Chapter Twelve

The Hunters and the Hunted

EVA

When director Muriel Box approached Eva to play a supporting role in a 1957 British comedy, The Truth About Women, shewas eager to sign, even though she’d be playing the fifth lead.

She was pleased to be working with Laurence Harvey, who had remained Zsa Zsa’s friend. He was cast as Sir Humphrey Tavistock, who regales his son-in-law with decades-old anecdotes about “found lovers and lost loves.”

Eva was cast in a glamorous role as the sophisticated “Louise Tiere,” a diplomat’s wife. The female lead went to veteran actress Julie Harris, whose talent Eva envied. She lost enthusiasm for the project when she learned that the Swedish actress, Mai Zetterling, had been cast in the fourth lead, with billing over hers.

Eva arrived sobbing at the dressing room of Harvey. “The Swedish cow stole Ty Power from me,” Eva lamented. “He’s now living with that low-rent bitch. I don’t know how she schemed her way into his heart. I heard she got her start in 1944, fucking Ingmar Bergman in Stockholm. The press calls her a sex symbol. She’s about as sexy as fried liver left out in the desert sun for two days. Dahlink, I’m the sex symbol, not this Zetterlingcreature.”

When the director, Box, introduced Eva to Zetterling, Eva slapped her face. “Never in my life have I ever behaved so unprofessionally, and I’ve often worked with both men and women I detested,” Eva later confided to Harvey. “But I completely lost control when I came face to face with the woman who took Ty from me. Perhaps there’s something about a woman scorned that rings true. I should apologize, but I never will. I truly hate her.”

At one point, Eva was so exasperated about Zetterling having been cast that she approached Box, telling him that the Swedish actress was a “card-carrying communist.” The director dismissed her charge as a “wild and reckless accusation, based on Eva’s jealousy”

Eva’s charge was actually very serious. It had been levied during the 1950s, a decade that began with a communist witch hunt among working people in Hollywood. Senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, sometimes with dubious evidence, had rooted suspected communists out of the film industry. Many of those accused were subsequently blacklisted, their careers and livelihood destroyed.

However, The Truth About Women was a British production, and that country had no such blacklist.

Although Eva’s accusation was dismissed, she knew more than the rest of the cast. How she obtained such personal information about Zetterling’spolitics is not known.

During the early part of the 21st Century, the National Archives in London released a lot of previously top secret information.

Zetterling’sname appeared on a list of suspects closely watched by British security agents. Records revealed that they had labeled and defined her as “a known communist and possibly a spy.”

In 1994, when Eva read of Zetterling’s death, she told friends, “There is a certain joy in outliving rivals.”

Eva herself only had months to live.

***

In 1957, actor Ben Gazzara was at the low point of his career, even after a run of three hit plays. One of them had included his long-running interpretation of the homosexual football hero, Brick, in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Gazzara’s 1951 marriage to radio actress Louise Erickson was all but over.

The son of Italian immigrants from Sicily, Gazzara admitted that his discovery of his love for acting saved him from a life of crime.

He often spoke of his childhood, where he slept outside on a fire escape in summer, listening on occasion to the screams coming from the nearby Bellevue psychiatric hospital.

Rough, virile, and unconventionally handsome, Gazzara admitted, “I was a babe magnet, also attracting a lot of interest among the gays.”

One night at his favorite Manhattan hangout, Harold’s Show Spot, a rendezvous for out-of-work actors and writers, along with a train wreck of Broadway sharpies, he’d had a bit too much to drink. Nevertheless, he pulled himself together and attended a chic cocktail party on the Upper East Side, which was attended by three of the co-stars from All About Eve—Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, and Celeste Holm. Eva had gone to the party because she’d heard that her former lover, Hugh Marlowe, would be there, but he had failed to show up.

At the party, Gazzara was sitting alone in the corner when, in his words, “A vision of blonde loveliness approached.”

In a Hungarian accent, Eva said, “I’ve seen all of your work, dahlink. You are vonderful.”

He looked up at her. “I know you. You’re one of the Gabor sisters. The youngest and prettiest.”

What an acute observer you are, dahlink,” she said, sitting down beside him. “Those All AboutEvebroads are dominating this party. Let’s skip out and go dancing.”

“You’re on, babe,” he said to her.

“I thought I was having a wet dream,” Gazzara later recalled. “Dinner, dancing, with the lady picking up the tab.I had only $200 in the bank at the time, having gone through all my Broadway earnings. Later, she put me in a perfumed bubble bath in her apartment in the annex of the Plaza Hotel. As I bathed, she fed me one grape at a time. I was almost tempted to say, ‘Beulah, peel me a grape,’ borrowing a Mae West line. The grapes were very succulent, and so was Eva that night. She seemed to enjoy the sex as much as I did, maybe more so.”

For the next few weeks, Gazzara, at least temporarily, made Eva forgether earlier lovers.At the Stork Club, they chatted with Joan Crawford and Walter Winchell. One night, Gregory Peck stopped by their table. Gazzara told him, “If I had your looks, and retained my talent, I could be the biggest star in the world.” Eva told Peck, “I’d settle for your body even without the talent.”

Most evenings ended at Chez Vito, where Eva asked the serenading Hungarian violinists to play a song from her youth in Budapest. “It makes me want to cry,” she told Gazzara. “Someday, I want to take you to Budapest.”

“With no money, I was living the playboy’s life and loving it,” Gazzara said. “Of course, I kept hoping every day that some producer or director would start thinking about casting me in something. Eva kept up my spirits most of the time by constantly reassuring me that I was terrific in bed.”

Gazzara, hanging out at Harold’s, told playwright Tennessee Williams, “Eva Gabor sure likes to pay homage to my Sicilian salami.”

Williams responded, “And who among us can resist it?”

“I loved Ben, but on occasions, he’d go into the deepest, darkest moods, a wall of depression enveloping him,” Eva recalled. “He resented Marlon Brando forging ahead, with him sitting around waiting for a producer to call. He lamented his own mistakes in turning down several offers for films a few months back. He told me, ‘I didn’t think I was ready. Hell with that! I should have accepted those roles, and I might be a big film star today like Brando.’”

“With so little money, I was grateful for all those dinners I had at the Gabors,” he said. “Most of them took place in a townhouse owned by Magda and her husband, Tony Gallucci. At most of the dinners, Jolie was an honored guest. She always wet-lipped me and gave me a bear hug, welcoming me to the family. However, Eva and I had never talked about marriage. The Gabors were great hosts, the sisters were supposed to be jealous of each other, but I never saw any of that.”

“During my short affair with Eva, I really bonded with Gallucci,” Gazzara said. “He was a low-rent WOP like myself. He often cried in my arms, and I mean that literally. Nothing sexual, just a deeply troubled man who saw in me a kindred spirit.One night, he’d cry about his dead mother. On another night, he’d cry about his dead father. On yet another evening, his sex addiction would bring him to tears. He was madly in love with Magda, but couldn’t stop cheating on her. He even cried at his success at making all those millions in plumbing. I listened patiently, thinking I had only $89.31 left in the bank.”

“You never knew who would turn up at one of the Gabor family dinners,” Gazzarasaid. “Those lavish meals kept me from starvation. One night, George Sanders showed up and was still treated like one of the family, even though he was no longer married to Zsa Zsa. I was expecting the witty, debonair Addison DeWitt from All About Eve. What I got was a sad, lonely man who ate little and said even less. Rumor had it he was deeply troubled about his latent homosexuality.”

One night, Marlene Dietrich was a guest, and she and I got offon the wrong foot,” Gazzara claimed. “I attacked narcissism in actors.She scolded me, claiming, ‘Everyone in this world needs a good dose of narcissism to survive, especially if you’re an actor.’ She said that rather icily, but a few nights later, she warmed to me…and how!”

“I finally got up enough nerve to invite Eva to my dingy local dive, Harold’s,” Gazzarasaid. “Our host put on the dog for her, even bringing up a free bottle of Dom Pérignon. They boys at the bar crowded around Eva, treating her like royalty. With her stunning beauty, and dressed in diamonds and mink, she sure lit up that place. Not a lot of women patronized the joint, except a few aging prostitutes still plying their trade to tourists on Times Square.”

That night, Harold christened Eva ‘The Goulash,’ a rather unglamorous name for such a glittery star. After that night, Eva sometimes insisted on dropping in to Harold’s, joining the bums of Broadway for a night cap. She was very democratic.”

Eva was cast at the time in an off-Broadway play, Franz Wedekind’s Lulu, and she invited Gazzara to attend her opening night performance. Before the curtain went up, he went backstage to her dressing room. “I kissed her, careful not to ruin her makeup. Kneeling at her feet was some wardrobe mistress fiddling with the hem of her gown. When she rose up, it wasn’t some old hag at all, but Marlene herself. She wet kissed me like Jolie always did.”

“She was a hell of a lot friendlier that night than when we’d first met at Magda’s place,” Gazzara said. “As we watched Eva from the wings, Marlene did not hide her attraction for me. My god, this screen diva was actually feeling me up and getting me excited, even though she must have been a contemporary of Goethe.”

“Before the night ended, Marlene asked me to visit her some night,” Gazzara said. “She gave me her unlisted number. ‘You must call me,’ she urged. Here I was, a greasy Italian kid who grew up in KipsBay, being pawed over by a Hungarian bombshell and a Prussian goddess who had once brought a tingle to Hitler’s sole testicle.”

Before flying to Hollywood the next day, Gazzara spent his final night with Eva at her apartment. “He made love to me all night,” Eva later told her confidants. “I made breakfast and coffee for him in the morning, and he kissed me goodbye as he headed out the door. He promised to call the next day. He never did.”

***

Back again at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Eva signed to appear as Deborah Aldrich, a supporting role in the 1957 comedy Don’t Go Near the Water. The film also starred Glenn Ford, Gia Scala, Anne Francis, and Keenan Wynn. After the success of Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), in which Ford and Brando became mortal enemies off screen, this was the first of several comedies in which Ford would be cast.

For Eva, the most memorable experience working on the film did not involve anything to do with her role, but with her exposure to Glenn Ford, upon whom she’d always had a crush, especially when she saw him in Gilda, playing opposite Rita Hayworth [who became his lover at the time.]

The film’s gay director, Charles Walters, liked Eva, and she often sat with him when he was helmingother actors in their scenes. He’d just finished The Tender Trap (1955) and High Society (1956), both starring Frank Sinatra. She was amused to learn how Bing Crosby and Sinatra had vied for the attentions of Grace Kelly during the filming of High Society, a remake of Katharine Hepburn’s The Philadelphia Story.

“I always like to be directed by a man who’s gay,” Eva later said. “Such directors always saw that I was photographed looking my most beautiful, and that I appeared in a flattering gown.”

The plot of Don’t Go Near the Water involved a U.S. Navy public relations unit stationed on an island in the Pacific during World War II.

When Eva first met Ford, she, along with the rest of Hollywood, knew that hewas an adulterous married man. The list of beautiful actresses he’d seduced had become legendary. Women such as Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth, Margaret Sullavan, and Barbara Stanwyck had fallen for him.

Not bad for a former stableboy who used to shovel horseshit for that homespun comedian Will Rogers. “He fired me when he came into his stable one afternoon and stepped in a stallion’s big, smelly dump,” Ford claimed.

Walters told Eva that “Ford approaches his role like a temperamental little boy, going at his own slow pace, regardless of how he’s directed. If he were mine, I would make him take off his pants and drop his underwear for a bare-butt spanking.”

Eva had been immensely attracted to Ford but found him an enigma she could not solve. She often asked other people about him. One night at a party, Clifford Odets, the playwright and screenwriter, told her, “It is an easily won bet that in a few years Glenn will get just like the other movie people—bored, sprawling, careless, an overly relaxed fallen angel—they are all affable boys out here, almost tramps.”

That murky assessment confused her all the more.

She set out to unlock the enigma on her own. Ford had flirted with her since filming on the movie began. She told Walters, “I signaled to him that I was not only available, but panting.”

By the time Eva got involved with Ford,his 1943 marriage to dancer/actress Eleanor Powell was nearing its end. Their divorce came in 1959 when Eva co-starred in yet another picture with Ford, It Started With a Kiss.

“He was one of my greatest lovers,” she said. “In bed, he wasn’t a hard-driving demon stud, but had the tender qualities of a late teenager eager to please. He was so endearing. He had this wonderful masculine aroma that was intoxicating. When he got up to leave for work, I longed for him to stay in bed with me all day.”

“He was very free with his magnificent body, allowing me to roam at will, exploring each nook and cranny. He was also a great kisser.”

Shortly after her first night with Ford, Eva told Walters, “Glenn is the first man I’ve met who could help me get over Ty Power.”

Each day she learned more about Ford and began to understand his unique screen presence. “We were both ideal for the Eisenhower era,” she said. “I represented the fake glamour of that time, and Glenn represented all the strong qualities most admired in a man—that is, the man who appeared on the screen, not the little devil in his private life.”

“I think I know why Glenn eventually drifted off,” Eva said. “One night in Palm Springs, I was so turned on by him, I wanted it four times over a twenty-four hour period. We were in this rented villa, lying around the pool nude. The more I saw that magnificent Canadian stud, the more I wanted him.”

Ford’s sympathetic good looks made him an ideal leading man for both weepies and romances, and he brought a genial and relaxed sincerity to the screen. Eva agreed with one critic who wrote that Ford “could be a brooding menace, heroic, taciturn, wise, foolish, amiable, dull, or sardonic.”

At the time Eva met Ford, he was at the peak of his career, appearing on Quigley’s Annual List of Top Ten Box Office Champions, rising to Number One in 1958.

Peter Ford, Glenn’s son, wrote a 2011 memoir, Glenn Ford: A Life. In it, he accurately claimed that Eva was the woman his father “almost married.”

“Glenn often talked of marrying me when his divorce from Powell came through,” Eva said. “He held out dreams for me that we could star in a series of romantic comedies in the 1960s, perhaps becoming popular like Rock Hudson and Doris Day, who were all the rage at the box office. But it was a dream only to be dreamed.”

“During the course of our love affair, I saved on repair work done around the house,” Eva claimed. “Glenn knew all about plumbing and wiring, even air conditioning. When there was a leak in my roof, he climbed the ladder and repaired it. One time, a burglar broke plate glass in my windows and robbed my house when I was at the studio. When I called Glenn, he rushed over, inspected the damage, and returned from the hardware store with new glass to repair the window. He installed the glass himself. Then he took me upstairs and made mad love to me. What’s not to love about a man like that?”

“One night Glenn and I spent with his friend, Ronald Reagan, whose career was in great decline,” Eva said. “Reagan spent the night discussing politics, which I find boring. In spite of that, he possessed a certain charm, and he was still reasonably good looking, but not like his 1940s screen image.”

“After Reagan left, I spoke to Glenn about him. I told him that in spite of his gab, I heard that when Reagan stopped talking, he was a hit with the ladies. I wondered if he were great in bed.”

“How in hell would I know?” Glenn asked her. “Unlike you, he’s never sucked my dick. All I know is what his former wife, Jane Wyman, told me. ‘Ronnie is as good in bed as he is on the screen.’ You figure that one out for yourself.”

[Although a Democrat when she’d met him, Ford later switched parties, supporting Reagan in both his 1980 and 1984 bids for the presidency.]

“There came a night when I first realized that Glenn was not going to marry me,” Eva said. “He’d made a date to pick me up for drinks and dinner at seven that night. In addition to Reagan, William Holden was a close friend, very close. These two good-looking guys had bonded ever since they’d made the movie Texas in 1941.”

“I looked ravishing that night when I answered the doorbell,” she said. “I was shocked when I opened the door. Staring back at me was not Glenn, but a gorgeous Bill Holden, who looked absolutely adorable and ever so sexy.”

“What woman in her right mind would turn down a date with Bill Holden?” she asked. “Of course, dahlink, I spent the night with him and would have married him if he’d asked me. I later learned that Bill and Glenn were known for exchanging women they considered hot.”

“I realized what a fool I’d been to think that Glenn ever had any intention of marrying me. Bill Holden was a great consolation prize. Any woman would have considered him a delight. Just ask Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Barbara Stanwyck, and—are you ready?—both Lucille Ball and Jackie Kennedy.”

When Zsa Zsa heard of Eva’s affair with Ford, she told her sister, “At last you’ve found a man in Hollywood who hasn’t fucked Marilyn Monroe.”

[ZsaZsawas wrong. On October 4, 2008, Peter Ford auctioned off the sofa where his father “screwed Marilyn,” the couch selling for $1,750.

Ford had met Marilyn in 1962, the year she was murdered. Both of them were attending a party in Hollywood for Abraham Ribicoff, who was John F. Kennedy’s secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Ford remembered how Monroe at his home “drank an entire bottle of champagne in about two seconds.”

A seduction followed.]

“After Don’t Go Near the Water was wrapped, and before we made another movie, I saw Glenn perhaps two or three times a month,” Eva said. “I recall spending many a rainy night in Los Angeles with him. Funny, he always seemed to show up when it rained.”

“I never really cracked the enigma that was Glenn,” Eva said, “although I tried. I have no regrets, however. At least I got to enjoy the most romantic sex of my life as opposed to the most passionate. You figure out the difference, dahlink.”

***

“A glamour puss has to be found to play Joana in Present Laughter with me,” Noël Coward said in January of 1958. He thought Eva would be ideal in the stage role, for which he wanted her to appear for a month’s engagement in San Francisco and for two weeks in Los Angeles.

Coward’s play had been written in 1939 and first staged in London in 1942. The play’s title was inspired by a line from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. (“Present mirth hath present laughter”).

The plot spins around a comedy actor, Garry Essendine, who is set to tour Africa. Before his departure, he faces a series of farcical events involving women who want to seduce him.

In his first call to Eva, Coward told her his play, in which he’d also star, was “a series of semi-autobiographical pyrotechnics about an actor facing an impending midlife crisis.”

Coward had starred as Garry Essendinein the original production. Present Laughter had been revived many times with such actorsas Nigel Patrick, Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, Simon Callow, and Ian McKellen playing the leads.

Eva found Coward in a foul mood, denouncing his fellow cast members as “silly asses,” and accusing them of “raising hell and clamoring for more money. In general, they made beasts of themselves.”

But he praised Eva for raising the spirits of the demoralized cast by her mere appearance.

“She was an adorable darling,” he said, “and I was enchanted by her, both on and off the stage.”

However, at a dress rehearsal, they had their first artistic disagreement. She appeared in a stunning dress of orange chiffon. He looked her up and down and said, “You’re not going to wear that thing, are you?

“What’s the matter with it?” she asked. “I look absolutely gorgeous.”

“If you wear that, no one in the audience will look at me.”

Finally, they agreed she could wear the chiffon number, but only if it were redesigned and remade in muted tones of champagne.

As Coward’s biographer, Cole Lesley, wrote, “During the run of the play, Noël would hang his felt hat on one of Eva’s beautiful breasts for his quick change at the side of the stage.As he explained it, ‘There’s no time for messing about.’”

Years later, Eva admitted to her companion and biographer, Camyl Belanger, “I seduced Noël in San Francisco. “He told me that I was the only woman in his entire life who turned him on and that he could not resist me. Of course, we were both a little tipsy on champagne that night.”

In response, Belanger told Eva, “I think you probably changed him,” referring, of course, to his sexual preference. “Eva had that power, a seductive power that made her a sex vixen. She was very attractive and so feminine.”

In spite of Eva’s qualities as a sex vixen, she hardly changed Coward’s sexual nature.

In fact, after the seduction, he made many indiscreet remarks to personal friends such as Laurence Olivier and Rex Harrison. “A bloody awful experience that I wouldn’t want to repeat, my dears.”

He also claimed that , “All that open plumbing absolutely revolts me. Being in bed with a woman is like feeling the skin of a snake. God preserve me in my future from female stars!”

When Harrison heard this, he said, “That Noël is a terrible cunt in many ways. If he and Eva made it, as he alleges, they at least had one thing in common: Tyrone Power had already fucked both of them.”

In reviews of Present Laughter in San Francisco, Eva was cited for her glamour instead of her acting. The play was reviewed as “a wittily impudent and neatly invented burlesque of a French farce,” and Coward was praised for his “mockery of the vain, posturing, and yet self-scrutinizing and self-amused matinee idol.”

[In 1976, in Chicago, Coward arranged a reunion with Eva and Zsa Zsa when he took his long-time companion, Graham Payn to see them, horribly miscast, in a production of Arsenic and Old Lace.

“They looked like innocent schoolgirls as the two murderesses,” Coward said. “We stayed up until two in the morning with Eva, laughing about the times gone by. ‘He took all my lovers from me,’ Eva said to Graham about me.”]

***

At long last, Eva was cast in a movie, Gigi, that walked away with a Best Picture Oscar at the annual Academy Award ceremonies in Los Angeles in 1959.

The year before, director Vincente Minnelli had cast Eva in the glamorous role of “Liane d’Exelmans” in this romantic musical comedy staged in Belle Époque Paris.

Regrettably, the film’s biggest spotlights did not shine on Eva, but to the French gamine, Leslie Caron, who played the precocious and carefree Gilberte (aka Gigi). The role was originally intended for Audrey Hepburn.

Cast as the film’s wealthy young bon vivant (Gaston Lachaille) was Louis Jourdan, once labeled “the handsomest man in the world.” The role had originally been offered to the British actor, Dirk Bogarde, a heartthrob who was the current king of British cinema.

Co-starring in the lead character roles were the scene-stealers of the geriatric set, Maurice Chevalier, as HonoréLachaille, an aging boulevardier and Gaston’s uncle. As Madame Alvarez, Hermione Gingold, in Eva’s words, “ate up the scenery.”

Eva was pleased to be reunited with the French Basque actor, Jacques Bergerac, cast as Sandomir, upon whom she’d had such a crush in the early 1950s. “He was in better form than ever,” Eva said, “having survived a marriage to Ginger Rogers. He was still handsome, in great shape, and more appealingly virile than ever. Yummy, yummy, buy me some of that, Papa.”

“Vincente went around the set with his tongue hanging out, panting for Louis, and I went about lusting for Jacques,” Eva facetiously claimed.

“One day I lunched with Vincente, and I told him that I would have adored being cast as Gigi,” Eva said.

“But Gigiis very, very French,” Minnelli said. “With your Hungarian accent, Colette’s novella would not have worked.”

Minnelli told her that originally, the movie was to be entitled The Parisians, “but that seemed déjà entendue. We figured that Caron had been in too many movies like Lili and Gaby with cute Gallic nicknames. But Gigi, as a title, won out.”

The film was a blockbuster, in spite of sometimes critical reviews. Time Out New York said it was “like eating a meal consisting of cheesecake. The cast tries to be more French than French, especially Chevalier who redeems himself in singing ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls.’”

TV Guide defined Gigias “overbaked but enjoyable, a feast for the eyes, thanks to Cecil Beaton’s sets and costumes. Ten minutes into the movie, you’ve resolved the plot and are left to wallow in the lovely frou-frou.”

Even so, Gigi was a record breaker (at the time), winning nine Academy Award nominations.

In London, veteran actor John Gielgud saw the movie three times. He told his gay friends, “In one scene those trousers worn by Louis Jourdan were so tight that you could see that this well-hung gentleman possesses enough meat for the poor.”

***

In 1959, Eva was “so very pleased, really happy” to be reunited with her lover, Glenn Ford, in a romantic comedy, It Started With a Kiss.” Debbie Reynolds had the female lead, with Eva in third position, playing the glamorous “Marquesa Marion de la Rey.”

“When I returned to Hollywood, Glenn Ford, my fickle lover, was waiting for me,” Eva claimed. “Within one day, especially in one night, this handsome hunk was back in both my bed and my good graces. Of course, dahlink, I forgave him. Who could look into those adorable eyes of his and not forgive him for anything? If the worst thing he did was to send over that living doll, Bill Holden, to fuck me, how could I hold a grudge about that? I should have gotten down on bentnylon and thanked Glenn for the gift of love.”

Debbie Reynolds, a close friend of Ford’s, once noted that he was ‘hot to trot,” even though married to the fabulous dancer and actress, Eleanor Powell. “He couldn’t resist looking at and patting a woman,” Reynolds said. “Fordloved women, loved to look at them, play with them, touchthem. I think he flirted with every woman he ever worked with. He always wanted to have his cake and eat it, too.”

Parts of It Started With a Kiss would be shot in Spain. It was during the filming of this movie that Reynolds became one of Ford’s lifelong friends.

At first, Reynolds seemed unaware that Eva and Ford were on again, off again lovers. “Glenn often spoke about the breakup of his marriage to Eleanor Powell,” Reynolds recalled. She’d already experienced losing her own husband, Eddie Fisher, to Elizabeth Taylor .

Years later, Reynolds wrote, “And then, Glenn started making eyes at Eva.” Actually he was making more than eyes. Reynolds also claimed that Eva had a boyfriend who would be arriving any minute, “and she wasn’t really that interested in Glenn anyway.”

“Debbie was wrong,” Eva later said. “I was madly in love with Glenn. I would have dropped any of my casual beaux at the time for Glenn.”

It was during the making of It Started With a Kiss that Reynolds realized she could do the best imitation of Zsa Zsa and Eva of any other entertainer.

“I found Zsa Zsa’s accent fascinating,” Reynolds wrote in a memoir. “There isn’t much she won’t say or ask.”

Ford later said, “Debbie could do every veddy, every zounding, funnee, dooo, izzat, zing, un-uzjo-wull, chuss, lakh, zink,and knooo.”

When Eva heard Reynolds impersonating her, she told Ford, “Debbie sounds more like Zsa Zsa.”

Eva also shared her worldly wisdom with Reynolds. “Dahlink, pearls muss alvays fall between the bosoms. The skin vill make them varm and lustrous.”

“When it came to men and lovemaking, Eva was very European, very open, very candid, and funny,” Reynolds later wrote in a memoir.

“Glenn often didn’t spend the night with me, but stayed out drinking with his favorite director, George Marshall,” Eva said. “If that weren’t bad enough, I think he was also falling in love with Debbie.”

To make Ford jealous, Eva deliberately set out to date other beaux. At a cocktail party in Madrid, she met a handsome young Wall Street broker, Richard Brown. She later said, “Mama knows best. She told me the best way to get rid of an old lover is with a new lover.”

Within two days, Brown had moved into her suite in the Spanish capital. Once he was installed, Eva rushed down the hall to the suite occupied by Reynolds. She grabbed the actress’s arm. “Dahlink,” Eva exclaimed. “My new fiancé is here, and you must meet him.”

She practically dragged Reynolds down the hallway and into her suite. Not finding Brown in her living room, she directed Reynolds into the bedroom and from there, pulled her into the bathroom. Brown was discovered sitting in a tub of water without bubbles.

“You can clearly see, dahlink, why I’m attracted to him,” Eva said.

“That’s rather obvious,” Reynolds said.

After three weeks of filming in Spain, the cast and crew were flown back to the United States for the interior shots at the MGM lot. As Eva admitted, “My relationship with Glenn was in a state of total confusion. He told me he was still sharing a house with Eleanor Powell, although they didn’t speak to each other. Their poor son, Peter, was acting as a go-between for the two different warring camps.”

Powell filed for divorce on May 1, 1959, on Ford’s forty-third birthday.

“I waited and waited, thinking a marriage proposal might come,” Eva said. “But nothing happened. I feared that I might lose Glenn to Debbie when they signed to do another picture, The Gazebo, without me.”

Debbie told me that Glenn often came by to discuss his failed marriages,” Eva said, “their pain and frustration.”

In her memoir, Reynolds wrote, “Glenn began to think perhaps he was in love with me.” The problem was, she wasn’t in love with him, although she did reveal that Ford later asked her to marry him.

“I didn’t want to fall in love with anyone at the time,” Reynolds said.

“At least Debbie got a marriage proposal out of Glenn,” Eva said. “I didn’t get that, but his love-making left me with some wonderful memories.”

“When Glenn left me for good, I didn’t cry over him like I had done when Ty deserted me,” Eva said. “By the time It Started With a Kiss was released, I had already fallen in love with another man and had even gotten him to marry me.”

***

When Eva had a long-delayed reunion with Susan Hayward, she told her friend, “My greatest dream would be to have both Bill Holden and Glenn in bed with me, making love to me all night.”

“I’ve already had Bill, and what fun it was,” Hayward said. “We co-starred together in The Young and Willing (1943). I was both young and willing. Unlike you, I also bedded Glenn’s other best friend, Ronald Reagan.”

Eva later wrote, “In my life, I have been the hunter and the hunted, and what depresses me is that in either role, I’m usually the one who gets hurt.”

***

Whereas Eva was the most distant of Jolie’s three daughters, Magda and Zsa Zsa had a long talk with their mother every other day, some of these conversations lasting for more than an hour.

Eva had not shown up for Jolie’s wedding to a much younger man, Edmund de Szigethy, on March 3, 1957. For Jolie, he was husband number three.

He was a war refugee, originally from Transylvania “where Dracula comes from.”

In her memoir, Jolie claimed, “Edmund escaped from Eastern Europe after all his lands and property had been confiscated by the communists. He fled to the West with only two suits, wearing one on top of the other. When I first met him, he had $27 left, of which he spent $25 on roses for me.”

Eva was not pleased, having warned Jolie—“at your age, dahlink, you should have married for money.”

In Palm Springs society, where Jolie had a home, as did each of her daughters, she wanted friends to refer to her new husband as a count. “That will make me a countess, like Magda,” Jolie proclaimed.

At her wedding, Jolie had managed to “take at least twenty years off my face,” having suffered through her fifth “surgical renaissance.” She’d advised Eva, along with Magda and ZsaZsa, to get a face lift—as many as needed. “If a woman doesn’t have a good nose, a good chin, then for God’s sake, have once carved by one of the beauty butchers.”

Magda, too, had had “everything lifted, including those little wrinkles under the eyes.”

When Eva finally came to Palm Springs to greet the newlyweds, including her latest stepfather, she, too, had had everything lifted. She appeared at the desert resort at a gala for Vincente Minnelli. Allene Arthur, society editor of The Palm Springs Desert Sun, later wrote: “I inspected Eva’s face up close. It was dazzling. She looked no more than a day over thirty.”

Unlike Eva, Magda, and Jolie, Zsa Zsa became testy whenever the subject of cosmetic surgery came up. She told Eva that she wanted to publicize her offer of $10,000 to anyone who had definite proof that she’d had a face-life. “I’m a timeless wonder, dahlink,” Zsa Zsa claimed.

In Palm Springs, Eva introduced Jolie to her young stockbroker, “Nuci, meet the man who is on the way to becoming husband number four for me. Richard Brown.”

Jolie later wrote that she found Brown “dark and handsome.” Privately, she told her society friends in Palm Springs, “I have been assured that he is very, very, sexy, just like my Edmund.”

In the weeks leading up to her marriage to Brown, Eva found herself on the front pages of newspapers that stretched from the New York Islands to the San Francisco Bay.

On April 10, 1959, police in New York found the body of a beautiful model, Venita Ratcliffe. Wrapped in a red silk robe, she was discovered on her bed, having committed suicide by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills.

A note was discovered near her body: “Dick, my love, I understand now that I would only continue to be a pest in your life. But, Dick, I love you more than life itself. Without you, there is no meaning for me, no reason to go on living.”

Her phone records revealed that she had called Brown only an hour before killing herself.

Venita was only twenty six years old, Brown thirty-seven. His love letters to her were also found. He called her “Mommie,” and she referred to him as “Daddie.”

The suicide launched a month-long feeding frenzy within the tabloids.

A headline in The New York Post proclaimed—EVA GABOR LOVE PIRATE, JILTED MODEL TAKES HER LIFE. It became known as “The Case of the Heartbroken Model.” In San Francisco, a headline described Ratcliffe and Brown as STAR-CROSSED LOVERS.

In Hollywood, Eva issued a statement to the press. “I am very, very sorry that this beautiful girl took her life. But I am only an innocent bystander in all of this. The romance between Richard and me began long after he left Venita.”

Louella Parsons warned the publicity department at MGM to “defuse this bomb as soon as possible.” MGM was about to release It Started With a Kiss, co-starring Eva with Glenn Ford and Debbie Reynolds.

“Before we were married,” Eva told the press in Hollywood, “a model was in love with him, and she could not face the fact that Richard and I were getting married. Stupidly, she ended her life and people were then talking and all the newspapers were saying that I was a home wrecker, a barracuda, taking every man away from their wives. This is so unfair, so untrue.”

The Love Pirate story just wouldn’t go away. In desperation, Eva called the Associated Press. “I do not go around taking anyone’s man. I am much too spoiled for one thing, and there are so many attractive men around these days. I am not a love pirate. Remember, if a man is truly in love, the most beautiful woman in the world couldn’t take him away. Maybe for a few days, but not forever.”

After the headlines died down, Eva in Las Vegas went ahead anyway and married Brown. She did not invite the other Gabors. Red Buttons was the best man, and his wife, Helayne, matron of honor.

Jolie later claimed that Eva was not a good daughter during her marriage to Brown. “Often, both of them were in New York and didn’t even call me. Brown turned Eva against her family. Even when Eva and Brown were in Palm Springs, and I was spending the winter there, they never came by to visit.”

Eva told her longtime assistant, Caryl Sosa Belanger, that Brown was “the best husband I’ve ever had.” Belanger thought Eva was much in love with the dashing young man.

After years of rocky marriages and romances, Eva proclaimed, “At long last I’ve found the man of my dreams.”

***

In Miami, Eva stayed with Brown in the exclusive North Bay Village Racquet Club. In its golden heyday, the club had attracted the likes of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton and silent screen vamp Gloria Swanson.

The club had always been known for its security and had never experienced a robbery until the first week of January, 1964.

Downstairs, on January 4 of that year, Eva had grown bored with a party that she dismissed as “insurance salesmen from the Middle West with their wives in feedsackdresses.” She decided to return to her suite with Brown for a supper of caviar and champagne.

Brown was pulling off his shirt as he came into the bedroom. As he was undressing, he suddenly noticed “a blonde Viking kind of man emerging from the closet with a revolver pointed at my head.” A red bandana obscured his face.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Brown said to the burglar. “Do you know who we are?”

It was precisely because the bandit knew that he was in Eva Gabor’s suite that he was there in the first place. He’d read about all the jewelry she wore.

From the living room came the sounds of Eva’s screams. In spite of the gun pointed at him, Brown rushed into the living room to confront another tall, burly man who held Eva in his grip. As he did, Brown tripped and fell over the leg of a piece of furniture. The booted foot of the blondelanded in his stomach.

“Get the fuck up, you dumb son of a bitch,” the blonde demanded.

As Brown stood up, he noticed that Eva had been pistol whipped; her face was bloody.

“They’re going to kill us,” Eva shouted at Brown, who was powerless to help her. The blonde put his revolver into Brown’s mouth, pointing it upward toward his brain.

“Make a false move, and I’ll blow your brains out,” the blondethreatened. “The jewelry!Where does the cunt keep it?”

Eva answered for her husband. “It’s locked up in the hotel’s safe downstairs. There’s nothing here.”

As both of them were held at gunpoint, Eva and Brown stood by as the blondetore apart their suite, searching every drawer. He located her jewel box, but it contained only a valuable wrist watch and a tangle of pearls which were actually fake, a gift from Jolie’s shop in Manhattan.

“Where in the fuck are the diamonds?” the blondedemanded to know.

“I told you,” Eva said. “In the safe downstairs.You’ll have to rob it.”

The darker man ordered Brown to get dressed and go downstairs and bring the jewelry back to the suite. “I’ve got a pocket knife,” he said. “If you tip off security, I’ll carve up the face of your bitch.”

Obeying his orders, Brown dressed quickly and descended into the lobby, where he removed the jewelry. Eva had not traveled with a lot of her gems. The most valuable item was a twenty-carat diamond ring.

Back in the suite, Brown handed the gems to the blonde. When he saw how small the stash was, he kicked Brown in the groin. Bunched up in pain, Brown lay in agony on the carpet. The blondedid not believe he’d brought back “all those diamonds.”

He stood over Brown. “You asshole, he shouted at him. “Listen, pretty boy, I’m tempted to plow your asshole. Burst that rosebud and leave it raw and bleeding.”

The phone rang and it went unanswered. Fearing that Brown had tipped off security, both men tied Eva and Brown up, putting tape over their mouths. An hour later, a maid discovered and untied them.

Eva rushed down to the lobby, screaming, “Call the police! We were robbed!” Her face was still covered with blood.

An ambulance was called, and, with its red dome flashing, Eva was rushed to the Francis Hospital inMiami. Brown stayed by her side. Fortunately, her injuries were only superficial, but she stayed for two days in the hospital, her doctor fearing that she might have suffered a concussion.

Outside the hospital, after her release, she told reporters, “I don’t want to see another diamond as long as I live. I thought those men were going to kill Dick and me.”

The burglars were later caught and arrested, turning out to be Jack Murphy (known as “Murphthe Surf”) and Alan Dale Kuhn, the two most notorious jewel thieves in America. The pair had previously stolen the famous Star of India sapphire. They were arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to jail terms.

In Hollywood, Zsa Zsa commented on Eva’s robbery. “[It’s] the curse of being a Gabor, but we’ll continue to wear our diamonds. After, all, dahlinks, it is our trademark.”

***

[Alas, Eva’s marriage to Brown did not last, even though it was successful in the beginning.

During its eleven-year run, Eva was most enthusiastic at the marriage’s debut. She praised Brown in the press, defining him as “my anchor—both lover and best friend. I am completely dependent on him. When he flies away to New York on business, my heart dies. I don’t even leave the house unless I have to. At home, I don’t put on a gown to go out with him without first getting his approval. He is a real man.”

When Brown’s career as a Wall Street stockbroker began to wane, Eva used her new clout at CBS—a result of the success of her hit TV series, Green Acres, to get Brown a position as an executive producer at the studio.

But it was her success—not his—that afforded them the good life. She became the president of an interior decorating business and chairwoman of the board of a wig manufacturing company. They lived in a beautiful mansion in Beverly Hills filled with valuable paintings and antiques, a real showplace. She and Brown employed four servants and a male secretary, driving around Hollywood in two matching Rolls-Royces.

As the years stretched on, Eva learned that her errant husband was having affairs with other women. This time she turned to Jolie for comfort and advice. Her mother told her, “Women are stupid when they throw out their man for having a little sex on the side with another woman. Personally, I don’t cheat on Edmund, but only because no man asks me to.”

During the course of her marriage to him, Eva had remained faithful to Brown. She never had sex with another man, except for one night when she was raped. (Details to be revealed later.)

To her chagrin, however, she discovered that in lieu of a random extra-marital affair, Brown had conducted a prolonged sexual tryst with his secretary at CBS. “This was no longer a fling or a passing fancy, but a long, drawn-out affair,” Eva claimed. “I think he loved her. I could not tolerate this.”

In 1972, she filed for divorce. Mimicking a song from the musical, South Pacific, she claimed, “I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair.”

Promising to be faithful in the future, Brown vowed to break off his affair. He begged to come home again.

“It’s over, Dick,” she told him. “Kaput!”

Eva lost little time mourning the loss of Brown. She set out immediately to find a new lover who was husband material. “After all, dahlink, I’m not as dewy fresh as I used to be, although I still look gorgeous, of course.”]

***

ZSA ZSA

Zsa Zsa still missed Rubirosa and almost nightly longed for him to hold her in his arms again. To her close friends, such as Helen Greco Jones, she confided that she spent many a lonely night wandering around her Bel Air manse, dreaming about her beloved Rubi. “I miss him terribly,” she told Jones. “I miss his love-making. He is without equal.”

Jones often spent the night at her house, listening to Zsa Zsa’s lament about Rubi and her complaints about the constant demands made on her “in my career of just being Zsa Zsa.”

She cited the pressure of always having to appear filled with gaiety and looking glamorous before photographers; the constant rehearsing, the long sessions with hairdressers and makeup people—and just polishing my diamonds.”

One rainy night in Bel Air—“Why is it always a rainy night?” she asked—a call came in from Paris. Jones picked up the receiver to hear Rubi’s voice on the other end. He wanted to speak to Zsa Zsa. Only that night at dinner, Zsa Zsa had asked Jones, “Where will I ever find a man who loves me as much as Rubi does?”

As she went to the phone, she whispered to Jones. “Rubi is thinking of me tonight the way I was dreaming about him.”

But a very different Rubi confronted her on the phone. He was not so romantic, but rather business-like. “Ma chérie, I want you to be the first to know,” he said. “I don’t want you to have to read it in the newspapers tomorrow. Although in my heart, I still love you, I’m getting married tomorrow to a young model, Odile Rodin. She loves me very much and is willing to give up her career for me.”

“You once asked me to give up my career,” Zsa Zsa said. “Perhaps if I had, you would still be mine.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But in romance, one should never look back to what might have been.”

“Oh, dahlink, what can I say, but to wish you and your teenage maiden all the happiness in the world,” she said. She’d already read about his romance with Rodin in the gossip columns. She felt she was about to burst into tears, and she wanted to get off the phone. She didn’t want him to hear her crying. “I will always love you.” Then she put down the phone and ran sobbing to her bedroom.

Rubi had met the 17-year-old Odile Rodin in Paris in 1956 when the aspiring actress had graced the cover of Paris Match. “I fell in love with her the first time I saw her,” Rubi later confessed. “There was a 31-year difference in our ages, but it didn’t matter. She was so young, so fresh, so beautiful, and there was a certain mystery about her.”

As Rubi expressed a growing interest in Rodin, her mother had been horrified. She warned her daughter that “this Rubirosa is a dangerous man.”

Rodin didn’t listen. She fell in love with the man who was old enough to be her father.

Kahil Heche, a close friend of Rubi, claimed, “He played Pygmalion to his young bride’s Galatea when they got married in October of 1956. He wanted her to dress very conservatively, more like Grace Kelly, the opposite of Zsa Zsa. She got around his dress code by wearing no underwear.”

***

At this point in her life, Zsa Zsa began to commit a number of irrational acts, a habit that would continue for decades and in time would land her in jail. Some of her barbs at fellow actresses would lead to libel suits, such as the one threatened (and settled out of court) by Corinne Calvet.

Zsa Zsa feuded with columnist Earl Wilson. She spread the story that he had been broke in Paris, and she gained permission from Rubirosa to feed and house him at his townhouse. Actually, Wilson and his family had rented a suite at the Ritz, and werefar from destitute.

One night in Beverly Hills, publicist Warren Cowan invited Zsa Zsa to dine at Prince Mike Romanoff’s Restaurant. Wilson, who was seated at a nearby table, walked over and confronted ZsaZsa “about the lies you’ve been spreading.”

“Right in front of Cowan, Zsa Zsa claimed that what she had been telling was absolutely true,” Wilson said. “She sat there on her fat ass with her big lie. On that trip to Paris, I never saw her or Rubirosa.”

Two weeks later at the Stork Club in Manhattan, Zsa Zsa was once again dating actor Franchot Tone, the ex-husband of Joan Crawford. She often resumed her ongoing affair with him “between marriages.”

At a nearby table, a drunken detective in a loud voice could be heard making unflattering remarks about her. “She’s older than Marlene Dietrich, and the Kraut is older than sin,” the detective charged. “She’s had too much goulash and is fat as a Hungarian goose. Not only that, but she’s a slut.”

Zsa Zsa burst into a rage, demanding that a drunken Tone get up “and defend my honor.”

“Darling, I see no point,” Tone told her. “Someone on the staff will kick him out. Besides, he’s twice my size.”

She picked up an open bottle of champagne from an ice bucket on their table and poured it over Tone’s head, drenching his hair and his tuxedo.

It was his last date with her.

***

The 1950s were coming to an end as Zsa Zsa made several attempts to revive a stalled movie career. “On the big screen, the pickings were lean, and I decided I’d do better on television. But a few things turned up for me in movies.”

One bizarre offer involved her starring role in Country Music Holiday (1958), playing herself—“I do Zsa Zsa better than anyone, even Debbie Reynolds.”

The 80-minute quickie, directed by Alvin Ganzer, was a Paramount release starring “gangsters, prizefighters such as Rocky Graziano, and rockabilly tunes.” Grazianolater told a reporter, “I signed on only because I heard I might get to fuck Zsa Zsa. People said she put out. But she snubbed me.”

Inspired by the rise of Elvis Presley, the plot, such as it was, concerned a hillbilly singer’s rise to fame. Felrin Husky, cast as “Verne Brand,” plays an ex-G.I. from Tennessee with a good singing voice. The movie also starred June Carter before she married Johnny Cash.

Critics labeled Country Music Holiday as a “curio,” wondering what Zsa Zsa was doing in it, and suggesting that Jayne Mansfield would have been a better choice.

***

One night at her Bel Air manse, a call came in from Orson Welles, asking Zsa Zsa if she would appear in a cameo in his new drama. [It was later entitled Touch of Evil, a crime thriller released in 1958.] She had always wanted to work with the former boy genius, and he told her he was hoping this offbeat film would “put me back on the top again in Hollywood.”

He’d written the screen play, and was also going to star in and direct the film. Its plot centered around the investigation by an American narcotics detective in the small border town of Los Robles. It evolved into one of the last films noir of a cinematic movement [motivated by the European existentialists] that had burst onto Hollywood’s movie making scene in the 1940s.

Zsa Zsa’s brief appearance was as the impresario of a strip club. “Do I have to show the money-maker?” Zsa Zsa asked facetiously.

“You’ll be fully clothed,” Welles answered.

Her appearance would be only a two-minute segment at the beginning of the movie, which otherwise starred Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh.

Welles came by Zsa Zsa’s mansion the following night to discuss her brief appearance in his upcoming film. She was particularly concerned with her wardrobe.

Since his marriage to Rita Hayworth, Welles was no longer as handsome as he once had been, but she found him charming and persuasive. She later admitted to friends that, “I entertained the boy genius in my bedroom later that evening. He was an ardent lover, but a bit too heavy. Naturally, in his condition, he preferred the woman on top.” At the time, Welles was only forty-one, but looked much older.

Later, friends of Zsa Zsa’s challenged her choice of Welles as a lover. Pamela Mason asked her, “How could you sleep with that pile of whale blubber?”

Zsa Zsa defended her choice of lover for the night by insisting that Welles in the flesh looked far better than his appearances on the screen.

Days after she had completed the filming associated with her involvement in the movie, Zsa Zsa was shocked to hear that Marlene Dietrich, almost at the last minute, had agreed to don a wig discarded by Elizabeth Taylor and interpret the role of “Tanya,” a tarot card reader and madam of the local whorehouse. After consulting the tarot cards, she tells the character played by Welles (Captain Hank Quinlan), “Your future’s all used up.” [In the film, it is Dietrich, as Tanya, who addresses Welles’ grotesquely dissipated character with the line, “You’re a mess, honey.”]

“The picture was doomed from the beginning,” Zsa Zsa later recalled. “Orson told me he was not allowed any involvement with the final cut and it was badly edited. I was very angry that he did not offer me the role of Tanya. It was a far better cameo than mine. Dietrich stole the show.”

Zsa Zsa also noted that her photograph was not included on movie posters distributed throughout America. “But because I was so popular in Europe, the studio ran my picture in the European publicityalong with photos of the rest of the cast.”

When it was released, Touch of Evil was viewed as a B-picture running as half of a double-bill. The other half consisted of Hedy Lamarr’s A-list picture, The Female Animal, her swan song to Hollywood.

In time, a re-edited version of Touch of Evil was re-released. It developed a cult following around the world.

[The bitter end of whatever traces of aimiable charity might have existed between Dietrich and Zsa Zsa occurred in Cannes in 1964, when Zsa Zsa attended a performance of Dietrich’s one-woman show. In the middle of her act, Zsa Zsa’s personal photographer stood up from a position adjacent to Zsa Zsa and, with flash bulb popping, snapped a picture of Dietrich in the middle of her show and against house rules. The diva stopped her show and shouted at security to remove the photographer from the theater, and to confiscate his camera.

Zsa Zsa rose to her feet. “So he will give you the film, dahlink?” she shouted, addressing Dietrich on the stage but also playing to the audience. “Anyway, he couldn’t sell your picture for a penny.”

After that hot night in Cannes on the Côte d’Azur, ZsaZsa’s relationship with Dietrich forever after remained north of the Arctic Circle.]

***

Zsa Zsa faced ridicule in the press when she signed for one of her last movies in the 1950s, Queen of Outer Space. Without seeing the film, most critics thought she had been cast as a sci-fi queen in the film’s title role.

[Queen Ylana (as interpreted by Laurie Mitchell) was a shapely looking but perpetually masked woman who had banished all men from her planet. The reason she was masked was because her face, as the plot revealed, had been disfigured by radiation.]

Zsa Zsa, cast as Talleah, a scientist, longs for the love of men and wants to remove the evil queen from her throne. Zsa Zsa’s most famous line from the movie, “I hate that queen,” brought howls from her gay fans in the audience.”

Cast as her leading man, a Californian, Eric Fleming, played astronaut Captain Patterson. Eva and Zsa Zsa had become known for often seducing their leading men. A former U.S. Navy veteran from World War II, and standing 6 feet, 4 inches, he and Zsa Zsa had no chemistry either on or off the screen. He’d received extensive facial plastic surgeries following injuries to his face during the war.

Right after the completion of the film, he signed to star with Clint Eastwood in the top-rated TV Western series, Rawhide, that ran from 1959 to 1966.

“I think Eric might have been gay,” Zsa Zsa asserted to Pamela Mason. “I looked gorgeous when I made the film, and he never even made a pass at me. He seemed more entranced with Eastwood on Rawhide than with me.”

The film’s producer, Walter Wanger, had gone to prison for shooting the actors’ agent Jennings Lang in the groin for having an affair with his wife, Joan Bennett. After that scandal, and after his release from prison, Wanger could find work only at Allied Artists, the outfit that had purchased Ben Hecht’s sci-fi script. It was Wanger who talked with ZsaZsa about starring in it.

For such a low-budget quickie, the director, Edwards Bernds, famed for his movies with The Three Stooges and with The Bowery Boys, secured Edith Head to design ZsaZsa’s wardrobe, at the cost of $15,000 per outfit.

In later years, Zsa Zsa said, “I had the last laugh. A lot of people made fun of me for starring in science fiction. But Queen of Outer Space later became a classic.”

In September of 1966, at the end of his Rawhide series, Zsa Zsa over her morning coffee was shocked to read about what had happened to Eric Fleming. He had signed for a role in High Jungle (1966), an MGM action/adventure film shot in the rain forests of Peru. During the final stages of shooting, his dugout canoe overturned in the rapids of the Huallaga River, and the actor was swept to his death by the strong currents.

***

Zsa Zsa’s last major movie role of the 1950s came when she was signed by the director Rudolph Matéfor the filming of For the First Time, released in 1959 as Mario Lanza’s last and final movie. The film told the sentimental story of an operatic tenor, Tony Costa (as interpreted by Lanza),who falls in love for the first time with a young German woman (played by Johana von Koczian) who is deaf. With her friend Kurt Kasznar, Zsa Zsa led the supporting cast. MGM released the film in the dying days of 1959.

Even before there was any discussion about Zsa Zsa appearing in a movie with Lanza, the singer called her late one night at her home in Bel Air. Because he was such a world-famous figure, she took the call out of curiosity.

As she told Pamela Mason the following morning, his phone call shocked her. “Basically, he claimed that if I let him come over, he’d give me the fuck of my life,” Zsa Zsa revealed. “He said he’d do that even though he was aware that I’d been royally screwed by Porfirio Rubirosa.”

“Size is not everything,” Lanza told her. “It’s important that a man has the stamina of a bull.”

To illustrate, he revealed details to her about the time he was stationed at the Texas Air Base in Marfa, Texas. This was the little Texas town where Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean had filmed Giant (1956).

“My buddies made a bet with me that I could not have sex with a dozen women,” Lanza confided to Zsa Zsa. “In this local garage, they lined up twelve Mexican prostitutes for me in a circle. While they were cheering me on, I satisfied every one of the putas, bringing each of them to climax.”

“That is a very impressive record, but, even so, I must refuse your gracious offer,” Zsa Zsa told Lanza by phone.

Before ringing off, he said, “Judy Garland went wild over me. If given a chance, I could transport you to heaven. It’s your loss, lady.”

Baffled and disturbed by the call, Zsa Zsa phoned Kathryn Grayson the next day. She knew that the singer had appeared with Lanza in pictures, beginning with That Midnight Kiss back in 1949.

Grayson wasn’t at all surprised by Lanza’s outrageous request. “The first day on the set, he told me, ‘You’ve got to be more sexy. Push up to me. Let me feel your pussy next to my big cock.’ When he made his first movie with me, he kept ramming his tongue down my throat. It was the crudest thing I’d ever been exposed to. I didn’t welcome his advances, but he kept on Frenching me until I became disgusted.”

“He kept it up the next day and the day after,” Grayson said. “I went to Helen Rose, my cosume designer, because I wanted to retaliate. I had her sew brass knuckles into all my costumes. When Mario tried to French me again, I fisted him right in the balls—and he’s got a big pair of them. He squealed like a pig and never tried to kiss me like that again. He accused me of trying to make a castrato out of him.”

Before she flew to Rome for the film, Zsa Zsa made a final call to Hedda Hopper, who knew Lanza. The columnist delivered a harsh judgment: “Mario recognizes no authority. He has no discipline. In his behavior, there are no frontiers, except his own gigantic appetite for food, drink,…and sex, of course.”

When she first faced reporters at the Teatro dell’Opera (The Opera House) in Rome, Zsa Zsa was asked, “I hear that Mr. Lanza uses dirty language with women. Is that true?”

“I’ve never heard it,” she claimed, obviously shielding him from unfavorable publicity.

On Zsa Zsa’s third night in Rome, Lanza invited her for dinner at his rented villa, a building once occupied by Benito Mussolini.

“I met Betty Hicks, Mario’s wife, along with his four children, three of whom would die tragically and far too young. I wandered about, trying not to bump into Mussolini’s marble furniture.”

Two nights later, she invited Lanza to dine privately with her at her hotel suite. “During the course of the dinner, I noticed he had a constant problem in consuming far too much wine and pasta.”

“Don’t you ever worry about being unfaithful to your wife?” ZsaZsaasked.

“Hell, no!The more I lay other women, the better I am as a husband.”

“After dinner,” as she’d later confide to Pamela Mason in Hollywood, “the inevitable happened. I gave in to him. He overcame my resistance, which wasn’t all that strong to begin with. He was the most persistent suitor I’d ever had. He just wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

Then she delivered a shocking revelation. “Like the movie title, it was my first time,” she told Pamela. “Before making love to me, he sang ‘Be My Love’ to my vagina.”

The next day on the set, Rudolph Maté, the director, asked Zsa Zsa to do him a favor in association with Lanza’s big musical numbers within the film. [They included “Vestila Giubbia” from Pagliacci, and the death scene from Otello.] “He is very neurotic,” Matéasserted. “He needs constant praise. Please keep flattering him. After each number, go up to him and assure him about how wonderful he is.”

Once, after one of his arias was filmed, he told Zsa Zsa, “It’s all sex when I’m singing. That’s me. It comes right out of my balls.”

In another incident, she dared to visit him in his dressing room. “He was opening mail from his starstruck fans,” Zsa Zsa recalled. “He was receiving very suggestive letters from women all over the world. Many pictures were of young girls in very pornographic poses. Many of these women wrote about what they wanted Mario to do to them.”

At the end of filming for the movie, she told reporters, “Mario has a smile as big as his voice. He is absolutely charming, a pleasure to work with. However, he has the habits of a tiger cub. Impossible to housebreak.”She’d stolen those lines about Lanza from Hedda Hopper.

***

After Zsa Zsa had flown back to Hollywood, she learned that Lanza, still in Rome, was facing his final curtain.

Lucky Luciano, a Sicilian-born American mobster, was boss of the Genovese crime syndicate, which controlled the nation’s heroin traffic.

In Rome, after he was deported from the United States, he visited Lanza. The singer hated the mob and didn’t want to make any deal with the crime boss, who had proposed that Lanza appear in Naples and sing for free at a big charity event he had organized.

In retaliation, the gangster at first sent a threat to Lanza that he was going to order the kidnapping of his children. When Lanza still didn’t acquiesce to his wishes, Luciano reportedly ordered the singer’s murder.

On October 7, 1959, Lanza was rushed to the Valle Giulia Clinic in Rome. There were rumors he’d suffered a heart attack. Lanza’s chauffeur accompanied him to the hospital, and slept there in an adjoining room. Late that afternoon, the nurse on duty told the chauffeur she was sending in a substitute nurse because she felt ill. Subsequently, a red-haired woman in a nurse’s uniform came into Lanza’s private room to administer an intravenous feeding.

Two hours later, when the chauffeur went to check on Lanza, he found his boss dead. The intravenous needle was still plugged into his arm, but there was no fluid in the jar. Only bubbles were entering Lanza’s bloodstream. He was dead.

Both Grayson and Zsa Zsa concluded from what they’d heard that Lanza had been murdered.

“I was shattered by his death,” ZsaZsalater wrote. “He was outrageous when I first met him. I suspect that Enrico Caruso was equally outrageous, if not more so. I’m sure Leonardo da Vinci was not a piece of cake. Great men, I’m convinced, behave extravagantly. I came to adore Mario for his extravagances.”

Headlines screamed the death of Mario Lanza, at 38 years old, hailing him as “the world’s most famous tenor.”

***

After Rubirosa married his teenage bride, Odile Rodin, in Paris, Zsa Zsathought she’d seen and heard the last of him, except for what she continued to read in the gossip columns.

But two months after his marriage, she received a letter from Rubi, which was odd in itself, since, in the past, he had always telephoned her.

“Ma chérie,

For the sake of our wonderful times gone by—recall the happy memories. I can’t think of them as they still make me sad and blue. Please grant me a favor. My President’s son and my dearest friend, RamfisTrujillo, is studying in Kansas. He wants to visit Hollywood to meet American film stars. Please, when he comes, introduce him to movie society.

Love, Rubi.

She had first met Ramfis at Manhattan’s Colony Restaurant during her torrid affair with Rubirosa, when one Dominican playboy, Rubi, had introduced her to the other leading playboy of the Caribbean. Ramfishad once been Rubi’sbrother-in-law during Rubi’smarriage to his sister, Flor de Oro, daughter of Generalíssimo Rafael Trujillo, the autocratic ruler of the Dominican Republic.

Ramfis’ formal name was Rafael Trujillo, Jr., but his friends and the international press called him Ramfis as inspired by the name of the high priest in Verdi’s opera, Aïda. His closest friends, including Rubi, nicknamed him “Ram.”

When Ramfis telephoned her, they agreed to meet not in Hollywood, but in the city of New Orleans, where she was to make a personal appearance at Mardi Gras. He would sail in for the event aboard his yacht.

The Angelitawas the largest yacht in the world, having once been owned by the super-rich Mrs. Joseph E. Davies, wife of the former U.S. ambassador to Russia.

Outfitted in Nassau, the luxurious yacht was a virtual floating palace.

At the time ZsaZsareunited with Ramfis , he was twelve years her junior, but basically they looked the same age.

When he had been four years old, his father, the Generalíssimo, had made him a general in the Dominican Air Force. At the U.S. Army General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Texas, Ramfis had operated with the protection and status ofa lieutenant colonel.

ZsaZsaflew to New Orleans where Ramfis had arranged for a limousine to pick her up at the airport and deliver her directly to his yacht, anchored in the harbor.

She interpreted her arrival aboard Ramfis ’ yacht as the most memorable of her life. “I was a vision in white, even my wide-brimmed white hat and white mink. It was a night of champagne and caviar. I was fascinated by Ramfis , his beauty, his mammoth yacht, his entourage of wealthy friends bowing before me, his gorgeous male servants in their tailored tuxedos. At one point, I was surrounded by six of them, each of whom looked like he’d been fathered by Rubirosa.”

That night in New Orleans during her reunion with Ramfis, he was an impressive attraction in his jacket laden with tassels and gold braid, covering a broad chest that led to a slender waist. Silver buttons and “colored ribbons of honor” also added to the jacket’s allure. His long, tall legs tapered off to a pair of spit-polished cavalry boots.

“Before we went out that night, I luxuriated in my suite furnished in Louis Quinze, with a pink marble bathroom,” she said. “I poured almost a bottle of Chanel No. 5 into the pink marble bathtub and lounged in the water.”

“After a night of dancing at the Roosevelt Hotel’s Blue Room in New Orleans, Ramfis brought me back to his yacht. “It was like a romance novel taking place in the rosy dawn of a Southern morning. He held me in his arms and kissed me passionately. But he was more Ashley Wilkes than Rhett Butler. He turned down my invitation to spend the early morning hours in my suite, making love to me.”

Zsa Zsa became lost in Ramfis’ world, which she characterized as belonging to medieval times, with Ramfis her heroic prince charming, and she his beautiful princess. “This glorious man and I were not of the 20thCentury, but belonged to the Age of Chivalry. Think one of those Robert Taylor movies in the ‘50s—Ivanhoe, which he made with George, or Knight of the Round Table and especially Quentin Durward.”

The next day, Ramfis stood by as Mayor Chet Morrison presented Zsa Zsa with the key to the city. That evening, she was crowned Queen of the Mardi Grasat the Hermes Carnival Ball, the climax of the riotous annual celebration.

The highlight of the ball was preceded by the blare of trumpets. Ramfis, the mayor, and the Grand Marshal appeared carrying a mammoth bouquet of rainbow-hued orchids for ZsaZsa.

She accepted it as photographers snapped her in her flaming red chiffon designer gown, the most dazzling sold at Martha’s along Palm Beach’s Worth Avenue. “I was bathed in pink spots,” she recalled. “It was a glorious night. No man ever put me on a throne like Jolie wanted for me, but I sat there on a faux throne and ruled the night.”

After New Orleans, Ramfis flew Zsa Zsa in his private jet back to Los Angeles. Along the way, they were entertained by his personal guitarist, Humberto Diaz. Along for the ride was Ramfis’ beloved German shepherd, his most faithful companion, since the women in his life came and went.

“Back in Hollywood, I learned things about Ramfis that wouldn’t make him a good prospect for marriage,” Zsa Zsa said. “I heard he was already married to Octavia Ricart, who bore him six children.”

She had also heard that Ramfis was not the biological son of Rafael Trujillo, but that his father had been Rafael Domincis, a light-skinned Cuban, which explained why Ramfis ’s physical features were more Caucasian than those of the Generalíssimo, who had some African ancestors.

Armed with that evidence, Zsa Zsa ruled Ramfis out as a possible suitor. But she learned that he had a crush on one of her friends, Kim Novak. Novak had just broken up with Sammy Davis, Jr., after he’d received death threats. Novak’s studio boss at Columbia, Harry Cohn, had taken drastic steps to end that black-on-white liaison.

At her Bel Air manse, Zsa Zsa agreed to throw a lavish party to introduce Ramfis to Hollywood. His date for that event would be Novak herself. Novak had been previously linked to such names as Cary Grant, heavy-hung John Ireland, Prince Aly Khan, Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, and Zsa Zsa’s own beloved Rubirosa.

The 200 members of Zsa Zsa’s guest list were strictly the elite of Hollywood—Robert Taylor, Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, James and Pamela Mason, Jeanne Crain, Beatrice Lillie, Ginger Rogers, Kathryn Grayson, David O. Selznick and Jennifer Jones, Conrad Hilton, Sr. with Ann Miller, Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, Rhonda Fleming, who showed up with a surprise date, John F. Kennedy, Shirley MacLaine with Dean Martin, and Maureen O’Hara with John Ford.

To her shock, Rubirosa had flown in from Biarritz with his bride, OdileRodin. He placed a possessive arm around Rodin when he introduced her to Zsa Zsa.

“Rubi, dahlink, how nice of you to drop in unannounced, and to bring this charming creature, Odette,”

“It’s Odine,” the young model said.

Standing with her in his capacity as co-host of the event, George Sanders told her, “Cokiline,this is the party to end all parties.”

Zsa Zsa later claimed that Rubi spent the entire evening gazing at her instead of at Rodin.

Selznick came up to her, telling her, “You’re the only woman alive who could bring two of your ex-husbands, George and Conrad, together at the same party with your most notorious lover, Rubirosa.”

“I presided over my gala like an empress,” Zsa Zsa recalled. “My ladies-in-waiting were Jolie and Eva. Even Life magazine covered it.”

For the gala, ZsaZsahired two orchestras and three dozen wine stewards, dressing them in red velvet livery with blue satin sashes.

At the time Zsa Zsa arranged a date between Ramfis and Kim Novak, Novak was filming Bell, Book and Candle with James Stewart. Ramfis agreed to escort her to Zsa Zsa’s party. Novak, as a lavender blonde, arrived at the party looking stunning in black mink and a midnight blue gown designed by Jean Louis.

Both columnists, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, were introduced to Ramfis at Zsa Zsa’s party. Parsons cited him as “the ideal heartthrob for Kim.” Hopper expressed her belief that Ramfis “looked a little bit like Tyrone Power, but in those skin-tight black trousers he wore, he would give every male except Rubirosa a case of penis envy. George Sanders observed that Ramfis “evoked a captain in an operetta.”

Eva observed that Ramfis looked like “Valentino come back from the grave.”

The morning after the party, Zsa Zsa received an urgent phone call from Novak, who complained that Ramfis didn’t ask her to go to bed with him.

Zsa Zsa advised her friend to be patient, claiming that Ramfis was a courtly Spanish gentleman. “He didn’t want to rip your clothes off and rape you the first night, dahlink. Be patient. Wait until tonight.”

Two days later, Zsa Zsa received a call from the most expensive furrier in Beverly Hills, asking her to come by for a fitting at her convenience. She protested, “I didn’t order a fur. I have all the mink coats my wardrobe will allow.”

“This is a gift from an admirer,” the manager told her. She knew at once that it was a gift from Ramfis.

Within a week, she was seen around town wearing a $17,000 floor-length chinchilla coat. Along with the fur came a $3,500 diamond-and-pearl ring. That’s not all. In her driveway, the next morning,, she found parked a $11,500 red Mercedes roadster 220S, with a gigantic red ribbon tied around it.

“After telling Ramfis, ‘You shouldn’t have,’ I put the red Mercedes roadster in my garage, with my other expensive chariots.”

Although Ramfis offered to pick up the tab for Zsa Zsa’s party for him, she refused his offer, paying out the $10,000 herself, which would be the equivalent of about $100,000 in today’s currency.

When the press in New York confronted Jolie with news of Ramfis’ gifts, she asked a question. “What would a man give a pampered woman like Zsa Zsa? A box of Whitman’s chocolates?”

After her party for Ramfis, Rubi wrote yet another note to Zsa Zsa, thanking her. He’d talked to Ramfisand reported that his friend had fallen madly in love with Novak. “They remind me of the time when you and I were in love,” he wrote. “Ram wants to marry Kim.”

Reportedly, Novak told Zsa Zsa, “Let Grace Kelly have that chubby Prince Rainier. I’ll take my handsome, dashing Prince of the Caribbean.”

***

For the next few weeks, Ramfis and Novak were seen everywhere together, ordering asparagus omelettes at the Farmers Market or downing “sunset cocktails” at a tavern overlooking the beach at Malibu.

Ramfis gave Novak a lavender Mercedes, priced at $14,000, even more expensive than the one presented to Zsa Zsa. When the gift aroused the ire of congressmen in Washington, D.C. Novak came out to greet reporters on her front lawn. She told the men, “I already have a car. I was only keeping the vehicle for Mr. Trujillo, who is a friend of mine.”

At one point during the scandal, a bumper sticker appeared on the cars of young women in Los Angeles—THIS CAR WAS NOT A GIFT FROM RAMFIS TRUJILLO.

On one occasion, Ramfis was accused of spending $40,000 for a private plane to fly Novak and himself to Las Vegas to hear Frank Sinatra.

“All this lavish spending from Ramfis invariably attracted press attention. A hawk-eyed reporter for the Associated Press began adding up the price tags of the gifts to ZsaZsaand Novak. Ramfis had rented a mansion in Holmby Hills (near BelAir), whose rental was priced at $3,000 a month. He also maintained a staff of twelve servants, including two chauffeurs, day and night. His food and liquor bills came to $25,000 a month. Those figures incited outrage when they were transmitted over the wire services.

In Washington, President Dwight Eisenhower was enraged to read about Ramfis, Novak, and Zsa Zsa, since the United States had recently given $1.3 million to the impoverished Caribbean nation in emergency Federal aid. Ramfis, through connections, had even arranged for the U.S. military to pay for his tuition at Fort Leavenworth, even though the Generalíssimo gave him an “allowance” of one million dollars a year.

Congressman Wayne Hays of Ohio demanded an investigation. “Much of our country’s aid to the Dominican Republic is going into the personal pockets of the playboy, Ramfis Trujillo, and into the jewel boxes of those blonde Hollywood hussies, Kim Novak and Zsa Zsa Gabor, who is the ultimate gold-digger, still counting the millions from her divorce settlement from Conrad Hilton.”

His remarks were greeted with a standing ovation from his fellow Congressmen, with a few dissenters who remained glued to their seats.

In an outrageous display, Hays unfurled a seductive picture of Zsa Zsa as she’d appeared in the film Lili. “If this scarlet woman continues her devious tricks with this Caribbean playboy of hers, foreign aid as we know it will come tumbling down. The American taxpayers are subsidizing the lifestyle of a reckless playboy and his concubines.’

“Zsa Zsa Gabor is the most expensive courtesan since the days of Madame de Pompadour,” Hays charged, “and that one nearly bankrupted the treasury of France. American aid, sent to the Dominican Republic to relieve poverty, is being sent right back to our shores to pay for mink coats, diamond rings, and custom-designed automobiles for Miss Gabor to add to her fleet of existing luxury automobiles.”

Speaking to The Washington Post and to reporters from CBS and NBC, Congressman Charles O. Porter of Oregon suggested that Federal aid to the Dominican Republic “might be placed directly into the bank accounts of Kim Novak and Zsa Zsa Gabor. That would save a lot of paperwork in transferring the money from Ciudad Trujillo to Hollywood. That way, the United States could get a return on its money by taxing the bloated income of these two pampered stars.”

From his sickbed at the Santa Monica Hospital, where he was suffering from pneumonia, Ramfis spoke to a reporter. “Please tell me what is wrong in giving two ladies a little gift from time to time, especially to repay them for their hospitality and generosity to me?”

At the Santa Monica Hospital, Ramfis had to undergo a sinus operation.

Ramfis’ press agent claimed that his client was one of the wealthiest young men in the world. “There is no connection between the money he spends on his personal life and funds granted by the United States to the Dominican Republic.”

Just as this was happening, Life magazine was delivered to newsstands across the country, with a six-page spread on Zsa Zsa’s lavish party for him in Bel Air.

The most damaging part of the Life magazine feature was a photograph of Ramfis’ wife, Octavia Ricart, and their six children. In the aftermath, many members of the American public came to view Zsa Zsa as a homewrecker.

Stories about Zsa Zsa and Ramfis created a feeding frenzy for the tabloids. The New York Daily News headlined its feature—ZSA ZSA GABOR, THE TIN SOLDIER, AND HIS HONOR FROM OHIO.

Then the American Legion denounced Zsa Zsa as “a wanton gold-digger.”

In Hollywood, after hearing a broadcast of Hays’ remarks, Zsa Zsa confronted reporters at her front door. “If Mr. Hays ever comes out from behind his congressional wall of immunity and repeats those slanderous statements, I will sue. And I will win!”

To protect Novak’s career in movies, her bosses at Columbia Studios, including Harry Cohn, told her to return the jewelry and the Mercedes. To save her flourishing movie career, she was ordered never to see Ramfis again.

Bowing to studio pressure, Novak gave back her expensive gifts to Ramfis. Zsa Zsa, however, in her chinchilla, was seen driving around Beverly Hills in her red Mercedes roadster.

Years later, Zsa Zsa read with glee that Hays had become embroiled in a sex scandal in Washington, as part of events spinning around his secretary, Elizabeth Ray.

“Vengeance is sweet,” said Zsa Zsa. “His Karma caught up with him.”

***

Ramfis had ordered the crew of his yacht, Angelita, to sail to Los Angeles, coming to anchor at a yacht slip in Santa Monica Harbor. This berth would make it convenient for Zsa Zsa to visit Ramfis in the wake of his failed romance with Novak.

After Ramfis had promised Zsa Zsa that he’d seek a divorce, she re-evaluated, more favorably his suitability as a potential lover and husband.

His yacht had been staked out by reporters. At two o’clock on foggy morning, a “blonde with a scarf covering her head and wearing large sunglasses” was seen going aboard the Angelita. No one saw her depart from the yacht during a period of three full days and nights. At first, it was speculated that Novak had been “the blonde in the fog.”

But months later, Zsa Zsa admitted, “I was that blonde.”

Before he sailed back to the Caribbean, Ramfis proposed marriage to Zsa Zsa. His previous pursuits of Novak, and later, of Joan Collins, had each gone astray.

He informed Zsa Zsa that eventually, when his father either died or surrendered control, he would become the dictator of the Dominican Republic. He also unveiled a spectacular plan to establish a “United States of the Caribbean,” with himself installed as president of this newly formed federation.

Each night, he dazzled her with plans for their future, even promising to make her the “Queen of the Caribbean.”

She succumbed to this dream, fancying herself as an “Evita Perón of the West Indies.”

After a final long and passionate sojourn, Ramfis sailed away to his island in the sun. After he left, she began to reconsider her decision to accept his proposal of marriage.

“My marriage to Ramfis would have been the worst mistake of my life, considering what eventually happened to that man.”

***

In New York, Jolie summed up the dilemma facing ZsaZsa. “There aren’t enough men around who can feel secure around ZsaZsa. Women are supposed to be soft, feminine, and helpless, all the things Zsa Zsa isn’t. She is one of the most famous, most ravishingly beautiful, most successful, women on earth. She is also rich. She’s too beautiful, too demanding, too witty, too everything. She can’t even keep servants. Men are afraid of her. She’s too busy conquering the world to be a little woman sitting at home adoring a man.”

Zsa Zsa virtually wrote her own epitaph when she said, “Who knows, in this life of ours, what is really true and what is enchanting make-believe?”

Eva

On the set of The Truth About Women, Eva got into a catfight with the Swedish beauty, Mai Zetterling (depicted above)

“I gave the bitch the slap of her life,” Eva later said. “She not only stole Ty Power from me, but she adopted my dress, my hairstyle, and my makeup.”

“That’s not all. The cretin was also a communist spy.”

Actor Ben Gazzara, star of the Broadway version of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, admitted, in a rare instance of name-dropping, to “being a babe magnet.”

“Marilyn Monroe went after me, and Audrey Hepburn fell in love with me, too,” he claimed. “At the Actors Studio, Marlon Brando and James Dean chased after me. And Eva Gabor fell for me, until I ditched her one night for that glittering antique, Marlene Dietrich.”

Eva Gabor made two movies with Glenn Ford, Don’t Go Near the Water and It Started With a Kiss.

Eva got her man offscreen during the filming of both movies, and later claimed, “Glenn was the second greatest love of my life after Ty. He instructed a woman as to what he liked. The first time we made love, he told me, ‘My hot spots begin with my ears and end with my big toe. Don’t miss any of them!’”

“In America, dahlink, that’s known as an ‘Around the World.’”

Eva said, “I got the surprise of my life when handsome William Holden showed up on my doorstep one night. I had dressed for a date with Glenn Ford, but he sent his best friend instead.”

“I was heartbroken, of course, because it signaled that Glenn was not going to marry me, but Bill, at least, was a fabulous consolation prize.”

During the course of his long career in show-biz, Noël Coward had accumulated an impressive roster of A-list seductions: James Cagney, Louis Hayward, Stewart Granger, Peter Lawford, Cary Grant, Laurence Olivier, Tyrone Power, Michael Redgrave, Michael Wilding, plus such royal figures as Prince George, the ill-fated Duke of Kent.

He once confessed that he’d lost his virginity (at age 13, and aboard a train) to actress Gertrude Lawrence.

Eva Gabor claimed, “I was the only known woman who seduced Noël when he was an adult.”

After Audrey Hepburn turned down the role of Gigi, it went to the French actress Leslie Caron, who used it as the vehicle for her greatest stardom.

Eva desperately wanted to play Gigi, but the producers and directors decided that her Hungarian accent made it almost impossible for her to even be considered. They eventually relented and awarded her a supporting role instead.

Jacques Bergerac(left) famous for his marriage to Ginger Rogers, also had a supporting role in Gigi. In the photo above, he courts Eva in one of the film’s subplots.

“He was absolutely adorable,” Eva said. “Why is it that Basque men have such sex appeal?”

Jolie (right figure in the quartet above), after a series of face-lifts, found additional rejuvenation when she married a much younger man, Edmund de Szigethy. At their wedding, on March 3, 1957, Jolie was hailed by society columnists as “The Bride of the Year.”

After the wedding, Zsa Zsa(left) and Magda(center) kissed the groom with Jolie’s “reconfigured” face looking on approvingly.

Jolie later said, “I would die without my Fairy Prince.” She obviously didn’t mean it that way.

Like her mother, Eva, too, thought she’d found the man of her dreams when she wed Richard Brown. But from the beginning, the marriage provoked lurid headlines when a model, Venita Ratcliffe, committed suicide.

Ratcliffe had been deserted by Brown, who had subsequently taken up with Eva.

In the aftermath of her death, the youngest of the Gabor siblings endured her worst headlines, some defining her as a home wrecker, “a shark who steals other women’s men,” and “a love pirate.”

Zsa Zsa

Between marriages, Zsa Zsa sometimes dated the aging actor Franchot Tone, the former husband of Joan Crawford.

“But I dumped him one night when he did not defend my honor. He let a man at a nearby table get away with claiming that I was older than Marlene Dietrich.”

No one, dahlink, is older than Dietrich. Not even God.”

Unexpectedly one day, Zsa Zsa(left) announced to friends, “Dahlinks, I’m starring in a hillbilly musical. You know, dahlinks, redneck bubbas.”

In Country Music Holiday, an oddity for her, she was cast as herself opposite Rocky Graziano (seated), one of the greatest knockout artists in boxing history, and character actor Jesse White (standing).

Graziano said he signed to do the picture “only because I was hoping to give Zsa Zsa a knock-out punch, if you get my drift.”

Cast as Tanya in Touch of Evil, Marlene Dietrich had only a small role in this cult classic and film noir, but the way she handled her part propelled it into one of the most enduring screen characterizations in the history of film.

On the left is Orson Welles, who had himself made up to look as debauched and grotesque as possible.

“My friends mocked me when I played a scientist in a science fiction film called Queen of Outer Space,” Zsa Zsa said.

“I did it to remain a fixture in the movies, and it was the only script offered to me at the time.”

“Of course, dahlink, I did not expect an Oscar for my role. But my fans loved it, and as it happened, it evolved into high camp for later generations.”

“In real life, Eric Fleming, the male star of Queen of Outer Space, actually had his face disfigured during the War,” Zsa Zsa said, “but the beauty butchers gave him a new one.”

“I found him appealing, and I left the key under the doormat, so to speak, but he never came knocking. I thought his death was tragic.”

“Most people thought that I, Zsa Zsa, interpreted the role of the Queen of Outer Space. But Laurie Mitchell (photo above) played that role, disguised throughout most of the filming with a mask, supposedly because her face had been disfigured by radiation.”

“I, of course, dahlink, would never play such a role.”

An overweight Mario Lanza signed to co-star with Zsa Zsa in what would be his last film, For the First Time, shot in Rome.

Lanza, as Zsa Zsa already knew, had a gargantuan appetite for food and sex, in that order.

On the first day of their shoot together, Zsa Zsa (left) hauled out a bottle of champagne to celebrate with Lanza, not knowing he was nearing the end of his life.

She always asserted that he was murdered.

Ramfis Trujillo, the son of Rafael Trujillo, Dictator of the Dominican Republic, modeled his life on the way Rubirosa led his.

In pursuit of Hollywood movie stars like Zsa Zsa and Kim Novak, he was a debauché, recklessly spending money on extravagant gifts for the current lady of his choice.

Known for wild variations in his behavior and moods, some of which led to the whimsical execution of some of his countrymen, he was later commited to a sanatorium in Belgium for electroshock therapy

Ramfis Trujillo is seen here on a date with Zsa Zsa.

“Kim [Novak] and I shared him, dahlink,” Zsa Zsa claimed.

“I felt I was betraying Rubi, his best friend, by sleeping with Ramfis, but what the hell? We can’t remain virgins forever.”

“After seducing every single woman who ever lived, Rubirosa (right) finally settled down with a schoolgirl,” Zsa Zsa with contempt in her voice. “Her name was Odile Rodin (left). Jackie Kennedy and I hated her. That was about the only thing Jackie and I ever agreed on.”

“She is so young, so fresh, so pretty,” Rubi told an aging Zsa Zsa, a statement that only inflamed her jealousy.

A journalist noted Rodin’s “wide smile, almond eyes, freckles, voluptuous curves, and mod hairdo,” labeling her “a chic Parisian from the city’s Left Bank.”

At long last, at a party in Zsa Zsa’s Bel Air manse, LA GABOR contronted Odile Rodin, noting Rubirosa’s arm possessively wrapped around her slim waist. To the left of Zsa Zsa, partly hidden, stands Kim Novak and, to Zsa Zsa’s left, Novak’s date for the evening, Ramfis Trujillo.

Zsa Zsa asked Rodin, “Do you enjoy Rubi’s beatings as much as I used to?”

Kim Novak was the lavender blonde goddess at Columbia Studios.

Although her gruff boss, Harry Cohn, liked to remind her that “You’re nothing but a piece of meat in a butcher shop,” to the world at large, she was an icon of desirablity and soft femininity.

Eva’s former lover, Tyrone Power, referred to her as “a bitch and a spoiled brat” after filming The Eddy Duchin Story with her in 1956.

Ramfis Trujillo is seen here with Kim Novak,

He became (momentarily) infatuated with her, showering her with presents which included a $14,000 Mercedes (painted lavender, like her hair) and showering her with expensive presents.

His reckless spending of money that officials in Washington, D.C., defined as “U.S. charity to the Dominican Republic,” resulted in loud denunciations of both Zsa Zsa and Novak from the floor of the U.S. Congress.

Congressman Wayne Hays, a Deomocrat from Ohio, led the attack on the floor of Congress against Zsa Zsa, at one point calling her “a gold-digging harlot.”

He was protected from libel by congressional immunity; otherwise, as she announced, “I would sue the bastard liar.”

In 1976, Hays was forced to resign from Congress after a bitter and much-publicized sex scandal of his own.