Chapter Thirteen

When Roses No Longer Bloomed in May

Whatever Happened to Magda?

MAGDA

“At long last, one of my daughters has a happy marriage,” Jolie stated to a reporter. “There are problems, of course, but Magda seems content with Tony Gallucci. At least they are rich, and that always helps a marriage.”

But tragedy lurked.

At their mansion in Southampton, Magda and Galluccihad entertained guests on a Thursday evening. In the middle of the night, at around 2am, Magda woke up feeling dehydrated and wanted some orange juice from the kitchen downstairs.

Her French poodle had long ago died, and she’d replaced her with a much bigger dog named Maxim. The dog always slept at the foot of an elaborate spiral staircase Gallucci had imported from Italy. Magda always warned guests not to trip over Maxim when descending the stairs at night. On this particular pre-dawn morning, she didn’t heed her own warning and tripped over Maxim. She took a bad fall, hitting her head on a piece of furniture.

She summoned the maid in her downstairs bedroom, who woke up and brought her cold compresses for her head.

Magda complained of a severe headache, but assured the maid she would be all right in the morning.

Thinking that his wife had suffered only a minor bump, Gallucci left for a game of golf late that morning. By three o’clock on Friday afternoon, Magda’s headache grew worse, but she had not called a doctor. She did telephone Jolie, who was staying in their guest cottage.

“Nuci, he’s just ignoring me,” Magda said. “Here I am lying in bed dying, and he’s downstairs with his butler watching a baseball game on TV.”

Jolie didn’t realize the gravity of the situation. She told Magda to keep applying those cold compresses and that the swelling would go down. “A bump on the head, nothing serious.Quit angering yourself over Tony and get some rest.”

Magda was feeling better Friday night. Gallucci had not only come to her bed, but had made passionate love to her.

By Saturday afternoon, when she’d called Jolie, she assured her mother that she was feeling wonderful and was getting dressed to attend the gala Horse Show Ball that would bring out tout Southampton.

Magda was photographed in full regalia astride an Arabian show horse, which had once been owned by Rubirosa.

An urgent call from Gallucci came in at ten that morning. “Jolie, come at once. Magda can’t talk. Not a word.”

Within fifteen minutes, Jolie was in the Gallucci mansion, racing up the steps to Magda’s bedroom. There, she discovered her stricken daughter. When Magda opened her eyes, she stared blankly at the ceiling. Jolie feared that the entire right side of her body was paralyzed.

Gallucciwas on the phone summoning an ambulance. Within five minutes, its siren could be heard as two attendants with a stretcher pulled up in front of their manse.

With her daughter rushed to the emergency room at the hospital, Jolie placed a call to ZsaZsa, who was in Manhattan attending the premiere of a film. She asked Zsa Zsa to use her influence and contact Dr. Andrew Bernath.

Jolie explained to Zsa Zsa that Dr. Bernath had treated Magda once before, after she and Jolie had had a bitter quarrel. That hadoccurred five years before. “Magda suffered this little spell, and she lost her speech for a little while. But she recovered quickly.”

Zsa Zsa located the physician and persuaded him to travel the one hundred miles to Southampton to treat Magda once again.

After only a cursory examination, Dr. Bernath concluded that Magda had suffered a massive stroke and had to be rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.

Jolie rode beside her stricken daughter to the hospital, holding onto her limp right hand and at times cradling her head in her lap. She refused to leave Magda’s side when the night nurse called a curfew for visitors at nine that evening.

Promising to leave, Jolie acted impulsively after the nurse left. She slid under the covers of Magda’s bed, using her mink coat as a blanket, her purse for a cushion. She spent the night beside Magda, listening to her moans and holding back her own tears.

By 5am, Jolie was in the bathroom, applying more makeup and arranging her hair so she would look presentable when two physicians came in to examine Magda at 6am that morning.

During Magda’s stay at the hospital, Jolie maintained a constant vigil, with Gallucci joining her at night.

As Magda began to recover physically, she still had not regained her speech. With money no object, Gallucci summoned the best speech therapists in New York, including a team from the Rusk Center in Manhattan.

Finally, both Gallucci and Jolie were told, “Magda will never speak again. It’s hopeless. There’s nothing more we can do for her.”

“I refuse to accept that,” Jolie told the therapists. “You wait and see. Miracles do happen when backed up by a formidable human resolve.”

When Eva heard the news, she flew from Palm Beach to New York and took a taxi all the way to Southampton to join Magda, who by now had been released from the Manhattan specialists and was back in her home.

Jolie later said, “Magda knew all of us, including Tony, Zsa Zsa, and Eva, and she knew what was happening. But she couldn’t utter one word.”

Jolie’s young husband, Edmund de Szigethy, had a cousin, Dr. Julien Rosenthal, who was a brain surgeon. He was consulted and he examined Magda intensely. He told Jolie and Gallucci, “If I operate, Magda has only a fifty percent chance of living. If I don’t operate, she can live a long and peaceful life, but without all her facilities.”

Jolie burst into tears. “My darling once spoke eleven languages.”

That night,Jolie met with Zsa Zsa and Eva. All three Gaborsagreed not to operate, afraid to take the chance with such odds against Magda.

During the weeks ahead, Magda struggled to get just one word out, but to no avail. One night, Jolie was sitting with her. Magda was shedding bitter tears. That day, she’d been told that Gallucci had terminal cancer. Forcing herself, she managed to utter three words—“No speech…die!”

Jolie grabbed her and hugged her. “No, no, if you die, I die.”

Magda tried to comfort Gallucci as she watched him suffer from the cancer eating away at his body during the six months before he died.

Just before his burial, wearing a heavy black veil, she stood in front of his casket. As she leaned in to kiss the casket, she formed words on her lips, but no sound came out.

In her weakened condition, and as a widow, she had to handle a nightmarish galaxy of lawsuits from members of the Gallucci family for control of her husband’s mammoth estate.

“Magda never regained her speech, although in some way we could understand her a bit,” Jolie said. “She was very brave.”

***

In the wake of her husband’s death, Magda spent many a sleepless night agonizing over the upcoming legal battles for the Gallucci millions. She read law books, and she made clever business decisions, even though she couldn’t speak.

She even managed to entertain guests in her Palm Springs home. In trying to tell Jolie about the guests the following morning, she often managed to utter the word “couple” without being able to identify her guests to Jolie.

She urged her lawyers to “Fight! Fight!” for her late husband’s millions. In the end, she prevailed, winning control of most of Gallucci’s estate, which made her the richest of all the Gabors.

As Zsa Zsa quipped, “Those sewer pipes pay rich dividends, dahlink.”

After the estate was settled, she made yet another smart business decision. She sold all her interests in her late husband’s plumbing-supply business just before the Gallucci industries failed. She ended up getting all her money out of the companies. The Gallucci family was eventually left with nearly worthless stock.

Although she retained ownership of her house in Southampton, to an increasing degree, she spent time in Palm Springs, where she lived in luxury in a mansion whose kitchen was the size of a dormitory. For nearly a year during its construction she directed workers with her limited vocabulary.

Eventually, Magda evolved into one of the leading hostesses of Palm Springs. As journalist Allene Arthur noted, “The Gabors are to Palm Springs what fancy desserts are to a good meal.”

During the years to come, Magda was often seen at the Palm Springs jewelry store Jolie had opened. “You might see her with Mamie Eisenhower or with Governor Pat Brown,” Jolie said. “She made herself understood as best she could.”

Many famous guests, including Ann Miller, visited Magda’s Palm Springs home, which stood atop a hill up a winding road. “You got the idea that Magda liked red—the den, the powder room, the bedrooms, even a red grandfather clock,” Miller said. “For her parties, a red invitation went out. The flowers were red, the upholstery red, and the table linens red.”

“In spite of her speech problem, Magda always appeared beautifully gowned, made up, manicured, coiffed, and bejeweled,” said Frank Sinatra. “She owned enough pearls to stretch to Hungary.”

As Arthur noted in an article, Magda “keeps the allure going as if it were a sacred duty.”

***

Of all the many marriages of the Gabor sisters, none came as quite the surprise of Magda’s sudden marriage to George Sanders, Zsa Zsa’s former husband. Although she later altered her story, Zsa Zsa for years claimed that she was responsible for that quickie marriage.

She “confessed” to Brian Aherne, one of Sanders’ best friends, what had happened.

“George stayed with me for weeks in Bel Air, begging me to marry him, but I had no intention of doing that. I had moved on to other beaux and to other husbands.”

“One afternoon, I told George to marry Magda,” Zsa Zsa said. “I reminded him that Magda was a rich and lonely widow.”

In Richard Vanderbeets’ biography of Sanders, he wrote: “The idea of marrying Magda took a firm hold in Sanders’ head. He charges straight down to Magda’s house in Palm Springs and confronts her with the announcement that they were getting married that afternoon, and that is what they did, believe it or not!”

On very short notice, Magda’s efficient secretary, Mitzi Meyer, with her connections, arranged for the marriage license and even found a judge to perform the marriage ceremony.

After proposing to Magda, Sanders then visited Jolie, who approved. She later told the press, “It’s always nice when you recapture a son-in-law.”

Magda took Sanders as her fifth husband on December 4, 1970, at Indio, a town outside Palm Springs. Sanders told a stray reporter, “Marrying Magda was not my idea. It was Zsa Zsa’s doing.”

Zsa Zsa later changed her story, suggesting that she had been merely joking when she told Sanders to marry Magda. With bitterness, she later said, “I thought I was going to go insane, and I realized that George married Magda because he wanted to hurt me, because I had wounded his pride in turning him down, and because he had finally accepted the fact that we had no future together.”

Sanders asked Jolie to go with him to purchase a wedding band for Magda, leading her to a junk shop, where he discovered a gold-colored pair of earrings, costing $1.90. “George was such a cheap bastard that day,” Jolie recalled. “He haggled with the shopkeeper, claiming he needed only one earring, the owner says that he would sell the earrings only as a pair. I saved the day by offering to spend 95 cents to purchase the other earring.”

According to Jolie, Magda’s marriage to Sanders was never consummated. Almost from the first, the couple seemed to realize that their marriage, conceived in a moment of impetuosity, was not one of their brighter ideas.

When he called Aherne, he said, “Age is a ghastly phenomenon. I am now an irascible old fart, deaf, and intractable. It seems, as I looked around, that all my friends are either dead or dying. It really is the last mile for all of us.”

During the brief time Sanders lived in Magda’s home, occupying a separate bedroom, he constantly referred to her as Zsa Zsa.

“Calling her Zsa Zsa really hurt Magda,” Jolie said.

“George was still mine—no matter how many wives he has,” Zsa Zsa later told Magda, which hurt her even more. “I advised Magda to have the marriage annulled, and she complied with my wishes,”

Jolie later said, “There was no alimony, of course. But Magda did get some trinket from the marriage. She kept the Oscar he won for his performance in All About Eve. She placed it in her bar, which was painted red, of course.”

***

Even though her speech remained impaired, Magda attracted suitors. She was still beautiful, and very, very rich. She learned to put on wigs, makeup, and false eyelashes with the use of her left hand, as her right arm remained useless. She even had a fiancé, actor Gary Moore.

Magda ended her affair with Moore when she came to believe his passion for golf was greater than his love for her.

At one point, Magda had two princely squires in pursuit of her, including Prince Umberto de Poliolo who lived in La Jolla and operated an art emporium, Gallery de Poliolo, in Palm Springs.

Her other suitor was Prince Alfonso de Bourbon, who proposed marriage to Magda. The four Gabors met to consider the offer, and after some discussion, advised Magda to turn him down, even though he was a scion of a famous noble family in Europe, the Bourbons.

Over a period of years, Magda also dated the artist, John Morris. He later said, “Magda and I would always be engaged in between her husbands and various beaux.”

Even with her affliction, Magda never lost her sense of humor. Once a reporter asked her which of the Gabors was the oldest. “Mother!” she blurted out.

The author, Norma Lee Browning, recalled attending a lavish engagement party at Magda’s home to announce her upcoming marriage to “Count Somebody.” She didn’t remember his name, but recalled that the count had “extravagant manners and wore a diamond earring.”

“By midnight, the count had vanished and no announcement came,” Browning said. “So we assumed the engagement was broken. But the gypsy fiddler played and Jolie sang ‘Never on Sunday.’ All of us had a wonderful time.”

In spite of her speech impairment, Magda, on August 5, 1972, at the age of fifty-seven, made one final attempt at marriage. In Southampton, she wed Tibor R. Heltai, an economic consultant who later became a real-estate broker. Of all the Gabor marriages, this wedding was the least publicized.

In her memoirs, Jolie suggested that it might not have been a marriage at all.

Jolie claimed that Magda was no longer interested in sex, so the reason for her marriage to Heltai was never known. As Jolie wrote in her memoir, “Magda closed the bedroom door when the last husband, Tibor Heltai, wanted to come in. She shuddered. I don’t know whether it was the thought of sex or the thought of Tibor, but I only know she shuddered.”

The marriage ended almost before it had begun, although Magda did not file for divorce until 1975. That was the year Jolie published her memoirs, ghost written by the popular author and columnist for The New York Post, Cindy Adams.

The book was a fascinating read, not only about Jolie but about her era and her views on the lives of her daughters and their many marriages.

Sometimes, Magda joined the three other Gabors, including making a spectacular entrance when they were honorees at the annual Americana Ball at the Hilton Riviera in Palm Springs in 1980. They came onto the red carpet, with husband Edmund escorting Jolie; artist John Morris with Magda on his arm; escort Glen Bohannan accompanying Zsa Zsa, and Eva arriving with TV host, Merv Griffin, with whom she enjoyed a platonic relationship toward the end of her life.

That night, Griffin was the master of ceremonies, telling the audience, “The Gabors came here poor, without friends, and couldn’t speak the language. Now they are successful, rich, and famous. And they still can’t speak the language. Eva is now in the hairpiece business, and Zsa Zsa is in the cassette business. They are marketing vigs and wideos. Jolie swears that Zsa Zsa’s first words were “I do.”

Madga’slongtime secretary, Mitzi Meyer, characterized the Gaborsas “holdovers from the Moulin Rouge era, the 1800s world of the artist, Toulouse-Lautrec.”That conjured up an image of ZsaZsaas Jane Avrilin her 1952 film, Moulin Rouge.

“The Gabors lived in a world of caviar and champagne,” Meyer said, “of designer gowns with plunging décolletage, of night life with cabaret gaiety, lavish dinners, countless parties and countless husbands and beaux—not to forget the diamonds and mink coats. They represented old world glamour, and they fought their relentless enemy, time, which went marching on as it inevitably does, doing all of us in eventually.”

In many ways, Magda remained Jolie’s most loyal daughter. She once wrote that her mother in her nineties had “the endurance of the Danube.” She stood by Jolie when she cancelled her fifth facelift to have her second hip replacement surgery instead.

All the Gabors, spearheaded by Magda, gathered at the Eisenhower Medical Center until they learned that their matriarch had come through like a German Panzer invading Poland in 1939.

During her final years, Magda often spent hours alone with her wheelchair-bound mother, whose eyesight and hearing were mostly gone. Jolie wanted people to remember her glittering image, so she no longer made appearances.

As journalist Allene Arthur wrote: “She made fashion a religion and man-trapping an art,” becoming the role model for Magda and her other two daughters. Arthur claimed, “Jolie fought for a life of spun gold and violins. And won. She has enjoyed 19 sons-in-law and a trillion party invitations.”

Magda always liked her stepfather, Edmund de Szigethy, whom Jolie had married in 1957. Her mother told her, “Edmund is a moneymaker. He takes care of me,he takes care of my business, my three homes in Florida, New York, and Connecticut. When I married him, he looked younger than me, but now, he looks older.”

Death came to Edmund in 1989.

Eva died in 1995, and Zsa Zsa made a decision not to tell Jolie about the death of her youngest daughter. Born in 1896, Jolie died on April 1, 1997, at the age of 101.

Two months after Jolie’s death, Magda herself died on June 6, 1997, from renal failure. She was buried in Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, California.

This heroine of World War II was eighty-one years old at the hour of her death. Zsa Zsa mourned her passing.

Of the four fabulous Gabors, Zsa Zsa was left as the sole survivor.

Magda

Although her speech patterns were greatly impaired, Magda (right) maintained her position in society in Palm Springs. Here, she dressed up in costume to attend a costume ball thrown by Jolie (center) in 1974.

Eva (left) claimed, “I didn’t want to look like Dale Evans. I refused to dress up like a cowgirl.”

Until she actually tried to speak, Magda hardly looked like a lady with a speech impairment.

She evolved into a beloved hostess in Palm Springs, enjoying her role as a social butterfly and a patron of the arts.

Old friends came to call, including David Niven. “Somehow, people managed to understand what she was trying to say.”

Both Magda and George Sanders made an impetuous error when they got married in 1970.

The marriage lasted only six weeks before both parties agreed to seek an annulment.