Luis Basualdo, not for the first time in his life, was in bed and in deep trouble. He had told his girlfriend, Lucy Pearson, to meet him for a tryst at his room in St Moritz at 10am, knowing that his other girlfriend, Christina Onassis, always picked him up at 11 to hit the slopes. Basualdo, the swish Argentinian playboy, must have opened the door to Lucy thinking he had pulled off another feat of cad logistics, with each girl in the dark about the other. All went well until… uh oh! A knock on the door! It was only 10.30, but Christina arrived early to pick up her man! Disaster: one girl was hammering outside on the door and another asking who was this stranger demanding to see Basualdo so early in the day, and why won’t he open up? Basualdo bravely decided to keep quiet. He waited till Christina had left before exfiltrating Lucy out the back. Phew!
These soap opera moments marked Basualdo’s golden years in the 1970s and 80s, when he played polo with Prince Charles and charmed the gullible daughters of the filthy rich into bed and out of their trust funds. His death last month at the age of 75 commemorated that old era of international playboyhood. Gone are the days when high-born layabouts could finish school, travel to the Alps, the Riviera, or the Upper East Side to seduce a doe-eyed billionaire and learn the trade of spending someone else’s money. Now aspiring rogues have to be seen to hold down jobs, even if those are running nebulous charities funded by each other’s parents, appearing on reality TV or organising horse events in despotic regimes.
The demise of the lothario might not be such a bad thing. Luis Basualdo’s antics were once excused by friends as roguish behaviour but he would now be called, with much justification, a proper bastard — even a creep. On the day he was married to Lucy Pearson, the heir to a giant slice of the Cowdray fortune, he left his teenage bride in London and flew to Munich on polo business, shared a bottle of champagne with the woman sat next to him, and took her back to his suite at the Königshof for the next three days. His marriage to Lucy, built on such stable foundations, did not last but he cashed out with £200,000 from her viscount father.
He played polo with Prince Charles and charmed the gullible daughters of the filthy rich into bed and out of their trust funds.
It was just a temporary setback for Basualdo, for whom the arms of another wealthy patronne were never far away. Born in 1945, his Argentinian family was “respectable but not rich”, according to Michael Wright, author of All The Pain That Money Can Buy, a biography of his later lover Christina Onassis. Basualdo arrived in Europe in the 60s, ready to pounce on high society. He honed his craft at the Palace Hotel in St Moritz, where the knowing management gave cheap rooms in the eaves to handsome young men who could provide après-ski entertainment to the wealthy older women. “A hustlers’ training camp,” says Wright, which should have given Basualdo all the skills he needed to woo Christina, inheritor of the Onassis shipping fortune, who spent the ski season there.
His lessons were not put into practice. After they first met she teased him for being financially dishonest and he dropped hints to a dinner party about her recent abortion. After she asked him to pay her cab fare, he snarled: “If you own so many fucking tankers, you can pay your own way home!” Which rather betrays his image as a sophisticated Romeo dishing out playful zingers at the Café Royal and suggests a character better suited to the vicious arguments in The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Every month, Christina had her private jet fly to the States to pick up ten crates of Diet Coke at a cost of $30,000 per trip
There are doubtlessly few children of shipping tycoons who have gone on to enjoy quiet, well-adjusted lives, but despite any red flags she may have presented, Christina’s money “registered dollar signs like a fruit machine” in Basualdo’s eyes. They shared a talent for burning cash — him on daily deliveries of caviar and champagne, her on soft drinks. Every month, Christina had her private jet fly to the States to pick up ten crates of Diet Coke — still unavailable in Europe — at the estimated cost of $30,000 per trip. She refused to do this less often, claiming that the taste of Coke deteriorated after a month in the can.
Things did not last with Christina, and she was soon wooed away by Nicky Mavroleon, another shipping scion, notwithstanding Basualdo’s best efforts (he had been laid up by a ski injury but once gobbled 15 aspirins so he could get out onto the slopes and ward off rivals).
After this, lovers came thick and fast for Basualdo, even if, like a John Le Carré con artist, his finances weren’t always as liquid as he would have liked — if he was paying for dinner, he would tell his dates to only order one course. Claims he procured women also followed, and he said he introduced a young Prince Charles, who played on the same polo team as Basualdo, to potential dates. “After all he couldn’t just go to a pub and pick someone up,” Basualdo explained to Annette Witheridge, the veteran journalist. “He didn’t need to say more.”
Basualdo claimed to have organised games of Murder in the Dark at Lodsworth House so Charles could meet women in the late 70s. “The house was huge, and what he’d actually do was find a girl, pinch her somewhere naughty and then start kissing her,” he said. “It was dark, he led them to sofas in reception rooms and had sex with them, there and then.” If a girl refused Basualdo’s advances after she had been with Charles, he would tell his royal pal that she was on drugs or about to talk to the newspapers, and Charles would ditch her. How charming.
The accountants at Onassis HQ in Monte Carlo snarled: “The only time he has to put his hand in his pocket is to scratch his balls.”
In later years he took on a hybrid role as equerry, dogsbody, stud and jester to wealthy women, having a gift for entertaining bored one-percenters. He met up with Christina Onassis again, who said doctors told her she needed a stable companion in her life. Basualdo’s reaction says a lot: “How much do you have in mind?” He snagged $30,000 a month plus expenses for being in her service, to which the accountants at Onassis HQ in Monte Carlo snarled: “The only time he has to put his hand in his pocket is to scratch his balls.” This strange relationship became too much when Basualdo was reduced to mitigating Christina’s amphetamine habit, cleaning up when she fouled the sheets after a bender, and herding a 17-year-old devoutly Jewish boy into her bedroom at her request. Basualdo fled to Argentina after being rumbled when $1.2 million was transferred into his bank account from Christina’s pile and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Against all odds, he was cleared.
Other relationships failed. His marriage to Jan Leach ended after a litany of disasters: she chased him down Madison Avenue trying to stab him, and once in winter he locked her out on the balcony naked and read Debrett’s. He split from Martha Reed, heiress to a pasta fortune, claiming she lied about the contents of her bank account and age on her birth certificate. His belt had to tighten, even as his waistline grew – he was stopped by the police for having a bald tyre on his Rolls-Royce that he couldn’t replace. Basualdo retired to Argentina in the 90s, starting to creak with middle age and various ailments, sometimes returning to see old pals on Park Avenue or in Mayfair. But by this point he was out to pasture like the cows on his estate.
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