The Last Playboy : the High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa

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Description

At one gilded moment, his fame used to be so great that he used to be recognized far and wide 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 used to be 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 not possible for me to work. I just wouldn’t have the time.”

His natural habitat used to be 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 in the world. 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 some other woman.

But he used to be 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 source of revenue used to be scarce, he diverted himself with jewel-thievery, shadowy diplomatic errands, and another illicit scam that came his way.

Whatever legitimate power he wielded came to him from the hands of Rafael Trujillo, one of the crucial 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 used to be 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 used to be still a novelty; of glamour before it used to be to be had to the masses.

In The Last Playboy, Shawn Levy brings Rubi’s giddy, hedonistic story to Technicolor life.

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