Chapter 29
Shatterproof
Magda Gabor viewed life through a darker lens than others in her family. If Eva was the optimist, and Zsa Zsa the absurdist, then Magda might be called the realist. As such, if history had not decreed otherwise, Magda might eventually have taken over the family businesses in Budapest, for she had the mind of a CEO. In the gender-role terminology of last century, Magda did a man’s work: as an underground operative and Red Cross volunteer in Hungary, she drove trucks and ambulances at a time when many women could not imagine their hands on a steering wheel. Without stouthearted Magda, Jolie and Vilmos would surely have perished at the hands of the Nazis.
We have seen how, later in New York, she masterminded Jolie’s success in the jewelry business and drove it forward. At times, Magda functioned as her mother’s keeper, especially when irrepressible Jolie played the scatterbrain. Scolded by her elder daughter, giggling Jolie would say, “Oh Magduska, you are always anxious and worried about me. It is like you are the mother and I am your daughter.”
“You do stupid things. That’s when I feel I must take care of you.”
Magda, having absorbed her father’s no-nonsense business acumen, perhaps comprehended herself in masculine terms. Once when the columnist Earl Wilson expressed doubt over some gossipy tidbit she confided to him, Magda’s comeback was, “You know I tell the truth. After all, I am a gentleman.”
Genteel exterior notwithstanding, she could fight like a bruiser. In the mid-fifties, Magda and Eva had a huge quarrel. (“I don’t know why,” she said later, “and anyway it’s unimportant.”) The sisters did not speak for months. Then one evening Magda and Tony Gallucci went to El Morocco. No sooner were they seated than who should enter but Eva and her husband of the moment, John Williams.
“If you call her to our table,” Magda said to Tony in a steel-blade voice, “I will never talk to you again.” He demolished a drink and quickly ordered another.
After studiously avoiding Eva’s glances, Magda excused herself to the powder room. She returned to find her sister and brother-in-law seated at her table, chatting merrily with Tony. In Hungarian, Magda spat out, “You fool!”
To which Eva replied, in English, “I think you are so bitchy.” Eva’s linguistic sucker punch infuriated Magda even further.
“Why did you say it in English? We fight in Hungarian, not English. Get away!”
Eva and John left. A bit later, a family friend stopped by to greet Magda and Tony. Magda’s sullen face prompted him to ask, “What has upset you?” Eyes flashing, she gave a terse account.
“Why do you lower yourself to her standards?” was his tactless query.
“How dare you speak of my sister like that!” Magda exploded. And never spoke to him again. The point of her story was one that every Gabor made sooner or later: “I don’t think that any of us alone could really stand. Even when I resent my sisters, we stick together.”
Tough, moody, a no-nonsense businesswoman with a get-on-with-it attitude towards life and work, she spent many years in struggle, first to distance herself from her family’s antics, then to regain her damaged health. For in 1962, Magda suffered a debilitating stroke. She was forty-seven years old at the time.
This massive stroke was foreshadowed by what appears to have been a ministroke, or transient ischemic attack (TIA). Five years earlier, during a heated quarrel with Jolie, Magda temporarily lost the ability to speak.
Then, in the fall of 1962, Jolie and her husband, Edmond de Szigethy, came to the Gallucci estate in Southampton for a long weekend with Magda and Tony and to take in the Horse Show Ball, a traditional event that ended the summer social season in the Hamptons. In the early hours of Friday morning, Magda got up from her bed. Not wanting to wake Tony, she didn’t turn on a light. Although she always warned visiting family and other guests not to trip over Maxim, her black poodle who slept on the staircase, this time she herself forgot. The dog didn’t move. Magda tripped and banged her head on the stair rail. Tony heard the crash, turned on the light, and rushed to help his wife. Other than the immediate pain of the bump on her head, she seemed all right. He rang for the maid, who applied cold compresses for an hour or two, and then everyone went back to sleep.
On Friday afternoon, Magda was restless. She seemed unreasonably annoyed with Tony because he was drinking with the butler and watching a baseball game on TV rather than keeping watch by her bedside. Jolie took Tony’s part. “He is good and generous with you,” she said. “Be a little understanding with him and don’t excite yourself.”
By Saturday afternoon Magda was herself once more, and that evening, according to Jolie, she was the belle of the Horse Show Ball. Toasted by friends and looking her high-toned best, she was photographed atop a wooden horse and seemed to enjoy every moment of the long evening. But if Magda, Tony, Edmond, and Jolie had paused to recall the Trojan Horse of mythology and the calamity it brought with it, superstition might have made them flee and seek all possible help.
On Sunday morning a panicked Tony summoned Jolie, who occupied the guest house. “Come quick,” he panted. “Magda cannot speak. I think she’s in a coma.” Arriving at the main house, Jolie and Edmond knew immediately that Magda was gravely ill. An ambulance took her to the local hospital, and in the afternoon she was transferred to Mount Sinai, in Manhattan.
Zsa Zsa happened to be in New York. As soon as she got word of Magda’s condition, she telephoned Eva, who had arrived that very morning in Palm Beach. Eva took the next plane to New York, and by late Sunday evening the family had gathered in Magda’s hospital room.
After four months of hospitalization and rehabilitation, Magda at last was able to return home to Southampton. Speech therapists at the Rusk Clinic in New York told her she would never speak again. Jolie recalled that “Magda became bitter and it broke my heart. She kept trying to tell me something but she couldn’t. She could manage a word or two but she couldn’t connect phrases.” She sank into a depression. One evening she said to Jolie, “No speech . . . die.”
Stunned, Jolie said to her in grave tones, “If you die then I will die, too.” Even at this nadir, gloom did not stay. Like a titanium alloy of strength and toughness, these two women began the rigorous journey that would eventually return Magda to functional health. In her future was a new home in Palm Springs, new friends, several lovers, and two additional husbands.
* * *
That journey toward healing required alpine effort. Although Magda never reached the top, she did achieve a lower plateau that confounded the negative prognosis of the Rusk Clinic. The young Helen Keller comes to mind: the high-pressure drive to speak, the angry frustration when words would not come, the despair and then the joy when at last sound, any sound, broke through the tongue-tied barrier. In the case of the deaf, blind, and mute girl, the first sentence was “I am not dumb now.” For Magda, the open-sesame phrase became “Believe you me.”
No doubt her flair for languages served her well, for she knew that in Hungarian (as in English and other languages) certain inflections and intonations not only convey nuance but also change the meaning of words. Although Magda did not know a tonal language such as Chinese, she eventually turned “Believe you me” into a palette of tones and timbres that could mean, according to tonality, emphasis, facial expression, and volume, everything from “Yes, it’s exactly that way” to “If you don’t like it, shut up.”
A similar multipurpose phrase was “You better believe it.” Family and close friends learned to follow her modulations, almost as if she were playing a musical theme and variations on the piano. Eventually Magda’s glossary of shortcuts became an entire thesaurus. “I am able to understand her,” Zsa Zsa said. Francesca explained further that “my aunt Magda can’t speak, but she has all her brain power. By now we can all understand her.” Magda remained as much a Gabor sister as always, meaning that she attended Jolie’s parties, also Zsa Zsa’s and Eva’s, turned up at nightclubs and society soirées, and proved herself an actress after all: so clever was she in hiding her challenges that press and public soon forgot. Perhaps she had Garbo in mind, who left the screen in 1941 and for the next fifty years was seen but not heard.
In 1966, when Magda’s efforts to recover sometimes threatened to overwhelm her, Tony Gallucci developed cancer and died the following year. Again, Magda was devastated. She almost gave up. Jolie, seeing her smoke two packs of cigarettes a day and drink too much coffee, couldn’t bring herself to say, Stop. Nor had Magda yet developed her later idiosyncratic vocabulary and syntax. After Tony’s death, for instance, if she wanted to tell Jolie that friends had visited, she would say on the telephone, “Couple.” When Jolie asked who had paid a call, Magda would fumble: “Man. Woman.” At last, unable to go further, she would snap, “Forget. It.”
An earlier chapter chronicled Magda’s bitter fight with Tony’s family over the codicil to his will. By the late sixties, when this probate war took place, she was advised to settle out of court. This Magda refused to do. In furs and jewels, she made her entrance in court with the aplomb of a Vanderbilt or an Astor. No one guessed that the words she whispered to her lawyers amounted to “yes,” “no,” “fight,” and a few other monosyllables.
* * *
Zsa Zsa, within the Gabor family and out, was said to be tightfisted. In the matter of distributing ex-husbands, however, she had grown philanthropic. Happy was she when they found new wives—except in the case of George Sanders. Even so, she befriended his third spouse, Benita Hume, whom he married in 1959 and with whom he lived in great contentment until her death in 1967. Zsa Zsa visited them in England, and Benita wrote regular letters telling Zsa Zsa of their travels and of George’s health. After Benita’s death, George sank into depression and drink. At times he seemed unhinged, the aftermath perhaps of a light stroke that left him shaken both physically and emotionally.
Benita Hume and Tony Gallucci died the same year. Zsa Zsa, increasingly concerned for widow and widower, invited George to come and live with her. “He’s lonely, and I have plenty of room,” she said. (Marriage and divorce being so fluid under Zsa Zsa’s roof, George’s homecoming resembled that of a prodigal welcomed once more into the parental nest.) George, although loath to admit it, found a measure of contentment with his wacky in-laws. When Zsa Zsa was away, he consoled himself with Jolie and Magda in Palm Springs, and now that Francesca no longer required kiddie games and baby minding, he enjoyed hearing of her volatile adventures. He also encouraged her independence from draconian Grandmother Gabor. As ironic connoisseur of the absurd, George occasionally wondered why he hadn’t stuck around.
Zsa Zsa, having disburdened herself in 1967 of husband number five, found George the perfect male to live with. Their “dates” involved watching television, walking dogs, refereeing cat fights—between actual felines as well as Gabor sister-cats—and settling into middle age, though woe betide anyone who applied the term within Zsa Zsa’s hearing.
It was almost like being in love—until George, in a moment of candor, let Zsa Zsa in on a secret. A rich society lady had suggested that he marry her (for money being understood) but also for security, companionship, villas on tropical islands and spacious apartments in New York and Europe. This announcement formed icicles on Zsa Zsa’s heart. Always a quick thinker, she countered with, “Magda is also rich. She is terribly lonely, and so are you. You need each other, you can help each other. Besides, you always said I talk too much. Magda can barely speak. She always loved your movies, now she will listen to you all the day and night.”
George, only in his early sixties but feeling much older, considered the proposition. While he shopped marital possibilities in his mind, Zsa Zsa flew to Jolie’s side. “Nyuszika,” she gurgled, “I want to keep George in the family. We have all loved him, even you. He didn’t mean it the time he called you a fucking Hungarian. Let’s give him to Magda, then they will have each other to lean on.”
A few days later, George told Zsa Zsa, “Cokiline, I’ve thought it over and for once you make sense.” Meanwhile, Jolie informed Magda of the latest marital plans afoot. “Unbelievable. Beautiful,” Magda said.
Decision made, George acted like a young groom-to-be. He bought forty red roses in Los Angeles and rushed them to Palm Springs into the hands of his former sister-in-law, now his betrothed. “Let’s have vodka and caviar,” he said, “and get married immediately.” Like a hurry-up wedding in an RKO western circa 1940, they rushed off not to a grizzled frontier preacher but to a judge in the small town of Indio, a few miles out of Palm Springs. There they exchanged their vows on December 4, 1970. At the reception, held in the Palm Springs Racquet Club, Jolie said, “It’s always nice to welcome a son-in-law back into the family.”
For a brief moment, generosity flooded George’s heart. He bought Magda a television set and paid $300 to repair her Cadillac. Then the flood receded; after all, the new Mrs. Sanders was rich—why should he unglue his banknotes?
The wedding shocked the world, or at least that fragment of the world who still remembered George Sanders. As for Magda, many mistook her for Zsa Zsa and Eva’s mother. The revolution had happened—the sixties—and now the seventies swept away the few remnants of studio-era stars and glamour. The likes of Ali MacGraw and Carrie Snodgress became icons of antiglamour, and few movie fans in the younger set knew such names as Sanders or Gabor. These grotesque nuptials struck them, if at all, as belonging to a firmament wedged between Hollywood Babylon and the Motion Picture Country Home.
Less than six weeks later, the marriage was annulled. George, who perhaps believed that Magda was a quieter Zsa Zsa, awoke to the realization that his new wife was a semi-invalid. Since the stroke, her right arm was paralyzed, meaning she did everything with her left. According to Jolie, she learned to adjust her wigs, apply makeup, even attach false eyelashes. But Palm Springs, for the unsocial like George, might just as well be Bakersfield. What does one do all day after a quick morning look at mountains and palm trees? How many hours can anyone splash in an azure pool? One day George drove away and never returned. Magda didn’t grieve. The end of a marriage had become as routine as tax day on April 15 or a dental checkup twice a year.
George’s health continued to decline and he suffered another stroke and showed signs of dementia. Zsa Zsa went to him in Europe and tried to help, but he had decided his fate. On April 25, 1972, he died from an overdose of sleeping pills in a hotel in Spain, where he had lived after leaving Magda. His suicide note echoed the cynical, world-weary characters he often played onscreen: “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”
George’s death saddened every Gabor. Each one, and Francesca, as well, absorbed the grief in her own way.
* * *
Other suitors came calling, for Magda was known as a rich, lonely widow. Anyone mistaking her for vulnerable soon found out the opposite, for in addition to her own powerful will, any hint of exploitation locked the Gabor testudo into place—testudo being a Roman military formation in which soldiers turned their shields into protective cover like a tortoiseshell against enemy projectiles.
Then in August 1972 Magda married Tibor Heltai, a Manhattan real estate broker born in Hungary in 1918. They separated ten months later and divorced in 1975.