Agatha Christie could not have thought of a better opening scene. When the English butler entered the luxurious bedchamber on Manhattan's upper Fifth Avenue to awaken his master one morning last week, he saw a ghastly sight. Supine on the wall-to-wall carpet lay the master—46-year-old Serge Rubinstein, millionaire, financial finagler, satyr and draft dodger—bound, gagged, strangled and quite dead. The body was dressed in midnight-blue silk pajamas, and the room was a picture of studied disarray.
The scene but not the character was pure Christie. Serge Rubinstein belonged in spirit to an earlier, gamier era—the turn of the century, when too many of the continental rich were confirming Emile Zola's savage caricatures of their class. His life was a rococo embroidery of lies, boasts, swindles, treacheries, beautiful women and rich living. He was a crook—who called himself an international financier—and he got away with it because highly placed people were impressed by his spending and his line. After he had been repeatedly exposed in court for shady dealings and declared non grata in France, he was, on the eve of his wedding in 1941, a guest at the White House of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Troikas & Sapphires. That is fact, but in much of Rubinstein's biography the New York police found it hard to separate fact from fabrication. He was born in St. Petersburg where his father, he said, was financial adviser to the monk Rasputin—a background hardly calculated to recommend Serge to the business world; it was as if a clergyman told his colleagues that his father used to be chaplain to King Kong.
Serge was a precocious boy whose doting mother pampered him and made him wear sailor suits until he was 13. After the Bolsheviks took over in Russia, father Rubinstein, according to Serge, lined his greatcoat with rubles and jewels, and raced off across the frozen Gulf of Finland in a troika. The family followed him four months later, and ten-year-old Serge arrived in Stockholm with money pinned all over his undershirt, and a big sapphire hung around his neck.
The Rubinsteins drifted around Europe, from Stockholm to Paris to Vienna. On his 15th birthday Serge decided he had an inferiority complex, asked his parents for an appointment with Dr. Alfred Adler, the famed Viennese psychologist, for a birthday present. Since Adler was a responsible physician, the story that Rubinstein later told seemed one other piece of his self-dramatization. Serge said that Adler offered to cure his neurosis, but added: "Do you want that? You'll just be an ordinary person. The way you are now, you'll be driven by ambition and desires." Serge said he decided to remain neurotic.
Larceny & Marquises. When he was 18, Serge went off to Britain's Cambridge, graduated two years later with high honors. His older brother Andre paid for his education, spent the rest of his life unsuccessfully suing Serge for millions he claimed Serge had stolen.