Finding Zsa Zsa

Onlookers—and there were many—to Zsa Zsa’s final marriage found themselves as polarized as Democrats vs. Republicans. Was the groom, who projected a vague distinction and who called himself Prince Frederic von Anhalt, really the aristocrat he claimed to be, or had Zsa Zsa hooked the Faux Prince of Bel Air? Later, she herself claimed that this marriage was among her happiest, and indeed it lasted thirty years, four months, and four days—from August 14, 1986 until her death on December 18, 2016. Her previous marriages combined totaled less than this stretch of time.

When one is a faded star crashing into seventy, is it wise to take on a forty-three-year-old German with a dodgy past, a questionable present, and a blank future? This cockeyed coupling with self-styled royalty presented itself to Zsa Zsa as the culmination of a long quest, a quest not so much for marital happiness as for a title. Perhaps the secret rosebud in Zsa Zsa’s century-long life, the great desire never fulfilled until Frederic came along, was to be addressed as Miss Magyarország, or even better as countess, duchess, sultana, principessa, or Lady Zsa Zsa. Any title at all to fill the aching void created by that prodding mother who spurred little Sári toward fame and greatness, the mother whose own neurotic frustrations trapped her daughters, and Zsa Zsa most of all, in a twisting labyrinth of ambition.

Recall how Jolie taunted young Zsa Zsa at the circus as an Indian fakir swallowed fire while climbing a ladder of razor-sharp swords on naked feet. “Now,” Jolie hissed in the darkness, “when will you be able to do that?” Any child would suffer from such an absurd and abusive challenge, and this taunt no doubt represents a lone example from a pattern of impossible demands.

It would take an Orson Welles, and a Citizen Gabor, to unpeel the petals . . . Imagine a snowy scene in wintertime Budapest, and Jolie promising trustful Zsa Zsa the world and its kingdoms, if only: “You must be a princess, and then Mamuska will love you most of all.” Eventually Zsa Zsa became that princess, at least in her own fevered fantasy. The title was a joke to everyone else, but with those fabulous words, “Princess Zsa Zsa,” ringing in her ears like golden bells, she dismissed the stark fact that the prince had paid a California photographer $5,000 for an introduction to her. He brought as tribute a pedigree written in vanishing ink. As this fairytale script played before an audience of one, Princess Zsa Zsa preferred not to question the tenability of the fairyland from whence came her liege.

* * *

From Cindy Adams’s column in the New York Post on August 14, 1986: “Jolie, the mother of the bride, won’t attend the wedding. She’s unhappy about it. ‘But you told me last week you were giving Zsa Zsa a diamond ring as a present,’ I said. ‘Yes, but that was last week,’ Jolie said. ‘This week we are not speaking.’ ”

Jolie recognized Zsa Zsa’s piece of royalty as a piece of work. She warned her silly daughter that this was a frog who, even when kissed, would remain a reptile. Although Jolie specialized in imitation jewels, hers carried the stamp of expert craftsmanship. Her hard, practiced eye could distinguish, from any distance, a real diamond from a rhinestone, or a gob of paste parading as a pearl, and as with jewels, so with people. Even when Zsa Zsa’s dream came true, Mamuska remained unpleased. Her daughter created a circus, but the Indian fakir had morphed into a German faker, and instead of flames what Zsa Zsa swallowed was a line of bull. The marriage was a circus that featured too many clowns.

Celebrity media—People magazine, tabloid dailies, Entertainment Tonight—found the match of passing interest, and Zsa Zsa was still quotable. “I’ve only had three real husbands—Conrad Hilton, George Sanders, and my first, Burhan Belge. The others were only legalized love affairs.” She also told anyone who would listen that she was fifty-five, and therefore—“It’s time to settle down.”

“I know he’s no good,” Zsa Zsa confessed to Alan Richman, a reporter from People. Echoing Judith Anderson’s line in Laura—“He’s no good but he’s what I want”—Zsa Zsa was referring to her new husband, Frederic von Anhalt, soi-disant prince, soi-disant duke of Saxony, holder of a sheaf of unlikely titles. You will not find him in the Almanach de Gotha, though he did make regular appearances in police files back in Germany. As reported in People on September 1, 1986, “according to various published reports Prince Frederic is a con man, a shoplifter, and a brawler. He denies all but the scrapes.”

The People article detailed the wedding with tongue-in-cheek thoroughness: Zsa Zsa’s Ruben Panis gown, pale glacial ice-blue with embroidered satin flowers; the groom’s Graustarkian medals strung across his ruffled shirt; the congratulatory telegram from Ronald and Nancy Reagan, read aloud for all to hear; the hundred-plus guests in formal attire; and the bridal bouquet, which Zsa Zsa, breaking with tradition, tossed before the ceremony. She pitched the bouquet to Francesca, who dropped it—a dark omen to the romantic and the superstitious.

For Francesca, the omen proved deadly. At first she planned to boycott the nuptials. Having attended so many maternal weddings, she considered this latest a mere summer rerun. A week before the ceremony, she told Cindy Adams, “I hope Mother will be happy, but I’m afraid.” Adams added, in her next column, that neither Eva nor Francesca would attend. Two days later, Adams reported that “Francesca answers her phone: ‘Royal Wedding Information.’ ” Perhaps to please Zsa Zsa, Francesca had decided not only to attend but also to act as official photographer, even though she considered the whole affair as frivolous as a skit on Saturday Night Live. Zsa Zsa was miffed at Eva not only for her refusal to attend but also for her sister’s harsh words about the groom-to-be. “She is so jealous of me,” Zsa Zsa informed the press. “If Eva married a murderer, I’d still go to her wedding.”

It was reported that Zsa Zsa had hoped for a Catholic ceremony. Defying canon law, church teachings, and social protocol, she asked for a priest to marry her and Frederic in a lavish barn owned by her friend, the horsewoman Elizabeth Whitney Tippett in Saratoga, a small town south of San Francisco. Her reasoning sounded unassailable: since none of her previous marriages, nor Frederic’s, had been recognized by the Church, this would be their first. The request was denied nonetheless. As for the venue, Zsa Zsa said, “I love animals. I’m not so fond of people.”

Was she really more audacious than Henry VIII, or did the bridegroom float this silly prank for publicity? Almost certainly the latter. Except for an article in the New York Daily News, however, the gimmick failed. Zsa Zsa, no doubt enraptured by her forthcoming title, would have supplied the witty quote when a reporter phoned. Without Frederic’s prodding, however, she would never have committed this minor sacrilege against an institution that she held in awe.

* * *

“I always marry bad men,” Zsa Zsa told the writer from People. “It’s a sickness, my sickness. The more bad they tell me they are, the more I am attracted.” Zsa Zsa did not define her meaning of the adjective “bad,” but in this case she surely got worse than she bargained for.

During the next thirty years, plot and characters resembled a Danielle Steel novel or a bad TV drama: A rich dowager, slightly off in the head, meets a much younger European man who lets it slip that he belongs to the nobility. Having found what she has always wanted, the lady takes him in, finds him compatible, and soon marries him. While she is up and running, he remains discreetly in the background. Some years after the marriage, however, she falls ill. Her condition worsens. The crafty husband now takes over her elaborate home, her millions, indeed her very life, for she has vested all power in him. He alienates her family and friends, barring them from his wife’s bedside, until at last all have either died or disappeared, so that he, left in command, mistakes himself for a real celebrity and engineers one tacky publicity trick after another while his elderly wife languishes in semiconsciousness. His final moment in the spotlight comes at her funeral, after which he retreats to his shady pastimes in the hilltop mansion that he has inherited, along with her fortune. So deluded is he—far more than his late wife—that he does not grasp his wretched status as a tattered remnant. The widower is a scrap of Hollywood notoriety as scorned and forgotten as the page of a 1980s newspaper blowing down an empty street.

* * *

For a few years after the wedding, Zsa Zsa and Frederic settled into a reasonable pattern. Sounding uncharacteristically sensible, he said, “This is a friendship marriage. We have much in common: animals, horseback riding, getting up early in the morning, working in the garden.” They traveled extensively, Europe, Australia, South America, sometimes in the company of Eva and Merv Griffin. (Eva, having predicted a brief span for this marriage, finally accepted the status quo.) Both Zsa Zsa and Frederic achieved their goals, for she became a princess and he now had access to her Rolls-Royce, her bank account, and her famous friends, who nodded politely in his direction as though to a member of Zsa Zsa’s household staff. Most important, he luxuriated in the afterglow of Zsa Zsa’s celebrity, which, like a low-burning candle, seemed ready to flicker out.

Frederic’s phrase, “a friendship marriage,” perhaps carried more truth than he intended, or was generally capable of. Francesca—who always had Zsa Zsa’s ear—claimed that the marriage was unconsummated. According to her, Zsa Zsa and the husband had an understanding. “I don’t care what you do,” she told him, “but don’t bring it into my house.” In spite of a few public kisses for the benefit of paparazzi, their body language suggested anything but passion. Convinced that her title conferred true royalty, Zsa Zsa reigned while Frederic followed a few steps behind. If she fancied herself on a par with Queen Elizabeth II, Frederic was not her Duke of Edinburgh but rather a groom from the imperial stables.

Zsa Zsa insisted on separate bedrooms, at home and when traveling. In New York for an appearance on The Joan Rivers Show, she demanded a two-bedroom suite at the Plaza. According to a hotel employee, she said, “Dahling, there is no way the prince can see me before I have my hair and makeup done.”

And all the while, like Madame Defarge knitting as she awaits the French Revolution, Frederic waited for his day to come.