Femme fatale loved to live fast
jetsetter b February 21, 1937 d December 12, 2018
When God created woman, according to film director Roger Vadim, he had Brigitte Bardot in mind. However, there were those who held that Bardot was merely a rough draft, and that the divine design was fully realised in the form of Odile Rubirosa, who has died of cancer, aged 81.
She was perhaps best known as the young and last wife of Porfirio Rubirosa, the prince of playboys. They met in 1956 in Paris, where the Dominican lothario, diplomat and racing driver was recuperating from a fall at polo. Then 47, he had already been divorced by four wives. Among his other paramours were Ava Gardner, Jayne Mansfield, Kim Novak and Eva Peron.
Since he was neither tall nor especially handsome, it was maintained that his undeniable appeal to women rested on the reason waiters in restaurants dubbed outsize pepper-grinders ‘‘Rubirosas’’. But he had charisma too, and in the 19-year-old Odile Rodin, a young French actress from Lyon, he seemed to find an alluring freshness.
They were engaged within weeks. ‘‘I didn’t want to get married, I wanted a career,’’ she said of her succumbing to Rubirosa. ‘‘But at the end of one month I was totally fascinated.’’ She wore leopardskin at their wedding.
‘‘Rubi never let me make a decision,’’ she would say later. He not only had an eye for women’s fashion, but dictated to his wife the clothes and jewellery she would wear, and even her hairstyle.
Keeping up appearances was expensive; when their hotel room was burgled on a visit to New York, Odile was revealed to have lost earrings and a necklace worth about NZ$300,000 today. ‘‘Most men’s ambition is to save money,’’ Rubirosa once observed. ‘‘Mine is to spend it.’’
In 1957 Porfirio Rubirosa was appointed ambassador to Cuba by the Dominican Republic’s dictator Rafael Trujillo, who had once been his father-in-law. After Trujillo’s assassination, he cultivated the Kennedys and their circle, holidaying with Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra and their like, in the hope of restoring his fortunes. It was hinted that Odile became one of the future president’s many lovers. Certainly, by the mid-1960s, she appeared to have shaken off Rubirosa’s control.
In 1965, he died in a car crash in Paris. His murmured last word was simply: ‘‘Odile’’.
After his funeral, she went to the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, at the invitation of the former president’s sisters, Pat and Jean. Thereafter, she fell into a depression, resurfacing on the Riviera a couple of years later.
By the early 1970s she had moved to Rio de Janeiro, becoming a familiar and energetic figure in its cafe society. Even in Brazil she caused a sensation with her scanty attire at its carnival and, by now blonde and perpetually bikini-clad, with her flirtatious approach to life. She spoke of how she needed the attention of men – ‘‘three or four at the same time, why not?’’
By the 1980s, after a failed marriage to a young entrepreneur, she was still seen at all the clubs, but by now she was drinking too much and there were too many public rows with former friends and the string of men still eager to squire her.
Salvation took the form of a young American guitarist, Jim Moss, 16 years her junior, whom she met at Rock in Rio in 1985. Gradually, she stopped drinking, and with his encouragement took up painting and opened a tea house. The couple, who were married in 1986, lived away from Rio and later in New England.
‘‘If Rubi could have chosen the way he died,’’ she had said after her first death, ‘‘this is the way he would have gone . . . He loved speed. But he loved life even more.’’
The same was abundantly true of her. –