Finding Zsa Zsa

Among the bitter and baroque stories of Hollywood children, Francesca’s eclipses most others. I can hardly write about her without a lump in the throat, for she was a dear friend. Thelma Ritter’s reaction to Marilyn Monroe on the All About Eve set—“I adored that girl from the moment we met”—comes to mind when I recall my first encounter with Francesca. At sixtysomething, her life had been one rough patch after the next. Still, she was holding on, even though Frederic, in barring her from her mother’s house, had made communication between her and Zsa Zsa virtually impossible. “My mother used to call me ten times a day,” Francesca said during our initial conversation. “Then Frederic took away her phone.”

Prior to that first meeting, I telephoned Francesca to seek her imprimatur for the book about her family. I said right off that without her approval I did not want to proceed, and she agreed to discuss the project. Arriving early at The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, 7915 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, I found the place crowded, the afternoon balmy, and so I took a table on the patio. Reading a newspaper, I was startled when she appeared behind me and said, “Sam?”

“How did you spot me?” I asked. A set-in-L.A. movie moment as a smile teased her lips: “I just knew.” Francesca was not immediately recognizable as the scion of Hollywood glamour. She wore navy sweatpants and a bulky top, an outfit that partially disguised her weight. Light lipstick and blonde hair, slightly teased, recalled photos of an earlier, less bedeviled, Francesca Hilton. Although no surgeon’s knife had come near her face, from certain angles the Gabor structure was detectable. She barely sipped her mineral water, so we talked. Or she talked, mostly about Frederic. I realize now that her obsession with him not only bankrupted her but also hastened her death on January 6, 2015. (She told me not long before she died that she had spent $400,000 in legal fees to obtain visiting rights with Zsa Zsa. Among Frederic’s stated reasons for barring her: negativity.)

The deadly strife between Francesca and Frederic verged on Hollywood noir. Neither used a gun, although thoughts of murder surely darkened their dreams. As the afternoon wore on, a thunderstorm spread across Los Angeles. During one of Francesca’s tirades, she mentioned the rumor that Frederic was in poor health. “Maybe he’ll die!” she proclaimed. Just then there came a bulbous growl of thunder.

Any mention of “struck by lightning” would have been superfluous. We moved inside. There we remained for another hour, then she drove me in the rainstorm to my car several blocks away. Her dilapidated SUV, with a handicapped sign dangling from the rearview mirror, was piled high with papers, books, magazines, food scraps, electronic gadgets, paper bags with unknown content—in short, a foreshadowing of homelessness. She walked with some strain, although otherwise she didn’t appear beset by ill health.

* * *

Disaster hit in the final months of 2014. I had not seen Francesca for several months, though we spoke often by phone. That fall, she told me that she had lost the lease on her rented house in Hollywood. She supplied only vague indications of her new address; mail went to a post office box. In late November I asked, as usual, about her cat. She replied in a voice of lead, “She died. It’s okay, she was old.” Knowing Francesca, I realized that she feared showing emotions that might elicit pity. I knew also that she, like all the Gabors, was a lover of animals and that the death of her cat would have brought staggering grief.

When I phoned her on Christmas Day 2014, she was napping so we chatted briefly. “I spent the day at a homeless shelter,” she said. Unaware of her desperation—I later learned that she slept in her car during those final days—I took it to mean that she had volunteered to help serve Christmas dinner. This was a reasonable assumption, since her abrasive side was tempered by a compassionate heart. Such goodwill, however, she kept locked out of view. Twelve days later she died.

If I had been fully aware of her anguish, I would have sent her a plane ticket and insisted that she come to me for an indefinite stay.

* * *

Among Francesca’s many burdens was the Gabor legend, which the Gabors expected her to assume as a natural legacy. She was groomed by masters. One of her childhood Christmas presents was a set of four dolls dressed and bewigged to resemble Jolie, Magda, Zsa Zsa, and Eva. These totems wore miniature copies of Dior gowns owned by the Gabors. Zsa Zsa claimed that she and Francesca’s governess—as if inspired by the dark arts—had personally sewed the wardrobes for these miniature graven images. The cult-like objects, however, failed to cast a spell on the girl-child.

When Francesca rebelled, early on, against furs, jewels, flashy marriages and quick divorces, overstuffed headlines, haute couture, the Republican politics of her family, a slim waist and a camera-ready smile, Zsa Zsa was stunned. Their mother-daughter friction led to high-decibel fights that pealed across Bel Air; slammed doors and thrown objects; estrangements; and, in later years, lawsuits actual and threatened, followed by countersuits. But always, reconciliations.

Francesca’s cousin put it this way: “She inherited all the liabilities and none of the benefits of the Gabor family.” Jolie, who had micromanaged her daughters’ lives from Budapest to New York to Hollywood, despaired of her insubordinate granddaughter. This grandmother, herself never a sylph, hounded Francesca to lose weight. When Francesca grew up, she avoided the nagging granny whenever possible. Despite the tensions, her tales of Grandmother Gabor’s smash-bang driving could have furnished a skit for Carol Burnett and Vicki Lawrence. “She drove through a hurricane on Long Island with me in the car,” Francesca recalled. “Even as a kid, I thought we were headed into the ocean.” Her hair-raising account of Jolie’s attempt to parallel park: “She banged the car in front, I screamed, then she slammed into the car behind.” Francesca saw the absurd comedy in these stories. But when anger boiled over, Jolie became “that old cunt.” (Eccentric driving ran in the family. Francesca swore that Zsa Zsa would turn her head to window-shop as she motored down Wilshire Boulevard.)

By the time of Eva’s death, those wacky days were gone. Jolie and Magda died two years after Eva, leaving Francesca with a mere fragment of family. Only Zsa Zsa remained, and as usual she focused her attention on face, hair, glamourous outfits, gasp-worthy jewelry, her career or what was left of it, and Frederic.

* * *

For young Francesca, home life under Zsa Zsa seesawed from a child’s wide-eyed fantasy to an opulent reign of terror. Life in a mansion, travel to storied cities with days of pleasure and hotel nights of great luxury, meals in high-gloss restaurants, doting nannies and schools to encourage every grace and enthusiasm. But also: shrill demands incomprehensible to a young girl; maternal fits of tears and screaming provoked by unknown cause; rigorous expectations laid out by movie star mother and aunt, and by the other aunt, Magda, who prefered poodles to children; unwelcome advice from a grandmother whose notions of child rearing stopped at the silver spoon. And what was this little girl to make of an elderly father who resembled her Hungarian grandfather, and who sent lavish presents but seldom permitted her to visit his home? What of the various “uncles” who made their entrances and exits and then were seen no more, gone before she could sort them out? Other children might wish for a pony (Francesca had one), but Francesca’s mighty hope was for a daddy to counteract her mom. That intermittent mom, who kissed and embraced little Franci, then left for weeks and months to make pictures in far-off lands, returning for a day or a week before another TV show or another studio summoned her once more.

“I brought myself up,” Francesca said in a tone that mixed bitterness and tough resignation. Her litany of sorrows began early and never found an end. “I couldn’t bring home my friends,” she said, “because my mother hit me every day. She also hit the help.”

I hesitate to repeat this accusation, one reason being that corporal punishment—spankings and the like—was common during Francesca’s childhood. Unless it took injurious forms, society looked upon it as a normal privilege of parenting, and it was also widespread in schools. A proverb oft repeated was “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” For that reason, it seems unfair to condemn a parent of sixty or seventy years ago who could not have imagined that slapping a child’s backside would someday be looked on as abuse. From Zsa Zsa’s point of view, her daughter’s cheekiness must be curbed.

As for hitting the help, Betsy Jentz, and also Nancy DeJean, both employed by Zsa Zsa to assist in managing her big life, said nothing of the kind. Both women attended her funeral, and in a later conversation Nancy had this to say: “I want you to know she was a very generous lady. And loving, really kindhearted. There is no greater lady in my book than Zsa Zsa Gabor.”

I asked how she came to work as Zsa Zsa’s personal assistant. “I worked for an attorney who screamed a lot. Zsa Zsa happened to be one of his clients, and when she heard him yelling at me she said, ‘Nancy, dahling, how can you let him speak to you this way? This is not healthy, this is no good. You should come to work for me.’ A year or so later, she was in the office when it happened again. She said, ‘Dahling, you’re such a beautiful girl. You can have a job anywhere. Come with me. Leave this man.’ You know what? I went to my computer, turned it off, grabbed my keys, left, and never went back.”

Nancy was also fond of Francesca, whom she, like many family members and close friends, called Franci. “Our relationship was sisterly,” she recalled. “Franci would call me to complain about her mom. When I scolded her for drinking too much, her response was, ‘Oh shut up, you sound like her.’ ”

At some point Francesca, like Zsa Zsa, began to suffer the dizzying mood swings of bipolar disorder. Sometimes—perhaps when medicated—she was delightful, witty, the finest of friends. On other occasions, she would rant. Often on the telephone she raved for an hour, revisiting a lifetime of insults, injuries, and slights real or imagined. The immediate ones typically involved Frederic; others veered toward the Gabors. Once she said, “I studied drama for years and Eva wouldn’t give me a job on Green Acres.” But Eva was not the show’s producer. It’s true that she could perhaps have influenced her bosses, but it’s likely that Eva, always professionally correct, quailed at the thought of temperamental outbursts and the upsets that her niece might cause on the set and off.

Even in her bitterness, however, Francesca glowed with family pride. “My mother is Zsa Zsa Gabor,” I heard her say more than once to an acquaintance who failed to recognize her right off. It seemed a pleasing fiction, if a brief one, to cast herself as the last of the glittering Gabors. Toward the end of her life, she added the fabled name to her own, so that her business card read “Constance Francesca Gabor Hilton.”

* * *

“A lot of people ask what it’s like growing up with Zsa Zsa Gabor as your mother,” she told an interviewer in 1975. “Well, if you know nothing else, it’s quite normal. My mother was very strict. I remember once being so embarrassed by my report card marks that I didn’t want her to see it. The problem was, the parent had to sign the report card. So I took one of her 4-by-5 fan pictures that had been mass-copied with her autograph. I cut out the signature and taped it on. When I turned it in at boarding school, I said my mother had a broken arm.”

Also during Francesca’s teen years, Zsa Zsa, as if playing a helicopter mom on TV, would sometimes stand at the front door making small talk as Francesca tried to say good night to a date. Later on, Francesca found these intrusions funny, though at the time her resentment boiled over. The boys in question didn’t come ’round again.

Zsa Zsa, of course, intended to be a doting mother. Her love for Francesca never wavered, and yet—with her model for motherhood as none other than Jolie, along with echoes of grandmother Franceska Tillemann, both of whom blended the talents of prison matron with mother love—what chance existed for this child of uncertain provenance? For not only was Conrad Hilton hesitant to claim her as his own. Rumors circulated in the Hilton family and beyond that her actual father was Nicky. Zsa Zsa herself claimed that she and her former stepson had a sexual relationship that began soon after her release from the sanitarium in 1945 and ended during his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, a stretch of five years. Always maintaining that Conrad raped her during the final days of their marriage and was thus Francesca’s father, Zsa Zsa unwittingly allowed, in her chronology, for the possibility that Nicky Hilton, not Conrad, fathered her child. He would thus have been Francesca’s father and her half-brother.

Zsa Zsa’s claim of an affair with Nicky Hilton might well have been planted and watered by Wendy Leigh, her notorious collaborator on One Lifetime Is Not Enough, that highly unreliable autobiography published in 1991. Earlier, when working with Gerold Frank in 1960 on My Story, Zsa Zsa’s comment about her former stepson was this: “Any place he sees me he screams, ‘Mother!’ I think Nicky has a little hidden sort of crush on me.” Frank omitted the statement from the published book, leaving it instead among the outtakes. Her “proof” of Nicky’s crush meant little, however. Not only he, but Barron Hilton, as well, used the same sobriquet. During one of Zsa Zsa’s Las Vegas shows, Barron said, “I’m going to catch Mother’s act.”

* * *

If Francesca had been Eva’s daughter, the story would surely have ended differently. Early on, this aunt became Francesca’s most steadying influence. Late in life, Eva said on television, “I wanted six children and couldn’t have them. Believe me, I tried.” (Her final marriage, to Frank Jameson, brought her stepchildren and stepgrandchildren who adored her, and she them. They, like Francesca, inherited money from Eva’s estate.)

Interviewed while appearing in Her Cardboard Lover in 1951 at the Theatre by the Sea in Rhode Island, Eva sounded maternal.

“Let me tell you about my niece,” she said. “She is such a little beauty. On the West Coast, we walked past a kiddie shop with toys and dolls in the window. ‘Oh, Auntie Eva,’ she said, ‘aren’t they beautiful?’ When she and my sister visited New York last year, I took Francesca backstage at The Happy Time. There is a scene where Kurt Kasznar argues with another man in a very loud voice. When the play was over, my little niece walked right up to Kurt and said, ‘I heard you. You were arguing and fighting with that man, and everybody could hear every word you said. If you act that way pretty soon people will not like you.’” Eva, laughing, added, “And then she shook her finger at him. She is such a darling child!”

Two years later, a photo in the New York Daily News showed Auntie Eva and six-year-old Francesca deplaning at LaGuardia. They had just flown in from Los Angeles, and Zsa Zsa had come to collect them.

Magda, although a more remote aunt than Eva, told a story about young Francesca that accords with Eva’s account of their niece’s sauciness. “One night at dinner with Zsa Zsa and George Sanders, when Francesca was three or four, my little niece headed off to bed. She said, ‘Good night, Eva, good night, Magda, good night, Mommie, good night, Uncle George.’ Then she walked to the door, turned around, and to George she said, ‘You Russian!’ And ran out of the room.”

Magda thought it hilarious, but not George. “He couldn’t even laugh at that,” she said. By that time—around 1951—he was a changed man, according to Magda. “In earlier years,” she added, “George was entirely different. He supported his family, who left Britain during the war. Not only his parents but also his sister, brother-in-law, and all their children. Nine or ten people in all.” Magda hinted that marriage to Zsa Zsa, along with the pressures of a job he disliked—acting—brought on the change in his personality.

When Francesca grew up, Eva treated her as an adult, an equal. Zsa Zsa, on the other hand, fancied a thirty-year-old child kept in a doll’s house, then a forty-year-old one, then fifty and beyond. Perhaps she dreamed of repairing earlier mistakes. Moreover, the younger the daughter in appearance and actions, the younger the mom. A demented extension of Zsa Zsa’s rich fantasy life: John Blanchette told me that Zsa Zsa urged him to marry Francesca and produce a grandchild for her. Two obstacles obviated the match: he was gay and Francesca couldn’t stand him.

* * *

Francesca’s school years resemble a checkerboard—not one of orderly squares but rather a jigsaw of surreal triangles and trapezoids unnervingly juxtaposed. In other words, chaos. At various times she attended the Knox School on Long Island; the Château Montchoisi, a Swiss finishing school; Marymount, a Catholic girls’ school in Los Angeles, from which she graduated in 1965. A person familiar with Francesca’s time in Switzerland said, “That poor sweet girl—she had ball gowns but no underwear.” A bit later, she made a brief stopover at UCLA.

In 1966, Leonard Lyons quoted Zsa Zsa in his syndicated column: “I am sending Francesca to another school—in Paris—to learn to be a woman of the world. In this school she will learn how to cook, paint, sew. The courses will include visits to Dior to learn haute couture, and to Van Cleef and Arpels. It is important for a woman to know about emeralds and rubies.” Whether or not Francesca actually attended this Gaboresque institution remains unclear. It would surely have contradicted her interests.

In 1968, Zsa Zsa gave a farewell party for herself and Francesca. They were leaving for London, where Francesca had been admitted either to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art or the Drama Centre acting school. Francesca herself claimed the latter, while newspapers reported the former. Admission to either suggests talent and promise in theatre and cinema. But like so many other intentions in Francesca’s life, drama school didn’t work out. One reason seems to have been drug use. She joked about marijuana: “While I was a student at the Knox School, I came back to L.A. with a marijuana seed that I planted in my mother’s backyard in Bel Air. The gardener watered it and it grew. Then my mother had it pulled up!”

Unfortunately, she didn’t limit herself to pot smoking. Swinging London in the late sixties, with hashhish, LSD, cocaine—it’s easy to fill in the blanks. The story is all too common: the banal allure of drugs seducing unhappy people like Francesca, whose entire life hovered near a cliff. The miracle is that she didn’t plunge off it until age sixty-seven. A person who knew Francesca for many years assured me that the house Zsa Zsa bought for her in Bel Air was lost “to drugs and a gigolo husband.” Unlike Zsa Zsa and all the Gabors, she lacked a tough sense of money management. They worked hard; every penny must be accounted for. Francesca, by contrast, a child of plenty with time on her hands, failed to grasp the fragility of abundance. Before Frederic’s arrival, Zsa Zsa might grouse but she would not let Francesca go wanting. Eva’s legacy could have kept her niece in comfort for the rest of her life if only Francesca had learned how to invest, how to live within a budget.

* * *

Francesca’s companion for several years in the early seventies was the actor and director Jack Starrett, who gave her a bit part in his 1973 film, Cleopatra Jones. She also worked as a production assistant on the picture. When they were no longer lovers, she recalled him with great fondness. “He’s wonderful,” she told an interviewer. “I still see him as a friend.” In her proposal for the autobiography she never wrote, she called Starrett “one of the funniest men I ever met. He drank Jack Daniel’s a lot and wore long wavy robes. Jack played the Gabby Hayes character in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles. Mel complained that Jack stole every scene he was in.”

In that proposal, Francesca gave short shrift to her two marriages. “1988—I married Vincent Munden for six months. Got my first annulment.” And, on the next line: “1993—Joe Piche, met him at a pool hall—Hollywood Athletic Club—married him a year and a half later.” Her companion from 1997 until her death was Michael Nateece, whom she met in Las Vegas and who seems to have provided a stabilizing influence.

Her acting career went nowhere. After half a dozen bit parts from 1971 to 1999, including Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills, Francesca wisely retreated from the cinematic side of show business. Later she tried stand-up comedy, with short-lived results. Her wittiest line onstage: “My mother and I get along great now that we’re the same age.” Zsa Zsa, in the audience, clapped hands and rolled with laughter.

Over the years, Francesca tried her hand at various jobs. She worked behind the counter in a Hollywood camera store. While in public relations, she managed Mickey Rooney Jr. for part of his brief film career. Her two main interests, however, were photography, which she began in childhood, and Hilton hotel management. The latter endeavor turned into a comic nightmare involving not only Barron Hilton, who ran the corporation after Conrad’s death, but hotel employees in various cities. Like Zsa Zsa, Francesca seemed unable to occupy a hotel room without epic melodrama. Once in Madrid Zsa Zsa was pulled off a plane by Spanish police and charged with failure to pay her bill. Similar incidents took place elsewhere. Francesca, like her mother, felt entitled to royal treatment in any Hilton hotel, Zsa Zsa owing to marriage and Francesca to paternity.

At some point in the 1980s, after many a dead-end job, Francesca landed a minor position with the Hilton Hotel Corporation—in reality, a sinecure to pacify her as well as Zsa Zsa. For a time, Francesca received a free room in any Hilton hotel. That privilege ended when some in-room shortcoming led to a fracas. She threatened to fire the manager, a call was made to corporate headquarters, and Miss Hilton no longer slept gratis under the family roof.

On another occasion, during a manic phase, she stripped naked at the pool of the Washington, D.C., Hilton, and was led away. Then, and on other occasions, her mania was further fueled by diet pills, which Francesca sometimes consumed in unhealthy doses. In 1987, Barron Hilton wrote to Francesca informing her that her monthly check from him would be reduced by half until the entire amount of $6,200, which he paid to the Las Vegas Hilton to cover bad checks she wrote, was reimbursed to him. The origin of this monthly stipend is unclear.

As a result of continuing clamor and disorder, she was eventually barred from all Hilton hotels, an interdict that left her undeterred. For years, and literally to her dying day, this was the saucy outgoing message on her phone: “This is Francesca Hilton of the Hilton Corporation. Please leave your name and number and a message and I will call you back. If you do not leave your name and a number I will not call you back.”

Overmedication with appetite inhibitors led to a mephitic episode that caused a two-year rift between Francesca and Zsa Zsa during which they did not speak. In September 1984, the columnist Marilyn Beck reported that Francesca had entered Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles as a result of an overdose of diet pills. In a phone conversation with Zsa Zsa, Beck learned that Francesca had not slept in four weeks owing to the pills. “We had to get those uppers away from her,” said Zsa Zsa. “She’s doing fine in the hospital, finally getting some rest. I’m begging her to stay another week. I tell you, it’s not easy being a mother today.”

Two days later, Beck reported that “Constance Francesca Hilton phoned me to say that her stay at Cedars-Sinai is involuntary, that her mother had her committed to the psychiatric wing of the hospital against her will. She adds that she had not been taking diet pills, as Zsa Zsa claimed, and that she has informed her attorney that she wants to sue her mother for defamation of character.”

Francesca referred to this horrific episode as her time in “the nut house,” using the same terminology that her mother used to describe her own involuntary incarceration. In a late-night phone conversation a few years before her death, Francesca recalled being handcuffed in a police car after she had run amok in the streets of Bel Air.

* * *

After working on her autobiography for thirty years, with few pages written, she searched for a coauthor and was turned down by several prospects. Eventually she asked me to take on the assignment. “But Francesca,” I said, “I can’t spend months, maybe a year, in Los Angeles, and you won’t come to me. So I have to say no, even though I would love to work with you.” She then suggested Skype, and again I had to decline.

Her book’s working title was Hotels, Diamonds, and Me. The six-page outline runs from birth to 2007, the year she put it aside. I suggested that, in view of her tribulations with the Hiltons and their hotels, she might have a bit of fun at Barron’s expense. “Go back to your original title. Call it Miss Hilton Prefers the Ritz. Or,” I added, “if not that, how about Miss Hilton Regrets?” I knew, however, that none of these would see print. In life, and on the page, just when success seemed at hand, she subverted it. In this respect, she copied her mother, who sacrificed her early career to hormones. But Zsa Zsa’s implicit motto was “I won’t be defeated,” while Francesca’s more poignant one might have been “Fate always intervened.”

* * *

Was it fate, or Zsa Zsa, who stepped between Francesca and photojournalism? In the early 1970s, Francesca sold a few photographs to People magazine. In 1976 she traveled to the Middle East—Turkey, Iran, Syria, Lebanon—for her work. Arriving in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, she landed just as Syrian troops invaded the country. Her photographs from this period are of museum quality. “I was in the middle of a war zone,” she wrote in her book proposal, “and it was not a movie set. My mother called and pleaded with me to come home. I said, ‘Hell no!’ This is the real thing. Although I was terrified being there, it was fascinating to see it unravel before my eyes. I was the only photojournalist there and one of the photos I took ended up on the front page of the New York Times.”

Two years later, Francesca and Zsa Zsa appeared together on Dinah Shore’s syndicated talk show. Thirty-one at the time, Francesca conducted herself as a professional woman. Smartly attired in a black pantsuit, with light makeup and blonde hair stylishly done, she looked the antithesis of florid Gabor glamour. Nor did she resemble any of the Gabors, which surely pleased her. On this occasion, the only unsettling aspect was her leveled-out behavior: she seemed artifi-cally calm, perhaps medicated, very different from the volatile woman of later years. The topic of that day’s show was mothers and daughters. Dinah’s other guests were Judy and Diana Canova, and Lee Grant with her daughter, Dinah Manoff. Of the three pairs, only Zsa Zsa and Francesca betrayed strains in their relationship.

Unlike Judy Canova and her daughter, or Lee Grant and hers, who seemed like chums, Francesca and Zsa Zsa bristled, though subtly enough to maintain the nonconfrontational style of Dinah Shore’s show. When Zsa Zsa interrupted her daughter, Francesca snapped, “I understand the question!” For an instant, Zsa Zsa looked as if she had been bitten; next moment she was back to her shtick, fabulously giddy once more.

Then a cutaway to photos of each mother and daughter when the girls were very young. Zsa Zsa’s commentary: “Franci was three or four, she was very good then, she didn’t answer back, she was adorable. Now she has her own opinion about everything.” This Zsa Zsa said with a laugh that betrayed low-level anger, as if to rebuke her daughter for daring to be an adult. Francesca replied sotto voce and Zsa Zsa muttered a retort. Their swashbuckling exchange was not picked up by microphones.

Another cutaway to Francesca’s Middle East photographs. After half a dozen seen on camera, Dinah Shore and her guests applauded. Zsa Zsa did not, since Francesca’s time in Lebanon had been a source of contention. On the show, Francesca said, “When I was in Lebanon, my mother demanded, ‘Come home at once! You will come home, you must come home!’ She was very upset. I didn’t tell her I was there, she found out.”

Zsa Zsa’s anxiety, of course, was natural and certainly not blameworthy. Who wouldn’t worry about a loved one in a war zone? Unfortunately, Zsa Zsa wanted total obedience. When she spoke ex cathedra as the mother, she expected compliance of the kind that she, Eva, and Magda gave to Jolie. But Francesca was not a Gabor sister, and so the lifelong conflicts grew and festered.

* * *

Whenever I traveled to Los Angeles, Francesca and I would often meet for breakfast in Hollywood at her favorite Starbucks. Her rhapsodic review of the lattes, the bagels with cream cheese, and all else on the predictable menu struck me as ironic, and a bit melancholy, in view of her lifelong experience with fine restaurants. On the last one of these occasions, I arrived early and took a seat outside to wait for her. Surrounded by millennials and others in thrall to every conceivable electronic device, I spotted Francesca on the sidewalk thirty or forty yards away. Just as I stood up to go and meet her, a cyclone of abuse erupted from her mouth that would startle a Billingsgate fishwife.

With gorgon furrows on her face, she slung her words at the man seated to my right, who raised a bewildered head from his laptop as if upbraided by a she-devil. “You fucking piece of shit!” she screamed. “Son of a bitch, you made up lies about me on TMZ, goddamn you, rotten sewer rat!”

Catching his breath, the middle-aged defendant yelled back something I didn’t catch, although it sounded as accusatory as what Francesca charged him with. Dumbfounded though I was by such a scene—and before breakfast—I recall that no one seated at those tables outside Starbucks seemed surprised. Perhaps they imagined we were all extras in a movie.

I went over, greeted her, though she was too livid to do more than nod in my direction. The wildcat snarls back and forth grew louder even as I opened the door and guided her inside, making whatever anodyne small talk I could summon in the midst of such melodrama. “I’m hungry, aren’t you?” I asked. Then, “How’s your cat?” My relief was enormous when finally we found a table. Even so, Francesca’s glare at her adversary threatened to melt the plate-glass window. Soon the man sidled away, perhaps to amplify whatever slander he had perpetrated on TMZ.

Francesca soon calmed down, and I noticed that the staff deferred to her as if she were the Grande Dame of Franklin Avenue. Were they intimidated, I wondered (as I was, a bit), or was it owing to her difficulty walking, that she received table service while the rest of us stood in line at the counter?

Looking back, I see this altercation as more than an embarrassing scene in public. In a sense, it was the Gabor Göt-terdämmerung, all other battles having been fought and many of them won. Now, however, Eva’s ashes reposed in Westwood Village Memorial Park, Jolie’s and Magda’s farther away near Palm Springs, while Zsa Zsa, the last goddess of that fabled dynasty, lay slowly dying on a mountaintop in Bel Air, just a few miles from where Francesca battled demons—those invisible ones that plagued her body and mind, and the one of flesh and blood who had long since locked her out of paradise.

That day, that ordinary day in Hollywood, the great Gabor Valhalla began its final, fearsome fall.