The Ferrari hit the tree and stopped. Porfirio Rubirosa, fifty-five years old, was dead. No one ever established whether the crash that ended his life in 1965 was the result of too much drink or the weight of a depression that had been closing in on him for years. What was certain was that the car, the speed, and the man had all been part of the same restless equation, and that the man who had spent three decades living like a character out of a novel had finally run out of road.

The woman he left behind was Odile Rodin, his fifth wife, thirty years his junior. She would eventually move to Rio de Janeiro and marry a Brazilian businessman. But in that moment, the story of the Dominican playboy who had charmed, manipulated, and married some of the richest and most famous women in the world had come to a sudden, ambiguous end. To understand how Rubirosa arrived at that tree, it is necessary to go back to the beginning, to a childhood shaped by a father who taught him everything about pleasure and nothing about restraint.

Porfirio Rubirosa was born in the Dominican Republic in 1909, the youngest of three brothers. When he was six years old, his family moved to Paris after his father, Pedro Rubirosa, secured a diplomatic post in France. Pedro was a man of considerable presence, a brilliant career diplomat with a vibrant social life and refined tastes. Above all, he was famously fond of women.

His youngest son absorbed every lesson. But where the father took both work and pleasure seriously, the son would devote himself only to pleasure. At seventeen, the young Rubirosa returned to the Dominican Republic and followed his father into the military. He rose quickly, and by the age of twenty he had reached the rank of captain in the army and earned a place on the national polo team.

It was through polo that Rubirosa first crossed paths with the brutal Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Rubirosa deployed his charm and impressed the strongman. Trujillo made him an offer he could not refuse: a new post as a lieutenant in his personal presidential guard. One of his first assignments seemed simple enough.

He was to meet the dictator’s seventeen-year-old daughter at the airport. Her name was Flor de Oro, and she had just returned from her studies in France. Rubirosa fell for her the moment he saw her. Beautiful women were his weakness, and this one was beautiful beyond question.

He struck up a conversation in French, and his charm worked so well that he was soon invited to a dance at the presidential palace. That invitation was only the beginning. At the ball, Rubirosa committed a grave breach of etiquette. He danced with the dictator’s daughter for every single number.

What had begun as a flirtation had become an open provocation, and Trujillo noticed. The dictator’s rage was immediate. Rubirosa was dismissed from his post in the presidential guard. He went into hiding at his family’s coffee plantation, uncertain what would happen next.

Eight days later, a message arrived from Flor. She wanted to meet him secretly at a photography booth, away from prying eyes. It was a turning point. Flor de Oro proposed to Rubirosa, and they married in 1932.

The hasty marriage was risky, but it bought Rubirosa something invaluable: a return to Trujillo’s favor. Following his father’s path, he began a diplomatic career that took him first to Berlin and then to Paris. Marriage did nothing to tame him. Paris was a city of temptations, and Rubirosa surrendered to all of them.

He became famous for raucous parties that stretched through the night, returning home with lipstick marks on his collar. The irony was cruel: he beat his wife when she asked where he had been. Years of infidelity and mistreatment wore Flor down, and in 1937 they divorced. The separation was dangerous.

Rubirosa feared returning to the Dominican Republic, knowing the fury of his former father-in-law would be waiting. Money also became a problem once the support of his ex-wife’s family dried up. But Rubirosa found an unexpected way to compensate. Europe was deteriorating politically as the Second World War approached, and many Jews were desperately seeking refuge in safer countries.

Rubirosa began selling them visas to the Dominican Republic. His motive was probably personal gain, but there was no doubt that he saved many lives in the process. The outbreak of war brought new challenges. His views on the Germans were unacceptable to the Vichy government in France, and he found himself detained for five months in a German hotel.

Rescue came from an unexpected quarter. At the time, Rubirosa was deeply infatuated with the beautiful French actress Danièle Darrieux. She managed to secure his release in exchange for some promotional work in Berlin. Once they were free, the couple decided to marry quickly, despite the ravages of war.

Life together proved harder than expected. In 1944, they were ambushed in Paris while returning home from a nightclub. They were exposed in a car, completely vulnerable to the attackers, but Rubirosa shielded his wife with his body and took three bullets near his kidneys. After the horrifying attack, it became clear they needed to leave the city.

They went into hiding and spent the remaining months of the German occupation of France at Darrieux’s farm. Even there they were not entirely safe. Once, they were forced to spend several days concealed in a friend’s barn. The couple had endured a great deal together, but shared trauma would not prove enough to hold them together over the long term.

Darrieux, coming from the glittering world of cinema, unintentionally introduced Rubirosa to many beautiful and eligible women. One of them was the journalist Doris Duke, heiress to a fortune estimated at one hundred million dollars. After interviewing Darrieux in Rubirosa’s presence, the two felt a mutual attraction. Duke became determined to have Rubirosa for herself and used her money to make it happen.

It was rumored that she offered Darrieux one million dollars to divorce him. Whatever the truth of the offer, the divorce was finalized in 1947, and Rubirosa married Duke shortly afterward. Just before the formal ceremony, however, Duke’s lawyers surprised Rubirosa with a prenuptial agreement. He hesitated, but in the end he signed it.

Marrying one of the richest women in the world had its advantages. Rubirosa was showered with luxury gifts, including sports cars, horses, and even a World War II-era B-25 bomber. But wealth and extravagance did not translate into a successful marriage. The two had very different expectations.

Duke expected her husband to be available to her at all times. Rubirosa had always been fiercely independent, determined to do exactly as he pleased. That independence led to secret affairs with other women. One of them was his first wife, Flor.

When Duke caught Rubirosa with his ex-wife in flagrante, the marriage collapsed rapidly and ended in divorce. Remarkably, it had lasted barely a year. Because of the prenuptial agreement he had signed, Rubirosa received only a seventeenth-century house in Paris and a modest alimony of 25,000 dollars a year, payable until he remarried. Repeated bachelorhood and a desire for a rich wife to support him had become a pattern in his life.

Asked once about work, he delivered his famous line: “Work? It is impossible for me to work. I do not have time for it. ”

Rubirosa seemed to consider his profession to be socializing with women and entertaining.

Among the various circles he moved in, he found himself drawn to car racing. He befriended many racing drivers, and the racing world became another space where he could meet new women. All women seemed to be of romantic interest to him, even the wives and girlfriends of his peers. One married woman who caught his attention was the celebrated American-Hungarian actress Zsa Zsa Gabor.

After a brief encounter at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1953, she returned to her suite to take a nap. When she woke, she found her room filled with flowers and a message that read: “To the most beautiful woman. ” Rubirosa pursued her relentlessly, showering her with flowers and phone calls. Day by day, Zsa Zsa became more attached to him.

But this passion was only a glimpse of his darker, possessive side. In time, Gabor’s husband filed for divorce. Shortly afterward, Rubirosa gave Gabor an ultimatum: marriage or separation. Despite her desire for Rubirosa, she remained conflicted over her love for her husband.

Rubirosa was not satisfied with the situation. On one occasion, he attacked and beat her. Gabor responded in a startlingly convoluted way, defending him by saying: “His beating me is proof of his love for me. A woman who has never been beaten by a man has never been loved.

”

Meanwhile, Rubirosa’s bank balance continued to dwindle. So when an extremely wealthy woman entered his life, he was drawn to her despite his interest in Gabor. The heiress was Barbara Hutton. She was in her forties, not the type of youthful beauty he was accustomed to.

But she was rich, very rich. Curiously, she was also in a long-running feud with Rubirosa’s ex-wife, Doris Duke. If she married him, it would be a satisfying act of revenge. Perhaps for the wrong reasons, both agreed to the marriage, and they were wed in a lavish ceremony in New York in 1953.

The marriage was no better than Rubirosa’s previous ones. Hutton was in poor health, and with Rubirosa’s complete lack of empathy, the situation was a poor fit. His former lover Zsa Zsa Gabor mocked him, saying: “I bet this man will come back to pursue me within six months and a few weeks. ” Still, they tried to make the relationship work, or at least Hutton did.

She lavished him with expensive gifts: a large coffee plantation, forty suits, eight polo ponies, an airplane, and on one occasion, two and a half million dollars in cash. Reports even claimed she was spending 66,000 dollars a day on him. Yet despite all this, Rubirosa was, for some reason, unhappy and visibly bored. Astonishingly, this marriage was even shorter than his previous one-year marriage.

After only two weeks, Hutton left Rubirosa and moved in with her aunt. The rift only deepened, and after just 53 days, they separated. Rubirosa was never the husband Hutton needed, given her condition. He longed to return to his wild bachelor life, complaining: “She stays in bed and reads all day.

It is a very boring life. ”

Despite the shock of the affair, one thing was true: this marriage had been very profitable for him. He was no longer broke. Now free again, Rubirosa returned directly to the arms of his former lover, Zsa Zsa Gabor, exactly as she had predicted.

By 1956, Rubirosa was 47 and back in Paris. For various reasons, things ultimately did not work out with Gabor, and the two parted ways. Soon after, Rubirosa met a young, ambitious French actress named Odile Rodin. He fell in love at first sight, saying: “I fell in love with her from the first moment I saw her.

She was young, fresh, very beautiful, and had a mysterious charm. ”

Rodin’s mother knew Rubirosa’s reputation and forbade her daughter from responding to his advances. Nevertheless, she eventually relented after seeing the harmony between them during a quiet dance. Rubirosa was enamored with Odile and her vitality.

For her part, she thoroughly enjoyed staying up into the early hours of the morning with him. Five months after they met, they married in October 1956. Odile soon discovered a dark side of Rubirosa that had not been visible from the outside: how controlling he was. He dictated his wishes about how she should behave, from how much hairspray she used to how modest her clothing should be.

At social gatherings, he watched her with intense jealousy, tracking her every interaction. He moved her to the outskirts of Paris, away from the film industry, to tighten his control over her. Apart from his domineering behavior, their marriage was more stable than Rubirosa’s previous relationships, outwardly free of violence and problems. As the years passed, by 1961, things changed in his homeland with the assassination of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.

He was succeeded by his son, Ramfis Trujillo, who proved to be no less unstable than his father. Ramfis’s leadership was catastrophic for the Dominican Republic. He tried to eliminate the Venezuelan president, provoked the United States to impose an embargo on the country, and then decided to embezzle 200,000 dollars from the treasury and flee the nation. Eventually a new leader came to power: the elected president Joaquín Balaguer, who soon dismissed Rubirosa from his post as a Dominican diplomat.

The playboy sank into immediate financial distress. By that time, many of his millionaire friends had distanced themselves from him, and money troubles weighed heavily on his shoulders. Living without money was difficult for a man accustomed to a life of leisure and pleasure. Rubirosa fell into depression.

In 1965, he was dead, the Ferrari wrapped around a tree. Whether the crash was caused by excessive drinking or by depression was never known. Odile later moved to Rio de Janeiro and married a Brazilian businessman.

The man who had once said he had no time for work had spent his whole life proving it, and in the end, the empty hours caught up with him.