Finding Zsa Zsa

Films about artists and their lives usually go astray. Two examples: Lust for Life, starring Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh, and The Agony and the Ecstasy, with Charlton Heston as Michelangelo. One reason for the failure of such biopics is the difficulty of showing an artist at work: it’s seldom engrossing onscreen or off, just as movies about writers must rely on everything but what a writer does. In the movies, a painter at the easel or an author at a keyboard holds as much interest as a dentist filling teeth.

John Huston poured much love into Moulin Rouge, since Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was one of his favorite painters. The director owned several of his works. Watching the movie is like seeing the Lautrec catalogue raisonné come to life across the screen, for Huston’s color palette matches the painter’s own. The result is that Huston’s re-creation of the paintings, and of fin-de-siècle Paris, succeeds better than his scripted biography of Toulouse-Lautrec. Therein lay the aesthetic challenge, which Huston met head-on. To a great extent, his visual accomplishment hides the picture’s flaws, so that Moulin Rouge stands among the iconic films of the 1950s. “From the first,” Zsa Zsa recalled, “John Huston had a paralyzing effect on me. He was the kind of dour man who makes me feel that he thinks everything I say to him is a lie.”

Huston didn’t want her for the part of the dancer and singer Jane Avril in Moulin Rouge, and he was hostile to her during much of the shoot. According to Stuart M. Kaminsky, author of John Huston: Maker of Magic, “Huston was unmerciful to Gabor, who had trouble with her lines. He had her repeat scenes over and over and sing [i.e., lip-synch] the film’s theme song dozens of times. He criticized her for dropping words at the ends of sentences, and she replied that this was her natural Hungarian inflection.” (Anyone studying Hungarian soon learns that this is indeed the case.)

How, then, did Zsa Zsa land the most important role of her career, the role for which she is best remembered? Huston had nothing to do with it, although he was a producer of the film, along with Jack Clayton, who is best remembered as director of such pictures as Room at the Top (1959) and The Great Gatsby (1974). The other producers were the British founders of Romulus Films, John Woolf and his brother, James Woolf. It was the latter who chose Zsa Zsa and stuck by his choice. In Hollywood scouting for an actress to play Jane Avril, Woolf met Zsa Zsa and realized immediately what she might bring to the part. “You’re more like Jane Avril than anyone I can imagine,” he told her. As a gay man, Woolf perhaps valued the oddball quality of Zsa Zsa’s screen presence: the high-gloss mannerisms, along with the petulant, voluptuous ego of a drag queen, plus the camp accent of a Moon Goddess—all of this, plus eye-popping beauty, made her as indelible as a Dietrich or a Mae West. It was perhaps Woolf also who acceded to demands from Zsa Zsa’s agent that she receive star billing, even though she appears in a mere handful of scenes and her total screen time amounts to no more than eight or ten minutes. But her name comes second in the credits, under that of José Ferrer, who plays Toulouse-Lautrec.

“Almost from the day the script arrived,” Zsa Zsa remembered, “I began learning my lines. In Jane Avril I saw myself—or the self I wanted to be.” Zsa Zsa was no dummy, though sometimes she might appear so. Reading the script, she grasped the melancholy subtext that ultimately turns the film, for some viewers, into a Technicolor nightmare. On page after page she found what she considered “lovely, heartbreaking scenes, as if my own heart were speaking the words.”

John Huston surely knew that if he made Moulin Rouge in Hollywood it would end up as Dore Schary’s picture, or Darryl Zanuck’s, or Jack Warner’s. Meaning a big beached whale of an enterprise, chopped by censors, with no doubt a tacked-on happy ending to qualify as family entertainment. Huston was having none of it. The Huston of Moulin Rouge is a European director, literally and figuratively. He shot Moulin Rouge in Paris and London, with an international cast that included no native-born Americans in leading roles except for José Ferrer, whose Hispanic heritage qualified him as quasi-European although he was born in Puerto Rico and thus a U.S. citizen. (Two later Huston films, Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Dead, have the look and feel of European works.)

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“I want this film to look as though Toulouse-Lautrec himself directed it,” Huston told his director of photography, Oswald Morris. Together they devised a system of running the film past a specialized light to fog it before it was loaded into the camera. Their next step was to produce the desired effect with the help of gauzes. Huston also hired Eliot Elisofon, a photographer employed by Life magazine, to experiment with new techniques and special filters in the use of Technicolor. In collaboration with consultants from the Technicolor laboratories—or in spite of them, according to some reports—Huston, Morris, and Elisofon created a muted palette of soft, flattened tones that contradicted the usual saturated colors of the Technicolor process. Going further still, Huston wanted his actors photographed under blue lights. Zsa Zsa recalled yet another special effect: “All about us were prop men with machines puffing blue smoke. John wanted everything to appear as Toulouse-Lautrec saw the world around him, in shadows of blue and green—the colors that haunt his paintings and express the sadness of his spirit.” These mood-colors functioned somewhat like motifs in music and literature. As in the paintings and posters, so in the film: vivid colors in the foreground, blue-green shadows behind. Zsa Zsa’s costumes, designed by Schiaparelli in crimson and regal purple, are the best example of Huston’s technique in re-creating Toulouse-Lautrec’s palette on celluloid. In one scene, she blazes in a red gown, with even redder jewelry—ruby tiara, ruby necklace and earrings. In another, gowned in black with a long boa of warmest sunflower yellow and matching plumed hat, she looks like a ravishing bumblebee.

The happy result of such extraordinary attention to detail is a film that seems to recapture the light, the smoke, the very air of nighttime Paris as savored by habitués of the Moulin Rouge. But also the narrow, cobblestoned streets and the cluttered apartment of the afflicted artist, whose growth stopped in childhood owing to a fall that stunted both legs. Toulouse-Lautrec reached a height of only four and a half feet. Owing to his tortured sense of inadequacy, and to the impossibility of finding a woman to return his love, he died in 1901 as a result of severe alcoholism and other ailments. He was thirty-seven years old. During his lifetime, and ever since, Toulouse-Lautrec and the famous cabaret with the red windmill on its roof have seemed conjoined, even though the original Moulin Rouge burned in 1915. (Soon rebuilt, it still packs in tourists by the busload.) According to Gerstle Mack in his 1938 biography of Toulouse-Lautrec, “Among the picturesque cabarets, dance halls, cafés-concerts, restaurants of every sort, hole-in-the-wall dives, and every sort of establishment catering to macabre, fantastic, or hilarious tastes, none ranked higher during the painter’s prime than Le Moulin Rouge.”

Huston wished to show all of that and more, but to ward off the howls of offended puritans he and co-author of the screenplay Anthony Veiller sanitized the Lautrec story. Even so, illicit suggestions jostle one another in the final cut: cancan dancers in lacy pantaloons flinging up skirts to show front side and back; streetwalkers; seedy taverns where the consumption of absinthe resembles an opium den; brothels; and a hint of lesbianism as two women, pressed together, twirl around the dance floor of the Moulin Rouge. Huston’s only significant clash with the Hollywood production code had to do with an advertising poster that showed a cancan dancer’s exposed thigh. The leg was soon edited, Moulin Rouge opened in late December 1952 in Los Angeles to qualify for Oscar consideration, and Zsa Zsa’s hour of triumph came in February 1953 at the New York premiere.

No one, however, was immune to right-wing tyranny at the height of the Red Scare, and so a phalanx of American Legion protesters showed up on December 27, 1952, at the Fox Wilshire Theater in Los Angeles for the Moulin Rouge premiere. “American Legion Bans José Ferrer” was a typical sign held aloft. Another was “Communist Press Praises John Huston.” The protesters were disgruntled because Huston, in 1947, had helped to form the Committee for the First Amendment, an action group in support of the Hollywood Ten and others affected by the black list. Members of the group included Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Myrna Loy, Bette Davis, Groucho Marx, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly, and many others.

Ferrer, a liberal Democrat, was tarred as a communist sympathizer. Zsa Zsa, considered a refugee from communist Hungary even though she had not seen her native country since 1941, remained above suspicion. During the witch hunt of the early fifties, with Hollywood fogged in by fear, José Ferrer was taking no chances. He wired the American Legion that he would be glad to join the veterans in their “fight against communism.” A few days later, he denounced his fellow actor Paul Robeson for accepting the Stalin Peace Prize. Among Huston’s reasons for moving to Ireland a bit later was his dislike of American political paranoia.

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“She moved like a tank,” said Oswald Morris, referring to Zsa Zsa. It is doubtful, of course, that Zsa Zsa ever moved like a tank, though Huston’s intimidation may have temporarily stiffened her spine. One thing she did extremely well onscreen and off was to walk with confidence and grace, and in ballroom scenes throughout her career she glides across the floor with swan-like ease. Morris, as Huston’s crony and director of photography on Moulin Rouge, no doubt absorbed the director’s prejudice against her. Morris added that he and Huston asked Colette Marchand, another star of the picture, to show Zsa Zsa how to move. If so, the instruction seems misguided because Marchand had trained as a ballet dancer and Zsa Zsa’s character, Jane Avril, was a self-taught dancer who, in her youth, was treated for the movement disorder known as St. Vitus dance. The dance style she invented, captured only in a few photographs and in Lautrec’s work, evokes a spidery grace that verges on the grotesque. Nor is Zsa Zsa called upon to dance. The script—and Huston—portrayed Jane Avril only as a singer, and whatever Oswald Morris’s reservations, he made Zsa Zsa the most dazzling woman in the film.

She first appears ten minutes into the opening sequence in long shot at the top of a flight of stairs at the Moulin Rouge. She is singing what became known as “The Song from Moulin Rouge” (dubbed by Muriel Smith, who appears in the film as Aicha, the fiery Algerian cancan dancer). The camera glides up the stairs to meet her, then pulls back and back to show her long descent of the staircase. With each step she makes Lautrec’s Jane Avril come to life. Zsa Zsa’s willowy arm movements replicate exactly Lautrec’s posters and tableaux of Jane Avril. Pauline Kael’s comment on those movements—“her gestures while she pretends to sing are idiotic”—couldn’t be more wrongheaded. Zsa Zsa uses not only her arms but her entire body to capture the wavy, art nouveau undulations of Jane Avril through the eyes of Toulouse-Lautrec.

At the end of the picture, the artist lies on his deathbed. Unshaven, distraught, he looks—perhaps intentionally on the part of Huston—like Proust as photographed in his own final hours. Hallucinating as he dies, Lautrec sees the characters he has sketched at the Moulin Rouge materialize through the wall and, in feverish montage, dance wraith-like to his bedside. The cancan dancers; Chocolat, the young black dancer; double-jointed Valentin, of the exaggerated nose and prominent Adam’s apple; and finally Jane Avril, in a haunting valedictory that Zsa Zsa claimed to have invented: “Henri, my dear, we just heard you were dying. We simply had to say goodbye. It was divine knowing you. We will see you later, of course. But now, if you forgive me, I must fly. There is the most beautiful creature waiting for me at Maxim’s. Goodbye, Henri. Goodbye!”

She blows a kiss and vanishes into air.

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Fast-forward to 1983. Zsa Zsa, looking years younger than she did in 1953, stood before a stellar audience in Los Angeles and spoke with affection about the director who hadn’t wanted her at all in his picture. By the end of Moulin Rouge, however, they had become friends owing to their mutual love of horses. Addressing her old nemesis at the American Film Institute Salute to John Huston, she said, “John dahling, you didn’t want me for the movie Moulin Rouge. Before seven hundred extras, you screamed into the loudspeakers, ‘Miss Gabor, you can’t act, you can’t sing, and you can’t dance! At least show your face to the camera!’

“You put a big red heart on it and you said, ‘Make love to the camera.’ John dahling, you made me what I am today—rich and famous—but you never married me!”

She might have added that owing to her role in the film, forever after when she entered a nightclub or a restaurant, the orchestra would play “The Song from Moulin Rouge.” In a sense, John Huston not only made her famous, but immortal. When she died, every obituary named Moulin Rouge as the high point of her career. One of the better elegies echoed her final lines from the picture. Writing in Time magazine, Richard Corliss concluded: “Mademoiselle Gabor, you silly delight, it was divine knowing you.”