Fourth Estate £12.99 pp356

We have not yet reached that stage of human civilisation when we will cease to be fascinated by penises of prodigious proportion. The Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa (1909-65) was possessed of such an attribute, but lived during a time when it was a widely and archly advertised thing of mystery. “He became famous just as the era of audacious-celebrity-for-its-own-sake was blooming,” explains Shawn Levy in this excellent, gossipy study. “And the genius of it was that the reason for his celebrity, even if it were known, couldn’t actually be spoken of — not firsthand, not out loud.”

Halfway through his book, Levy devotes a lengthy passage to consideration of this priapic marvel. The homosexual photographer Jerome Zerbe followed Rubi into the gents one day, emerging to describe it, in a vivid phrase, as resembling “Yul Brynner in a black turtleneck”. His third wife, Doris Duke, reported it as “six inches in circumference . . . much like the last foot of a Louisville Slugger baseball bat with the consistency of a not completely inflated volleyball”. The former husband of one of his wives called him “Rubberhosa”. Furthermore, his vast, pendulous testicles required him to wear a jockstrap at all times. But those with organs of more modest dimensions can rest assured. His first wife later vouchsafed that “he took so long to ejaculate that by the end I was a little bored”.

Rubirosa himself found boredom unbearable. “It has always been one of my chief principles,” he confessed, “I will risk anything to avoid being bored.” He risked his life by eloping with Flor de Oro, daughter of his patron, the vicious Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. What followed was far from dull: his subsequent marriage to Danielle Darrieux, the French film actress; his laid-back war years, spent under light arrest in the German spa town of Bad Neuheim; his marriages to two of the world’s great heiresses, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, each of whom gave him money and a B-25 aeroplane; his torrid, knockabout romance with Zsa Zsa Gabor; his last marriage to a young French actress, Odile Rodin, who tamed him (“Odile had the power over him that he had, all his life, wielded over others,” said the fashion designer Oleg Cassini. “She exhausted him and made him jealous.”) Then there was the endless round of Paris, Palm Beach, Hollywood, Las Vegas, New York, polo, motor racing at Le Mans; and, finally, his death by Ferrari (seatbelts are for wimps), dressed in his evening clothes, after an all-night celebration of a polo victory. It is hard to overestimate the dazzling impression that Rubi’s exotic, carefree life made on the American and British press of the 1950s. “Work?” he said in reply to a journalist. “It’s impossible for me to work. I just don’t have the time.”

Yet there was the secret working life of a diplomat from a minor Caribbean dictatorship: as a courier, he took money from Trujillo to New York and paid the assassins of a Dominican political exile; he was posted to Paris and, later, to Buenos Aires; he sold Dominican visas to Jews wishing to flee Europe; he made efforts, encouraged by JFK, to sway Trujillo into liberalisations, although this was overtaken by the dictator ’s assassination. Rubi needed patronage, but most important from Trujillo’s point of view, his colourful gallivantings put Dominica on the map for reasons other than its record of political repression.

Levy, who wrote an engaging book about the Sinatra Rat Pack, has a kinetic prose style. He likes the occasional one-line paragraph and sentences that begin with “and”. And he has a Runyonesque penchant for antique phrases such as “awaken the ire”. (You get the point.) It is unforgivable that his publisher has chosen not to include a single photograph of Rubirosa, apart from the one on the cover, even though there are plenty of good pictures available. The omission is all the more absurd given Levy’s final assessment of the publicity-seeking Rubi: “he had given himself over to sensation, he created sensations, he ended in sensation”.

Parisian waiters may still refer to over-sized pepper grinders as Rubirosas, but apart from that Rubi is a will-o’-the-wisp figure. “The world was there for him,” concludes Levy, “not vice versa.” But now, Levy’s luscious, shimmering and titillating portrait is there for the world.

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