O pequeno Grande Jorginho, como visto pelo New York Times

Transcrição do artigo de LARRY ROHTER para o NYT, na edição on-line

Jorge Guinle, 88, a Playboy Who Outlived His Millions, Dies

Published: March 6, 2004

BUENOS AIRES, March 5 — Jorge Guinle, one of the last of the millionaire playboys whose free-spending ways and romantic exploits made them global celebrities from the 1930's onward, died early Friday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 88 years old and died in a suite at the luxurious Copacabana Palace Hotel, which his family built and owned for more than half a century.

Mr. Guinle had been at a hospital awaiting surgery for an aortic aneurysm. But on Thursday he insisted on being released, and checked in at the hotel where he had spent much of his gilded childhood, choosing to dine on chicken stroganoff, raspberry sherbet and tea for what turned out to be his final meal.

"He died as he lived, in grand style and with his eyes shining," said Claudia Fialho, a hotel spokeswoman. "Coming here was his last wish."

Mr. Guinle, who stood 5-foot-5 and was known as Jorginho by friends, was born into what was once Brazil's richest family, a wealth derived from owning Brazil's largest port, at Santos. His mission was to spend as much of that fortune as he could, and in the end, he succeeded too well.

"The secret to living well is to die without a cent in your pocket," he said in an interview in 2002. "But I seem to have miscalculated."

In his heyday, Mr. Guinle was either a friend or rival to other playboys like Porfirio Rubirosa, Howard Hughes, Ali Khan and Aristotle Onassis. But he also had a serious side that expressed itself in his later years, after he had gone broke, in his study of the Stoic philosophers and a passion for music and art.

Thanks to a friendship with Nelson A. Rockefeller, Mr. Guinle went to Hollywood as World War II approached. With his money and charm, Mr. Guinle became a well-known man about town, often cruising from one fashionable club or restaurant to another with his occasional roommate Errol Flynn.

During his years in Hollywood and then after his return to Brazil, Mr. Guinle was romantically linked, at one time or another, with film stars like Rita Hayworth, Veronica Lake, Lana Turner, Hedy Lamarr, Jane Russell, Anita Ekberg, Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe.

Mr. Guinle was not only a spendthrift but also a bad judge of business opportunities. He turned down projects like the Diners Club card, and he financed others that lost millions. In the end, he squandered most of his family's fortune.

During the last 20 years of his life, Mr. Guinle lived in increasingly modest circumstances, relying on a government pension and loans from friends. He and his third wife, Maria Helena, separated in the 1990's. At the time of his death he was sharing an apartment in a middle-class neighborhood with his two surviving children, Georgina, 31, and Gabriel, 20. Another son, Jorge, died in 1987.

His notoriety as a ladies' man notwithstanding, Mr. Guinle was most proud of his reputation as a connoisseur of jazz. He was the author of the book "Jazz Panorama," and claimed to have helped finance some of the first bebop recordings in the 1940's by musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Thelonius Monk and Oscar Pettiford.

Mr. Guinle was buried Friday in his family's tomb at São João Baptista Cemetery in Rio de Janeiro.

In an interview last year Mr. Guinle said he had only one regret. "I wish I had studied the saxophone more seriously so that I could really say that I play it."