He Married Doris Duke. Then Barbara Hutton. Then He Crashed His Ferrari in the Bois de Boulogne.

In this documentary, we explore the life of Porfirio Rubirosa — the Dominican playboy, polo player, race-car driver, and diplomat who married five women including the two richest heiresses on Earth, was a confidant of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, allegedly procured young women for the Dominican regime, and died in his Ferrari at five in the morning on July 5, 1965, after crashing into a chestnut tree in the Bois de Boulogne following a long night of celebration at Jimmy's Club in Paris. ------------------- Gain FREE access to secret full-length documentaries on wealthy families "too scandalous for YouTube" by joining our newsletter: https://www.substack.com/@oldmoneyluxury ------------------- In the early hours of July 5, 1965, Porfirio Rubirosa drove a Ferrari 250 GT at high speed through the Bois de Boulogne in western Paris. He had been celebrating his polo team's victory at the Coupe de France. He was fifty-six years old. The car left the road and struck a chestnut tree. He died of his injuries before the ambulance reached the hospital. He had been born sixty-four years earlier in San Francisco de Macorís, in the Cibao region of the Dominican Republic, the son of a small-town landowner. He attended a French Catholic school in Santo Domingo and then in Paris, returned home, and was selected, at twenty-four, to join the personal guard of Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo — the man who had seized the Dominican presidency in 1930 and would rule until his assassination thirty-one years later. Trujillo's only daughter, Flor de Oro, fell in love with the handsome young guard. They married in 1932. Rubirosa was twenty-three. He became, at a stroke, the dictator's son-in-law and a member of the Dominican diplomatic corps. The marriage lasted six years. What he did during the years between marriages is the subject of decades of speculation. He was rumored to have procured young women for Trujillo. He was rumored to have laundered money for the regime. He was definitively assigned to the Dominican legations in Berlin, Vichy, Rome, Buenos Aires, and Paris over a thirty-year diplomatic career that produced almost no diplomatic correspondence, an enormous expense account, and an international reputation as the most polished operator on the Côte d'Azur. In 1942 he married the French film actress Danielle Darrieux, a marriage that ended in 1947 amid the post-Liberation accusations of collaboration that ended many Vichy-era careers. In 1947 he married Doris Duke, the American tobacco heiress whose fortune at the time was estimated at well over $100 million. The marriage lasted thirteen months. Duke later said she had divorced him at the moment she realized he was incapable of being faithful for more than a single afternoon. In 1953 he married Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, in a Manhattan ceremony that Confidential magazine described as the wedding of two of the unhappiest people on Earth. The marriage lasted seventy-three days. Hutton paid him a settlement of approximately $2.5 million in cash and properties. Both women had returned, by the end of his life, to a kind of wary friendship with him. Both had also written him out of their wills. He drove Ferraris, raced at Le Mans, played polo for the French national team, and conducted a long affair with Zsa Zsa Gabor that produced public fistfights, courtroom subpoenas, and a disputed pearl necklace that ended up at the Smithsonian. His final wife, Odile Rodin, was a nineteen-year-old French actress when they married in 1956. She was twenty-eight on the morning the Bois de Boulogne accident widowed her. The Trujillo regime had collapsed four years earlier. Without his patron Rubirosa was, by Dominican standards, an unemployed diplomat. The Ferrari that killed him was reportedly a gift from a friend in Beverly Hills. He had no estate to leave and no inheritance to pass down. His pension from the Dominican Republic had been cancelled by the new government. He left behind a legend, two ex-wives wealthier than most countries, a polo trophy, and a phrase that French waiters used for thirty years: a "rubirosa" became the term for an oversized pepper mill, a tribute to the legendary anatomical attribute the playboy himself never confirmed and never denied.