Young Man Goes West

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Young Man Goes West

"Pretty high-class people," said the manager of Kansas City's Ambassador Hotel. "They had satin sheets on the beds." The "people" were Lieut. General Rafael ("Ramfis") Trujillo Jr., who checked out of a full-floor Ambassador suite last week after failing to get a diploma from the Army Command and General Staff College at nearby Fort Leavenworth, Kans. With two aides, a collie and 35 pieces of luggage, he boarded a private railroad car bound for the West Coast and the only person who seemed to care: Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Zsa Zsa was solicitous. "What would be nicer." she asked, "than to have him marry a nice American girl? Think what this would do for friendly relations between his country and the United States." The general met Zsa Zsa for dinner and moved into a $2,500-a-month mansion until he can start a cruise on the Trujillo yacht Angelita.* Happily, Zsa Zsa began to plan a party aboard the yacht.

A few days later, manned by a crew of 80 that included a twelve-piece band, Angelita steamed into Los Angeles harbor, sideswiped a dock and stove in a lifeboat. Registered as a naval vessel, it dodged $18.25 a day in dock fees, though the only visible armament was a line-throwing gun. Caterers began loading on such supplies as champagne and cracked crab, and the master came aboard--but in bad temper from all the publicity. "Zsa Zsa Gabor is not giving a party on my boat," Ramfis snapped. "We will entertain." an aide explained, "but the general will be the host."

In Ciudad Trujillo, Rafael Trujillo Sr. stayed in bad temper over his son's repeated setbacks. Having promoted Junior to chairman of the Dominican Joint Chiefs of Staff just after the boy flunked at Fort Leavenworth, the dictator followed up by calling home all 30 Dominicans who were studying at U.S. military establishments. He threatened to end all military and aid pacts with the U.S.. including the one under which the U.S. runs a missile-tracking station in the Dominican Republic. He sniffed that since the Army Command and General Staff College has become a "political tool," its diploma "cannot constitute an honor to anyone."

*A four-masted bark measuring 316 ft. from the tapered stern to the golden eagle on its bow, Angelita is the same ship that dazzled bleak Russia in 1937 when its former owner, Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post Davies, and husband Joseph E. Davies, U.S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., sailed the vessel, then named Sea Cloud, through the Baltic to Leningrad.

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