Chapter 15
We Were Both in Love with George
What a shame Noël Coward didn’t script Zsa Zsa’s marriage to George Sanders. Imagine the witty dialogue, the arch innuendoes . . . Herewith, a sketch for the comedy that Coward never wrote.
Curtain up on a cocktail party in a Manhattan penthouse. Act II is then set in Bel Air, Act III in Las Vegas, and the final act plays out in a Hilton hotel on the Riviera. The revelations draw laughter and blood. Finally, after waspish aspersions, highly civilized insults, and roguish asides, all is resolved as George sweeps his irrepressible wife into a stage embrace at curtain fall. But the next instant he parts that very curtain to deliver a coup de théâtre: “My dear, I want a divorce.”
Reality began as comedy. During Christmas week 1946, Zsa Zsa saw George in a movie and whispered to Mama in the darkened Manhattan cinema, “There is my next husband.” The picture, as Zsa Zsa recalled, was The Moon and Sixpence, which had been released four years earlier. She remained resolute in that memory, despite his having starred in some half-dozen pictures in the last year or so that might also have been showing around town.
Even Jolie was nonplussed. “This is no time for you to think of a next husband,” she hissed. Jolie’s reluctance sprang from the fact that Zsa Zsa was seven months pregnant. For once, Mama’s opinion fell by the wayside. Zsa Zsa made it her mission to meet the irresistible Mr. Sanders. Baby Francesca Hilton was born March 10, and five weeks later, on April 19, 1947, mission accomplished. Since the next best thing to Coward dialogue is Gabor-Sanders repartee, as recorded over many years in books and newspapers and on television, I have distilled it to the form of a playlet. With apologies to Sir Noël.
ACT I, Scene I—A penthouse apartment, Manhattan, 1946
George Sanders: I never really met Zsa Zsa. We collided in New York at a party given by Serge Simonenko, the banker.
Zsa Zsa Gabor: Serge, I must meet Mr. Sanders. Please bring him to me.
Serge Simonenko: Mrs. Gabor Hilton,
Mr. George Sanders.
ZZG: Oh, Mr. Sanders, I have been wanting to meet you for so long. I have such a crush on you.
GS: Indeed. How very understandable.
ZZG: I’m such a fan of yours. I saw The Moon and Sixpence and I cried in all the right places.
GS: You’re a very pretty girl.
Scene II—Later that evening, Zsa Zsa’s East Side brownstone
Enter Zsa Zsa, George, and another gentleman from the party.
ZZG: Won’t you both come up for a drink? You must see my baby. (George ignores baby, looks distastefully at growling dog. The other gentleman pets the dog and coos to the baby.)
Scene III—The same, much later that evening
The other gentleman: It’s late, George. I think we must go and let Zsa Zsa get some rest.
GS: You go, old boy. I’m staying.
(Zsa Zsa feigns astonishment.)
GS: There was really nothing fit to eat at that dreadful party. Have you any vodka and caviar? Afterwards, you might bring me a glass of milk, my dear. Just be sure to take the chill off it.
ACT II—Bel Air, the early 1950s
GS: We have been married two years and I haven’t spoken to Zsa Zsa since she said yes.
ZZG: All during my marriage to George Sanders, we had one thing in common. We were both in love with George.
GS: A man has to be married at least twice to appreciate being a bachelor.
ZZG: George was always unfaithful. Once I heard him on the telephone, and I picked up the extension in my bedroom. A woman said to him, “What are you doing with that Hilton woman? You know that I love you . . .”
GS: Being married to Zsa Zsa was like living on the slope of a volcano. Satisfactory between eruptions.
ZZG: . . . and that woman on the telephone was Lucille Ball.
GS: During the five years I was married to Zsa Zsa, I lived in her sumptuous Bel Air mansion as a sort of paying guest. I was allotted a small room in which I was permitted to keep my personal effects until such time as more space was needed to store her ever-mounting stacks of press clippings and photographs.
ZZG: The trouble with George was that he never knew who or what he wanted to be—an English duke, a beachcomber in the tropics, or the greatest woman-hater of his time. In his indecision he gave me some of the most wretched—and happiest—hours of my life.
GS: Zsa Zsa urged me for some time to see her own analyst. Her taste in psychiatrists, as in other spheres, turned out to be examplary. In due course he not only cured me of my obsessional impulses and my periodic backaches. He also cured me of Zsa Zsa.
ZZG: We were two of a kind. We both lived in a special world. In time I was to discover that I saw things not as they were but as a play within a play, in which I was always the heroine.
ACT III—Las Vegas, 1953
ZZG: Our marriage could never survive the threat to George presented by my success in the movies.
GS: I never see my wife—only when she washes my socks.
ZZG: George read Schopenhauer in bed while I was reading scripts.
GS: Zsa Zsa said I was the best of all her husbands. I was. ZZG: I loved that guy. Like no husband I ever had.
GS: I must get out of this ridiculous marriage in which I have got myself involved.
ZZG: A reporter asked George, “Are you still friendly with Zsa Zsa?” He said, “Not very.” That’s not true, dahling. George just never learned to show his true feelings.
ACT IV—A Hilton hotel on the Riviera, 1954
GS: Zsa Zsa becomes angry when I fail to catch her TV appearances. And angrier still when I explain that I am too sensitive an artist to watch her.
ZZG: He was ashamed of being an actor.
GS: In our profession the papers are always full of something or other. And, on occasion, I think that Zsa Zsa is, too.
ZZG: George’s pet name for me was Cokiline, pronounced “cookie-line.” “It’s a Russian term of endearment,” he said. “It means my little sweet cookie, my cookie with a little spice.”
GS: I arrived in Cannes. Zsa Zsa flew down from Paris where she had been the house guest of His Excellency Don Porfirio Rubirosa, Dominican Ambassador to the Republic of France. After two weeks in Cannes where we went to parties and generally had a very good time, I took off for Hollywood and Zsa Zsa returned to Paris to assist in the promotion of, ahem, good will between the Dominican Republic and France.
ZZG: I was addicted to Rubirosa. He was in my blood and he possessed my soul. He was renowned for his machismo and above all for his sexual prowess.
GS: Every age has its Madame Pompadour, its Queen of Sheba, its Cleopatra, and I wouldn’t be surprised if history singles out Zsa Zsa as the twentieth-century prototype of this exclusive coterie.
ZZG: George dropped a bombshell. He filed for divorce.
GS (reading aloud his farewell letter to Zsa Zsa): Don’t be unhappy. I am really much too old for you. You need someone closer to your own age, someone who can respond to your admirable effervescence, someone who has more vitality. I shall always love you, and yield to no one in my admiration for your many qualities.
ZZ: You never really know a man until you divorce him.
GS (continues reading letter): A big kiss for Francesca, and a hug for you. George.
ZZG: We always lived happily ever after—before the marriage, during the marriage, and after the marriage.
GS (some years later): I might remarry you. I find your money a great aphrodisiac.