the municipality in the town of Santiago. It is usual for local governors to seize on any opportunity to curry favour with the President, and it is clear to all that his daughter is destined for a starring role in the country’s affairs. The prospect of a suburban repetition of her earlier lacklustre dance fills Flor with gloom, but it provides an opportunity. Though it is hard to find privacy to make the call, she telephones Lieutenant Rubirosa at the fortress to invite him.

A few days later, after improvising an appointment with a medical specialist, he comes to the ball. There he approaches Flor, bows, and asks her to dance. They dance… and continue to do so for five numbers in a row, observed by countless eyes while tongues wag. And it is noted that this is not the limit to the young man’s audacity. Taking time out, the two stroll together in public beneath the lit-up trees of the town’s dusty plaza, animatedly talking together in French. ‘From that moment,’ Rubirosa says, ‘I was in love, and Flor as well.’

Informers are everywhere, part of the system; denunciation forms a recognised method of self-advancement. Even before the ball ends, the President is apprised of what had taken place. What impudence!

Vengeance is swift. Next day Rubirosa’s sword and revolver are taken from him, he is stripped of his uniforms and expelled from the army. On the instant he becomes a non-person, and he knows this is not the end of it. The President is notorious in his wrath towards those who displease him. A gang of psychos and thugs lurk close to hand, prepared to torture, maim or kill to fulfil his whim, adept in the refined barbarities of their calling.

Rubirosa knows that his life is under threat. He considers escaping from the island, ‘but to leave would be to lose Flor. And to lose Flor would be to die. But to stay would also be to die.’ Dispatching a note to her, he borrows a pistol and hides out in the stables on one of his uncle’s plantations.

His note to Flor is intercepted and carried to the President, its bearer tied to a palm tree in the garden and whipped before Flor’s eyes. Appalled, she locks herself in her room, rejects meals, and refuses to see or speak to her father. An aide is sent to reason with her, but she is implacable. ‘Tell my father that I want to marry the man I love, and I will marry him. Otherwise I would not be worthy of being his daughter.’

Meanwhile Rubirosa’s mother, fearful for her son’s life, seeks an audience with Trujillo and goes to plead for him. Cautiously, in a tone designed not to rile him, she points out that the family are respectable and loyal. Her husband had served his country honourably and with distinction throughout his career. Where was the shame if Lieutenant Rubirosa has asked the great man’s daughter to dance, accompanied her on a passade around the town square? Where was the affront to Him if the young couple had fallen in love?

Perhaps it is Dona Ana’s sincerity, perhaps Trujillo’s intuition this personable youth could prove of use to him, perhaps a flicker of concern for his daughter’s happiness, just possibly the remembrance that he too had once been young and ardent; more likely though on that particular morning his Furies are not with him. Whatever the explanation, the President does not hear out the mother’s plea. ‘Enough!’ he shouts, and his fist slams the surface of the desk. ‘That’s enough! They will marry right away.’

The origins of Presidente Rafael Trujillo were veiled by the spin of myth to have become legend, for to the inhabitants of the island he stood on a par with God; his banner bore witness to their twin omnipotence. But to an impoverished, illiterate, provincial population gossip is the stuff of life, and the facts – though seldom and only furtively discussed – were available to all. His grandfather was a Spanish policeman stationed on the island, whose illegitimate son spawned a litter of eleven children, one of them Rafael.

How far the boy’s nature was shaped by deprivation and abuse, by lack of education or redemptive role model is impossible to say. After reviewing his career it is natural to conclude he was born a brutal thug. The dark was present in him at his nativity and later would expand until it possessed him. He showed street savvy from the start, joining a gang of hoods named ‘The 44’ on reaching his teens. Short, wide and hard, he became an enforcer, using blackmail, violence and terror to collect. Not that he often had to employ such tactics. He had a presence, a menace that induced others to yield. He was working as a telegraph operator for $25 a month when he married the peasant woman who would become Flor’s mother. Poor, their worldly wealth amounted to one burro stabled in the garden of their palm-thatched house, but Trujillo had a keen sense of appearance. He owned only two white suits, but his wife spent much of her time washing and pressing them. Soon he became a security guard on a sugar plantation and in the role acquired a taste both for uniform and tyranny.

At this time, just after the Great War, America was an imperial world power who had colonised – a word never uttered – several islands in the Caribbean. Santa Domingo was occupied by a military force of US Marines. The exemplary manner in which Rafael Trujillo imposed discipline on a disaffected rabble labouring on a plantation in near-slave conditions under the heat of the sun became known to the military authorities. He was effective, ‘without scruples’, it was noted with approval. He sounded like a useful man, the sort they were looking for. In 1918 he was awarded a commission in the National Guard, which was officered by marines. Readily allying himself with the occupying power, his ascent up the ranks was swift. When US forces finally quit the island in 1924 Trujillo had risen to command of the National Army. Six years later he led a coup against President Vasquez, installing himself in the become-vacant office. Soon after, the island’s capital, Santa Domingo, was renamed Ciudad Trujillo and that crucial year of 1930 inaugurating his regime was designated Year One of the new republic.

Eleanor Roosevelt, Rafael Trujillo and his wife

With his meaty hand slamming down explosively upon the desk the President had issued his decree: Enough! They will marry right away!

Never could he reverse his decisions, for to do so would be to show weakness, but afterwards and not for the first time he wishes back the consequences of his impetuous edict. Behind the implacable façade lurks a man of passion whose violence is barely held in check. He feels toward his first-born daughter a fierce possessive love. She is his own flesh, the child that he has made, not just biologically but by taking charge of her upbringing after divorcing her mother, sending Flor to board at military school at the age of nine. There she learned discipline and obedience while remaining wholly dependent upon Him.

Call it masochism, my slave-blood psychology coming out, but I had to submit to Trujillo’s will. For in my tangled emotions he was not only papá, cajoling, demanding, ordering, for whose love I thirsted insatiably – perhaps above my husband’s – but the demigod Generalissimo Trujillo, bizarre, fateful, omnipotent. Like the humblest Dominicano I prospered and suffered under his rule and came to think of him as immortal. I had succumbed to the Dominican neurosis, a willingness to swallow anything because it came from Trujillo.

Papa was God, didn’t the two receive equal billing? He had fashioned her from the start and at fifteen dispatched her to finishing school in France to polish his creation. Yet the creature was not made in his own likeness, but rather its opposite. Crassly ignorant himself, coarse, unravelled, unsophisticated, deficient in all the graces, he has a clear picture of how he wants her to be.

What Trujillo desires for his daughter and his ambitions for his country are the same. The island that forms his fiefdom is a feculent midden, the population subsisting on one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world. He intends to transform the place into an international destination rivalling Venice or Monte Carlo, a luxurious world-class resort for the rich and famous. Through personal determination alone he will impose the appearance if not the structure of modernity upon the capital and adjacent coast. Santa Domingo will become a favoured luxury watering hole and playground for the cosmopolitan smart set. And his daughter will become the symbol to the world of this brave new republic, elegant, smart, high-toned, above all modern; the epitome of chic and style.

That was Trujillo’s intention, which he’d never doubted he could achieve. He could impose his will on others, why not upon Flor, his creation? It had not entered his mind that in the process of European grooming the creature would gain a will of its own or a taste for freedom and independence, a teenager’s urge to rebel.

The President is used to dealing with those who oppose him: he has them taken care of. To have Flor dealt with in the same way is inappropriate and counter to his feeling for her. And to have Rubi banished or disposed of would alienate her beyond recall; it would make her his enemy so she too would have to be dealt with in her turn.

Thus it was that upon this occasion on the murky battlefield of the dictator’s mind Love won over Death – but this is still relatively early in his career during which, later, Death will prove always to be the safer option.

But the President is displeased, and when He is vexed those around him tiptoe in mortal terror, frantic to avoid his path. From the day he announces they will be married, he severs contact with the young couple. He is icy in his detachment, refusing to address one word to either.

Meanwhile he takes charge of every aspect of their forthcoming wedding: orchestration of the splendid ceremony, briefing the Archbishop, the wording of the invitations, the guest list and the lavish reception afterward. The President will give away the bride, still attached to him by an invisible chain. Rubi’s best man will be the American ambassador, Arthur Shoenfeld, whom he’s never met but who represents the new republic’s patron, the US. A strategic relationship which well suits the State Department; Trujillo may be a monster but he is their monster.

The nuptials are set, the details are decided and the country’s leading newspaper, Listin Diario, records that ‘the genteel couple have united their pulsing hearts in emotion’ and announces ‘the most aristocratic wedding ever recorded in the social annals of the Republic’.

For the genteel couple themselves all this comes as something of a shock. As Flor puts it, ‘Five dances in a row, two circles around a park, an innocent flirtation, and I was to marry a man I scarcely knew.’

The pair’s chaste incipient romance has jumped fast forward into a situation neither had planned or contemplated, far less discussed. There has been no opportunity to talk, or gain knowledge of the other’s past or flesh. Supervision over them has been constant. The two are strangers, designated partners in an arranged marriage.

For Flor this dalliance with Rubi had originated as a gesture of defiance to her father, a statement of independence. Rubi had happened to be standing in the right place at the right time, wearing a uniform in which most males look their swaggering best. It was very easy for women – now and later – to fall for the image of Rubi. Dark, handsome, slender and erect, he looked the part. On sighting him Flor had developed an instant crush – many women would later do the same.

Of course, to her it feels like love. Crushes do, and seventeen-year-olds are seldom analytical or self-aware. But her reason for marrying him is traditional, even primal, for it has applied since pre-history – to escape from home. ‘I was infatuated by now, and also wild to leave my prison, to run like hell from father, an instinct that was to propel me all my life.’

And Rubi? He is twenty-three, fit and bold. For a macho Latin stud to roll over and acquiesce to an arranged marriage is the response of a man lacking balls. And Rubi has these, and the apparatus that comes with them will receive further attention in this book, indeed will form a leitmotif to the narrative. But neither Rubi’s tackle nor male pride rears up in protest at this takeover of his life. Complaisantly, he goes along with the plan. He is confident of his own worth and what he is bringing to the wedding feast.

For him, marriage to Flor poses no dilemma. His nature is that of a gambler, a chancer. He will become known as a unscrupulous gigolo but in one sense he remains a romantic until the end. He believes instinctively that if he seizes the present the future will provide room-service and a fairy godmother pick up the tab – and this will remain so all his life. For him this marriage is no sort of choice.

Rubi, who will spend his entire life among the privileged and well-heeled, will remark later that Trujillo is the only really rich person he has ever known, ‘He owns a whole country.’ In the republic the Great Benefactor is the source of all wealth, all power, all patronage, and blithely Rubi steps forward with his bride to drink at the toxic font. The dowry he receives for saying ‘I will’ includes the distinction of a public identity: he is appointed Secretary to the Dominican Legation in London, their passport to liberty. The couple is given $50,000, a house in the grounds of the presidential mansion and a Buick convertible with chauffeur and their entwined initials embellished in gold leaf on the door.

On 2 December 1932 Flor marries the first of her nine husbands and Rubi secures his starter heiress, the first of five wives. So, together and in love, they climb into the Buick and set off for the world stage and the roles they believe life owes them…

CHAPTER 2

FLOR TRUJILLO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, 1932–37

The crowd of gaudily over-dressed wedding guests applauds as Flor and Rubi drive off from the mansion, high on hope and delusive liberty. They have defied the Benefactor and survived, the world lies open before them … but first there is the matter of sex to resolve. Flor has to be deflowered.

Her bridal night is spent in their new house in the grounds of the presidential mansion that Trujillo has given them. There her mother is waiting to greet the couple with a bottle of chilled champagne, for she has not been allowed to attend the ceremony, ‘A ritual she was to follow after so many of my marriages,’ Flor will recall thirty years and seven husbands later. But that is a remark made by a woman a great deal more worldly and cynical than the teenager she is today.

Sexually she is wholly inexperienced, innocent even of heavy petting. The sophisticated brat pack she’d known in France had been experimentally wanton in their ways but she’d been constrained by her Catholic upbringing and the value her provincial culture set upon virginity. ‘You must realise that Latin girls are as jealously guarded from young men as the women of any Moorish harem,’ she explains. Whereas Rubi has extensive acquaintance with sex; he claims to have enjoyed his first encounter aged thirteen. He is skilled in the arts of love, and he’s not about to take her by force.

Flor has been told about the mechanics of the deed, school friends breathlessly have confided its details. And shortly before the wedding in a scene of tortuous embarrassment she’d been formally instructed in the act by Dona Bienvenida, her stepmother. Only the knowledge that she’d soon be clear of this insufferable parental custody enabled her to endure it.

So Flor is theoretically prepared for what is in store, but later that evening when, dressed in a pink negligee, she is waiting for Rubi beneath a tent of mosquito netting and he returns from the shower and drops his towel, for the first time she sees it…

Much has been said and written of Rubi’s organ, and by many. In the 1960s the giant pepper grinders flourished by Italian waiters were known as ‘Rubirosas’. A broad female clientele have testified to the awesome reality. Its reputation will firm up into legend and later wives will comment on that particular consistency, neither soft nor hard, along with other aspects … but now it is the sight alone that causes Flor to shriek, leap out the bed and race in terror for the door. She makes it into the passage with Rubi in pursuit. ‘I ran all around the house while he chased me,’ she recalls.

He grabs her, attempts to calm her without success. There is no rape, nor penetration that night. He is neither a cruel nor brutal man in lovemaking unless the moment calls for either. But eventually the ritual act of consummation has to take place, though it is a messy, painful business. ‘I didn’t like it because I bled so much, and my clothes were ruined. In time, he began to make love to me in different ways, but when it was over my insides hurt a lot. He was such a handsome boy and so charming that I let him do whatever he wanted. But he took so long to ejaculate that by the end I was a little bored.’