Finding Zsa Zsa

by Sam Staggs

  Eva, a freelancer at the time, lacked studio protection. Moreover, she had been single since her divorce from Charles Isaacs in 1949—a condition looked upon with suspicion in the conformist fifties. Then, too, among her close friends were Marlene, Tallulah Bankhead, and other women they whispered about. The last thing Eva needed was a suggestive magazine cover line: “When Dietrich Gave Eva Gabor’s Man the Boot,” or, even worse, “The Night Dietrich Spent with Eva Gabor.”

  Marry a doctor, problem solved. Even if the marriage lasted hardly longer than an office visit.

  * * *

  By the mid-1950s, Eva had reluctantly accepted her status as perpetual supporting player in the movies. Only on television and in regional theatre would she be first or second billed. From 1956 to the end of the decade, however, she seldom had a day off. While still in California prior to rehearsals for The Little Glass Clock, she costarred with June Allyson and David Niven in My Man Godfrey. Also in the cast was Martha Hyer, who, ten years later, turned down the role of Lisa Douglas in Green Acres over a salary dispute. In so doing, she inadvertently gave Eva one of the best opportunities of her career.

  In 1957 Eva traveled to London for The Truth About Women, in which she costarred with Laurence Harvey and Julie Harris. The sex-comedy genre, to which this film belongs, is one of limited possibilities, but this British example outshines anything that prudish Hollywood dared at the time. The Truth About Women could pass for a naughty French farce, since it makes no moralistic apologies for the various characters’ adulterous relationships. Just about every man has a mistress and every woman a lover. This in contrast with Eva’s sophomoric American movies of the same period, It Started with a Kiss and Don’t Go Near the Water.

  Like so many pictures of the time, these two depend on tiresome titillation. In Don’t Go Near the Water Eva plays a correspondent for Madame magazine who is sent to a remote Pacific island in the closing days of World War II. She’s the feistiest presence in this puerile comedy as she flutters in like an unwitting canary to a taxidermy shop. As the only female on a carrier with a thousand sailors, she creates horny pandemonium by hoisting her black lace panties to dry high up on the ship’s cordage near the main mast. Glenn Ford, star of the picture, was Eva’s boyfriend before and during the shoot. Attempting to escape the “Glamorous Gabor” stereotype, Eva told an interviewer, “I refused to wear anything but a very unchic uniform of military khaki. I was very drab. Not even one basic diamond!” Appearing on What’s My Line? in 1957, shortly after the film’s release, Eva said, “I spent three days on a battleship with the boys.” Jim Backus, a member of the panel, mentioned that Eva was his landlady; he was subletting her apartment at 1033 Fifth Avenue. “Do you like sleeping in my bed?” she asked with her particular brand of wide-eyed innocence. (Zsa Zsa once described Eva as “the little innocent one, but she’s not that innocent.”)

  Although Glenn Ford was Eva’s costar once more in It Started with a Kiss, it was Debbie Reynolds who claimed her attention. On location in Spain in 1959, they met for the first time. “I was prepared not to like Debbie,” Eva told Louella Parsons. “That’s because in the split from Eddie Fisher she seemed goody-goody. On the contrary, from the minute we reported for work, I found her to be a girl who can stand on her own two feet. She is strong, courageous, and she doesn’t ask for sympathy. We became good friends from the very beginning. I encouraged her to make the most of her beauty and to go out with other men and to forget the past.” Debbie’s much publicized friendship with Eva helped her shed that goody-goody image for a more sophisticated one. And, as one of the best mimics in show business, Debbie did hilarious Gabor imitations for the next forty years.

  It Started with a Kiss belongs to Debbie, who makes a mediocre story come alive with tomboy energy and comic timing. Eva, as the Marquesa del Rey, has little to do except smile and wear fetching outfits designed by Helen Rose. She seems undirected, but unlike Zsa Zsa she knew how to direct herself. Instinct told her to move with the grace and hauteur of a real marquesa, at least the kind imagined by MGM. Again in contrast with Zsa Zsa, who was poised in person but seldom seemed at ease with herself onscreen, Eva uses face, body, and costumes to avoid going rigid as the film plods along.

  Eva’s last picture of the decade, Gigi, is an MGM behemoth, loved by audiences from its release in 1958 to the present, smothered in Oscars, and the apotheosis of what a studio musical might have been. Instead, it’s a Vincente Minnelli picture that runs out of steam, and Leslie Caron in the title role is an unconvincing gamine on the verge of womanhood. (At twenty-seven, she was a decade late.) Eva, as the courtesan Liane d’Exelmans, gives a champagne performance—light, pale gold, and sparkling.

  * * *

  One week before Eva married John Williams, Magda married her fourth husband. Arthur Gallucci was his name, though everyone called him Tony. They met in 1950 at a cocktail party on Long Island, where his family’s business was located and where he lived in a seven-bedroom mansion in Southampton. That business was variously reported as a contracting firm, a manufacturing concern, and a plumbing corporation. There were rumors, also, of underworld connections, which Francesca vehemently denied. Whatever his dealings, three facts are inarguable: he was wealthy, a volatile alcoholic, and he treated young Francesca with kindness.

  After their first meeting in 1950, Magda and Tony became inseparable and eventually lived together in Magda’s town house at 13 East Seventy-first Street and in Tony’s estate on Long Island. Tony’s amorous inclinations, however, matched the Gabors’ in complexity. Jolie spotted trouble early on: womanizing and drink. Whatever his charms, the following story shows him as a sometime louse.

  At the end of a long afternoon in 1955, Magda’s little dog, Coco, began yapping to remind them it was time for his walk. Tony volunteered to take him out, and an hour later they had not returned. Two hours, three, then four. Imagining the worst, Magda paced. Should she call the police? The nearest hospital?

  Then Coco barked at the door. He raced in without leash or collar. At this point the narrative grows bizarre, whether recounted by Jolie or reported obliquely in the press. While on the walk, Tony ran into a former girlfriend who invited him to join her for a drink at a nearby bar on the East Side, not far from Magda’s house. He became inebriated and at some point noticed that Coco had wriggled out of his collar and escaped. Tony did not go in pursuit.

  Although Magda and Tony had recently become engaged, he didn’t return to her that night. Instead, he shacked up with the girlfriend and, a few days later, married her. Magda, distraught even with Coco safely home that night, and without waiting to find out what had happened, swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills. As the bottle contained either four, or ten, depending on Jolie’s wavering memory, the overdose was not fatal. Always the woman of the hour, Jolie sensed that something was wrong at Magda’s. She raced over, found Magda passed out on a bed, called a doctor who induced vomiting, and except for a terrible headache Magda returned to normal. That precipitous overdose, taken before she learned of Tony’s flight, suggests an unstable relationship riddled with doubts. It also belies Magda’s reputation as the strong, dominant sister. Then, too, Jolie’s chronology no doubt omits significant details.

  Months later, Magda heard that Tony’s brief marriage had ended. She invited him to her house. Once she had him inside, she beat him with a whip. “Magda didn’t hurt him too badly,” Jolie reasoned, “because he managed to stay alive for another twenty years.” (Her math was off; he lived twelve years longer and endured several other beatings from his wife. Jolie did not divulge his level of pleasure.)

  Although Magda, unlike her mother and her sisters, did not chase publicity, her marriages made news. The romantic details of Magda and Tony’s wedding day, however, remained largely untold for sixty years, appearing at last in 2017 in the New Jersey Herald, a paper published in Sussex County. By then, all the adults who attended were dead, and youngsters who recalled the day were in their seventies. Events were reconstruct
ed for the newspaper from their childhood memories and from local press coverage of the wedding, which took place on April 1, 1956.

  Neither Tony’s betrayal nor Magda’s use of the whip was mentioned on the happy wedding day. They were married at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Leslie Vermes on Rutherford Avenue in Franklin, New Jersey, with the town’s mayor, Alfred B. Littell, officiating. Dr. and Mrs. Vermes, members of the local Hungarian community, had met Eva a few years earlier. Their son, Bob Vermes, recalled that “my parents were flying back from a vacation in Mexico, and they were seated next to Eva Gabor. The three of them struck up a conversation in Hungarian and they quickly became fast friends.”

  It is unclear why Magda and Tony chose this location rather than Manhattan or Southampton. Perhaps it was because a New Jersey wedding was something no Gabor had tried before. After the ceremony, which was attended by family and close friends, the hosts opened the front door and invited the many onlookers gathered in the street and on the lawn to meet the Gabors and to share the traditional Hungarian feast prepared by members of the local Hungarian Reformed Church, including six wedding cakes.

  * * *

  Up until the marriage, Magda remained active in regional theatre, appearing in such light entertainments as Molnár’s The Play’s the Thing and the French farce Pajama Tops. Like Jolie, Eva, and Zsa Zsa, she turned up frequently on television and at charity events, though she seemed abstracted from the sparkle created by her mother and sisters. Magda and Tony loved and fought until his death in 1967. And beyond.

  Believing that she was Tony’s primary legatee, Magda learned otherwise when his will was filed for probate. Less than two months before he died, her husband added a codicil that removed her as beneficiary of his personal jewelry, art objects, automobile, and other holdings. From his estate in excess of a million dollars, Magda received a bequest of twenty-five thousand, plus the income for life of a trust fund. All else went to Tony’s brother and a nephew. Later that year, Magda was ordered to appear in court to answer questions about the disappearance of valuables including a check for ten thousand dollars, jewelry, and other personal possessions of the deceased worth in excess of a hundred thousand dollars.

  Magda won the bitter, protracted court battle with Tony’s family and emerged not only a merry widow but a rich one as well, with two husbands yet to come. For the last thirty years of her life, however, she would need more than money could buy. While the unbreakable fibers that brought her through the war and its terrors sustained her through years of hardship, at times that strength wavered. But whenever Magda foundered, the other Gabors, never failing, united to form her bulwark.

  Chapter 25

  Ruszkik Haza!

  (Russians Go Home!)

  When the Hungarian Revolution erupted on October 23, 1956, the non-communist world reacted with an outpouring of sympathy and support for the courageous Hungarians who dared rise up against the brutality of their Soviet-imposed government. The revolt began as a student demonstration in Budapest. Soon it spread to all levels of the population and to every part of Hungary. For a brief time it seemed that the Hungarians had triumphed, but on November 4 hundreds of tanks crossed the border from the Soviet Union to suppress the uprising and to mete out horrific punishments for anyone suspected of taking part.

  While Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America had long urged people living behind the Iron Curtain to fight communist oppression, 1956 was an American presidential election year and Dwight D. Eisenhower, running for a second term, did not want to risk a confrontion with the Soviet Union. It was believed, also, that any such confrontation might lead to all-out nuclear war. In Hungary, therefore, freedom fighters waited for help from the West, but none was forthcoming.

  Before the borders were resealed after the Soviet invasion, some 200,000 Hungarians fled the country, creating a need for emergency relief funds and resettlement in other lands. A number of Hollywood stars at the time, as well as directors and others behind the camera, were Hungarian either by birth or descent, among them Tony Curtis, Cornel Wilde, George Cukor, Michael Curtiz, and Adolf Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures. While many of these joined their show business colleagues to raise money for refugee relief, no one drew more attention to the cause than Ilona Massey (1910–1974). Billed upon arrival in Hollywood in 1937 as “the new Dietrich,” she made only a dozen films in a career that lasted two decades. Today she is best remembered for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) and for her angry protests in 1956 outside the Russian mission to the UN and the Russian embassy in Washington. Nor did her hatred of Russian barbarism abate after the Hungarian Revolution. In 1959 she led pickets in Hollywood when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States included a luncheon at 20th Century Fox.

  In 1956, dramatic photographs appeared in the press of Ilona Massey standing on platforms, or sometimes on the hood of a car, fist upraised, blonde hair blowing and tears streaming down her cheeks, as she denounced the Soviet Union and pleaded for United States intervention to stop the carnage in Hungary. From the beginning of the uprising, she urged the Gabors to join her. Owing to their celebrity, she believed they could raise vast amounts of money.

  The Gabors were as distraught as Ilona Massey at the events in Hungary. They hesitated, however, to take such a confrontational approach as their countrywoman. At the time, their refusal was not well understood. They joined no protest demonstrations, and their fund-raising efforts received only such random mention in gossip columns as, “Zsa Zsa Gabor really shelled out for Hungarian relief, even though she hates to part with money,” and this from Hedda Hopper: “Zsa Zsa is out raising money for the Hungarian war relief; says she can’t think of anything else. ‘All our relatives are there,’ she told me.”

  It was true, many relatives remained in Hungary, on the Gabor side and the Tillemann. The Gabors’ main concern, however, was Vilmos, who had been in disfavor with the communist regime for years. Now he was old and in poor health, and therefore less subject to official harassment. It was no secret, however, that persecution of ordinary Hungarians resulted from criticism of the government made by relatives abroad.

  Before the revolution, and after, the Gabors maintained regular contact with Vilmos. How they managed to do so is not entirely clear, because several factors militated against such communication. No communist government welcomed attention from flashy capitalists, which the Gabors had become as soon as possible after arrival in the United States. Then, too, as previously noted, Vilmos in the early fifties had been labeled an “undesirable,” stripped of his real estate holdings and all else, and forced to live with his second wife in a cramped suburb of Budapest. Old and infirm, he offered no threat to the government, but neither did communist officials have a reason to treat him favorably.

  A partial explanation for the ease of communication between Vilmos and his family is this: in 1953, at the height of the Cold War, Imre Nagy was appointed prime minister of the Hungarian People’s Republic. Attempting to steer Hungary away from Stalinism and the heavy hand of Moscow, Nagy sought to usher in limited press freedom, openness to the West, and economic reforms. His agenda earned the name “the New Course in Socialism.” Such innovative thinking displeased the Kremlin. The Soviet Union considered Nagy’s Hungarian brand of communism not only weak but untenable, setting a dangerous example for other Iron Curtain countries. He was therefore removed in 1955, and the country returned to its former lockdown. This renewed despotism helped to spark the revolution.

  During Nagy’s brief rule, however, Vilmos benefited. For a time, his daughters were able to telephone him almost at will, a freedom unheard of before Imre Nagy. Perhaps he was even singled out by the regime as an example of the beneficent new face of communism.

  And so it happened that in 1954, one of the most frigid years of the Cold War, Vilmos was permitted to give an interview to a visiting Hungarian-speaking journalist for the Associated Press. With tears in his eyes, he spoke openly about his famous offspring, calling the
m “the best daughters in the world” and adding that “all three are angels to me.” Of Jolie, he said that after their divorce they remained good friends, adding that “she is a kind-hearted woman.” At the end of the interview, Vilmos pulled from his pocket a stack of postcards to show his visitor. Sent by his loved ones from various countries, they were said to be “couched in warm, loving words.” And possibly in prearranged code to tell Vilmos things not otherwise permitted. Since letters were subject to censorship and confiscation, postcards were considered the safest medium. (As late as 1987 I was cautioned by a friend in Czechoslovakia not to mention certain topics in my letters lest he face retribution.)

  During this period of slight relaxation, an outbreak of polio threatened countless Hungarians. The country was ill equipped to cope with routine medical troubles, let alone a crippling epidemic. The mother of József Gabor, Zsa Zsa’s cousin, wrote asking for any help available from the United States. Upon receipt of the letter, Zsa Zsa set to work via contacts in Washington and elsewhere. According to József Gabor, “a plane load of polio vaccine from Switzerland arrived in Budapest.” Speaking after Zsa Zsa’s death, he added, “She was a very good person. She claimed she wanted only understanding and love, but couldn’t get that from people, only from animals.”

  Returning to 1956, it seems obvious that the Gabors’ hesitation to take part in overt protests against the Soviet invasion of Hungary had to do with the safety of Vilmos and other relatives. To do so would likely have guaranteed the end of all contact. Instead, they worked tirelessly behind the scenes, raising thousands of dollars in the weeks and months immediately after the revolution. These included: