by Sam Staggs
More than three decades after her departure from Turkey in 1941, Zsa Zsa received an invitation to the White House as a guest of President and Mrs. Nixon. The event was a dinner for Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia. Zsa Zsa made the guest list for two reasons: She was a Nixon Republican who added glitter to the evening, and she had first met the emperor in Ankara at a state function around 1938. No one asked Selassie, eighty-one years old, whether he remembered the former Madame Belge. Nor did reporters ask Zsa Zsa what she recalled of her long-ago meeting with the Lion of Judah, one of the emperor’s many titles. By this time she had come to rely on talk-show shtick, and so she babbled to the press about being “a bride of fifteen who was hostest-with-the-mostest in Turkey.” Flinging back her head with a laugh and caressing her blonde hair—or perhaps it was an Eva Gabor wig that she caressed—she added, “I didn’t speak Turkish, so I was always falling asleep at my own dinners.” This bit of whimsy, like a line from a bad script, carries no conviction.
* * *
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, president of the Republic of Turkey from 1923 until his death in 1938, founded the modern Turkish state, which he seized from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. He is also the JFK of Turkey, his legend encrusted with the allure, the errors, the personality cult, the worship and the loathing, the womanizing, and the similar elevation to godlike reverence of the American president.
Zsa Zsa, with her lifelong fetish for powerful older men, invented an Orientalist narrative that costarred her in a Hollywood-tinged romance with Atatürk. That tale is as pretty as an illustrated children’s book, as smarmy as some fantoosh version of The King and I. Hearing it, one hardly knows whether to laugh or leave the room. Zsa Zsa herself played the scene endlessly as theme and variations. Each performance found her orchestrating with more brass.
Stated in its original form, her yarn goes like this. Burhan and Zsa Zsa, Leman and Yakup are dining at a Russian restaurant in Ankara when Himself enters with an entourage of bodyguards and cohorts. The room is electrified. Zsa Zsa cannot stop staring at Atatürk. “Don’t look, don’t look,” scolds her sister-in-law. But: “I stole a glance at him again. Our eyes met.” Minutes later, a presidential aide approaches their table, and bows. “The President would like their Excellencies Burhan Belge and Yakup Kadri and their ladies to join his party.”
Zsa Zsa, intimidated by greatness in the room, stammers in response to presidential questions. He invites her to drink raki; she chokes on the Turkish national drink. He offers a cigarette embossed with his initials. One inhale and she coughs and sputters. He asks her to dance, at which she is more adept than at drinking and smoking. When they resume their seats at the table he makes a proclamation. “From now on Turkey and Hungary are brother and sister.” For days afterward, young Zsa Zsa remains intoxicated by the fumes of memory that waft Mustafa Kemal Atatürk to her, like jasmine on a summer night. Those French novels she read back in Switzerland were mere nursery rhymes compared to this.
Shortly thereafter, through an intermediary, Zsa Zsa receives a mysterious invitation to drink tea in the old city with a secret admirer. At this point we might imagine a match-up of the Brontë sisters with the Gabor sisters, or more precisely a one-on-one: When Zsa Zsa Mimed Emily, for in Zsa Zsa’s tale gothic trappings overhang all of Ankara.
In an antiquities shop where she often browsed after dismounting from Fatushka, she is given a key sent by the mysterious admirer. Overcome by curiosity, she locates the address “in a tiny street that wound like a corkscrew through the old city.” At the top of a narrow, dark staircase she fits the key in the lock. Behold, there in the gloom of a dim, silent, forlorn chamber she makes out a table, and beyond it an armchair in which someone is sitting, his back to her. “Woman was not made to resist temptation,” quoth the voice. “I knew you would come.” It is, of course, the voice of Atatürk, to Zsa Zsa’s ears as awesome as the voice of Jehovah from the burning bush.
Drunk, and in the later stages of alcoholism (he would die of cirrhosis), Atatürk craves her companionship. Zsa Zsa’s faint implication is that he coveted intimacy but suffered from impotence. After tea and conversation, he drops off to sleep and she slips quietly from the room. These chaste assignations, she claimed, continued almost until the day of his death.
* * *
Male presidents often consort with at least one girlfriend, or what used to be called a mistress. In the United States, for instance, it became the rage with John F. Kennedy, and has pingponged to the present day. In Turkey, President Atatürk banished the harem while continuing to enjoy its pleasures as of old. Lord Kinross, in his 1965 biography Atatürk, almost brings credence to Zsa Zsa’s coy narrative. “No woman,” he wrote, “was held to be safe at his hands. Turkish mothers might indeed thrust their daughters at him (and Turkish husbands their wives), but diplomatic mothers would hurry their daughters away from a party for fear he would invite them to his table. When he did so he would often merely subject them to a viva voce exam. Taking a fancy to a young Polish girl at an embassy party, he was heard asking her for proof of the existence of God. With a married woman the interrogation might be on the more intimate subject of her relations with her husband. He sensed just how far to go with women and was a good judge of husbands, never flirting with the wife of one likely to be jealous. Occasionally, however, a scandal arose when the wife of some diplomat allowed herself to become emotionally too much involved with the President.”
Zsa Zsa’s Atatürk theme, begun in her 1960 autobiography My Story, sounded notes of seduction while remaining in the key of respectability. Whatever accuracy one finds there owes much to her collaborator, Gerold Frank. Frank aided other tempestuous Hollywood women with their life stories, including Diana Barrymore, Lillian Roth, and Sheilah Graham. More scrupulous for detail than any of his subjects, he insisted on as much truth as he could squeeze from his various celebrities. Zsa Zsa’s posturing in My Story is held to a minimum. Gerold Frank’s papers, housed at the New York Public Library, show his finesse in extracting truth from the deep core of show-business fantasy and invention. Hundreds of pages of outtakes from My Story show Zsa Zsa as the willing subject of his subtle probes.
Her second collaborator, the late Wendy Leigh, was almost as off-center as Zsa Zsa. Thus, One Lifetime Is Not Enough, which appeared in 1991, slogs along like the tiresome tattle of two over-the-hill drunks in an old-timey bar, viz., Zsa Zsa and Wendy.
In her autobiographical swan song, Zsa Zsa blasted her variations on a Turkish theme in boombox decibels. Earlier, in 1960, many were still alive who might contradict her assertions, including Burhan Belge. The possibility of legal action also restrained authors and publishers. By the 1990s, however, libel laws had relaxed and words, as well as suggestions, that were whispered a few decades earlier could now be broadcast.
Coaxed by Wendy Leigh, a veteran of tabloid British journalism, Zsa Zsa would have us believe that she was Atatürk’s concubine. And that countless other powerful men—few of them older, by this point, than Zsa Zsa—wanted to marry her, or at least sample her wares, among them Henry Kissinger. In that same book she claims that Kissinger, after a dinner date, made a move on her virtue and—here we re-enter Patrick Dennis territory—“I wasn’t married at the time, so I didn’t protest when he asked if he could come in for a drink. We started talking, then things got more personal, with Henry showing signs of making an amorous approach to me. I don’t know what would have happened had his beeper not suddenly cut into the silence. Nixon wanted him immediately at San Clemente.”
Nixon, it seems, like that damn dog back in Turkey, was always cutting in on Zsa Zsa’s romantic life. Another time, Kissinger was scheduled to fly to Zsa Zsa’s side, perhaps to try again what was foiled by his beeper interruptus. He called to cancel, and when Zsa Zsa asked why, the dutiful secretary of state offered a memorable excuse: “I can’t fly down because we are invading Cambodia tomorrow.”
Such buffooneries raise questions among readers of Zsa Zsa’s pages, among t
hem the immediate one: 1) Finding Zsa Zsa available between husbands number five and six, why did Kissinger soon settle for the decidedly less glamorous Nancy Maginnes; and the historical conundrum: 2) Who was governing Turkey while Atatürk was enveloped in the splendid arms of Madame Belge?
* * *
Perhaps Zsa Zsa’s close encounters with the likes of Kissinger, Nixon—oh, and John F. Kennedy as well, revealed in 1991 as one of her admirers before Jacqueline Bouvier caught his eye—perhaps these Washington associations gave her greater insight into political matters than she possessed as a young bride in Turkey. Sounding like a Republican fundamentalist, she expressed the thought to Wendy Leigh that “Atatürk was one of those rare men who I believe the Lord sent to save their country.” (But then such a man was Nixon, to Zsa Zsa at least; and Ford, and Reagan, and Bush père et fils, yet this country remains unsaved.)
Pushed along by Wendy Leigh, Zsa Zsa at last told all . . . We are once more with Madame Belge in the dim, silent, gloomy chambre de rendez-vous of President Atatürk. “Just as I was about to speak,” Zsa Zsa remembered, “he clapped his hands and dancing girls appeared, their multicolored veils floating suggestively in the coolness of the room. As they danced their slow, sensuous dance, wordlessly Atatürk motioned that I sit on the red velvet and copper-colored cushions next to him. Mesmerized, I complied. He offered me his pipe—and unquestioningly, I took it. Then he passed me a gold-and-emerald-encrusted cup filled with raki. I sipped from the cup.
“Until now, I have never before revealed what happened next, what happened when Atatürk dismissed the dancing girls and the two of us were alone. Sometimes I think it happened in a dream, sometimes that I was in an opium haze, or a stupor induced by the raki. All I know is that day, Atatürk, the conqueror of Turkey, the idol of a million women and the envy of countless men, took my virginity.”
Did she forget, with this thundering revelation, about that damn dog who was bedded down in the kitchen the first—or second, or third—time Zsa Zsa’s virginity was snatched from her?
* * *
Further along in this heavy-breathing passage, which echoes Omar Khayyam crossed with Maria Montez in Cobra Woman, we learn the reason for Zsa Zsa’s long marital quest post-Burhan: “Atatürk ruined me for every other man I would ever love, or try to love.” During the six months of their liaison, claimed Zsa Zsa, with Wendy Leigh panting beside her on the sofa, “we spent hours together locked in each other’s arms, while he dazzled me with his sexual prowess and seduced me with his perversion. Atatürk was very wicked. He knew exactly how to please a young girl. He was a professional lover, a god, and a king.”
Given the limited list of perversions available to an alcoholic man in failing health, which Atatürk already was in 1935 when the Belges arrived, one can only surmise. Zsa Zsa’s fervid confessions to the highly unreliable Wendy Leigh fail to allow for his weakened physical state and also for the fact that even so, he had a large and difficult country to run; a parliament to sway whenever possible; cabinet ministers to wrangle with and replace. In addition, he often traveled to Istanbul. Moreover, throughout the 1930s on the European horizon loomed the double threat of Hitler and Mussolini. It is unlikely that in his final years Atatürk could escape the presidential office for long afternoons spent sipping sweet liqueurs and lounging on cushions with Zsa Zsa Belge.
A closing note on the late Wendy Leigh, who presumed a friendship with Zsa Zsa’s daughter, the late Francesca Hilton. Francesca referred to her as “that S&M creep with her harnesses, rubber suits, and dildoes.”
* * *
To clear the perfumed air from Zsa Zsa’s hallucinatory hideaway, I fling open the windows to Murat Belge, Burhan’s son. From one of his emails: “Now, the story of Zsa Zsa’s arrival. The word reached Turkey before she did. She was not the international figure then, but somehow news spread to Ankara that Burhan got married to a fabulous woman. It was a real sensation. They came [to Ankara] and rushed to the house of my uncle and aunt. For about a fortnight they stayed in the house. Finally, they gathered courage to attempt to show themselves in public. The main restaurant in Ankara at the time was Karpich, run by a Russian who ran away from the revolution. On a weekday the place was not crowded. However, in about half an hour sirens and sounds of scooters were heard and in came Atatürk and his retinue! Obviously, the message had been transmitted and he came to make his own observations.
“They all acted as if this was a coincidence. The tables were joined and the orchestra of the restaurant started to play waltzes—this was the dance that Atatürk knew best. So he asked Zsa Zsa to dance and off they went.
“I heard the story from both my father and his sister, my aunt. Their accounts agree in general. But now I stick to the version of my aunt. After the waltz with Zsa Zsa, Atatürk asked my aunt to the next one. As they danced, he said, ‘Ah, Burhan! Naughty boy.’ I never understood what this meant. Apparently my aunt did, because she used to say she started to cry and said, ‘My Pasha, please forgive him.’ Another mystery for me.
“After such a start, you might expect a certain development of relations but that did not take place, despite the silly stories Zsa Zsa made her ghost writers to narrate—and they change from one autobiography to the other [emphasis added].”
These distant memories, the faded, scattered remains of long-ago days, leave us unsettled, like reading an O. Henry story with the last page missing. For that reason, I append my own gloss to the Belge family legends.
It’s easy to believe that Zsa Zsa’s reputation preceded her. The denizens of Ankara, like those of small towns and minor cities everywhere, were eager for distraction, for variety in their routine lives. Suddenly rumors buzzed: Burhan’s wife was Miss Hungary; a star on the Vienna stage; a beauty; and only fifteen . . . sixteen . . . or was it seventeen? In the days before television and social media anesthesized the world, it wasn’t hard to arouse rampant curiosity in the bourgeoisie. And let us recall that even then, back in Budapest, the Gabors inhabited a perpetual press release. Nor is there reason to believe that Atatürk himself would have ignored such titillating rumors. With an eye for the ladies, and perhaps foreshadowed by mortality, he, too, wanted a look at Burhan’s beauty queen.
As for the president’s cryptic remark: “Ah, Burhan! Naughty boy.” If we heard it in Turkish, we might interpret it as a sly joke, meaning, Where did he find a dish like that? Or this: on the dance floor, cheeky Zsa Zsa made a suggestive remark; a waggish proposition; an innocent gaffe that the president repeated to Burhan’s sister, who, being a sophisticated and very proper lady, found inexcusable on the part of her new sister-in-law. If Mrs. Kadri wept easily, it’s conceivable she shed tears of shame on behalf of this Hungarian teenager.
With only enough information to make us wish for more, we must, in l’affaire Atatürk, depend forever on scattered hints, uncertain inferences, and conflicting rumors.
* * *
After a detour into Zsa Zsa’s fantasy sphere comes the introduction of several genuine alliances from her Turkish years. These friends found her vivacious and delightful to know on her own, apart from her husband’s shadow.
Sir Percy Loraine, British ambassador to Turkey from 1933 to 1939, later referred to Ankara’s “pathetic bleakness,” and Lady Loraine called it “the most godforsaken hole I have ever been in.” Sir Percy’s posting to Turkey was nevertheless of crucial importance to Great Britain as the prospect of war loomed ever nearer. The ambassador’s close friendship with Atatürk helped to cement relations between their two countries. So cordial were the two men that Sir Percy visited Atatürk on his deathbed in 1938.
Although Ankara’s population had soared by the mid-1930s, it retained the mores of a sleepy town. The ruling elite, and the foreign diplomatic corps, formed a small nucleus with clearly defined boundaries. Within that perimeter, everyone knew everybody. In Ankara, the theory of six degrees of separation could be reduced to two.
It’s not surprising, therefore, that Sir Percy and Lady Loraine
befriended the Belges. With Zsa Zsa, they shared a compelling interest: horses. During his years in Turkey, the Ankara Riding Club absorbed Sir Percy whenever he could escape from official duties, and after his retirement from the diplomatic corps he resumed his longtime avocation, the breeding and racing of Thoroughbreds. Zsa Zsa never wavered in her devotion to Fatushka, who was stabled there. A photograph of Zsa Zsa mounted on Fatushka shows her at her smiling prettiest, unlike other pictures taken during her Turkish sojourn in which she looks strained and unhappy. Nor did she have gleaming white teeth until a few years later when she married Conrad Hilton, who paid the dentist’s bills.
Only that picture of her on Fatushka, and another one in which she is swathed in a filmy gown like a sari, suggest young Madame Belge as a sprite. In others, she could have passed for forty-plus while still in her early twenties. But then she and her sisters, and Jolie, as well, aged in reverse, like a quartet of female Benjamin Buttons. At eighty, Zsa Zsa looked not a day over fifty. Eva, a month before her death, could have passed for forty, though in reality she was seventy-six. Wigs and surgery, of course, became synonymous with the family name Gabor.
In some of her Turkish photographs, Zsa Zsa is blonde, while in others her hair looks black, although according to Zsa Zsa herself her natural hair color was red. She spoke of rinsing it in rose water to bring out its reddish highlights. The fact is, however, that Zsa Zsa never looked really young. Always, even in her teen years, her face bore a wolfish expression, slightly mocking, even smug, as though she had not only tasted the forbidden fruit of Eden, but sliced it onto her breakfast cereal.