Finding Zsa Zsa

While Zsa Zsa was building a career in Hollywood, Eva, Magda, and Jolie were doing the same in New York. We left Jolie at 699 Madison Avenue, superivising her daughters as they draped magenta satin in the windows of her new shop, the Jolie Gabor Pearl Salon. A name more reflective of the brains and labor behind that enterprise might have been Magda Gabor Costume Jewelry, Inc. Evidence points to Magda as the maven who kept everything on track while Mama cavorted in Manhattan nightclubs and prowled for husband number three.

In 1947, Jolie had married number two, Peter Howard Christman, a man she met during her brief tenure in the West Forties before her ascent to Madison Avenue. Christman worked at a nearby eatery called Hamburger Heaven, and although in later years Jolie billed him as manager of several such establishments, in truth he manned the cash register. The marriage, as both parties realized from the start, was one of convenience: an American husband guaranteed a fast and easy route to citizenship for Mrs. Christman. “I told him my problem of an expiring visitor’s visa,” Jolie said.

It seems likely that Christman made a profit from the marriage. After all, Jolie’s three daughters had married into money and were in a position to chase the immigration wolf from Mama’s door. “Imagine the headlines,” Zsa Zsa warned Conrad, “if your mother-in-law is deported. How much easier to buy her a husband.”

Jolie proposed to Christman with these words: “I want desperately my citizenship and secondly I want you.” Is it possible that he found himself addled by Gabors and drink? For according to Jolie, Christman had suffered a bout of pneumonia some years earlier and a doctor prescribed a daily bottle of whiskey to prevent recurrence. Christman never deviated from this prophylactic regimen, while the doctor no doubt attracted hordes of thirsty patients. “Each morning,” said disingenuous Jolie, “he would start with a few sips in the bathroom before breakfast, but always he was gentlemanly and nice to me.” In 1948, however, he inherited a small house in Arizona, whose dry air and cheaper whiskey proved too tempting a situation to refuse. (Or did he buy the house with uxorious cash?) Then, too, Jolie’s chaotic bookkeeping, and her enlistment of Christman to help her in the shop after a long day at Hamburger Heaven, surely persuaded him to choose the West over the West Side. “I cannot add,” Jolie stated, “but I can take one glance and estimate correctly. I am not so good either with multiplying or subtracting or dividing but I can look at a pile of merchandise and guess how much it is to the last rhinestone.” Realizing the dangers of this marital morass—as legal spouse, Christman might be liable for Jolie’s debts to suppliers and to the IRS—he filed for divorce.

* * *

Jolie lost two husbands almost at once. Peter Christman fled to Arizona, and Vilmos, unable to speak English and not eager to learn, prepared for a return to Hungary. Saturated by cajoleries from his ex-wife and three daughters, with all such pleas accompanied by geschrei and wet tears, he decided that war-ravaged Budapest looked calmer than the battles raging in Gaborland.

Zsa Zsa, casting aspersions on Eva during one of their frequent blowups, implied that her sister was partially responsible for their father’s unhappiness in the U.S. “He stayed for a while with Eva in California,” she said. “He was miserable because she gave him a room with a tiny little bed to sleep in. I don’t know why unless she’s so stupid—she’s always so very cheap and I don’t like that.”

A more likely reason for his telling Zsa Zsa one day in 1948 that he wanted to go back was owing to a new government ruling. “If you returned to Hungary,” she said, “you got back everything you previously owned. So he got his shop and also furnishings that relatives had hidden for him. He had a villa again and everything was fine.” His other objective was to marry the woman Zsa Zsa called “his adoring secretary who had doted on him for twenty-five years, even when he was still married to Mother. His second wife was not like my mother, who is always the grande dame.”

Not long after Vilmos arrived in Budapest, while still occupied with rebuilding his former business, a new government ruling came down. Zsa Zsa explained that “the communists confiscated everything except five pounds of one’s belongings, and began deporting people. They deported Father to a peasant house where he lived with his wife and three other people.”

That “peasant house” was in the drab suburb of Budakeszi. In 1950, the repressive communist government labeled Vilmos and his second wife as “undesirables” and banished them from Budapest. Reasons for this banishment were perhaps his former bourgeois status and prosperity, or his rumored support of the quasi-fascist interwar regime of Admiral Horthy. De facto anti-Semitism, along with his original Germanic family name—Grün—may also have accounted for his disfavor, for many ethnic Germans and others with Germanic names were deported after the war, even those whose ancestors had lived for several centuries in Hungary. (For a time in the nineteenth century, Jewish families could buy Hungarian surnames. This is perhaps how Vilmos Grün became a Gabor.)

When Vilmos approached Zsa Zsa about a return to Budapest, she realized that “he somehow didn’t belong any more to our life.” Without discussing the matter with Eva and Magda, she bought him a ticket, gave him several thousand dollars, and saw him off on a transatlantic ship. He left behind his walking cane, which Zsa Zsa kept by her bedside for the rest of her life.

No doubt Vilmos came to regret his decision. He had returned to a democratic parliamentary government officially called the Second Hungarian Republic, which lasted from 1946 until the communist takeover in 1949, at which time the country became the People’s Republic of Hungary with a constitution patterned on that of the Soviet Union. Almost overnight, Vilmos found himself behind the Iron Curtain.

Throughout much of the 1950s, communication was sporadic between Vilmos and his family in the United States. Virtually all letters entering or leaving Hungary were subject to censorship or confiscation. Telephone connections, even when possible to make, took hours or days to arrange, and then were listened to in communist Hungary and probably in McCarthyite America, as well. The Gabors, knowing his vulnerability, rarely spoke of Vilmos in public. Asked by a reporter in 1957 about his welfare, Eva gave this laconic reply: “Yes, we hear from him. He is fine.” They were well advised never to criticize the Hungarian government, for the safety of Vilmos and other relatives in Hungary. Not until the late 1960s was Zsa Zsa able to obtain a visa to visit the country.

* * *

During Jolie’s entrepreneurial early days, Magda had joined the marital merry-go-round that enriched her sisters. From 1946 until 1947, her husband was the writer William Rankin. In midsummer 1949 she married attorney Sidney Robert Warren and remained his wife until the next year. When not honeymooning or divorcing, Magda helped her mother, though she despaired of Jolie’s cockamamie business methods.

Even in childhood, one of Magda’s nicknames was “the General.” Her dangerous work in wartime and her success in escaping to Portugal with members of her family proved her sangfroid and steely determination. As Jolie fiddled and floundered in her first shop on the outskirts of Hell’s Kitchen, Magda decided that she must fill the power vacuum.

For details of Magda’s expertise and her accomplishment, I summoned Tony Turtu, my good friend to whom this book is dedicated. Tony, author of the visually stunning Gaborabilia, published in 2001, is an authority on all things Gabor. He owns the world’s most extensive collection of photos and documents relating to them, and in addition he is a fashion designer with a profound appreciation of costume jewelry, its design and merchandising. Recently, I asked him to explain why Magda and Jolie, working as a team, succeeded where many colleagues and competitors failed.

This is what he said. “Jolie guided and nurtured her jewelry business, but it was Magda who provided the initial foundation. While Jolie acted as the amusingly daft figurehead, Magda piloted the ship during those early New York years, keeping flamboyant Mama in line.

“The costume jewelry business in the 1940s, ’50s, and beyond was crowded with companies such as Dior, Scaasi, Laguna, and Corocraft, to name only a few. Enter Magda Gabor who, despite a limited grasp of English and even smaller knowledge of American business practices, knew how to conceptualize and execute her own and Jolie’s costume jewelry designs. That, however, was only step one. What came next after their designs were turned into actual jewelry?

“That is, how to sell the lovely brooches, rings, necklaces, and earrings when they arrived at 699 Madison Avenue from the manufacturer? Magda sold them to department stores and drew attention to them with her own high-kilowatt glamour, exotic charm, and a family name that, by 1950, had already gained a coveted place in American media. Magda often oversaw lighting, music, program notes, and selection of models in venues where Jolie Gabor jewelry was featured. She pushed it on radio and television, and in personal appearances at major department stores such as Bonwit Teller and in fashion showcases. Early on, for instance—in March 1949—Magda made one of her first in-store appearances at a trunk-show display in the Don Loper Studio on Sunset Boulevard. Quite the publicity master stroke! And little sister Eva was on hand for the big event, as well.

“Magda and Jolie did their own best advertising. ‘Magda is publicity minded,’ cooed Jolie, but so was Jolie herself. No Gabor ever spoke in private if they could say it for publication. They understood that wearing their own creations at the Stork Club, ‘21’, and Sardi’s cost less, and seduced a better clientele, than an ad in the New York Times. Nor did Magda overlook well-publicized showcases at the Waldorf (owned by former brother-in-law Conrad Hilton), the Warwick, Philadelphia’s Bellevue-Stratford, and other high-end hotels. And of course, Zsa Zsa and Eva never left home without a full complement of diamonds, emeralds, and rubies—most from Mama’s inventory, although in interviews they shamelessly upped the price tag from seventy-five dollars to seventy-five thousand.”

Removing a newspaper clipping from one of his file folders, Tony said, “Here is a typical print feature: Own Family Designs Eva’s Jewels. This syndicated photo layout pictured Eva wearing a three-piece ensemble designed by Mama and Magda. Based on copies of Empress Maria Theresa’s crown jewels, the pieces were made of cultured pearls, simulated emeralds, and rhinestones.”

He continued, “Magda pioneered the art of group concepts, which is the background of any good design business. For example, when Jolie designed a beautiful three-strand faux-pearl choker, it was Magda who added a matching bracelet and earrings to the line. Providing the customer with additional options is a shrewd marketing strategy that can lead to exponential sales volume.

“In their philosophy of nonstop jewelry, Magda and Jolie also taught their customers never to neglect daytime jewelry. Sportswear and casual clothing? Try a chic necklace and button-earrings paired with a simple sweater. A pearl ring on the smallest finger? Dahling, it’s perfection! It vill drive your man crazy.

“Then along came Jolie’s newly launched line of cosmetics, with the ritzy-tawdry brand name Pink Danube.”

I interrupted to ask, “Was the pun intentional? After all, pink is in the family of red, and the Red Scare was still up and running.”

After jokes about Pink Danube’s possible hidden meanings, Tony went further with specifics of a business model that might save almost any company from failure. “Magda,” he said, “engineered cross-promotions between those two lucrative product lines, jewelry and cosmetics. Other family-endorsed products that debuted around this time were the Gabor Foundation Cream, the Madame Jolie Gabor Makeup Base, and, best of all, Pearl de Jolie perfume, in a bottle mounted with ‘pearls.’ I have one, and there’s neither a pearl nor a ‘pearl’ in sight.

“Now, remember that in the early fifties there was not the deluge of perfumes that exists today, when every pop princess with a tin ear and any reality-show nobody can have a fragrance. Fashion icons—Helena Rubenstein, Elizabeth Arden, Chanel—each had a signature scent. This was the rarified world that Jolie entered, or should I say elbowed her way into? Magda no doubt had a hand in it. And Pearl de Jolie meant that Jolie Gabor had arrived.

“When loyal customers asked for advice, Magda said, ‘My suggestions are general. Learn to experiment.’ Since she, and the other Gabor women, lived their philosophy of jewelry every day, her clever retorts to customer questions carried conviction. They are part of her legend. Among Magda’s best quotes are these:

• More than one stunning ring on one hand is unchic.

• Never wear gold jewelry with an evening dress.

• Jewelry does not have to be flamboyant to be beautiful.

• Pearls offer a softness and a glow that no other stone imparts.

“And,” he concluded, “she meant every word. The Gabor family lived by those precepts. Remember, too, that owing to Magda and Jolie’s complete design control over their product, and the superior workmanship of Jolie Gabor costume jewelry, even today pieces from Jolie’s collection are highly sought after.”