Chapter 27
The Trujillo Stink
Ionce heard someone call Zsa Zsa “the world’s most brilliant stupid person,” and her judgment in the late fifties confirms the epithet. This time the career vandal was not Rubirosa but his amigo and former brother-in-law from the Dominican Republic, Rafael “Ramfis” Trujillo, rancid son of the foul dictator.
Born in 1929, Ramfis was awarded the rank of colonel at age five. From then on, he appeared often with his father at state occasions in full military regalia. Adding to the child’s grotesque costume was a chest covered with fake medals. Shawn Levy, in The Last Playboy, his biography of Rubirosa, portrays Ramfis as “a pouty brat” who was “weak, uncertain, childish.” Despite such liabilities, he remained the apple of his father’s evil eye. Trujillo père promoted him to brigadier general at age nine. In his twenty-second year, Ramfis was named commander of the Dominican Republic’s midget air force, even though, as Levy points out, “he couldn’t pilot so much as a crop duster.” Beginning in his teens, Ramfis learned torture and massacre from his father, who intended this first-born son to carry on the dynasty.
In 1957, Trujillo enrolled his heir at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. If Robert Altman had filmed this story rather than M*A*S*H, the comedy might have been not only dark but stygian, for Ramfis the cadet possessed all the diligence and character of a Donald Trump, had that future commander-in-chief not received five deferments to avoid the draft. As politicians-in-waiting, however, both fought similar battles. Trump told Howard Stern in 1997 that his own “personal Vietnam” was avoiding sexually transmitted diseases. “I feel like a great and very brave soldier,” he crowed, implying Napoleonic battles minus a genital Waterloo. Such was Ramfis’s own field of battle. He waged his venereal campaigns with such vigor that he often lacked time and energy to show up for class.
Upon arrival in Kansas at age twenty-eight, Ramfis deposited a million dollars in various bank accounts. He also received a monthly allowance from the dictator of $50,000, while the majority of Dominicans struggled in poverty. After weekday classes, Ramfis and his sizable entourage occupied a ranch house in the town of Leavenworth and on weekends they drove to Kansas City, Missouri, where the heavily guarded ninth floor of the Ambassador Hotel was theirs for the entire nine-month course of study. At both locations, some three dozen detectives and bodyguards patrolled around the clock, for the Trujillos were hated throughout the world.
Having been prodigiously indulged all his life, Ramfis quickly grew bored in Kansas. Along with sloth, he suffered from depression, anxiety, insomnia, and excessive drinking. Doctors prescribed pioneering tranquilizers and antidepressants, but no drug listed in the PDR was effective in treating a sociopathic personality. Nor did he find comfort in his wife, Octavia, and their six children, five of whom had accompanied their parents to the American Midwest.
Ramfis, Octavia, and their youngsters returned to the Dominican Republic for the Christmas holidays in 1957. While there, he explained to the dictator that responsibility for a wife and children made study difficult, not to mention their hindrance to pleasure after long hours of instruction. A divorce would be so convenient, he whined. Exit family.
During the spring term Ramfis welcomed his mentor, Rubirosa. Learning of his friend’s boredom, Rubi called Zsa Zsa.
“Do you remember young Ramfis?” he asked.
“Of course,” Zsa Zsa giggled. “He’s my favorite Dominican after you.” She had met him twice, once when she visited the Dominican Republic with Rubirosa and another time in New York.
“If I send him out, can you show him around?” He told her that Ramfis loved movies and the beautiful stars, like herself, who starred in them.
“Perfect timing,” Zsa Zsa purred. Her latest picture had just wrapped, and she was thrilled because Queen of Outer Space offered one of the biggest parts of her career.
Learning that Ramfis was famished for blondes, and that he had a burning crush on Kim Novak, Zsa Zsa told Rubi that she and Kim were good friends. “Any friend of mine is a friend of Kim’s,” she assured him. “It’s happened before. Did I tell you about the time—well, you remember.”
When he put down the receiver, Rubi smiled at Ramfis. Whatever his actual words in Spanish, the gist of it was, She will make you glad you’re not in Kansas anymore. “Nobody gives a party like Zsa Zsa,” Rubi assured his protégé. “The things I could tell you.”
* * *
Before Zsa Zsa could set to work on her welcome-to-Hollywood soirée for Ramfis, she had to meet several professional obligations. So grateful was he for the promised event, however, that he began phoning her several times a week to drool about movie stars and to remind her obsessively of his eagerness to meet Kim Novak. “Yes, dahling,” Zsa Zsa said as she rushed off to rehearsal for an episode of The George Gobel Show. During a break, she got a message to step outside and see the present that had just been delivered for her. Parked at the door was a red Mercedes-Benz convertible that Ramfis had sent by chartered plane.
She called him in ecstasy. “But you shouldn’t have,” she gurgled unconvincingly. “How can I thank you?”
“Your friendship is thanks enough.”
Zsa Zsa drove the car home and parked it in the garage beside her several others. Since a chauffered limousine usually picked her up for television shows, she had no need of yet another fancy car. Her hectic pace continued. In January 1958 she appeared on the popular afternoon drama series, NBC Matinee Theater. In February she flew to Palm Beach for the annual Heart Fund Ball, of which she was honorary chairwoman. While there, she heard from Ramfis again. “I’m in New Orleans for Mardi Gras,” he informed her. He had sailed across the Gulf of Mexico on the presidential yacht and wanted Zsa Zsa to come on board as his guest. “I have the consul general of the Dominican Republic and his wife aboard, and several other friends. You’ll be well chaperoned.” So Zsa Zsa recalled, though it’s doubtful that the word “chaperone” entered his mind or issued from his mouth in any language.
She arrived in New Orleans at night. Her low-light description sounds like the opening sequence in a film noir. “At the airport three of his aides waited to whisk me in an enormous black limousine through the city to the dark, black docks. It was like a murder mystery—squads of police on guard, secret-service agents in the shadows, and there, looming like a great trans-Atlantic liner, the magnificent Angelita. It was the longest yacht in the world. I saw dark sailors in white uniforms peering out. I heard, floating across the water to me, the soft Caribbean music of the orchestra.”
On board the yacht, she wallowed in banana-republic luxury for several days in the company of shady fellow guests whom she named only as “six or seven men and three or four lovely women.” She hardly recognized Ramfis when he greeted her. Gone were whatever youthful looks he once had. Zsa Zsa tried not to notice his swollen face, puffy from drink and drugs, the piled-up hair that gave him the look of a swarthy cockatoo, and the banal, imbecilic eyes.
She focused on the overdone sumptuousness of her Louis Quinze suite and its golden bed, the Aubusson carpet, the pink marble bath with gold taps. Like the aimless rich in an Antonioni film, the Trujillo party and his entourage of goons moved off the sultry waters and into the sweaty town, joining the Mardi Gras revels and elevating Zsa Zsa, their quixotic star, to elegance concocted of tinsel and paste, which to her looked like Versailles. And like Marie Antoinette, she gave no thought to the poor peasants across the water in the Dominican Republic.
In the powder room of a nightclub a woman claiming to be a fan took Zsa Zsa’s picture. At the time it seemed harmless enough. Next day, the mayor of New Orleans came on board the Angelita with his wife. He brought along the morning paper, which headlined: ZSA ZSA IS HERE; BUT WHERE? IS SHE VISITING THE TRUJILLO YACHT? Illustrating the story was the powder-room photo of Zsa Zsa. “They love to make scandal wherever I go,” Zsa Zsa groused. The mayor soothed her feelings. “You’ll come with me to city hall and I’ll present the keys to the city and name you an honorary citizen of New Orleans.”
Humid mist and gray shadows hung not only over the yacht and above the entire city; the murky damp closed in quietly on Zsa Zsa herself, whose nervous merriment among the masked faces of Mardi Gras could not dispel the stealthy whisperings in the Angelita’s corridors and the curious cries in the night. Whatever her pleasures, she could not linger on in the fantastic dream, and so her revels ended.
The sunshine of Los Angeles, draped in webs of haze, did not relieve Zsa Zsa’s vague foreboding. What was the gnawing that refused to state its scheme? But work, always work, pushed it away. Jack Benny’s Shower of Stars in March, another appearance on NBC Matinee Theater in April, and her first invitation to Jack Paar’s late-night talk show, which would take her to New York in early May.
But before departure, two conspicuous events.
* * *
If one listed the ten most assiduous party givers of the twentieth century—in the U.S., at least—the names would include Elsa Maxwell, Perle Mesta, Truman Capote, and Zsa Zsa. By the late fifties, her parties routinely earned photo spreads in big-city newspapers and occasionally in Life and other national magazines.
In that spring of 1958, Zsa Zsa’s house seldom quieted. She was either planning two big occasions, attending to every detail as expert party givers do, or else the events were taking place. First came Francesca’s eleventh birthday celebration on March 10. For this annual event Zsa Zsa wanted more than cake, sweet drinks, and kiddie games. She hoped Francesca would remember the day forever. This year Zsa Zsa decided that the children would dress as grown-ups. She counted on their behavior matching their outfits. In previous years mayhem had erupted, leaving her house a shambles. Invitations specified long evening gowns for girls, tuxedos and black ties for boys. Zsa Zsa’s canny sense of how dress affects behavior worked as she predicted with the assembled guests, who loved the pretense of adulthood. They sipped ginger ale from martini glasses and parroted the latest talk in “the industry.”
Conrad Hilton gave Francesca a gold and pearl necklace. Ramfis sent a bouffant ball gown from New Orleans. (In future years Francesca would not speak his name.) Other gifts included Nancy Drew mystery novels and a gold watch. On that Monday afternoon the house filled with young sophisticates: Kathryn Grayson’s daughter Patricia, Van Johnson’s daughter Schuyler, Dick Powell and June Allyson’s Pamela, Keenan Wynn’s son Tracy, Deborah Kerr’s Melanie, and the two sons of Franchot Tone, Jeff and Pat. There were eighteen guests in all.
Carrie Fisher, not yet two, didn’t attend, but her father did. A picture in Life shows him hugging Francesca. Like many young girls across the country, Francesca had a crush on Pat Boone, who was then at the height of his cloying fame. Unlike other little girls, however, Francesca was called to the phone to hear her absolute idol sing “Happy Birthday, dear Franci.” After much ribbing from the youngsters, Eddie Fisher sang “April Love”—Pat Boone’s big hit. Then Johnny Mathis sang, accompanied at the piano by Jolie.
Well-mannered children, like obedient dogs, are never one hundred percent house trained. As afternoon faded to evening, little ladies and gents regressed. Tired; out of sorts; tears—Zsa Zsa witnessed the entire palette of childhood disgruntlement, as fisticuffs broke out among the boys and minor hair snatching among the girls. Yet no one wanted to leave, even as annoyed parents threatened dire detentions.
“But for my sweet daughter,” Zsa Zsa said with great satisfaction, “it was the night of nights. And also for me, her proud mother.”
* * *
A few weeks later, in April, Zsa Zsa gave her party of the year. She determined to invite everyone in Hollywood that Ramfis wanted to meet, and then some. One hundred and ten invitations went out, with only a few regrets from those filming on location. For Zsa Zsa, any party was an ordeal because of her exacting arrangements. “Every flower must be in place,” she said, as if writing a manual, “an ashtray cannot be awry, house, food, help, decorations, program, music—all must be perfection.”
Lending respectability to the occasion were cohostesses Jolie and Eva. Who could criticize a lady whose mother and sister were in attendance, even if the guest of honor was a squalid reprobate? Arriving guests also towered above the unseemly: Mr. and Mrs. James Stewart, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Taylor, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Mitchum (his jail term for marijuana almost forgotten), Zsa Zsa’s close friends James and Pamela Mason, her very best friend Kathryn Grayson, Louella Parsons, Mr. and Mrs. Kirk Douglas, Bea Lillie, Ginger Rogers, Rhonda Fleming, Shirley MacLaine, Maureen O’Hara, Ann Miller, George Sanders (“Dearest Cokiline,” he whispered as he kissed her cheek, “this is a party to end all parties”), Kim Novak, who was already intimately acquainted with Ramfis since his arrival in town a week earlier. And Rubirosa and his young wife, Odile. Ramfis had flown them in from Paris just for tonight.
“Mr. George Sanders,” Zsa Zsa said, hooking her arm through his, “may I introduce Mr. Porfirio Rubirosa.” Then she recalled: they had met unforgettably on Christmas Eve a few years back, when attire was considerably less formal than tonight’s black tie. Mr. Sanders and Mr. Rubirosa shook hands and smiled as if for a dental X-ray. The encounter was one of perfect aplomb, except that a moment later George’s left hand quivered and he spilled a flute of champagne on Zsa Zsa’s party frock.
Zsa Zsa dreaded the encounter with Odile, but the younger woman won her over with a question, posed in French: “Rubi stays out all night in les boîtes de nuit, drinking and—well, what shall I do?”
“Chérie, that is Rubi. There is nothing at all to be done. Rien du tout!”
Ramfis flitted from star to star. Among the guests, the savvy Masons, James and Pamela, would have been aware of the Trujillos and their reign of terror, and a few other guests also. But Hollywood was still a company town, as insular in some ways as a medieval walled city. Then, too, since the United States government and the largely subservient American media favored bloody dictators placed strategically in Latin America, so long as they were anti-communist, real information about Trujillo and his offspring would have required searching beyond the Los Angeles Times or the trade papers, which constituted most of Hollywood’s reading.
The party cost $10,000, which Zsa Zsa said came from her pocket. Given Ramfis’s bank accounts, however, it’s more likely that he picked up the tab. The consensus among departing guests around 4:00 a.m., and among the wide-awake Gabors who swapped gossip and bon mots for another hour, was that Zsa Zsa’s party was the social event of the season.
Two days later, her furrier telephoned. Could she drop by his store in Beverly Hills to choose the style chinchilla coat she preferred? One had been ordered for her just that morning.
Astounded, she asked who ordered it.
“Mr. Ramfis Trujillo, with his compliments.”
* * *
In 1956, Zsa Zsa had formed a professional alliance with Joey Adams, the Borscht Belt comedian and New York Post columnist. Their initial act, which ran for a month in Las Vegas at the Riviera Hotel, proved a lucrative outlet for Zsa Zsa’s talents. Now, with film offers becoming less frequent, she approached Adams and they landed a ten-day engagement at the Cafe de Paris in Washington, D.C. Zsa Zsa’s take was said to be a thousand dollars a night.
Despite its elegant name, the Cafe de Paris was the kind of glitzy front where you might glimpse money laundering in the kitchen and payoffs in the parking lot. Audiences there being less demanding than in, say, New York, they laughed when Adams greeted them: “Good evening, ladies and germs. Here’s a story I just heard—a Jew and a parrot walk into a bar . . .”
Eventually Zsa Zsa came onstage in a sequined low-cut dress and costume jewelry from Mama’s shop. Gazing at her chest with goggle eyes, Adams said, “It’s thrilling to be here with the three of you.” Billed as the Professor of Love, she took questions from the audience: “Zsa Zsa, how many husbands have you had?”
“Do you mean apart from my own?”
“What’s the best way to keep a man from straying?”
“Shoot him in ze legs.”
This shtick, of course, was old and gray even then, but Zsa Zsa recycled it in every venue and continued to do so for the next forty years on television. At some point she must have faced the wretched fact that she had become a cartoon, but given her guts and determination, plus the indomitable Gabor genes, she never stopped playing the star. And it worked, to a point. Even those who dubbed her a has-been prefaced it with the words “celebrity” and “glamorous.”
The grimness of her professional situation had not yet dawned, but with Hollywood studios on the verge of collapse, and contracts cancelled rather than renewed, she and other famous blondes were about to become passé. In six years she had gone from John Huston and Moulin Rouge to this vulgarian and his tit jokes.
In proportion as her claim diminished—her claim to consideration as a diva—Zsa Zsa counterclaimed prima donna rights. She grew more temperamental, demanding, mercenary, headstrong. Deeper into her forties, but claiming twenty-five, she became a parody of the earlier Zsa Zsa. Added to her miseries was deepening bipolar disorder, for which no foolproof treatment existed. As a comedienne, she covered humiliation and heartbreak with witty comebacks, even if that meant coasting on lines exhausted and moldy from overuse. All the same, she might still have rescued her career had she chosen her friends more judiciously.
* * *
While appearing with Joey Adams in Washington, Zsa Zsa received a telephone call. “Miss Gabor, this is United Press International calling. Is it true that General Trujillo gave you a Mercedes-Benz roadster?” Standing at a wall telephone outside her cramped, unadorned dressing room at the Cafe de Paris, and caught off guard, Zsa Zsa answered, “Yes, of course it’s true. Why?” Since the gift had arrived months earlier, she couldn’t imagine why anyone was interested now.
“Is it true that Miss Kim Novak also received a Mercedes from the general?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” she snapped.
Next day’s headline: KIM NOVAK AND ZSA ZSA GABOR RECEIVE GIFT AUTOS FROM TRUJILLO.
When the press got wind of the chinchilla evening jacket—a confection of the thickest pelts—they called again for a statement. Even if Russell Birdwell had been there for damage control, it was too late. The scandal flamed and scorched like wildfire. It didn’t help her case that Zsa Zsa told a reporter, in flippant tones, “He gave me a lovely chinchilla coat because I worked so hard to make his visit to Hollywood pleasant. I gave a terrific party for him and he is not the kind of man who says thank you with a bouquet of flowers.”
Headlines roared on and on, even in small-town newspapers. Time and Newsweek had their fun, and Life ran a photo spread: in one picture, Zsa Zsa, Kim, Ramfis, Rubi, and Odile; in another, Ramfis’s children and their nurse. According to the story in the issue of May 26, 1958, Zsa Zsa’s Mercedes 190 SL cost $5,800 and the chinchilla $17,000. Kim’s Mercedes 220 S convertible cost $8,700, and her suitor’s generosity extended to $5,000 worth of jewelry. Zsa Zsa claimed she had tried to sell her gift car because it lacked automatic transmission and was therefore difficult for her to drive. All the same, she posed for Life seated under the steering wheel. In the photo, her expression was that of the proverbial cat who has lapped up the cream. Elsewhere, she posed in the chinchilla as if the little animals had grown it especially for her.
Soon Confidential, Whisper, and the other scandal magazines ran cover stories on Zsa Zsa, Kim, Ramfis, and his largesse. On television and in night spots comedians made lurid jokes about Zsa Zsa’s party giving secrets. One columnist even suggested that she be deported for moral turpitude. Zsa Zsa later admitted that Eva was “terribly upset” by the scandal. “She is much more practical minded than I am,” said Zsa Zsa, as if the Trujillo episode were no more than a parking ticket stuck on her windshield.
Then the coup de grâce. A reporter phoned the Cafe de Paris to ask Zsa Zsa whether she had a response to the congressman. She had no idea what he was talking about until he explained in detail. “Congressman Wayne Hays of Ohio. What do you think about his statement in the House of Representatives that you are the most expensive courtesan since Madame de Pompadour?”
The reference was to the Marquise de Pompadour, chief mistress to Louis XV of France in the eighteenth century. Behind the congressional podium, Hays had this to say: “If this scarlet woman continues her tricks with this Latin American playboy of hers, foreign aid as we know it today may come tumbling down around our feet.”
Hays was known as the meanest man in the House. Peter H. Brown, in his biography Such Devoted Sisters: Those Fabulous Gabors, sets the indelible scene: “A gigantic color banner of Zsa Zsa Gabor striking a seductive pose from the film Lili was unfurled before the men in the U.S. House of Representatives. Congressman Hays, a big man with a thundering voice, looked around to see if his words were having the proper effect. A silence had settled over his peers. He let the hush play its course before he pulled out his ace in the hole.
“ ‘And here,’ said Hays, unfurling still another photo of Zsa Zsa, ‘is the most expensive courtesan since Madame de Pompadour. And I have seen evidence that direct American aid to the Dominican Republic is being sent right back to our own shores in the form of expensive gifts to Miss Zsa Zsa Gabor and her friends. If we want to give foreign aid to movie stars, let’s pass a special bill and get rid of the middleman. Hell, let’s pass a bill and send the money straight to Zsa Zsa out there in Beverly Hills.’
“There was a strong reaction. The congressmen rose to their feet, clapped, whistled, and cheered.”
Zsa Zsa’s response in the press sounded weak. “If Mr. Hays comes from behind his congressional wall of immunity and repeats this statement, I will sue him for slander.” Rage as she might, there was nothing she could do. She should have listened to those friends who warned her not to get involved with anyone named Trujillo. She never named them, but the warnings may well have come from James and Pamela Mason, from Eva, from Tony Gallucci. He, perhaps more than anyone else in her circle, could smell taint from afar. And unlike his impetuous sister-in-law, Gallucci knew what to do when an odor grew noxious.
The U.S. Congress had not finished with Zsa Zsa. Representative Charles Porter of Oregon, echoing his Ohio colleague, suggested that since Ramfis “spends a million dollars a year, the $1.3 million in U.S. aid to the Dominican Republic be given directly to the taxable movie stars instead of going through the Trujillos.”
Zsa Zsa’s heedless behavior caused this embarrassment, as it would trigger disputes and scandals for the rest of her life. In this case, however, she had the last laugh, although it took eighteen years. In 1976, Wayne Hays resigned his seat in the House of Representatives after a sex scandal involving his former secretary, Elizabeth Ray. The Washington Post quoted Ray as saying that while she was ostensibly hired for office work, “I can’t type, I can’t file, I can’t even answer the phone.” But disgraced congressmen, like old soldiers, don’t die; they just fade away. Three years after his own scandal, Hays was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives and served one term.
Zsa Zsa holds the distinction of being one of the very few film stars to be censured in the U.S. Congress. The other is Ingrid Bergman, who became pregnant by Italian director Roberto Rossellini while still married to her first husband. When the story broke, a senator condemned her as “an assault upon the institution of marriage” and “a powerful influence of evil.” The irony of such pronouncements is glaring. The sexism, the hypocrisy, and the pestilential wrongs of the U.S. Senate, the House, and the presidency are as enduring as the republic for which they stand.
* * *
After the assassination of Trujillo the dictator in 1961, Ramfis briefly took over the country. He continued the former policies of murder, torture, and repression until later that year, when he was deposed. He and all the remaining Trujillos fled to Europe aboard the luxurious Angelita. Also on board was Trujillo’s casket, which was said to be lined with four million dollars in cash as well as jewels and incriminating documents.
In 1962 Ramfis and others of the Trujillo family settled in Spain under the protection of another bloody dictator, Francisco Franco. Ramfis died in Madrid in 1969 of injuries sustained in the crash of his blue Ferrari sports car.