by Sam Staggs
Around the same time, he announced plans to run for governor of California. Even in the sideshow of American politics, this candidacy caused guffaws. Although a right-wing supporter of Reagan, Bush, and later of Trump, von Anhalt styled himself a “liberal independent.” He withdrew his candidacy when he could milk no further coverage from it.
As Zsa Zsa’s health declined, she suffered heart failure, a stroke, a heart attack, and amputation of her right leg. When death seemed imminent, Frederic made the ghoulish decision to preserve her body by plastination and put it on display—“so that her beauty will last forever,” he said. Lured by his macabre carny show, the Golden Casket Company, a Connecticut firm, offered a solid gold coffin as a “pre-need gift” to Zsa Zsa. Pretending outrage, Frederic stated that he would accept the gift and have it melted into a ring. Reacting to Frederic’s indignation, the company confirmed that John Blanchette had called to express interest on the part of his client, Frederic von Anhalt. “We have voicemail proof of this call,” said Edward Balfour, head of sales at Golden Casket.
Along with his displays of hideous taste, Frederic ran a sideline of adopting adult males and turning them into “knights” and also the kind of princes that he himself was. For such entrée into the Teutonic nobility, they paid top dollar—though not top Deutsche Mark, such activity being illegal in the Federal Republic of Germany. Among the colorful names taken by Frederic’s titular offspring are several Prince von Anhalts and a Prince Germany. At last report, Chancellor Angela Merkel did not feel threatened by a restored German throne operating out of California.
His next shenanigan reeks of amateur porn crossed with The Dukes of Hazzard. In this scenario, Prince von Charming stops his Rolls-Royce to help three damsels in distress. They are in a white Chrysler convertible with Florida license plates. As he drives by, the ladies recognize him as a stellar celebrity and flag him down. Is it for an autograph, he wonders, or to pose for selfies? Forgetting to ask, “Is that a gun in your purse?”, he finds himself enmeshed in a robbery. They take his wallet, an expensive watch, $1,800 in cash, then they strip him naked and handcuff him to the steering wheel. Or so he said. A pathetic photo shows him bare-assed and bound, stretch marks shining, bent over the steering wheel though not handcuffed but tied with a white cloth. Like Clark Kent, however, he somehow managed, or so he said, to wiggle free and call police on a cell phone. Why he then retied himself to the steering wheel for a photo op was not explained, nor was the fact that the LAPD could find no handcuffs.
Worst scene of all, which ends this lamentable saga: On Zsa Zsa’s ninety-fourth birthday, he brought photographers to the bedside where she lay, helpless and demented, and invited them to photograph her sans makeup, sans wig, sans beauty, sans everything. These pictures he sold to tabloids, who then flashed them around the world online. Francesca, horrified, said what anyone knows who knew Zsa Zsa at all: “She was never seen in public unless she looked like a movie star, and the last thing she wanted was to be old and helpless.”
If there is karma in this world or the next, Zsa Zsa—along with Eva, Magda, Jolie, Vilmos, and Francesca—will see to it that Frederic’s punishment, for this desecration of her image, goes on forever.
Chapter 36
Not Waving but Drowning
Among the bitter and baroque stories of Hollywood children, Francesca’s eclipses most others. I can hardly write about her without a lump in the throat, for she was a dear friend. Thelma Ritter’s reaction to Marilyn Monroe on the All About Eve set—“I adored that girl from the moment we met”—comes to mind when I recall my first encounter with Francesca. At sixtysomething, her life had been one rough patch after the next. Still, she was holding on, even though Frederic, in barring her from her mother’s house, had made communication between her and Zsa Zsa virtually impossible. “My mother used to call me ten times a day,” Francesca said during our initial conversation. “Then Frederic took away her phone.”
Prior to that first meeting, I telephoned Francesca to seek her imprimatur for the book about her family. I said right off that without her approval I did not want to proceed, and she agreed to discuss the project. Arriving early at The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, 7915 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, I found the place crowded, the afternoon balmy, and so I took a table on the patio. Reading a newspaper, I was startled when she appeared behind me and said, “Sam?”
“How did you spot me?” I asked. A set-in-L.A. movie moment as a smile teased her lips: “I just knew.” Francesca was not immediately recognizable as the scion of Hollywood glamour. She wore navy sweatpants and a bulky top, an outfit that partially disguised her weight. Light lipstick and blonde hair, slightly teased, recalled photos of an earlier, less bedeviled, Francesca Hilton. Although no surgeon’s knife had come near her face, from certain angles the Gabor structure was detectable. She barely sipped her mineral water, so we talked. Or she talked, mostly about Frederic. I realize now that her obsession with him not only bankrupted her but also hastened her death on January 6, 2015. (She told me not long before she died that she had spent $400,000 in legal fees to obtain visiting rights with Zsa Zsa. Among Frederic’s stated reasons for barring her: negativity.)
The deadly strife between Francesca and Frederic verged on Hollywood noir. Neither used a gun, although thoughts of murder surely darkened their dreams. As the afternoon wore on, a thunderstorm spread across Los Angeles. During one of Francesca’s tirades, she mentioned the rumor that Frederic was in poor health. “Maybe he’ll die!” she proclaimed. Just then there came a bulbous growl of thunder.
Any mention of “struck by lightning” would have been superfluous. We moved inside. There we remained for another hour, then she drove me in the rainstorm to my car several blocks away. Her dilapidated SUV, with a handicapped sign dangling from the rearview mirror, was piled high with papers, books, magazines, food scraps, electronic gadgets, paper bags with unknown content—in short, a foreshadowing of homelessness. She walked with some strain, although otherwise she didn’t appear beset by ill health.
* * *
Disaster hit in the final months of 2014. I had not seen Francesca for several months, though we spoke often by phone. That fall, she told me that she had lost the lease on her rented house in Hollywood. She supplied only vague indications of her new address; mail went to a post office box. In late November I asked, as usual, about her cat. She replied in a voice of lead, “She died. It’s okay, she was old.” Knowing Francesca, I realized that she feared showing emotions that might elicit pity. I knew also that she, like all the Gabors, was a lover of animals and that the death of her cat would have brought staggering grief.
When I phoned her on Christmas Day 2014, she was napping so we chatted briefly. “I spent the day at a homeless shelter,” she said. Unaware of her desperation—I later learned that she slept in her car during those final days—I took it to mean that she had volunteered to help serve Christmas dinner. This was a reasonable assumption, since her abrasive side was tempered by a compassionate heart. Such goodwill, however, she kept locked out of view. Twelve days later she died.
If I had been fully aware of her anguish, I would have sent her a plane ticket and insisted that she come to me for an indefinite stay.
* * *
Among Francesca’s many burdens was the Gabor legend, which the Gabors expected her to assume as a natural legacy. She was groomed by masters. One of her childhood Christmas presents was a set of four dolls dressed and bewigged to resemble Jolie, Magda, Zsa Zsa, and Eva. These totems wore miniature copies of Dior gowns owned by the Gabors. Zsa Zsa claimed that she and Francesca’s governess—as if inspired by the dark arts—had personally sewed the wardrobes for these miniature graven images. The cult-like objects, however, failed to cast a spell on the girl-child.
When Francesca rebelled, early on, against furs, jewels, flashy marriages and quick divorces, overstuffed headlines, haute couture, the Republican politics of her family, a slim waist and a camera-ready smile, Zsa Zsa was stunned. Their m
other-daughter friction led to high-decibel fights that pealed across Bel Air; slammed doors and thrown objects; estrangements; and, in later years, lawsuits actual and threatened, followed by countersuits. But always, reconciliations.
Francesca’s cousin put it this way: “She inherited all the liabilities and none of the benefits of the Gabor family.” Jolie, who had micromanaged her daughters’ lives from Budapest to New York to Hollywood, despaired of her insubordinate granddaughter. This grandmother, herself never a sylph, hounded Francesca to lose weight. When Francesca grew up, she avoided the nagging granny whenever possible. Despite the tensions, her tales of Grandmother Gabor’s smash-bang driving could have furnished a skit for Carol Burnett and Vicki Lawrence. “She drove through a hurricane on Long Island with me in the car,” Francesca recalled. “Even as a kid, I thought we were headed into the ocean.” Her hair-raising account of Jolie’s attempt to parallel park: “She banged the car in front, I screamed, then she slammed into the car behind.” Francesca saw the absurd comedy in these stories. But when anger boiled over, Jolie became “that old cunt.” (Eccentric driving ran in the family. Francesca swore that Zsa Zsa would turn her head to window-shop as she motored down Wilshire Boulevard.)
By the time of Eva’s death, those wacky days were gone. Jolie and Magda died two years after Eva, leaving Francesca with a mere fragment of family. Only Zsa Zsa remained, and as usual she focused her attention on face, hair, glamourous outfits, gasp-worthy jewelry, her career or what was left of it, and Frederic.
* * *
For young Francesca, home life under Zsa Zsa seesawed from a child’s wide-eyed fantasy to an opulent reign of terror. Life in a mansion, travel to storied cities with days of pleasure and hotel nights of great luxury, meals in high-gloss restaurants, doting nannies and schools to encourage every grace and enthusiasm. But also: shrill demands incomprehensible to a young girl; maternal fits of tears and screaming provoked by unknown cause; rigorous expectations laid out by movie star mother and aunt, and by the other aunt, Magda, who prefered poodles to children; unwelcome advice from a grandmother whose notions of child rearing stopped at the silver spoon. And what was this little girl to make of an elderly father who resembled her Hungarian grandfather, and who sent lavish presents but seldom permitted her to visit his home? What of the various “uncles” who made their entrances and exits and then were seen no more, gone before she could sort them out? Other children might wish for a pony (Francesca had one), but Francesca’s mighty hope was for a daddy to counteract her mom. That intermittent mom, who kissed and embraced little Franci, then left for weeks and months to make pictures in far-off lands, returning for a day or a week before another TV show or another studio summoned her once more.
“I brought myself up,” Francesca said in a tone that mixed bitterness and tough resignation. Her litany of sorrows began early and never found an end. “I couldn’t bring home my friends,” she said, “because my mother hit me every day. She also hit the help.”
I hesitate to repeat this accusation, one reason being that corporal punishment—spankings and the like—was common during Francesca’s childhood. Unless it took injurious forms, society looked upon it as a normal privilege of parenting, and it was also widespread in schools. A proverb oft repeated was “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” For that reason, it seems unfair to condemn a parent of sixty or seventy years ago who could not have imagined that slapping a child’s backside would someday be looked on as abuse. From Zsa Zsa’s point of view, her daughter’s cheekiness must be curbed.
As for hitting the help, Betsy Jentz, and also Nancy DeJean, both employed by Zsa Zsa to assist in managing her big life, said nothing of the kind. Both women attended her funeral, and in a later conversation Nancy had this to say: “I want you to know she was a very generous lady. And loving, really kindhearted. There is no greater lady in my book than Zsa Zsa Gabor.”
I asked how she came to work as Zsa Zsa’s personal assistant. “I worked for an attorney who screamed a lot. Zsa Zsa happened to be one of his clients, and when she heard him yelling at me she said, ‘Nancy, dahling, how can you let him speak to you this way? This is not healthy, this is no good. You should come to work for me.’ A year or so later, she was in the office when it happened again. She said, ‘Dahling, you’re such a beautiful girl. You can have a job anywhere. Come with me. Leave this man.’ You know what? I went to my computer, turned it off, grabbed my keys, left, and never went back.”
Nancy was also fond of Francesca, whom she, like many family members and close friends, called Franci. “Our relationship was sisterly,” she recalled. “Franci would call me to complain about her mom. When I scolded her for drinking too much, her response was, ‘Oh shut up, you sound like her.’ ”
At some point Francesca, like Zsa Zsa, began to suffer the dizzying mood swings of bipolar disorder. Sometimes—perhaps when medicated—she was delightful, witty, the finest of friends. On other occasions, she would rant. Often on the telephone she raved for an hour, revisiting a lifetime of insults, injuries, and slights real or imagined. The immediate ones typically involved Frederic; others veered toward the Gabors. Once she said, “I studied drama for years and Eva wouldn’t give me a job on Green Acres.” But Eva was not the show’s producer. It’s true that she could perhaps have influenced her bosses, but it’s likely that Eva, always professionally correct, quailed at the thought of temperamental outbursts and the upsets that her niece might cause on the set and off.
Even in her bitterness, however, Francesca glowed with family pride. “My mother is Zsa Zsa Gabor,” I heard her say more than once to an acquaintance who failed to recognize her right off. It seemed a pleasing fiction, if a brief one, to cast herself as the last of the glittering Gabors. Toward the end of her life, she added the fabled name to her own, so that her business card read “Constance Francesca Gabor Hilton.”
* * *
“A lot of people ask what it’s like growing up with Zsa Zsa Gabor as your mother,” she told an interviewer in 1975. “Well, if you know nothing else, it’s quite normal. My mother was very strict. I remember once being so embarrassed by my report card marks that I didn’t want her to see it. The problem was, the parent had to sign the report card. So I took one of her 4-by-5 fan pictures that had been mass-copied with her autograph. I cut out the signature and taped it on. When I turned it in at boarding school, I said my mother had a broken arm.”
Also during Francesca’s teen years, Zsa Zsa, as if playing a helicopter mom on TV, would sometimes stand at the front door making small talk as Francesca tried to say good night to a date. Later on, Francesca found these intrusions funny, though at the time her resentment boiled over. The boys in question didn’t come ’round again.
Zsa Zsa, of course, intended to be a doting mother. Her love for Francesca never wavered, and yet—with her model for motherhood as none other than Jolie, along with echoes of grandmother Franceska Tillemann, both of whom blended the talents of prison matron with mother love—what chance existed for this child of uncertain provenance? For not only was Conrad Hilton hesitant to claim her as his own. Rumors circulated in the Hilton family and beyond that her actual father was Nicky. Zsa Zsa herself claimed that she and her former stepson had a sexual relationship that began soon after her release from the sanitarium in 1945 and ended during his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, a stretch of five years. Always maintaining that Conrad raped her during the final days of their marriage and was thus Francesca’s father, Zsa Zsa unwittingly allowed, in her chronology, for the possibility that Nicky Hilton, not Conrad, fathered her child. He would thus have been Francesca’s father and her half-brother.
Zsa Zsa’s claim of an affair with Nicky Hilton might well have been planted and watered by Wendy Leigh, her notorious collaborator on One Lifetime Is Not Enough, that highly unreliable autobiography published in 1991. Earlier, when working with Gerold Frank in 1960 on My Story, Zsa Zsa’s comment about her former stepson was this: “Any place he sees me he screams, ‘Mother!�
�� I think Nicky has a little hidden sort of crush on me.” Frank omitted the statement from the published book, leaving it instead among the outtakes. Her “proof” of Nicky’s crush meant little, however. Not only he, but Barron Hilton, as well, used the same sobriquet. During one of Zsa Zsa’s Las Vegas shows, Barron said, “I’m going to catch Mother’s act.”
* * *
If Francesca had been Eva’s daughter, the story would surely have ended differently. Early on, this aunt became Francesca’s most steadying influence. Late in life, Eva said on television, “I wanted six children and couldn’t have them. Believe me, I tried.” (Her final marriage, to Frank Jameson, brought her stepchildren and stepgrandchildren who adored her, and she them. They, like Francesca, inherited money from Eva’s estate.)
Interviewed while appearing in Her Cardboard Lover in 1951 at the Theatre by the Sea in Rhode Island, Eva sounded maternal.
“Let me tell you about my niece,” she said. “She is such a little beauty. On the West Coast, we walked past a kiddie shop with toys and dolls in the window. ‘Oh, Auntie Eva,’ she said, ‘aren’t they beautiful?’ When she and my sister visited New York last year, I took Francesca backstage at The Happy Time. There is a scene where Kurt Kasznar argues with another man in a very loud voice. When the play was over, my little niece walked right up to Kurt and said, ‘I heard you. You were arguing and fighting with that man, and everybody could hear every word you said. If you act that way pretty soon people will not like you.’” Eva, laughing, added, “And then she shook her finger at him. She is such a darling child!”