Almost more than his first shave or sexual experience, the privilege to wear long pants on a daily basis was a symbol of achieving manhood for a young teenager of the era—a sartorial bar mitzvah for the Little Lord Fauntleroy set. At school, Porfirio had become chummy with a Chilean boy, Pancho Morel, and a boy named Jit Singh, youngest son of the maharaja of Karpathula. They were younger than Porfirio, but they didn’t have the protective Doña Ana as their mothers and had not only begun wearing trousers but had worn them into nightclubs in Montmartre, lording their mature adventures over their bare-kneed Dominican pal. He seethed.
Finally, when her son was sixteen, the painstaking Doña Ana allowed him the dignity of long pants. And as soon as he buckled his belt, he was off. From the first night he steeled his nerve and sauntered into a Montmartre nightclub, Porfirio Rubirosa was at home.
“I had a racing heart and boiling blood and a delicious impatience throughout my body,” he confessed later. “I remember the doorman, the music that came in waves, the diffused light that imparted mystery to the faces.… More than 30 years have passed since that night, and I still see the wet lips opening on white teeth and the eyes that shone like lights, and I hear the laughs that merged into one single strident trumpet blare.”
He wandered home at dawn, drunk on the atmosphere and the possibilities—as well as the libations. His parents had been up all night, worried sick, more grateful for his safety than angered at his presumption. Porfirio was chastened, and resolved privately never to frighten them again. But presently he realized that, truly, he felt only the slightest bit contrite: “I am, and will always be, a man of pleasure.”
And why not? Fate and history had brought him to come of age in one of the great seats of pleasure the world would ever know. “Those who didn’t know Paris in the ’20s,” he declared with certainty decades later, “don’t know what a nightclub is.” The interwar demimonde into which he flung himself was the stuff of legend. The Montmartre of the 1920s was no longer the bohemia of starving artists that it had been before the Great War; Pablo Picasso and his adherents had moved across the Seine to Montparnasse and founded a new enclave that would soon draw the Lost Generation of American writers and free spirits. In their wake, the neighborhood that sported such venerable outposts of debauchery as the Moulin Rouge, Le Chat Noir, and the Folies Bergère as well as such lower-rent cousins as Tabarin, Monaco, La Perruche, Zelli’s, Chez Florence, and Le Grand Duc, had become increasingly associated with a blend of criminality and pleasure that lacked the éclat of arty bohemianism. It was no longer an aesthetic wonderland but rather a carnival world of low life lived hard—no place for innocents.
And yet its denizens looked favorably on this ambitious Dominican boy. Latin men were, at the time, enjoying a unique cachet. The tango craze that had begun before the war was booming and had, indeed, been amplified by other musical fads imported from the Caribbean and South America, including the Dominican merengue. Latin musicians and idle young Latin men were everywhere, and they drew to their hangouts a clientele of slumming locals, many of them women; from afternoon on into the early morning hours, the clubs of Montmartre hosted a stream of Parisian matrons led provocatively around dance floors by younger Latin men who were paid for their time: gigolos (from the French word for a loose-moraled dancing girl, gigolette). These hired guns of the boites were glamorous in a sinister fashion that gave additional luster to their reputation as men employed for pleasure.* None other than the great Rudolph Valentino, who died of a perforated ulcer during the days of Porfirio’s induction into Parisian night life, had voyaged to America from Italy as a tango specialist and was said to have made his first living in New York as a gigolo. A young Latin man couldn’t help but admire and aspire.
But crazes, of course, are designed to fade. And although the Latin vogue was wearing out, Porfirio was still in luck. The new fascination in the Parisian demimonde was with American hot jazz and black musicians, singers, and dancers. The area of Montmartre below the Butte was the Parisian Harlem, teeming with African-American expatriates and dotted with hotels, bars, cafés, and nightclubs that catered to them. Once again, a boy from the Caribbean, of mixed blood, with café au lait skin and hair described as somewhere between wavy and kinky, would blend easily into such an environment, acquiring a liberal education in sensation and reckless living that would, obviously, ingrain itself in his spirit far more deeply than anything going on at school.
In this sexy, dangerous world, the game young Porfirio more than fit in, he was a hit. But his love affair with Parisian night life would prove, at least for the time being, a dalliance. Once again, in 1926, Don Pedro’s work called for the family to move. Another tottering government had been established in Santo Domingo—this one installed by the Americans, who had pulled out their troops to allow the locals a chance. The new regime assigned Don Pedro to its embassy in London; Porfirio would be schooled relatively nearby, in Calais.
As evinced by his decision to move the boy closer to where he himself would be, Don Pedro had some concerns about this boy who seemed more dancer than warrior. Porfirio was thin, wasp-waisted, coltish. And although he had an undeniable knack for sports, there were no obvious bulges of muscle on him, nor had his mettle ever been truly tested. Don Pedro arranged for him to be tutored in boxing. “The man of action still lived beneath the diplomat’s clothes,” he later explained, “and he wanted a solid son with quick fists.”
Porfirio did no better in his studies at his new school than he had at any of the others. But the boxing was another matter. Springy and quick, he was a natural. And even better, the gym was located in a louche part of town where the young man’s eyes were caught one afternoon by a sign reading Piccadilly Bar.
He went in. He ordered a drink. He made small talk. He had a good time. He came back. “I quickly became a regular,” he later boasted, “celebrated for my youth, my free way with money, my Dominican nationality, a taste for strong cocktails and a strong hunger for the ladies.” As in Paris, his race got him noticed and his cool, breezy, agreeable manner made him popular.
The taste of notoriety went to his head. He soon felt sufficiently full of himself to accept the challenge of a fight against a local champion named Dagbert. On the big night—the humming crowd, the smoke-filled room—a sense of grandeur infused the young fighter. For a round or so, he used his training, his wile, his wits to keep Dagbert safely at bay. Then he reckoned he could grab the advantage and got cute. Dagbert saw an opening and pasted him squarely. “I got hit right in the Adam’s apple,” he remembered. “I couldn’t breathe, I was suffocating, but I was saved by the bell. But by the end of the rest period, I still hadn’t recovered. Despite the shouting, I quit the fight. The thrills of the Piccadilly were less dangerous.”
It was the last proper boxing match in which he would ever take part, and, indeed, he quit his formal training soon after. But he didn’t quit leaving campus for lessons. He simply told the authorities at school that he was off to the gym and made a beeline instead for the Piccadilly, where he delved deeper into his cups until finally he was found dead drunk one evening by his scandalized schoolmaster. It was a terminal offense: He would not be permitted to return to the school after the summer holidays.
That was just as well, because by then Dominican politics had yet once more yanked at Don Pedro, pulling him from London back to Santo Domingo, where a seemingly stable government had been installed and was working toward elections. Don Pedro, now a seasoned international diplomat and legal mind, was thought more valuable at home than in foreign courts. He returned home and, with the chimerical hope that his wayward youngest son would straighten himself out in his absence, left Porfirio in France to finish his baccalaureate studies.
The freedom provided by his parents’ absence was absolutely intoxicating. Porfirio passed most of that summer partying in Biarritz with his wealthy schoolmates. “The images that come to my mind,” he recalled “are pictures of a brilliant sea beneath the sun, sports cars tearing through little towns, thés dansantes with women who acted like girls. Everything was the pretext for a dare: swimming, drinking, racing, love. Naturally, when we returned to Paris, we tried to extend the crazy atmosphere of our vacations. This was made easier for me because of my father’s absence.”
Don Pedro hired a tutor—“friendliness personified” as Porfirio