ZsaZsa the factor 5 7

sa Zsa, dahling. Her childhood nickname and it says it all. Effortless yet extravagant, old-world yet modern, both extremes all at once. Actress and socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor titled her third published book One Life-time is Not Enough

Considering the sheer number of experiences she packed into her long life, it’s clear that she had it right, at least for herself. A brief article is hardly enough to gloss over the heights her celebrity climbed from the time she emerged as a competitive beauty in the Miss Hungary Pageant of 1933 to her death in 2016, just shy of 100 years old. In the years between, Zsa Zsa Gabor starred in over 60 films and as many television programs, often playing herself, married 8 men (9 if you count her one-day marriage at sea), and in her 60-odd years in Hollywood collected an incalculable number of stories. An influencer before Instagram, she was perhaps one of the first celebrities who was famous for being famous, paving the way for the likes of Paris Hilton (whose grandfather she once married) and Kim Kardashian. Gabor modernized a long tradition of diamonds-and-furs celebrity and feminine power. She had the fun everyone wished they were having, behaving exactly how she wanted without batting an eyelash. Her aura was one of coquettish delight, the kind of woman who (famously) never told you her age, who could sweep you up before you realized it, who was surrounded by such wealth, and such joy in it, that she was impossible to ignore.

Zsa Zsa was born Sarí Gábor in 1917 in Budapest to affluent parents. Her father, Vilmos, was a soldier, and her mother, Jolie Gabor, was an heiress of the Tilleman family jewelry business, though some sources claim her family’s fortune came from owning brothels. Even before she became known for her extravagant lifestyle, Gabor lived a life of relative luxury. All three Gabor sisters attended Madame Subilia’s School for Young Ladies in Lausanne, Switzerland, where on top of the Hungarian and German they spoke at home, they learned English and French. They emerged, beautiful and accomplished, onto the social scene in the 1930s.

If there is a gene that predicts celebrity, the Gabor family had it. Her sisters, eldest Madga and youngest Eva, would also grow up to become socialites in the United States. Gabor’s earliest appearance in the spotlight after the famed Miss Hungary pageant was her stage debut in 1934. At 17, Zsa Zsa had already begun establishing the character she would portray her whole life.

On the boards of the Theatre van den Wien in Vienna, Zsa Zsa played the “soubrette” role in the operetta The Singing Dream, an archetype for just the sort of girl she seemed to set out to be: a flirt, a gossip, a mischievous feminine presence who pulls focus every moment she stands on stage. She was cast

• le printemps 2023 • l’édition pour animaux de compagnie et mode • readelysian.com in the role by famous tenor Richard Tauber. It became clear as opening night drew closer that Zsa Zsa’s looks and, to put it in today’s terms, her vibe, were all she brought to the performance. Tauber told her that her singing, dancing, and acting were not cutting it and that instead of learning, all she had to do was point her pretty face at the crowd. It would be advice that shaped her career.

Gerold Frank, who co-wrote Gabor’s 1960 autobiography Zsa Zsa Gabor: My Story, described her as “a woman from the court of Louis XV who has somehow managed to live in the 20th century . . . She says she wants to be all the Pompadours and Du Barrys of history rolled into one.” This energy, one of exuberant opulence, became Zsa Zsa’s guiding star, the attitude that made her vibe so unavoidably charming.

Gabor fled Europe surrounded by the growing tensions that eventually led to the Nazi occupation of her childhood home in 1941. She had already married her first husband, Burhan Belge, whom she left behind in Turkey. She joined her sister Eva in Los Angeles where she lived with her husband and was working to begin her film career. (Eva would go on to star in Green Acres as Lisa Douglas.) Zsa Zsa emerged in the glitz of 1940s Hollywood already the life of the party, sporting her flawless blonde hair and her charming Hungarian accent—“Zeeze are my vorking diamonds, dahlink!” She made early headlines claiming to have “danced with Hitler, twice.” She might have been seen rejecting Frank Sinatra’s advances in a pink ruched gown, or shamelessly flirting with the man who would become her next husband, hotel mogul Conrad Hilton. This was 1942, and at the time Hilton was 55, 30 years her senior.

Her time with Hilton was perhaps the one that most challenged and changed Zsa Zsa Gabor. The five-year marriage was shadowed by the horrors of World War II, a dark time made particularly dark for Zsa Zsa as she waited for news of the family she still had back in Budapest. Like everyone she met, Hilton was drawn to her looks and her spirit, but once they joined their lives, she got to know the man for who he was: printemps 2023 • l’édition pour animaux de compagnie et mode • readelysian.com a notoriously frugal, business-first type with Texas manners she found gruff and a sense of entitlement and ownership of her that she despised. She wrote that his only true loves were his Catholic religion and Hilton hotels. He curbed her spending, putting her on an unforgivable $250/month budget. The couple slept in separate rooms. Zsa Zsa’s only child Francesca, whom she revealed later was a product of rape, grew up in a divided, hostile home, and later embroiled Zsa Zsa in a lawsuit over what else but her parents’ tangled fortunes. After her pregnancy, a reported affair with her stepson, a harrowing robbery of the Hilton home, and a stay at a psychiatric hospital for depression, Zsa Zsa divorced Hilton in 1947.

In her 1970 advice book How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, How to Get Rid of a Man (a subject on which she would become a true expert), Zsa Zsa wrote, “I think every woman should have at least three husbands.” Released from her restrictive second husband, Zsa Zsa was free to marry her third, Academy Award-winning actor George Sanders, who spurred her film career by securing her a role in a TV pilot in London. Though the role never materialized, Zsa Zsa quickly landed her first role in a feature film as a featured extra in the 1952 movie Lovely to Look At. In the film, she plays her best character: herself, a model named Zsa Zsa who speaks only un-subtitled French in a rollicking party scene and later appears modeling an over-the-top black gown and an enormous, glittering diamond necklace, surrounded by gilded candelabras and, for some reason, suits of armor with golden faces. In this shot of her twirling in that incredible dress, it’s clear Zsa Zsa is in her element. Sanders said of Zsa Zsa in his autobiography Memoirs of a Professional Cad: “Every age has its Madame Pompadour, its Lady Hamilton, its Queen of Sheba, its Cleopatra, and I wouldn’t be surprised if history singles out Zsa Zsa as its 20th-century prototype of this exclusive coterie.”

The50s would bring two more of Zsa Zsa’s most well-known movie appearances, a small role in 1953’s Lili, another in the Ginger Rodgers/Fred Astaire hit We’re Not Married!, and a featured role in 1952 in Moulin Rouge as the singer Jane Avril. The film was a huge event in cinema. It was directed by John Huston, who had recently won an Academy Award in directing for The African Queen, and starred a lauded debut performance by Jose Ferrer. Moulin Rouge made strides in technicolor for the time. The film’s vibrant palette seems meant to feature Zsa Zsa’s two musical numbers (her vocals were dubbed by Muriel Smith). Her first song comes ten minutes into the film after an introduction of a vibrant Moulin Rouge night as Toulouse-Lautrec sketches dancers. Zsa Zsa slows the film down with her presence, spends most of the film wearing incredible feathered hats, and was a grounding cast member in a star-studded film that received seven Oscar nominations (including Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Supporting Actress), and was awarded honors in costuming and art direction. Her performance in Moulin Rouge was by far her most prominent serious leading role, and it catapulted her into the public eye. She appeared in 17 films throughout the 1950s, her first decade of six in film and television, including a small role as a strip club owner in Orson Welles’s 1958 classic Touch of Evil. In the same year, she played a seductive alien queen in the camp classic Queen of Outer Space. It was perhaps the one performance she was embarrassed by, “a horrible film,” she called it, that “[kept] coming up” for the rest of her career.

In Film historian Neal Gabler’s 1998 book Life: The Movie - How Entertainment Conquered Reality, he defines the trajectory of what we’ve come to call “famous for being famous” as “The Zsa Zsa Factor,” or, Zsa Zsa’s ability to use her marriage to Sanders as leverage for a film career, then to use that career to leverage higher celebrity. As Gabler studies in Life: The Movie, Zsa Zsa is one of the pioneers of “human entertainment,” a person whose own life is entertainment, rather than the work they produce. Zsa Zsa came to Hollywood at a pivotal moment. She parlayed not only her relationship with Sanders but the trajectory of the entire film industry. As TV talk shows began their rise as accelerated gossip rags, as access to information sped the rise of celebrity, there was Zsa Zsa.

During her five-year marriage to Sanders, Zsa Zsa began a high-profile affair with Porfirio Rubirosa, a Dominican diplomat, polo player, racing driver, and notorious playboy whose (very)

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Zsa Zsa Gabor having her hair done by Rene of Mayfair, in1965. Gabor would famously be quoted as saying “I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back.”

LICHFIELD / CONTRIBUTOR / GETTYIMAGES.COM animaux de compagnie et mode • readelysian.com long list of lovers included Ava Gardner, Eartha Kitt, Eva Peron, Rita Hayworth, Judy Garland, and Kim Novak, to name only a few. Rubirosa spent lavishly on Zsa Zsa, and their affair lasted most of the decade. She once called Rubi “a disease of the blood. I cannot be without him.”

Zsa Zsa’s only child Francesca grew up in a divided, hostile home, and later embroiled Zsa Zsa in a lawsuit over what else but her parents’ tangled fortunes.

The 1960s saw Zsa Zsa marry first Herbert Hunter in 1962, then oil magnate Joshua S. Cosden Jr in 1966 (this one only lasted a year). After her brief success in film, Zsa Zsa’s roles settled into a style of performance that suited her well: the cameo. She was featured in seven films in the 1960s, and already in four of those roles she was playing herself. In the two notable performances from this time, Zsa Zsa plays rich sex pots in the forgettable 1966 film Drop Dead Darling, a black comedy starring Tony Curtis as a murderous playboy, and in 1967s Jack of Diamonds, in which Zsa Zsa, as herself, is featured as one of a few victims of George Hamilton’s cat burglar lead. Around this time, Zsa Zsa also became a regular on talk shows and latenight television as the genre blossomed, beginning the climb to a level of celebrity fascination closer to what we know today.