Introduction: Five Nights in the Fifties
Why, one may ask, only five? After all, the blonde-hungry 1950s belonged to the Gabors as surely as to Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and to all those bottle-blonde starlets, models, and TV personalities. And also, of course, to countless imitators striving to live blonde lives in the postwar, conformist Eisenhower era, all of whom answered “Yes!” to Clairol’s advertisement: “Is it true blondes have more fun?”
Every night from 1950 to 1960 belonged to one Gabor or another. Zsa Zsa and Eva laid claim to most, but Magda—the redhead, the older sister—and Jolie, the irrepressible mother, grabbed the leftovers. Since these opening pages must limit the Gabor exploits of that teeming decade, I begin with an hors d’oeuvre: five pungent nights that helped entrench the Gabors in the spotlight. (Once on that magic media carpet, they scrambled and clawed to remain irresistible public dahlings.) After this appetizer, like Scheherazade I will unscroll the prodigious, hallucinatory, rollicking, and sometimes bitter lives of these four women, as well as the very different trajectories of Vilmos, father of the Gabor sisters, and Francesca Hilton, Zsa Zsa’s troubled daughter.
January 24, 1950
Opening night of The Happy Time at the Plymouth Theatre on Forty-fifth Street in New York. Written by Samuel Taylor, produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and set in Ottawa in the 1920s, it’s the story of Bibi, a French-Canadian schoolboy on the verge of puberty who learns something—but not much—about love. For 1950, however, in Cold War America, the play was looked on as a sex comedy, for Bibi stands accused by his schoolmaster of drawing dirty pictures, and much talk ensues among the grown-ups about nudity and the like. It turns out the boy didn’t do it—those doodles were the work of a guttersnipe classmate.
At home, the boy’s mother is a straitlaced Presbyterian while his more lenient father is a vaudeville musician and there’s an uncle who is—wink, wink—a traveling salesman. Then there’s Mignonette, the French maid, who gives Bibi his first kiss and, as Life magazine demurely put it, “Bibi feels the first stirrings of manhood.” (This plot, of course, is Gigi transgendered.)
The French maid, however, speaks with a Hungarian accent, for she is played by Eva Gabor. Making her Broadway debut, Eva the minx outshone other cast members with her sparkle. Life again: “The play’s most decorative performer is Eva Gabor.” Others in the journeyman cast included character actors Kurt Kasznar, Leora Dana, Claude Dauphin, and Johnny Stewart as Bibi. Eva, too, felt the boy’s “stirrings,” for Stewart was sixteen years old and when he and Eva embraced, his manhood saluted.
Eva, who arrived in the United States in 1939 with the first of her five husbands, had appeared in half a dozen forgettable movies from 1941 to the end of the decade. Then, on October 3, 1949, she costarred with Burgess Meredith on CBS in the first episode of the network’s new series, The Silver Theater. This episode, broadcast live, was titled L’Amour the Merrier, and Eva played a French maid with a Hungarian accent. Richard Rodgers, sans Hammerstein, happened to watch television that night, and even in black and white Eva struck him as just the right article for The Happy Time. Had he guessed that she was thirty-one years old, he might have switched channels in search of a fresher soubrette.
The play ran for 614 performances, but Eva left the cast after a year and a half, in May 1951. Two weeks after the opening, Eva’s flawless face appeared on the cover of Life. That stunning portrait was the work of Philippe Halsman, one of the twentieth century’s best-known photographers. A few years later, a different photograph from the session, although equally strong, appeared on the cover of Eva’s autobiography, Orchids and Salami.
Eva’s Life cover flung open doors for her in New York that had remained shut in Hollywood. For a time, Eva’s face, her fashions, and most of all her accent popped up everywhere at once. A feeding frenzy swirled around this new exotic beauty whose past lay locked behind the Iron Curtain. But acting, more than allure, was her great passion. This she cultivated with love and labor, although glamour, and her accent, blocked the route. Like Marilyn Monroe, Eva studied with expert teachers and attended classes at the Actors Studio. Like Marilyn also, no one believed she wished to perfect the craft of acting.
July 23, 1951
Enter Zsa Zsa. With all eyes on Eva, Zsa Zsa was a distant dream that had not yet come true. Her resumé, had she produced one, would have shown that she possessed the requisites for a sort of louche fame, for in 1933, at age fifteen, she had been a contender in the Miss Hungary contest. Two years after that, she married an official in the Turkish government who often visited Budapest on political missions. With him, she lived in Ankara until 1941, when she embarked for the United States and arrived in New York on June 3rd of that year, along with twenty-one suitcases. In 1942 she married Conrad Hilton, the wealthy but tightfisted American hotelier whose anticipated generosity proved a sore disappointment to his spendthrift young wife.
Having deleted Conrad Hilton, in 1949 she married the actor George Sanders, who taunted and belittled her when she begged him to help her get a toehold in movies. Between Hilton and Sanders, Zsa Zsa cracked up and became the involuntary inmate of a psychiatric institution.
When Eva opened on Broadway in The Happy Time, Zsa Zsa had been Mrs. George Sanders for less than a year. Living in Hollywood yet segregated from the studios, Zsa Zsa felt betrayed by her nearest and dearest: George, the man she loved, and also the younger sister who made movies and who now posed for magazine covers and had New York at her feet, as the columnists liked to say. Zsa Zsa secretly accused Eva of a stroke of low cunning, for the Life cover bore the date February 6, 1950—Zsa Zsa’s thirty-third birthday!
While Zsa Zsa seethed with envy, news came one day of an offer to make a film—an offer for George, of course. They had now been married just over two years, and in the summer of 1951 George left for England to make Ivanhoe, in which he costarred with Robert Taylor, Joan Fontaine, and Elizabeth Taylor. Zsa Zsa begged and pleaded to go along. Her supplications echoed like forlorn yodels across the hills of Bel Air, where she lived with George and loved him with a full heart, though he was never under her spell and found her usually quite exasperating. In spite of his ill treatment, or as she later implied, because of it, she loved him until death.
“You stay home,” he told her. “You would just be bored and would make it impossible for me to work.”
In the empty house, she wept and phoned her mother in New York. But not until long-distance rates went down after five o’clock; the Gabors, even when prosperous, counted their spare change. “Oh, Nyuszi,” Zsa Zsa wailed, “I cannot live without him. I will kill myself.” (The girls sometimes called her “Mama,” though more often “Nyuszi,” or “Nyuszika,” pet names in Hungarian meaning “bunny rabbit.”)
Jolie had heard it all before. “Buy a new frock and charge it to George,” she counseled. “And throw in diamond earrings to match.”
When George learned of his mother-in-law’s advice, he called her “you fucking Hungarian!” But Jolie, having seen husbands enter and exit, knew that greatness lay in store for her Zsa Zsa, along with marital treasures far brighter than this disdainful man who spoke Russian to his brother when he wished to keep secrets from Zsa Zsa.
That brother, the actor Tom Conway, had grown up in St. Petersburg, along with George and their sister. Although Russian citizens, they were said to be descended from English stock and the Sanders family emigrated to England at the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917. (The family’s English heritage has subsequently been disputed. Late in her life, George’s sister came to believe the family to be pure Russian.)
Tom Conway worked steadily in pictures, although in character roles and smaller parts, unlike George, who had become a real movie star. Between films, Tom was a regular panelist on a new West Coast television show called Bachelor’s Haven. The show’s gimmick was advice to the lovelorn, always lighthearted and the sillier the better. (The heavy breathing of ABC’s The Bachelor and its spinoffs was unthinkable on fifties TV.)
On July 23, 1951, two days after George’s departure for England, Tom Conway phoned Zsa Zsa with an offer that she almost refused. “We’ve a vacancy on tonight’s panel,” he said. “Do be a love and help me out of a jam.” She balked. True, she was not easily intimidated, for she had traveled alone, during wartime, from Turkey across such risky terrain as Iran, Iraq, and Afganistan, finally boarding a ship in India for passage to the U.S. She had married three times and had woken up in a straitjacket in a mental ward. All that, yet she quailed at the thought of live TV. “No, dahling,” she said. “Your dear brother has told me a thousand times I have no talent.” Pause. “What would George say?” Two beats. “I’ll show that son of a bitch. What time are you picking me up?”
If the camera in that TV studio had been of the male gender, Zsa Zsa would surely have seen its manhood stirring, for it did everything but fondle her. And no wonder. Perfect skin, pure as vanilla ice cream, against her black Balenciaga gown. Diamond earrings and more diamonds around her neck and on her fingers. When she opened her red Cupid’s bow mouth, a feral accent spilled out that sounded like a snow leopard learning English.
During the show’s opening moments, the host commented on her jewelry. She shrugged. “Dahling, zese are just my vork-ing diamonds.” The audience roared; Zsa Zsa’s wisecracks kept them in stitches right up to the closing credits and calls inundated the switchboard. Soon fan letters flooded the station. A week later Daily Variety reported that Zsa Zsa was an “instant star” and had been invited as a regular on the show.
Bundy Solt, a childhood friend of the Gabor sisters, had come to Hollywood at the outbreak of World War II. Two days after Zsa Zsa’s dazzling debut, he phoned her and said, “Have you read the trade papers?”
She replied, “I do not know what means ‘trade papers.’ ”
“You dope,” he replied. “Hold the line.” And he read her the raves, which perplexed the brand-new celebrity. As far as she knew, she had done nothing other than being Zsa Zsa Gabor.
When George Sanders returned from his long location shoot in England, he first thought it was Eva once more on the cover of Life. But no, it was Zsa Zsa, who adorned the issue of October 15, 1951. She had been too busy to inform him that she now had an agent, a manager, a dramatic coach, a PR team promoting her, and offers to appear in movies.
Back in New York, good-natured Eva felt kicked in the belly. She, who had toiled for years in drama classes, rehearsed scenes and monologues, showed up for cold readings, done screen tests and auditions—all that, and now her bossy, overbearing sister had become one of the greatest overnight successes in show-biz history. And all because of a raucous, unscripted appearance on TV.
January 9, 1953
In the press, Magda was often described as “the quiet Gabor.” And so she was, at least in public. In the family, she could raise her voice, flounce out of a room, spew invective, and slam doors as theatrically as the others. She had no theatrical ambitions, however, until one day a producer of plays for a regional theatre phoned to offer her a part in The Women, the acerbic comedy of manners written by Clare Boothe Luce. The play’s gimmick is that the female characters, in bitchy repartee, dissect husbands and boyfriends—and one another—yet no men appear on the scene. The 1939 film version, directed by George Cukor, starred Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Fontaine.
When the producer told Magda why he was calling, she berated him. “You are an opportunist!” she hissed. “You want only a Gabor for publicity. I have never been in my life on a stage.”
He managed to say that he wanted her for the role of Crystal. “She’s the girl in the bathtub,” he added.
“I can see it now,” Magda railed. “Your publicity—‘See a Gabor in a Bathtub.’ ”
The producer didn’t flinch. “So you can’t take a challenge,” he chortled. “You lack the courage of Zsa Zsa and Eva!”
That did it. “I was so mad I signed for the play. But not for Crystal in the bathtub. I played Peggy, the role of Joan Fontaine in the film.” (In this production, the character was described as a “war bride” to account for her accent.)
Magda’s stage debut took place January 9, 1953, at the Hilltop Theater in the Round in Lutherville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore. The run of the play was thirteen performances, with Magda the only neophyte in a seasoned cast. During one performance, with Magda and four other cast members onstage, an actress forgot her line. It was hardly her fault, however, for in this arena production, the front row of the audience sat only a few feet from the actors. When the script called for this actress to light a cigarette, a man in the front row did it for her. His unwelcome courtesy threw her off. She went blank. At that point, Magda ad-libbed a line that quickly steered her floundering colleague back on script. Backstage after the performance, the entire cast praised her quick thinking. “Magda,” they said, “you’re a real trouper. Welcome to the theatre!”
Magda said later, after appearing in other plays, that instead of theatre in the round she preferred a traditional proscenium—or, as she called it, “theatre in the square.”
February 10, 1953
Unstoppable Zsa Zsa. In spite of her late start in show business, she had almost fifty years ahead during which she would perform in virtually every branch of entertainment, and in many countries, until her final appearance before a camera in 1998.
Among the reverberations from her slam-bang debut on Bachelor’s Haven were three films made in rapid succession: Lovely to Look At, for MGM, filmed in fall 1951; We’re Not Married, at 20th Century Fox, shot in December 1951 and into 1952; and Moulin Rouge, for which Zsa Zsa traveled to Paris and then to London in the summer and fall of 1952.
When Moulin Rouge opened in New York on February 10, 1953, Zsa Zsa had star billing second only to José Ferrer. That night, the same New York that had lain stretched out at Eva’s feet three years earlier now clamored for Zsa Zsa. If that fickle city spoke with a single voice, it might well have rasped, “Eva who? We want Zsa Zsa, send her out that we may know her!”
She arrived at Idlewild Airport to an aurora borealis of flashbulbs and newsreel cameras. The stampede followed her to the Plaza, where the film’s producers had booked a larger suite, and a more lavish one, than anything ex-husband Conrad Hilton had ever shown her—and he owned the Plaza.
Zsa Zsa recalled every instant of her apotheosis: “The morning of the Moulin Rouge premiere I climbed a white ladder at Fiftieth Street and Broadway and while the cameras turned, I replaced the street sign with one reading Rue de Montmartre in honor of our opening at the nearby Capitol Theatre.”
Outside the Capitol, Walter Winchell acted as emcee for the premiere, proceeds of which would go to charity. In later years Winchell would discover that Zsa Zsa could talk faster and say less than he, but on that cold February night in 1953 even he was agog. As crowds of fans pushed against police barricades, and klieg lights outshone the bright lights of Times Square, celebrities arrived in droves, but no one got louder cheers than Zsa Zsa, who loved the adulation so much that she might have forgotten to go inside and watch herself onscreen had not Harold Mirisch, one of the producers, signaled that the show was about to begin and escorted her to what she perhaps mistook for a throne. That night, she was monarch of all she surveyed.
“Moulin Rouge began, and I watched myself. How bitterly I had fought with John Huston, how I had struggled with my part, how terrified I had been through all the shooting—now I was repaid. The evening was a triumph. At my staircase scene the audience broke into applause, and when the lights went on, I heard voices: ‘Zsa Zsa! We want Zsa Zsa!’ ”
When she returned at last to the Plaza, she found a telegram: YOU AND TECHNICOLOR SAVED OUR PICTURE. CONTRATULATIONS. JOHN HUSTON.
The audience loved her, and so did New York, and most reviewers singled her out as—well, not knowing exactly what she was, they decided that readers should keep their eyes on this thrilling newcomer.
* * *
A short time before the premiere, Zsa Zsa had encountered Porfirio Rubirosa, a roving diplomat for the Dominican Republic and the ex-husband of French film star Danielle Darrieux and also of Doris Duke, said to be the richest woman in the world. But on the night of February 10, 1953, he was there at the Plaza, and when Zsa Zsa returned from her evening of glory, he telephoned to invite her downstairs to the Persian Room. There he and several friends, including Prince Carl Bernadotte of Sweden, were waiting to toast her victory.
This, the fourth one of those five Gabor nights in the fifties, might reasonably count as a double entry, for not only did Zsa Zsa reach the pinnacle of her professional life, but before the night was over, she had captivated the man reputed to be the Greatest Lover of the Century. That night she spent in the notorious, intoxicating arms of Rubirosa.
Too much happiness, however, proved dangerous, for that very night began Zsa Zsa’s long, slow decline from her brief pinnacle. If her famous stairway scene in Moulin Rouge had flashed a mirror image behind the screen of the Capitol Theatre, the audience might have watched in disbelief as Zsa Zsa shed the adulation of that evening, along with the admiration of the crowd and the promise suggested by reviewers. In time her lovely screen persona would reverse and turn into a caricature and a parody—a hollow husk and a spectre that haunted even Zsa Zsa herself.
October 29, 1958
On a cold autumn Sunday, Eva and Magda arrive at Flughafen Wien, Vienna International Airport, on a flight from New York, and two days later Jolie blows into town. Then, on Wednesday evening, October 29, 1958, Zsa Zsa draws the biggest crowds when she and her eleven-year-old daughter, Francesca Hilton, land in Vienna on a flight from Rome. She has taken a few days off from filming For the First Time with Mario Lanza. Zsa Zsa leaves the plane ahead of other passengers, and behind her comes Francesca, clutching a Hula-Hoop. (“The first one in Italy!” she exclaimed more than fifty years later. “The Italians had never seen anything like it.”)
They have all come to Vienna for a reunion with Vilmos, Jolie’s ex-husband, the father of Magda, Zsa Zsa, and Eva, and Francesca’s grandfather. It’s the first time the entire family has been together since 1948, when Vilmos, who had spent three years in the United States, decided that Hungary was where he wanted to live out his remaining years. Francesca was an infant then, so that tonight it’s as if she has not met him before. Never again will the entire family be together, for Vilmos will die four years later.
Hungary’s communist authorities have, at last, issued a visa to the elderly man. His ex-wife and his daughters used every influence available in Washington and elsewhere to obtain his eight-day release from behind the Iron Curtain.
There at the airport to meet Zsa Zsa and Francesca are Vilmos and Jolie. Great throngs of reporters, photographers, police, autograph seekers, and the merely curious make it difficult for Zsa Zsa to embrace her father and cover him with kisses. Not once, but repeatedly. Everyone kisses everyone else—Zsa Zsa kisses Vilmos, then Jolie, Vilmos kisses Zsa Zsa, Jolie kisses Vilmos, Francesca kisses Vilmos and then her grandmother. The crowds, even in orderly Vienna, verge on hysteria like those at the riotous Hollywood premiere in The Day of the Locust.
A curious omission: no one sheds tears at this highly emotional meeting. That’s because tough-minded Gabors always kept their deepest emotions out of sight. “This is my only real husband,” Jolie chimes out, whether to Vilmos or the press is unclear. She kisses him once more—for the cameras, forgetting that thirty years earlier she had called him a savage reprobate. We can’t make out what Vilmos thinks of his daughters’ candy-floss fame and their display of capitalistic luxury. The choice of fur coats is wide, the jewelry slightly subdued for this dignified occasion in a conservative European city.
For years, his daughters, and Jolie as well, have sent Vilmos as much money as allowed by a rigid communist state, reportedly one hundred dollars a month. They are allowed to ship parcels not to exceed the value of forty dollars, and Zsa Zsa sends a monthly supply of insulin, for Vilmos is diabetic. Until recently, he and his second wife, formerly his secretary, lived in a one-room flat in Budakeszi, a bleak suburb of Budapest. Indeed, all is bleak since the uprising in 1956. Exactly two years ago, in late October, Hungarians revolted against Russian tyranny only to be murdered by the thousands as Russian tanks invaded the country and gunfire ripped Budapest apart. Those men and women not killed in the streets, or lined up before firing squads, were herded into sealed boxcars and sent to the Soviet Union, never to be seen again, or else imprisoned in Hungary under vile conditions.
Tonight the Gabors move toward their limousine but it’s like walking through water. The police can barely control the frenzied crowd. Newsmen shout questions through the air in German, English, Hungarian, and Zsa Zsa flings back press-release tidbits in all three languages. “Ja, natürlich freue ich mich sehr, meinen lieben Vater wiederzusehen!” and “Yes, we are all happy. Please let us pass.” The throng swirls around these famous Gabors like extras in a Fellini movie.
Eventually, airport police push the crowds aside and clear a path into the terminal, to baggage retrieval, and at last to the waiting limousine. Francesca climbs in first, then Jolie and Vilmos, and Zsa Zsa. On to the august Sacher Hotel, where the Gabors occupy four suites.
“No, no, I cannot give any more autographs,” Zsa Zsa says, slightly irritated, as she glides through the imperial doors. “I haven’t seen my father in years!” Accosted once more, Zsa Zsa snaps, “I am not answering this interview!” Nevertheless, she permits one newsreel photographer into her boudoir for a moment. The next day on Austrian television Zsa Zsa preens and primps before a large mirror, even though hair and makeup have retained their movie star perfection. As always, she is the fairest in the land.
After everyone has freshened up, they gather in Magda and Eva’s suite. The press is invited in, flashbulbs go off like popcorn and newsreel cameras whirr and buzz. Three generations! Mink coats out of sight, pearl necklaces on Jolie and her girls, Eva and Magda showing décolletage and bare shoulders in contrast to Zsa Zsa’s tailored suit, everyone kissing everyone once more, it’s like a champage high on New Year’s Eve at midnight. Then Francesca takes out her own camera and photographs the family while press photographers take pictures of her doing so.
She is the only one who will soon go to sleep. Her mother, her aunts, and her grandparents will talk most of the night. On Sunday night, after their arrival, Eva, Magda, and their father stayed up talking until five in the morning. “And we cried and cried,” said Magda. They also laughed at his old-country notions. When Magda took out a cigarette, Vilmos jumped. “Oh Magduska, you smoke. How terrible!”
Tonight Magda, with a firm smile, ushers to the door all those who have no Gabor blood. Only then do she, her mother and father, and her sisters, say all the things that Gabors, and others, say when overcome by happiness. During these fleeting hours, the night is perfect. Here in the warmth and comfort and safety of this venerable hotel, it is as if there were no war, no separation, no tears, and no death.