by Sam Staggs
* * *
For his book, published in 1988, Weaver interviewed Edward Bernds. The director told him how the picture came to be made. At the time, no one dreamed that Queen of Outer Space would transcend its low origins to soar into the kitsch stratosphere, taking Zsa Zsa with it. The producer Walter Wanger, husband of Joan Bennett, shot his wife’s lover and went to jail. Needing work after serving a four-month sentence, he came to Allied Artists. He brought with him a ten-page story outline by Ben Hecht titled Queen of the Universe, which Bernds recalled as “not a motion picture story at all. It was just a satirical look at a planet ineptly ruled by women.”
Eventually Ben Schwalb, rather than Wanger, produced the picture from a screenplay by Charles Beaumont. There being very little of use in the Ben Hecht outline, the screenplay, according to Bernds, turned into “pretty much an original.” After extended rewriting by Bernds and other hands, the shooting script incorporated virtually everything that later made it unforgettable.
Asked about directing Laurie Mitchell, Eric Fleming, and Zsa Zsa, Bernds said that he had used Mitchell in several previous films and liked her work. Fleming, he recalled, was “a model of professionalism, always prepared, dialogue solidly memorized, all business despite Zsa Zsa’s flightiness.”
Questioned further about Zsa Zsa, Bernds said that “she was not thoroughly professional, she didn’t have her lines well prepared, she had a kind of giddy attitude toward things.” During wardrobe wrangles before filming began, Bernds complained to the producer about her demands. He told Schwalb, “This is our chance to dump her. If she wants to walk, let her walk.” The producer demurred. “No, we need a star. Without a star we haven’t got a picture. Humor her.”
According to Bernds, “Ben Schwalb went to the hospital with ulcers halfway through the picture,” the implication being that Zsa Zsa caused them. “I was left to cope with her alone,” Bernds added, “and she damn near gave me ulcers. If the picture’s shown on TV, I won’t watch it, because Zsa Zsa Gabor still gives me a swift pain.”
Eventually, Bernds softened somewhat toward Zsa Zsa. Interviewed in 1998 by Scary Monsters magazine, he said, “When Zsa Zsa and I went to choose her costume, she was much too picky and wouldn’t wear anything they had to offer. This became at the time quite irritating to me. Looking back, however, I can agree because she was indeed a beautiful woman but also she was our star with the power of drawing people into theatres to see Queen of Outer Space. Her appearance was our future. If she had allowed us to put something on her just because it was available that would not have been in her best interest. I respect her for this. She had to protect her image.”
Laurie Mitchell added that Zsa Zsa “wanted to know what I was wearing and where did I get it. The wardrobe woman made sure none of us in the cast had the same hair color as Zsa Zsa, nor similar costumes.” Mitchell said she believed that Zsa Zsa had a special designer for her clothes, one not affiliated with Allied Artists, the Poverty Row production company.
By the time of Zsa Zsa’s collaboration with Wendy Leigh on One Lifetime Is Not Enough, a highly fictionalized memoir published in 1991, she had convinced herself that Ben Hecht wrote Queen of Outer Space. She added, “I adored my costumes, designed by Edith Head and costing a staggering $15,000 apiece.” Since by her own admission she received $10,000 for her work in the picture, one suspects that her own brand of creative accounting added several zeros to the dressmaker’s tab. And while no one disputes the graffito, “Edith Head gives good wardrobe,” she didn’t give Zsa Zsa any of it for Queen of Outer Space.
* * *
In October 1958 Zsa Zsa flew to Italy to film For the First Time, with Mario Lanza. Directed by Rudolf Maté, whose career as cinematographer includes such classics as The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Foreign Correspondent (1940), and Gilda (1946), the picture promised more than it delivered. As a director, Maté lacked the artistry that he often achieved with the camera. Zsa Zsa plays a Continental playgirl whose line—“When I first came to Capri, I used to fall in love every other day”—predicts her next forty years of TV chitchat. For several in the cast, it was a valediction. Lanza died shortly after the picture’s release; the ingenue, Johanna von Koczian, had a low-grade career confined to German-language films and TV; and this was Zsa Zsa’s last costarring appearance in a respectable, though mediocre, movie. Her role fits the image the public had now formed of her: a publicity-seeking playgirl. When Mario Lanza complains about so many reporters at what was supposed to be an intimate party, Zsa Zsa replies: “But dahling, these are my most intimate friends—United Press, Associated Press, and Mister Reuters.”
Next came an obscure Italian picture, La Contessa Azzurra, released in 1960, followed by Pepe the following year. In it, Zsa Zsa begins her devolution into meaningless cameo roles. (Her first one, in Touch of Evil, had a purpose thanks to Orson Welles.) Neither she, nor the two dozen other stars who make cameo appearances in Pepe, adds anything to George Sidney’s long, lumpish bore. Her next humiliation came when she happened to be in England in 1961. Hearing that Bob Hope and Bing Crosby had reunited for another of their popular “Road” pictures, she turned up at their location shoot thirty miles outside London. “Bob dahling,” she said, “I understand there is the most wonderful part in your picture for me.”
“Sure is, honey,” he replied. “We’ll have it written tomorrow.” According to Bob Hope’s memoir, The Road to Hollywood, the writers devised a scene in which Zsa Zsa played a nurse attempting to cure Hope of amnesia. This hurried-up scene, along with Hope and Crosby’s burned-out shtick, plus pervasive Hollywood mediocrity in the early sixties—throw them all together and what you get is Zsa Zsa’s brief scene deleted and Zsa Zsa left to television: Make Room for Daddy, Mister Ed, General Electric Theater, Burke’s Law, Gilligan’s Island. Despite the eventual rerun popularity of some of these shows among viewers who weren’t subjected to the original telecasts, those titles and dozens in the same key add up to a sad legacy for someone of Zsa Zsa’s earlier possibilities.
It’s hard to realize today that just over fifty years ago Hollywood made sophomoric movies about horny adults. The Doris Day virgin role in Boys Night Out (1962) went to Kim Novak, who perhaps put in a good word for Zsa Zsa and got her a wee part at the end of the picture. In a ten-second shot, she glides in, swathed in chinchilla. This one, however, was not the Trujillo jacket that caused the uproar four years earlier but another one from her closet. The tepid filmography continued through the sixties, with Zsa Zsa in the kind of movies that made people stay home and watch TV: Picture Mommy Dead; Arrivederci, Baby; Jack of Diamonds. And throughout the seventies as well, with Up the Front, Every Girl Should Have One, and Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood.
The bleak cavalcade seemed endless, like a ghost train circling the world. In the eighties, Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie; Smart Alec; A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors; Johann Strauss: The King without a Crown; and into the nineties: The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear; The Naked Truth; The Beverly Hillbillies; up to her finale, a cameo with Rosie O’Donnell in A Very Brady Sequel in 1996.
* * *
The period known as the fifties did not necessarily finish at midnight on December 31, 1959. Some say the spirit of that decade only ended with the election of JFK in 1960; others move the date to November 22, 1963. In Hollywood, distant rumblings became more ominous, and on August 5, 1962, catastrophe struck: the death of Marilyn Monroe, a terrible event in itself but also a convenient symbol to mark the demise of old-fashioned glamour, in Hollywood and elsewhere. For the legions of blonde actresses who claimed the 1950s as their decade, the following years turned barren and bitter. Those who survived had to undergo a metamorphosis. Even so, few emerged from the ordeal with wings; the change more likely took them backward, into a cocoon of ruptured dreams. Zsa Zsa and Eva at least kept their own wings, which by the early sixties were showing battle fatigue.
An apocryphal story: at a Hollywood party in the early sixties, two ic
onic fifties blondes are sitting together on a patio, looking up at the stars and commiserating. Their talk is about the difficulty of maintaining any semblance of a career in the post-studio era, when their kind of glamour and hijinks have become passé and they now must grab any job they can get, whether cheap TV or dinner theatre or summer stock in bottom-feeder plays.
“You know,” says Jayne Mansfield to Mamie Van Doren, “Marilyn was the lucky one.”
Chapter 29
Shatterproof
Magda Gabor viewed life through a darker lens than others in her family. If Eva was the optimist, and Zsa Zsa the absurdist, then Magda might be called the realist. As such, if history had not decreed otherwise, Magda might eventually have taken over the family businesses in Budapest, for she had the mind of a CEO. In the gender-role terminology of last century, Magda did a man’s work: as an underground operative and Red Cross volunteer in Hungary, she drove trucks and ambulances at a time when many women could not imagine their hands on a steering wheel. Without stouthearted Magda, Jolie and Vilmos would surely have perished at the hands of the Nazis.
We have seen how, later in New York, she masterminded Jolie’s success in the jewelry business and drove it forward. At times, Magda functioned as her mother’s keeper, especially when irrepressible Jolie played the scatterbrain. Scolded by her elder daughter, giggling Jolie would say, “Oh Magduska, you are always anxious and worried about me. It is like you are the mother and I am your daughter.”
“You do stupid things. That’s when I feel I must take care of you.”
Magda, having absorbed her father’s no-nonsense business acumen, perhaps comprehended herself in masculine terms. Once when the columnist Earl Wilson expressed doubt over some gossipy tidbit she confided to him, Magda’s comeback was, “You know I tell the truth. After all, I am a gentleman.”
Genteel exterior notwithstanding, she could fight like a bruiser. In the mid-fifties, Magda and Eva had a huge quarrel. (“I don’t know why,” she said later, “and anyway it’s unimportant.”) The sisters did not speak for months. Then one evening Magda and Tony Gallucci went to El Morocco. No sooner were they seated than who should enter but Eva and her husband of the moment, John Williams.
“If you call her to our table,” Magda said to Tony in a steel-blade voice, “I will never talk to you again.” He demolished a drink and quickly ordered another.
After studiously avoiding Eva’s glances, Magda excused herself to the powder room. She returned to find her sister and brother-in-law seated at her table, chatting merrily with Tony. In Hungarian, Magda spat out, “You fool!”
To which Eva replied, in English, “I think you are so bitchy.” Eva’s linguistic sucker punch infuriated Magda even further.
“Why did you say it in English? We fight in Hungarian, not English. Get away!”
Eva and John left. A bit later, a family friend stopped by to greet Magda and Tony. Magda’s sullen face prompted him to ask, “What has upset you?” Eyes flashing, she gave a terse account.
“Why do you lower yourself to her standards?” was his tactless query.
“How dare you speak of my sister like that!” Magda exploded. And never spoke to him again. The point of her story was one that every Gabor made sooner or later: “I don’t think that any of us alone could really stand. Even when I resent my sisters, we stick together.”
Tough, moody, a no-nonsense businesswoman with a get-on-with-it attitude towards life and work, she spent many years in struggle, first to distance herself from her family’s antics, then to regain her damaged health. For in 1962, Magda suffered a debilitating stroke. She was forty-seven years old at the time.
This massive stroke was foreshadowed by what appears to have been a ministroke, or transient ischemic attack (TIA). Five years earlier, during a heated quarrel with Jolie, Magda temporarily lost the ability to speak.
Then, in the fall of 1962, Jolie and her husband, Edmond de Szigethy, came to the Gallucci estate in Southampton for a long weekend with Magda and Tony and to take in the Horse Show Ball, a traditional event that ended the summer social season in the Hamptons. In the early hours of Friday morning, Magda got up from her bed. Not wanting to wake Tony, she didn’t turn on a light. Although she always warned visiting family and other guests not to trip over Maxim, her black poodle who slept on the staircase, this time she herself forgot. The dog didn’t move. Magda tripped and banged her head on the stair rail. Tony heard the crash, turned on the light, and rushed to help his wife. Other than the immediate pain of the bump on her head, she seemed all right. He rang for the maid, who applied cold compresses for an hour or two, and then everyone went back to sleep.
On Friday afternoon, Magda was restless. She seemed unreasonably annoyed with Tony because he was drinking with the butler and watching a baseball game on TV rather than keeping watch by her bedside. Jolie took Tony’s part. “He is good and generous with you,” she said. “Be a little understanding with him and don’t excite yourself.”
By Saturday afternoon Magda was herself once more, and that evening, according to Jolie, she was the belle of the Horse Show Ball. Toasted by friends and looking her high-toned best, she was photographed atop a wooden horse and seemed to enjoy every moment of the long evening. But if Magda, Tony, Edmond, and Jolie had paused to recall the Trojan Horse of mythology and the calamity it brought with it, superstition might have made them flee and seek all possible help.
On Sunday morning a panicked Tony summoned Jolie, who occupied the guest house. “Come quick,” he panted. “Magda cannot speak. I think she’s in a coma.” Arriving at the main house, Jolie and Edmond knew immediately that Magda was gravely ill. An ambulance took her to the local hospital, and in the afternoon she was transferred to Mount Sinai, in Manhattan.
Zsa Zsa happened to be in New York. As soon as she got word of Magda’s condition, she telephoned Eva, who had arrived that very morning in Palm Beach. Eva took the next plane to New York, and by late Sunday evening the family had gathered in Magda’s hospital room.
After four months of hospitalization and rehabilitation, Magda at last was able to return home to Southampton. Speech therapists at the Rusk Clinic in New York told her she would never speak again. Jolie recalled that “Magda became bitter and it broke my heart. She kept trying to tell me something but she couldn’t. She could manage a word or two but she couldn’t connect phrases.” She sank into a depression. One evening she said to Jolie, “No speech . . . die.”
Stunned, Jolie said to her in grave tones, “If you die then I will die, too.” Even at this nadir, gloom did not stay. Like a titanium alloy of strength and toughness, these two women began the rigorous journey that would eventually return Magda to functional health. In her future was a new home in Palm Springs, new friends, several lovers, and two additional husbands.
* * *
That journey toward healing required alpine effort. Although Magda never reached the top, she did achieve a lower plateau that confounded the negative prognosis of the Rusk Clinic. The young Helen Keller comes to mind: the high-pressure drive to speak, the angry frustration when words would not come, the despair and then the joy when at last sound, any sound, broke through the tongue-tied barrier. In the case of the deaf, blind, and mute girl, the first sentence was “I am not dumb now.” For Magda, the open-sesame phrase became “Believe you me.”
No doubt her flair for languages served her well, for she knew that in Hungarian (as in English and other languages) certain inflections and intonations not only convey nuance but also change the meaning of words. Although Magda did not know a tonal language such as Chinese, she eventually turned “Believe you me” into a palette of tones and timbres that could mean, according to tonality, emphasis, facial expression, and volume, everything from “Yes, it’s exactly that way” to “If you don’t like it, shut up.”
A similar multipurpose phrase was “You better believe it.” Family and close friends learned to follow her modulations, almost as if she were playing a musical theme a
nd variations on the piano. Eventually Magda’s glossary of shortcuts became an entire thesaurus. “I am able to understand her,” Zsa Zsa said. Francesca explained further that “my aunt Magda can’t speak, but she has all her brain power. By now we can all understand her.” Magda remained as much a Gabor sister as always, meaning that she attended Jolie’s parties, also Zsa Zsa’s and Eva’s, turned up at nightclubs and society soirées, and proved herself an actress after all: so clever was she in hiding her challenges that press and public soon forgot. Perhaps she had Garbo in mind, who left the screen in 1941 and for the next fifty years was seen but not heard.
In 1966, when Magda’s efforts to recover sometimes threatened to overwhelm her, Tony Gallucci developed cancer and died the following year. Again, Magda was devastated. She almost gave up. Jolie, seeing her smoke two packs of cigarettes a day and drink too much coffee, couldn’t bring herself to say, Stop. Nor had Magda yet developed her later idiosyncratic vocabulary and syntax. After Tony’s death, for instance, if she wanted to tell Jolie that friends had visited, she would say on the telephone, “Couple.” When Jolie asked who had paid a call, Magda would fumble: “Man. Woman.” At last, unable to go further, she would snap, “Forget. It.”
An earlier chapter chronicled Magda’s bitter fight with Tony’s family over the codicil to his will. By the late sixties, when this probate war took place, she was advised to settle out of court. This Magda refused to do. In furs and jewels, she made her entrance in court with the aplomb of a Vanderbilt or an Astor. No one guessed that the words she whispered to her lawyers amounted to “yes,” “no,” “fight,” and a few other monosyllables.
* * *
Zsa Zsa, within the Gabor family and out, was said to be tightfisted. In the matter of distributing ex-husbands, however, she had grown philanthropic. Happy was she when they found new wives—except in the case of George Sanders. Even so, she befriended his third spouse, Benita Hume, whom he married in 1959 and with whom he lived in great contentment until her death in 1967. Zsa Zsa visited them in England, and Benita wrote regular letters telling Zsa Zsa of their travels and of George’s health. After Benita’s death, George sank into depression and drink. At times he seemed unhinged, the aftermath perhaps of a light stroke that left him shaken both physically and emotionally.