by Sam Staggs
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.
Chapter 1
Gábor úr és Gáborné
(Mr. and Mrs. Gabor)
To locate the beginning of the Gabor saga, we must go to Central Europe at the time of the complicated dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, which was created in 1867 and ruled by the Hapsburgs. On the other hand, if we accept fanciful family lore, our trajectory jumps to earlier centuries farther east. Zsa Zsa and Eva spoke so often of their high Mongolian cheekbones that this fiction became real to them as they pictured ancestors on horseback who swept across the Eurasian steppe with Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan. From time to time in Zsa Zsa’s yarns, a soupçon of Gypsy blood spiced their veins, and she sometimes alluded to an obscure Russian granny perched on a far branch of the family tree. Her kinsmen seemed unaware of this babushka.
In reality, they were Jewish. Francesca maintained, vaguely, that Vilmos, her grandfather, was not, yet he was born Farkas Miklós Grün and, like many Hungarian Jews in the late nineteenth century, changed his name to advance financially and socially at a time of raging anti-Semitism. Unlike some of their relatives, however, who adhered to the Jewish faith, the Gabors were secular and nonobservant. One might say that instead of the God of Israel, they worshiped the King of Diamonds.
Zsa Zsa once said that her father had her baptized a Catholic at birth. If her report was accurate, no doubt her sisters were also baptized in infancy. If not, then at some point Zsa Zsa and Eva converted to Catholicism, and Francesca was raised in the Church. Another possibility is this: the Gabors converted to Catholicism in 1928 for the purpose of upward mobility. I base the speculation on a baptismal certificate that Zsa Zsa produced in 1983 to “prove” her age as fifty-four when, in reality, she was sixty-six. It will surprise many readers that Eva and Francesca were regular churchgoers and that Zsa Zsa sometimes dropped in at Christmas and Easter. Zsa Zsa once explained her many marriages like this: “I can’t live in sin. I never stopped being a Catholic in my heart.”
Although Budapest had a huge Jewish population before World War II, the prestige religion was Roman Catholicism. Social climbers scouted for members of the clergy, whose presence at dinner or a celebration might well gain a mention in the newspaper. Jolie claimed that Cardinal József Mindszenty, head of the Catholic Church in Hungary, attended her mother’s soirées. If true, his attendance would have been prior to World War II and before his elevation to cardinal, which was soon followed by imprisonment under the communist regime.
If Vilmos approved his family’s conversion, he later reverted to Judaism. He is buried beside his second wife in the Kozma Street Jewish Cemetery in Budapest. On his gravestone is a Hebrew inscription translated as “Mourned by his wife and family with never-ending love.”
It is important to note that assimilation—a new, frightening, but also a tempting phenomenon for many Jews, and often accompanied by conversion to Christianity—was widespread in Hungary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of interest, also, in placing the Gabors in context is this statistic from The Invisible Jewish Budapest by Mary Gluck: “In 1900, Budapest had a Jewish population of roughly twenty-three percent, making it the second largest Jewish city in Europe.” Only Warsaw surpassed it. A reviewer summarized Gluck’s history as an examination of “the vibrant modernist culture created largely by secular Jews in Budapest, in counterpoint to a backward-looking, nationalistic Hungarian establishment and a conservative Jewish religious elite.”
In changing his name from Grün to Gabor, Vilmos perhaps intended a coded message to the community he had left. Since “Gabor” in Hungarian means “Gabriel,” the name of the archangel who appears in both Jewish and Christian scriptures, Vilmos’s subtext might have been, You see, we’re still one of you as well as one of them.
* * *
Motherhood, in the Gabor family, has a curious history. One can observe its transmigration through three generations, beginning with Franceska Reinherz Tillemann, the first matriarch whose likeness comes into focus. In a formally posed photograph from around 1900, she stands like a tall Biedermeier chest of drawers, carved from oak or mahogany and capable of filling up a high-ceilinged room. (The photograph belies reality; Zsa Zsa recalled her as quite short.) Her bell-shaped face, bedecked with a voluminous hat, suggests great intelligence, limited patience, and high spirits. Her keen interest in current Viennese and Budapest fashion is obvious, for she is swathed in a lacy black gown with a triangular sprig of white lace that seems to peer into a daring décolletage. That peek is a tease, however, for beneath the
lace is a silk bodice.
Despite her large bosom, she refused to nurse her children: Janette, Dora, Jancsi, Rosalie, and finally Sebestyn, the only boy. Many years later Jancsi (pronounced YAWN-chee) became known to the world as Jolie Gabor. “She had some Jewish blood,” Jolie said of her mother, and left it at that. She had much more to say about her mother’s parenting skills, many of which she herself practiced with Magda, Zsa Zsa, and Eva, and which Zsa Zsa, in the case of her own Francesca, carried to regrettable extremes. We will come to these presently. Before Franceska Reinherz Tillemann became a parent, however, she worked as a cook, waitress, and then purveyor of jewels.
Franceska Reinherz was born in Vienna, although her birth year is open to debate. Jolie provided no date, and so we must grope in nineteenth-century darkness to locate her probable d.o.b. as 1865. Or 1870. Even on this sliding probability scale, the date would not have been more than a year or two later, for Jolie—the third of five children—was almost certainly born in 1893, the same year as Mae West and Mao Zedong, with both of whom she shared certain traits. Jolie’s niece, Annette Tillemann-Dick, recalls her great-aunt saying on a visit in 1988, “Dahling, I’m ninety-five years old.” And Jolie would have had no reason to lie to a family member.
The Reinherz family owned a chain of jewelry shops in Vienna and a bit of real estate. “They weren’t a rich family,” Jolie stated in her autobiography, “just a good family.” With typical bourgeois yearnings, they wished their daughter to marry a professional man with shining prospects. Franceska, however, believed in love, which came to her in the form of József Tillemann, a poor university student. After a ruction at home, Franceska and József packed up and eloped to Budapest. In those days, everyone above the peasant class spoke German as well as Hungarian, so the young couple avoided linguistic if not financial tribulation. József became a tutor to the scions of wealthy families, and in less than a year he had saved enough to open a small luncheonette in an obscure quarter of Budapest. With no money for hired help, he and his wife labored without rest. “My mother,” recalled Jolie, “who was raised like a queen, worked eighteen hours a day, cooking, washing dishes, and personally serving the customers.” (This backstairs revelation, along with many other glimpses of kitchen-sink realism, explains why Zsa Zsa and Eva were incensed with Mama Gabor when her book came out in 1975.)