by Sam Staggs
The person who suffered long and poignantly from this paternal blank was Francesca. All her life she yearned for a father who might add stability to counteract Zsa Zsa’s emotional fluctuations and the frequent absences demanded by a Hollywood career. As we will see in a later chapter, Francesca pleaded for Conrad Hilton’s affection, which he doled out in small measures throughout her childhood and into her adult years. Ultimately, however, he rejected her as if she were a needy stray who would find a home elsewhere. She told me of visiting his grave at Calvary Hill Cemetery in Dallas. On that pilgrimage she took along a female friend. Francesca said no more, but I wondered whether she feared emotional catastrophe if unattended at the gravesite.
These are gothic images out of Emily Brontë. The next belongs to a silent movie melodrama of heart-tugging pathos and a black-caped villain. For years, Francesca clung to each new husband or long-term lover that Zsa Zsa brought home. Until the final one. Some were kind to her, others indifferent, but all eventually vanished. By 1986, when Zsa Zsa married the pantomime prince, Frederic von Anhalt, Francesca had grown tough and abrasive—on the outside. Inside she remained that lost little girl looking for a daddy.
She disliked von Anhalt on sight, as did Eva. Francesca’s verbal dagger was soon unsheathed and pointed toward Frederic, whose own psychological armaments exceeded those of the war-mongering Krupps. The job required years, but he struck the final blow by throwing up a latter-day Berlin Wall to separate Zsa Zsa from her daughter. “My mother used to call me ten times a day,” Francesca told me, “and now he has disconnected her phone.”
* * *
Not once in his autobiography, Be My Guest, does Conrad Hilton mention Francesca. By 1957, when the book was published, he had convinced himself that she was not his daughter, a suspicion held from the time of her birth. And yet, after Francesca’s confirmation into the Roman Catholic Church in 1960, which he attended, Conrad took her and Zsa Zsa to lunch at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, which he owned. Zsa Zsa included a happy photo of the three of them in her first autobiography, published that same year.
How does one account for such switchback behavior? I can offer only meager clues. Patricia (Trish) McClintock Hilton, the widow of Conrad’s son Nicky Hilton, married into the family several years after Zsa Zsa and Conrad were divorced. Yet, according to her and many others, Zsa Zsa was always considered part of the Hilton family. (Years in the future, Paris Hilton and her little siblings would splash in Zsa Zsa’s pool.) In a recent phone conversation, Trish Hilton had only good things to say about Zsa Zsa and about Francesca, and in general she admired Conrad, although she told biographer Jerry Oppenheimer, in The House of Hilton: “In many ways, Connie was a very naive man. He ran from problems even though they involved his own flesh and blood. His thing was business and that’s all.” She added that in effect he abandoned her husband—his oldest son, Nicky Hilton, who suffered from severe alcoholism and who died in 1969 at age forty-two. Nicky—Conrad Hilton Jr.—is best remembered as the first husband of Elizabeth Taylor.
When I asked Trish Hilton, “Was Francesca the biological daughter of Conrad?” she paused for a long moment. At last came her enigmatic reply: “I can’t even answer that.” Since she was a Hilton insider, and privy to family secrets, I take this to mean that neither she, nor anyone else, held more than shifting opinions.
Insofar as he was capable, Conrad treated Francesca well. When she asked to borrow money, however, he balked. But so did he with the three sons born from his first marriage. His traditional American capitalist belief never wavered: Make your own fortune and don’t ask me for handouts. Yet he was a philanthropist.
In his autobiography, Hilton mentions prayer so often that he sounds like a televangelist. Mixing Roman Catholic piety with Protestant work ethic, he believed that prayer, hard work, enthusiasm, and dreams could make anyone rich and successful. In his case, the formula worked. To his credit, Conrad’s genius for business deals and the resulting millions did not corrode his heart. Like the Gabors, he also revered his mother. He claimed that after his first divorce, she “took over my social life.” Before his marriage to Zsa Zsa, he would decline unwelcome invitations with the tongue-in-cheek reply, “My mother won’t let me.”
Hilton disliked firing employees, and his disinclination to banish anyone helps to explain his ambivalence toward Francesca. He wanted her as a distant relative, but no nearer. In this regard, he and Zsa Zsa were alike. “I believe in large families,” she said. “Every girl should have at least three husbands.” True to her witty precept, she remained on good terms not only with Conrad but with all ex-husbands except one. Zsa Zsa never forgot a kindness, but woe to anyone who dared abuse her or anyone close to her.
Given these two quicksilver personalities—both of whom loved the almighty dollar—it’s understandable that Zsa Zsa’s divorce from Conrad Hilton resembled a surreal cross of Judge Judy with Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the court case in Bleak House that dragged on for generations. In April 1945, shortly before she was locked away in West Hills Sanitarium, Zsa Zsa filed for divorce with a price tag of ten million dollars as settlement. The Los Angeles Times quoted her as saying, “I don’t want that money for myself. I wouldn’t take it. I would give it for relief of European refugees, particularly Jewish refugees who have suffered so much.” Even in the throes of a breakdown, as she then was, Zsa Zsa surely realized the impossibility of such a sum.
A year and a half later, when the divorce was finally granted, Zsa Zsa received $275,000, along with other favorable considerations such as stock in two Hilton hotels. Jolie berated her for not getting a Plaza suite for life. “How stupid of my daughter,” she said. “Not even a ten percent discount in the Hilton hotels. She, the wife, even the ex-wife, should never be charged for one of his rooms.” In later years Zsa Zsa said on television, to the great amusement of Jack Paar and the studio audience, “When I divorced Conrad Hilton, I got six thousand Gideon Bibles.” She repeated this line in one of her Las Vegas nightclub appearances when Conrad was in the audience. He shouted back, “Why don’t you read one of them!”
That made Zsa Zsa laugh, though usually it was Conrad who roared at her bon mots. “Zsa Zsa and I are very good friends,” he told the New York Post in 1958. “There is no bitterness between us.”
“I can always call up Conrad and ask him for a favor,” Zsa Zsa told the same reporter. “We have lunch together very often.” They were obviously better suited as pals than spouses.
During the divorce hearing, Zsa Zsa never mentioned that she was pregnant. J. Randy Taraborelli, in The Hiltons, devotes many pages to the divorce and to the lingering question of who fathered Francesca. “The big question,” he writes, “was whether or not Conrad Hilton had sexual relations with Zsa Zsa Gabor during the time that they were separated, and in this case it would have been sometime in the summer of 1946. She claimed that they saw each other just one time between April and August of that summer, and that is when they were intimate. He said he did see her once, but that they most certainly did not have sex. They weren’t even having sex when they lived together, he argued. Why would he fly all the way to New York to be intimate with her? Zsa Zsa listed Conrad as the child’s father on the birth certificate. He didn’t contest it.”
Taraborelli suggests that Conrad did not repudiate his name on the birth certificate because he did not want an innocent child to bear the label of bastard, which in those days could mar a life. Nor did he want any breath of scandal that might affect the reputation of his family and of his company. For these reasons, he did the gentlemanly thing.
Certainly a convincing argument, and yet . . . the Gabor-Hilton chronology for 1946 raises still another question. Why did Conrad finance Jolie’s first jewelry shop if she was soon to become his ex-mother-in-law? He set her up in business in spring 1946, quite near the time when Zsa Zsa conceived. Given Conrad’s frugality with blood relatives, it seems uncharacteristically generous on his part to shell out thousands for a woman he had met for the first tim
e in January of that year. One possibility is Catholic guilt: after a night in the arms of the seductive wife who has estranged him from his religion, he presents a benefaction to Zsa Zsa’s blessèd mother. To Jolie it was a mitzvah, for Conrad a plenary indulgence.
But still another plot twist. Taraborelli reveals that in a 1947 codicil to his will, Conrad stated, “It is my express purpose to leave nothing to the child born on or about March 10, 1947, to my former wife, Sari Gabor Hilton.” Only after Conrad Hilton’s death did this codicil come to light, contradicted by the fact that he left Francesca $100,000 in a subsequent will. Zsa Zsa felt irritated and betrayed by the paltry amount. As for Francesca, the great mischief it caused her included still another tidal wave of rejection.
Chapter 15
We Were Both in Love with George
What a shame Noël Coward didn’t script Zsa Zsa’s marriage to George Sanders. Imagine the witty dialogue, the arch innuendoes . . . Herewith, a sketch for the comedy that Coward never wrote.
Curtain up on a cocktail party in a Manhattan penthouse. Act II is then set in Bel Air, Act III in Las Vegas, and the final act plays out in a Hilton hotel on the Riviera. The revelations draw laughter and blood. Finally, after waspish aspersions, highly civilized insults, and roguish asides, all is resolved as George sweeps his irrepressible wife into a stage embrace at curtain fall. But the next instant he parts that very curtain to deliver a coup de théâtre: “My dear, I want a divorce.”
Reality began as comedy. During Christmas week 1946, Zsa Zsa saw George in a movie and whispered to Mama in the darkened Manhattan cinema, “There is my next husband.” The picture, as Zsa Zsa recalled, was The Moon and Sixpence, which had been released four years earlier. She remained resolute in that memory, despite his having starred in some half-dozen pictures in the last year or so that might also have been showing around town.
Even Jolie was nonplussed. “This is no time for you to think of a next husband,” she hissed. Jolie’s reluctance sprang from the fact that Zsa Zsa was seven months pregnant. For once, Mama’s opinion fell by the wayside. Zsa Zsa made it her mission to meet the irresistible Mr. Sanders. Baby Francesca Hilton was born March 10, and five weeks later, on April 19, 1947, mission accomplished. Since the next best thing to Coward dialogue is Gabor-Sanders repartee, as recorded over many years in books and newspapers and on television, I have distilled it to the form of a playlet. With apologies to Sir Noël.
ACT I, Scene I—A penthouse apartment, Manhattan, 1946
George Sanders: I never really met Zsa Zsa. We collided in New York at a party given by Serge Simonenko, the banker.
Zsa Zsa Gabor: Serge, I must meet Mr. Sanders. Please bring him to me.
Serge Simonenko: Mrs. Gabor Hilton,1 Mr. George Sanders.
ZZG: Oh, Mr. Sanders, I have been wanting to meet you for so long. I have such a crush on you.
GS: Indeed. How very understandable.
ZZG: I’m such a fan of yours. I saw The Moon and Sixpence and I cried in all the right places.
GS: You’re a very pretty girl.
Scene II—Later that evening, Zsa Zsa’s East Side brownstone
Enter Zsa Zsa, George, and another gentleman from the party.
ZZG: Won’t you both come up for a drink? You must see my baby. (George ignores baby, looks distastefully at growling dog. The other gentleman pets the dog and coos to the baby.)
Scene III—The same, much later that evening
The other gentleman: It’s late, George. I think we must go and let Zsa Zsa get some rest.
GS: You go, old boy. I’m staying.
(Zsa Zsa feigns astonishment.)
GS: There was really nothing fit to eat at that dreadful party. Have you any vodka and caviar? Afterwards, you might bring me a glass of milk, my dear. Just be sure to take the chill off it.
ACT II—Bel Air, the early 1950s
GS: We have been married two years and I haven’t spoken to Zsa Zsa since she said yes.
ZZG: All during my marriage to George Sanders, we had one thing in common. We were both in love with George.
GS: A man has to be married at least twice to appreciate being a bachelor.
ZZG: George was always unfaithful. Once I heard him on the telephone, and I picked up the extension in my bedroom. A woman said to him, “What are you doing with that Hilton woman? You know that I love you . . .”
GS: Being married to Zsa Zsa was like living on the slope of a volcano. Satisfactory between eruptions.
ZZG: . . . and that woman on the telephone was Lucille Ball.
GS: During the five years I was married to Zsa Zsa, I lived in her sumptuous Bel Air mansion as a sort of paying guest. I was allotted a small room in which I was permitted to keep my personal effects until such time as more space was needed to store her ever-mounting stacks of press clippings and photographs.
ZZG: The trouble with George was that he never knew who or what he wanted to be—an English duke, a beachcomber in the tropics, or the greatest woman-hater of his time. In his indecision he gave me some of the most wretched—and happiest—hours of my life.
GS: Zsa Zsa urged me for some time to see her own analyst. Her taste in psychiatrists, as in other spheres, turned out to be examplary. In due course he not only cured me of my obsessional impulses and my periodic backaches. He also cured me of Zsa Zsa.
ZZG: We were two of a kind. We both lived in a special world. In time I was to discover that I saw things not as they were but as a play within a play, in which I was always the heroine.
ACT III—Las Vegas, 1953
ZZG: Our marriage could never survive the threat to George presented by my success in the movies.
GS: I never see my wife—only when she washes my socks.
ZZG: George read Schopenhauer in bed while I was reading scripts.
GS: Zsa Zsa said I was the best of all her husbands. I was. ZZG: I loved that guy. Like no husband I ever had.
GS: I must get out of this ridiculous marriage in which I have got myself involved.
ZZG: A reporter asked George, “Are you still friendly with Zsa Zsa?” He said, “Not very.” That’s not true, dahling. George just never learned to show his true feelings.
ACT IV—A Hilton hotel on the Riviera, 1954
GS: Zsa Zsa becomes angry when I fail to catch her TV appearances. And angrier still when I explain that I am too sensitive an artist to watch her.
ZZG: He was ashamed of being an actor.
GS: In our profession the papers are always full of something or other. And, on occasion, I think that Zsa Zsa is, too.
ZZG: George’s pet name for me was Cokiline, pronounced “cookie-line.” “It’s a Russian term of endearment,” he said. “It means my little sweet cookie, my cookie with a little spice.”
GS: I arrived in Cannes. Zsa Zsa flew down from Paris where she had been the house guest of His Excellency Don Porfirio Rubirosa, Dominican Ambassador to the Republic of France. After two weeks in Cannes where we went to parties and generally had a very good time, I took off for Hollywood and Zsa Zsa returned to Paris to assist in the promotion of, ahem, good will between the Dominican Republic and France.
ZZG: I was addicted to Rubirosa. He was in my blood and he possessed my soul. He was renowned for his machismo and above all for his sexual prowess.
GS: Every age has its Madame Pompadour, its Queen of Sheba, its Cleopatra, and I wouldn’t be surprised if history singles out Zsa Zsa as the twentieth-century prototype of this exclusive coterie.
ZZG: George dropped a bombshell. He filed for divorce.
GS (reading aloud his farewell letter to Zsa Zsa): Don’t be unhappy. I am really much too old for you. You need someone closer to your own age, someone who can respond to your admirable effervescence, someone who has more vitality. I shall always love you, and yield to no one in my admiration for your many qualities.
ZZ: You never really know a man until you divorce him.
GS (continues reading letter): A big kiss for Francesca, and a hug for
you. George.
ZZG: We always lived happily ever after—before the marriage, during the marriage, and after the marriage.
GS (some years later): I might remarry you. I find your money a great aphrodisiac.
Chapter 16
Backstage at . . . We Were Both in Love with George
All of the above is true, as far as it goes. The question lingers, however, whether theirs was a match predestined by the gods or tailored by Lucifer himself. Perhaps, like all marriages, it had patches of perfection surrounded by brimstone and pitch.
When they met in New York in 1947, it’s likely that Zsa Zsa imagined George Sanders as a duplicate of the characters he often played onscreen. Many others thought the same, and no wonder. That’s the image that George wished the world to have. Dorothy Parker, reviewing his Memoirs of a Professional Cad for Esquire in 1960, took him literally. “As shown by this book,” she wrote, “George Sanders off the screen is just like George Sanders on it—the curled lip, the look down the nose, the rigid stance, the high, icy detachment from the herd.” She should have known that autobiographies always lie.
Zsa Zsa said many times that she liked a man who would slap her around. She also liked to slap back, to scream and rant and throw things and then make up with her man like panthers mating. In this regard, George disappointed her: he was too phlegmatic for fisticuffs. He was happiest when left alone in his workshop with his inventions, for he was an amateur scientist who held patents on several Rube Goldberg contraptions. Among them, the one that he called “the greatest work of my career.”