| Synopsis: |
Some women - including apparently almost all heiresses - find themselves drawn to thoroughgoing bastards who steal their money, cheat on them, even sometimes beat them up. Why, to these educated, rational and otherwise balanced young women, is "Mr Wrong" so often irresistible? Jeremy Scott tries to answer this question in his remarkable book. The Irresistible Mr Wrong is the dizzying true story of six women who fell for one such man; Porfirio Rubirosa - diplomat, playboy, racing car-driver and prodigious womaniser, of whom his benefactor Dominican Republican dictator General Trujillo, famously remarked, "He is good at his job because women like him and he is a wonderful liar." The settings are Cafe Society, prewar Berlin, occupied Paris and the post-war haunts of the international rich who occupied the Jet Set. It is the story of six women who inhabited that glossy milieu. They are Flor Trujillo, daughter of the dictator; Danielle Darrieux, leading French actress; the richest woman in the world, Doris Duke; Zsa Zsa Gabor, Hungarian adventuress; Woolworth heiress, Barbara Hutton; and Odile Rodin, another French actress.Together with Rubirosa, these women lived soap opera lives of excess, greed and rare redemption. All six episodes of The Irresistible Mr Wrong are threaded on the same string, linked by one infamous figure who married five of these women in turn. What was his secret? Of greater interest is this question: knowing all they did about him, what drove them to do so? |