by Shawn Levy
Of course, Alexis was sapping much more than that. He had agreed to a prenuptial settlement that kept him from getting his mitts on all of her dough—$1 million in dowry and an annual allowance of $50,000. But he found ample ways to spend money on things that he insisted they both needed—cars and clothes and horses and property in France and Venice and antiques and travel and the like. For a year they toured the world, lapping up extravagant tchotchkes and bickering like brats. When they finally got to London, their one-year-old marriage was collapsing, and Barbara was grateful to turn to her right at a formal dinner party celebrating her twenty-second birthday to meet the gaze of Count Court Haugwitz-Reventlow, a Danish genuine nobleman—tall, erect, nearing forty, with a snooty air and the chiseled good looks of an Old World army officer in a Hollywood movie. Six months later, in a single twenty-four-hour period, she shed herself of Alexis and became a genuine countess by marrying Court.*
This act of caprice brought out the venom of the press more than ever: Barbara was positively barracked in headlines, gossip columns, and editorials, treated rudely by doormen and waiters, spoofed in movies, even cited as an example of the callous wealthy by a Canadian Parliament inquiry into the operation of Woolworth stores in that country. She considered herself “the most hated girl in America,” and she had the press clippings and bruised feelings to prove it. She started a counteroffensive, a PR campaign of charitable contributions and good acts. But at the same time she spent outrageously and said and did utterly foolish, self-destructive things. In 1937, for instance, in a byzantine plot to curtail her tax obligations, she renounced her American citizenship in favor of the Danish nationality she acquired upon her wedding to Court; and she acted unconcerned when shopgirls from Woolworth’s all over the country went on strike for better wages and working conditions. True, she had nothing to do with the operations of the company, but the pattern of her behavior was so tone-deaf and superior that no hospital wing she might build could erase its impact.
By the time of these missteps, Barbara and Court had begun living in a mansion near London’s Regents Park and had seen the birth of a son, Lance. In the wake of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, they worried fervently, and with good reason, about the safety of their son: The animosity directed at his mother more than once manifested itself in genuine danger. Barbara had had an awful time with pregnancy—Lance was a C-section—and that and the threats and her characteristic nervousness made Court’s severity all the harder to bear. With a soul like an epee, he poked everyone in his world toward propriety, respect, and discipline, even his wife. (He once upbraided her for giving an order to a maid, insisting that “the Countess Reventlow doesn’t speak to servants!”) It was a rotten match, and it ended at a kind of apogee of horror, with Court, according to Barbara, dragging her to watch a sex show in Paris then taking her by violence and forcing her to watch him defecate. By 1938 they were living apart.
If anything, the divorce that followed was even uglier than that barbarous ultimate scene of their marriage; negotiations and litigation dragged on for years. Unlike Alexis Mdivani, Court had an heir, and he used his son as a weapon to pry concessions and riches out of Barbara. She in turn set the boy against his beastly father, turning him into a petulant, angry, brooding little firecracker batted cruelly back and forth between his parents—an awful business to which the 1941 divorce decree did nothing to put an end.
Barbara began to spend time in California, where she could see relatives and indulge a new fascination: Hollywood. There was a brief affair with Howard Hughes and a longer one with Robert Sweeney, the very fellow who would one day name Rubi in a divorce suit. And then, before her thirtieth birthday, there was a third marriage—to the one and only Cary Grant.
At the wedding, they were beautiful together, both at the height of their natural charm; she had grown into her looks with a kind of exquisite delicacy—up close, it could appear brittle—and had found a more natural (indeed, more American) way to dress, and he was simply himself: perfection. They partied and entertained and spent quiet time together, but once again there was something less than a harmony of personalities between them. Barbara was a doer and spender, always looking to expand the world as she fancied it; Grant was a workaholic and a tightwad, still feeling the sting of growing up as wretched Archibald Leech in Bristol, England. She was distracted by the continuing battles with Court over the custody and rearing of Lance and by FBI inquiries into her friendships with European nationals who may have been Nazi spies; he hated the strange, adverse publicity that came with proximity to her and the way that she threw money around.
Inevitably, she wandered. She acquired a flat in Los Angeles that she used for trysts, including one that her swain of the moment, designer Oleg Cassini, then married to Gene Tierney, recalled as being ethereal, spooky, and a little disturbing. (As he surmised from the experience, “She divided men into two groups—those she loved and those she took to bed. Her marriages were essentially sexless, and her affairs were bereft of love.”) Inevitably, two separations and, after three years of marriage, divorce. And as always, nothing but kind words in public for her ex; as always, a declared resolve not to marry again.
For a brief while, it seemed possible that she might stick to her resolution. She poured her energy into acquiring and furnishing a house, a palace, truly, in Tangiers. But when in Paris she was squired by the notorious Freddy McEvoy, and that was likely only to lead to trouble. McEvoy, the Australian sportsman and playboy, was best known for being a chum of Errol Flynn’s and for his adventures as an athlete (he captained England’s bobsled team in the 1936 Olympics); Suicide Freddy he liked to be called. He had a brace of broken marriages to American heiresses behind him, a shadowy reputation as a sex machine and as a doer of rich folks’ dirty deeds—both of which qualities recommended him, of course, to Barbara. Their affair was physical, but it was even more a kind of business arrangement: She seemed to have fronted him money, which he poured into suspicious operations such as selling black market American military goods and performing illegal currency exchanges; Barbara, of course, had no knowledge of these dealings and sought no profit from them, but it was with seed money from her that he was able to open an office on the Champs-Élysées to put a shiny face on his dirty work.
It wasn’t surprising, then, that McEvoy didn’t wed Barbara but rather brokered her introduction to the man who would serve as the fourth in her line of failed marriages: Prince Igor Nikolaievitch Troubetzkoy, heir to a worthless Lithuanian title, then employed as a journeyman bicycle racer and one of Freddy McEvoy’s bagmen. Less than two years after signing divorce papers with Cary Grant (the only of her husbands who had insisted on neither a dowry nor parting gifts), she was once again a princess. This one endured until 1951, with most of the last year being given over to separations, fights, and his authorship of a tell-all book as a weapon of blackmail. She cut the check. Dasvidanya, Prince.
All of it had ground her down. She had never been robust but, now nearing forty, she was continually sick, with surgeries for mystery ailments and an increasing taste for the oblivion induced by booze and pills. She suffered from depression and a restless inability to stay in one place or heed the advice of her doctors. The mainstays of her life, such as they were, disappointed: Lance, a teenager in private school in Switzerland, was snarky and remote; cousin Jimmy Donohue had evolved into a world-class hedonist. Barbara, still writing poetry, still seeing herself as a misunderstood, abandoned soul, yearned for the solace of a true love. In the summer of 1953, she packed up Lance and went to Deauville hoping she might find it.
It was a mad season.
Barbara ran into her former beau, Bob Sweeney, who was in the process of shedding himself of his unfaithful wife Joanne Connelley. And milling around the place as well was Rubi, the very man with whom Mrs. Sweeney had provoked her husband’s outrage. Rubi had won the Coupe d’Or at Deauville with his Cibao—La Pampa team just two years prior and never missed the event—if not for the polo then for t
he social opportunities. Meeting Barbara certainly ranked high among them.
How did it happen? Take your pick. Elsa Maxwell claimed to have introduced them and then later claimed it wasn’t she but somebody named S. Leland Rosenberg, a school chum of Lance’s who was along for the holiday. Others say that it wasn’t Rosenberg but his Parisian acquaintance Manuel de Moya, a Dominican pretty boy and diplomat in the Rubi mold that was becoming a stereotype of sorts among their countrymen.*
And Rubi offered an account that only partially cleared up the confusion: “I had known Barbara since she was married to my friend, Igor Troubetzkoy.… Later we often had lunch together when I was married to Doris.… Rosenberg was my special secretary during this time when I met Barbara, but he had no part in our union.”
How Rosenberg came to be Rubi’s special secretary—and, in fact, who Rosenberg was in the first place—would be one of the more persistent mysteries of the decidedly murky episode. He was born in Switzerland and came to America in 1946 on a passport that described him as a lawyer; while working at the United Nations, he married the daughter of the Chinese ambassador to Mexico, a union that failed to last out a year but served to introduce Rosenberg—who claimed vague war heroics and blood relation to several different industrial tycoons—to the son of Mexico’s then-president. That friendship brought him to Hollywood, where he had a brief fling with the ubiquitous Gene Tierney and met Lance Reventlow, with whom he sailed to Europe on the same ship that was carrying Manuel de Moya.* At the time of this fateful nexus of characters in Deauville, he was perhaps working for the UN, perhaps engaged in some sort of business with de Moya and Trujillo, perhaps both—and, perhaps, special secretary to Rubi, a man who barely did enough desk work to warrant an actual secretary: boxes within boxes within boxes.
At any rate, contact between the two famous divorcés was made. Rubi renewed his acquaintance with the fragile Miss Hutton and turned on the charm: dancing, chats in between chuckers of polo, moonlight serenades outside her hotel window with the accompaniment of some musicians he’d hired at a nightclub. He considerately showed Lance about the resort city and its pleasures: the horses, the boats, the dances. The boy was only thirteen, but Rubi sincerely enjoyed young people; at around this time, he met the schoolboy Taki Theodoracopulos and befriended him as well. “In those days, people didn’t give a fuck about young people, their feelings or their sensibilities,” Taki recollected. “But Rubi was very kind and interested.”
That summer, Barbara was too frail and confused to respond to Rubi’s gentle siege—and, to be fair, he was himself caught up in the hurricane of his affair with Zsa Zsa. So many possibilities! The season ended—Cibao—La Pampa failed to win the Coupe d’Or—and they parted.
In early December, Barbara left Paris for New York, where she kept an apartment at the Pierre. And then she left the Pierre for Doctors Hospital to be treated for what was characterized as bronchial pneumonia but was more likely a deep general malaise. Three weeks she was there and twice she was visited by Rubi.
He had homed in on Barbara and was preparing to swoop down as frankly as any bird of prey. For all the perennial talk about his ruthlessness and his selfishness and his eyes always being on the next prize, it was hard to see it for certain until now. Flor he had fortunately stumbled across; Danielle he had met as another face in the glittering Parisian throng; Doris, well, why not shoot for Doris and a lifetime of security, especially as his white-hot marriage was dimming. But Barbara was a wreck; he was way ahead of her; and he was clearly in it for himself and his future comfort alone. Ever the charmer, he put it over on her, and he tried to find a way to express it years later that made it seem something other than what it was: pure, wicked calculation: “Our friendship took a new course. We discovered a powerful attraction for each other. As soon as she regained her health, I discovered a new woman: with a delicate beauty, intelligent, cultivated, sensitive, around whom I took increasing pleasure.”
That second visit, when she was truly on the rebound, must have been an especial pleasure. Afterward, Rubi made a beeline for Dunhill’s, thirty blocks south, and ordered a closetful of $300 suits—a large closetful—to be billed to Barbara Hutton, to whom, he whispered to the store’s owner, Norman J. Block, he would soon be wed.
And then he flew back to L.A. and Zsa Zsa.
By the fall of 1953, George Sanders had well and truly had it.
Bad enough to be married to an explosive temperament. “Life with Zsa Zsa is like life on the slopes of a volcano,” he mused. “It can be very pleasant between eruptions.” But when that volcano demonstrated the temerity to outscale him as a performer and then flaunt a torrid affair across two continents, he determined to return to his vinegary bachelor ways. He moved his belongings out of Bellagio Place on October 20 and two weeks later filed for divorce in Santa Monica Superior Court. “I have separated from my wife, Sari E. Sanders, also known as Zsa Zsa Gabor,” read his petition, “and after this date I am not responsible for any debts she may contract.” (As if!) He went on to complain that Zsa Zsa had been a constant source of “cruelty and inhuman treatment, causing great humiliation, mental anguish and embarrassment resulting in great mental suffering, health deterioration, nervousness and a rundown condition.”
In New York, Zsa Zsa, discreetly accompanied by Rubi, initially didn’t respond to reporters looking to get a rise out of her. That resolve lasted a day, and then she let loose. “I really don’t understand it,” she commenced. “For eight months I have begged him for a divorce. But nothing he does surprises me any more—he does whatever his psychiatrist tells him. He goes to the analyst every day. He’s all mixed up. And only a little while ago the analyst told me George would have a nervous breakdown if I divorced him.” In particular, and with reason, her gorge rose at the idea that Sanders was somehow amicably leaving her with the fruits of their joint financial lives: “When was he ever responsible? He’s lived in my house in Bel-Air that I bought and paid for. He drives my car. That’s why I’ve been away in NY and Europe—I have to earn a living to support my baby.… George just walked out of the house and left the child with a new maid.” Upon vacating the house, she claimed, he had helped himself to several household items that weren’t his—radios, chairs, candlesticks, a cheese set. “Why, he even took all the liquor in the place! I’m glad he left the air in the tires of my car! George never bought a ticket or paid a hotel bill. He used my car, my house. This man didn’t buy one hat for me.… I didn’t even get an engagement ring … I’m a nice lady, so I don’t sue him, but he sues me.” She ended with her sole note of understatement: “I don’t think he’s a gentleman.”
She didn’t know the half of it. Sanders apparently had no confidence that he could count on Zsa Zsa to let things die a quiet, natural death. He was advised that he needed explicit evidence of Zsa Zsa’s infidelities, and he knew just how to get it.
Christmas Eve on Bellagio Place: Grandma Jolie, little Francesca, Magda, and Eva with their beaus of the moment, Zsa Zsa hovering over the stove and the bar, and, acting as the gentleman of the house, Rubi. There was more to celebrate than the holiday. The sisters would all three meet up again at the Last Frontier hotel in Las Vegas in just two days for the December 28 debut of a new stage show, a grand extrapolation of Zsa Zsa’s solo act—a little singing, a little dancing, lots of droll, scripted one-liners about men: not bad for $15,000 a week.
A lavish meal, the opening of gifts, and then kisses all around and it was a night. After putting Francesca down to enjoy her visions of sugarplums, Zsa Zsa and Rubi went to bed.
Accounts diverge as to what exactly happened next in that bedroom. Either a gift-wrapped brick flew in, shattering the panels of a French door, or a window smashed under the weight of a ladder and the fellow it supported, or somebody simply sauntered in from the terrace. At any rate, it’s agreed that the happy couple soon found themselves confronted by Sanders and a pair of private detectives, one of whom was busily flashing photos even as Rubi and Zsa Zsa bolted in
their birthday suits for the bathroom.
A cutting “Merry Christmas” oozed out of Sanders.
“How could you do this?” Zsa Zsa shouted from behind a closed door. And then she emerged with a sangfroid that would have given pause to a Medici. “It was perfectly awful of you to come, darling, but since you did, please take your Christmas present. It will save me the trouble of delivering it.”
She took him downstairs and offered him a glass of champagne and handed him his gift. In turn, he swept a hand toward his accomplices. “And this, Cokiline, is my Christmas present to you.” And he walked out the door.
“He had entered like a thief,” she recalled. “He was leaving like the master of the house.”*
By Christmas morning, a Friday, Rubi had emerged from the bathroom and was off to New York to see to the other woman he was so frantically juggling. Satisfied that Barbara was still on the string, he flew to Las Vegas, arriving there on Saturday as the Gabors were honing their act.
In his wake followed press speculation that he was marrying somebody: Barbara? Zsa Zsa? No one was sure. But it was an irresistibly juicy story that was selling newspapers. At airports in New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, Rubi was met with questions about whom and when he would wed. He brushed them off. Zsa Zsa told anyone who asked that Rubi had assured her he was marrying the heiress—she herself had refused him repeatedly and he’d finally given up. “I think Barbara Hutton is very eager to marry him,” she continued. “She has nothing else to do. He can take her to lots of parties. They were in Deauville this summer. He was playing polo at his best. Her son is a very good friend of his.” And Barbara issued a statement from her suite to the effect that she would not be issuing a statement. “She is resting and reading,” as a spokesperson blankly put it.