by Sam Staggs
Benita Hume and Tony Gallucci died the same year. Zsa Zsa, increasingly concerned for widow and widower, invited George to come and live with her. “He’s lonely, and I have plenty of room,” she said. (Marriage and divorce being so fluid under Zsa Zsa’s roof, George’s homecoming resembled that of a prodigal welcomed once more into the parental nest.) George, although loath to admit it, found a measure of contentment with his wacky in-laws. When Zsa Zsa was away, he consoled himself with Jolie and Magda in Palm Springs, and now that Francesca no longer required kiddie games and baby minding, he enjoyed hearing of her volatile adventures. He also encouraged her independence from draconian Grandmother Gabor. As ironic connoisseur of the absurd, George occasionally wondered why he hadn’t stuck around.
Zsa Zsa, having disburdened herself in 1967 of husband number five, found George the perfect male to live with. Their “dates” involved watching television, walking dogs, refereeing cat fights—between actual felines as well as Gabor sister-cats—and settling into middle age, though woe betide anyone who applied the term within Zsa Zsa’s hearing.
It was almost like being in love—until George, in a moment of candor, let Zsa Zsa in on a secret. A rich society lady had suggested that he marry her (for money being understood) but also for security, companionship, villas on tropical islands and spacious apartments in New York and Europe. This announcement formed icicles on Zsa Zsa’s heart. Always a quick thinker, she countered with, “Magda is also rich. She is terribly lonely, and so are you. You need each other, you can help each other. Besides, you always said I talk too much. Magda can barely speak. She always loved your movies, now she will listen to you all the day and night.”
George, only in his early sixties but feeling much older, considered the proposition. While he shopped marital possibilities in his mind, Zsa Zsa flew to Jolie’s side. “Nyuszika,” she gurgled, “I want to keep George in the family. We have all loved him, even you. He didn’t mean it the time he called you a fucking Hungarian. Let’s give him to Magda, then they will have each other to lean on.”
A few days later, George told Zsa Zsa, “Cokiline, I’ve thought it over and for once you make sense.” Meanwhile, Jolie informed Magda of the latest marital plans afoot. “Unbelievable. Beautiful,” Magda said.
Decision made, George acted like a young groom-to-be. He bought forty red roses in Los Angeles and rushed them to Palm Springs into the hands of his former sister-in-law, now his betrothed. “Let’s have vodka and caviar,” he said, “and get married immediately.” Like a hurry-up wedding in an RKO western circa 1940, they rushed off not to a grizzled frontier preacher but to a judge in the small town of Indio, a few miles out of Palm Springs. There they exchanged their vows on December 4, 1970. At the reception, held in the Palm Springs Racquet Club, Jolie said, “It’s always nice to welcome a son-in-law back into the family.”
For a brief moment, generosity flooded George’s heart. He bought Magda a television set and paid $300 to repair her Cadillac. Then the flood receded; after all, the new Mrs. Sanders was rich—why should he unglue his banknotes?
The wedding shocked the world, or at least that fragment of the world who still remembered George Sanders. As for Magda, many mistook her for Zsa Zsa and Eva’s mother. The revolution had happened—the sixties—and now the seventies swept away the few remnants of studio-era stars and glamour. The likes of Ali MacGraw and Carrie Snodgress became icons of antiglamour, and few movie fans in the younger set knew such names as Sanders or Gabor. These grotesque nuptials struck them, if at all, as belonging to a firmament wedged between Hollywood Babylon and the Motion Picture Country Home.
Less than six weeks later, the marriage was annulled. George, who perhaps believed that Magda was a quieter Zsa Zsa, awoke to the realization that his new wife was a semi-invalid. Since the stroke, her right arm was paralyzed, meaning she did everything with her left. According to Jolie, she learned to adjust her wigs, apply makeup, even attach false eyelashes. But Palm Springs, for the unsocial like George, might just as well be Bakersfield. What does one do all day after a quick morning look at mountains and palm trees? How many hours can anyone splash in an azure pool? One day George drove away and never returned. Magda didn’t grieve. The end of a marriage had become as routine as tax day on April 15 or a dental checkup twice a year.
George’s health continued to decline and he suffered another stroke and showed signs of dementia. Zsa Zsa went to him in Europe and tried to help, but he had decided his fate. On April 25, 1972, he died from an overdose of sleeping pills in a hotel in Spain, where he had lived after leaving Magda. His suicide note echoed the cynical, world-weary characters he often played onscreen: “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”
George’s death saddened every Gabor. Each one, and Francesca, as well, absorbed the grief in her own way.
* * *
Other suitors came calling, for Magda was known as a rich, lonely widow. Anyone mistaking her for vulnerable soon found out the opposite, for in addition to her own powerful will, any hint of exploitation locked the Gabor testudo into place—testudo being a Roman military formation in which soldiers turned their shields into protective cover like a tortoiseshell against enemy projectiles.
Then in August 1972 Magda married Tibor Heltai, a Manhattan real estate broker born in Hungary in 1918. They separated ten months later and divorced in 1975.
Chapter 30
Dahling, I Love You,
but Give Me Park Avenue
Eva Gabor had two marital mottoes. The first was, “Marriage is too interesting an experiment to be tried only once or twice.” The second, “I will tolerate many things from a husband but I will not tolerate a husband who cheats.” Richard Brown, whom she married in 1959, met both conditions. Husband number four was blatant in his infidelities. When Eva found out, he joined the exes.
They met in 1957. The press described Brown, divorced with two teenage sons, as a retired, at thirty-seven, textile manufacturer and also as a millionaire stockbroker. Whatever his profession, Eva made sure this time that the husband would pay at least more than his share of the bills. After dating for a year, they were in Las Vegas to see Betty Grable’s show at the Flamingo Hotel. Between sets, Brown whispered in Eva’s ear, “Will you marry me?” Speaking to reporters after the ceremony, she said, “I played hard to get and said yes.”
Like two kids fleeing a paternal shotgun, Eva and Dick decided the wedding must take place the next day. The following afternoon, she assembled a trousseau from the hotel dress shop, then rounded up comedian Red Buttons to give the bride away and his wife as matron of honor. The marriage took place with such speed that no other Gabors had time to fly in. Jolie and Zsa Zsa telephoned congratulations. When reporters called Zsa Zsa in New York, she said, “I’m sorry I can’t be there but I’m giving her away by approximately—oh, that’s not right, but you know what I mean.” The press helpfully supplied the word “proxy.”
“This time is for real,” Eva said, as if that ominous phrase had never before been spoken.
* * *
Six months before the wedding, scandal had touched Eva. She, unlike Zsa Zsa, was not accustomed to it and disliked its effects. A typical tabloid headline: EVA GABOR CALLED LOVE PIRATE. JILTED MODEL TAKES HER LIFE. The model was Venita Ratcliffe, who committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills in her Park Avenue apartment. Her note addressed to Dick Brown ended with the words, “I love you more than life itself.”
Eva learned of these headlines at MGM, where she was filming It Started with a Kiss. Extremely upset, she left the soundstage and went to her dressing room accompanied by several costars. A studio publicist issued a statement from Eva: “I am very, very sorry that this beautiful girl took her life. But I am really an innocent bystander in all this. The romance between Richard and me began long after he left Venita.”
Eva, falsely accused, grew angry once she recovered fro
m the initial shock. An Associated Press story reported her fury. “I do not go around taking anyone’s man,” she declared. “I am no love pirate! Besides, if a man is truly in love, the most beautiful woman in the world couldn’t take him away.”
Eva was indeed innocent. The Gabors didn’t break up homes—except their own.
* * *
Eva’s career in the 1960s did not nosedive as Zsa Zsa’s did. She made only two films, in both of which she gave a pleasing performance. In A New Kind of Love (1963), four good actors—Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Thelma Ritter, and Eva—are humiliated by the stultifying script and the coy direction of this sex comedy that’s at least ten years over the hill.
Eva is the best thing in it. As feisty French sophisticate Félicienne Courbeau, she outshines the provincial Americans in Paris who behave like clichés. Resplendent in Edith Head gowns, she has effervescent comic moments when she does the twist (not very well) with George Tobias, and then with Thelma Ritter.
In 1963, Eva was forty-four. Her latest face surgery had begun to wear off, and you see lines and a hint of sag, neither of which detracts from her beauty. Eva’s softer face, with its touch of wistful vulnerability, made her more winsome than Zsa Zsa.
In Youngblood Hawke (1964), Eva plays the wife of a New York publisher. Youngblood Hawke (James Franciscus) is the naive young novelist from Kentucky that Eva’s husband takes advantage of. Eva, in a small role, seems in her element as a social arbiter and party giver in the New York literary world, mass market division.
In retrospect, Eva’s attempts during the early sixties to be taken seriously as a stage actress draw admiration for effort over result. She herself realized this disparity. Asked near the end of her life, “Do you have any regrets?” Eva gave a melancholy answer: “Oh yes! If I had been born English, I could have done Shakespeare, such wonderful plays I could have done if I didn’t have this accent.” Even so, she could always crack a joke. Appearing on Liberace’s television show, she chirped, “I went to the same school in New York as Marlon Brando—I studied at the school of Methodist acting.” (At the Actors Studio in 1955, she did indeed attend classes in Method acting.)
Eva always took herself seriously as an actress, despite mountainous obstacles. She never stopped polishing her craft. In 1967 she studied for a time with Agnes Moorehead, who was highly regarded as both actress and drama teacher. Nor did she ever lose the desire for thoughtful audiences and perceptive critics. Several colleagues in New York theatre must have seen promise beyond the accent and Eva’s reputation for theatre-lite on the summer circuit, among them David Ross, a respected producer and director of off-Broadway modern classics in the fifties and sixties. Ross cast Eva in 1958 as the eponymous Lulu in Frank Wedekind’s controversial erotic tragedy. The play documents the strange story of a young woman whose sexuality and innocence lead her from risky lovers in Germany and Paris to the streets of London and Jack the Ripper. Wedekind’s play is still performed, though its later adaptation by Alban Berg as the opera Lulu is more widely seen today. Eva accepted a salary of seventy-five dollars a week. Neither the play nor the production, however, was liked by playgoers or reviewers. Lulu ended its run at the Fourth Street Theater after sixteen performances.
Surely Eva’s bravest attempt at classic theatre took place around 1961 before an audience of only forty or fifty. Gene Gill was there that night, when Eva played the title role in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Gill is probably the only remnant of that vanished evening. For that reason, and also because she has been an avid theatregoer since her earliest years, I quote at length from her unique recollections.
“I remember Eva Gabor’s performance in Hedda Gabler quite well, though I can’t be certain of the year. My mother was in New York, and we went somewhere off, off, off-Broadway and walked up at least one flight of stairs into what seemed an apartment that had been gutted for use as a tiny theatre. When we got out of the taxi, the driver was worried about our safety. A scary neighborhood, someplace on the Lower East Side.
“We sat in a U-shape, not a complete circle, and we happened to be in the front row. Eva Gabor was the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen. She was a foot or two away from me, and her skin looked like porcelain. She had provided her own costumes. I only remember one, a garnet shade of velvet. Of course it had a bustle for period detail. Her blonde hair was piled high.
“Lester Rawlins played Tesman, Hedda’s husband. He was quite a credible actor. I don’t remember anyone else in the cast. I attended the performance because I’m an Ibsen freak and I really wanted to see it. I didn’t go because of Eva, but I became her fan. I thought she acquitted herself with professionalism. It was not the best Hedda I had seen before, nor since. But she did not embarrass herself in any way. No, it wasn’t a staged reading. The cast had memorized the script. There were several pieces of furniture in that small space—a love seat and a couple of other pieces.”
Asked whether this was a backers’ audition, Gene Gill said, “I believe it was more of a vanity production. In fact, Eva herself may have put money into it.” And was the onetime performance more flamboyant or subdued? “I considered it subdued.”
Since Eva’s costar Lester Rawlins had appeared in David Ross’s production of Hedda Gabler at the Fourth Street Theater in 1960, it seems plausible that both Rawlins and Ross had Eva in mind for a more visible production. Eva’s bravery in attempting this daunting role suggests her dissatisfaction with standard-issue stock comedies and predictable TV dramas. Hedda is a role that many an actress wants to play. Before Eva, and after, legends performed it, including Eleonora Duse, Alla Nazimova, Ingrid Bergman, Diana Rigg, Claire Bloom, Maggie Smith, and Glenda Jackson.
* * *
Next Eva turned to musical comedy. While it is true that many ad hoc singers in Broadway musicals can’t sing, in Eva’s case the term “vocal shortcomings” is an understatement. Hers could have inspired the phrase, “can’t carry a tune in a bucket.” (In the Green Acres opening montage, she veers off-key with the line, “Dahling I love you, but give me Park Avenue.”) Certain nonsingers know enough tricks to fool an audience; for instance, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady talk-sings his way through the picture, as he did through the play. Marlene Dietrich sang for years without really singing—her triumph had to do with style, illusion, and the Dietrich legend.
When Eva replaced the ailing Vivien Leigh in Tovarich on Broadway in 1963, eyebrows raised. Not that Leigh was really a singer, but she could act a song. The show’s producers must have concluded that Eva had the same ability, since they could have chosen from a battalion of other candidates. Eva took over on October 21; the play ended its eight-month run on November 9. The following summer, she had a longer success with the play on tour.
Jean-Pierre Aumont, male lead for the run of the play, recalled Eva as costar in Tovarich: “I knew the Gabor sisters well, since I had already filmed Lili with Zsa Zsa. Eva proved to be charming, both on and off the stage. Though she didn’t have Vivien’s royal bearing, she compensated for this by her good humor and her communicative warmth. The play wavered a little. Instead of the story of a grand duchess who is transformed into a maid, it became the story of a lovely young thing who disguises herself as a grand duchess.”
Tovarich did not end Eva’s work in musicals. In 1973 she toured in Applause, the Charles Strouse and Lee Adams musical based on All About Eve. The tour, a financial and critical disaster, cost the producers some $200,000 in losses. One cruel reviewer wrote, “No applause, Eva Gabor is dreadful.” Another misfortune: during a performance at the Valley Forge Music Fair outside Philadelphia, Eva fractured her thigh bone. She missed only two performances, resuming the tour in a cast from hip to ankle. According to an audience member, “They wheeled her down the aisle and sort of dumped her onstage.” Chorus boys immediately scooped her up and hoisted her as necessary up to the finale.
Always a pro, Eva performed in the cumbersome cast for six weeks, during which time she suffered migraines and a mild case of pneumon
ia. Incidentally, Lauren Bacall, who originated the role of Margo Channing in Applause on Broadway, was also an unconvincing singer and dancer.
During that painful summer, Eva quietly divorced Richard Brown. Later she talked about his infidelity. “I know how men are—strange creatures, and being what they are I don’t mind maybe if they have a one-night stand. But at least they must be discreet. When everybody in the studio knows but me, then I say it’s too much. Even so, I stayed with him three years more even after I found out, so you must say I tried.”
A few years after Applause, Eva appeared in a dozen performances of A Little Night Music. These took place in Warren, Ohio, far from Broadway and Stephen Sondheim, who might have required CPR had he heard Eva’s rendition of “Send in the Clowns.”
Why, given Eva’s musical challenges, did producers continue to cast her in roles beyond her reach? The main reason: audience likeability. In show-biz lingo, she put asses in the seats. Then, too, except for Tovarich, her musicals took place after Green Acres left the air, meaning that the series had made her a household name. It was thought, therefore, that out-of-town playgoers, considered less demanding than New York audiences, wouldn’t notice if she flitted through a song with the giddy effervescence of Lisa Douglas. Such audiences came for the name, not for the notes. Another reason producers liked casting Eva: she was always the pro. Unlike Zsa Zsa, whose high maintenance, lack of dedication, and fits of pique made her the bottom choice instead of the top, Eva toiled as a team member. After all, she adored her Green Acres colleague Arnold the pig.