by Sam Staggs
* * *
One laments Eva’s untimely death even more in light of how she might have prepared a better ending for Zsa Zsa. Had Eva been alive in 2002, she would have taken complete control of Zsa Zsa’s care and comfort. In league with her powerful friends, she would have made Frederic an offer he couldn’t refuse: a settlement in exchange for removing himself forever. Eva might well have taken Francesca in hand, despite the difficulty of that undertaking. But Eva was gone.
As the years flowed over Zsa Zsa, she spent her hours in bed dozing and watching television. She received the occasional visitor, spoke to Francesca by phone until Frederic ended the calls, and in 2007 suffered a stroke that debilitated her even further. Still she lived on, even as the larger public assumed she was dead. To the extent that her damaged consciousness took in Frederic’s hijinks—his ludicrous claim to have fathered Anna Nicole Smith’s baby, tabloid reports that he blacked out from exhaustion while caring for his bedridden wife, the arrival of fire trucks after he called in a questionable report of an eight-foot snake dangling from the front gate of their home, his declaration that Zsa Zsa lost millions to Bernie Madoff’s fraud—the phantasmagoria must have compounded her confusion.
On several occasions an ambulance rushed Zsa Zsa to the hospital. Francesca believed some of these emergencies to be publicity stunts on Frederic’s part to keep himself in the news.
On July 17, 2010, Zsa Zsa fell and broke a hip while attempting to sit down in a wheelchair that wasn’t locked in place. She underwent hip replacement—a risky procedure for a ninety-three-year-old woman—and recovered sufficiently to return home on August 4. The following day she experienced chest pains. She was rushed back to the hospital, where doctors found and removed two blood clots, one of which was dangerously near the heart. By Saturday, August 7, she had improved and was able to speak. On Sunday morning her condition worsened, and she asked for a priest to administer the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. (This sacrament, though popularly termed “the last rites,” is more correctly designated as “extreme unction” or “the anointing of the sick.” It is administered when death seems imminent.) After the rite, Zsa Zsa appeared to lapse into a coma.
A week later, she returned home once more, although her prognosis was unclear. She improved slightly, and began to eat small amounts of solid food. John Blanchette reported in a press release that she was “in and out of consciousness.” On August 31, she was rushed once more to the hospital after Frederic found her “unresponsive and in distress.” On September 2, she was released and returned home “in great pain,” according to Blanchette. She had stopped eating and was receiving nutrition through a feeding tube.
On October 1, 2010, John Blanchette informed me by email that “Zsa Zsa’s health is improving. The doctors removed the feeding tube today, she’s eating a regular diet and getting stronger.” Ten days later, in a phone call, he said that Frederic planned to take Zsa Zsa for a Sunday-afternoon drive to the ocean. Despite the unintentional Baby Jane Hudson echo, such news betokened prodigious improvement.
* * *
Meanwhile, the battle between Frederic and Francesca intensified. Between 2009 and 2012, Francesca paid several hundred thousand dollars to lawyers in attempts to gain some control over Zsa Zsa’s care and finances, to prove that she and not Frederic was Zsa Zsa’s designated legatee, and to secure the right to visit her mother’s bedside after Frederic barred her from the house. In 2010, Francesca told me that she was allowed to go to the house and visit her mother only when Zsa Zsa’s doctor was present. In 2012, Francesca filed a petition requesting that an independent conservatorship be established to monitor her mother’s health and finances. A judge in Los Angeles granted the conservatorship, which pleased Francesca, but in a turnaround rebuff the judge made Frederic the temporary conservator of Zsa Zsa’s finances, with the stipulation that such finances be used only for his wife’s care. The judge also granted Francesca visiting rights every Tuesday, although each time I asked about the state of Zsa Zsa’s health, she said, “My mother is always asleep when I go. I think it’s because Frederic drugs her.”
In January 2011, when it seemed that Zsa Zsa’s perilous condition could decline no further, she developed a severe infection that did not respond to antibiotic treatment. She developed gangrene in the right leg, which was amputated as a life-saving measure. Not until two years later did she comprehend the loss, however dimly. Two months after the amputation, hearing on television of Elizabeth Taylor’s death, Zsa Zsa suffered a panic attack that raised her blood pressure to a dangerous level. According to John Blanchette, Zsa Zsa feared that she would be the next star to die. (In long-held Hollywood superstition, star deaths occur in threes, and Jane Russell had died shortly before Elizabeth Taylor.) Once more an ambulance rushed Zsa Zsa to the hospital.
During 2012, Frederic permitted cast and crew of HBO’s Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra to shoot scenes in the house and to paint a swirling L on the bottom of the pool. On one of the Tuesdays of Francesca’s scheduled visits, an altercation occurred with security guards. Without trying to find out who she was and why she was there, they attempted to oust her from her mother’s home. She trembled with hurt and anger as she recounted this humiliating episode.
On August 19, 2012, Frederic hosted an elaborate party to celebrate the twenty-sixth anniversary of his marriage to Zsa Zsa. Several hundred people attended, including reporters from the U.S., Europe, and Australia. This, at last, was Frederic’s own Norma Desmond moment—just him, the lights, and the cameras. After twenty-six years of waiting, he was overdue for his close-up.
According to John Blanchette’s press release, the stars of Behind the Candelabra—Michael Douglas, Matt Damon, Debbie Reynolds—and director Steven Soderbergh had accepted invitations. If they turned up, I didn’t see them, but the big arabesque L was still entwined across the bottom of the pool. Zsa Zsa, semiconscious in a faraway bedroom and attended by a nurse, knew nothing of the champagne celebration. Nor was Francesca ever on the guest list. Phyllis Diller, one of Zsa Zsa’s few surviving friends, might have attended had her own health not been precarious. She was on hospice care and died on August 20, the day after the party.
* * *
In an earlier chapter I reported my final conversation with Francesca, which took place on Christmas Day 2014. Eleven days later, she died of an apparent stroke. Since her next of kin was Zsa Zsa, who lay near death herself, for days no one claimed the body, which remained in the Los Angeles County coroner’s morgue. In a grotesque attempted beau geste, Frederic von Anhalt tried to claim Francesca’s body and to make funeral and burial arrangements. The coroner denied the request. Eventually Stephen M. Hilton, one of Barron Hilton’s sons and thus (depending on one’s view of Conrad Hilton’s paternity) Francesca’s nephew, came forward to claim the body and arrange for burial.
Francesca’s memorial Mass took place on January 21, 2015, at St. Ambrose Catholic Church in West Hollywood. The service was by invitation only, with this message printed on the card: “Per the family’s wishes, this is a private service with no reception.” Decoded, it meant that Frederic von Anhalt was denied entry. To make sure that he did not crash the service, two guards were stationed at the church entrance.
To no one’s surprise, Frederic would not shut up. He opined to anyone who would listen that since the Hiltons claimed her body, “she should be buried next to her father in Texas and not here in Los Angeles. She always wanted to be with her father. That’s what makes sense.”
Francesca was cremated and her remains interred at Westwood Village Memorial Park, near Eva’s. Perhaps the only decent thing to be said for Frederic von Anhalt is this: He made sure that Zsa Zsa never learned of Francesca’s death.
* * *
By 2016, Zsa Zsa had lived so long, and been seen so often, that many considered her immortal. If Hollywood had a Mount Rushmore, her likeness would surely have been carved near the top. How apt was the title of her book, One Lifetime Is Not Enough, an
d how unfortunate that the book itself read like a dime novel.
On Sunday afternoon, December 18, 2016, the immortal Zsa Zsa Gabor finally died. Had she lived seven more weeks, she would have reached her desired goal of one hundred. Nor were her expectations misplaced. The Gabors were long-lived: Eva’s death at seventy-six seemed premature, while Jolie passed a hundred by several years and Vilmos and Magda reached their eighties.
Zsa Zsa’s death immediately became headline news around the world. A mere sampling:
LEGENDARY SOCIALITE AND ACTRESS ZSA ZSA GABOR
DIES AT 99
MOULIN ROUGE ACTRESS ZSA ZSA GABOR DIES AGED 99
ZSA ZSA GABOR FALLECE A LOS 99 AÑOS
ZSA ZSA GABOR IST TOT
E MORTA ZSA ZSA GABOR, AVEVA 99 ANNI
ZSA ZSA GABOR N’EST PLUS
ELHUNYT GÁBOR ZSAZSA
The New York Times, in a long obituary and a later appraisal, devoted more than a full page to Zsa Zsa. Among its reporting errors was the common one that she had been Miss Hungary in 1936. The appraisal, by staff writer Alessandra Stanley, led with the moldy cliché, “Long before the Kardashians, there were the Gabors.” The writer’s subsequent insights were equally lame.
* * *
As in life, so in death: controversy engulfed plans for the funeral and the disposition of Zsa Zsa’s remains. The agent of dispute was of course the widower, whose grief did not obscure opportunites for the spotlight. A week before Zsa Zsa’s funeral Mass, he released to the media a list of celebrities supposedly planning to attend. Among those named were Debbie Reynolds, Barbara Eden, Carol Channing, Larry King, Ruta Lee, and George Hamilton. The list, like so many of Frederic’s inventions, bore no relation to reality. Those named on it, all of them friends of Zsa Zsa, wished to avoid the kind of sideshow that Frederic had become known for. Without him as ringmaster, they might all have attended the funeral.
Edward Lozzi, Zsa Zsa’s longtime friend and former publicist and perhaps Francesca’s closest friend—she was on the phone to him moments before her death—challenged Frederic’s spurious announcement. From his PR firm, Lozzi sent a cease-and-desist letter to Frederic, as did Larry King. Lozzi’s letter read in part, “A false media release is being sent to news agencies and celebrity publicists containing the names of stars who have no intention of attending.” Lozzi said that his client Debbie Reynolds phoned him immediately to find out how to remove her name from the list. (In a development of staggering irony, Debbie herself died on December 28, two days before Zsa Zsa’s funeral.) The others on Frederic’s list also demanded removal of their names.
Countering what threatened to be an embarrassment to Zsa Zsa’s memory, Lozzi announced plans for an alternative remembrance ceremony to be held at her gravesite. He, along with two dozen others of her friends, gathered at Westwood Village Memorial Park after the funeral. They expected her ashes to arrive there, since she owned a plot near Eva’s and wished to be buried in it. Instead, Frederic took home the urn. According to Lozzi, he said, “These are my fucking ashes, and she was my fucking wife.”
* * *
Edward Lozzi was always a fierce defender of Zsa Zsa and Francesca and of their respective legacies. It was he who sent me an invitation to Francesca’s funeral (I was unable to attend), and his description of Frederic’s intended “circus” left me in doubt whether or not to attend Zsa Zsa’s funeral Mass. Knowing that I was at work on this book, he urged me to go. “You really can’t afford not to,” he said.
The service began at ten o’clock on the morning of December 30, 2016, at Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. In front of the altar was a large portrait of Zsa Zsa from around 1994, and captioned “Farewell, My Love.” For ten minutes before the service, Frederic received condolences while standing beside the portrait. His attire was bizarre; he wore a necktie but in place of a dark suit or a blazer and dark trousers, he chose a brown barn jacket. One might have mistaken him for a hay broker delivering straw for Zsa Zsa’s horse.
Photographers swarmed over the sidewalk in front of the church. Cameras and audio equipment from networks and other media filled the choir loft, and in an example of postmodern bad taste, virtually every member of the congregation aimed smartphones to grab images for uploading to Facebook and YouTube. For Frederic, the crowning Norma Desmond moment had finally arrived. Unlike Norma, however, he could go on with the scene, and on and on beyond that. Whirring cameras elevated him to a higher plane of paradise than the one newly occupied by Zsa Zsa.
The opening hymn was “Amazing Grace,” followed by the Roman Catholic liturgy comprising Bible readings, more music, and the Eucharist. Father Ed Benioff, who delivered the homily, spoke of Zsa Zsa’s contributions to various charities and her great love of animals. “She supported those in distress and those less fortunate,” he said, “and she gave much money to the Salvation Army. She had a big heart for the homeless. She helped their cause in many ways. And, as Jesus said, ‘Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,’ Zsa Zsa did not talk about her good works.”
The funeral Mass was properly dignified, comforting, and inclusive, perhaps a reflection of the leanings of the present pope. At the Eucharist, the priest invited everyone to gather at the altar, Catholics to receive Communion and others who wished a blessing to cross their arms over their chest.
In keeping with modern funeral tradition, near the end of the Mass came a time for Words of Remembrance. Typically, family members and close friends give a brief informal eulogy, often with anecdotes recalling happy times in the life of the departed. As if to subject poor Zsa Zsa to further crass narcissism, Frederic seized the opportunity to address his captive audience and the online millions in a rambling monologue that resembled a medley of windbag speeches from Oscar night.
Holding the urn with Zsa Zsa’s ashes, he began his forty-five-minute discourse by saying, “The church is not full because the timing is bad. But timing was always bad for my wife. She could have died two weeks ago, or in January—today, many are on vacation or out of town.” (He omitted the celebrity boycott.)
“I was famous in Germany,” he continued, to the amazement of those familiar with his past, “then I came to Hollywood.” At this point he held up a German magazine from 1983 with Zsa Zsa and him pictured on the cover. The speech became more and more inappropriate for a church service, especially a Mass for the dead. Even so, his use of props took on the lineaments of an infomercial. He held up the carrying case that Zsa Zsa used for Macho Man, a shih tzu and one of her favorite dogs, and pointed out a fancy yellow pillow bought in Munich for the dog’s comfort. Finally, he concluded—or so one thought with a sigh of relief—“Keep her in your thoughts the way she was.”
His tackiest moment, however, was yet to come. As the clergy began their procession from the altar, Frederic interrupted—“Wait a minute”—to add a postscript about a horse picture that Zsa Zsa painted, which he held up and proceeded to explicate like Kenneth Clark elucidating Giotto for a PBS audience.
The priest, perhaps recalling martyrs of old, waited with saintly patience for the art lecture to end, betraying no sign of chagrin that a monster ego kept him standing for long minutes with crucifix held aloft. Having upstaged Christ on the Cross, Frederic then placed Zsa Zsa’s ashes in Macho Man’s Louis Vuitton carrying case, proceeded down the aisle and out of the church. The cantor began the recessional hymn, “May Choirs of Angels,” to the tune of “Londonderry Air.”
Outside the church, as I spoke with Zsa Zsa’s former assistants Betsy Jentz and Nancy DeJean, I overheard Frederic extolling the virtues of president-elect Donald Trump to any reporter left standing. And no wonder, for Frederic’s own practices parallel those of fly-by-night Trump University, now defunct. For instance, Zsa Zsa’s cousin József Gabor told an interviewer in Hungary that Frederic contacted him about the cost of a Hungarian funeral, with interrment of Zsa Zsa’s ashes near the remains of her father in Budapest. József sent the estimated cost: two million forints, roughl
y seven thousand dollars. Frederic demurred, saying the grave of Vilmos was in bad condition. This József disputed. “After that, he disappeared,” according to Zsa Zsa’s cousin. As this book goes to press, Zsa Zsa’s ashes remain in Frederic’s custody.
It is doubtful that Zsa Zsa ever expressed the wish to die in Hungary, as Frederic claimed on TMZ, or that she would have wished her ashes to be sent there. Otherwise, why would she have purchased a plot at Westwood Village? Moreover, while she respected the Jewish faith of her ancestors and had many Jewish friends and one Jewish husband, she herself would not have desired a Jewish burial.
In this regard, as in so many others, Zsa Zsa often contradicted herself. Francesca would sometimes needle her: “We’re Jewish, aren’t we?” but Zsa Zsa was not amused. On the other hand, Betsy Jentz told this anecdote: “When I worked for Zsa Zsa, Frederic made a business deal that Zsa Zsa considered less than spectacular. She said to him, ‘If you had one drop of Jewish blood in you, you would be able to deal with these people.’ ” And all of the Gabors worked on behalf of Jewish charities. Among Zsa Zsa’s possessions sold at auction in 2018 was an award from the United Jewish Welfare Fund.
In 2017, People magazine revealed that according to probate court documents, Frederic was sole heir to Zsa Zsa’s estate. Her will established a trust that consolidated all of her assets, with her husband as sole trustee. The trust stipulated that the amount of Zsa Zsa’s estate not be disclosed. With exquisite irony, therefore, Zsa Zsa turned her final headline into an eclipse. One question hangs in the air, however: whether Zsa Zsa truly willed it this way. A previous document that went missing raised other possibilities, but of course anyone who might have challenged Zsa Zsa’s last will and testament was forever silent.