by Sam Staggs
In the play, the murderous sisters, Abby and Martha Brewster, who have poisoned a man, hide the body in a window seat. When Zsa Zsa, speaking her lines, bent over the rectangular seat to open it, she broke out in hysterical laughter, for instead of the imagined body of the text it was her husband, Jack Ryan, curled up inside and making funny faces at her.
Before that, however, the management faced an explosive quandary: Which one of these prima donna stars would get top billing? With the wisdom of Solomon, the theatre printed a playbill that credited only “GABOR.” Regarding her costar, Eva said, “It’s so difficult to appear with your own family. Zsa Zsa kept saying, ‘You do this’ and I kept saying, ‘Don’t you tell me what to do.’ ”
The laughter in Zsa Zsa’s marriage to Jack Ryan soon died away, and in 1976, the year after their vows, they divorced. In 1989, he suffered a stroke that left one side of his body paralyzed. Two years later, he committed suicide by firing a. 45 caliber pistol into his mouth. Zsa Zsa, saddened by his death, attended his funeral, for they had remained friends. Long after the divorce, Jack and his next wife sometimes went to Zsa Zsa’s for dinner.
* * *
When Zsa Zsa married her next husband, this joke went ’round: “Now she’s Zsa Zsa O’Hara, just like Scarlett.” But Scarlett stopped at three, and Michael O’Hara was Zsa Zsa’s seventh. He happened to be the lawyer who had finalized divorce number six. “I almost feel like characterizing my marriage to Michael O’Hara by just writing his name and leaving a blank page,” said Zsa Zsa to her collaborator Wendy Leigh. To Zsa Zsa, however, more was more, and so she continued. “I should have listened to the words of my friend Merle Oberon, who cautioned, ‘Be careful. I wouldn’t marry a lawyer because it can only cost you.’
“My marriage to Michael O’Hara did, indeed, cost me. Emotionally, that is. We were married for five years and, at first, things were wonderful.” But then Zsa Zsa discovered that while he looked like a gorgeous Irishman, six feet four with green eyes and tanned skin, he was in fact of Yugoslavian extraction. She did not explain where he picked up the Celtic cognomen.
Nor did she include in One Lifetime Is Not Enough any reason for their marital dissonance other than her husband’s moodiness. For once, words failed her. “I am still not sure what really happened. Only that Michael and I don’t—to this day—ever exchange a word. And that he is the only ex-husband who is not still my friend.” Indeed, Zsa Zsa could have been chairperson of the Hollywood Ex-husband’s Club.
Magda, on the other hand, was the opposite. When one of her marriages went belly-up, the locks were changed, his belongings thrown on the curb, and his aftershave poured down the drain. Eva, though not vindictive, remained closemouthed. When David Letterman asked, “How many ex-husbands have there been?” a streak of irritation crossed her face. “Oh, three or four. Vy do you vant to know such a thing?”
Did Merle Oberon, perhaps, or some other well-meaning friend, hand Zsa Zsa a Syllabus of Undesirable Traits to look out for in future mates? And if so, did Zsa Zsa read it upside down, or mistake it for desiderata? For the worst was yet to come.
Before the bitter end—husband number nine—came a farcical interlude. Zsa Zsa called it marriage number eight and a half, perhaps alluding to Fellini’s great film. In reality, it merits a lesser fraction than one-half. Call it minus eight.
* * *
The nuptials took place in April 1982 on the yacht belonging to Frank Jameson, Eva’s husband and the bride’s brother-in-law, with the Jamesons present. The place: the Pacific Ocean, a dozen or so miles from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and therefore thought to be in international waters. The yacht’s captain performed the brief ceremony that united Zsa Zsa with the Spanish aristocrat, Felipe, Duke of Alba.
Felipe, however, was a duke only in the sense that John Wayne was called “Duke” by his friends; he was a citizen of Mexico. The yacht’s captain possessed nothing other than a marine license, which did not entitle him to perform a marriage ceremony, and besides, the yacht apparently remained in Mexican waters without reaching the high seas. A storm blew up during the ersatz wedding and resulted in several guests hanging over the boat’s rails while others clung to ropes in order not to be swept overboard. Among the guests were John Huston, who thirty years earlier on the set of Moulin Rouge had berated Zsa Zsa for lack of talent, and Zsa Zsa’s long-suffering daughter, Francesca. The bride, who had recently given her age as fifty-four, was in reality sixty-five and still the wife of Michael O’Hara. On her calendar she had marked the wrong date, for instead of gaining her freedom on April 4 she would remain legally Mrs. O’Hara until the fourth of July. And the sham marriage almost caused an international incident. When King Juan Carlos of Spain heard of it, he commanded the Spanish embassy in Washington to enlighten the American press: there was no duke of Alba, but rather a duchess. That lady had no intention of ceding her title to Señora Gabor.
Upon discovering that they were not man and wife and never had been, each party issued a snarky statement about the other. “We were planning to legalize our status in July,” said Zsa Zsa, “but I called it off. He bored me. He was nothing but a playboy, and I am a hard-working actress.” Her recent paramour struck below the belt: “Zsa Zsa told me she was fifty-four. When I learned that she is nearly seventy, well—”
The marriage, which had never existed, was annulled the day after it didn’t take place.
Chapter 32
Don’t Cry for Me, Philadelphia
In 1970, Zsa Zsa took time off from marriage to appear in Forty Carats, her only Broadway appearance. Julie Harris having opened the show, her replacements were June Allyson, Joan Fontaine, and Zsa Zsa, who took over the lead on July 6 and gave 180 performances until the show closed on November 7. New York audiences, along with out-of-towners, turned her four-month engagement into a personal triumph. They found Zsa Zsa effervescent in the comedy, and they applauded loudly with standing ovations. After performances, crowds gathered at the stage door to take pictures and clamor for autographs. On Zsa Zsa’s opening night, Eva sent an elaborate floral arrangement with forty carrots peeking from the blossoms. Zsa Zsa roared at the joke. Two months later, George Sanders attended a performance and afterwards invited his favorite ex-wife to a champagne supper.
In her suite at the Waldorf Towers, Zsa Zsa’s companions were Miss Pussycat, a silky white Persian, and Ruby Red, a Lhasa apso. These two, unlike her eight cats at home and several other dogs, were deemed suitable traveling companions for a star reborn.
After Broadway, Zsa Zsa traveled with Forty Carats to several regional theatres. A dozen years later, she signed to do the play for a month at the City Line Dinner Theater in Philadelphia. There, in 1983, she became embroiled in another damaging scandal when she was accused of insulting the handicapped.
The Philadelphia engagement opened on May 25 and was scheduled to run through June 26. From the start, Zsa Zsa locked horns with the management. She arrived for rehearsals to discover that her leading man lacked what she considered the requisite virility for the part. (Her character is a middle-aged New York businesswoman on vacation in Greece who meets a twenty-two-year-old man. After a summer fling, he turns up in Manhattan and they rekindle the romance. And yes, for once she did play someone’s mother; her character has a teenage daughter.) Zsa Zsa demanded, and got, a more manly costar. Others in the cast and crew were outraged by her highhandedness; the stage manager quit the show in protest.
She perceived growing hostility. “A lot of people with the theatre were out to get me after that,” she said, “but that first actor just wasn’t believable as anyone my character would be in love with.” She further irritated the management by complaining when dinner was brought to her dressing room by a waiter instead of a bell captain, as she had stipulated. As if to blacken the gathering stormclouds even further, Zsa Zsa’s two dogs ran loose, snarled and yapped, and soiled the executive offices.
Such unprofessional behavior was deemed inexcusable, although Zsa Zsa wasn’t the first
performer to act like a diva. By any measure, hers was a sad comedown from Hollywood studios to a provincial theatre where cooking odors eclipsed the smell of greasepaint. The very term “dinner theatre” implies food service over thespian talent. Like it or not, however, actors must often accept such assignments if they are to work at all. Zsa Zsa believed herself too chic for Philly; and perhaps she was.
On the night of May 31, a group of sixteen handicapped people from the Woods School in suburban Langhorne attended the performance of Forty Carats. According to Deborah Missanelli, a supervisor at the school who escorted the group to the theatre, “These were all patients who were normal until a certain point when a car accident left them brain-damaged.”
According to several members of the group, during the intermission a waiter told them that Zsa Zsa Gabor had instructed him to move six people in wheelchairs from their front-row seats to the back of the theatre. The waiter’s stated reason to the group was that by laughing out of turn they had disturbed the star and interrupted the performance.
Shocked by the accusation and by the request that their seats be changed, the group discussed a course of action. Missanelli, their escort, said later that she looked around the theatre for several minutes in search of alternate seating. By that point, however, the entire group of sixteen had decided to leave.
Two days later, with the incident gathering momentum in newspapers and on television, the management fired Zsa Zsa. The media, undertstandably, along with their readers and viewers, took the part of the handicapped. Although Zsa Zsa’s side was reported, her difficult reputation had preceded her. Headlines portrayed her as a shrew crossed with the Wicked Witch of the West (and her little dogs, too).
* * *
My purpose is not to cast doubt on statements made by the group of handicapped persons, for in my opinion they were part of an unfortunate misunderstanding. Rather, I have tried to marshal facts overlooked at the time and to show that Zsa Zsa, blameworthy on various other points, was innocent of any deliberate affront to those in her audience who were physically challenged.
Let us imagine that we are onstage that night, with bright lights in our eyes yet unable to see clearly those audience members seated in pervasive shadows. The men and women from the Woods School, according to their escort, had dressed up for the occasion—“women in formals and the guys in coats and jackets.” Their attire would have blended with that of others in the audience who had also dressed up, and would have further obscured wheelchairs and prosthetics.
Zsa Zsa, in her own defense, said that the theatre had been too dark for her to tell that handicapped people were in the audience. As far as she could see, everyone was able-bodied. In the New York Daily News, a photograph of nine of the sixteen people from the Woods School suggests that even in daylight, when the picture was made, they might be taken for nonhandicapped. Only two wheelchairs are evident in the photo, and those partially.
Years earlier on Broadway, Zsa Zsa had surely become adept at making quick entrances and exits for her sixteen costume changes. Now, however, she was a dozen years older and a dozen years more nervous. At sixty-six, she had to work harder and pay closer attention to every cue. Any distraction might make her go blank. And by Deborah Missanelli’s own admission, some of those from the Woods School “tended to laugh loudly or a little later than nonhandicapped people might. But no one laughed at an inappropriate moment.”
Zsa Zsa said that she and other actors on the stage heard noise in the audience on that evening of May 31 and thought that some theatregoers were intoxicated, since dinner theatres routinely serve alcoholic drinks. She pointed out that with so many costume changes, she barely had time to enter and exit on cue, far less to scrutinize the audience. Zsa Zsa denied that she asked for anyone’s removal. Even if she did complain to theatre employees, she might well have done so without realizing the actual source of noise. “If I had known the handicapped people were there,” she said, “I would have sent them cake and champagne.” She stated that she was unaware of the incident until the owner of the theatre called her the following day to demand that she make a public apology. According to Zsa Zsa, he said, “Tell the press you requested that they sit at the back of the auditorium, otherwise the pickets will close this theatre.”
It is important to note that a waiter brought a message to the group, saying that Zsa Zsa had instructed him to remove them to the back of the theatre. Was it perhaps the same waiter who served Zsa Zsa’s dinner and whom she insulted by demanding a bell captain instead? Silly snobbery on her part, and very unwise: one should never antagonize those who serve one’s food. The consequences can be fatal.
Although theatre management denied any involvement in the order to move audience members, it is possible to doubt their word. Fed up with Zsa Zsa, they nevertheless required order in the house. Clues enumerated above suggest a management decision that boomeranged to the difficult diva. How could Zsa Zsa, backstage at intermission adjusting costumes and makeup, have located a waiter to deliver her ultimatum? A stage manager or headwaiter, on the other hand, would have ready access to waitstaff.
The night after the incident, some hundred handicapped people and their supporters demonstrated outside the theatre. Zsa Zsa came out and spoke with them. Along with her denials, she said she hoped to perform free at the Woods School. This suggests good intentions, though it’s likely that Zsa Zsa, nervous and defensive, lacked the apologetic skills of an oily politician. No doubt she sounded shrill in maintaining that she had nothing to apologize for. Nor did anyone among the demonstrators, or in the media, know of Zsa Zsa’s longstanding efforts on behalf of many charities. Later that year, while starring in Forty Carats in Dallas, Zsa Zsa appeared at a charity brunch for the city’s Society for Crippled Children. Her presence raised $1,500 for the local chapter.
Unfortunately for Zsa Zsa’s reputation, she never made it to the Woods School. Her agent phoned the institution with news that she had left town owing to harassment by theatre management and the media. Callers also left death threats at her hotel and at her agent’s office in Los Angeles. After her departure, performances were canceled until further notice. The theatre claimed losses in excess of $100,000. Eventually Terry Moore came in as replacement, playing to a nearly empty house.
Zsa Zsa hired a New York attorney to file an arbitration suit with Philadelphia’s Commission on Human Relations. His statement carried weight in the commission’s deliberation. He said, “Actors have no authority in respect to their audience. All they’re supposed to do is put on a show. The dinner theatre has control over patrons and it was obviously the theatre’s decision [to move those patrons].” Leaving aside the question of whether Zsa Zsa or the theatre management wanted the handicapped people moved, the commission ruled two years later that the theatre was guilty of discrimination because Zsa Zsa was its employee at the time.
After Actors’ Equity entered the ruckus, two outcomes were reported: a decision against Zsa Zsa, or else a ruling not made public. Inquiries to the actors’ union went unanswered owing to its privacy policies.
* * *
A few months after Zsa Zsa’s fiasco at the dinner theatre, Eva returned to Broadway as the Grand Duchess Olga Katrina in You Can’t Take It with You. Her character is kitchen-sink glamourous, for the grand duchess fled the Russian Revolution only to end up waiting tables in a Childs’ Restaurant. This was Eva’s fifth, and final, Broadway appearance. She filled in for a vacationing Colleen Dewhurst, and one of her costars was Eddie Albert. By nostalgic coincidence this play ran at the Plymouth Theatre, where Eva had made her debut thirty-three years earlier.
In a small role, Eva entered only in the third act. As usual, she was popular with cast and crew. Sandy Faison, a cast member who was also in The Edge of Night on daytime television, persuaded Eva to do a guest spot on the show. In the only soap opera appearance of her career, she played—Eva Gabor.
You Can’t Take It with You was Eva’s second time to replace a star more critically acclaim
ed than she herself. In 1963, she briefly took over Vivien Leigh’s role in Tovarich. In that instance, audiences had come to see a double legend—Vivien Leigh, and Scarlett O’Hara. Many, no doubt, felt disappointed to see Eva’s name on the marquee. As Dewhurst’s replacement, however, Eva’s presence perhaps delighted more than it chagrined. She and Eddie Albert together again, a dozen years after Green Acres, created something of an event. Then, too, Dewhurst was not at home in light comedy. Outside of the O’Neill roles that made her famous, she could become a lumbering presence onstage. For that reason, Eva’s down-at-the-heels duchess struck many playgoers as a better fit. She was Lisa Douglas à la russe (though the accent was echt Budapest, never Moscow).
Chapter 33
The Ninth Circle
Onlookers—and there were many—to Zsa Zsa’s final marriage found themselves as polarized as Democrats vs. Republicans. Was the groom, who projected a vague distinction and who called himself Prince Frederic von Anhalt, really the aristocrat he claimed to be, or had Zsa Zsa hooked the Faux Prince of Bel Air? Later, she herself claimed that this marriage was among her happiest, and indeed it lasted thirty years, four months, and four days—from August 14, 1986 until her death on December 18, 2016. Her previous marriages combined totaled less than this stretch of time.
When one is a faded star crashing into seventy, is it wise to take on a forty-three-year-old German with a dodgy past, a questionable present, and a blank future? This cockeyed coupling with self-styled royalty presented itself to Zsa Zsa as the culmination of a long quest, a quest not so much for marital happiness as for a title. Perhaps the secret rosebud in Zsa Zsa’s century-long life, the great desire never fulfilled until Frederic came along, was to be addressed as Miss Magyarország, or even better as countess, duchess, sultana, principessa, or Lady Zsa Zsa. Any title at all to fill the aching void created by that prodding mother who spurred little Sári toward fame and greatness, the mother whose own neurotic frustrations trapped her daughters, and Zsa Zsa most of all, in a twisting labyrinth of ambition.