Glamour Gabor
Zsa Zsa Gabor, who had allure and husbands in spades, dies at 99.
THE best known of three glamorous sisters from Hungary, actress Zsa Zsa Gabor pioneered a modern version of celebrity – she was famous for being famous.
With the advent of television talk shows, Gabor became a frequent guest as early as the 1950s, charming audiences with her fractured English and slightly risque jokes about her reputation as an oft-married seductress fond of men and money.
“Husbands are like fires. They go out if unattended,” she would say. Or “I want a man who is kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?”
Her nine marriages and reputation for shaving years off her age made her a pop-culture punchline. When entertainer Bob Hope joked, “You can calculate Zsa Zsa Gabor’s age by the rings on her fingers,” it only cemented her fame.
So did a penchant for public escapades that included a 1989 assault conviction for slapping a Beverly Hills police officer. When reporters asked if she was ppreparedp for a longg trial, she cooed: “I have enough outfits to last a year.”
The final years of her life were marked by a strange circus of publicity often orchestrated by her ninth husband, Prince Frederic Von Anhalt, a German immigrant who had brokered an adoption as an adult to gain a royal-sounding title. He issued frequent media alerts on her precarious health and publicly squabbled with Gabor’s only child, Francesca Hilton.
Gabor died Sunday of heart failure in her Bel Air mansion, according to her publicist Edward Lozzi. She was 99.
The last surviving Gabor sister, she had been in declining health after being seriously injured in 2002 when the Rolls-Royce convertible in which she was riding, with her hairdresser at the wheel, jumped a curb on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood and struck a light pole. The accident left Gabor partially paralysed.
She had been in and out of the hospital since breaking her hip in 2010 and having most of her right leg amputated in early 2011 after developing an infection following hip-replacement surgery.
Although her personal life grabbed the headlines, Gabor did build an acting career. One of her finest film roles came early in her career when she portrayed Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s model in 1952’s Moulin Rouge. In directing her, John Huston reportedly said: “Zsa Zsa, forget about acting. Just make love to the camera.”
Gabor later told a biographer: “Now, I knew very little about acting but a great deal about making love. It worked.”
In 1958 she made an impression as a strip-club owner in the Orson Welles cult classic Touch Of Evil and appeared in the campy Queen Of Outer Space, one of her many more forgettable movies. She acted in at least 30 films.
By the 1970s, Gabor had begun turning down the smaller parts that came her way but would occasionally appear on TV and in movies. She made appearances on talk shows, and on game shows as a panellist, into the 1990s. To Gabor, everyone was “dahlink”, an endearment that entered the vernacular of mid20th century America. She was a celebrity of the old school who believed in glamour. She once said of today’s actresses, “When you see them in real life, they look like nothing.” Not so Zsa Zsa, who flaunted her jewels and furs. She turned her celebrity into a commodity, mining her own reputationp for one-liners. “I am a marvellous hoousekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house,” she mmight say, or “There is nothing wronng with a woman encouraging a man’s advances, as long as they aare in cash.”
The aristoocratic, blonde Gabor was repo rtedly wooed by such rich andd famous men as Princee Aly Khan, billioonaire J. Paul Getty andd actor Richard Buurton, none of whom shhe married. Shortly after arrivinga in the United States in 1942, she made her most notable marriage with second husband Conrad Hilton, the hotel magnate, who was more than twice her age.
The union lasted five years. The couple’s daughter, Francesca, was the only offspring of the Gabor sisters, wwho had at least 18 mmarriages among thhem. Older sister Maagda, who largely stayeed out of the limellight, had at least five husbannds, while younger sister EEva had at least four. Eva madde the biggest splash as an actrress, co-starring in the CBS sitcomm Green Acres, which debuted in 11965.
Life with hiis young wife, Hilton later wrote, wwas “a little like holding a Romman candle – beautiful, exc iting, but you were never quite suure when it would go off. And it iis surprisingly hard live the Fourth of July y day.” e added, “Glamour, I und, is expensive.” For her part, Gabor ater said Hilton was he only husband she ad married for money. In the divorce ettlement she received US$ 35,000 and US$2,500 a month until she remarried. That union linked her by marriage to tabloid favourite Paris Hilton, Conrad’s great- granddaughter.
Gabor’s next marriage, in 1949, was to actor George Sanders, whom she called her one true love. But Gabor complained that the mercurial Sanders wanted to turn her into a “little hausfrau” and divorced him after five years. Sanders, who was later briefly married to Gabor’s sister Magda, committed suicide in 1972.
Gabor next married businessman Herbert Hutner, oilman Joshua Cosden, inventor Jack Ryan, attorney Michael O’Hara and Mexican businessman Felipe de Alba. The de Alba union was declared invalid after a day because Gabor’s divorce from O’Hara wasn’t final.
In 1986, when Gabor married Von Anhalt, she told reporters he would be her last husband. She was true to her word.
Zsa Zsa Gabor was born Sari Gabor in Budapest on Feb 6, 1917, and named for Hungarian actress Sari Fedak. Her father, Vilmos, was a cavalry officer turned diamond merchant, and her mother, Jolie, was a one-time aspiring actress who steered her daughters toward show business.
At 15, Zsa Zsa entered the Miss Hungary contest, which led to another beauty contest in Vienna. Instead of returning to Swiss boarding school, Gabor proposed to Burhan Belge, a former Turkish ambassador to Hungary, and the couple married.
But bored with her first husband – and entranced by sister Eva’s descriptions of life in Hollywood, where she had started acting – Gabor hopped a ship to the US in 1941 and had her marriage annulled.
Her mother came too, and started a successful jewellery business in New York. With her daughters, she became a fixture of high society. Both Zsa Zsa and Eva often appeared on covers of popular magazines and in 1953 the three sisters had a nightclub act in Las Vegas.
Gabor said she was “born to make headlines”, and often did.
In a 1989 incident that came to be known as “the slap heard ‘round the world”, she was convicted of assaulting Paul Kramer, a Beverly Hills police officer who had pulled over her Rolls-Royce Corniche for having expired license plate tags. She claimed she never hit him, served three days in jail and paid nearly US$13,000 in fines. She later poked fun at the cop-slapping incident in the movie The Naked Gun 2 1/2.
Medical bills and meagre savings forced Von Anhalt to list Gabor’s mansion in 2011, he said. Two years later the home sold for US$11mil in a court-approved deal that allowed the couple to continue living there for three more years.
An accomplished horsewoman, Gabor rode in the Rose Parade and owned a horse ranch in Ventura County. She also wrote several autobiographies, including a slender 1970 volume, How To Catch A Man, How To Keep A Man, How To Get Rid Of A Man.
“A girl must marry for love,” Gabor once said, “and keep on marrying until she finds it.”
She is survived by her husband, who could not immediately be reached by the Los Angeles Tim es on Sunday.