Chapter Fourteen

Green Acres Deep in December

Whatever Happened to Eva?

EVA

Eva had long abandoned hopes of a career as a movie star, although for a 1963 release, A New Kind of Love, a role was offered to her. The film starred the husband and wife team of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, with Eva cast with veteran character actress Thelma Ritter as the leading supporting players. Maurice Chevalier appeared as himself in this Paramount release.

The comedy concerned a journalist who mistakes a woman for a prostitute. While he tries to interview her about her job, he falls in love with her.

Eva was thrilled to be working with Newman. She told her friends, “I think he has divine looks, and I hear he’s an errant husband who sleeps around. I should be so lucky.”

On meeting Newman, Eva learned that he didn’t really want to do the script. He told her, “I’m appearing in it as a favor to Joanne. After making The Stripper, she thinks she’s Marilyn Monroe, and she gets to wear some expensive French lingerie in this film.”

Eva’s own wardrobe was designed by Edith Head who had dressed stars from Mae West to Bette Davis.

As Ritter reported, “It was obvious that Eva was making a play for Paul. She came raving to me one day when she’d heard that he had Hungarian blood flowing through his veins. ‘That’s why I’m so attracted to him,’ she told me.”

Reportedly, Woodward had to warn Eva that, “Mr. Newman is taken. In case you didn’t know, I’m his wife.”

Behind Woodward’s back, Eva told Melville Shavelson, the director, producer, and scriptwriter, “Paul is divine but that Woodward creature is a bitch! Also, dahlink, you should have let me design that blonde wig of hers. It’s hideous on the poor creature.”

Years later, at a dinner party thrown by Merv Griffin for twenty-four guests, Eva was asked if she’d managed to seduce Newman while making thatfilm.

“Of course, I did, dahlink,” she said. “You didn’t think that Woodward could safeguard a handsome hunk like that twenty-four hours a day?”

She whispered to Griffin, “I got him drunk on beer and then raped him.”

“I’m very experienced,” she told the assembled guests, sounding more like Zsa Zsa than herself. “I’ve been seducing other women’s husbands for years.”

A somewhat skeptical Zsa Zsa asked her, “Did you really seduce Newman, or are you just claiming that?”

“Let me put it this way,” Eva said. “If I didn’t seduce him, I would claim him as my conquest anyway. After all, dahlink, I’ve got a reputation to maintain. So have you, Sister Dear.”

Later, Eva claimed, “Paul Newman was a prize, a male body for the ages. Truly a Greek God, except perhaps his legs, which were a bit on the skinny side.”

***

Since the early 1950s, Eva had been consistently mistaken for her more famous sister, Zsa Zsa. On a first-class flight to Sydney, Australia, two teenage girls approached her, “Zsa Zsa, maywe have your autograph?” one of the girls asked. Concealing her exasperation, Eva replied, “Dahlinks, I’m Eva Gabor. But I’d be honored to sign my name in your autograph book. In case anyone asks, I’m the pretty one.”

Gossip columnist Joyce Haber defended Eva as “the least boring of the Gabor sisters.”

Sometimes, Eva used the public’s confusion to escape embarrassment. One June evening after midnight, she was caught swimming nude in the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Two men shouted, “LOOK, IT’S EVA GABOR!”

Emerging dripping wet from the pool, Eva rushed for one of the hotel’s huge bath towels. “No, dahlinks,” she said. “It’s Zsa Zsa.”

In addition to sideline commercial enterprises, such as hawking wigs, Eva continued to pursue a career on Broadway, although the prospect grew dimmer and dimmer with each passing year.

In October of 1963, she signed to appear in Tovarich in the role of Tatiana on Broadway, replacing Vivien Leigh in the role. Eva’s engagement would only last until November of that year.

Leigh had opened in the play in March, attracting a large audience, many of whom came “to see Scarlett O’Hara.” Although Leigh later won a Tony Award, she was too weak and too emotionally unstable to appear month after monthin the demanding role.

She was assisted and emotionally reinforced, to some degree, by her male co-star, Jean Pierre Aumont, with whom she’d once conducted a love affair.

When Leigh announced she had to leave the role, the producers searched for a big name star to replace her as a draw within the mammoth Winter Garden Theater. Marlene Dietrich was approached, but she turned down the offer.

When Eva was asked, she accepted. She enjoyed working with Aumont, and she formed a close alliance with him. She was aware of the affair the handsome French actor had had with ZsaZsawhen they’d appeared together in the Leslie Caron film, Lili.

In his memoirs, Sun and Shade, Aumont wrote, “Eva was charming, although she didn’t have Vivien’s royal bearing. The play wavered a little—Instead of the story of a grand duchess who is transformed into a maid,it became the story of a lovely young thing who disguises herself as a grand duchess. Throughout the play, Eva communicated in a spontaneous and chirping Hungarian twitter which I didn’t always understand.”

Aumonttold the director of the play, Peter Glenville, that “Eva and I made love four or five times. I forgot the exact number. She is far better in bed than she is on the stage.”

Eva had a different point of view, confiding in Glenville that once, during sexual climax, Aumont had yelled out, “Grace!”

“The poor boy is still in love with Grace Kelly, and I cannot be her,” Eva said.

Right before Tovarich closed on Broadway, Aumont received a call backstage from his friend, Porfirio Rubirosa. He invited him to a midnight party at the home of “a certain Mrs. Smith,” as Aumont relayed in his memoirs. At first, Aumont, who was tired, didn’t want to attend, but Rubi made the party sound so enticing, he changed his mind.

Rubi called back, requesting that “a real VIP at the party wanted to meet Eva, so please bring her along.”

Always ready to party, Eva accepted, thinking she was going to meet a big-time movie star and admirer of hers.

At the door to a Park Avenue apartment, they were greeted by “Mrs. Smith,” who turned out to be Jean Kennedy Smith, the eighth of the nine children born to Joseph and Rose Kennedy, and the last surviving child by the year 2013.

The moment she got there, Eva excused herself and disappeared into the powder room “to make myself camera ready.”

In the meantime, Mrs. Smith introduced Aumont to some of her other guests. “Jack, this is Jean Pierre; Jean Pierre, Jack.”

Aumontwas awed to have come face-to-face with John F. Kennedy, the President of the United States.The date was November 15, 1963. The president would soon be flying with Jackie to Dallas.

Seated across from JFK were Robert and Ted Kennedy, his brothers. In his memoir, Aumontremembered JFK as “warm, friendly, and witty. I was fascinated by Bobby, but I was under the spell of the president. Some interior fire consumed JFK, some concentrated mission. One moment, he would seem austere, and then a dreamy expression would pass over him. He was a surprising mixture of vigor and timidity.”

He admitted that once Eva emerged from the powder room, “none of theKennedy men, especially Jack, seemed too interested in me. I think she could have gone to bed with all three of them that night. She did look very glamorous.”

“Eva was well aware of ZsaZsa’s affair with JFK, and I’m sure she wanted to get one up on her older sister,” Aumontsaid.

The actor said that in the early morning hours, through the nearly deserted streets of Manhattan, he delivered Eva in a limousine to the Hotel Carlyle. She’d been told that JFK was on his way. She was very excited. I kissed her good night, but she had little interest in me. The following night at the theater, I wanted a blow-by-blow description, but didn’t get it.”

Eva confided only what didn’t happen to Aumont: “I wanted to ask the president which Gabor sister was better in bed—Zsa Zsa or me, but I didn’t dare.”

When Aumontannounced he was publishing his memoirs [they were released in 1977] he received a surprising telephone call from Eva. “She asked me to respect her privacy and not reveal that she’d had a brief fling with the president. She felt the American people would be outraged to know she’d seduced JFK days before his assassination.”

“I would get all the blame, because Jackie was clearly the heroine of that horrible November,” Eva told him. “I would look like some devouring monster, a cheap back alley whore slipping around.”

Aumontagreed to respect her wishes, but he didn’t remain silent about her encounter with a sitting U.S president. He published an account of it in his memoir anyway.

***

Along with Jean Pierre Aumont, Eva was to meet another sitting U.S. President, Lyndon B. Johnson. The occasion came about in Washington,D.C., when both stars were appearing in Tovarichafter it had closed on Broadway. The president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, had attended a gala performance of Tovarich, and in its aftermath, she invited Aumont and Eva to the White house for tea.

At the tea, Eva was visibly disappointed that President Johnson wasn’t there. “I once met President Kennedy, and now I want to meet President Johnson,” she protested to Lady Bird.

With perfect manners, the First Lady told Eva that Johnson was in a cabinet meeting discussing urgent matters pertaining to the war in Vietnam.

After two cups of tea, Eva once again confronted Lady Bird. “I came to the White House to meet President Johnson. Would you please tell him I’m here. I’m sure he’d love to meet me.”

In his memoir, Aumont quoted Eva’s exact words: “We’re playing this evenink and ve can’t wait.”

Finally, Lady Bird left and went into the room where Johnson was presiding over his cabinet.

She presented Eva’s demands to the president. In a surprise move, Johnson interrupted the cabinet meeting and excused himself. “To hell with Vietnam. I’ve got to go out there and meet one of the Gabor sisters. Frankly, I can’t tell one from the other. I just hope it’s not the fat mama.”

Ushered into the room by Lady Bird, Johnson came face to face with Eva.

“Dahlink, you are exactly like me,” she told him.

He seemed amused at that remark, as he gazed down into her plunging neckline. “Well, little darling, I’d say there are a few differences.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t mean it that way. What I mean is you’re so much better looking in person than you are on TV. Just like me. Promise me never again to appear on TV.”

“Well, little darling, as President of the United States, I can’t exactly make that promise. I’ve got to go, but it was nice meeting you. Now that Lady Bird had to run to the john, I’ll make it up to you by giving you a sloppy wet one.” He carried through on his promise.

After he’d kissed her, she said, “I’ll never wash my lips again.”

With a final goodbye, Johnson rushed back to his Cabinet meeting. Lady Bird returned to briefly congratulate Aumont and Eva on Tovarich and then quickly disappeared back into her private chambers.

***

Eva was offered the role of Fannie Price in the film adaptation of Youngblood Hawke (1964), based on a novel by Herman Wouk. It was a story about the rise and fall of a young writer, inspired by the life of Thomas Wolfe. Warner Brothers cast the handsome actor, James Franciscus, as Youngblood Hawke. Other members of the cast included Mary Astor, Suzanne Pleshette, Genevieve Page, Lew Bowman, Don Porter, Kent Smith, and Mildred Dunnock.

Afterthe film’s release, most critics suggested that the film was “clichéd but somewhat compelling trash.”

Eva found the star, Missouri-born Franciscus, who’d attended Yale, mesmerizing. Years later, the actor’s preppy good looks enabled him to portray JFK in the 1980 TV movie, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. The year before, he’d also played the president in The Greek Tycoon, based on the Jackie Kennedy/Ari Onassis story.

At the time Eva met him, Franciscuswas married to Kathlene (“Kitty”) Wellman,the daughter of the film director, William Wellman.

Eva never let something like a marriage stand in her way when she wanted a man. She went after Franciscus. He became significant in her life because it marked the last time she succumbed to the “disease of Leadingman-itis.” With Franciscus, her predilection for seducing the leading man of whatever play or movie she was in came to an end.

Franciscus shared stories of his life with her, and she got to know him extremely wellas he relayed details about his Tom Sawyer-ish boyhood spent fishing, building rafts, and even hunting skunks. “What a stinking job,” she said.

He had been nicknamed “Goey” [pronounced as “Gooey”] since childhood, and he let Eva call him that, too. When he was a boy, he told her, he almost died when he fell down on a lightening rod that pierced his stomach. He even showed her the scar that remained. “When I saw that, I wanted to see more of his body—and I did, dahlink.”

He’d lost his father, an army pilot, during World War II, and had been brought up by his mother. He’d made his acting debut at an all boy prep school playing a girl.

“I don’t know how anyone could mistake him for a girl,” Eva said.

He told her that 200 actors had auditioned for the role of Youngblood Hawke before the part was given to him.

Eva was surprised to learn that Franciscus had beenJane Fonda’s first love. In 1957, he even went to Europe one summer with the Fondas, staying at their villa in Villefranche along the French Riviera.

In her memoirs, My Life So Far, Fonda claimed that the young actor gave her her first swoon. “My body swooned against him, my knees buckled, and he had to hold me to keep me from falling. When our lips parted, everything was swirling, the sea, the sky. Hemingway’s line, ‘And the earth moved,’ came tome. This is what he meant? The earth moved. Goey caused it.”

“The earth didn’t exactly move for me,” but James rang all my bells,” Eva said. “After our first night together, I would have married him if he weren’t already taken. He was everything a man should be…and gorgeous to boot. God had certainly been good to him. James was built to give infinite pleasure to a mere mortal woman like myself.”

***

Exit James Franciscus. Enter the flamboyant Hungarian aristocrat, Sepy Dobronyi, who was known as “The Hugh Hefner of Miami.”

Touring with a play in Miami, Eva met Sepy at a party. “We were enchanted with each other that first night,” she said. “It was all so romantic—Moon Over Miami…stuff like that.”

At the time she met Sepy, he’d just ended a brief fling with Tallulah Bankhead, who was appearing in Coconut Grove in a play by Tennessee Williams.

As Eva remembered Sepy, he was wearing a snakeskin vest, snakeskin pants, and snakeskin boots. “I prefer only rattlesnake skin,” he told her. “I like that particular snake because its venom brings a quick death.” He made that astonishing statement to her in his native Hungarian language.

His full name was Baron Joseph de Bicske Dobronyi. Born in Budapest, he was a sculptor, royal crown jeweler, art collector, world traveler, movie maker, pilot, wine collector, sportsman, playboy, and bon vivant. The raffish expatriate often entertained at home, wearing an ascot and a silksmoking jacket. He told Eva, “I devote my life to hedonism and beautiful women.”

The Baron was renowned for his bronze-and-gold sculptures of famous celebrities, including a controversial 42-inch tall statue of movie goddess Anita Ekberg, who had posed for him. “The Ekberg Bronze” had been featured in the August, 1956 issue of Playboy.

He radiated Continental charm, and often hung out with celebrities, even seducing them. His list of conquests was impressive, including such screen goddesses as Joan Crawford, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Brigitte Bardot, and Carmen Miranda.

He often bragged abouthis seductions. “One night after I fucked Linda Christian, she told me that her husband, Tyrone Power, would love it if I did that to him.” Eva didn’t like hearing that story about the “love of my life.”

Sepyalso claimed that he’d screwed another matinee idol, Errol Flynn, in Port Antonio, Jamaica. In Cuba, he’d been friends with Ernest Hemingway and had also supplied blonde-haired American showgirls to the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, before he was overthrown by Fidel Castro’s guerrilla army.

Sepy referred to Hugh Hefner as “my best friend,” and he was also politically well connected. In 1964, Barry Goldwater had once attended a Republican Party fundraiser at Sepy’s mansion in Coconut Grove.

During his first evening with Eva, he enthralled her with stories about his adventures with the Hungarian Air Force during World War II, telling her amazing tales of a flaming parachute jump and a death-defying post-war escape from the communists.

When Eva met Sepy, he was married to Amy Green Brown, the New York heiress, but she was nowhere to be seen. Eva accepted Sepy’sinvitation to drive her, after her evening performance back to his home in Coconut Grove.She got into the front seat of his Rolls Royce Corniche, which sported a representation of a nude female torso painted on the outside of the passenger door.

“When I came into his living room, I thought I was wandering into the home of Ernest Hemingway,” Eva later said. “Sepy had gone on safaris in Africa with Hemingway, and his walls were lined with the heads of wild beasts he’d bagged. He told me, ‘I’m known for my African adventures, my New Guinea tribal war wounds, my Swedish marriages, and my Mexican divorces.’”

She was awed by some of his trophies, including 120-pound elephant tusks, two Nepalese temple lion statues, and six Tibetan yak-wool rugs.

He took her on a tour of his fabled wine cellar. “Some of the trophies included what he called the world’s largest collection of hotel room keys,” she said. “It was a bizarre sight, but some of the wine bottles were adorned with women’s underpants.”

Later that night, he invited her upstairs to his bedroom, which was centered around a carved bed styled like the replica of a Viking ship. “Please, lie down in this bed, where so many goddesses have lain before you, including Lana Turner, who said she experienced the thrill of her life here.”

It was an invitation Eva could not resist.

“Lena Horne and Jayne Mansfield echoed Lana’s rave reviews,” Sepy said.

“You left out Marilyn Monroe,” Eva said.

“She eluded me, but I got the French love goddess, Brigitte Bardot, as compensation. “Frank Sinatra, with me, often fucked the same girl in this bed at the same time.”

Weeks later, Eva recalled her first time with Sepy. “Perhaps he exaggerated his sexual prowess, but after only one night with him, sailing away in that Viking ship, I was transported to Nirvana.”

After the run of her play, Eva had to leave Miami. Sepy later maintained that “she begged me to marry her, and when I turned her down, she attempted suicide.”

There is no record to suggest that that charge was true.

[In 1972, Sepy allowed the Mafia-backed producers of the epic porn flick, Deep Throat, to film scenes in his trophy-filled home. He seduced Linda Lovelace, the star of the movie, and was later furious at her for “extolling my physical properties in print.”

Years later, Eva recalled “the most bizarre exhibit Sepy displayed to me was a pair of Queen Elizabeth’s underpanties that were at least 40 years old…and rather stained.”

That undergarment appeared to have been authentic. It wasacquired by a friend of Sepy’s when the Queen accidentally left them on a private plane she disembarked.

Shortly after Sepy’s death of liver cancer on May 29, 2010, The Miami Herald wrote about the royal underpanties as part of its description of an estate sale of Sepy’s possessions engineered by Louis F. Cruz. The owner of the panties today is unknown.]

***

Eva’s greatest exposure to the American public came with the TV debut of Green Acres. In the wake of the success of a sister show, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres was first broadcast on CBS on September 15, 1965. The series continued until April 27, 1971.

It received solid ratings during its six-year run and exposed Eva to households across rural America whose inhabitants had never seen her perform before.

Green Acres made Eva a multi-millionaire and brought her international recognition, even though she’d been cast as a last-minute choice. The role had originally been written for blonde-haired Martha Hyer, who usually played snobby rich girl roles as she did in Some Came Running (1958) with Frank Sinatra. CBS executives were very disappointed when the deal with Hyerfell through. A total of twenty-six actresses were auditioned. Finally, in desperation, CBS settled on Eva, despite their fears that rural American TV viewers would not understand her accent.

Hyer had been one of the supporting players in the 1957 film My Man Godfrey, in which Eva also had a supporting role. When Eva learned that CBS had originally wanted Hyer to star in the series, she cattily remarked, “She is an innocuous and singularly unspectacular talent. You didn’t know I could use such big English words like that, did you, dahlink?”

In the series, Eva was cast opposite Eddie Albert, an easy-going actor with a comfortable manner, who had gotten his start in Hollywood in 1938, appearing with Ronald Reagan in Brother Rat. In Green Acres, he was cast as the constantly befuddled city-slicker-turned-farmer, Oliver Douglas. In New York, before escaping from urban life, he’d been a lawyer.

His glamorous Hungarian wife—who as the series’ theme song defined and explained, “preferred Park Avenue to the farm”—was played by Eva, cast as Lisa Douglas. Their supporting player was a pig named Arnold Ziffel.

Eva, as Lisa, a former Manhattan socialite, became known for dressing in diaphanous gowns and fabulous négligées, and for uttering such lines as “I gad allergic smalling hay.”

Before signing on, Eva cemented an agreement with the producer of the show, Paul Henning, that she would always appear in Jean Louis designer frocks, even while feeding her two favorite chickens, “Henrietta” and “Alice.” Green Acres was set in Hooterville, the same backdrop for Petticoat Junction (1963-1970).

In the most inappropriate wardrobe in the history of television, Eva drifted through chicken coops and hogpens in outfits that included marabou négligées, always overdressed, always looking ready to attend a ball at the Waldorf Astoria. She pulled off this stunt through 120 episodes, and the public loved her charm and style. “My character was inane, but popular,” she said. “I was more Marie Antoinette than Lisa Douglas, but who’s counting?”

“I was supposed to be a complete idiot in some scenes,” Eva recalled.

One critic asserted: “Lisa’s skewed world view and domestic ignorance provides fertile ground for recurring gags. Much of her early life was lived in Hungary, where she grew up as a diva of her time, which explains her lack of education and her ignorance of normal household chores. Her waterless coffee oozes from the pot in a thick, tarlike sludge; her hotcakes are inedible, so tough that Oliver makes head gaskets for his truck and tractor using her recipe. Her sandwiches included such epicurean delights as liverwurst and jelly.”

“I was a dazzler in my silk, organza, and chiffon, along with my ostrich feathers, sequins, and rhinestones,” Eva said. “On some episodes, I appeared in seven different outfits.”

“Every morning, I had to get up before dawn and go to the studio in a chauffeur-driven limousine to face my hairdresser. My hair was teased and tormented. My character of Lisa preferred a skyscraper hairdo on top of my head.”

“I virtually had to give up my life,” she claimed, “to maintain this 4:30am to 9pm regime five days a week. No more partying for me. I almost never went out. During part of the run, I flew to New York to be with Richard Brown, to whom I was married at the time. He was a stockbroker on Wall Street. Things eased up a bit when I got him a job with CBS in Hollywood.”

Albert defined the series as “all slapstick, silliness, and schtick,” and Eva agreed.

“Eddie was a dear man,” she said, “and very kind to me. He was a tireless conservationist, crusading for healthy food, endangered species, and against polluting the bay at Santa Monica.”

“In later years, there were some women who have come forth alleging that he’d raped them,” she said, “but I saw no sign of such violence during all my years of working with him.”

“Eddie jogged every day, and was proud of the way he kept his body trimmed,” Eva said. “One morning on the set, after jogging, “He whipped off his robe to show off his physique. He was clad in a pair of jockey shorts that were almost transparent. He might as well have been nude.”

“Eat your heart out,” he said.

“That was as close as we ever came to having sex,” Eva said.

During the first season of Green Acres, Eva was voted the most popular woman actress on television. “I was written up as an overnight sensation, but it took me twenty-five years to really make it at a time when I was dangerously close to forty. The Hollywood Hills are filled with talented actresses who were never offered a job after they turned thirty-five.”

During its first four seasons, Green Acres, along with The Beverly Hillbillies, remained among the top twenty TV shows. The series was canceled by CBS, however, in 1971 during that network’s famous “rural purge,” inaugurated as a result of its hopes of attracting a younger viewer demographic. Most viewers of Green Acres at the time were at least 40 years old.

After that, although one final husband lay in Eva’s future, Green Acres would represent the highlight of her show-biz career. “With a little gig here and there, and some voiceovers, it would mainly be Here’s Lucy, The Flintstones, and frequent appearances on The Merv Griffin Show for me,” Eva said. “Oh, yes, lest I forget, there were several appearances as a panelist on Match Game between 1973 and 1982. And of all things, Tales of the Klondike in that 1981 miniseries. But in other words, after Green Acres, Eva Gabor, as an actress, was on the road to nowhere.”

***

One of Eva’s worst episodes with a male movie star was so traumatic she revealed it to no one outside her family, with the single exception of celebrity seer, John Cohan, author of the book, Catch a Falling Star: The Untold Story of Celebrity Secrets, published in 2008. Over the years, many of his celebrity clients, including Elizabeth Taylor, told their most intimate secrets to this sensitive, loyal, and deeply intuitive man.

Cohan has been a celebrity psychic to the stars for more than three decades, offering insights to such stars as Natalie Wood, Merv Griffin, River Phoenix, and Elvis Presley. Nicole Brown Simpson was a friend of his, as was “the love of my life,”Sandra Dee, former wife of Bobby Darin. Eva Gabor numbered among his friends and clients.

At one point, she shared a dark secret with him: One which involved her brutalization and rape by actor Lawrence Tierney.

That fateful evening began at the recently renamed Cocoanut Grove Night club at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Eva had wanted to attend Sammy Davis, Jr.’s appearance at the Club. Because he was one of the investors, the club had been temporarily renamed, at his instigation, with the trendier label, “The Now Grove.” Previously, Eva’s close friend, Merv Griffin, had appeared for several singing engagements at the club.

Eva knew who Tierney was, but was not that familiar with his career, having seen him in only one movie, Dillinger, the 1945 gangster film, a tale of “blood, bullets, and blondes.”

She was aware of his reputation as one of the “Bad Boys” of Hollywood, but viewed him as rather harmless, except for his heavy drinking.

Griffin was supposed to have been Eva’s escort for the evening, but at the last minute, he had taken ill. Through some change of plans, it was arranged for the actor Lawrence Tierney (brother of movie star Scott Brady) to escort her instead.

Eva knew that Tierney had been involved in a number of drunken brawls, which had landed him in jail on occasion. In just seven years between 1944 and 1951, Tierney was arrested twelve times for drunk and disorderly conduct, often as part of violently public fistfights.

The Brooklyn-born actor was Eva’s same age, and had been a star athlete in school, and for a brief period, had modeled tight-fitting jockey shorts for Sears Roebuck & Co.

He’d lost that job when the editor of the Sears catalogue decided that Tierney looked obscene in his panties. “We don’t want to give our less endowed customers a case of penis envy,” the Sears executive had said.

When they were introduced, Eva found Tierney “rather handsome and very masculine. He had quite a lot of sex appeal. Over drinks, we bonded in talks about our stalled film careers.”

“I resent having to play all those bold, bad killers,” he told her. “I never thought of myself as that kind of guy. I’m really a nice guy who wouldn’t do such rotten things.”

She later claimed that she felt “Lawrence was speaking from the heart.”

He admitted that in the 1960s, movie roles had been scarce. When he returned to New York, hoping to find stage work, he’d been forced to take odd jobs, working as a bartender, construction worker, and even driving tourists in a horse-drawn carriage through Central Park.

Before Eva confided details of her night of terror to Cohan, with the clear understanding that “I’ve never been a nun.” She insisted that she enjoyed sex when it was within the context of meaningful encounters with men she liked. “Touches of interpersonal warmth and humor from a man are requisites to whether I will consent or refuse a suitor,” she claimed.

“My sexual experience with Tierney was horrible, brutalizing, and terrifying,” she told Cohan.

At the night club when not listening to Davis sing, “Tierney manipulated me with his tales of woe. At the end of the act, he feigned illness, shutting his eyes. He said he needed to lie down.”

She admitted escorting him to the bedroom that had been arranged for her use, thanks to the patronage she enjoyed through Griffin and his long-standing relationship with the Ambassador Hotel.

Once inside the room, Tierney recovered quickly from his so-called illness and changed into Mr. Hyde, Eva charged. “Like a lady, I refused his offer of sex, because at this point, he turned me off. I first tried to tease him when he felt my breasts. I pushed him away. ‘Don’t be a naughty boy,’ I told him. But he was very persistent. When he saw that I was going to resist his advances, he slapped me real hard. He shoved me back onto the sofa and ripped off my gown.”

“He was very strong, and had once done some boxing, so he quickly overpowered me. I was afraid he’d injure me or harm my face, unless I gave in to him. He told me, ‘You’ll love it, bitch. All the sluts in Hollywood go for my big dick.’”

“He forced himself into me, a brutal penetration. It seemed like he was deliberately causing me pain as a means of showing off what a big man he was.”

“It seemed like an hour, but was probably much shorter,” she recalled. “I wanted it over with. I was afraid he might harm me.”

“Finally, he pulled out of me, but was no less threatening,” she said. He told me ‘If you tell anyone about this, I’ll come after you.’ I felt terrorized by him.”

“I suffered from that attack for years,” she said. “For a long time, I felt a fear of intimacy until I remarried. I had once been carefree, but he traumatized to me the danger of living the life of a celebrity.”

“The movie tough guy could really be tough beating up on a woman,” Eva said, bitterly.

A few years later, after her rape from Tierney, she read that he’d been arrested and questioned by the New York City police in connection with the death of his 24-year-old girlfriend. She’d plunged from the window of her apartment to her death below. Tierney was in the apartment at the time. He claimed she’d jumped in a suicidal leap.

Eva told Merv Griffin, “I have my doubts. I think he pushed her to her death. It could have happened to me had I not given in to him.”

***

In 1972 Frank Sinatra began to pursue Eva Gabor.

Before TV talk show host Merv Griffin became more intimately linked with Eva, he often referred to Zsa Zsa and Eva as “my favorite and most amusing guests on TV,” the “Gorgeous Gabors” and “The World’s Greatest Sister Act.”

Nine years after the assassination of JFK, in advance of the presidential elections of 1972, Frank was no longer supporting the Democrats, and had switched his allegiance to Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. The world learned that Frank was dating Eva when he showed up with her at several Republican Party events at the invitation of Agnew, who had become his close friend.

Because of her unpleasant experiences with Frank in the late 1950s, Zsa Zsa warned Eva about Frank.

“My dah-ling Zsa Zsa, all men are dangerous,” Eva responded. “I would think a woman of your age had learned that by now.”

On their fourth date, Frank decided it was time to seduce Eva, and she seemed most willing. But disaster occurred later that evening. Eva had had lovers before, including Tyrone Power and Glenn Ford, but none with a penis the size of Frank’s.

Although known as a gentle lover, he apparently got carried away that night and plunged too deeply into Eva. As she later told her mother, Jolie Gabor, “He split me in two. Something ripped inside me.” She had to be rushed to the hospital that night in an ambulance, as she was bleeding.

One would think that was enough to turn her off Frank. But in three weeks they were back together again. But this time they had an agreement. He was not to plunge all the way in.

Instead of being ashamed for harming Eva, Frank seemed elated. He bragged about it to his fellow Rat Packers. He wanted the story to get back to Rubi. “Zsa Zsa could easily take Rubi, but I sent Eva to the hospital,” Frank bragged.

In her memoirs, Eva’s long-time companion, Camyl Sosa Belanger, wrote about Eva and Frank in her biography, Eva Gabor: An Amazing Woman, published in 2005.

Belanger claimed that “Eva and Frank were in love, wild about each other, and they were eager to be married.” Their hot romance lasted for six months until it cooled down. Eva was between husbands at the time, and Frank was on a rebound after Mia Farrow.

Eva had divorced her fourth husband, stockbroker Richard Brown, and had not yet married her fifth spouse, Frank Jameson, Vice President of North American Rockwell.

Eva later said that her romance with Frank was “the most passionate I ever had, far more than all my husbands combined. We were both on the rebound, but the right age, and each in the peak of our prime.”

“Since we were on the rebound, our only healer was sex,” she claimed. “We could not wait to go into the bedroom. We made love on the carpet of my living room, in the shower, on the kitchen table, and everywhere else, even out by the pool.”

“One night he was in my kitchen making spaghetti, but couldn’t find the oregano,” Eva said. “Since he couldn’t make the sauce without the oregano, we did the next best thing and ended up making out on the kitchen floor.”

“They were very hot for each other,” Belanger claimed in her memoirs. “Eva was that hot sexy type, and so ardent that she did not hide it and whoever escaped Eva it was their loss.”

English, of course,was Belanger’s second language.

Frank later told Peter Lawford, “I had to go slow and break Eva in, but now that she’s used to my size, she can’t get enough of me. After I finish with her, I will have ruined her for all other men.”

“My passion for Frank Sinatra was just too intense,” confessed Eva Gabor to her longtime companion, Merv Griffin.

“It was just destined to burn itself out. He was at that age when men start looking around for a very young girl—in this case, Mia Farrow. We glamour queens of yesterday had lost some of our glow. He really enjoyed me in the beginning, perhaps too much so. But I watched his roving eye night after night—in restaurants, clubs, and bars. Slowly, ever so slowly, he began to lose interest in me.”

“I tried to hold on, but I could see it was a hopeless cause. If he had married me, I would have been very European about his other women. As long as the diamonds and the money kept rolling in, I could forgive an occasional dalliance from a husband.”

***

The date was September 21, 1973, and the organist played “More Than the Greatest Love.” Eva married her fifth and final husband in a double ring ceremony. Zsa Zsa caught the bouquet, although Eva had aimed it at Tina Sinatra.

Her husband was Frank Gard Jameson, vice president of the manufacturing and electronics giant, North American Rockwell.

[After a series of mergers, spinoffs, and acquisitions, it later changed its name to Rockwell International.]

Jameson lived in Beverly Hills. Jolie, in her memoirs, said “He’s not tremendously rich, but he’s among the industry barons of the world. He is tall and very good-looking.”

Cindy Adams, the columnist for The New York Post, facetiously suggested that “Eva was marrying her 44th husband.”

At the party to announce her engagement, Eva appeared in a gown that Adams described as “very décolleté. Between the flesh hills of Eva was a cross larger than St. Peter’s Basilica. The Gabors were Jewish, so I asked Jolie, ‘What’s with the goddamn cross?’ Jolie said, ‘Eva’s about-to-be husband hates the Jews, so when you write my memoirs you make us Catholic.’”

In Ms. Adams summation, “The Gabors have always lived with no reality. There was never any truth to anything.”

After her honeymoon, Eva went to live in a baronial manse in Beverly Hills, filled with costly antiques, silk upholsteries, and satin curtains. Jameson’s hobby involved raising orchids in a mammoth greenhouse.

He noted that most of Eva’s day was spent beautifying herself, keeping her body in shape on his tennis courts, in his Olympic-size swimming pool, and in his private gym. “She had developed keeping young to a science,” he once remarked to her friend, MervGriffin. At Eva’s request, the gym was equipped with huge mirrors on all its walls.

When Griffin invaded her home with his TV cameras for his talk show, she spoke about how to remain “forever young.”

“It’s sheer torture,” Eva said. “I have to be up with the chickens everyday and go to work on my body. First comes the stretching, then the weights. I hate it, but I suffer through it. I’ve been training to be an actress since I was four. At age five, I began to take beauty sleeps.”

She went on: “I’m acting when I’m a hostess, acting when I run my wig business. I was born to act, and life itself is the greatest role. Acting to me isn’t just a TV series, a talk show, or a play. I’m a workaholic.”

She concluded that she had “come a long way since I arrived in Hollywood. One time, I had only thirty cents in my purse and a husband to support.”

“Like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, I vowed I’d never go hungry again,” she claimed.

By the time of her final marriage, Eva knew most of the major stars in Hollywood, including Cary Grant, James Stewart, and David Niven.

Suddenly, as Mrs. Jameson, she was entertaining a whole new set of friends from the world of politics. They included Richard and Pat Nixon, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, and Spiro Agnew, who once made a pass at Eva, or so she later claimed.

It wasn’t clear whether she was a Republican, because she once hosted a “Democrats for Nixon” bash that was hailed as one of the legendary gatherings in Hollywood. For the occasion, Eva rented the Malibu mansion belonging to the former Mrs. Paul Getty.

When Reagan swept into the White House in 1980, Eva continued to entertain the President and his First Lady at parties in Beverly Hills, New York, Palm Beach, and Washington, D.C.

“I had two careers,” she told Griffin, “each a 24-hour-a-day job. One was just being Eva Gabor, the other was being the wife of Frank Jameson and entertaining the movers and shakers of the world.”

“Just the other day, I got a call from Frank, warning me that he had invited 250 guests over for Sunday buffet. ‘Of course, dahlink,’I told him. ‘That was vonderful.’”

“In addition to everything else, there’s my wig-and-dress business, which is another 24-hour-a-day job. As a sideline, hawking my lightweight wigs for around $25 each, I take in half a million dollars a year…at least.”

As Jolie put it, “My daughter is very very rich. All my daughters are rich!”

[Perhaps Eva didn’t have time for marriage after all. It all became too much. She and Jameson divorced in 1983. She would never marry again.]

***

It was 1988, a balmy night in Southern California. All heads turned as Merv Griffin made his way across the floor of L’Escoffier—“the most exclusive restaurant in the world”—on the eighth floor of the Beverly Hilton. And well they should. He not only owned the hotel but was the chief honcho of a multi-billion empire. The maître d’ rushed toward him to usher him to the best table in the house. In fact, legend had it that Merv had bought the hotel to make sure he always had his favorite table.

Leading the march across the elegant room, with its panoramic views, was the Hungarian beauty, Eva Gabor, who’d become his permanent “arm candy.” He’d never seen her look more stunning in her taupe gown and what she called “my Cinderella slippers.” Around her swan-like neck was a diamond-and-ruby necklace he’d presented to her only that afternoon. He told her that it had once belonged to Marie Antoinette, knowing that she didn’t really believe that but would loudly advertise it as fact.

She loved the necklace but had really wanted an engagement ring to solidify their relationship. He knew, however, that wasn’t going to happen. There would be no other Mrs. Merv Griffin. It had taken him three years to untangle himself from his one and only marriage. He had no interest—certainly no sexual interest—in entering into another permanent bond with a woman.

Earlier in the evening he and Eva had stopped off at the hotel bar, making the rounds and encountering Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, and Nancy Sinatra. She told him that she’d come just to sample the egg rolls at Trader Vic’s that night.

He also ran into a deeply suntanned George Hamilton, who said, “Look around you. There are at least five or six big-time movie stars here with their off-the-record girlfriends. But it’s so God damn dark you can’t make out anybody. Thank God there are two entrances. If a wife walks in one, the waiter can hustle the mistress out the other door.”

In spite of the sad news he’d learned earlier in the day, Merv had a light step as he made his way through the restaurant greeting guests. He’d long ago learned to disguise his true feelings. He was still “every mother’s favorite son-in-law,” although getting a bit long in the tooth for that appellation.

He always felt more of a man when he had a beautiful woman like Eva on his arm, even though she was an expensive adornment. Hollywood was nothing if not public images. It was a city where truth didn’t matter. Only the method you chose to deceive the public. All his life he’d believed in playing by the rules, not changing the game.

He didn’t want to die like his best male friend, Liberace, did in disgrace, succumbing to AIDS and having his reputation destroyed. If Merv could control events, there would be no notoriety to surround his death the way it had in the case of Rock Hudson, his former lover in the 1950s.

Unlike Rock and Liberace, Merv knew how to protect himself. No virus would get to him. As he candidly told Eva, his most trusted confidante, who knew all his secrets, “I plan to die of natural causes. Not some disease I picked up from an overnight trick.”

Seated at table in L’Escoffier, and looking like a Hungarian princess, Eva didn’t have to request her drink of the evening. Her champagne was already chilling. “Could you imagine a Gabor drinking anything else?” she had once asked him. Indeed he couldn’t.

But there was one big change on her menu for the night. She’d abandoned her usual caviar for a treat the chef had secured for her. The best salami from Budapest had been flown in.

Eva would give up anything for salami. “It is a delicacy created by the Gods,” she told him.

To take the “curse” off such a lowly cold cut, Merv had ordered the most beautiful orchids placed on their table. Eva said that when she consumed salami, she always wanted to be wearing diamonds and surrounded by orchids. In fact, she’d entitled her tell-nothing memoir, Orchids & Salami.

Tonight in familiar, swanky surroundings, Eva was in what she called “my gay mood”—she still used the word in its old-fashioned sense. Skilled as a courtesan and arguably trained at the role since birth, she knew that her job was to entertain Merv.

On this particular night, Griffin did not seem amused by either her wit or her charm.

“What is it, dahlink?” she asked, sympathetically taking his hand. “You look so sad, so blue.” Usually he was jolly and fun, filled with amusing anecdotes. After all, he’d interviewed or else had known practically every celebrity in the world from Marilyn Monroe to Marlon Brando. “It’s Nancy,” he said, looking depressed and dejected.

During his good moods or bad ones, he could always count on Eva to listen patiently to his troubles. Like a good courtesan, she was always reassuring. “You succeeded beyond your wildest fantasies,” she told him. “You became not only rich, but the wealthiest man on the planet.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he cautioned her.

“Rich and adorable, an irresistible combination,” she said. “Zsa Zsa and I have found that rich men are all bastards. You’re a marvelous exception to that rule. Who on Earth doesn’t adore MervGriffin?”

Eva knew that Nancy Davis Reagan was his best friend. He’d canceled many an engagement with Eva to escort Nancy to some function. Once when Eva had an argument with him, she accused him of plotting to marry Nancy after her husband, Ronald Reagan, died. “That would be the ultimate triumph for you,” she charged. “Marrying the woman who presides over the Free World.You could get a lot of publicity marrying the First Lady. Aristotle Onassis did. Did you know he proposed marriage to me before he asked for the hand of Ms. Jacqueline Kennedy?”

“In your dreams,” he said.

Eva had stormed out of his living room, but the next morning they made up at breakfast. It seemed that every night they had some silly argument, yet in most ways, she, not Nancy, was his best friend. He privately told his confidants that “Nancy is best friend, Eva first mistress.” He always laughed at his own joke, and so did his staff, although no one seriously believed that he’d ever gone to bed with Eva.

“You still haven’t told me why you’re so sad,” she said.

“You’ve got to keep this a secret,” he said. “Nancy will break it to the world when the time comes. No one must know.”

“What is it?” she asked, genuinely interested.

“Nancy called me this afternoon from Washington with the bad news. She’s just found out: Even Ronnie doesn’t know yet. But the President has been diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s disease.”

“Oh, my God!” she gasped. “No one must find this out. The Stock Market would crash. There could be calls for his impeachment.”

“That’s why you’re going to keep this news under that pretty blonde wig of yours.”

After fifteen minutes of trying to console Merv, she said, “You need some serious distraction. You need some fun and games, and I know you’ve got something planned later in the evening to take your mind off the Reagans. Your mother knows about such things.”

“You’re so understanding,” he said.

“But you’re such a cad. You could have planned some fun and games for little ol’ Eva. Perhaps that handsome lifeguard you hired two weeks ago. Don’t tell me you’ve not had him already.”

“You know too much,” he said. “Fortunately, you’re not in a habit of calling the National Enquirer.” After dinner, Mervostentatiously escorted Eva to her suite. Passers-by in the hall saw him as he disappeared inside with her, an indiscretion he wanted them to publicize. But he was going only for a nightcap.

She poured him a drink and gave him a feather-light kiss on the mouth before heading into her boudoir and dressing room to begin her nightly beauty treatments designed to keep her, in her own words, “forever young.”

***

Griffin had met Eva when both of them had been cast in a TV show entitled The Wonderful World of Toys.

Before this meeting with her in the early 1960s, he’d seen her hilarious appearances with Jack Paar on his talk show. At the time Merv met her, she was deep into her fourth marriage to Richard Brown.

Years later, Merv recalled his first luncheon with Eva. He found her witty, charming, and beautiful. As a gay man, he was not sexually attracted to her, but found her desirable as an amusing companion. As he recalled, “Eva and I parted as potential friends. She gave me a light kiss on the lips.

“Someday, when we’re both older,” she predicted, “we’ll be friends. We Hungarians are like gypsies. We know of such things. But, right now, both of us have too much living to do.”

He was amused at their keen ability to deliver one-line zingers. Zsa Zsa was the best at fast quips.

On his show, Eva sometimes gave beauty tips, especially if it concerned the wigs she was promoting. “A girl likes to look her best, even if she cheats a bit, or especially if she cheats a bit. All women have to deceive the world, especially about their age.”

Sometimes, Zsa Zsa became angry at Eva’s on-air remarks, as when she said, “I was the first actress in the family, and I am still the only actress in the family. I shouldn’t be saying that. It just slipped out.”

Merv was often asked if Eva was like the character she played on Green Acres.

“She was a smart business woman, but sometimes she could be just like her character,” he said. “I remember once when I invited Eddie Albert and her to stay at my ranch. That morning Eva came down the stairs in a feather boa. Eddie is a big animal rights guy, and he was outraged. ‘Eva, don’t you know where those feathers come from?’ he yelled at her. She screwed up her face, very quizzical, and said, ‘Pillows?’”

One of Merv’s fondest memories of Eva as a guest on his talk show involved the episode when she appeared with Eddie Albert, her Green Acres co-star, alongside the then-most-powerful TV critic in the industry, Cleveland Amory. “He’d panned their show,” Merv said, “And on-camera, both Eddie and Eva attacked him. He might have been the nation’s number one television critic, but he left that show really scathed. I learned from that broadcast that you never wanted to get on the bad side of Eva.”

Merv once claimed that “Eva was born to appear on TV talk shows.” In 1951 she’d been a guest of Steve Allen on his first talk show for CBS. Allen, in fact, did even more than Merv to introduce the Gabor Sisters to American television. “The glamour and humor of the Gabors came into family living rooms across the nation,” Merv said, “And Zsa Zsa was even better at the double entendre than Eva.”

Sometimes, especially when Merv had been drinking, he privately asked Eva outrageous questions. “Is it true that when you worked on Artists and Models with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, you slept with both men? And is it true that Jerry has three inches, Martin ten?”

“No woman should ever reveal a man’s most closely guarded secret, even to his enemies,” Eva diplomatically responded.

She would say things whimsical, gracious, and charming, such as “All any girl needs at any time in history is simple velvet and diamonds.” On the other hand, Zsa Zsa would utter something funnier. “I wasn’t born, dahlink, I was ordered from room service.”

After watching so many appearances by both Eva and Zsa Zsa “on the couch” on TV talk shows, author Anthony Turtu said, “Eva’s turns were always glamorous, witty, and serene—unlike appearances by her unpredictable sister, who could always be counted on for her brand of fireworks.”

Merv called Zsa Zsa, Magda, and Eva “Vonderful Vimmen. They conquered kings, princes, playboys, movie stars, and millionaires, broke hearts while amassing fortunes, and became adored by the world at the same time. Of course, all women held tightly on to their husbands when one of them walked into the room. They were the Budapest Bombshells.”

***

On an impulse in 1979, Eva called Merv and asked him to join her vacation party on their upcoming tour of Asia. In dire need of a long holiday, he told Eva, “What the hell? You only live once.” So he arranged for several shows to be pre-taped in advance of his time away, and agreed to join Eva and her then-husband, Frank Jameson, on the tour, with the understanding that it would include stops in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

They were guests of William Rockwell, Jr., the CEO of Rockwell International (a manufacturer of advanced weapons systems), and his wife, Constance. For Rockwell, this was a major showcasing of the company’s products. For others in the party, including Eva and Merv, it was just a bit of vacation fun. Rockwell and his entourage were flown aboard a converted 727. Preoccupied with the serious business of PR, corporate politics, and weapons sales, Jameson “tolerated” Merv. Eva, however, adored him. It was the first time she’d ever spent a great deal of time with him.

“You really know how to enliven a boring party,” Eva told him, looking directly at her husband as she said that.

Rockwell’s converted 727 had scheduled a stop on Midway Island, famed for a role during World War II as a battleground between the naval forces of the U.S. and the Empire of Japan.

When Merv landed there, he discovered that several hundred Navy personnel and their wives followed a daily routine which involved watching The Merv Griffin Show on a communal wide screen TV. During the broadcast, business in the Midways virtually came to a halt. “It was an important ritual for them in those remote islands,” he wrote in his second autobiography. “It was one of the ways they maintained a connection to home.”

When Merv, Eva, and members of the Rockwell contingent walked in, with fanfare, at the end of one of the broadcasts, it caused pandemonium.

After Eva’s divorce from Jameson in 1983, she turned to Merv for comfort. “Despite the many husbands she’d had, Eva was crushed by the final divorce,” he claimed. “In her way, she really loved Frank and hated losing him.”

He invited her to visit his ranch in the cool mountain air over the Carmel Valley. “She came to heal herself, and we grew close,” he said. He generously offered her long-term use of one of the half dozen guest cottages on site. “Stay here forever,” he told her. “You’re most welcome.”

Like the protagonist in the play, The Man Who Came to Dinner, Eva moved in, interpreting as a literal fact his invitation to stay forever. It cemented the long-enduring friendship that would last almost until her death.

He recalled that at the ranch she’d get up early every day. “I’d get up an hour later and walk down to the stable. By then, every horse in the pasture would have red lipstick on it.”

In the next few months, Eva became his “arm candy,” going on trips with him and appearing with him at premieres and public events.

“Eva had a love for Merv, but at his age and at his weight it was not sexual,” Jolie confided to friends. “Every day of my life I tried to get Merv to marry my daughter. I knew if she married Merv, she would be secure for life and never worry about having to sell wigs or appear in some dumb TV sitcom.”

As Merv revealed in his second autobiography, he and Eva often passed the day together lying on sofas in his living room. “I’d get on one couch, Eva on the other,” he said. “We’d lie there for days at a time—laughing, sleeping, laughing, watching television, laughing, eating, and laughing some more. We almost never argued except when we watched Wheel of Fortune. She’d get furious because I knew all the answers in advance.”

Zsa Zsa knew the full details of the “arrangement” between Merv and Eva, but in her second autobiography, One Lifetime Is Not Enough, she chose to be discreet. “She is happily involved with Merv Griffin and has a marvelous life with him,” Zsa Zsa claimed. “I like Merv a great deal, did hundreds of shows with him, and am glad that Eva is now so happy.”

Behind the scenes, Zsa Zsa, like her mother, was constantly urging Merv to marry Eva and “make an honest woman out of her. There are many marriages without sex. It’s an old Hungarian custom. Men marry, have children with their wives, and then stash them away so they can spend the rest of their lives with various mistresses.”

Merv got a taste of Zsa Zsa’s famous temper in 1989 after she’d been thrown in jail for slapping the policeman who stopped her for a traffic violation. “All my friends came to support me in court,” Zsa Zsa told Merv. “But not you—and not Eva.”She took particular exception to a quote by Eva that appeared in the press. The item quoted Eva as saying, “Mrs. Kirk Douglas and I just had lunch, and we agreed that if Zsa Zsa hadn’t talked so much, this stupid thing would never have happened.”

Before slamming down the phone, Zsa Zsa told Merv, “I’ll never speak to the bitch ever again.”

But in a few days, he succeeded as peacemaker, bringing the two warring sisters together for dinner. Over wine, with tears, both Eva and Zsa Zsa poured out their “undying love” for each other.

***

In 1991, Eva stood by Merv during what she called his darkest hour. “If ever he needed a friend, it was during that awful year.”

Double jeopardy came for Mervat the age of sixty-five, when he was slapped with both a palimony suit and a sexual harassment suit. Filing the complaint was a handsome thirty-seven-year-old former employee, Brent Plott. He had previously been Merv’s “secretary/driver/horse trainer/and bodyguard.” In his complaint, Plott stated that in addition to the duties cited, he’d been Merv’s lover.

He also charged that he’d been Merv’s business consultant and was entitled to a share of the Griffin fortune. As an example, Plott maintained that he’d played a big role in the creation of Wheel of Fortune,and he also took credit for personally selecting Vanna White as hostess of the show.

The lawsuit sought in excess of $200 million, according to Miami attorney Ellis Rubin, who filed the claim with Los Angeles attorney Stephen Kolodny.

Plott had left Merv’s employment in 1985, moving to Florida. It is not known why he waited until 1991 to file the lawsuit.

Rolling Stone, in a piece written about Merv, analyzed the issues associated with Plott’s palimony suit and the subsequent sexual harassment suit.

“Merv does not refute the underlying implication in both cases: that he is gay,” the magazine claimed. “Nor does he admit to it. Instead, he mentions the high-profile relationship that he began with actress Eva Gabor at the time of his legal troubles. They were photographed everywhere: Atlantic City, La Quinta, Hollywood premieres. Merv says that they discussed marriage, and he parries any direct questions about his sexual orientation. ‘You’re asking an eighty-year-old man about his sexuality right now!’ he cries. ‘Get a life!’”

Plott had alleged that Merv’s relationship with Eva was a cover-up. “Every picture she’s in, I am there too,” he claimed. “She went where Merv and I went. The editors crop me out.”

The most insiderish look into Eva’s relationship with both Merv and Brent was published by Camyl Sosa Belanger in her memoir, Eva Gabor: An Amazing Woman, in 2005. Camyl had worked as a personal assistant to Eva for some twenty years.

In February of 1991, Belangerrecalled that she had been at Eva’s home when Mervand Eva returned together from a trip to Palm Springs.

“Dahlink, can I tell Camyl?” Eva asked.

“Sure, why not?” Merv said.

“Merv and I are getting married,” Eva told her friend.

Belanger had been urging the marriage for years—“a better catch, forget it.” Her book makes it obvious that she knew that it would be a marriage based on financial security, not romance. The next day Eva told her that Merv was insisting on a prenuptial agreement.

After Plott filed his palimony suit in April of 1991, Belangersaid “All hell broke loose.” Merv called Eva, because he wanted her to know what had happened before it appeared in the news media.

After the call from Merv, Eva turned to Belanger. “Remember Brent?”

Belanger said that, of course, she remembered him. “Is he back?”

At one point Eva admitted that “the kid deserves all the money he’s asking for. It is no peanuts. He wants millions. No wonder Merv asked me to marry him. He knew all along that Brent was planning to sue him.”

Belanger later asserted that news of the lawsuit did not come as a shock to Eva because she knew about “the close relationship” between the two men right from the beginning.

Eva called her friends, including ZsaZsa, and Eva’s voice was filled with remorse. “We’ve known for decades that Merv was a homosexual. Now the public will know. The whole world will know. The secret is finally out in the open.”

Belanger wrote about Eva’s tolerance, about her acceptance of Merv’s homosexuality, and specifically about his love affair with Plott. “Eva was at the time really annoyed and humiliated because, after all, Eva loved and respected her friend, and seeing him like a wounded soul was no joy to Eva. Eva knew it all along, and she lived with them, and they went out to places together and to long trips on the road and to Europe, so Eva was used to that kind of life and she did not care.”

Belanger wrote that Eva enjoyed “traveling like a queen and with expenses paid.”

Many of Eva’s friends later admitted that “she’s one of the most gay-friendly women in Hollywood, where the competition for that title is keen.”

Belanger herself was saddened by the lawsuit, because she too had seen the relationship between the two men first hand. “How can anyone destroy many years of happiness and drag each other in the mud when there was so much love during the young fresh years when one had eyes only for each other? From what I had seen during the fresh years, it was love and equality and eating from the same table.”

In the days and weeks ahead, Eva was hounded by the national media for an articulation of her reaction to the lawsuit. The Star, The Globe, and TheNational Enquirer were virtually harassing her day and night. Belanger claimed that both Plott and Merv had treated Eva with “love and kindness like a little sister, especially after her last divorce.” It was obvious to Eva’s friends that her loyalties were tested. In the end, of course, she sided with Merv.

Putting up a brave public front, Eva told the press, “I’ve been with Merv for nine years, and I can tell you, this is ridiculous.” Privately to her friends, Eva had maintained all along that Merv was gay and that her relationship with him was platonic.

In an outrageous statement on The Joan Rivers Show, Zsa Zsa suggested that it was Eva who should be suing for palimony. “After all, she lived with Merv for nine years.”

In November of 1991, Plott’s case against Merv came before Judge Diane Wayne of the Los Angeles Superior Court. She dismissed it “with prejudice,” meaning that the case could not be refiled. The court also fined Plott two thousand dollars for bringing the case against Merv. A spokesman for Merv claimed, “This was a totally baseless suit from a guy trying to make a quick buck.”

Many observers disagreed with that opinion, thinking the case “had a lot of legs.” Others were surprised at the quick dismissal.

When news reached Eva that the lawsuit against Merv had been dismissed, Belanger asked Eva about the status of Merv’s marriage proposal.

Eva’s answer was somewhat enigmatic. “Come on, dahlink, don’t play dumb. It is out in the air and that is all—and there is nothing to worry now.”

***

In the spring of 1998, Merv granted an interview to Matt Tyrnauer of Vanity Fair. During their time together, Merv discussed Eva, who had died three years before. “Those years had great ups and downs,” he said. “We really loved each other a lot, but sometimes we would leave each other and go to different people. She would go to someone else, and I would go to—say, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. We had broken up just before her death, but when we were together we traveled everywhere: Morocco, all the islands.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Herb Caen of The San Francisco Chronicle, once said, “If Merv and Eva ever stopped laughing, they’d get married.”

“Now everyone says, ‘God, we really miss the two of you,’” Merv said. “We were like another version of Lucy and Desi.”

He refused to tell Tyrnauer the reason he split from Eva, although he did confess that they’d planned to be married, with Nancy Reagan serving as the matron of honor. “There was a pre-marital agreement,” he said. “But we could never agree which house we’d live in, and I couldn’t agree which of her staff she would bring with her and that really drove us apart. It’s awful,because there is so much more I can’t tell. It was a monstrous problem and it wasn’t mine—but I will never drag Eva’s name through the mud.”

The “monstrous” problem that he referred to was Eva’s demand that he settle fifty million dollars on her for all the years she’d been his companion. If he didn’t come across with the money, Eva was threatening to file a palimony suit against him, like his former companion Brent Plott had done.

After learning of her intentions, he could not forgive her, and ordered her from La Quinta and all of his other properties. When she’d returned to her own home and recovered from her immediate anger, Eva told her friends, “I don’t know what got into me. My Hungarian temper, I suppose. I would never have sued Merv, but he should have made some financial settlement on me.”

The unresolved marriage—or money—issues between them bubbled over “when he fell madly in love with a young hustler and wanted to spend all his evenings with the handsome little stud—and no more evenings with me,” Eva said.

In June of 1995, after her split from Merv, Eva journeyed to Baja, Mexico, where she had a home. Bitterly disappointed over the failure of her relationship, she claimed she was in desperate need of a vacation.

On June 2, she “ate a bad piece of fruit” in her words and contracted viral pneumonia. As her condition weakened, she refused to seek help from Mexican doctors, having no faith in them. In her disoriented state, she collapsed on a staircase in her house, falling about ten steps to her foyer. Her hip was broken.

Eva’s housekeeper placed a call to Merv, who claimed he was “devastated” to hear of Eva’s injury. He immediately called for a private jet to transport Eva from Baja to the Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

When Eva was admitted there on June 21, doctors discovered fluid in her lungs and a blood clot. She was also running a dangerous fever. Put on a respirator, she was given the injectableanticoagulant drug Heparin for the clotting and antibiotics for the pneumonia.

Experts have speculated that Eva may not have died of viral pneumonia, but of pneumococcal pneumonia, a horrible bug that can kill within twenty-four hours.

Under heavy medication and with her condition worsening by the hour, she slipped into a coma. Death came at 10:05 on Tuesday, July 4, 1995. Presumably, Eva was seventy-six years old, although some have disputed that.

The increasingly senile Jolie wasn’t immediately informed of her daughter’s death, but ZsaZsaand Magda, her older sisters, attended a 7pm memorial service at the Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills. Eva had been cremated.

Paying his last respects was her faithful co-star of Green Acres, Eddie Albert. He embraced Merv, who also greeted fellow mourners Rosie O’Donnell, Johnny Mathis, and Mitzi Gaynor. The matriarch of the Gabor clan, Jolie, and Eva’s older sister, Magda, would each survive another two years.

From aboard his yacht, The Griff, Merv had heard about Eva’s death and went into shockbefore flying back for thefuneral. “Only because we’d had an argument, and we hadn’t settled the argument yet, and I was mad, and I was off on my boat, and she died while I was gone. That was rough.”

Reportedly, his final words to Eva before they departed forever were, “I’ve loved a thousand times, but never been in love.”

Eva

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were husband and wife in real life and they co-starred together in A New Kind of Love. Eva Gabor was cast in a glamorous role as a supporting player.

She told her fellow co-star, Thelma Ritter, “Any woman married to a handsome hunk like Paul Newman must expect that he’ll be faced with endless temptation to stray.”

“I don’t want to sound immodest,” Eva said, “but Paul Newman and I brought beauty to A New Kind of Love.

The cast included (left to right)Joanne Woodward, Thelma Ritter, George Tobias, and Eva herself.

Vivien Leigh and French actor Jean- Pierre Aumont had briefly been lovers when they were much younger. They were reunited on Broadway in the play Tovarich.

Leigh was neither physically nor mentally able to handle her grueling role. After struggling for several months, she was replaced by Eva Gabor.

Smiles before tragedy: (left to right) John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy. Eva later admitted that she and the President had a one night stand at the Hotel Carlyle on November 15, 1963. “I was following in Zsa Zsa’s footsteps, dahlink,” she told Aumont.

A few days later, JFK was assassinated in Dallas. “It may have been the last affair Jack Kennedy had before his death,” Eva told Aumont.

Deep into Aumont’s backstage affair with Eva during her appearance with him in Tovarich, the actor invited Eva to accompany him to a Manhattan party hosted by “Mrs. Smith.”

She turned out to be Jean Kennedy Smith, (photo above) and her fellow guests included all three of the Kennedy brothers.

One afternoon, when Eva was invited for tea at the White House by the First Lady, she rudely demanded to see the President, even if it meant interrupting his cabinet meeting devoted to the Vietnam war.

In the photo above, Lady Bird Johnson is dancing with her husband, Lyndon B. Johnson, at a White House gala.

Actor James Franciscus, both because of his talent and his looks, was cast as John F. Kennedy twice onscreen.

“I’d had the real Jack Kennedy, so why not the lookalike?” Eva asked when she appeared with him in Youngblood Hawke.

In the photo above, a young James Franciscus appears on the French Riviera with his then-lover, Jane Fonda,

“Gothic America” never looked this good, when Eddie Albert (as Oliver Douglas) and his Hungarian wife (Eva Gabor) moved to Hooterville to startle the local hayseeds with their ideas about how to manage a farm.

Eva slopped the hogs in a Jean Louis frock and became a household word to the American public, most of whom had never seen any of her screen or stage appearances.

The Celebrity Seer and psychic advisor to the Hollywood stars, John Cohan, learned shocking secrets from, and offered advice to, clients and friends who included Eva Gabor, Elizabeth Taylor, and dozens of others.

Eva revealed to him the ugly details of one of the most traumatic experiences she ever suffered.

Not all of Eva Gabor’s experiences with Hollywood leading men were romantic.

Her worst encounter was with Lawrence Tierney, seen in this picture as if stripping down for sex.

The brutal attack on her from “Hollywood’s most dangerously sociopathic bad boy” traumatized Eva for years.

Eva’s first sexual encounter with Frank Sinatra sent her to the hospital. But she came back for more, and they developed a hot and torrid ongoing romance. Both were on the rebound from failed relationships.

“Eva got romance from Sinatra,” protested Zsa Zsa, “but all he did for me was to rape me.”

Eva Gabor’s last and final husband was Frank Jameson, a Los Angeles “Old Guard socialite” and aeronautical millionaire. The marriage, inaugurated in 1973, would last a decade.

For many years, it was viewed as the perfect match. But as Eva said herself, “Dahlink, things are not always what they seem to be.”

Eva Gabor and Merv Griffin appear as a happy couple.

The TV talk show host loved her deeply during the course of his platonic relationship with her. He provided a luxurious lifestyle for her, and she was willingly used as “arm candy” to deflect rumors about his homosexuality.

During her long relationship with Merv Griffin, Eva sometimes entertained close friends of his, President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, (depicted above). “Even at their age, Ronnie and Nancy were still passionate with each other,” Eva said.

Eva considered herself Griffin’s best friend, and resented it when he informed people that “Nancy is my best friend.”

In 1984, Merv and Eva came up with an idea for a TV series that included both Eva and Zsa Zsa. He even hired scriptwriters, who concocted the story of Two Hungarian Maids.

“These maids would be more like queens,” Merv said. “The most hilarious duo of house servants history has ever known. Regrettably, the networks turned it down.”

“Just as well,” Zsa Zsa said. “Who would ever believe that Eva and I could be maids?”

Merv Griffin only proposed marriage to Eva after Brent Plott(above) brought a $200 million palimony suit against him.

When the case was dropped, so was Merv’s proposal of marriage.