Adorable Times #3: Jorge Guinle
From Rio de Janeiro to Hollywood, with no regrets
Jorge Guinle
Jorge Guinle (Rio de Janeiro, 1916 – 2004) was a billionaire from the Guinle family of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Jorge Guinle was born on February 5, 1916.
His family amassed an immense fortune from a 90-year concession to build and operate the port of Santos, Brazil.
They built the Copacabana Palace Hotel in Rio, and a huge mansion at Botafogo, where Jorge grew up. When Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Brazil in the 1930s, he stayed with the Guinles.
As a young man, Jorge Guinle never worked. Then in 1942, when the American government was concerned to counter Nazi influence in Brazil and Latin America, Nelson Rockefeller persuaded him to work for the Allied cause, at home and in the United States.
Thereafter, Guinle commuted between Rio de Janeiro, then one of the world's most glamorous cities, and Hollywood, where his charm, wealth and polished manners endeared him to stars and studio heads alike.
One of his official tasks was to read film scripts, to ensure, for example, that Brazilian screen characters spoke Portuguese, not Spanish. He shared a flat with Errol Flynn, and in 1947 took up with Marilyn Monroe, then 20.
Guinle's height was between 1.60 m and 1.63 m. He tried to compensate by wearing shoes with internal heels that increased him by a few cm – which still kept him shorter than his girlfriends, but not much.
Short stature had never been an obstacle: he preferred tall women and Hollywood actresses, attending all the parties he could on the Rio circuit, Los Angeles , New York and Paris.
He had blue eyes, and a ”soft charm“.
Over the years, he made his mark as one of the era's great lotharios. Besides Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner succumbed to his charms; so, too, did Hedy Lamarr ("along with Ava Gardner, the most beautiful woman Hollywood has ever seen"), Anita Ekberg ("very unsophisticated, but so beautiful") and Veronica Lake.
Many of them went to stay with him at the Copacabana Palace, which overlooks the famous beach. The stars' presence there, drinking their way through oceans of champagne and cavorting at the carnival festivities, helped to establish both the hotel and Jorge Guinle as Brazilian icons.
Ginger Rogers taught Guinle to dance down the hotel's marble corridors; Marlene Dietrich stood on a piano in Guinle's home and sang to the accompaniment of Burt Bacharach.
Guinle was on the set of Casablanca when Humphrey Bogart said the famous "Play it again"; newspapers named him as the man for whom Janet Leigh left Tony Curtis.
In 1962 he flew from Rio to LA to reunite with his old flame Marilyn Monroe and then escort her to the Venice Film Festival. With him he carried an extraordinary topaz necklace which a jeweller friend had asked him to give her.
However, on touching down at Los Angeles, Jorge Guinle learned of Marilyn's death.
Guinle opened his address book and scanned the names until his eyes happened upon Jayne Mansfield, then the blonde on the rise.
She was happy to receive the necklace and spent two years as Guinle's girlfriend.
Girls aside, jazz was Guinle's great passion in life.
He was an early fan of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker; Louis Armstrong was a friend. He played the saxophone ("not too well", he said) and wrote several books, including Jazz Panorama (1953). He published an autobiography, "A Century of the Good Life", in 1997 (which is now increasingly rare and sought after in the secondary market).
The Santos port concession ended in 1972, and latterly Guinle found himself paying the price of a life spent making love instead of money: the millions had been frittered away and he was dependent on the generosity of family and friends.
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