Chapter 8

E.G., Phone Home

If only Eva could have dialed direct! Desperately homesick, she needed to hear Mama’s voice, or Magduska’s, or Papuska’s. But from Los Angeles such a call took hours to place, and cost a small fortune. Before long, war in Europe made phone calls to Hungary virtually impossible. At least, however, Eva soon had the mixed blessing of Zsa Zsa, who arrived in California in June 1941.

After spending several months in Budapest during the winter of 1940, Zsa Zsa returned to Turkey more discontented than ever. Ankara held no new surprises for her. Marriage to Burhan, which for a time had amused her in spite of its lack of love, now seemed stale. He wanted a child, but his mother-in-law back in Hungary was too vain to accept the role of grandmother. “Jolie takes you away from me,” he chided. “I have no wife, and because of her no children!” Burhan, and all future Gabor husbands, soon learned that Jolie possessed her daughters body and soul, keeping them under psychological lock and key.

Another reason for Zsa Zsa’s wish to leave Turkey was Eva’s minor success in Hollywood, for not long after her arrival Paramount Pictures signed her as a contract player. At that time the studios were tossing contracts to all comers, or so it seemed. After making the rounds, Eva found a place at Paramount in the studio’s B-movie unit. Blondes with foreign accents were in vogue, although immediately she was told to lose ten pounds. Studio brass disliked the baby fat and Hungarian hips. Thus began Eva’s lifelong habit of dieting, so that in later years she stayed trim while Zsa Zsa’s weight zoomed—yet another source of sisterly friction.

Other than abundant blonde hair, the accent, and malapropisms that always got a laugh—“I wish to buy a dress for street walking,” she told a saleslady; “We sang ‘Old Anxiety’ on New Year’s Eve”—she had no particular silver-screen assets and the studio regarded her as one new face in the swarm of young women and men who landed contracts each year and then vanished. Or rather, many went back where they came from while others took menial jobs and never relinquished their shattered dream. To Zsa Zsa, however, far away in Ankara and bedazzled by the lure of movie stardom, Eva looked already like the new Garbo. Sibling rivalry overspread Zsa Zsa like hives.

Another reason to leave Turkey was the menace of fascism, not only from Germany but from Italy, as well, and from various European countries with fascist leanings: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the pro-German government of Vichy France. In Turkey itself were many who admired Hitler and Mussolini and who lacked sympathy for the beleaguered Jews. Zsa Zsa’s Mongolian cheekbones notwithstanding, anyone interested in her ethnicity knew she had Jewish blood.

According to Zsa Zsa in later years, Jolie urged her to leave Burhan and go to comfort Eva, whose marriage to the most beautiful man in the world had devolved from storybook to housework. After their arrival in Los Angeles, she and Eric lived in a small hotel, which suggests that his income did not match that of the average medical doctor. When he went to work each day, Eva lacked occupation. Her English was imperfect; she had little money; she knew no one; and Hollywood, then and now, takes on the bleak lineaments of an Edward Hopper canvas if you’re broke or depressed. Eva was both.

“I went back to bed every morning as soon as my husband left for the day, and wept all over the linen,” said Eva. Jolie, always the fixer, wrote to Eva that she must look up Ilona Massey, the Hungarian actress then at the peak of her career in Hollywood. Although Jolie and Ilona were acquainted, Eva was not granted an audience. In later years, however, Ilona and the Gabors crossed paths as did all Hungarians in American show business.

Shortly after Eva’s arrival at Paramount, the studio sent her on a modeling assignment. Her portfolio comprised only a scattering of print ads for Jolie’s shop that had appeared a few years earlier in local papers in Budapest. Despite limited experience, but with shiny new teeth (Jolie claimed she sent two thousand dollars to pay for crowns), Eva posed for a pictorial spread, “Five Steps to Winter Beauty,” that ran in several movie magazines in 1940. In the layout, a smiling Eva preps her skin for winter using such products as Palmolive soap, Woodbury face cream, and Yardley hand cream, along with cosmetics by Max Factor.

* * *

Zsa Zsa did not so much as throw Burhan a kiss from the train. On her final prewar visit to Budapest, she decided—with Jolie’s collusion—not to get off in Ankara but rather to head for Hollywood. When she boarded the train on February 15, 1941, these countries, either all or in part, were under German occupation: Austria, the Baltic states, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway. Bombs were falling on London and across the United Kingdom, and on the very day that Zsa Zsa left Budapest Austria began mass deportation of Jews to Poland.

Despite her diplomatic passport, she could not travel west across occupied countries, so that her sole option was to travel east. Although Bulgaria was still officially neutral, fighting had broken out in the southern part of the country and some railroad tracks had been bombed. As Zsa Zsa’s train approached the Turkish frontier, the announcement was made that passengers must detrain and walk across the border. All luggage, including Zsa Zsa’s twenty-one suitcases, arrived safely in Istanbul after having been inspected and loaded onto a different train. Passing through Ankara, she almost got off. After all, she had invested six years of her life there, and despite her fatigue with Burhan, she found much to admire in him. He had treated her kindly, and the Turks had welcomed her. But she stayed on the train, eventually changing numerous times as she made her way along the Syrian border and into Iraq.

In Bagdad she waited almost two months to arrange ongoing transportation. Each day she had to report to police headquarters. Her presence in Iraq, everything about her, aroused suspicion. Why was she traveling alone? Where was her husband? How did she obtain a diplomatic passport? Why was she headed to the United States? To the authorities, she was as suspect as a Mata Hari or a Tokyo Rose. Fortunately, she made the acquaintance of a young sheik and lived with him during her Iraqi sojourn. He, like so many who wanted to and the nine who did, wished to marry her. Zsa Zsa liked the sound of the matrimonial title he offered—sheikha—but the gravitational pull of Hollywood won out. Epithets such as “actress” and “movie star” dazzled her like a mirage on the Arabian desert.

Finally cleared to leave the country, she flew to Karachi, then part of India before Partition, and from there to Bombay, where she boarded the SS President Grant on April 27, arriving in New York on June 3, 1941, along with her twenty-one battered suitcases. She had traveled from the Indian Ocean across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, over the Caribbean, around the tip of Florida, and up the Atlantic Coast to New York. Curiosity, and a certain notoriety, awaited her in Manhattan. Although not yet a celebrity, she had accrued a reputation as an exotic adventuress. Someone photographed her on deck before disembarkation, and in that picture she looks as though she has just come from a makeover spa. Blonde, rested, aglow with a confident smile, she was no doubt rejuvenated by ocean air and a new continent to conquer.

Always one to keep her address book up to date, Zsa Zsa had sent a telegram to a retired industrialist in New York whom she and Burhan had entertained in Ankara. He met her at the pier and within hours of touching the Manhattan pavement, she was dining at ‘21’. The next day several newspapers carried her photograph, announcing “Turkish Beauty Arrives.” Eva flew to New York to welcome her. “We fell into each other’s arms,” Zsa Zsa said, “babbling ecstatically in Hungarian.” A day or two after that, they flew to Los Angeles.

One may wonder how a woman of twenty-four, unemployed, a spendthrift, indulged by parents and then by her husband, collected the means to travel halfway around the world, and to do so in style. The only explanation comes from the pen of Jolie, who asked Zsa Zsa in Budapest, before departure, “How will you be for money?”

“I have some from Burhan,” she answered. “I also have from Grandmother plus the twelve-carat ring which Grandmother gave me plus some other little bits of jewelry like the ruby necklace Papa gave me for the wedding present.” Her perilous journey in wartime across hostile countries and oceans under threat of bombs raises another question: Where did she find such courage? The best answer comes from George Sanders, her third husband, who said, some years after their divorce, “Whatever else could be said about Zsa Zsa, and a great deal could, and is, being said about her, one thing is certain, she has a lot of guts.”