“Sometimes I look back and I wonder how the whole thing happened. How I became who I have become. How I managed to live so many lifetimes, to love and be loved by so many men, to survive so many adventures…yet still be Zsa Zsa.”
Zsa Zsa Gabor—star of films like Lili and Moulin Rouge, thousands of late-night talk shows and countless National Enquirer covers—was one of the gamest camp figures of the 20th century. With her nine husbands, famed bon mots (“macho doesn’t prove mucho”), and dripping diamonds, this beautiful Hungarian fireball was famous for being famous decades before the Kardashians appeared on the scene.
From the moment she burst onto screens with her first appearance as a guest on the 1951 talk show Bachelor’s Haven, Gabor’s masterful comedic timing and improvisational abilities were often overlooked due to her outsized persona and romantic exploits. With her equally intoxicating sisters Eva and Magda (who boasted twenty marriages between them), she poked fun at the sexual mores of a staid era and lived by her own code.
Unsurprisingly, Gabor’s 1991 autobiography, One Lifetime Is Not Enough, is an easy-breezy must read, filled with frothy fables that go down like expensive champagne. What lurked in her darkest moments (which biographers believed included bipolar disorder) is not discussed, leaving the reader to revel in her eye for the absurd and her snarky sauciness.
Gabor paints herself as a tough, talented tease whose rules for life include useful advice like “when in trouble, take a bath and wash your hair,” and Hollywood gossip one should take with a grain of salt as big as the Hope Diamond. “From the start,” she writes, “I luxuriated in having an audience, making people laugh, in binding them to me by all manner of spells.”
Empress In Training
“We were born to be special, born to be queens and empresses, to marry the crème de la crème, to personify perfection,” Gabor writes of herself, her older sister Magda, and her younger sister Eva.
Her eccentric, romantically delusional but determined mother, Jolie, made sure of that. Sári Gábor was born on Feb. 6, 1917, in “wickedly glamourous” Budapest, Hungary, to a secular Jewish family. Jolie, the daughter of an equally glamorous mother who owned a chain of jewelry stores, had a volatile relationship with her husband, Vilmos, a businessman whose fortunes rose and fell with his latest deals.
But the loves of Jolie’s life (she would be married at least three times) were her precocious daughters, whom she raised to value beauty and diamonds above all else. “When they were little girls, I would charge them two cents to touch my beautiful complexion,” Jolie said, per Zsa Zsa. “This taught the value of money and the value of beautiful skin.”
In Finding Zsa Zsa: The Gabors Behind the Legend, biographer Sam Staggs tries valiantly to sort the fact from the Gabors’ voluminous fiction. There, Jolie is also depicted ruthlessly pitting her daughters against each other. He writes:
On a particular rainy afternoon, when Magda was six, Zsa Zsa four, and Eva two, they asked their mother how they might spend the afternoon. “Why not have a fight?” she suggested. “With pillows?” Magda chirped. “No, a fistfight. A fight with hitting one another.” And so they began.
For Jolie, watching the battle was a thrill: “For me it was very interesting. I like when they fight. I like when they do everything.”
According to Gabor, the girls would forever worship their mother and inherit her addiction to drama. Zsa Zsa, a self-proclaimed rebellious, talkative tomboy who loved horses, would surpass her mother as a fantastic dreamer as a boarder at Madame Subilia’s School for Young Ladies in Switzerland. “Even then, I was somewhat of a femme fatale, reading French novels secretly and imagining myself as the heroine. “
The Globe-Trotting Goddess
After winning the Miss Hungary pageant, then being disqualified from further competition because of her age, the lushly beautiful Zsa Zsa was already on her way to becoming the star of her own soap opera. In 1935, at the age of 18 (though she claims she was only 15), she married a minor Turkish diplomat named Burhan Belge, and found herself in the swirl of pre-war intrigue in the ancient city of Ankara.
Zsa Zsa thrilled in that atmosphere, but not so much in her serious, much older husband. And so, she claims, she was swept off her feet by the country’s powerful ruler Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who took her virginity in a haze of opium. “He dazzled me with his sexual prowess and seduced me with his perversion,” she writes. “Atatürk was very wicked. He knew exactly how to please a young girl. He was a professional lover, a god, and a king.” Never mind, as Staggs notes, that at the time Atatürk was in the end stages of cirrhosis due to alcoholism.
Soon bored with Belge and eager to escape the horrors of World War II, Gabor escaped in 1941 to America—where Eva was living in Hollywood, working as an actress. She was in New York City by a family friend, who took her straight from the boat to society hotspot the 21 Club.
While Zsa Zsa’s lies are legendary, what actually happened next is the stuff dreams are made of. In Hollywood, she says she and Eva were so cash-strapped that they fed their dogs orchids sent by a smitten Charlie Chaplin. Then Gabor collided with millionaire Texan hotel magnate Conrad Hilton at Ciro’s nightclub.
On the night of their marriage in 1942, Gabor realized where she ranked on Hilton’s list of priorities. “Still dreamy and ecstatic, floating on cloud nine, I gazed ardently into Conrad’s clear blue eyes and whispered, ‘Conrad, what are you thinking of?’ expecting a torrent of amorous declarations,” she writes. “’By golly,’ said Conrad, ‘I am thinking of that Blackstone [Hotel] deal!’”
Folie-a-Trois
”If I could live my entire life over again, I would spend every minute of it with George,” Gabor writes of her third husband, the acidic, aristocratic actor George Sanders, whom she married in 1949 after her 1947 divorce from Hilton (which produced a daughter, Francesca).
Despite her wicked wit and snappy bon mots, Gabor’s inherent kindness often shines through her memoir, and her profound adoration for the diffident, difficult Sanders is touching. “Just talking to George excited me,” she writes. “We spent a lot of evenings in bed having caviar and iced vodka as George read the plays of Noel Coward to me.”
Like two caged tigers, they also hurt each other. The mind games and quippy cruelty Gabor recalls with excitement seem exhausting—and often abusive. Things came to a head when Gabor hired a private investigator who discovered Sanders in bed with heiress Doris Duke. In retaliation, Gabor began an affair with Duke’s ex-husband, the legendary lothario Porfirio Rubirosa, a “diplomat” from the Dominican Republic famous for his huge penis.
But Gabor got more than she bargained for. “Rubi was a sickness to me,” she writes. Soon the love triangle between the globe-trotting Sanders, Gabor, and Rubirosa had been written up in every tabloid. She discovered Rubirosa’s true nature while preparing for a show in Las Vegas, where Rubirosa made an announcement: “My darling, I have to leave you. I need money and Barbara Hutton has offered me five million dollars if I marry her. Then I’ll come back to you in a few weeks.”
“Naturally mon cheri,” Gabor replied. “But when you come back to me, remember to buy me much jewelry.”
This chic drawing room comedy was shattered hours later when Rubirosa assaulted Gabor, giving her a black eye. Always one to laugh in the face of horror, Gabor wore an eye patch at her show and in the days that followed, allegedly causing a perverse run on eye patches across the country.
After Rubirosa’s farcical 53-day marriage to Hutton, he was back with the obsessive Gabor, who would be caught in his whirlwind for four years. “There was always more champagne,” Gabor writes. “More caviar, another dance, another romantic refrain for him to strum on a guitar handed to him by some admiring orchestra leader, eager to see the legendary Rubirosa serenade his Zsa Zsa Gabor.”
Degrees of Bitchiness
“Nothing can compensate for being bored,” Gabor writes. “Not even one hundred million dollars.”
If you excited Gabor, complimented her, or just showed her plain human kindness, then Gabor could be complimentary. The people she liked included her best friend Kathryn Grayson, Nancy Reagan, Ava Gardner, Clark Gable, David Niven, Bette Davis, Maria Callas, and Bob Hope.
But if you slighted her, threatened her, or bored her, Gabor becomes the master of the delicious, backhanded compliment—barbs she directs at the likes of Hedy Lamarr, Joan Collins and Debbie Reynolds. Gabor had a particular problem with other blondes, especially Marlene Dietrich, a frenemy of epic proportions. According to Gabor, Marilyn Monroe was “extremely adept at wiggling her ass and batting her eyelashes.” Princess Grace? A “bricklayer’s daughter” who had “more boyfriends in one month than I had in a lifetime.” Even Mae West, whom she admired enormously, gets labeled “the ugliest woman I had ever seen.”
In her own mind, Gabor’s number one competition appears to have been Elizabeth Taylor. “Elizabeth and I have always had a great deal in common—not only men,” she writes. “Neither of us can ever truly be dominated by a man—which makes the men in our lives insecure. We are both famous for our diamonds and for our many husbands and our paths have often crossed, not always happily.”
She isn’t kidding. Gabor claims to have had an affair with her stepson Nicky Hilton, Taylor’s first husband. She also gratuitously recalls a three-day affair with Richard Burton pre-Liz, rhapsodizing about how he threw her down on a white fur rug in front of a fireplace, “talking incessantly, erotically, the entire time he made love.”
Because of this, Gabor claims that she was repeatedly snubbed by la Liz, whose revenge extended into the 1980s at an AIDS benefit. “Although many people had contributed to raising the money, only Liz came onstage, as if she had done everything herself,” Gabor writes. “The rest of us were left, like poor relatives, hidden away in another area, singing ‘The Best of Times’ from La Cage aux Folles, while Liz basked in her glory.”
Simply Irresistible
After her fifth marriage to businessman Joshua Cosden Jr. ended in 1967, Gabor made a familiar trip. “It was back to Juarez for me, where a divorce was waiting along with a group of Mexicans, waving a banner that read ‘Welcome Back Zsa Zsa,’” she writes.
Gabor was equally busy in between her nine marriages, if she is to be believed (and it is so much fun to believe!). According to her, she dated (but didn’t bed) a young Jack Kennedy, who “radiated sexuality” and was addicted to Hershey’s Bars, earning her the lifelong ire of future first lady Jackie Kennedy. Then there was her passionate affair with a young Sean Connery, his “skin as soft as velvet,” and romantic proposals from the Duke of Marlborough and J. Paul Getty. Greta Garbo kissed her on the mouth and, she writes, “I couldn’t help but kiss her back because she was so overwhelmingly strong and beautiful.”
Not all her assignations were happy. According to Gabor, one night a pushy, classless Frank Sinatra locked himself in her house, refusing to leave until she had sex with him. Terrified her daughter would recognize his car, she finally slept with him in the morning so he would leave.
In Gabor’s telling, every man in society at some point propositioned her for sex or aggressively came on to her, with some handling her rejections better than others. They include, in no particular order: Prince Philip, Mario Lanza, Alexander Korda, George Bernard Shaw, Errol Flynn, John Huston, Mike Todd, Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, Lord Mountbatten, and Elvis. According to Zsa Zsa, even the upright President Gerald Ford once whispered in her ear, “If I weren’t married, the two women I’d want to go to bed with are you and Ann-Margret.”
Perhaps the unluckiest of her failed paramours was lecherously drunk Richard Harris, who she says would not leave her home after proclaiming his intentions. “In the end I turned him out, whereupon King Richard lay on my front lawn singing ‘If Ever I Would Leave You’ from Camelot, until I was compelled to call the Bel Air patrol and take him away.”
“The Slap Heard ‘Round The World”
“Some people are dyslexic and can’t read. I am dysageic,” Gabor writes. “I have no concept whatsoever of age, numbers, or of getting old.”
By the 1980s, Gabor, constantly shaving numbers off her true age, had become a caricature of a caricature, a staple of late-night punchlines who still managed to be in on the joke. But her 1986 marriage to controversial Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt would cast the last 30 years of her life in a darker light.
In 1989, Gabor was pulled over by Beverly Hills Cop Paul Kramer in her Rolls Royce for expired tags. When Gabor asked if she could leave the scene, Kramer (whom Staggs notes had been accused of excessive force before) replied, “fuck off.”
“In England (where I spend a lot of time) ‘Fuck off’ is another, elegant way of saying, ‘please leave,’” Gabor writes, “so I left.” According to Gabor, as she tried to leave, Kramer yanked her from the car and in the ensuing fracas, she slapped him. Gabor was arrested, and her resulting trial was a media sensation that ended with Gabor spending three days in jail.
Gabor’s humiliation and fear is palatable as she describes the experience, but as always she found strength in her persona. “This jail sentence, this whole fracas, is just another episode in the continuing adventures of Zsa Zsa Gabor,” she writes. “I start laughing—laughing at the iron cot, at the prison bars surrounding me…and above all, at myself.”
But life would not get easier for Gabor. In the next decade, her beloved family—mother Jolie and sisters Magda and Eva—would all pass away, and her husband would wage a battle with her daughter, Francesca, over her care. Bedridden, she was helpless to stop Frédéric, who careened from one publicity stunt to the next, at one point claiming he could be the father of Anna-Nicole Smith’s daughter.
Zsa Zsa Gabor died on December 18, 2016, at the age of 99, after a lifetime of making her wildest dreams come true. “Remember that you are a Gabor,” she once told herself. “You are born to survive.”
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