by Sam Staggs
One day in the spring of 1945 Eva banged on the door to Zsa Zsa’s suite, ran inside out of breath, grabbed her sister, and burst into tears. A cable had arrived from Lisbon: ALL WELL WE SEND YOU LOVE MOTHER FATHER MAGDA.
* * *
Jolie is the only member of the Gabor family who gave a firsthand account of their ordeal in Hungary and their subsequent escape. That account, however, is garbled and also bizarrely frivolous, with gossipy interruptions to tell of in-law squabbles and her typical determination to let the world know that she left Budapest wearing a fur coat. For that reason, I quote from more reliable sources.
The first one is the website of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. There Ambassador Garrido is honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a designation that refers to non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save the lives of Jews. (Throughout this book, I refer to him as Ambassador Garrido. Other citations use his full name in the Portuguest style, Carlos de Almeida Fonseca Sampaio Garrido; on the Yad Vashem website he is Carlos Sampaio Garrido.)
From Yad Vashem: “Because of Allied bombing, some of the embassies chose to move from Budapest to the outskirts of the city, among them the Portuguese. The ambassador rented a house in Galgagyörk some 60 km from Budapest, and moved the embassy offices and his home to the new location. In his new residence he hosted a dozen Hungarian citizens, most of them Jews, so as to protect them from the danger in the city. Among these people were his Jewish secretary, Magda Gabor, and many members of her family. Sampaio Garrido did not inform his government of this fact.
“On 23 April 1944 the Portuguese ruler Salazar decided to order his ambassador to return to Lisbon and leave the Chargé d’Affaires in his place. Five days later, on 28 April 1944, at 5 a.m., the Hungarian political police burst into the ambassador’s residence. The ambassador tried to physically stop them from entering his residence, insisting that his home was ex territorial and that they were violating his diplomatic immunity.”
At this point, Yad Vashem quotes the testimony of Mrs. Lantos, Jolie’s niece. She was thirteen years old at the time, and sheltered there with her parents and other relatives, including the Gabors. “When the ambassador saw them taking Magda,” Mrs. Lantos said, “he put his foot in the door and didn’t let them leave.”
The Yad Vashem narrative continues, “Despite his persistence, the policemen went on and arrested the ambassador and his ‘guests’ and brought them to Budapest. There Sampaio Garrido continued to argue for his protégés’ release, until they were let go. Not deterred by this incident and although he was due to leave Hungary within days, Sampaio Garrido submitted a complaint to the Hungarian government, demanded an investigation and an apology. Several days later the Hungarians declared [him] persona non grata. It was only at this time that the ambassador informed Salazar of the identity of the people he had hosted in his home.” (Carl Lutz, the Swiss vice-consul, was similarly harassed and threatened, as were other diplomats from neutral nations.)
According to other sources, such as the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, Ambassador Garrido rented other houses and apartments in the Budapest environs in addition to the house in Galgagyörk in order to shelter many more Jews. In May 1944, the ambassador was reposted to Switzerland, and from there he continued to intervene where possible on behalf of Jewish refugees. He is credited with saving the lives of approximately one thousand persons.
After Ambassador Garrido’s departure from Budapest, the chargé d’affaires, Carlos de Liz-Teixeira Branquinho, continued to issue Portuguese passports, visas, and safe conduct passes to hundreds of Jews who might otherwise have died in fascist hands. Mrs. Lantos and her mother left Hungary with him, under his protection, “at the very last minute,” she said. Her father, Sebestyn Tillemann, stayed behind in Galgagyörk with his mother, Franceska Tillemann and several others who felt they were safe until either the Red Army or the Anglo-American forces liberated Hungary. In Mrs. Lantos’s words, “The Arrow Cross [i.e., the Hungarian fascists] broke in. They found the air raid shelter where the elderly people were, including my grandmother. The Arrow Cross herded them out to be shot. My father, in his own hiding place, heard the commotion, ran after the fascists and offered them money if they would let his mother go. Instead, he and his mother died together.”
Mrs. Lantos’s testimony contradicts the Wikipedia entry on Ambassador Garrido, which states that her father and her grandmother “both were killed during an Allied bombing raid.” Mrs. Lantos, of course, is the credible witness. According to Zsa Zsa, her grandmother refused to leave Hungary because so many of her relatives were there, and Sebestyn Tillemann would not depart without her. They were both shot to death.
Jolie learned of these deaths only after arrival in New York. She became hysterical with grief.
Once in the United States, Magda confided to Zsa Zsa some of the horrific sights she had witnessed during her final days in Budapest, where chaos prevailed. “Slaughter in the streets, the yellow badges, the men and women—our family physician, our lawyer, merchants we knew—taken to Tattersall, the famous riding academy, and there machine-gunned to death.” Magda saw frantic mothers begging strangers in the streets to take their babies.
In the middle of Magda’s narrative, Zsa Zsa stopped her. “No!” she said, trembling and in tears. “Don’t tell me any more. I have seen it all in my own nightmares.”
Chapter 13
West Hills Sanitarium
“For Magda’s Portuguese Ambassador I thank God,” said Jolie. “It was this man who saved my life.” Even holding Portuguese passports, however, Jolie, Vilmos, and Magda remained under deep suspicion and in grave danger. Suppose a Hungarian border guard asked them to recite a Portuguese poem? Magda, a talented linguist, might convince, but Vilmos? And Jolie’s insouciance must have vexed all present, for her account of their escape recalls Aunt Pittypat in Gone With the Wind when the Yankees turn up in Atlanta. In the safe house in Galgagyörk, Jolie and her sister-in-law were in love with the same man. When he turned his attention from Jolie, she fumed: “I am a queen in marabou feathers and beautiful hats and perfume. Yet he has left me for that mouse!”
Once in Portugal, the Gabors—three displaced persons among countless others—existed on money that Zsa Zsa and Eva sent each month. Even the Portuguese sunshine did not expel their drab desperation. Magda, thin and drawn, with clumps of hair falling out from anxiety and malnourishment; Vilmos, forlorn, separated from everything he knew and valued; and Jolie behaving like exiled royalty, demanding and inconsiderate, a ludicrous study in refugee chic.
There they remained from April 1945 until the end of that year, when at last they received their entry papers into the United States. Owing to bureaucracy and the vicissitudes of postwar travel, they left Portugal separately: Jolie on December 1 on board a Portuguese freighter, a journey that lasted thirty days; Magda waited a week after receiving her visa, then boarded a plane for New York. Unable to take her French poodle, Canou, on the aircraft, she booked passage for him on a ship. Upon arrival in New York, he was welcomed by a gaggle of Gabors in various states of hysteria. The reason, apart from love of animals, was that Canou’s barking had alerted Magda to danger on the day of her arrest. Vilmos, according to Jolie, was delayed until February 1946, though Zsa Zsa contradicted her, swearing that she, Eva, Jolie, Magda, Canou, along with Conrad Hilton and Charles Isaacs, drove to Philadelphia in early January of that year to meet Papuska’s boat.
* * *
Months before these joyous reunions took place, however, Zsa Zsa suffered a complete nervous breakdown. Many versions found their way into print of how that collapse came on, her suffering while confined, and her eventual release from an institution. I base my account on a few of the more credible ones, along with information from several persons acquainted with retrievable facts, all of whom requested anonymity.
Had Zsa Zsa lived and become sick in an earlier century, she might have been thrown into a literal snak
e pit. In 1945, she was locked up in a figurative one, despite its high tone and moneyed inmates. (William Faulkner was given electroshock treatments there in 1952 after an alcoholic binge and emotional collapse.) On the outside at least, the place bore scant resemblance to a Hollywood movie asylum such as the one in The Snake Pit, a film that won an Oscar nomination for Olivia de Havilland in 1948, or the one eleven years later that earned Elizabeth Taylor a nomination for Suddenly, Last Summer. Inside West Hills the nightmare screams followed no script, nor did anyone call “Cut!” If, in later years, someone could have induced Zsa Zsa to re-create onscreen her seven-week nightmare, what a career-changing spectacle!
Readers acquainted with today’s New York Post as the right-wing mouthpiece of Rupert Murdoch may be surprised to learn 1) that the paper’s editorial policies before 1976, when Murdoch acquired it, were to the left of the faint-hearted New York Times, and 2) that its publisher, editors, and reporters took seriously the job of journalism. For that reason, I quote the opening lines of an article by Alfred Aronowitz that appeared in the Post on November 24, 1958, the seventh article in a revealing eleven-part series on the Gabor family that remains unequaled to the present day for accuracy among such features in the popular press.
“It is late April, 1945. Beneath the overhanging trees on Fieldston Road where the Bronx suddenly becomes countryside, a car, large and expensive, pulls to a stop. A woman emerges. She has reddish blonde hair and she is heavily jeweled. She wears a long mink coat. With quick, graceful steps she hurries down a walk toward a small cottage. A door closes and she steps inside.
“The woman is Mrs. Conrad Hilton. She has just entered West Hills Sanitarium, an institution for the mentally ill.”
* * *
When did it start, that descent into what was then considered madness? We know that Zsa Zsa suffered from bipolar disorder, and that it appeared in a mild form during her Swiss school days. The excitement of her first years in America—remarriage, travel, Hollywood glamour as close as her sister, plus Zsa Zsa’s own ambition to break into movies—steadied her. The occasional tantrum, the high-pitched laughter, the constant entertaining performance at home and in public—Conrad attributed it to being a woman, while to Eva it was all of a piece. Zsa Zsa’s personality had always been a vaudeville.
Then, before their eyes, that one-woman show shifted from comedy to a darker genre. Madness is perhaps the wrong term. Even in those not suffering from bipolar disorder, extreme and prolonged anxiety can lead to what laypeople, and many doctors, consider mental illness. Then, too, Zsa Zsa’s disturbance occurred in the 1940s, when women especially—but men, as well—could easily be locked away for behavior that today would be looked on as merely unconventional. Electroconvulsive shock, insulin shock, and other “therapies” were as commonly prescribed then as Prozac in later decades. Did anyone listen when she told them of unrelenting worry about her family in Hungary? About her dream marriage turned sour? The loss of her home to fire, and grief for Ranger? About the galloping panic that overtook her, the feelings of suffocation, the jelly legs that barely held her up, the trembling hands and spilled coffee?
Since her return to California in 1944 from Washington and New York, Zsa Zsa had been under the care of an elderly doctor who believed that prolonged sleep could heal melancholia, neurasthenia, female problems, and nerves. Consequently, he prescribed barbiturates for sleep, and also for times when she felt shaky, or when tense chest muscles made it difficult to achieve a deep breath, and when she worried that her family would never reach America.
* * *
New York! She decided that the cure for some of her troubles, if not all, would take place in that city of endless parties, nightclubs, and shopping. Conrad agreed, and so did a reluctant Eva. She knew Zsa Zsa’s ups and downs, but something had changed. Nevertheless, she saw Zsa Zsa off at the airport. “I carried with me enough sleeping pills for a regiment,” Zsa Zsa later recalled. Her doctor’s parting words were, “Take those pills anytime you feel the need.”
Since Conrad owned the Plaza, she headed there and checked into a two-room suite. A few hours later, exhausted, she took a pill and fell asleep. Up at midnight, out on the town, home at dawn, another pill and ten hours sleep. Zsa Zsa’s pattern continued like this for days, but she found New York changed. She had never felt the city so very tiring. Café society and the Manhattan beau monde swarmed around the charming Mrs. Conrad Hilton, and her sparkling glitter made all the columns. “I can’t keep it up,” she confided to a date who arrived to escort her to El Morocco, one of her favorite night spots. “Why am I so weary?” His advice seemed just the ticket. “Benzedrine! I’ll call my doctor tomorrow and make an appointment for you.” Soon she skipped meals because she felt too excited to eat. “I swallowed my pills as once, when I was a little girl, I used to swallow chocolate-covered raisins, greedily, guiltily, so that Cuki, my governess, wouldn’t see.”
Her suite never emptied. New friends, and some of longer duration, called in throughout the day, and many new boyfriends spent the night. Word got around that Mrs. Hilton was behaving more like Miss Gabor. Coded mentions in the columns appeared almost daily: uninhibited . . . wild Hungarian. . . Gypsy wife . . . when the husband’s away.... Then she found a shop on Third Avenue where they sold authentic Turkish charcoal braziers. Perfect for the shish-kebab party she had dreamed of throwing for her new friends. As the meat sizzled, charcoal sparks flew onto the carpet, but Zsa Zsa didn’t notice, she was showing them how to dance the csárdás and everyone was whirling through the rooms, shouting, clapping, jumping until at last no one could dance another step and so they poured more wine and feasted on Zsa Zsa’s home-cooked Plaza meal.
The aroma of roasted meat in the corridor, however, did not please some of the more stolid guests, nor did the wild-party sounds that reverberated off the venerable walls. It sounds like—well, you know, they told the manager, who assured them he would look into the situation.
Next morning, when he requested an interview, a groggy Mrs. Hilton told him to ring back in late afternoon. When finally they met face to face, and he asked tactfully whether she had actually cooked a meal on an open fire in her suite, her nostrils flared and she answered in her most petulant tone: “But that is how we do it in Turkey all the time!”
Nonplussed, he mumbled, “I see.”
She added, as though explaining a simple fact to a child, that he certainly could not compare the Plaza’s cheap carpeting with “our priceless Oriental rugs.” There the matter rested for a time.
A few days later, she spent fifteen thousand dollars on antiques to replace the hotel furniture that to her looked shabby and déclassé. For company, she bought a brindle boxer and a French poodle, who yapped their displeasure when Zsa Zsa failed to provide adequate pet-pet. When she was away, they further stressed the singed carpet.
She bought more jewelry at Van Cleef and Arpels, ordered a new wardrobe from Hattie Carnegie, danced all night and forgot to sleep, occasionally dozing on a bench in Central Park as the dogs ran after squirrels. She screamed at maids, threatened an elevator boy who didn’t appear at the push of her button, and talked to everyone she knew in Hollywood at long-distance rates to the tune of six hundred dollars.
Zsa Zsa Hilton became, almost literally, the talk of the town. That talk soon reached Los Angeles. Buzz became a roar when, on April 12, 1945, she filed for divorce from Conrad Hilton.
One night at El Morocco on a date with the actor John Sutton, Zsa Zsa noticed the owner, John Perona, a former lover of Eva’s, approaching their table. She disliked Perona, for the previous year when Zsa Zsa was having drinks at the club, he had made an offensive remark about Charles Isaacs, whom Zsa Zsa considered almost as a brother. What Perona said was, “How could you let your sister marry that _____?” The word might have been “Jew,” or it might have been something else. Zsa Zsa never repeated it outside the family. (It was far worse than a lovers’ quarrel between Eva and Perona. Without revealing the cause, Zsa Zsa claimed t
hat her sister feared Perona would kill her. “He took her jewelry,” Zsa Zsa said, “and she went to court to get them back.”)
Again, this night, Perona said something that riled Zsa Zsa and she threw champagne in his face. A brawl narrowly averted, he ordered Zsa Zsa and Sutton off the premises and told her she was barred for life. (A few years later, Jolie approached El Morocco’s press agent. “My Zsa Zsa is a wonderful woman,” she said. “Won’t you talk to John?” The answer: “When the Pope visits El Morocco, Zsa Zsa can come in on his arm.” After Perona’s death in 1961, his son lifted the ban and all the Gabors flocked back. Zsa Zsa had triumphed again.) The El Morocco incident of course made the papers, and since Perona, and his nightclub, were New York institutions, the press took his side against Zsa Zsa, whose behavior was described as outrageous and unladylike.
A few mornings later, while still in bed with the dogs, she heard a knock at the door. Believing it to be housekeeping, Zsa Zsa called, “Come in.” She gasped to see Eva and Bundy Solt. “What are you doing here?” she cried out, rushing to embrace the two of them. Their vague answer, to the effect that they happened to be in town, didn’t deter Zsa Zsa from an endless stream of questions and chatter. Eva and Bundy sat across the room on the sofa while Zsa Zsa cuddled with her dogs on the bed.
Another knock at the door, Bundy answered, and in stepped a small man in late middle age who might just have landed from Europe had he not arrived in the States years before. Bundy welcomed Mr. Stein, and hurriedly introduced him to Zsa Zsa as a producer from Vienna who thought Zsa Zsa might be just right as the star of his latest play. “Now that I see you,” said Mr. Stein, “I am certain of it.” Zsa Zsa paced the floor, sitting, then standing, so that this producer could regard her from every angle. Taking her right hand, he said, to Zsa Zsa’s puzzlement, “You’re a very tired little girl. Why don’t you go to bed?” Miffed, she was on the verge of telling him to mind his own business when suddenly she tried to remember the last time she had slept. As best she could recall, it was the previous week. Suddenly she felt a great wave of desire sweep over her, a vast need of rest. She walked into the bedroom, lay down on the bed, and called the dogs to her side. “You are tired,” said Mr. Stein. “And you need to eat more. Nothing is really so urgent, you know. The important thing just now is rest. And when you wake up . . .” She hardly felt the needle enter her arm.