SIMPLY FABULOUS
Remembering Zsa Zsa
Zsa Zsa Gabor lived many celebrity lifetimes in one.
She sang opera, won beauty pageants, waged feuds, suffered strokes, raised horses, “wrote” books, made exercise videos, lost limbs, slipped into comas, awoke from comas, sued and was sued, dated Henry Kissinger, danced with Josip Broz Tito, bedded Kemal Atatürk, assumed the mantle of princess and duchess, punched a Spanish cop in the 1960s, slapped a Beverly Hills cop in the 1980s, allegedly used Evian to bathe during her three days in jail, bought Elvis Presley’s hilltop mansion in Bel Air, guest-starred on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and was RUSHED TO THE HOSPITAL! more times in the past 20 years than any other resident of Los Angeles County.
Two months shy of 100 years old, Gabor has passed away, and so vaat, dahling? She’s been dying for years now. No one under 25 knows her name, no one under 40 can articulate why she was a big deal, and no one under 60 thinks of her as anything but a has-been.
But what had she been? A fetching Hungarian who immigrated to Hollywood, became a hot blond, married a millionaire, made a couple movies — and then stayed famous by looking and acting famous.
Sound familiar? Yes, but she did it first and best, and that’s the “so what:” Gabor rouge’d a trail for the career-free celebrity. She was, simply, an invention of herself.
Without Gabor, the road would’ve been rockier for women like Anita Ekberg, Twiggy, Ivana Trump, Anna Nicole Smith, Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton (Gabor’s second husband’s great granddaughter), and most of the Real Housewives — as well as men, too, like the next president of the United States. Without Gabor, who married nine times, the romantic reputations of more “respectable” celebrities (Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Larry King) would have borne greater strain. For professional socialites, she raised the bar by lowering it. She worked hard at appearing not to work. She made classiness tacky, and tackiness classy, in a way that Donald Trump has done for 30 years. Gabor was the midpoint between Grace Kelly and Liberace.
Death and dying, for Gabor, would have to be done in the spotlight, too. Her most recent visible trip to the hospital was earlier this year, after having difficulty breathing, according to TMZ. “She is fighting right now and she wants to move on,” her husband, Prince Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, told Entertainment Tonight in February. “She wants to live.” But on Sunday, at her Bel Air mansion, she succumbed. And now we’re left to puzzle about her legacy, if there is one, just as we puzzled about her purpose, as if she needed one.
What did she represent? The American dream, or a version of it (or a perversion of it). Her prosperous parents pushed the three Gabor sisters to remain upwardly mobile, and the ceiling in Hungary was only so high. So Gabor followed younger sister Eva to Hollywood, acted for Orson Welles and John Huston and Vincente Minnelli, and inked herself onto the tabloid of our minds. Gabor was the original material girl, slung with pearls, dripping with diamonds, wrapped in mink, bristling with black feathers.
She objectified men, reduced them to musculature, turned them to punchlines. “I am a marvellous housekeeper,” she was oft-quoted. “Every time I leave a man, I keep his house.”
Among the trophy husbands mounted on Gabor’s wall: a Turkish diplomat, a Texas oil man, a German prince, a hotel magnate, an Oscar-winning actor.
Richard Nixon once set her up with Henry Kissinger, she wrote in her memoir One Lifetime is Not Enough, but clothes never came off.
“There is no bigger aphrodisiac than power,” she said in 1987 to David Letterman, who introduced her as “one of the all-time great talk-show guests” and “the only woman I know named Zsa Zsa.”
That was a perfect way to describe her. Gabor just was. And what she was fabulous.