by Sam Staggs
Eventually Franceska Tillemann’s financial acumen, boosted by a loan, enabled her to found the Diamond House where, according to Jolie, her parents “made a fortune on a clever new idea. In those days there were no cultured pearls, only expensive natural ones. Mama didn’t see why they couldn’t make good imitations to look genuine, so they created strands of fake pearls but with real diamond and gem clips.” In other words, dipped pearls. This intertwining of true and false, with pearls as with facts, could have served as the Gabor coat of arms.
Franceska and József, growing prosperous, ascended to the Budapest bourgeoisie. They continued to speak German at home, and that became the first language of Jolie and her siblings. Hungarian they picked up from playmates and at school. Recently I asked Jolie’s niece whether, in the Tillemann and Gabor households, German might actually have been Yiddish. “Oh no,” she said. “It was Hochdeutsch [high German]. Hungarian Jews looked down on Polish Jews and others who spoke Yiddish.”
That niece is Mrs. Annette Lantos, born in Budapest in 1931 and not to be confused with her daughter, Annette Tillemann-Dick, quoted above. Mrs. Lantos is the daughter of Jolie’s brother, Sebestyn, and the widow of Congressman Tom Lantos, Democrat of California, who served in the House of Representatives from 1981 until his death in 2008. I will call upon Mrs. Lantos in future chapters to help advance the narrative and to clarify certain dissimulations formulated by the press and by the Gabors themselves.
Mrs. Lantos explained that Franceska Tillemann—her grandmother and Jolie’s mother—owned several jewelry stores in Budapest. This came about because she opened a new store when each one of her children was born, intending every new establishment as the eventual dowry for that particular child. Jolie claimed in her book that by the time she and her siblings were in their teens, their parents owned a chain of thirty-six jewelry shops spread across Europe. Mrs. Lantos, well acquainted with her aunt’s exaggerations, adjusted that number downward to half a dozen or so.
One might expect a hard-driving businesswoman like Franceska Tillemann, a female pioneer in a man’s world and an innovator in her field of enterprise, to bring home some of her no-nonsense efficiency and high standards of behavior. And so she did. In private, as in the workaday world, she was formidable. Even in adulthood, her daughters and her son, along with her grandchildren, stood when she entered the room. According to Zsa Zsa, no one dared use the familiar form of address to this grandmother, a statement that requires explanation to speakers of English. We have only one word for “you,” but in Hungarian and in most other European languages, two forms are used. The familiar form is for children, family members, close friends, and animals. One uses the so-called polite, or formal, “you” when speaking to colleagues, clergy, teachers, acquaintances, and so on. In Hungarian the forms are “te,” familiar, “ön” and “maga,” formal. Zsa Zsa perhaps meant that no one outside the family dared address Franceska Tillemann as “te.” It would be unusual for family members to use formal address with one another unless, for instance, their kindred occupied a high social station.
She seems to have found children distasteful, though she produced five of them and demanded full devotion in exchange for aloof maternity. Scarcely were these infants delivered than Franceska Tillemann turned them over to wet nurses and nannies. Jolie again: “Mama never spent time with her children the way other mothers did. She didn’t play with us or take us to school or sit and listen to our problems. She remained always a big distance from us. If any of us called to her when she came home from work, she handled it by replying, ‘Keep still. Don’t shout. God should only help me that you will someday be out from here.’ I don’t remember her as ever being involved with us.”
Nevertheless, “Mama was our everything. Simple love wasn’t enough for how we felt about her. We adored her. We worshiped her.” With her own daughters, Jolie replicated this unorthodox parenting. “When they were little girls I would charge them two cents to touch my beautiful complexion. This taught the value of money and the value of beautiful skin.” Alongside this incipient charm school/credit union, Jolie would sometimes teach the girls pugilism. On a particular rainy afternoon, when Magda was six, Zsa Zsa four, and Eva two, they asked their mother how they might spend the afternoon.
“Why not have a fight?” she suggested.
“With pillows?” Magda chirped.
“No, a fistfight. A fight with hitting one another.”
And so they began. Eva ended with a bloody nose, Zsa Zsa with scratches, Magda with pulled hair, and all with weeping and wailing.
Just then Vilmos came home. “What is going on here?” he demanded above Eva’s screams. “Are you mad?”
“No,” said Jolie. “For me it was very interesting. I like when they fight. I like when they do everything.”
Jolie’s School Without Pity continued in summer when they vacationed a hundred miles from Budapest at Lake Balaton, Hungary’s largest body of water. “The lake was calm, I wanted them to know how to swim and so I threw them into the water. They simply had to swim and so they swam. My friend gasped, ‘How can you throw them in?’ ”
“ ‘They will paddle like dogs,’ I said calmly—and they did.”
One further example of Jolie’s pathological mother love will convince the most skeptical that Vilmos had a point. She was mad. “At the circus,” she recalled, “we sat spellbound as an Indian fakir swallowed fire while flames spurted from his mouth and he climbed a ladder of razor-sharp swords on naked feet. I punched my Zsa Zsa in her ribs. ‘Now,’ I hissed in the darkness, ‘when will you be able to do that?’ ”
Jolie’s goal, it seems, was to assure that her daughters turned out extraordinary, and, in their uniqueness, entirely dependent on her. Many children would resent this parental abuse to the point of loathing; the parent would risk estrang-ment. The Gabor sisters, on the other hand, professed undying devotion to Jolie, and throughout their lives they telephoned her once a day from whatever corner of the world they were in. No marriage took place until Jolie, like a dowager empress, nodded consent.
The obvious explanation for their slavish filial piety is insecurity, which Jolie instilled with mother’s milk. Terrified of losing her love, the girls panted for any drop that Jolie squeezed from her leathery heart. Since she also encouraged them early on to compete with one another for their small ration, and to do so forever, the Gabors were never weaned. Into their own senior years—their seventies and eighties—they groped and elbowed one another like a litter of hungry kittens at the bosom of centenarian Jolie, who lived, well past one hundred, until 1997.
* * *
With every Gabor, facts are elusive and often reformatted to suit the occasion. In the matter of Vilmos, few exist. According to Zsa Zsa, he was eighteen years older than Jolie. Jolie upped the figure to twenty. If his actual age in 1958, at the time of that final Gabor family reunion, was eighty-four, as reported in the press, then he would have been born in 1874. That makes him a contemporary of Jolie’s parents, and a couple of decades her senior.
In a photograph taken when Vilmos was about thirty-five years old, he resembles Harvey Keitel when Keitel was that age: a slightly crooked smile that suggests a lurking sense of sexy mischief; narrow eyes that seem to evaluate—or undress—those who catch his interest; and yes, those high cheekbones that his daughters so valued as their genetic inheritance. In another photograph, taken a few years later and after he had endured Jolie and the added stresses of fatherhood, Vilmos looks older than his fifty years.
As he aged, Vilmos came to look a lot like Conrad Hilton, Zsa Zsa’s second husband. Had the Gabors crossed paths with Dr. Freud, whose Viennese couch stood a hundred miles west of Budapest, the diagnosis might have been, for all three sisters: Electra complex. The majority of their husbands were considerably older than they, and a number of them bore similar paternal lineaments. With a few notable exceptions, Zsa Zsa, Eva, and Magda married hard-driving capitalists, like their father. Nor did matrimony provide much fun. Ever
ything wacky and witty that issued from a Gabor mouth was said on television or in interviews. Husbands were there as escorts, financial advisors, bearers of gifts, and scapegoats when plans went awry.
Lacking any chronicle by Vilmos, we must scrutinize every biographical scrap. As if intentionally to complicate the process, during his three years in the United States, 1945 to 1948, his daughters placed him under a virtual gag order: Do not speak to reporters! Later Iron Curtain censorship perhaps seemed benign by comparison. The girls also discouraged his learning English. What if, they whispered among themselves, he spilled the beans in contradiction of the growing Gabor myth invented by press agents and fattened by three hyperactive imaginations, with added calories from Mama? (One example: In the early 1940s, Paramount decided that Eva the starlet had been a champion ice skater and café singer in her native Hungary. In reality, she was minimally athletic and seldom landed on pitch. That imaginary café would have attracted only the deaf.)
* * *
According to Jolie, Vilmos was a poor boy who, by his thirties, had made a lot of money. He told his eager fiancée that his growing fortune came from the import-export business. “I own fruit trees,” he said, “real estate, and businesses in Sardinia and Portugal.” Translation: He had begun as a fruit peddler who operated a stall at the Central Market Hall, the largest and oldest indoor market in Budapest. In later years he prospered as a speculator, optioning entire crops of fruit in Italy and elsewhere when the young trees were planted. In so doing, he acquired rights to future yields at bargain rates. The risk, of course, was that bad weather could devastate the crop. This explains why the Gabor fortunes rose and fell. Eva, however, is the only one who ever alluded to lean times. In her sketchy autobiography, Orchids and Salami, she mentions that unlike her sisters, she did not go to finishing school in Switzerland. She hints, also, that ’round about this time the Gabor family gave up their comfortable apartment and moved in with Jolie’s parents.
Vilmos, courting Jolie, brought flowers, baskets of fruit, and on one memorable visit “a black velvet jewel box. Inside, on the plush purple velvet, was a diamond choker studded with deep blue sapphires plus a bow of diamonds on the choker. Also, resting on their own carved-out beds were a pair of diamond earrings.” This was almost certainly costume jewelry purchased at rhinestone rates, with perhaps a minuscule real diamond winking timidly in the mix.
His gifts impressed her, but not his manners. She considered Vilmos a parvenu, a nouveau riche. Whatever his deficiencies, however, Jolie matched and even surpassed them. “I thought, Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have all this jewelry without the man.”
Their marriage, in 1914, had nothing to do with love. Jolie, since childhood, had ambitions of becoming an actress, although her only qualification seems to have been the ability to swoon convincingly and collapse on the floor as limp as a feather boa. This talent she had acquired from watching silent-screen heroines such as Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, and the Hungarian actress Sári Fedák. Discussing the future with Vilmos, she confessed that she liked him but had no interest in marrying for love, not with him or anyone. She imagined herself in a few years as the First Lady of the Budapest Stage.
Vilmos, owing to his eye for sugar content—and invasive pests—in a given orchard, struck a deal with this silly young sprout of a girl. “Be my wife,” he said, “and I promise that at the end of six months if you still want to be an actress I will give you your freedom. If you are not hilariously happy I’ll give you a divorce. And you can keep the diamonds.” Here we see the start of a family tradition, for Jolie’s second marriage, many years later, and more than a few of her daughters’, involved a similar quid pro quo. Love, when it happened, was a fringe benefit.
Anticipating her night of ecstasy, lusty Jolie, though still a virgin, sought out a leg waxer. This she kept a secret, for in Budapest in those years the only women with depilated legs were said to be prostitutes. And so she and Vilmos were united as husband and wife, in a marriage from Armageddon. Troths were plighted in the Tillemann family apartment at Rákóczi út 54, a building still standing in Budapest. On the ground floor of this building was Franceska R. Tillemann’s emporium, the Diamond House.
* * *
From 1914, when they married, until 1918, and the Armistice, World War I engulfed most of Europe. Jolie seems hardly to have noticed, despite the turmoil and suffering. She makes only a passing reference to it in her autobiography: “The Budapest of those days was a center of enormous zest for living. Even after the First World War, which was so disastrous for Hungary, Hungarians still lived their lives in huge flourishes.” This omission seems even more singular in light of the Gabor family’s claim that Vilmos had served in the Austro-Hungarian Army. The exact dates of his service cannot be determined. Indeed, his actual service remains in question. Here’s why.
In the 1950s, when Gabor publicity resembled twenty-four-hour news, several reporters attempted to dig up the “truth” behind the headlines. At that time, a scattering of Hungarians living in the United States had known the Gabors back in Budapest, and reporters in search of an exclusive story spoke to various ones of them. Their versions often differed dramatically from the Gabors’ own.
The consensus of these Hungarian émigrés was that the Gabors lived above their means and were considered on the odd side by neighbors and by the girls’ classmates. Several made the unchivalrous claim that, far from the rank of major—or colonel, to which the family often promoted him—Vilmos had been a cook. Not so, ran a counterclaim. He sold fruit to Austro-Hungarian supply wagons and made a fortune with his overpriced produce. How then, these informants were asked, to account for the handsome photograph of Vilmos, in his forties one would guess, resplendent in hussar’s uniform, and a chest bedecked with two rows of medals, more even than you’d see on His Majesty the Emperor Franz Joseph? Oh that, they replied. That’s a cavalry costume from the operetta Tatárjárás, composed by Imre Kálmán in 1908. It was a huge hit all over Hungary, they added, and one of the hussar’s costumes found its way to certain photographers’ studios whose clients would pose in it for a portrait sitting. (Tatárjárás means “invasion of the Mongol Tatars,” and the operetta dealt, unrealistically of course, with an important event in Hungarian history. The notion of those Gabor cheekbones may have originated at a performance of the work.)
Conrad Hilton, Zsa Zsa’s husband for a time, met Vilmos shortly after his arrival in the United States in 1945. “I asked him about those medals,” said Hilton. “I said to him that he must have been in many battles.” Zsa Zsa translated her husband’s question, and her father’s witty answer. Vilmos laughed and said, “The greatest battle I ever had was getting my wife from twenty-nine to thirty!” This suggests that the family had not yet briefed Vilmos on the newly minted family history, and that his candor might prove problematic to their agenda. No English lessons for Papuska, they decided. From that day forward, as the girls themselves turned his Hungarian into English, much was surely lost in translation.
* * *
When not fighting with Vilmos, Jolie was giving birth: Magda in 1915 (some accounts list her arrival as 1914), Zsa Zsa in 1917, and Eva in 1919. One month after Eva’s birth, on February 11, revolution swept Hungary, with Budapest as storm center. With the country in postwar chaos, a small but powerful group of Hungarian communists, led by Béla Kun, proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic. This communist regime lasted a mere 132 days.
Before that, however, the official start of the First World War occurred on June 28, 1914, when an ethnic Bosnian, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. The assassination took place in Sarajevo, later a part of Yugoslavia and today, since the dissolution of that country in the 1990s, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Hungary in 1914 might be compared to present-day Scotland, which has its own prime minister, its own parliament, and yet in the eyes of many citizens, langui
shes under the heavy yoke of Great Britain. As in present-day Scotland, so in Hungary in the second decade of the twentieth century: agitation for independence, in the latter case from the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. As an independent nation, Hungary dates only from 1918.
Although outside the epicenter of war, Hungary nevertheless suffered widespread food shortages, high inflation, and other miseries. From Budapest 1900, by the eminent historian John Lukacs: “Sometime during the first winter of the war something unexpected began to appear in the streets of Budapest, something that clutched at the hearts of people, no matter how quickly they would turn their heads away from the sight of maimed or blind soldiers back from the front. Less visible at first but more and more evident was the destitution of tens of thousands of the wives and children of the working classes, whose husbands and fathers were at the front. The government support of their welfare was insufficient.”
One reason that Jolie remained oblivious to such misery was her feverish fantasy life. She seems to have lived in it much more than in real time. In this regard, she was like Emma Bovary: besotted by romantic dreams, and unable to separate the plots of trashy novels from the less colorful events of daily life. “After four years of marriage,” Jolie panted, “I read Elinor Glyn’s book The Three Weeks, which is about a princess and a commoner and how they make love all day long. I thought, I will die if I don’t have three such weeks.” (New Yorker writer S.J. Perelman called the novel “servant-girl literature” written in Glyn’s “marshmallow” style.)