zsa zsa

wrote in How to Catch a Man, “I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house.” Entering 1970 single and flush with the winnings from four prior divorce settlements, Zsa Zsa acquired perhaps the crown jewel of luxury living in 1973: the iconic home at 1001 Bel Air Road in Los Angeles, California. Eccentric director and producer Howard Hughes built the home in 1955. An apocryphal Hollywood story tells of a crumbling home on the property ready to be torn down until Howard Hughes sped onto the scene and declared he would buy the property and rebuild the home for whatever the price might be. The resulting house—a bright mustard yellow French Regency exterior with an intricate copper Regency roof, as well as a vibrant red-carpeted staircase connecting the upstairs outdoor patios to the downstairs Monte Carlo-style terrace and pool with respondent views of the city—saw thousands of Hollywood fixtures through its doors.

The house had been previously owned by Elvis Presley, who entertained The Beatles there in 1965. The one-acre property is tucked away on an LA hilltop, a six-bed, seven-bath home with 28 individual rooms across 9000 square feet, plenty of space for Zsa Zsa Gabor, her beloved Shih Tzu dogs. (At one time, she had nine dogs total and often threw them parties. The main course: hot dogs.) Zsa Zsa’s closet in the main bedroom spanned 30 feet long, 12 feet deep, and 14 feet high, with room for over 5000 individual garments.

In the main room, portraits of Zsa Zsa filled the walls. Zsa Zsa lived in the home for 40 years, until she died in 2016. She hosted hundreds, if not thousands of parties there, one of her favorite things to do, and guests included Hollywood icons like Frank Sinatra, and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Queen Elizabeth II herself. The home appeared in HBO’s 2013 limited series Behind the Candelabra as the set for Liberace’s home, and one of his pianos was a centerpiece in the home for many years. As if the American iconography could not stack up higher, her husband just after the time of this exciting purchase was Jack Ryan, Mattel designer of Barbie, Catty Cathy, and Hot Wheels.

Zsa Zsa Gabor’s home last sold in 2020 for $16 million. At the time of her death, the house represented, perhaps even more than she did in her last years, the time of her prime, the opulent legacy of Old Hollywood. When she purchased the property in 1973, she bought its history with it. Then 57 years old, she had been a part of that history for nearly 20 years. In the same year, she was the featured guest on Dean Martin’s Roast, and comedian Corbett Monica joked: “Look at Zsa Zsa, sitting there: famous, beautiful wealthy—how you must be laughing at those people who said you’d be through when talking pictures came in.”

If Zsa Zsa’s purchase of the house was indeed a look back in time for her, in 1976, she made a brief cameo appearance in Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood. A strange, dated riff on Rin Tin Tin, which ran from around 1922-1933, the movie follows the acting career of an incredibly intelligent German shepherd brought to 1920s Hollywood by an aspiring actress (Madeline Kahn), a bus driver and aspiring director (Bruce Dern, in a break into mainstream film), and a studio chief (Art Carney). Once the early plot setup brings the gang to le printemps 2023 • l’édition pour animaux de compagnie

Zsa Zsa Gabor with one of her beloved Shih Tzu dogs. (At one time, she had nine dogs total and often threw them parties. The main course: hot dogs.)

Zsa Zsa’s closet in the main bedroom spanned 30 feet long, 12 feet deep, and 14 feet high, with room for over 5000 individual garments.

Hollywood, the film is essentially a string of cameo appearances by faded Hollywood stars that the film’s target audience would have recognized: Dorothy Lamour, Henry Youngman, Aldo Ray, and Joan Blondell, to name only a few. The film was poorly received for plenty of reasons, but what makes it worth a mention is its timing. Zsa Zsa Gabor’s early career is studded with brushes with prestige filmmaking. By the time she has bought her iconic Hollywood home, through which so many of its now dim fixtures had walked, Zsa Zsa appears in Won Ton Ton, a nostalgia comedy project for the last 20 years of her life.

The 70s and 80s marked Zsa Zsa’s talk show era. Merv Griffin in particular seemed to enjoy teasing out her shallow nature. Zsa Zsa was always game for a joke, and these TV appearances became the sites of plenty of iconic one-liners. Ask her how many husbands she’s had, and she’d say “Apart from my own?” Or, “I never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back.” On Letterman’s Late Night, she appeared on the stoops of stunned housewives asking to snoop in their closets. It becomes clearer and clearer across her career that the role Zsa Zsa was destined to play was herself. Her deadpan charm, her countless affairs (a blind date with Kissinger set up by Nixon, a fling with Sean Connery, Sinatra, Richard Burton . . . ), her over-thetop, high-maintenance lifestyle: it’s just the thing you want to watch on TV, to read all about—the Zsa Zsa Factor.

At this point, she was married to husband number seven, Michael O’Hara, who had been her lawyer in the divorce proceedings with Jack Ryan. They got married at the Las Vegas Hilton three days after her divorce was finalized. She and O’Hara were married until 1983. That year, in her fastest relationship on record—and perhaps the shortest celebrity marriage in history—she wed Mexican attorney-turned-character actor Felipe de Alba on a boat on April 13 and had the marriage annulled the very next day.

Zsa Zsa’s last marriage was her longest, lasting until her death, to Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt. Born Hans Robert Lichtenberg, the German-American businessman took a new name in 1980, after he paid Princess Marie-Auguste of Anhalt (wife of a son of Kaiser Wilhelm II) to adopt him as an adult at 36. (He and Zsa Zsa would later adopt up to ten young men as adults to secure elder care for themselves as they grew old.) It was Zsa Zsa’s eighth marriage and von Anhalt’s sixth, and he was 27 years her junior. Von Anhalt liked to say they married for friendship, not love. Their meetcute is a picture frame for the type of relationship this marriage became: the two met at an A-list party von Anhalt was crashing. He paid two college students to pose as his bodyguard and driver and arrived at the home of writer Sidney Sheldon and actress Jorja Curtright, who let him inside on first glance at his vaguely “royal” outfit. Ask von Anhalt, though, and he will insist he met Zsa Zsa at a restaurant. He also insists that his wife knew he had bought his titles by paying for his own adult adoption, that she found it “entertaining.” From someone like Zsa Zsa, it may be true.

The entrance of von Anhalt in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s life marks a shift in her celebrity, perhaps because earlier she struck as vain, and flimsy, but credible, and this latest husband was anything but. Von Anhalt was not old money in the same sense: his persona was as much a character as Zsa Zsa’s, but by contrast, he had not come by it honestly. Whether the drama that followed Zsa Zsa from the 1980s on seemed darker because she had gotten older, or because the world had both changed so much and yet stayed quite the same, Zsa Zsa’s marriage marked a turn for coverage of her iconic celebrity. In 1989, Zsa Zsa served three days in prison and a fine of $12,937, rather than go through with a community service sentence, after she was convicted of slapping a police officer who pulled her over for a traffic violation in Beverly Hills. In 1993, her long-running feud with German actress Elke Sommers came to an end in lawsuits and fines totaling over $3 million. In 2005, a bitter filing fight between von Anhalt and her daughter, Constance Francesca Hilton, ended when Zsa Zsa refused to appear in court to affirm that she co-signed her husband’s suit accusing Hilton of larceny and fraud. Hilton died in 2015 at 67, and von Anhalt never told Zsa Zsa of her daughter’s death. In 2006, von Anhalt claimed to have fathered a child with Anna Nicole Smith, almost assuredly for the media attention the claim would bring.

After a series of health problems beginning in 2010, Zsa Zsa Gabor passed away in December 2016, two months shy of 100 years old. Von Anhalt was the sole inheritor of Gabor’s estate and auctioned off 400+ items from the Bel Air home, including a silver horse trophy that belonged to Reginald Vanderbilt, a “mountain” of monogrammed luggage and handbags from Hermes, Chanel, Dior, and her favorite, Louis Vuitton, 18th and 19thcentury furniture (including a gilded piano that belonged to George Sanders), and a sketch pad Gabor used to doodle during her 1989 trial for slapping the Beverly Hills police officer. Looking at Zsa Zsa Gabor’s later years, it is hard not to think of her slide from celebrity as inevitable. It is striking that even Zsa Zsa, who constantly lied about her age and in many ways defied her age as long as she could—even Zsa Zsa grew old. The culture of celebrity, our obsession with its character and spectacle, consumes its actors eventually. On Zsa Zsa’s Facebook fan page, run by members of her family, Zsa Zsa appears in post after post laughing with Sammy Davis Jr, lounging in a full page spread for LIFE Magazine, plugging her autobiography to Larry King. There’s a sense scrolling through the photos there that Zsa Zsa is still doing these things, that even after she experienced the part of life everyone must—the end—she did not stop existing to friends and fans as anything but herself, a cameo and the real thing, just Zsa Zsa. ■

AZZI & OSTA weaves rich narratives throughout their ensemble

“La Matière du Vent (Weaving the Wind),” as they strive to give substance to the fleetingness of a perfume. Dedicating the collection to the mystery of the wind and ancestral paths, where caravans laden with essences from all around the world carry the precious elements that make up a single scented drop. Weaving the Wind is the embodiment of a fragrance in clothen form, lying effortlessly against the skin until the breeze gently lifts it away. ■