Blond bombshell:
How Zsa Zsa Gabor defined an age with a life lived on the precipice of scandal
Glamour, glitz and heady scandal — find out how Zsa Zsa Gabor defined an age with a life lived on the precipice of scandal.
What is really important for a woman ... is to be entertaining,” Zsa Zsa Gabor once wrote. She certainly followed her own advice. The way she lived her life and the endless, outrageously quotable things she said marked her out as a personality utterly distinct from the world around her.
Born Gábor Sári in Budapest in 1917, Gabor became an actress, socialite, winner of Miss Hungary 1936, and pioneer of modern celebrity, known for a leading role in the 1952 film Moulin Rouge, but really blazing a trail in being famous for being famous.
A blonde bombshell who advocated promiscuity at all times, she publicly played up her own exoticism in America with exaggerated broken English.
She called everyone “daaahling”, saying it was to save her having to remember anybody’s name. She cultivated the air of an 18th-century Tsarina-turned-courtesan, eventually becoming one of the most wellknown names of the last century. With fame also surrounding her equally glamorous sisters, Magda and Eva, the family was an antecedent to today’s Kardashians.
Gabor’s was a world where women should marry whomsoever they pleased as long as they didn’t let it stop them from continuing to enjoy the company of as many other men as possible. When asked how many husbands she had, she responded, “You mean other than my own?”
Gabor married nine times, though she sometimes claimed it was only eight, and her last husband, Prince Frédéric von Anhalt, some 27 years her junior and the adopted son of Princess Marie-Auguste of Anhalt, insisted he was her 10th spouse.
Highlights from her marital history include George Sanders, who was also married to her sister Magda, and Conrad Hilton, great-great-grandfather of the socialite Paris Hilton and father of Zsa Zsa’s only child.
Another of her aphorisms was, “I am a marvellous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house.” Floating across Europe and America on a cloud of diamonds, fur and high-profile public feuds, every glamorous social event, and plenty of powerful men, seemed to bend to her glittering orbit.
“I have never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back,” she said of her penchant for divorce. In 1990, she spent three days in prison for slapping a police officer.
Her lovers were numerous, and are said to include almost every famous male name of the last century: Sean Connery, Frank Sinatra, John F Kennedy and Richard Burton were among her conquests, or so she claimed. Her secret? “The best way to attract a man immediately is to have a magnificent bosom and a half-size brain and let both of them show,” she said.
Infidelity was fine for her, but undesirable in her men. She had no loyalty to other women. “I couldn’t endure living in a harem, not even if I were the favourite (which, of course, I would be, if only because I would have poisoned all the others),” she wrote in her 1970 memoir, How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, How to Get Rid of a Man.
The stories about her can’t all be true. But she always understood the basic human thirst for gossip, and existed in a whispering aura of heady, unverifiable possible scandal.
For the last year, and well into her tenth decade, Zsa Zsa’s family had reported that she had been largely unconscious, beset by repeated illness.
Her daughter, Francesca Hilton, died of a stroke in early 2015 at the age of 67, and Zs aZ saw as reportedly unaware of her death. Zsa Zsa was partially paralysed after a car accident in 2002, endured several of her own strokes, and had a leg amputated following an infection.
Earlier in 2016 she was hospitalised for breathing difficulties and was scheduled to undergo surgery on her lungs a few days after her 99th birthday.
Even before her most serious illnessesset in, in her later life she rarely gave interviews. When she did grant an interview to Vanity Fair in 2007 she gave curt answers from atop a mound of pillows on a four-poster divan, near a gilded grand piano.
“The minute I understand a man, he is no longer exciting and a challenge to me,” she once said. “And the last thing in the world I want is for a man to understand me and know what’s always going on inside my head.”
Her wit belied her airhead image. As her health faded, so did the glitz and glamour of a personality who defined an age. But for Zsa Zsa Gabor, dying wasn’t something to worry about. Love, glamour and entertainment were far more pressing: “Don’t ever buy imitation furs,” she once said. “Because that’s worse than death.”