Toujours Pret

He was short, not overly bright, and bowlegged from years of polo. Yet Porfirio Rubirosa parlayed his genius for making women forget all that into 30 years of grand spree on the international circuit, a private fortune, a worldwide reputation as the last of the Casanovas, and lawful unions with five of the world's most beautiful, or else most spectacularly wealthy women.

Opinions differ on the essence of his appeal. Elsa Maxwell defined it as being "so unbelievably charming and thoughtful that you are off guard before you know it." Zsa Zsa Gabor said he was "a gentleman who should have been born a hundred years ago--this century is too fast for him, too cold." Men were apt to dismiss his allure as a capacity for taking infinite pains in the pursuit of pleasure: having a match flaming by the time a woman's cigarette touched her lips, for example, or being, as his old Paris nickname of "Toujours Pret" suggested, ever ready to supply affection. Rubi himself simply said, "I try to make women happy. A woman does not like to be pawed. She likes to be--uh--liked."

Women & Lies. His first chance to show how came in his native Dominican Republic with Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo's 17-year-old daughter Flor de Oro (Flower of Gold). Rubi was only a 22-year-old army captain and palace aide, and the Dominican dictator was not very enthusiastic about the match, but he made his new son-in-law a minor envoy to Berlin and was soon convinced he had done the right thing. "He's an excellent diplomat," exclaimed papa, "because women like him and because he is a liar." Flor de Oro tired of Rubirosa in 1937, but Trujillo had found that he came in handy for many tasks, and Rubi stayed on the Dominican diplomatic payroll most of the time until El Benefactor's assassination in 1961. At its first meeting, the new government fired him.

After a wartime marriage to French Cinemactress Danielle Darrieux, Rubi in 1947 married Doris Duke, heiress to the $100 million Duke tobacco fortune. Doubtlessly out of respect for the bride's family, Rubi smoked a cigarette all through the ceremony in Paris (Doris provided the ring), but the marriage lasted only 13 months. Doris was, as he said, "extremely generous," and he went on to become corespondent in two society divorce suits and, in 1953, Husband No. 5 of Dime Store Heiress Barbara Hutton. Babs and Rubi flew aboard a chartered Super Constellation from Manhattan to Palm Beach to honeymoon in the 14-room villa of the Maharajah of Baroda. Alas, Rubi disappeared the next day, turned up some time later aboard a yacht in the Caribbean, where, he explained, he was looking for a "fabulous treasure." Regretfully, Babs gave him some in the form of an unofficial settlement reputed by gossip columnists to be between $1,000,000 and $5,000,000.

End in the Bois. "Never again will I marry a woman of wealth," proclaimed Rubi at 44. He didn't need to. In 1957 he wed instead Odile Rodin, a 19-year-old French starlet, and retired to a relatively quiet life in his Paris home (a present from Doris), with his stable of ponies, his racing cars, his books, his garden, and his Chihuahua. Roaring home after an all-night blast celebrating his polo team's winning the French cup, the playboy of the Western World last week cracked up his Ferrari in the Bois de Boulogne, not far from where his friend, Aly Khan, was killed in a car crash five years ago. Rubi died on the way to the hospital.

He was buried in a Paris suburb in a varnished wooden coffin, after a funeral attended by 250 celebrities including Jean Kennedy Smith and Pat Kennedy Lawford, Perfume Queen Mme. Helene Rochas, Wine King Andre Dubonnet, and the proprietors of the Tour d'Argent and the Montparnasse discotheque New Jimmy's. None of his ex-wives could make it.

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