The Scoundrel

Agatha Christie could not have thought of a better opening scene. When the English butler entered the luxurious bedchamber on Manhattan's upper Fifth Avenue to awaken his master one morning last week, he saw a ghastly sight. Supine on the wall-to-wall carpet lay the master--46-year-old Serge Rubinstein, millionaire, financial finagler, satyr and draft dodger--bound, gagged, strangled and quite dead. The body was dressed in midnight-blue silk pajamas, and the room was a picture of studied disarray.

The scene but not the character was pure Christie. Serge Rubinstein belonged in spirit to an earlier, gamier era--the turn of the century, when too many of the continental rich were confirming Emile Zola's savage caricatures of their class. His life was a rococo embroidery of lies, boasts, swindles, treacheries, beautiful women and rich living. He was a crook--who called himself an international financier--and he got away with it because highly placed people were impressed by his spending and his line. After he had been repeatedly exposed in court for shady dealings and declared non grata in France, he was, on the eve of his wedding in 1941, a guest at the White House of President Franklin Roosevelt.

Troikas & Sapphires. That is fact, but in much of Rubinstein's biography the New York police found it hard to separate fact from fabrication. He was born in St. Petersburg where his father, he said, was financial adviser to the monk Rasputin--a background hardly calculated to recommend Serge to the business world; it was as if a clergyman told his colleagues that his father used to be chaplain to King Kong.

Serge was a precocious boy whose doting mother pampered him and made him wear sailor suits until he was 13. After the Bolsheviks took over in Russia, father Rubinstein, according to Serge, lined his greatcoat with rubles and jewels, and raced off across the frozen Gulf of Finland in a troika. The family followed him four months later, and ten-year-old Serge arrived in Stockholm with money pinned all over his undershirt, and a big sapphire hung around his neck.

The Rubinsteins drifted around Europe, from Stockholm to Paris to Vienna. On his 15th birthday Serge decided he had an inferiority complex, asked his parents for an appointment with Dr. Alfred Adler, the famed Viennese psychologist, for a birthday present. Since Adler was a responsible physician, the story that Rubinstein later told seemed one other piece of his self-dramatization. Serge said that Adler offered to cure his neurosis, but added: "Do you want that? You'll just be an ordinary person. The way you are now, you'll be driven by ambition and desires." Serge said he decided to remain neurotic.

Larceny & Marquises. When he was 18, Serge went off to Britain's Cambridge, graduated two years later with high honors. His older brother Andre paid for his education, spent the rest of his life unsuccessfully suing Serge for millions he claimed Serge had stolen.

At 23, Serge was manager of the tiny Banque Franco-Asiatique in Paris, which was the French financial agent for the Chinese government. Rubinstein discovered that a series of old, defaulted Chinese bonds were due to mature shortly, and quietly bought up a million dollars worth for $25,000. When the Chinese government forwarded more than a million dollars to cover interest payments on another series of bonds. Rubinstein simply paid off on the defaulted series, which rose automatically in value. "I had the bonds," he explained later, "and I had the money. I just paid myself off." For this kind of bald larceny, Rubinstein got a newspaper reputation as a "boy wizard of international finance."

In 1935 the French authorities told Serge to leave the country because of his shady financial transactions. Serge had another version: Premier Pierre Laval, he said, suspected Rubinstein of dallying with his mistress, a French marquise, and deported him in a fit of jealousy. Two years before his expulsion, he had got hold of operating control of the Chosen Corp., a British company which owned some Korean gold mines. It was a typically slippery operation. The company was in the midst of a management scandal (the director ultimately went off to Wormwood Scrubs prison), and the stock was momentarily cheap. Before Serge made his down payment, the stock began to rise in value, and by the time the air cleared it was apparent that Rubinstein had got in for nothing.

In 1938 Rubinstein arrived in the U.S. with a Portuguese passport which he had obtained in Shanghai for $2,000. He swore later that he was the bastard result of a premarital liaison between his mother, a Portuguese citizen (she was not) and his father, and was therefore entitled to citizenship under a Portuguese law protecting the love children of natives. Brother Andre promptly sued for defamation of their mother's character.

In the U.S., Rubinstein continued his rascally ways, and his ill-gotten fortune grew. He was sued or charged with everything from swindling to a Mann Act violation (with a blonde on a Caribbean cruise). He hired the best available legal talent, e.g., Connecticut's late Senator Brien McMahon, and paid double fees when he was acquitted. Sometimes, his friendship proved embarrassing: in 1943 the nomination of Ed Flynn, the late Democratic boss of the Bronx, to be Minister to Australia, was withdrawn after his legal associations with Rubinstein were revealed in the Senate.

All his life Rubinstein and his money attracted swarms of women, most of them beautiful and taller by several inches than the squat, 5-ft. 7-in. Serge. In 1941 he married Laurette Kilborn, a redheaded model from Flushing, L.I. After their wedding, in Alexandria, Va., Rubinstein gave a lavish reception at Washington's Shoreham Hotel, inviting 150 eminent friends. Nine ambassadors and a murmuration of Senators and Congressmen dutifully turned up to toast the bride and groom.

In Manhattan, Rubinstein bought the Fifth Avenue mansion of the late banker, Jules Bache, gave immense parties and hobnobbed with celebrities in Manhattan's restaurants and nightclubs (at least one club--El Morocco--had better sense than a lot of politicians and businessmen: it banished him "for eternity"). He conducted his business for a while from an elaborate suite of offices on Wall Street, with sliding walls and unnumbered beautiful secretaries. He also believed in numerology and developed an undisguised admiration for Napoleon; he loved to dress up as the Corsican at masquerades, kept a one-foot statuette of Napoleon on his desk.

Rembrandts & Doorkeys. During World War II, Rubinstein achieved his greatest public notoriety with his efforts to escape the draft. He was able to get his Selective Service classification changed 15 times, and each time he reverted to 1-A; with the help of influential friends, he got away. He finally met defeat, in the form of a two-year sentence and a $50,000 fine for draft evasion. While he was in Lewisburg Penitentiary his wife divorced him for, among other misdemeanors, knocking her unconscious and ripping off her clothes (last week in California, Laurette described Serge as "very kind").

After his release from prison, Serge went back to Manhattan and resumed his wicked ways. At a recent White Russian New Year's ball at the Ambassador Hotel, Serge turned up with seven girls. It was his habit to distribute house keys to his inamoratas (so that he would not have to trouble himself to walk downstairs when he summoned one late at night). Rubinstein would change the front-door lock whenever he got a new platoon of girls.

"Shall We Dance?" As police began to sift the names that crammed three thick ledgers in Rubinstein's study, a glamorous procession of Serge's women friends minced into headquarters. Betty Reed, a platinum blonde soprano, was prostrated, but rallied to give hours of information to detectives. "He wanted desperately to be accepted," said Dorothea McCarthy, a redhead. "I once saw him send a bottle of champagne to a man. He said he had once done something to the man that was unforgivable, and he wanted to try to apologize." The man was unimpressed by Serge's peace offering, Dorothea reported, and sent the champagne back with a message that he preferred seltzer. "All Serge said was, 'Shall we dance?' "

On the night of his death Rubinstein turned up at Nino's La Rue, a sleek supper club where he habitually dined, with a new girl friend, Estelle Gardner, a bosomy, cosmetics salesgirl. The two sipped martinis and pink champagne for a while, dined and danced, and left about 12:30 for a nightcap at Serge's mansion. In Rubinstein's third-floor suite. Estelle waited while he made several attempts to get Patricia Wray, another friend, on the telephone.

After about an hour, Serge said he was tired and showed Estelle to the door. He was not too tired, however, to call Pat again at 2:30 a.m. and ask her to come over. But she was really too tired, and hung up. Sometime during the next three hours Serge received another caller--his murderer.

After taking inventory, the police decided that robbery was not the motive. One of his enemies had punished a man who was so singularly immune to legal punishment. Quipped a reporter: "They've narrowed the list of suspects down to 10,000."

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