When people picture “James Bond,” they likely envision actors like Daniel Craig, Roger Moore or Sean Connery — guys who visually echo the white British secret agent in the Ian Fleming novels that inspired 60 years of hit films.
But lifelong 007 fan Christopher Rivas was shocked to learn, as an adult, that the man many consider a key inspiration for Bond — and whom Rivas calls the inspiration — was a suave and fearless Dominican-born playboy, diplomat and race-car driver named Porfirio Rubirosa.
And the more Rivas learned about Rubirosa, the more relevant his story came to seem to his own experience as a Dominican-American born a generation after Rubirosa died.
Rivas shares his thoughts and findings in “The Real James Bond … Was Dominican,” a lively and provocative multimedia monologue making its Pittsburgh premiere at City Theatre with performances Sat., Jan. 18, through Feb. 16.
The show, which debuted in 2018, in New York, is produced by DNAWorks, an arts group partially based in Pittsburgh.
In the 70-minute show, directed by DNAWorks’ Daniel Banks, Rivas shares the stage with percussionist Jonathan Gomez and projected videos.
But while the play landed Rivas a globe-trotting 10-part podcast deal with Stitcher, “Rubirosa with Christopher Rivas,” the stage show is mostly about neither Bond nor even Rubirosa. Rather, it explores how attitudes about race shaped the actor’s life, and Rubirosa’s too.
“James Bond is like the appetizer and the main course is something much deeper and darker and, I think, beautiful,” said Rivas.
Rivas spent his childhood idolizing Bond, complete with Nerf guns. As an adult, in 2010, a friend handed him the 2002 issue of Vanity Fair that included “The Legend of Rubirosa,” Gary Cohen’s feature story focusing on Rubi’s epic adventures as a playboy and gigolo.
Rubirosa, born in 1909 as the middle-class son of a Dominican diplomat, became a mid-20th-century Casanova. He bedded not only movie stars like Ava Gardner and Jayne Mansfield but also Eva Perón, and married — in sequence — the two richest women in the world, tobacco heiress Doris Duke and department store heiress Barbara Hutton.
Both marriages were brief, but Rubirosa always landed on his feet — right until the morning after the celebration of his latest polo championship, when his Ferrari crashed at high-speed into a tree in Paris.
That was in 1965, toward the end of the dinner-jacketed, jet-setting era both he and Bond epitomized. Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, “Casino Royale,” was published in 1953 — the year Rubirosa married Hutton, and six years after he made headlines by marrying Duke.
Fleming, who served in Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division during World War II, always said Bond was a composite of many men he met during the war (as well as himself). And indeed, Cohen's article mentions neither Fleming nor Bond in connection with Rubirosa.
But Rivas said books like Marty and Isabella Wall’s “Chasing Rubi” and Shawn Anthony Levy’s “The Last Playboy” suggest Rubi and his legend played a bigger role.
But if in “The Real James Bond,” Rivas asserts that Rubirosa has been unfairly erased from pop-cultural history, it’s as a way of approaching the often-internalized racism he’s experienced himself. One scene recalls Rivas’ grandmother’s instructions on how to make his nose more narrow — that is, more “white." Another recounts his sometimes comically fraught experiences dating white women.
Rubi, he notes in the show, himself got a nose job and used skin-lightening cream.
Researching Rubi’s story, Rivas said, he understood how the man felt as a fellow brown man in a white-dominated culture.
“I know his experience, I know his pain, I know what he wanted to be loved by,” Rivas said. “I think it’s because we’re sold an image very young of what is beautiful. More importantly, we’re sold an image of what might help us, as bodies of color, get ahead.”
The show also explores Rivas’ relationship with a working-class Dominican father, and the very Rubirosa strategy of fake-it-till-you-make-it, which Rivas says has inspired much of his own creative work.
His acting credits include the Fox sitcom “Call Me Kat.” He’s also the author of the 2022 memoir “Brown Enough,” and he’s preparing to direct a film adaptation of his play “Rough Magic.”
Ultimately, Rivas said, “The Real James Bond” is about the present as much as the past, and as much a cautionary tale as a celebration of a forgotten — if quite dashing — historical figure.
“You’re seeing this man in the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s who is so relevant to this moment,” he said. “That’s why I say, I was in love with him and then he became a warning of something I shouldn’t become. A reverse love story.”
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