WHAT A VULGAR SALE DAH-LING!
The late Zsa Zsa Gabor’s NINTH husband (a fake German prince) has flogged all her worldly goods from her gold piano to her Saks store card and pill bottles
ADIAMOND necklace that spells out ‘Dah-ling’, an ornate gold-painted grand piano garish enough to have stood in for Liberace’s, and a ‘small mountain’ of monogrammed Louis Vuitton luggage — when it came to the most ostentatious excess, few women could hold a gold candelabra to Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Nobody managed to pull off hedonistic, vulgar glamour quite like the Hungarian-born film star who was the first to embody the phrase ‘famous for being famous’.
She died aged 99 in December 2016, but she took one last suitably splashy curtain call when her ninth and surviving husband — Frederic Prinz von Anhalt — sold off more than a thousand of her treasured possessions at the weekend.
The plunging evening gowns that once contained one of Hollywood’s most famous cleavages, and the floor-length fur coats that swept along countless red carpets next to husbands who changed almost as quickly as the fashion seasons, all went under the hammer last Saturday.
Much of the jewellery and furniture is as imitation as Prinz Frederic’s title, but that didn’t stop the Los Angeles online auction house Heritage Auctions reporting sale proceeds of $909,000 (€736,400), with some items still for sale.
Gabor, a former Miss Hungary, loved to make jokes about her string of rich husbands — who included the billionaire hotelier Conrad Hilton and the film star George Sanders.
Her most famous witticism, of course, is: ‘I am a marvellous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house.’
WELL, her last husband appears to have had the last laugh. As the sole beneficiary of her estate, Prinz Frederic is flogging off pretty much everything down to her prescription pill bottles.
Promoting the sale, he admitted he was a shameless huckster who bought his German title, made millions out of selling titles to other wannabes and first met Gabor after gatecrashing a grand Los Angeles party.
Cynics might even say that, having cashed in on her wealth during their 34 years together, he’s now wringing the final few dollars out of her.
‘It’s not about the money. I didn’t need her money,’ he told me. ‘It’s about taking care of Zsa Zsa’s stuff. She took care of all the furniture herself. In the living rooms, nobody was allowed to touch the antiques. She cleaned them herself.’
His late wife loved all her possessions and wanted them to be appreciated, and so she urged him when she was still alive to put them up for auction, he said.
Besides, he adds, he’s 74 and will probably soon be moving out of the mansion they shared in Bel Air and into a much smaller place where he won’t have space to put the stuff.
But isn’t it a little tacky, to sell the pill bottles of a woman who suffered from years of pain and ill health?
‘Well, that was a surprise to me,’ he insists. ‘People called me to ask if I would sell them. I was ready to throw them away, but friends of hers, they want them. The auction house said people love to collect those things.’
Von Anhalt is sensitive to suggestions that he sponged off his wife, insisting he was a successful businessman in Germany who had come to the US on holiday in 1982 — only to meet the multi-millionairess who took an instant shine to his title.
‘Of course, when she told me to move into her house, I moved into the house,’ he explains. ‘She didn’t want me to get my own business and make my money because she wanted me to be around her. What was I going to do — fight with her every day?’
He said he kept back a few of Gabor’s possessions that had strong personal associations for him. And
apparently, the item he found hardest to put up for sale — because of the fond memories it evokes — was his wife’s mirrored dining table with matching and somewhat stained orange velvet chairs. 'We had four presidents sitting there, as well as Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Kirk Douglas... all those people had dinner with my wife and me,’ he says. Endless tea and crockery sets attest to a woman who clearly could never have too much of anything. Von Anhalt says he tried in vain to contain Gabor’s spending, but she simply loved buying things. Bidders who wanted a slice of Zsa Zsa’s style chose between opulent, garnish and tacky — or a mix of all Three. Gold is the ubiquitous colour. over the Steinway grand was brought r by third husband George Sanders from London after he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the 1950 film All About Eve. The couple had it painted gold. It was so camp that it was used in the 2013 Liberace biopic Behind The Candelabra, which was filmed at Gabor’s mansion.
Also gold is the marital bed — a massive carved wood canopy fourposter, which Gabor shared not only with von Anhalt, but also husbands Six, Seven and Eight.
Similarly impressive is a huge Louis XV-style 16-light candelabra that hung in her hallway.
There were also dozens of items in the sale from a vast wardrobe that included pieces by Chanel, Dior and Valentino along with several Hermes handbags.
One lot was a 104-piece Moet Imperial champagne collection — reflecting the fact that Gabor typically offered every visitor to her 9,000 sq ft home a glass of champagne.
Few people can have amassed as many paintings of themselves. The sale included around a dozen, all flattering and showing her in various states of utter gorgeousness. Zsa Zsa’s own somewhat underwhelming artwork is contained in a sketchpad in which she drew people in court at her 1989 trial for infamously slapping a police officer who stopped her for driving her Rolls-Royce without proper registration.
FOR a woman said to have had one of the world’s finest diamond collections, the auction was somewhat disappointing. But Gabor reportedly lost most of what was once estimated to be a $40million (€32.4m) fortune thanks to huge medical bills and investing in Bernie Madoff ’s infamous Ponzi scam.
She sold her mansion — once owned by Elvis Presley — for $11 million (€8.9m) in 2013, but von Anhalt persuaded the new owners to let him stay on despite the condition that four months after Gabor’s death it would be vacated.
Von Anhalt, who shares his late wife’s insatiable hunger for the limelight, has long been dogged by controversy. A compulsive teller of tall tales, his stories about his life with Gabor tend to change every time he tells them.
Last month, he told the Hollywood Reporter how he was born Hans Robert Lichtenberg in Germany but became Prinz Frederic von Anhalt, Duke of Saxony and Westphalia, Count of Ascania, in 1979 (despite Germany abolishing its nobility in 1919).
The impoverished Princess Marie von Anhalt, daughter-in-law to the last Kaiser, adopted him in exchange for a monthly pension.
Von Anhalt said he made money from loan-sharking and running gay saunas, but admitted he needed a title as a ‘door-opener’ to win over the rich and famous.
The ‘Prinz’ — who reportedly has German convictions for assault, burglary, fraud and theft — said he ‘sold’ his aristocratic name via brief sham marriages and adopting five adult sons who paid him for the privilege, while claiming to have earned over $10 million (€8.1m) from it.
Von Anhalt refuses to discuss his sex life and rumours that he’s gay, although he has described his marriage to Gabor as having been about friendship rather than love.
He claims their union ultimately lasted so long because, unlike her previous husbands, he always gave in to his tempestuous wife.
If he’s telling the truth about her tempers, the presence of a dozen crockery sets in the auction is a small miracle.
Zsa Zsa loved nothing better than to hurl a plate when she was trying to make a point.
÷For auction details and to view the remaining items visit ha.com