Chapter Seven

Hungarian Rhapsodies in Amerika! Amerika!

MAGDA

Two months before the Nazi takeover of Budapest, American bombers launched an early morning attack on the Hungarian capital, bombing strategic targets. One bomb fell right behind the Embassy of Portugal where Dr. Carlos Almeida Afonseca de Sampayo Garrido and Magda occupied the master bedroom. Other bombs leveled areas near Jolie’s apartment, destroying centuries-old villas, coffee shops, and theaters, along with a secret depot storing weapons.

In April of 1944, without a single bullet being fired, the Hungarians had capitulated to the powerful Nazi advance. “Within twenty-four hours, it was as if Goebbels himself was running every newspaper and broadcasting bulletins over every radio,” Magda said.

For a brief time in April, even after the Nazi takeover, Jolie tried to maintain her luxurious lifestyle, seemingly ignoring the threat. “I was like Nero playing my fiddle as Rome burned,” she later recalled. “Magda understood the danger. I did not.”

On a Friday night, Jolie had driven her Mercedes to the Arizona Club in the center of Budapest. It was a chic rendezvous mostly patronized by wealthy Jews from the business and professional communities. Jolie was friends with the owners, a popular Jewish singer and her husband, who accompanied her on the piano.

Jolie had ignored the warnings and hosted a large dinner party for the Gabor family. The champagne flowed. “It would be the last such gathering we ever had,” she lamented, years later. “The matriarch of the family, Francesca Tilleman, attended, wearing her mink coat and a stylish hat.

Jolie remembered getting drunk onchampagne. Her mother, Francesca, had warned her that this might be the last champagne the family would have. “I’m sure that the SS will raid our cellars.”

The matriarch, who had taken a young lover in the wake of the death of her husband, had only days to live before being executed by the SS for the “crime” of being a Jew.

Based on his status as a wealthy representative of the (neutral) nation of Portugal, Ambassador Garrido had already paid out the equivalent of $100,000 U.S. dollars to an informant within the inner sanctums of the Gestapo. That informant had kept him abreast of the intentions and actions of a military organization which the Ambassador defined as “a terrifying group of thugs.”

Early one morning, Dr. Garrido learned that the Gabor family’s name had been addedto a list of undesirables earmarked for extermination.

Magda had not spent the night with him, but was asleep in her own apartment. Garrido advised her that he was sending his chauffeur-driven Embassy car, with its Portuguese flag conspicuously flying, to transport her to the relative safety of his Embassy.

He was alerted that the Gestapo had learned that Magda had long been a member ofHungary’s underground resistance; that she had edited an illegal anti-Nazi newspaper; and that she had helped Polish soldiers, now fighting with British forces in Egypt, during their escapes from Nazi POW camps.

Magda did not have time to pack any of her most prized possessions. She managed to throw her jewelry into a suitcase and was on the street within fifteen minutes of the warning from Garrido, with a mink coat thrown on over her négligée.

When the driver from the Portuguese Embassy arrived, Magda persuaded him to take her to Jolie’s apartment. In desperation, Magda used her key to get in, finding her mother still in bed in her lace nightgown, sipping a rich Turkish coffee. Magda ordered her mother to put on some clothes, collect her jewelry and valuables, and leave with her at once.

“The Nazis won’t bother me,” Jolie foolishly said. “I can’t go because I’ve invited friends of mine to a luncheon at The Hungaria today at one o’clock.”

“If you don’t get out of that god damn bed, the only date you’ll have to keep is on a cattle car to Auschwitz.”

Magda was finally able to force her mother to leave. Jolie later lamented, “I had to leave everything behind. I escaped only with my jewelry and a few furs.”

Magda then ordered her driver to take Jolie and herself to the apartment of Vilmos. Unlike Jolie, he immediately ascertained the imminent dangers, and without any fuss, went willingly with them in the Embassy’s limousine.

When the driver deposited the Gabors at the Portuguese Embassy, Jolie expressed horror at the living conditions she found there. More than seventy refugees from the Nazis were already living there in appalling squalor.

Dr. Garrido had reserved a private room upstairs for Jolie and Vilmos. At first, Jolieprotested to Magda, “I divorced your father years ago, and now Mr. Ambassador expects me to sleep in the same bed with him?”

“Nuci, in case you haven’t heard, there’s a war on,” Magda told her. “You can either occupy this room, or join the refugees downstairs in the courtyard.”

Magda herself would share Dr. Garrido’s bedchamber.

The next morning over breakfast, Jolie told Magda, “We had sex last night. If it was good once, it can be again.”

Sex was the last thing on Magda’s mind. She could not depend on the local Hungarian-language radio broadcasts for accurate news. Dr. Garrido’s informants kept them posted on the Gestapo’s actions within Budapest. The news reaching the Embassy horrified both the Ambassador and the Gabors.

One thousand Jewish lawyers had been rounded up and taken to the banks of the Danube, where a firing squad was waiting to assassinate them. Jolie also learned what had happened to the patrons of the Arizona Club. The SS had demanded that every patron there turn over his or hermoney and jewelry. A plane waited for them at the Budapest airport “to fly them to Switzerland.”

The Jews duly obeyed. En route, inair space over Austria, SS members opened the plane’s exit hatch and threw each of the screaming passengers to their deaths 20,000 feet below.

Jolie had maintained a friendship with a young Jewish man who was skilled as a decorator. He was very pretty and a bit effeminate. The Gestapo arrested him, cut off all his fingers, and then tied him down where he was sodomized by nearly two dozen Nazi soldiers before they tortured him to death.

In the courtyard of the Embassy, Magda and Jolie encountered a young mother who had a small girl with her. She told them that to sustain life for her starving child,she had traded a ten-carat diamond for a stale piece of moldy bread. At one desperate point, she cut her wrists and drew blood to give a child a drink in lieu of other nourishment.

Magda later revealed to Zsa Zsa and Eva in Hollywood that many of their friends and extended family had been roundedup by the Gestapo and taken to Tattersall. That was a well-known riding academy where Magda and Zsa Zsa had learned to ride horses when they were young.

At Tattersall, these victims, including the Gabor family’s lawyer and their family physician, both of whom were Jews, were machine-gunned to death along with hundreds of others. Later, their bodies were thrown into a mass grave dug by slave labor on the outskirts of Budapest.

Dr. Garrido decided to transfer the Gabors to this country villa at Galgagyörk, a Budapest suburb. Surrounded by gardens, the villa was officially designated as an annex of the Portuguese Embassy, and as such, enjoyed diplomatic immunity. Life in the center of Budapest was becoming too dangerous.

Meanwhile, it was being loudly noted by the Nazis that the Ambassador from Portugal was anything but neutral, and that he was siding with the Allies on many important diplomatic issues. Consequently, Goebbels pressured the Portuguese dictator in Lisbon, Antonio Salazar, to recall Dr. Garrido and to replace him with an official more sympathetic to the Nazis.

As Magda remembered, for nearly a month, the Gabors lived “like it was the halcyon days of Hungary between the Wars.” Afternoon tea was served in the garden, and at dinner, the women wore gowns. Dr. Garrido came and went from the main office of the Embassy, but no longer took his protégéewith him, fearing that his car might be stopped and Magda arrested en route.

Suddenly, and without warning, a group of about adozen terrorists stormed the villa, Heavilyarmed, they were clad in black clothing, their faces concealed by masks. Their unidentified leader wore a long pair of black boots extending up to his thighs. As he barked orders, Magda noticed that those boots looked scruffy.

Pointing machine guns at the Gabors and at the villa’s other guests, most of them aristocraticJews, he ordered them to goto their rooms and return with all their money and jewelry. SS men were assigned to accompany them in case one of them tried to hide their valuables. “Anyone not turning over every valuable item will be executed on the spot,” the terrorist leader warned.

The bandits occupied the Portuguese-owned villa for about an hour before driving off in three separate vehicles. The occupants of the villa, including Magda, gathered in the building’s living room to await instructions from Dr. Garrido.

Garrido talked to them for about two hours, informing them that his position in Hungary was growing more dangerous by the minute, and that he feared that Salazar would succumb to the pressure from Berlin and have him replaced.

As he was talking, a dozen Nazi storm troopers raided the villa. Their leader told Dr. Garrido that they were responding to a report that terrorists had robbed the occupants of the villa.

In a bizarre twist, sharp-eyed Magda noticed that their commanderwore the same boots as the terrorist’s leader. It was one and the same man. The identities of the terrorists had been revealed.

With their permission, Dr. Garrido went immediately to his ground-floor office to lodge a formal protestwiththe Hungarian government.

During his absence, the Nazi leader grabbed Magda’s arm. “You have been identified as Magda Bychowsky, and you’re wanted for questioning by the Gestapo. You must come with us.”

Jolie, with Vilmos at her side, stepped up to protest. “We’re her parents, and we insist on going with our daughter.”

“The more Jews, the merrier,” the sadistic leader said. “It just means we’ll have to dig a deeper grave.”

From her lover, Magda had learned that the first stop for captives was an interrogation by the Gestapo, followed by a trip to one of the “killing fields” outside Budapest, where they’d probably be shot.

As she was being dragged along the corridor that opened into Dr. Garrido’s office, she learned why he had not come to her rescue. His heart had failed him, and he was lying on the floor of his office, dying.

She broke from her two SS captors and darted into his office where she reached into his desk and removed a vial of medicine. Following his instructions, she got him to swallow its contents, knowing that if she failed to make him swallow it, he’d have only moments to live. As he gulped, gagged, and choked, the medicine had theinstant effect of reviving him.

When he became aware of his surroundings, she helped him to his feet. “I am the Ambassador from Portugal,” he told the SS men. “If you take Magda or any of the Gabors, I insist that you arrest me, too.”

The stormtrooper’s leader did not immediately acquiesce to Dr. Garrido’s request, even though he probably realized how inappropriate it would be to arrest, without specific instructions, an ambassador from a neutral country.

Outside, a large black car was waiting for the captives. An SS officer forced Jolie and Vilmos into its back seat. Magda was ordered in next. But when Dr. Garrido attempted to join them, the SS officer blocked him.

Impulsively, Magda placedher foot outside the car door, planting it firmly on the ground. The SS officer slammed the door on her leg, but she kept it firmly in position anyway, despite the agonizing pain. She kept doing that even when she feared that her leg would be broken, or perhaps even severed. She later recalled the almost unbearable pain.

The door did not close, and Dr. Garrido quickly joined the Gabors in the vehicle’s back seat.

In an amazing turn of events, after their car had traveled about two miles along the road leading to Gestapo headquarters in central Budapest, two squad cars of the Hungarian police gave chase. In a surprise move, the SS officers stopped their car and gotout, running into the fields, leaving Dr. Garrido alone in the car with Vilmos, Jolie, and Magda with her injured leg.

When the Hungarian police arrived at their car, their chief officer, who had obviously been briefed, apologized for the arrest of the ambassador. One of the policemen was ordered to drive the Gabors and the ambassador back to the villa at Galgagyörk.

Vilmos was let out first, followed by Dr. Garrido and Jolie.Magda required assistance. However, instead of helping herout of the vehicle, the policeman slammed the door of the car with Magda still inside. Then the driver accelerated, aiming his vehiclequickly out of the driveway.

Vilmos, Jolie and Dr. Garrido were informed that Magda would be escorted to police headquarters, where a report had to be filed before she’d be returned, unharmed,to the villa.

Dr. Garrido assured the officer that he would immediately file a protest. From his office, Dr. Garrido telephoned the German Ambassador to Hungary, who agreed to contact Germany’s Chief of Diplomatic Protocol.

Later, however, when Garrido telephoned the local police headquarters, he was told that Magda was not on the premises—nor had she been brought there at all. Garrido, still weak from his near-fatal heart attack and his traumatic experiences of the previous hour or two, demanded her return.

As revealed in latter-day dialogues with Magda, she had not been taken to policeheadquarters, but to a recently configured nerve center and torture chambermaintained by the Gestapo.

She was ushered into a large office where she confronted an SS colonel wearing enormous Nazi military head gear.

“Your Excellency,”he said to Magda. “Despite the unusual circumstances, it is an honor to meet the Countess of the former city of Warsaw. I am Adolf Eichmann. Yes, enjoying the same first name as that of our beloved Führer.”

***

Otto Adolf Eichmann was born in 1906 to a soldier who served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I. In time, he, too, joined the military on the side of the Nazis, where he rose quickly to become an SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel). He was charged with the monumental task of managing the logistics of the mass deportation of the Jews to ghettos and extermination camps throughout Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, including Hungary.

Eichmann arrived in Budapest in the immediate wake of the Nazi takeover of Hungary in 1944.Soonafter, he sent a message, through underground channels, to the Western powers, proposing the establishment of a “Blood for Goods” program wherein Hungarian Jews would be traded for Allied trucks and vital supplies. When the Allies rejectedhis proposal, he ordered that 430,000 Hungarian Jews, more than half of the country’s total Jewish population of 800,000, be sent by rail to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Shortly after their arrivals at the death camp, the Jews were gassed. This was part of Eichmann’s orders to carry out “The Final Solution” to the existence of Jews in Hungary. Eichmann’s program was carried out between May 15 and July 9, 1944.

[Exactly what happened to Magda during her custody under Eichmann may never beknown. She never shared the details of her experience with either Dr. Garrido or with her parents. But when Eichmann was arrested in 1960, she revealed a few insights. He had been living quietly in a suburb of Buenos Aires when he was kidnapped by agents of Mossad and flown to Israel to stand trial.

In 1944, fearing she would be tortured, Magda was taken to a room where two SS officers stripped her of all her clothing and tied her nude body to a cot. Within a half-hour, Eichmann entered the room. Without removing his uniform, he unbuckled his trousers and proceeded to rape her. When he was finished, he called her a “Jew bitch” and slapped her face several times.]

Intently, almost obsessively, she followed Eichmann’s trial in Israel, wherehe was indicted on fifteencriminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. When he was executed by hanging on June 1, 1962, she said, “I am dancing on the monster’s grave. There is a special torture chamber waiting for him in Hell.”

During her incarceration at Gestapo headquarters, Magda had assumed she’d be tortured and forced to reveal the names of key members of the Hungarian underground. But, surprisingly, she was not.

After her rape, she was delivered back to the villa at Galgagyörk where Dr. Garrido, Vilmos, and Jolie had been waiting for her. The ambassador had summoned a doctor to examineher leg and treat it.

She was experiencing some degree of traumatic shock. Even though she was, at least for the moment, in safe surroundings, she seemed to fear that the Nazis were coming to take her away at any minute. At random moments during the days ahead, she would suddenly burst into tears, reliving some past horror.

“None of us is safe, even within this Embassy,” Dr. Garrido warned. “All of us must begin making plans tonight to escape from Hungary.”

That night, Magda kissed Dr. Garrido. “You have given my parents and myself the gift of life. I’ll be eternally grateful. But time is running out.”

***

ZSA ZSA

Cut off from her husband, Conrad, Zsa Zsa led a lonely life in her wing of the Hilton manse in Bel Air. Barron and Nicky Hilton were away at military school in New Mexico.

Conrad came and went from the house without telling her. Her only companion was a shy and neurotic, but loving German shepherd named “Ranger.” He accompanied her through the gardens and around the house, but ran and hid if somebody approached.

In looking back, Zsa Zsa claimed that she knew her marriage to Conrad was over one Saturday night when he returned to their beautiful home on Bellagio Road from a business trip.

After dinner, she put on her most stunning Parisian négligée and “painted on my most glamorous and seductive face.”

Walking down the corridor, where her bedroom lay three doors away from his own boudoir, she knocked lightly on his door. There was no answer. She tried the knob, only to find he’d locked the door from the inside.

“He no longer wanted me,” she lamented.

The following Monday morning, Conrad left the house at 6am. Zsa Zsa didn’t rise until eleven.

Her maid informed her that Father Jack Kelly had phoned, asking to come by that afternoon for tea at 4pm, and she agreed to see him.

She knew at once that Conrad had asked Kelly to talk to her.

Five hours later, over tea, the priest came to the point, telling her that the first Mrs. Conrad Hilton was still alive, and that in the eyes of the Catholic church, Zsa Zsa wasn’t officially married.

“Poor Mr. Hilton, who is one of my most faithful churchmembers, lives day and night with the torment of having divorced his first wife,” Kelly said. “You can end his suffering by divorcing him. That way, he can be accepted once again into his faith where he belongs—and no longer living in sin with you.”

Zsa Zsa rose to her high-heeled grandeur. “GET OUT!” she shouted at the priest. It was the remark about living in sin that she could not tolerate.

Her nights became an agony of horror. Tormented with visions of Vilmos and Jolie being shot, and ofMagda being rapedby the SS, she couldn’t sleep.

She began a reliance on pills, both uppers and downers. As the weeks passed, she grew increasingly dependent on them. She also suffered great guilt, feeling she’d deserted her parents for a life of luxury in Hollywood. “Life here involved gossiping about who was having an affair with whom, what movie deals were being made, and what Louella or Hedda had said in their latest column,” Zsa Zsa said. “As far as Hollywood people were concerned, Hungary existed on the other side of the moon.”

Afternoons were often spent on the terrace of Eva’s apartment. Zsa Zsa found that only European men understood her dilemma, pain, and guilt. Eva seemed less obsessed with the war, and was still dreaming of a career in films. “She was denouncing everyone and everybody for notgiving her the break she felt she so richly deserved,” Zsa Zsa said.

The great German director, Ernst Lubitsch, often joined Zsa Zsa on Eva’s terrace to discuss the war and its politics. She remembered him “as a littleman with infinite tenderness.”

His urbane comedies of manners had earned him a reputation as Hollywood’s most elegant and sophisticated director. His films were promoted as artworks “with the Lubitsch touch.”

Born in Berlin in 1892, he came from a Jewish family and had appeared in some thirty German-language films asan actor between 1912 and 1920. His last appearance as an actor had been with Pola Negri in Sumurun (1920).

Emigrating to Hollywood, he evolved into a well-respected director, helming stars who included Mary Pickford, Negri herself, even Jeanette MacDonald. Zsa Zsa had been thrilled when Lubitsch directed Greta Garbo in Ninotchka in 1939.

Ironically, in 1945, he would offer Eva a film role in A Royal Scandal in which Tallulah Bankhead portrayed Russia’s 18th-century monarch, Catherine the Great.

Lubitsch and Zsa Zsa didn’t talk about movies, but about what was happening to their fellow Jews amid the flames of Europe at war. Bitterly, she blamed herself for leaving Magda, Vilmos, and Jolie behind.

“But you did what you could,” he told her. “You urged them to leave. They were stubborn. They didn’t listen to you. Don’t blame yourself. You’ve been a good daughter. They must take some responsibility for not heeding your warning.”

The comfort he offered was only temporary. Alone, she confronted “nights without end”and cried herself to sleep. She often grew irritated with Eva, accusing her of being selfish and not showing concern for the plight of the Gabors they had left behind.

With increasing frequency, Zsa Zsa depended on pills. Without admitting it, she had become an addict.

Occasionally, she pulled herself together in her capacity as a hostess. She wore perhaps too much jewelry and seemed to float through a party without really seeming to know anyone there.

Louella Parsons recalled one of her encounters with Zsa Zsa. “I asked her if she planned to pursue a screen career,” Parsons said. “But she didn’t seem to know who I was, and everybody in Hollywood knew who I was. She actually welcomed me to the film colony and wished me luck in getting work in character roles. I thought she’d lost her mind.”

At times, Zsa Zsa became irrational, one night blaming her jewelry as the cause of her family’s suffering. She’d often spend nights with her jewelry, trying on one gem after another, usually beginning with the pearls her grandmother, Francesa, had given her, and invariably including the ruby necklace which Vilmos had presented to her in commemoration of her wedding to Burhan Belge.

One rainy, windy night in Bel Air at around midnight, she became overcome with guilt for owning so much jewelry when her family was probably starving. She was staying that night in a suite within the Hilton Town House Hotel.

Impulsively, she gathered up her jewelry, walked out onto her terrace, and tossed it six floors down to the grounds below. Fortunately, the doorman concluded that the gems had come from her suite. He gathered up her collection, except for a “misplaced” diamond necklace, and returned them to her. Zsa Zsa’s necklace eventually turned up around the neck of the doorman’s girl friend.

As he later told Conrad, “Mrs. Hilton didn’t seem to realize what she had done. She seemed to have no memory of throwing her jewelry off the terrace.”

When Conrad returned from his frequent trips, he no longer accompanied her out on the town, and he didn’t even have dinner with her, retreating instead behind the locked door of his private bedchamber.

A woman as heavily sexed and as young as Zsa Zsa could not continue for long “living the life of a nun,” as she put it.

In spite of her addiction to pills, she continued to stage elaborate dinner parties, inviting mostly expatriate Europeans who talked seriously about the homelands they’d abandoned.

One of her favorite guests was the Austrian actor Paul Henreid, who arrived with his wife, Elizabeth (“Lisl”) Gluck, whom he’d married in 1936.

Zsa Zsa confessed to Lubitsch her growing attraction to Henreid.

“It began with a flirtation over the dinner table when his wife wasn’t looking,” she said. “It was those sleepy eyes of his that attracted me. He was also suave and sophisticated. I had thrilled to him in two movies I’d seen months earlier.”

She was referring to Now, Voyager and Casablanca, both released in 1942.

In Now, Voyager, co-starring with Bette Davis, Henreid had delivered one of the most iconic scenes in movie history by lighting two cigarettes at the same time and handing one of them to Davis.

He’d also immortalize himself as the freedom fighter, Victor Laszlo, in Casablanca. Although second in line to the more famous Humphrey Bogart, he ended up with Ingrid Bergman in the final reel duringthe most famous goodbye-at-the-airport scene in film history.

“We also spoke the same language,” Zsa Zsa said. Henreid had been born in Trieste (now part of Italy) when it belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

She claimed that there came a point when she could no longer be alone in her wing of the Hilton manse. She confessed, “Even when Conrad is home, I am still alone. I can’t reach through to him. He frightens me, too.”

“Paul was the kind of man I was accustomed to knowing in Europe,” she said. “He was the very opposite of Conrad. He reminded me of the land I’d left behind.”

She was aware of his reputation—in fact,he later entitled his autobiography as Ladies’ Man. And so he was. He was reputed to have seduced many of his leading ladies, including French actress Michèle Morgan, as well as Bette Davis, Hedy Lamarr, Olivia de Havilland, Eleanor Parker, and perhaps even Ingrid Bergman, who was also pursued by Bogart in spite of her frequent denials. “Joan Bennett said yes, but Katharine Hepburn told him to knock on some other door,” Zsa Zsa later recalled.

“Sometimes my entire day revolved around the hour when I could drive over and meet with him,” she said. “He understood me. And, yes, after intercourse, he lit two cigarettes for me like he’d done for that bitch, Davis.”

“There was never any question of his leaving his wife,” Zsa Zsa said. “I didn’t want him to. We knew our affair had the chance of a plucked flower. But when it was in full bloom, it was pure ecstasy for me.I felt comfort, protection, with his arms around me. I felt like nothing could harm me. He was not the most beautiful man in Hollywood, but he knew his way around the ladies. No wonder he was so popular in the boudoir.”

In his 1984 memoir, Henreid claimed that his wife, Elizabeth, received an anonymous letter. It read:

“You are probably unaware that your husband is having an affair with Zsa Zsa Gabor. When he isn’t shooting, she picks him up at the studio parking lot and they drive away, leaving his car there. They return several hours later. He gets intohis car and drives away, and she drives away in her car. I have documentary proof of this in photos. If you’ll meet me at Sunset and La Cienega at nine tomorrow night, I’ll turn this proof over to you—for a hundred dollars.”

At that point, and based on the implications of that letter, Zsa Zsa and Henrieid decided not to continue their affair.

After breaking off with Henreid, Zsa Zsa’s mental condition continuedto deteriorate at an even more rapid pace. She told Eva and others, “Without love, I have no reason to go on living. There are those in Hollywood, mostly women, who are jealous of me. Married to a multi-millionaire and living in luxury in Bel Air. They don’t seem to realize that a life without love isn’t worth living. It is existing.”

On some nights when her personal crises bubbled over, she would driveto Eva’s apartment and spend the night with her.

On one such very early morning when she couldn’t sleep, she rose at around 3amand headed for the bathroom. She didn’t turn on the lights, because she didn’t want to disturb Eva, who was sleeping in the bed nearby. In the darkness, she dropped a glass. The sound of it breaking awakened Eva, who grabbed a flashlight. When Eva opened the bathroom door and shined the light into her sister’s face, Zsa Zsa became hysterical and started screaming.

Somehow, in her mind, Zsa Zsa perceived that the Nazis had broken into the apartment and were about to haul her away. She continued screaming and weeping.

Eva called a doctor who rushed to the apartment. He gave Zsa Zsa a shot to sedate her. An ambulance was summoned.

She was unconscious when she was taken to a hospital in Santa Monica. When she woke up, she had no memory of what had happened the night before.

The doctors diagnosed her as having had a breakdown. “They kept me on a diet of sleeping pills,” Zsa Zsa later recalled. “Eva came to visit. Conrad did not show up. I was in a fog during my stay—which lasted about a week—in that hospital.”

My worst experience there was when two men, dressed in white uniforms, arrived to deliver me to the funeral parlor,” Zsa Zsa said. “I panicked, thinking I had died. The men had the wrong room. A woman patient had died in the room next to mine. It was horrible. I started screaming once again, and this time a doctor shot me with something that knocked me out for two days.”

After about a week, Eva arrived to drive Zsa Zsa back to her apartment.

Zsa Zsa told her, “I’m leaving Conrad. I don’t plan to return to Bel Air. I’m flying to Washington to see if I can get some intervention in helping Magda, Vilmos, and Jolie out of Hungary—if they’re not already dead.”

“After that, I’m going to fly to New York and stay in a suite at the Plaza. After all, Conrad owns that hotel, and I’m still his wife. I want to be in New York to welcome our family if they can manage to escape to Lisbon. From there, we can arrange onward passage for them to New York and that Statue of Liberty.”

***

EVA

As a means of reciprocating their hospitality, the Paul Henreids often invited both Eva and Zsa Zsa to their rather intimate dinner parties. The guests were mostly European expatriates.

An exception was a handsome young man, Philadelphia-born Hugh Marlowe, a stage and screen actor whose career was wallowing in mediocrity. Critics claimed that on film, he was “the embodiment of stoic uptightness.”

When Eva met him, he was yet to immortalize himself playing Celeste Holm’s playwright husband in All About Eve (1950), starring Bette Davis and Anne Baxter.

When he was introduced to Eva at the Henreids’, he was a house guest of the couple and one of Henreid’s best friends. Just like Eva with Charles Isaacs, Marlowe was in the throes of a divorce from his wife, E.T. Stevens.

Elizabeth Henreid recalled Marlowe sitting on their sofa, with Eva huddled on the carpet at his feet. “She was such a lovely blonde, and she’d positioned herself so that she was exposing maximum cleavage. Hugh was all eyes.”

During the course of the dinner party, Elizabeth wrote, “Hugh and Eva had eyes only for each other. Occasionally, she would glance nervously at me. I wasn’t Hugh’s wife. I had no claim on him. Perhaps she’d heard rumors.”

At the time, gossips claimed that Paul and Elizabeth were locked into a ménage à trois with Marlowe.

Before settling in for the evening, Eva spoke to Elizabeth on her terrace. She was blunt. “Does Hugh belong to you?”

Elizabeth laughed at the suggestion. “Oh, please, this is not another Van and Evie Johnson/Kennan Wynn kind of household. You can have him, sweetheart. I’ll stick to Paul. He may be dull, but he’s mine. Didn’t you come with someone?”

Indeed, she had, although Eva later could not remember the name of whoever had brought her, only that he was a rich stockbroker from New York who invested in movies.

“He’s not really for me,” Eva confessed. “I accepted his invitation because he has millions of dollars, a Rolls-Royce, and a chauffeur.”

Elizabeth looked at the discarded beau, finding him a dapper man, somewhere on the shady side of eighty.

A sophisticated hostess, Elizabeth even suggested that Eva was welcome to share their guest room with Hugh if she so desired. “It was obvious to me she so desired,” Elizabeth said. “She was hot to trot.”

That night, Eva launched an affair with Marlowe that lasted for nearly eighteen months. Of course, she wasn’t always available. “Mydance card was always overbooked,” she later jokingly recalled.

As it happened, the Henreids were sitting in their living room having a drink with Marlowe, their houseguest, when Eva called one night to cancel a date with him at the last minute.

With drink in hand, Marlowe rose to answer the phone. “It’s me, dahlink,” Eva said. “I won’t be able to keep our date. Something’s come up, if you’ll forgive the expression. Last night, I fell in love with another man.”

After about fifteen minutes, Marlowe reported to his friends and hosts: “I don’t understand it. Yesterday…well, she swore devotion and her love for me. We even discussed marriage. This sudden change of mind…It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Actually, you look a bit relieved to get this Hungarian bombshell off your plate,” Henreid said. “Come on, have another drink and forget her.”

Years later, during the recitation of the story to party guests at Merv Griffin’s house, Eva said, “I lied to Hugh. I said. I’d fallen for another man. But I was never good at math. At the time, I was also in love with four other men…or was it five? As I told you, dahlinks, I never could count.”

***

At long last, Darryl F. Zanuck, at Fox, secured Eva a minor role in A Royal Scandal (1945), with the understanding that it would be directed by Zsa Zsa’s friend, Ernst Lubitsch, and that it would star the indomitable Tallulah Bankhead as the Russian Czarina, Catherine the Great. A young and beautiful Anne Baxter was cast as her chief Lady-in-Waiting, Anna Jaschikoff.

Charles Coburn was assigned the role of Chancellor Nicolai Iiyitch,with William Eythe interpreting the role of the romantic male lead, Lieutenant Alexei Chernoff.

This film would represent Lubitsch’s second attempt to bringthe life story of Russia’sCatherine the Great to the screen. He’dalready filmed Forbidden Paradise in 1924, a silent movie starring Pola Negri as Catherine.

Lubitsch had trepidations about working with Bankhead, who was known for her tendency to fly into sudden rages. Before Bankhead signed her $125,000 contract, Lubitsch had arranged for it to be sent to at least ten other actresses. Consequently, he eagerly accepted an unexpected, last-minute callfrom Greta Garbo, who had retired from the screen after the failure of her previous film, Two-Faced Woman (1941). Previously, both Lubitsch and Garbo had enjoyed great success through theircollaboration with Ninotchkain 1939.Millions of Americans were lured into the movie houses by thatfilm’s slogan: GARBO LAUGHS.

When Lubitsch was reunited with the elusive Garbo, she approved of the script he’d sent her. “I played a long shot sending it to Garbo, never thinking she’d agree to do it,” Lubitsch recalled.

Impulsively, without checking with Zanuck at Fox, the director more or less went ahead and promised the role to Garbo, even though Fox would have to pay off Bankhead.

To Lubitsch’s shock, Zanuck and Fox Studios’ New York-based sales department were dismissive of Garbo. “We don’t want the bitch back on the screen, at least not at Fox,” Zanuck claimed. “Her last picture bombed, and she did better in the European market than in America. Because of the war, we’ve lost the European market, so we’d better stick with the dyke we have instead of the dyke who wants to make a comeback at Fox’s expense.”

[The word dyke had come into usage in 1942.]

Thanks to Zsa Zsa’s friendship with Lubitsch, Eva discovered this pre-production hassle before she reported to work on the picture. There, she had been cast as Countess Demidow, a Lady-in-Waiting within Catherine’s court.

When she first met Eva, Bankhead seemed charmed by her, and invited her into her dressing room for a drink.

The next day, Eva joined Bankhead for costume fittings. “Remember, dahling,” Bankhead said to her. “My gownhas to dazzle. You are only a Lady-in-Waiting.”

Within fifteen minutes, Eva was privy to one of the most startling arguments ever to take place on the Fox lot: Greta Garbo Vs. Tallulah Bankhead.

Without having checked with anyone at Fox, Garbo had assumed that the picture was hers, and arrived at the studio for wardrobe fittings. The staff was startled to see Garbo making an entrance onto the site, and immediately assumed that she had arrived to wish Bankhead good luck. Rumor had it that these superstars had engaged ina brief sexual fling with each other during the early 1930s.

Eva was a witness to their encounter, although her presence was completely ignored by Garbo. Nonetheless, Eva would spend the next few years “dining out” on what she witnessed that day between the formidable über-divas.

As Garbo walked in on Bankhead, it was immediately obvious that there was no love lost between them. Theromantic encounter they had shared together [in 1931 at the home of the screenwriter, Salka Viertel, when Garbo had scandalously arrived at a formal dinner party wearing jodhpurs] was a distant memory.

Garbo was her usual blunt self, wasting no time in silly talk, getting immediately to the point. She stood back and skeptically observed Bankhead being fitted into a lavish ball gown that was probably more spectacular than anything the real Catherine the Great ever actually wore. Imperiously, Garbo gave Eva not the slightest indication that she even knew Bankhead.

Practicing her best Southern manners, Bankhead at first attempted to introduce Garbo to Eva.

“I’m not here to talk to some blonde thing,” Garbo droned, but to acquaint you with a change in casting. It’s regrettable that I have to work as a messenger boy for Fox. I just assumed that Lubitsch had told you. From this moment on, I’ll be playing Catherine the Great. The role of that Czarina is part of my destiny.”

“Miss Garbo, I would be the first to welcome your return to the screen,” Bankhead said. “But I’ve already been signed. Not only that, I’ve accepted my first paycheck and spent a huge chunk of it.”

“Lubitsch told me that you will be paid and bid a sweet adieu,” Garbo said.

“I know your pictures haven’t done well, especially that last turkey, Two-Faced Woman,” Bankhead drawled. “I tried to sit through it, but got diarrhea and had to run out. It’s true that America has grown tired of your emoting. But you’re still big in occupied Paris. Edward R. Murrow told me that Nazi soldiers crowd into speakeasies every night to watch you in Anna Karenina and Ninotchka. Mata Hari is the favorite of the SS boys. They adore you as a German spy.”

“At least I made some great pictures, unlike some other ‘actresses’ who came to Hollywood,” Garbo said.

“Need I remind you that my last picture for that divine Mr. Hitchcock was called Lifeboat?” Bankhead said. “They lined up around the block to see Mama Tallu.”

“Dear me, you were just playing yourself in that trifle,” Garbo said. “The role of Catherine the Great calls for a European woman. I have proved my greatness in playing Queen Christina.”

“You mean that Swedish dyke?” Tallulah said.

“I mean, that Queen Catherine did not speak like an Alabama pickaninny.”

“Dahling, I don’t know who taught you Southern dialect. But if you ever go below the Mason-Dixon Line, I suggest you not call a white Southern belle a pickaninny.”

“Lubitsch explained to me that it would be wrong for you to attempt to play Catherine,” Garbo said. “You were brought to Hollywood to become the second Garbo. You failed miserably at that. Unfortunately, I’ve sat through your pictures. You are not a screen actress, but a stage actress who in front of the camera seems to be projecting to the last row in a balcony on Broadway. You should have studied my close-ups more carefully if you were trying to imitate me.”

“I think I’m just as strong-willed and just as horny as Catherine ever was,” Bankhead said.

“You must select your film roles more carefully,” Garbo said. “That is, if there areto be any more film roles. I heard you came to Hollywood to play Scarlett O’Hara. She is supposed to be sixteen years old when the film opens. The role in Gone With the Wind that was suited to you would be Belle Watling.”

“Are you aware she’s the mistress of the local whorehouse, and that I’m a lady?” Bankhead said.

“You’ve played whores before,” said Garbo. “I saw you onstage in Maugham’s Rain.You were like the cheapest slut on Place Clichy in that one. I didn’t come backstage to congratulate you because I was too embarrassed.”

“Miss Garbo,you have played far more whores than I have,” Bankhead claimed.

“As for your makeup, it is too garish for Catherine. You must have raided the makeup department. You’re not an Indian putting on warpaint to massacre the white settlers. Fortunately, I don’t need to paint a face on myself—a little lipstick, a dash of powder, perhaps the quick brush of an eyebrow pencil. On me, false eyelashes are not needed.”

“I found that out,” Bankhead said. “Remember when I first met you, I pulled them to see if they were real. Let’s not get too carried away with all that natural beauty. You forget that I first met you when you passed through New York. You were an un-retouched Swedish dumpling, with frizzy hair, buck teeth, and, lest I forget, the shadow of a double chin, puppy fat accumulated by eating too many Swedish pancakes with sugar-coated lingonberries. Makeup, of course, could never do anything for those clodhopper feet of yours. And then you took up with that dreadful Mercedes de Acosta. To me, she always looked like some mouse in a topcoat.”

“Mercedes was a celebrated Spanish beauty,” Garbo said. “Not like your former lover, Hattie McDaniel, all 350 pounds of pure black Mammy.”

Word spread quickly to the executive offices of Fox that Garbo was on the lot, feuding loudly with Bankhead. An emergency call was placed to Lubitsch in the hopes that he would diffuse what was escalating into an explosive confrontation. Lubitsch made a call to the wardrobe department and got Garbo on the phone. “I had the horrible duty of telling her that Fox didn’t want her. It was one of the most painful things I’ve ever done as a director.”

After Garbo put down the receiver, she took what Bankhead defined as “French Leave,” departing from the Fox lot never to return. She was seen later that day aboard a flight to New York.

Three years later, in October of 1948, Garbo and Bankhead would compete for another imperial role, this time that of Elizabeth of Austria in Jean Cocteau’s new play, The Eagle Has Two Heads. Before Garbo could make up her mind, Bankhead signed for the role. “With the play, dahling,” she recalled, “came a young actor, Marlon Brando, who was called upon by me to perform boudoir duty.”

Years later, columnist James Bacon asked Bankhead to confirm the rumor about Garbo showing up to challenge her for the role of Catherine the Great during a pre-productionwardrobe fitting for A Royal Scandal.

“Yes, dahling, it is true and so embarrassing for her,” Bankhead said. “When I saw her, I said, ‘Greta, dahling, and here we are, still surviving after all these years. You with your face lifted and your vagina dropped, and me with my vagina lifted and my face dropped.”

***

The following day, secure in her status as a viable star after her confrontation with Garbo, Bankhead met the film’s co-star, a very beautiful and very young Anne Baxter. The young actress immediately antagonized Bankhead, who later told Eva, “The cuntie is an arrogant little snob just because she’s the granddaughter of Frank Lloyd Wright. The no-talent bitch has nothing to be snobbish about.”

That afternoon, Lubitsch also introduced Bankhead to her six feet tall co-star, William Eythe. Bankhead defined the dark-haired, twenty-four year old actor as “handsome like a man should be—not some powder puff like Robert Taylor.”

She told Eva, “The only thing I heard that was wrong with him involved a punctured eardrum that kept him out of the war. I understand that all other parts of him are in working order. Photoplay called him ‘a wonderful catch.’ Well, I’m planning on being on the receiving end of his ball…make that balls, dahling.”

Within a few days, Bankhead was raving to Eva about having scored a home run with Eythe. “He gave me my biggest thrill since I came to Hollywood with the intention of fucking that divine Gary Cooper.”

“Eythe was an equal opportunity fucker,” Lubitsch said. “Within the week, he was also secretly plowing Anne Baxter. It’s a wonder he had any energy left to perform on camera.”

Bankhead befriended Eva and was very supportive of her. She confrontedLubitsch, telling him, “You watch that girl. She’s going to be a big star. I should think you could find more for her to do in the picture.”

Lubitsch suspected that the bisexual Bankhead was more intrigued by the prospect of promoting an amorous relationship with Eva than boosting her standing as a film star—and he was right.

On Monday morning, when cast members reported to work at the studio, they were informed that Lubitsch had suffered a heart attack over the weekend and that he was recuperating in a hospital in Santa Monica. Because he’d be in no condition to continue his involvement in the movie, Zanuck had turned its direction over to Lubitsch’s young assistant, Otto Preminger.

That choice of director suited Bankhead better than Lubitsch. Sheand Preminger had been friendsfor years, ever since she’d used her influence with her friend, Harry S Truman, to get the Preminger family out of Nazi-controlled Austria. Bankhead had also learned that Preminger had been her biggest champion during the hassle over which star should play Catherine the Great—Garbo or herself.

She learned that Preminger had told both Zanuck and Lubitsch, “I will not double-cross Tallulah. If you sign Garbo and fire Tallulah, I will walk off the picture.”

Bankhead appreciated that kind of loyalty.

Unlike Baxter and Bankhead, who were still overworking Eythe as he performed double duty, Eva, as she later claimed, didn’t get intimate with anyone on the film set.

The sexual popularity of Eythe on set came to an abrupt end after twoshort weeks, when Lon McCallister, a Los Angeles-born former child actor, showed up on the set to retrieve his boyfriend.

Eva was the first to meet him. He was only four years younger than she was, but his height of 5’6” made him look forever boyish. Bluntly, he told Eva, “I’ve come to rescue Billy—he’s my boyfriend—from those two tarantula divas who have been pantingover all that man-flesh, or so I’m told.”

Since he didn’t have a job at the time, McCallister decided to remain on the set for the duration of the shoot. “When you find a cock as big as Billy’s, you got to hang on to it for dear life.”

[Eva bonded with McCallister and Eythe and remained friends with them foryears. As the decades passed, and as their movie careers slipped into oblivion, she persuaded Zsa Zsa to lobby their cause with Conrad Hilton. Her older sister agreed, and subsequently, arranged work for both actors in appearances in Hilton Hotel commercials.

With sadness, in January of 1957, Eva attended Eythe’s funeral. He had died at the age of thirty-eight, after suffering from hepatitis and acute liver disease.

McCallister fell into Eva’s arms, sobbing. “Without Billy, he told her, “I can’t go on living.”

Actually, he did, dying on June 11, 2005, from congestive heart failure at the age of eighty-two.]

The first dayon the set, lunching with Eva, Bankhead gracefully responded to the loss of Eythe as a lover. “Obviously, he prefers the midget [a reference to McCallister] to my overworked vagina. Let’s press on, dahling, to my next conquest.”

Another visitor to the set was Frank Lloyd Wright, wanting to watch his granddaughter perform in front of a camera. In reaction to this request, Bankhead stormed off the set, refusing to emote in front of the fabled architect. “I’m not his fucking granddaughter.”

Preminger finally persuaded her to appear, but Bankhead deliberately flubbed her line—thirty times—until Wright grew impatient and left the set.

When Preminger asked why she’d done that, she answered, “Darling, he’s a known anti-Semite and a Republican Nazi.”

A third visitor to the set was actor John Hodiak, coming to visit his bride-to-be, Anne Baxter, with whom he’d appeared in the 1944 film Sunday Dinner for a Soldier. They had fallen in love, and planned to be married. Despite roadblocks imposed by Baxter’s family, the couple would eventually marry in 1946.

Eva said that Bankhead “was in triumph when she learned that Baxter had fallen for Hodiak.”

“I had that beer can of his first,” she claimed, referring to their joint appearance together in Lifeboat (1944).

Baxter trusted Eva to entertain Hodiak when she was in front of the camera. Eva had read in Photoplay that Hodiak was “the next Clark Gable,” although that same appellation had also been applied to other actors, including James Craig.

Eva learned that Hodiak was the son of immigrants from the Ukraine. And although she was involved in a torrid affair with Hugh Marlowe at the time, she admitted to Bankhead that she found Hodiak “powerfully masculine.He’s soft-spoken and radiates sex appeal, but in a quiet way, not flashy like Errol Flynn. All John has to do is stand in one spot, light a cigarette, blow out the smoke, and the dames will come flocking to him.”

[The Hodiak/Eva Gabor affair would be postponed until 1952, in the wake of his divorce from Baxter after six unhappy years of marriage

Eva would be the first woman Hodiak called for a date after dumping Baxter. “I followed in Tallulah’s footsteps and got my man, although that sneaky bitch, Janis Paige, was also moving in on him. A catfight was brewing.”

Eva, perhaps influenced by Bankhead, alsobecame something of a diva on the set, challenging Preminger about his camera angles and repeatedly accusing him of trying to make her look unattractive. He was outraged—“all that from a little stinking Hungarian twat.”

As a means of wreaking revenge on “that two-bit Budapest whore,” Preminger cut every reference to her and each of her scenes out of the movie.

She burst into tears when she went to a theater in the Los Angeles area to see it with friends. “I’d told everybody about my being in it. Preminger, that ass, cut what little part I had. I simply didn’t exist.”]

***

MAGDA

Back at the annex of the Portuguese embassy in Galgagyörk, Magda was still trying to recover from her rape by Adolf Eichmann and her leg injury. In the adjacent bedroom, Jolie frequently heard her oldest daughter cry herself to sleep.

In the violent twilight of the Third Reich, Dr. Garrido warned her that diplomatic niceties “are no longer being respected by those monsters. The Nazis are arresting, raping, pillaging, and murdering thousands, even millions, at random. You are no longer safe here.”

The Soviet Army was advancingfrom the East, and even with the enemy at their gates, the Nazis continued their systematic execution of Jews. Those same Nazis would soon die with Soviet bullets in their heartsand heads.

Dr. Garrido had learned through his paid informant at Gestapo headquarters that Magda’s name had been added tothe list of the top ten most-wanted “enemies of the Nazi regimein Budapest,” and slated for execution.

“When the SS arrives to arrest you, they will have orders that will supercede any diplomatic privilege,” he told her. “You will be taken away, perhaps along with Vilmos and Jolie, too.”

The following morning, after telling her that, Dr. Garrido was ordered by the Portuguese dictator, Antonio Salazar, to surrender his ambassadorial post to a replacement arriving soon from Lisbon. Garridohad been reposted as the Portuguese ambassador to Bern, and was ordered to relocate to Switzerland within forty-eight hours.

Garrido told her that once he was established in Bern, that he could arrange air transport to fly her from Switzerland across Nazi-occupied France and neutral Spain into Lisbon. But first, she had to get there. He made her emphatically aware that even a vehicle flying the flag of neutral Portugal would not be a safe way to transport her across Nazi-controlled borders into neutral Switzerland.

Whereas Garridohad been ordered to fly from Hungary to Switzerland, it was understood that his personal property and his private papers would be transported by truck. The vehicle carrying his household goods would undoubtedly be stopped and searched, butas long as it didn’t contain anyone wanted by the Gestapo or by the Hungarian or Austrian police, it would probably be allowed to pass.

Dangerous political prisoners had already been smuggled out of Hungary within a secret and very cramped compartment concealed beneath the floor of a truck associated with the Portuguese Embassy. Although the ride would be long and difficult, it was decided that the only way Magda could avoid detection involved being concealed this way.

“It’s a ghastly trip,” he warned her. “Fumes, noise, bumping, dirt, and grime.In safe, secluded spots, you’ll be let out to eat and relieveyourself. But it will be the most uncomfortable and frightening trip you’ll ever take.”

It was agreed that once she arrived in Lisbon, he would arrange for lodgings within a luxurious villa of a friend of his while awaiting transport by ship to New York. “All ships going to America are overbooked these days, but I will use whatever influence I have left to get you onboard.”

Then he informedher that although the “replacement” Portuguese ambassador to Hungary,Teizeira Baranquino, would be sympathetic tothe plight of Vilmos and Jolie, “he’ll have no real power to protect them during the final days of the Nazi Occupation of Hungary. Those bastards are more intent on exterminating Jews than in defending Budapest from a Soviet attack from the East.”

She was aware that her parents might not survive the hundreds of miles of an arduous trip beneath the floor of a bouncing truck. Dr. Garrido believed that since there was no warrant for their arrest, they might follow later within a conventional vehicleflying the flag of Portugal.

“I will feel so alone with my daughters out of Budapest,” Jolie had told Magda. “Vilmos is begging me to stay until he is granteda Portuguese visa, which hasn’t come through yet. I already have mine. He does not. And of course, I can’t leave Paul Savosdy. I’m still madly in love with him.”

“This is no time to think about yourlove affairs,” Magda chastised her. “You can always find another lover. Zsa Zsa, Eva, and I can’t find another mother.”

The night before Magda’s escape, a young aide delivered a message to them. Jolie’s apartment, overlooking Elizabeth Bridge in Budapest, had been completely destroyed by an Allied bomb.

Jolie broke into uncontrollable sobbing. Magda recalled thatduring happier times,if a maid broke a single cup, Jolie would oftenbecome hysterical. Now, all her possessions, clothing, furniture, and paintings, were gone after just one blast. Fortunately, she had escaped with all her jewelry.

“It’s amazing that America, our hope for freedom, wasalso the force that destroyed my home. If anything wastelling me to leave Budapest, it was that single bomb.”

As Jolie told Magda, as part of a tearful farewell, “If I must die, I will die in peace, knowing that my daughters have made it to safety.”

[It was later learned that a few hours after Magda’s escape beneath the floorboards of the Embassy’s truck, an order was issued by the Gestapo: ARREST MAGDA BYCHOWSKY.]

***

ZSA ZSA

In an attempt to rescue her family, Zsa Zsa flew to Washington, D.C. During her time in the hospital, she had read that Conrad Hilton was one of the twenty most powerful men in the United States. She believed, therefore, that by announcing herself as Mrs. Conrad Hilton, she could get some of the power brokers in Washington to cooperate with her hopes of allowing Magda, Jolie, and Vilmos to enter the United States through the Port of New York.

When she checked into a hotel in Washington, she turned on the radio. At the noon hour, she heard the terrible news. One wing of Conrad’s Bel Air manse had been razed by fire. It was the wing in which she lived with all her family memorabilia, clothing, and personal possessions. She’d left behind many choice pieces of her jewelry. The announcer claimed that therehad been only one living creature who perished in the flames. It was her dog, Ranger. She burst into uncontrollable weeping.

Ouida Rathbone, her next-door neighbor, was the first to have spotted the fire. In a desperate search for more information, Zsa Zsa placed a call to her in Bel Air.

“Oh, Zsa Zsa, it was so terrible,” Ouida said, between sobs. “I stood in your front yard and I could hear Ranger’s howls. I begged the fireman to save her, but by then the fire was too advanced. Your poor dog died a horrible death, over my screams of SAVE THE DOG! It was too late.”

Zsa Zsa went into mourning as if she’d lost a beloved member of her family—which actually, she had.

Three days later, she had pulled herself together and set about the task she had embarked upon: Her mission in Washington.

She called first on Dr. Vasco Garin, First Secretary of the Portuguese Embassy in Washington, D.C. She carefully explained her family’s connection to Dr. Garrido and the Portuguese Embassy in Hungary. Garin told her that Portugal accepted war refugees only if the United States guaranteed their admission into America. However, since the Gabors were Hungarians, and since Hungary had declared war on the United States, the Gabors would have to be classified as “enemy aliens” and therefore not allowed to enter America.

Zsa Zsa remained in Washington for two frustrating months. “I knocked on every door.”

Dr. Munir Ertegün was the Turkish Ambassador to the United States. He and Mrs. Ertegün were emphatically aware that Zsa Zsa was the former mistress of Atatürk, and both of them paid great attention to her, but could provide no help.

Mrs. Ertegün did procure an invitation for Zsa Zsa to one of the parties hosted by Gwendolyn (Gwen) Cafritz, who was one of the most prominent hostesses in Washington. Cafritz competed with socialite Perle Mesta as the U.S. capital’s “Hostess with the Mostest.” During a period stretching from the end of World War II until the early 1970s, their lavish, widely publicized parties were famousfor influencing the course of legislative policies and for mingling Hollywood celebrities with politicians.

Cafritz extended her invitation to Zsa Zsa after learning that “Connie Hilton’s wife is Hungarian.” Both women had been born in Budapest.

At the Cafritz party, Zsa Zsa once again was introduced to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, along with the power elite of the U.S. capital.

Zsa Zsa wore her finest diamond-and-ruby necklace, but was outdazzled by Cafritz, who wore a diamond-and-emerald necklace featuring 13 oblong emeralds and 145 marquise diamonds, each within a setting of platinum and gold.

Zsa Zsa told her that before leaving Bel Air, “I was awakened by this man brandishing a gun. He looted my jewelry, even a Hand of Fátima that Atatürk had presented to me in Ankara.”

[In 1965 and again in 1969, Cafritz would experience two famous robberies herself. During the latter, four masked gunmen punched, kicked, and forced her to open a safe, while other members of her household slept undisturbed in a distant wing of her house.]

At her party, Cafritz was warm and hospitable to Zsa Zsa, discussing the problems she had finding a good servant and also the hardship her household was undergoing because of wartime scarcities. Zsa Zsa begged her to introduce her to an influential politician who might help her.

“Here comes Lyndon,” Cafritz advised. “He’s going to ask you to dance. Press your case, dear, as you press up against him. Don’t be surprised if you’re greeted by Jumbo.”

Not as hip as she later became, Zsa Zsa didn’t know what “Jumbo” meant. But she soon learned, as the Texas politician held her close.

Lyndon B. Johnson told her he was a close friend of her husband. After the dance, during which he held her far too close as she experienced “Jumbo” first hand, he invited her for a drink.

When she poured out the details of her plight to him, he suggested that they retire to a room he kept at the Mayflower Hotel for further discussions. “You’ll soon learn how things work in Washington: One good favor deserves another. We call it ‘reciprocation.’”

She later regretted rejecting his offer. “Had I known that one day he’d be President of the United States, I would have gone back with him to the Mayflower. But I never believed that a crude country boy like Johnson would ever become president.Had I been seduced by him I could add to my resumé that I slept with three Presidents of the United States.”

In her memoir, Zsa Zsa did not “out” Johnson, but wrote about “a courtly Senator who held my hand. All evening he nuzzled me,” while assuring her that he might be of aid. She also falsely wrote that he was from a state she could not recall. But whereas the episode was not published in her memoirs, she “dined out” on news of her encounter with LBJ throughout the 1960s, during his Presidency and beyond.

In spite of her turning down his sexual advances, Johnson may have helped Zsa Zsa after all. Soonafter, she received a call informing her that the U.S. Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, would receive her the following morning in his offices at ten o’clock. She dressed in a black dress with a black overcoat.

She remembered a slender, gray-haired man who treated her with great courtesy. When she became speechless in his presence,he brought her a glass of water. “A war was going on, and he didn’t have much time, but he listened to my dilemma,” she said.

He explained that the Soviets would soon be controlling Budapest, and that he didn’t have any influence with them. “Because they are Hungarians, and because Hungary is at war with the United States, the Gabors are enemy aliens. I can classify them as American allies only if they reach Lisbon. If they can do that on their own, I will speed up their clearance into the United States.”

She was so grateful that she kissed his hand. “I should be the one kissing your hand, beautiful lady,” Hull said.

She flew out of Washington that afternoon, heading for the Plaza Hotel in New York. For an indefinite time, that would become her new address. Her husband’s address would be the Hilton Town House Hotel in Los Angeles.

On her first day in New York, she called Eva and told her where she was, and how things had gone in Washington. She never left her suite during the entire second day and retired early. The ordeal in Washington, the anxiety, and her fears had weakened her.

At around midnight, she sensed the presence of someone in her bedroom. She bolted awake and switched on her bedside lamp. In the doorway was framed the figure of a nude young man.

***

EVA

Before abandoning Hollywood (“it abandoned me, dahlink”), Eva secured a small part in one final movie, The Wife of Monte Cristo, released in 1946.

Dorcas Cochran’s screenplay had little to do with the novel by Alexandre Dumas père.

The director was the super-masculine Edgar G.Ulmer, who had been born in what is now the Czech Republic. In Vienna, he had been an art director for Max Reinhardt’s widely respected Theater in der Josefstadt. When he came to the United States, he directed the low-budget Damaged Lives (1933), an exploitation film exposing the horrors of venereal disease. One reviewer wrote: “After watching this horror, no one will ever have sex again.”

The Black Cat (1934), which he directed, starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, became the biggest hit of the season for Universal Pictures.

The male star of Monte Cristo was John Loder, who had married Hedy Lamarr in 1943. The sultry brunette star and Ulmer had long been lovers, their affair beginning in Europe. Loder seemingly knew of Ulmer’s affair with his wife, but it caused no tension between them.

Although Loder had two children with Lamarr, his marriage to her was coming unglued, and each of them was seeing other people. During Loder’s fling with Dinah Shore, Lamarr was also slipping around for sexual trysts with the handsome actor and furniture maker, George Montgomery, Shore’s husband.

When she met Loder, Eva knew him only as Lamarr’s husband. The British-American actor, over a period of several decades, would eventually make at least one hundred movies beginning with Dancing Mad in 1925.

In Now, Voyager, (1942), he’d played a wealthy widower engaged to Bette Davis. Off screen, Loder had a brief affair with Davis. He later said, “I think Bette seduced me out of curiosity. She wanted to learn first hand what turned on the most beautiful woman on earth, meaning Hedy, of course.”

Until Loder came along, Eva had no conflicts with Lamarr about men. “Leave those jealous feuds to Zsa Zsa and Hedy,” Eva said. But upon meeting Lamarr’s husband, she was powerfully attracted to him, especially when she learned that his marriage to Lamarr was all but over.

Eva made friends with Lenore Aubert, who had been cast as the film’s female lead, the Countess of Monte Cristo. A year older than Eva, Aubert had been born in Slovenia when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Later, she married a Jew, Julius Altman, and immigrated to the United States after the Austrian Anschluss of 1938.

After that, Aubert began to find work in American films, including Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938). On the set, Eva met Aubert’s husband, Altman, who worked in the garment business in New York. When Eva moved there, he beefed up her wardrobe by helping her procure her designer clothing at cut-rate prices.

Eva later dismissed her own small part in the low-budget Monte Cristo swashbuckler. “I took the role of the Countess, Mme Lucille Maillard, because it was the only thing offered to a young ingénue like me. The pay was virtually nothing. Fortunately, I still had a rich husband to pay the bills. Lenore’s wardrobe was more beautiful than mine, as was her jewelry. She was also beautiful, but not in my category, dahlink. Some vicious queenie hairdresser gave me a hideous coiffure, with my hair piled in ringlets on top of my head. Far more devastating were friends who saw the movie. They claimed that my voice sounded more like Zsa Zsa’s.”

Women were attracted to Loder because of his looks. Lamarr had openly praised “his physique and his strength. As a bedtime partner, I had only one complaint about him. He wore his shorts under his pajamas.”

Loder was the subject of an underground rumor in Hollywood. It was said that he could make love to a woman nineteen times over the course of a two-day weekend.

One day, Eva kidded him about this assertion in his dressing room. “I can prove it to you if you’ll go away for the weekend with me to Palm Springs. The trick is to get lots of exercise and plenty of sleep before the marathon. Then, after things get started, I rest about two hours between each roll in the hay, and get by on about six hours sleep.”

In a spontaneous moment of recklessness, Eva agreed to test his claim, and consequently disappeared with him for three nights in the desert.

She later reported to Aubert, “John lived up to his boasting. Nineteen times! It was remarkable, unbelievable. For me, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Never again.No more sexual marathons for me, no setting of records. As a lady, I prefer quality more than quantity. Those last six times with John weren’t as good as they should have been.”

Loder admitted to Ulmer, “As you, of all men, know, I’m married to the world’s most ravishing brunette, but every now and then, a man becomes famished for blondes.”

Lamarr later learned about her husband’s adultery with Eva, and other female stars, and ultimately divorced him. Loder told Eva and Ulmer, “Hedy is accusing me of adultery, but isn’t that like the pot calling the kettle black?”

***

JOLIE

In war-ravaged Budapest, both Jolie and Vilmos realized that time was running out for them. Every day, they were in danger of being hauled off to a death camp. Magda had escaped, but they had remained behind.

The death toll within the city was appalling. At least five thousand Hungarians had already been murdered, and an equal number hauled offto Nazi-run slave labor camps. Nearly 15,000 residents had been deported to uncertain fates.

In a desperate move to obtain a Swiss entry visa, Jolie had gone to the unofficial Swiss consul in Budapest and offered a bribe. She would surrender her five-story apartment house in exchange for an entrance visa. She later said that the consul must have been the last official in Budapest who would not accept a bribe. He rejected her offer.

At the time, neutral Switzerland was besieged with thousands of Nazis fleeing from Germany, knowing—even if Hitler didn’t—that the Nazis had lost. These Germans were hoping to use Switzerland as a launch pad for their eventual escape to such South American countries as Paraguay or Argentina.

Fortunately, one of Jolie’s old beaux, André Zalábondy, contacted herafter a silence of almost fifteen years. Rather chubby, he had pursued her for years without much success. In Budapest, he’d sold villas to wealthy aristocrats. But for reasons not entirely clear, he’d fled from Hungary and established a base in Spain. It was rumored that Zalábondy was a black market courier allowed to operate even in countries controlled by the Nazis. He also had powerful connections among the government officials of neutral Switzerland.

He had never liked Magda, finding her too aggressive, but from Lisbon, she had contacted him and asked for his help. Zalábondy was never known to do a favor for anyone without compensation, so some deal was struck to arrange safe passage for Vilmos and Jolie, plus their entourage, for travel across Nazi-occupied Austria and through parts of Southern Germany into Switzerland, even though no one in their party had the proper transit visas.

Throughout the endeavor, Jolie seemed more intent on rescuing her lover, Paul Savosdy, than she was in saving her ex-husband, Vilmos. So far, despite his Jewish birth, Savosdy had managed to avoid the Gestapo. Jolie believed that he had not been immediately executed because of his involvement in food distribution through his firm, Mendel’s, which had been a major food exporter before the war. Savosdy had been assigned the task of feeding some 5,000 prisoners in a deportation camp. He later lamented, “I was given not enough food for 2,000.” The prisoners included many members of the Jewish elite, plus an array of countesses, turncoats, princesses, collaborators, and government ministers, all of them awaiting execution.

During her one visit to Esterházy Schloss, the elegant seat of the Savosdy family, Jolie had noted crosses affixed the walls of virtually every room. Her lover’s Dresden-born parents had been born Jews but had conspicuously converted to Catholicism during one of the pogroms that afflicted that city.

Even so, Savosdy’s parents, including his mother, whom everyone called “The Princess,” had been arrested, tortured, and dragged out of their luxurious castle and deported to a concentration camp.

Jolie sensed that Savosdy himself would be next. The Nazis no longer needed him, having commandeered most of the country’s stocks of food for themselves, and no longer concerned with sending them to the starving inmates of concentration camps.

“I’ve got to save Paul,” Jolie said. “My passion for him is so great, I’d make any sacrifice. My love for him is so intense, it’s a sickness.”

A reign of terror fell over Budapest during January of 1945, when the Soviets began their occupation of the eastern part of the capital. In Jolie’s words, “They robbed and raped and stole.”

Allied bombs, most of them American, rained down almost daily. In the Nazi-held territories of Hungary, Jewswere still being slaughtered. Then, when the Soviet troops moved in, they slaughtered Nazis. Random fires broke out across the city, and there was massive looting.

Jolie had arranged for her mother, the family’s reigning matriarch, Francesca Tilleman,to be provided with sanctuary within the Portuguese villa at Galgagyörk, But shortly after she got there, Francesca bolted, preferring to remain within the center of Budapest with her son, Sebika, and her three other daughters. Sebika was married to a woman known as Manci with whom he had produced a twelve-year-old girl, Anette.

Jolie worried nightly about her family, as American and British bombs rained down upon Budapest. Whenever that happened, she huddled in the cellar of the villa until the airplanes departed back toward the west.

During the interim between the departure of Garridos and the arrival of the new Portuguese Ambassador, a young Portuguese chargé d’affaires and his wife had taken over the administration of the Embassy, running things from headquarters within Budapest’s Ritz Hotel and the embassy’s “annex” in Galgagyörk. Unlike the Swiss consul, they were not opposed to accepting expensive gifts, including jewelry from Jolie.

The young Portuguese couple agreed to transport Savosdy to Galgagyörk in exchange for shelter and refuge. Savosdy relinquished his remaining food supplies, including the last of his canned hams, to the chargé d’affaires. “Both Paul andI ended up singing for our supper…really for our lives,” Jolie recalled.

[Until her sister-in-law moved with the other refugees into the Portuguese villa, Jolie had never defined Manci as a rival, referring to her as “the little brown mouse.” For months, she had denied Sebika conjugal rights, blaming it on “female trouble.” Ostensibly, at least, she kept a daily appointment with her doctor.

It was later discovered that nothing was wrong with her equipment. Instead of consulting the doctor, it was revealed that she was visiting his brother, an engineer, and engaging in torrid sex with him instead of with her husband.]

When she was at last reunited with Savosdy, Jolie invited him to her bedroom, where they made love. There was talk of marriage, although he reminded her, “You are four years older than me…and I’m being kind.”

She shot back, “That’s the most romantic proposal I’ve ever heard.”

The morning after Savosdy’s arrival at the villa, Jolie—who had not been able to sleep—arose early, and pulled back the curtains for a look out at the garden.

Right below her, she spotted Savosdy walking with Manci, holding her hand. “I was a queen in feathers and marabou and beautiful hats and perfumed,” she later wrote. “At the villa, they called me Madame du Barry. Yet Paul had left me to eat my guts out while he fastened those precious blue eyes on Manci, the mouse. Make it rat. I’d saved him so he could make love to my brother’s wife.”

Her brother, whom Jolie had affectionately called “Seby,” was relatively safe—at least for the moment—because he’d obtained a job as a chauffeur for the Nazis. Jolie warned him that when the Soviets took over, he would probably be executed, but he refused to listen. “No harm will come to me, but I want Manci and my daughter to stay with you in the Portuguese villa,” hehadsaid.

The following morning, clearance had been arranged for a four-vehicle caravan, each of its units waving the flag of Portugal, to depart from Budapest and head west, with the understanding that it would contain Jolie, Vilmos, Manci, Anette, and other refugees with enough clout to have been able to arrange the necessary payments.

Sebika remained behind with his mother, Francesca, and the other Gabors. Tearfully, Jolie packed their meager possessions and, with her ex-husband, got into one of the vehicles.

Jolie recalled her final goodby to “Seby” and her mother. She would never see them again.

There would be many stops along the way. The first was at the Austrian border, where the caravan stopped for a toilet break. Savosdy emerged from the men’s room, buttoning his trousers. He stood beside Jolie, looking at Manci, who was seated in one of the vehicles. He then turned and kissed Jolie on the mouth, giving her a bear hug. “I am not in love with you,” he said.

With a bitter sense of irony, she later wrote, “And this is how I left Hungary.”

***

For the remainder of their passage through Nazi-occupied Austria and Southern Germany, Savosdy sat in the rear of the vehicle, holding Manci’s hand, with Anette sitting on his opposite side. In a middle seat, Jolie sat with two Hungarian generals, along with two men she remembered only as “Count Mylot” and “Baron Gudman.”

With many stops and searches en route the four vehicles managed to avoid Allied bombs still raining down from above. Strewn beside the Autobahn were many vehicles still burning from recent attacks.

Word reached them that the Soviets were moving rapidly toward Berlin, which had already been bombed virtually beyond recognition. Hitler was said to have retreated to his bunker, along with Eva Braun and, among others, the Goebbels family.

Ahead of the caravan, she noticed several vehicles racing toward the Swiss border. Soldiers were tossing their Nazi uniforms out the windows and slipping into civilian clothing they’d stolen along the way.

Because their van was overloaded, Jolie was ordered to abandon her luggage. “Everything I possessed except the mink coat on my back was left along the Autobahn for some lucky woman.”

Since they didn’t have Swiss entry visas, they were detained in the border town of Sankt Margrethen. The prices the locals charged the desperate refugees for food was unbelievable, a chicken costing as much as $3,000 in American dollars.

Fortunately, Savosdy had packed a large garlicky Hungarian salami in his suitcase. “I knew Paul had fallen for Manci when he cut her a very large slice of the salami, giving me a thin cut,” Jolie said.

The entourage spent the night ina little hotel. Amazingly, Zalábondy knew of their whereabouts, and telephoned Jolie at the hotel. He told her that he’d arranged for her to cross the border, and that when she and Vilmos got to Bern, $5,000 would be waiting for her at the Portuguese legation.

Defining themselves as citizens of Portugal, the Portuguese delegation crossed the Swiss border that next morning, driving to Zurich for the night. It was here that Savosdy told her that he and Manci were going to remain in Zurich to start a new life together, even though she was still married to Jolie’s brother.

She later claimed that Savosdy knocked on her hotel door later that night. “It will be my last farewell present to you,” he said, standing before her and removing his clothes. He crawled into bed with her.

“This memory of me will have to last a lifetime. I will never see you again.”

Back in the van the next morning, she was trying to hold back her tears. Vilmos told her, “You are better off to be rid of that butcher.” [He referred to Savosdy that way because of his involvement in the meat-packing business.]

Traveling across rural areas of France, where the Nazis had retreated after the Liberation of Paris in August of 1944, Jolie was shocked to find fresh roses and a large box of chocolates waiting for her at the Spanish border, compliments of Zalábondy. “I was treated like royalty, even given a luxurious hotel suite in Barcelona.”

Zalábondy came to call on them and invited Vilmos and Jolie to an elegant dinner at his villa outside Barcelona. “He was pretty much as I remembered him,” she recalled, “but a lot fatter.” He also informed her that he was the best friend of General Francisco Franco, the notorious dictator of Fascist Spain.

During the ride back to Barcelona, Vilmos asked Jolie, “What does he expect from us? At some point the piper will have to be paid. His generosity is not gratis.”

Years would pass before Jolie learned why Zalábondy had been so generous. He had heard that Zsa Zsa was divorcing Conrad Hilton, who was said to be settling ten million dollars on her, a rumor that later turned out to be untrue.

At some point prior to all this, Zalábondy had met with Conrad in Los Angeles. It is not known who arranged the meeting, perhaps Zsa Zsa herself.

A deal had been conceived and hatched. With the blessing of Franco’s government, Conrad was invited to build a luxurious Hilton Hotel in Madrid on land owned by Zalábondy.

***

MAGDA

With Dr. Garrido—reposted to Bern—out of her life, Magda, in Lisbon, wasted no time in replacing him. Almost overnight, she became the mistress of a grandée of Spain at his luxurious villa in Estoril, 15 miles west of Lisbon.

He was José Luís de Vilallonga, the Spanish Marquis de Castellbell, who was six years her junior.

Of all her lovers, this tall and handsome roué was the most colorful, and led a life worthy of a movie plot. He is best remembered today for interpreting the film role of José da Silva Pereira, the dashing Brazilian multimillionaire whom Holly Golightly (played by Audrey Hepburn) planned to marry in Blake Edwards’ 1961 Breakfast at Tiffany’s, whose plot was based on Truman Capote’s novella.

Years before, his father, the nobleman Salvador de Vilallonga de Cárcer, wanted to toughen up his sixteen-year-old son. To that effect, he forced Vilallonga to join the National execution platoon, fatally shooting captured Revolutionary soldiers opposed to the Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco. “I shot at least one young man every day. On arguably my finest day, I murdered eight young men who weren’t allowed to finish their lives. All this killing made me very confused.”

At the time he met Magda, Vilallonga had become disenchanted with Franco’s Fascist regime. After the publication of his first novel, the fervently anti-Franco Ramblas End in the Sea in 1954, he was banned from ever re-entering Spain.and sentenced in absentia to imprisonment for sedition. Every three months thereafter, he was retried (in absentia). In every case, the severity of his punishment and the length of his imprisonment was increased. After several of these “retrials,” the combined totals of his various sentences called for jail time of more than 300 years.

He became a foreign correspondent and would later write four autobiographical books about his numerous love affairs, including the one he shared with Magda in Lisbon.

Later in life, he claimed, “I didn’t write about all my affairs. It would have taken ten volumes, not four. For example, when I lived in Argentina after the war, I didn’t claim I was regularly plowing Evita Perón, for fear of what might happen to me.”

“Magda Gabor was my greatest seduction. I called her ‘The Princess.’ Somehow, she remained a grand lady while performing the vilest acts on a man. It was amazing. My time with Magda was sheer bliss. She wanted me to get a divorce and marry her, but I had no intention to do that—not until I’d spent the last pound of my heiress wife.”

During his adulterous affair with Magda, Vilallonga often talked about his wife, the Hon. Essylt-Priscilla Scott-Ellis, whom he’d recently married. “When she fell asleep on our wedding night, I slipped away and spent the rest of the evening in a brothel filled with French prostitutes.”

Vilallonga called himself “a seducer of beautiful women and a cad. I’m a hardened alcoholic who, without taking precautions of any kind, slept with more whores than a porcupine has quills.”

His wife was the daughter of Thomas Scott-Ellis, 8th Baron Howard de Walden, one of the wealthiest peers in England. A former debutante who’d been nicknamed “Pip,” Priscilla had joined Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War.

Vilallonga’s father, Salvador, had opposed his son’s marriage, publicly accusing his rebellious daughter-in-law of “sleeping with half of the Spanish Army, if not the entire Nationalist Force.

This unchivalrous assertion prompted Lord Howard de Walden to challenge him (without success) to a duel.

Magda defined Villalonga as “the most skilled of all my lovers. Two weeks into our affair, I told him I’d fallen in love with him and wanted to marry him. He told me that ‘any woman who falls in love with me is making a dreadful error and heading for horrible humiliation.’”

After Villalonga spent his wife’s inheritance and sold off her valuable collection of modern art to finance his spending sprees, he divorced her in 1972.

Renowned for his indolent air and lanky elegance, he sailed the finest yachts, rubbing shoulders with Aristotle Onassis, the Rothschilds, and the Kennedys. (He aggressively pursued Jackie.)

He edited Spain’s version of Playboy and personally selected and “auditioned” the centerfolds. He also wrote a racy column, called “Letters from Paris,” for the soft-porn scandal weekly Interviú.

When Franco died and the Spanish monarchy was restored, Vilallonga returned to his native Spain, where he wrote a best-selling biography of King Juan Carlos.

In a drunken interview during the late 1970s, Vilallonga claimed that during the filming of Breakfast at Tiffany’s “Audrey wouldn’t get enough of my Don Juan swordsmanship. Truman Capote told me I had the most magnificent penis he’d ever seen.”

When Vilallonga died at the age of 87 in 2007, his obituary in The London Telegraph called him “a playboy, wastrel, fortune hunter, and bit-part actor.”

He wrote his own epitaph:

Here Lies the Don Juan of the 20th Century:

At Last His Lovers Know Where He’s Spending the Night.

***

ZSA ZSA

In her memoirs, Zsa Zsa, the lady, would deny affairs with such men as Howard Hughes or Errol Flynn. Yet in those same memoirs, she willingly made an even more damaging admission, asserting that she fell in love and had a voluntary affair with her stepson, Nicky Hilton.

He was that young man standing nude in the doorway of the bedroom of her suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.

As she frankly admitted, “I had always loved Nicky Hilton, my stepson; now I began to love Nicky, the man. He was sexy and exciting, but not quite as dazzling as Conrad.”

“It was a night of grand passion,” she later told Greta Keller. At the time, her unofficial godmother was singing at the Stanhope Hotel in New York, and Nicky and Zsa Zsa attended three of her evening concerts. No one, not even Walter Winchell in his syndicated column, noted their joint appearance in the audience. Since Conrad was out of town, people assumed that Nicky was merely functioning as a diligent and attentive stepson and escorting his mother to dinners and night clubs. No one seemed to notice that they were holding hands under the table.

“A love affair like ours wasn’t so unusual,” Zsa Zsa told Greta. [Ironically, Greta herself, when she was in her eighties,would end up with a lover, Wolfgang Nebmaier, in his twenties.]

“Actually, Nicky was closer to my age than I was to Conrad’s age.” Her stepson was born in 1926, which made Zsa Zsa only nine years older than he was.

“In many ways, I was instrumental in restoring Nicky’s manhood,” Zsa Zsa claimed. “All of his life, he’d lived in his father’s shadow. Nicky liked to drink and to carouse and didn’t really apply himself to running the hotels. He wanted to party. Conrad constantly attacked him and belittled him. Instead of building him up and supporting his son, he tore Nicky down.”

“During the long years of our affair,” she said, “I constantly praised his manhood. He was a stallion. Ever since he was fourteen, both homosexuals and hot-to-trot females had sought him out. He was handsome, rich, and possessed a magnificent weapon that he’d inherited through Conrad’s genes. Both of them were Texas bulls.”

Nicky photographed badly, but in person, he was extremely handsome, speaking in a soft Texas drawl. He was tall and broad-shouldered and wore tailor-made suits from Savile Row in London. Even as a teenager, he had a reputation as a playboy, his dark brown eyes suggesting mischief and desire.

Even though he looked like he’d just graduated from college, he was a man of the world, having launched affairs with members of both sexes. He was at ease moving withinhigh society, as he’d spent his early teenage years meeting movie stars, industrial tycoons, presidents, senators, and fading members of the European aristocracy.

“Yes, Nicky was bisexual,” Zsa Zsa said, “which did not come as a shock to me ever since I’d seen Bill Tilden going down on him on Chaplin’s tennis courts. Homosexuals restored his sense of manhood by the constant praise heaped onto that weapon of his. Even Tyrone Power, Eva’s future all-time lover, ‘bottomed’ for him. I had never heard that expression before I came to America, but I thought it apt.”

“Nicky might have indulged in sex with homosexuals, but I can assure you he was always the man in such situations.”

“He had such a commanding presence with women,” she said. “It was amazing for one so young. Over the years, there were many reports of his violence toward women, especially from his first wife, Elizabeth Taylor, but during our affair, which lasted for years, he always treated me with great respect, love, and tenderness.”

“Perhaps I exaggerate. He could get a bit rough in the bedchamber, but in a way that most women would adore. From reading American romance novels, which sell in the millions, I think women like to be devoured by a strong man who is a skilled swordsman. I can assure you that no woman ever left Nicky Hilton unsatisfied.”

As a teenage boy, he’d also been pursued by movie stars with voracious sexual appetites. He jokingly called them “child molesters, but in my case, the child wanted to be molested.”

An example of a star who Nicky had seduced (or vice versa) was Joan Crawford, who had once bedded Jackie Cooper when he was sweet sixteen. One night when Nicky checked into the Plaza Hotel, Crawford telephoned his suite and invited him over for cocktails.

He confessed that he accepted Crawford’s invitation. “She was ready to go,” he told Zsa Zsa. “We did it on the living room floor of her suite. She couldn’t wait until we got to her bedroom. It would have been a memorable experience for me, but she had the most awful breath.”

Lana Turner had been another of his conquests. “She even made a movie (Weekend at the Waldorf; 1945) at Dad’s hotel.”

The hotel heir didn’t really work, although in time, he held two major posts—one as the vice president of the Hilton Corporation, and the other as the manager of the swanky Bel Air Hotel, which he referred to as “my fuck pad.”

It was at this hotel that Zsa Zsa would prepare her famous “Dracula Goulash” for Nicky before bedtime in the privacy of his hotel suite.

Debates about fidelity never came up between Nicky and Zsa Zsa. Over the years, when he wasn’t with her, he was seen with actresses such as Denise Darcel, Terry Moore (rumored to have married Howard Hughes), or else with socialites like Kay Spreckels and Hope Hampton. Ironically, Conrad, Sr.,had previously dated both Spreckels and Hampton.

[In 1955, Spreckels,aged 39,became the fifth and final wife of Clark Gable.]

Zsa Zsa was well aware that Nicky occasionally pursued women who had previously visited his father’s boudoir. He was always after that final approval whenever he heard one of them say, “You’re a better lover than your father.”

“Nicky was a wonderful lover,” Zsa Zsa told Greta, “but he was more than that. He wasa supportive friend. We could even complain about our other lovers with each other. There was another compelling reason that made my affair with Nicky so exciting. When I married Conrad, he was almost the grandfather type, thoughstill reasonably virile.”

“With Nicky, I was getting ayounger version of Conrad, which his first wife had gotten, but which I never got to experience because of the difference in our ages.”

“As much as they disliked each other, Nicky was definitely his father’s son. Theywere men used to getting their way. Women were theirs to command. Both had forceful personalities, and both were strong and terribly sexy.”

“The subject of marriage did come up on occasion,”she claimed, “but only when we’d had too much champagne. We decided almost from the beginning that it would be too scandalous for me to divorce Conrad only to marry his son. After all, I didn’t want to be dropped from the social register.”

Zsa Zsa also told Greta, “When I became Nicky’s lover, I honestly felt that I had gone to bed with Conrad for the final time. As soon as I got back to California, I was going to file for a divorce. But my plandidn’t work out. There was an unexpected rape looming in my future.”

***

EVA

Eva was the first to admit that she had not been a good wife to her millionaire husband, Charles Isaacs, who doted on her. “He was in love with me; I was not in love with him, although he was rich and handsome, two very compelling reasons to marry a man.”

She’d grown bored with her role as a Hollywood hostess, and she didn’t want to feel any more guilt “when I had a string of beaux on the side.” Her list of outside romances still included, among others, Phillip Terry, Robert Taylor, Hugh Marlowe, Bugsy Siegel, and Robert Walker. (“He needed more comforting than love-making.”)

Her film career was going nowhere, especially after every trace of her small involvement in A Royal Scandal ended up on the cutting-room floor.Tallulah Bankhead had telephoned her twice, urging her to come to New York, where the actress promised to invite her to parties where she’d meet Who’s Who in “The Theater.”

One Sunday, when Isaacs returned home from his Coast Guard duties, Eva had already booked her train ticket and packed her luggage.

Phillip Terry, freed from the clutches of Joan Crawford, had driven by in a station wagon earlier in the day and had hauled her excess luggage into storage at a Los Angeles depot. He also gave her a “farewell fuck,” as he put it, knowing their sexual intimacy was all but over. Both Terry and Eva had already agreed that it was time for each of them to move on.

During the course of Eva’s last attendance at a Hollywood party, columnist Hedda Hopper asked her, “Why do you want to work as an actress? As the wife of Charles Isaacs, you can buy the studio.”

Eva complained to Susan Hayward that, “No one understands my commitment to acting. It’s something I’ve dreamed about as a little girl growing up in Budapest. I’ve got to pursue my dream; otherwise, my life will turn into a nightmare.”

Isaac’s best friend, a stockbroker named Ralph Fabor, said, “Eva was the love of Charles’ life. He catered to her demands shamelessly. She wanted something: He got it for her. He told me that she was his lifetime partner. Sad to say, because of his premature death, that one commitment he would honor.”

“Charles just did not understand how much I wanted to be an actress,” Eva said. “I wanted that more than anything, and I was willing to lie on casting couches, whatever it took. I didn’t want to be just the wife of a rich man. I wanted to be known as Eva Gabor, not as Mrs. Charles Isaacs. Unfortunately, my husband did not realize that. He thought that by providing me with a lavish lifestyle, turning me into a Hollywood housewife, he would please me and that I would stay with him. How he misjudged me.”

Ironically, the month Eva deserted him,his doctors told him that he was riddled with cancer. The malignant cells had spread throughout his body, and he had only a short time to live.

“But it wasn’tthe cancer that killed him,” Fabor said. “It was the loss of Eva. He never recovered from his broken heart. Usually, he was a guy who could roll with the punches. But her abandonment of him and the cancer thing—it was all too much. He lost his will to live.”

Eva later regretted her impulsive decision, referring to it as “the mistake of my life. He was literally dying the day I told him I was leaving,” she admittedin a candid newspaper interview, using a direct approach which in itself was unusual for her. “I’ve paid for that mistakedearly. I’m still haunted by it. I let ambition, not compassion, rule me.”

“I knew Charles would continue with the marriage, even if I confessed I was unfaithful to him. But I could not go on the way I was. I felt guilty sleeping in his bed, cheating on him, and living off his rich purse.”

As Eva wrote in her memoir, “And so, as the sun set behind the corner of Hollywood and Vine, I headed East, leaving behind the great film city,which didn’t even know that I had gone.”

Jolie later chastised her for leaving Charles. “Dahlink, you should have stuck around and inherited his millions.You would have been fixed for life. After you buried him, you could have gone and done anything you liked, even the theater. But you would show up at auditions in diamonds and mink instead of living in a seedy hotel near Times Square.”

According to some reports, Eva was given a million dollars by Isaacs. She informed her longtime companion, Camyl Sosa Belanger, however, that “I didn’t take a penny from him.”

Later, when Jolie got to Hollywood, she called on Isaacs, since his divorce from her daughter hadn’t yet been finalized. “I had heard how virile and handsome he was. Not the man I encountered that day. He was emaciated. A manservant had to carry him out onto a chaise longue for tea with me in the garden. His face had a yellowish color toit, and he looked like he weighed no more than eighty-five pounds. The cancer was eating his body alive.”

He spoke to Jolie about his great love for Eva “Look at me,” he said. “What kind of husband could I make? My life is over. I can only be grateful that she came into it and provided me love and comfort for the short time she did.”

“What is it with my daughters?” Jolie later asked. “They married millionaires and then they walked away from them. That’s not how I trained them as courtesans. Maybe in the future, they would learn their lessons better. But that didn’t happen all at once. Like a sister act, both Zsa Zsa and Eva would enter into disastrous third marriages. What’s a mother to do?”

***

MAGDA

As world War II wound down in 1945, Magda, followed by Jolie and Vilmos, found a temporary home in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, which had supposedly remained neutral throughout the war.

“Nucika,” cameMagda’s voice over the long-distance phone, calling from Lisbon to her mother in Barcelona. “Oh Nucika, you made it to Spain. Lisbon is only a flight away. The Nazis are behind us.”

Both women were crying over the phone at the sound of the other’s voice, but because of the high expense involved, they agreed to relay the bulk of their respective news until Jolie’s arrival in Lisbon.

In Spain, thesponsor who had navigated theway for Jolie and Vilmos, André Zalábondy, informed them that he was persona non grata in Portugal, and as such, he would not be able to accompany them.

At the end oftheir train ride across Iberia to Lisbon, Jolie and Magda fell into each other’s arms, crying and hugging, before Jolie released her daughter for the embrace of Vilmos, who seemed bewildered by his new surroundings.

Jolie was shocked at Magda’s appearance. Shelooked emaciated, and some of her hair had fallen out. Magda blamed it on her shattered nerves. “I didn’t know which members of my family were going to be executed.”

Unlike Spain, where they’d been treated like royalty, Jolie complained about their rude reception at the Portuguese frontier. “We were stopped, searched, and treated like all the other penniless émigrés.”

On theirway to the best hotel in Portugal, the Palacio Hotel in Estoril, Magda described her new circumstances as the mistress ofJosé Luís de Vilallonga, a grandée of Spain.

“If you don’t put some meat on those bones of yours, he’ll drop you!” Jolie (undiplomatically) warned her.

Before they arrived at the hotel, Magda informed them that all three of them would have to remain in Portugal until the end of the war.

When she saw the elegant and impressive Palacio Hotel, Jolie had to warn her daughter, “Magduska, Papa and I have escaped, but we have no money left. Everything was left behind, including $200,000 in jewelry which I had deposited in a bank vault, fearing it would be seized at the border by the Nazis. They take everything.”

“But Portugal is very cheap, “Magda assured them, “and José will take care of everything within reason. But we must be frugal.”

Eva and Zsa Zsa had also agreed to help. Each of them would contribute $500 a month to their parents’ welfare.

“With that, and with what José gives us, you can live in luxury here,” Magda assured them.

After the bellhop escorted them to their room, Jolie protested. “But only one room! I am a divorced woman!”

“The hotel is overcrowded,” Magda said. “Everyone from Nazi officers to Allied commanders, along with half the spies in Europe, have booked all the rooms.”

Finally, the next morning, Magda arrived with good news. “José has used his influence. You now have two rooms, although each is rather small.” Then she noticed that of the twin beds, only one had been slept in.

Jolie explained, “I went to lie on Vilmos’ shoulder, hoping he would console me. We remembered the good times, and one thing led to another.”

“Oh, Nuci, you’re impossible,” Magda said, “and after all the trouble I went to.”

Magda remembered looking at her father, who had once been a dashing Hussar. “His hair was gray, and he’d gotten fat. He was without his property, family, and friends, except for us. He longed for Hungary. I feared he would not adapt to America.”

Worried about the future, Jolie remembered being very despondent one night. She allowed herself to be picked up in the bar of the Estoril Palace by a blonde, handsome, blue-eyed Nazi.

Later, as she explained to Magda, “I felt dirty and used, although at first, I’d been flattered that such a good-looking devil found me attractive as a woman. I sat in the bathtub for an hour trying to wash off the Nazi slime.”

Jolie was eager for news of Zsa Zsa and Eva. Jolie was horrified when she learned that Zsa Zsa was divorcing Conrad Hilton, but predicted that the hotelier would settle millions on her.

Jolie went on with presuppositions about Eva: “I’ve told everybody that Eva is a big star in Hollywood. She sent me all these pictures of herself posing in gowns at lavish parties, or else in bathing suits in front of deluxe swimming pools. I figure that if Garbo makes $10,000 a week, Eva must be making at least $5,000 a week.”

“She’s penniless,” Magda said, “and she’s about to divorceher millionaire husband. She never made it as a star, or even as a starlet, in Hollywood. She moved to New York to look for work on Broadway.”

“I thought the $2,000 I sent her for her new teeth would have made her a great beauty and a star!” said Jolie, dismayed.

Throughout the remainder of World War II, Jolie and Vilmos remained installed at theHotel Palacio in Estoril, amid members of faded monarchies deposed by the seismic changes that had recently swept over Europe.

Magda visited her parentsdaily, often for lunch. The Gabors were already ensconced there when theSoviets took Berlin and when news spread that Hitler had committed suicide. Before the end of that summer of 1945, the U.S. President, Harry S Truman, launched the Atomic Age by bombing the Empire of Japan into unconditional surrender.

It was on December 1, 1945, that a fur-clad Jolie stood at the port of Lisbon, bidding Magda and Vilmos good-bye. She was sailing alone to New York aboard a dismal freighter. Vilmos and Magda would follow as soon as transport became available.

Jolie looked worried: “I haven’t seen Eva since 1940, or Zsa Zsa since 1941. I know they’ve changed. But what has America done to them?”

She kissed Vilmos and Magda as she sobbed, “I must start a new life. I’m beginning over again with nothing.”

Left on the shore holding her father’s hand, Magda also realized that she, too, would have to create a new life and identity in America. Only the night before, José had told her that he was leaving Estoril to accept a job in liberated Paris now that the war was over.

Without saying so, he made it clear that a former girlfriend was waiting for him in France.

After waving goodbye to Jolie, Magda turned to Vilmos: “Within six months in America, maybe less, I will find a new husband.”

***

ZSA ZSA

Zsa Zsa—never an example of marital fidelity—blamed Conrad’s adultery on the guilt he suffered for having divorced his first wife against the teaching of the Catholic church.

Just prior to her divorce from him, Zsa Zsa received an elegantly engraved invitation to a lavish party on Long Island. Conrad wanted her to attend the gala with him. Thinking it might be fun, she agreed to go, although she’d never heard the name of the hostess before. Conrad had insisted that the hostess “is a dear friend of mine.”

In a chauffeur-driven limousine, Conrad and Zsa Zsa arrived at a gated mansion in Southampton, at an estate once frequented by vacationing members of the Rockefeller family.

Taking Zsa Zsa’s arm, Conrad led her through the garden until a butler escorted them to the building’s largest living room. Instead of furniture, the latest owner had installeda mammoth indoor swimming pool in the floor. In it, lotus blossoms floated. “It was all very Dorothy Lamour and South Seas,” Zsa Zsa recalled.

She was amazed by the number of beautiful girls in shapely, skimpy bathing suits and by the array of handsome young men who lounged around the pool, drinking tropical drinks as if the estate were a Caribbean manifestation of paradise.

In the mansion’s main hall, the hostess stepped out to greet them, kissing Conrad full-frontal on the lips. Zsa Zsa was startled by the fact that she was completely nude. She was a beautiful, fairly young blonde, evoking Lana Turner, and she wore her hair long and flowing. Zsa Zsa later wrote in a memoir, “I was startled, but attributed the unconventionality of the situation to America, to my unfamiliarity with strange American customs, and even stranger American parties.”

After enjoying some food from a buffet table loaded with champagne, lobster, and caviar, Conrad disappeared behind a door that was padded and upholstered with redvelvet. Then the hostess reappeared with a good-looking young man who appeared to be no more than nineteen.

The madam directed Zsa Zsa into her study, with the young man—who wore a see-through bikini—trailing behind.

Once inside, she shut the door. “This is Ramon Garcia,” she said.

“Hello, beautiful lady,” he addressed her with accented English.

“He’s from Cuba, and he used to perform in stage shows in Havana,” the hostess said. “He was billed as ‘El Toro.’”

With one quick move she snapped off his bikini, a garment which had been specifically designed for fast, theatrical unfastenings. “Here’s why.”

Later in her life, Zsa Zsa would tell her friends, “Not until I met [the Dominican playboy] Porfirio Rubirosa, had Iever seen such an appendage. He resembled something you’d see on one of those XXX-rated mosaics the Romans installed in their villas in ancient Pompeii.”

“I thanked the hostess and complimented Ramon on his obvious physical attributes, but then fled Ifrom the study,” she said. “I went on a search for Conrad.”

“At first I hesitated, but then I opened the red velvet door and entered a room thick with the smell of incense. A beautiful young girl lay nude on the bed, andI came face to face with Conrad, who was just zipping up his pants.”

Before the night ended, she was made aware that those handsome young men, as well as the many beautiful young girls lying around the pool, were for hire.

She wrote, “My husband, the love of my life, had taken me to a whorehouse.”

She later claimed, “That was his way of signaling the end of our marriage. If I still had a residue of love left for him, it disappeared that night. It was an outrageous thing to do to me to end our marriage.”

But Zsa Zsa was wrong. The marriage didn’t end that night. It had a final round to go.

***

A few weeks later, Zsa Zsa—thanks to her association with Conrad—was staying gratis in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan. It was there that she learned that Conrad had been involved in a ski accident and that he was recuperating within the suite she had previously occupied at The Plaza, also in New York.

A call came in from her about-to-be-ex-husband, who told her that he was in bed with his leg in a cast. “I agreed to make a mercy call on him,” she said.

She admitted that the first hour of her visit to Conrad’s bedroom passed pleasantly enough. He’d obviously not learned of her affair with his son, Nicky.

“We talked about the ski accident, but made no mention of our upcoming divorce.”

She later wrote in a memoir, “Then (incredible as it sounds, but quite believable if you had known Conrad, his forceful nature, and his intense virility), he raped me.”

Nine months later, a daughter, and Zsa Zsa’s only child from all of her marriages, was born. “I named her Francesca Hilton.”

Zsa Zsa became the only Gabor sister to ever give birth to a child. All other potential Gabor babies were aborted.

Magda

Because of her heroic effort as an underground warrior against the Nazis, Magda was praised by Jolie.

“You are my bravest daughter,” she told her.“ You saved us from the firing squads that killed many other Jews along the banks of the Danube. I will be forever grateful to you.”

Adolf Eichmann, a mass murderer, was sent to Budapest by Hitler to carry out “The Final Solution” against the Hungarian Jews. Magda became one of his more prominent victims.

When he was executed in 1962 in Israel, with a sense of overpowering sadness, she “danced on the monster’s grave.”

One of the most evocative photographs from Hungary in 1944 was of a poor Jewish refugee and her shabbily dressed children on their way to the death camps at Auschwitz.

Zsa Zsa

A cigar chomper like Darryl F. Zanuck, the great Berlin-born German director, Ernst Lubitsch provided comfort for Zsa Zsa during his long talks with her about the war raging in Europe and the plight of his fellow Jews.

Both Zsa Zsa and Lubitsch felt that Hollywood was too self-involved to care that millions were being slaughtered by the Nazis.

Bette Davis enjoyed the romantic attention of Austrian actor Paul Henreid both on and off the screen when they co-starred together in the classic 1942 film, Now Voyager.

When Conrad Hilton began locking his bedroom door to Zsa Zsa, she, too, was driven into the arms of this “Ladies’ Man” (as Henreid accurately entitled his autobiography).

Eva

One of the most famous car conversations in movie history took place when Hugh Marlowe (right figure in photo above) departed to find a gas station after running his car out of gas. That left Celeste Holm (left) alone in the car with Margo Channing (center), a role interpreted by Bette Davis in her greatest role.

Eva and Marlowe conducted a months-long affair. “He was a bit dull, dahlink,” Eva told Zsa Zsa. “But he hit the spot.”

Director Ernst Lubitsch (upper photo) fell directly into a war between two über-divas, Tallulah Bankhead (third from top) vs. Greta Garbo (lower photo). Garbo is shown as she appeared playing the bisexual Swedish queen in Queen Christina.

Garbo had been misled into thinking she was also going to portray another queen on screen, Catherine the Great. To Lubitsch’s astonishment, he learned that “the money people in New York” preferred Bankhead over the great Garbo. The message to the director was blunt: “We prefer the dyke we have, instead of the dyke who wants the job.”

Cast in a small part in A Royal Scandal, Eva was an eyewitness to “two tarantulas contemplating regicide during pre-production wardrobe fittings

HOMAGE TO AUNT TALLU

(Tallulah Bankhead)

The author remembers Miss Bankhead fondly because of quotes such as this one: "I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic and the others give me a stiff neck or lockjaw."

Appearing in A Royal Scandal, based very, very loosely on the story of Catherine the Great. were Anne Baxter (left), William Eythe (center), and Tallulah Bankhead (right), clad in the wardrobe department’s idea of what the imperial empress might have worn.

Director Ernst Lubitsch later claimed, “There was more scandal going on off screen than on. Off screen, both Baxter and Bankhead were forcing Eythe to perform “double duty”—at least until Eythe’s jealous lover, actor Lon McAllister, showed up to reclaim his stud.

The former child actor, Lon McAllister (photo above), came of age but never got beyond his height of 5 feet 6. After hearing of the off-screen escapades of his lover, William Eythe, on the set of A Royal Scandal, he showed up to reclaim him.

After losing Eythe’s services, the bisexual Bankhead turned to a pursuit of Eva.

Called in to finish the picture after Lubitsch fell ill, the tyranical director, Otto Preminger may have been a horror to the rest of the cast, but he was forever loyal to Bankhead.

She’d used her influence with President Truman to get his family rescued from Nazi-occupied Austria.

News of actor John Hodiak’s “beer can” that he stuffed into his pants was already known when he showed up on the set to meet with his bride-to-be, Anne Baxter.

The couple (depicted above) had fallen in love during World War II when they’d made a morale-builder, Sunday Dinner for a Soldier, together.

Eva, too was attracted to this hot Ukranian, but she had to wait until he both married and divorced Baxter.

Magda

Zsa Zsa

In Washington, Zsa Zsa met with Secretary of State Cordell Hull. He told her the bad news:

“Because Hungary has declared war on the United States, your parents are classified as enemy aliens.”

At a party in Washington, Zsa Zsa later regretted that she turned down a proposition from rising Texas politician, Lyndon B. Johnson, to return with him to his suite at the Mayflower Hotel.

“I didn’t get to experience the full treatment of what he called his ‘Jumbo,’ but I sure felt it pressing up against my vagina as we danced.”

Eva

John Loder, seen here with Eva Gabor in a scene from the B-movie, The Wife of Monte Cristo (1946), was once married to Hedy Lamarr.

Loder lives in Hollywood sexual lore for his studly ability to function for more rounds in bed with a woman than any other actor on the screen.

Women, including Eva, often put him to this marathon test.

Jolie

Magda

Magda’s lover in Lisbon was the dashing Spanish grandée, José Luís de Vilallonga.

As a 16-year-old, during the Spanish Civil War, he launched his career by executing eight anti- Franco soldiers a day. He later turned against the Spanish dictator and was forced into exile.

Vilallonga is remembered today for playing a stylish cad, a Brazilian multi-millionaire, who seeks to run off with Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Here he is seen with Audrey Hepburn, who played Holly in that classic movie.

Zsa Zsa

“Nicky Hilton (photo above) was a Texas bull, just like his father, my husband Conrad,” Zsa Zsa said. “Perhaps I’m indiscreet, but I fell in love with him, even though he lacked the excitement of his father. He had everything else. Also, dahlink, he was much closer to my age than my husband.

“I wouldn’t be the only woman on the planet who fell in love with her stepson. It’s far better than a young man having sex with his mother.”

Eva

Magda

Zsa Zsa