Rubi was short, about five feet nine inches, and slim. Coast Guard: “Always ready.” When asked to compare Rubi’s member to a writer’s size-11 shoe, one of his paramours glanced at the shoe and merely shrugged. Truman Capote, no firsthand authority on the matter, described Rubi’s principal endowment in his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, as an “eleven-inch café-au-lait sinker as thick as a man’s wrist.” Rubi’s constant state of erection earned him the nickname Toujours Prêt, which in English is the motto of the U.S.
Yet Rubi’s potent charm had as much to do with the former as the latter. There are a lot of men who are excellent in bed, but you can’t go out to dinner with them.” “He made each woman feel that she was the most important thing in the world. “If he was talking to an 80-year-old or a 4-year-old, the most beautiful woman in the world could walk in and he wouldn’t look at her,” says Mildred Ricart, a friend from the Dominican Republic whose husband, Jaime, had been in the foreign service with Rubi. When he was around, an unlit cigarette never touched a woman’s lips. They were more for night, as sex objects.” Women weren’t taken as seriously, and you didn’t see them during the day. You went to a men’s club, you played sports with just men. “You have to remember that in the 1950s,” says Taki, “it was much more of a man’s world. “He was a gentleman, and a gentleman who has a lot of success with girls keeps his big mouth shut. “We never spoke about girls,” says Claude Terrail, the owner of the four-star restaurant La Tour d’Argent in Paris and one of Rubi’s closest friends. Columnist Taki Theodoracopulos recalls that when Rubi got drunk he would take out his guitar and sing, “I’m just a gigolo.” One friend sheepishly confirms that Rubi, who married the two richest women in the world, one after the other-Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton-slept with “thousands of women” while living in Paris in the 1950s and 60s.
His conquests included Eva Perón, Ava Gardner, Jayne Mansfield, Veronica Lake, and Dolores Del Rio the full tally, though, will never be known. He was widely seen to be in the same class as Don Juan and Casanova. The ones who didn’t were jealous of him.”īut it was Rubi’s success with the fair sex that made him a legend. He believed in the bond of male friendship.
The inspiration for the romantic hero in the 1966 Harold Robbins potboiler, The Adventurers, “he was the ultimate man’s man,” says banker Gerard Bonnet, a polo-playing friend from Paris. In life Porfirio Rubirosa played polo, piloted B-25 bombers, raced Ferraris at Le Mans, and hunted for sunken treasure in the Caribbean. He died within sight of two of his favorite recreation spots, the Longchamps Race Course and the Bagatelle Polo Club. The wooden steering wheel of the type used in racing competition had crushed his chest. Rubirosa died in an ambulance on the way to a hospital.
His powerful Ferrari sportscar, traveling at high speed, jumped the curb and crashed into a tree on Avenue de la Reine-Marguerite in the Bois de Boulogne at 8 a.m., according to the police. PORFIRIO RUBIROSA IS KILLED AS AUTO CRASHES IN PARIS, July 5, -Porfirio Rubirosa, former Dominican diplomat, international sportsman, and playboy, died in an automobile accident here today.