Finding Zsa Zsa

by Sam Staggs

  “Mr. George Sanders,” Zsa Zsa said, hooking her arm through his, “may I introduce Mr. Porfirio Rubirosa.” Then she recalled: they had met unforgettably on Christmas Eve a few years back, when attire was considerably less formal than tonight’s black tie. Mr. Sanders and Mr. Rubirosa shook hands and smiled as if for a dental X-ray. The encounter was one of perfect aplomb, except that a moment later George’s left hand quivered and he spilled a flute of champagne on Zsa Zsa’s party frock.

  Zsa Zsa dreaded the encounter with Odile, but the younger woman won her over with a question, posed in French: “Rubi stays out all night in les boîtes de nuit, drinking and—well, what shall I do?”

  “Chérie, that is Rubi. There is nothing at all to be done. Rien du tout!”

  Ramfis flitted from star to star. Among the guests, the savvy Masons, James and Pamela, would have been aware of the Trujillos and their reign of terror, and a few other guests also. But Hollywood was still a company town, as insular in some ways as a medieval walled city. Then, too, since the United States government and the largely subservient American media favored bloody dictators placed strategically in Latin America, so long as they were anti-communist, real information about Trujillo and his offspring would have required searching beyond the Los Angeles Times or the trade papers, which constituted most of Hollywood’s reading.

  The party cost $10,000, which Zsa Zsa said came from her pocket. Given Ramfis’s bank accounts, however, it’s more likely that he picked up the tab. The consensus among departing guests around 4:00 a.m., and among the wide-awake Gabors who swapped gossip and bon mots for another hour, was that Zsa Zsa’s party was the social event of the season.

  Two days later, her furrier telephoned. Could she drop by his store in Beverly Hills to choose the style chinchilla coat she preferred? One had been ordered for her just that morning.

  Astounded, she asked who ordered it.

  “Mr. Ramfis Trujillo, with his compliments.”

  * * *

  In 1956, Zsa Zsa had formed a professional alliance with Joey Adams, the Borscht Belt comedian and New York Post columnist. Their initial act, which ran for a month in Las Vegas at the Riviera Hotel, proved a lucrative outlet for Zsa Zsa’s talents. Now, with film offers becoming less frequent, she approached Adams and they landed a ten-day engagement at the Cafe de Paris in Washington, D.C. Zsa Zsa’s take was said to be a thousand dollars a night.

  Despite its elegant name, the Cafe de Paris was the kind of glitzy front where you might glimpse money laundering in the kitchen and payoffs in the parking lot. Audiences there being less demanding than in, say, New York, they laughed when Adams greeted them: “Good evening, ladies and germs. Here’s a story I just heard—a Jew and a parrot walk into a bar . . .”

  Eventually Zsa Zsa came onstage in a sequined low-cut dress and costume jewelry from Mama’s shop. Gazing at her chest with goggle eyes, Adams said, “It’s thrilling to be here with the three of you.” Billed as the Professor of Love, she took questions from the audience: “Zsa Zsa, how many husbands have you had?”

  “Do you mean apart from my own?”

  “What’s the best way to keep a man from straying?”

  “Shoot him in ze legs.”

  This shtick, of course, was old and gray even then, but Zsa Zsa recycled it in every venue and continued to do so for the next forty years on television. At some point she must have faced the wretched fact that she had become a cartoon, but given her guts and determination, plus the indomitable Gabor genes, she never stopped playing the star. And it worked, to a point. Even those who dubbed her a has-been prefaced it with the words “celebrity” and “glamorous.”

  The grimness of her professional situation had not yet dawned, but with Hollywood studios on the verge of collapse, and contracts cancelled rather than renewed, she and other famous blondes were about to become passé. In six years she had gone from John Huston and Moulin Rouge to this vulgarian and his tit jokes.

  In proportion as her claim diminished—her claim to consideration as a diva—Zsa Zsa counterclaimed prima donna rights. She grew more temperamental, demanding, mercenary, headstrong. Deeper into her forties, but claiming twenty-five, she became a parody of the earlier Zsa Zsa. Added to her miseries was deepening bipolar disorder, for which no foolproof treatment existed. As a comedienne, she covered humiliation and heartbreak with witty comebacks, even if that meant coasting on lines exhausted and moldy from overuse. All the same, she might still have rescued her career had she chosen her friends more judiciously.

  * * *

  While appearing with Joey Adams in Washington, Zsa Zsa received a telephone call. “Miss Gabor, this is United Press International calling. Is it true that General Trujillo gave you a Mercedes-Benz roadster?” Standing at a wall telephone outside her cramped, unadorned dressing room at the Cafe de Paris, and caught off guard, Zsa Zsa answered, “Yes, of course it’s true. Why?” Since the gift had arrived months earlier, she couldn’t imagine why anyone was interested now.

  “Is it true that Miss Kim Novak also received a Mercedes from the general?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she snapped.

  Next day’s headline: KIM NOVAK AND ZSA ZSA GABOR RECEIVE GIFT AUTOS FROM TRUJILLO.

  When the press got wind of the chinchilla evening jacket—a confection of the thickest pelts—they called again for a statement. Even if Russell Birdwell had been there for damage control, it was too late. The scandal flamed and scorched like wildfire. It didn’t help her case that Zsa Zsa told a reporter, in flippant tones, “He gave me a lovely chinchilla coat because I worked so hard to make his visit to Hollywood pleasant. I gave a terrific party for him and he is not the kind of man who says thank you with a bouquet of flowers.”

  Headlines roared on and on, even in small-town newspapers. Time and Newsweek had their fun, and Life ran a photo spread: in one picture, Zsa Zsa, Kim, Ramfis, Rubi, and Odile; in another, Ramfis’s children and their nurse. According to the story in the issue of May 26, 1958, Zsa Zsa’s Mercedes 190 SL cost $5,800 and the chinchilla $17,000. Kim’s Mercedes 220 S convertible cost $8,700, and her suitor’s generosity extended to $5,000 worth of jewelry. Zsa Zsa claimed she had tried to sell her gift car because it lacked automatic transmission and was therefore difficult for her to drive. All the same, she posed for Life seated under the steering wheel. In the photo, her expression was that of the proverbial cat who has lapped up the cream. Elsewhere, she posed in the chinchilla as if the little animals had grown it especially for her.

  Soon Confidential, Whisper, and the other scandal magazines ran cover stories on Zsa Zsa, Kim, Ramfis, and his largesse. On television and in night spots comedians made lurid jokes about Zsa Zsa’s party giving secrets. One columnist even suggested that she be deported for moral turpitude. Zsa Zsa later admitted that Eva was “terribly upset” by the scandal. “She is much more practical minded than I am,” said Zsa Zsa, as if the Trujillo episode were no more than a parking ticket stuck on her windshield.

  Then the coup de grâce. A reporter phoned the Cafe de Paris to ask Zsa Zsa whether she had a response to the congressman. She had no idea what he was talking about until he explained in detail. “Congressman Wayne Hays of Ohio. What do you think about his statement in the House of Representatives that you are the most expensive courtesan since Madame de Pompadour?”

  The reference was to the Marquise de Pompadour, chief mistress to Louis XV of France in the eighteenth century. Behind the congressional podium, Hays had this to say: “If this scarlet woman continues her tricks with this Latin American playboy of hers, foreign aid as we know it today may come tumbling down around our feet.”

  Hays was known as the meanest man in the House. Peter H. Brown, in his biography Such Devoted Sisters: Those Fabulous Gabors, sets the indelible scene: “A gigantic color banner of Zsa Zsa Gabor striking a seductive pose from the film Lili was unfurled before the men in the U.S. House of Representatives. Congressman Hays, a big man with a thundering voice, looked around to
see if his words were having the proper effect. A silence had settled over his peers. He let the hush play its course before he pulled out his ace in the hole.

  “ ‘And here,’ said Hays, unfurling still another photo of Zsa Zsa, ‘is the most expensive courtesan since Madame de Pompadour. And I have seen evidence that direct American aid to the Dominican Republic is being sent right back to our own shores in the form of expensive gifts to Miss Zsa Zsa Gabor and her friends. If we want to give foreign aid to movie stars, let’s pass a special bill and get rid of the middleman. Hell, let’s pass a bill and send the money straight to Zsa Zsa out there in Beverly Hills.’

  “There was a strong reaction. The congressmen rose to their feet, clapped, whistled, and cheered.”

  Zsa Zsa’s response in the press sounded weak. “If Mr. Hays comes from behind his congressional wall of immunity and repeats this statement, I will sue him for slander.” Rage as she might, there was nothing she could do. She should have listened to those friends who warned her not to get involved with anyone named Trujillo. She never named them, but the warnings may well have come from James and Pamela Mason, from Eva, from Tony Gallucci. He, perhaps more than anyone else in her circle, could smell taint from afar. And unlike his impetuous sister-in-law, Gallucci knew what to do when an odor grew noxious.

  The U.S. Congress had not finished with Zsa Zsa. Representative Charles Porter of Oregon, echoing his Ohio colleague, suggested that since Ramfis “spends a million dollars a year, the $1.3 million in U.S. aid to the Dominican Republic be given directly to the taxable movie stars instead of going through the Trujillos.”

  Zsa Zsa’s heedless behavior caused this embarrassment, as it would trigger disputes and scandals for the rest of her life. In this case, however, she had the last laugh, although it took eighteen years. In 1976, Wayne Hays resigned his seat in the House of Representatives after a sex scandal involving his former secretary, Elizabeth Ray. The Washington Post quoted Ray as saying that while she was ostensibly hired for office work, “I can’t type, I can’t file, I can’t even answer the phone.” But disgraced congressmen, like old soldiers, don’t die; they just fade away. Three years after his own scandal, Hays was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives and served one term.

  Zsa Zsa holds the distinction of being one of the very few film stars to be censured in the U.S. Congress. The other is Ingrid Bergman, who became pregnant by Italian director Roberto Rossellini while still married to her first husband. When the story broke, a senator condemned her as “an assault upon the institution of marriage” and “a powerful influence of evil.” The irony of such pronouncements is glaring. The sexism, the hypocrisy, and the pestilential wrongs of the U.S. Senate, the House, and the presidency are as enduring as the republic for which they stand.

  * * *

  After the assassination of Trujillo the dictator in 1961, Ramfis briefly took over the country. He continued the former policies of murder, torture, and repression until later that year, when he was deposed. He and all the remaining Trujillos fled to Europe aboard the luxurious Angelita. Also on board was Trujillo’s casket, which was said to be lined with four million dollars in cash as well as jewels and incriminating documents.

  In 1962 Ramfis and others of the Trujillo family settled in Spain under the protection of another bloody dictator, Francisco Franco. Ramfis died in Madrid in 1969 of injuries sustained in the crash of his blue Ferrari sports car.

  Chapter 28

  The Queen of Negative Space

  Some movies emit fumes of testosterone, others clouds of estrogen. Queen of Outer Space gives off bursts of egotism, thanks to Zsa Zsa’s performance. In every frame she dares you not to acknowledge her magnificence. Playing Talleah (and not the queen, as is often assumed), she is big; it’s the universe that got small.

  If Moulin Rouge counts as the high-class apex of Zsa Zsa’s career, then Queen of Outer Space demands separate but equal recognition. A favorite among cultists, it’s famous for low camp and fifties weirdness. All that is true, but what sets it apart is Zsa Zsa’s one-woman celebration of herself. Rearrange the scenery, change a couple of dates, and finally she has won the beauty contest. Not Miss Magyarország 1933, but twenty-five years later she crowns herself with the diadem of vainglory. Set on the Female Planet, the picture could have been titled The Gabor Who Conquered Venus.

  She never fully recovered from her grandiose coup. Arsenio Hall, interviewing Zsa Zsa in 1994, held up the VHS package of Queen of Outer Space. “How old were you when you made that movie?”

  “Twenty-one. It was the beginning of my career.”

  He accepted her answer with a gentlemanly nod.

  Once the picture had reached the heights of cult status, Zsa Zsa couldn’t decide whether to bask or to hide. Eventually she claimed it as her own. By the time of its reissue in a fully restored CinemaScope print in 1995, she was expected at the Film Forum in New York to preside over the event. Rumors circulated that she might make similar appearances across the country. Still grief-stricken over Eva’s recent death, however, she was not up to the travel and levity involved. She did consent to a telephone interview with the San Francisco Chronicle when the Castro Theatre screened the film. “To tell you the truth, we never even thought it would get released,” she said, a doubt not voiced by anyone else connected with the picture.

  After its release in September 1958, Queen of Outer Space took some dozen years to reach immortality. After Stonewall, when revival houses in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco began screening florid favorites from previous decades, hip audiences made it a gay emblem along with some of its betters, such as The Wizard of Oz, All About Eve, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Once lodged in the consciousness of connoisseurs, the picture—and Zsa Zsa’s immortal line, “I hate zat qveen”—never left. Endlessly quoted, the line has worn thin with use, like stairs at a place of pilgrimage.

  Despite its reputation, Queen of Outer Space is not really all that hilarious. (Pictures like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman are more over the top.) It has many static sequences, and low-budget cheesiness pervades the picture from the start, when the spaceship crew recline for takeoff in seats like Barcaloungers, and a blonde starlet on the ground—Joi Lansing—waves and blows kisses to her flight engineer boyfriend as though he were on board a Cessna.

  Captain of the spaceship is Eric Fleming, whose face, like that of a Gabor, had been reconstructed by plastic surgery owing to a disfiguring accident while in the navy in the 1940s. The surgical procedure worked well, for by the time of Queen of Outer Space, and then the TV western Rawhide, he looked like an aging Dolce & Gabbana model.

  Diverted from its intended course, the spaceship crash-lands on Venus, a planet ruled by gun-totin’ women who hate men, along with a few subversives who long for knowledge of the strange opposite sex. Variety’s review in 1958 noted that “most of the female characters look like they would be more at home on a Minsky runway than the Cape Canaveral launching pad.” More obvious today is the lesbian subtext that pervades the planet.

  In a plot that’s slow in thickening, Zsa Zsa appears thirty-one minutes into the film. With her dazzling face, as tight and Mongolian as any one of her supposed Asian forebears’, she looks all set to play Turandot. She’s not a queen, not an empress—not yet. That role went to Laurie Mitchell. At the end of the picture, however, zat qveen gets incinerated and Zsa Zsa, in gold lamé, ruby earrings, and tiara, ascends the throne, which resembles a chair in a dentist’s waiting room.

  The queen’s face is horribly scarred from radiation burns, and so she wears a mask. “Men did this to me!” she cries out when finally Eric Fleming unmasks her. She wants to destroy Earth before it can attack her planet. The politics of this picture could be read from the left as an allegory of U.S. imperialism, from the right a condemnation of Soviet Cold War policies.

  Zsa Zsa, who seems to be an eminent Venusian scientist, wears a parade of evening gowns to the lab. When captive earthmen elude their female guards and a melee
breaks out in Zsa Zsa’s workspace, she screams, “Get out! You are disturbing my vork!” And petulantly pulls her filmy shawl tighter across her shoulders. Eventually she sides with the earthmen, whom the queen considers responsible for wars and planetary mayhem. While the film’s sexism was funny in 1958, today it is jeered at screenings. The queen and her battalion of strong women get the applause.

  * * *

  Tom Weaver, author of Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers, joined Laurie Mitchell for the DVD audio commentary on Queen of Outer Space in 2008. Fifty years after filming, she recalled much of interest. “Edward Bernds, the director, shot one-fifth of the picture in a day. He explained to the cast that Zsa Zsa was a very sensitive actress. During the several weeks of filming, she wanted me to hang out with her. I don’t know why. The gossip columns ran items that we were not getting along, but that was baloney.” Mitchell recalled that Rubirosa would phone Zsa Zsa from France when she was on the set. He also sent champagne, which she kept in her dressing room.

  “Do you want to drink some?” she asked Laurie.

  “That’s very sweet,” Mitchell replied, “but I don’t drink while I’m working.”

  “Okay, you come back later.”

  Several years after filming, Laurie Mitchell was collecting her luggage at Heathrow Airport in London when she saw Zsa Zsa at the same carousel.

  LM: “Hello, Zsa Zsa. I’m Laurie.”

  ZZG (nonchalant): “Hello.”

  LM: “Do you know who I am?”

  ZZG: “No, I do not.”

  LM: “I did Queen of Outer Space with you.”

  ZZG: “That’s nice.” (Pause) “I’m so terribly upset. They will not let my dog sit next to me in the plane.”

  It was a puppy, Laurie recalled, and Zsa Zsa was afraid he would die in the compartment where animals travel. Laurie tried to reassure her that he would be all right. Zsa Zsa’s last words were, “I am going to make a big fuss over this. I want him to sit next to me.”