by Sam Staggs
Jolie’s endless fights with Vilmos, though vicious, served as aphrodisiac: “He and I were always arguing. For no reason we would have a fight. For instance: ‘If I gave you heaven you would not be happy!’ Vilmos shouted at me.
“ ‘That is true,’ I shouted back. ‘I will be happy only when I find another man.’ ”
Jolie admits, however, that while life with Vilmos lacked storybook romance, perfumed rooms dimmed by deliquescent candles, and the throb of Gypsy violins, sex was raw and frequent. “He would have sex with me in the morning, in the evening, in the afternoon. We would make love before dinner. Even when we were longtime married he was very passionate and it was good. Even when I didn’t like him in the daytime, I always loved him in the night.” She loved him especially on the night when he took her in the hallway of their apartment, in front of a large beveled mirror.
They were far happier after their divorce in 1940, for then Jolie could flirt with him as though she were indeed that princess in the marshmallow pages of Elinor Glyn. “After the divorce we not only had lunch together but Vilmos would take me to the theatre and he would take me to dinner and then he would escort me home and sometimes we would sleep together, and then finally I was happy with him for the first time.”
Chapter 2
The Mother of Them All
In her autobiography, published in 1975, Jolie narrates a relentless chronicle of faults, primarily those of Vilmos but also the miserable failings of her sisters, her in-laws, neighbors, friends far and near, and her daughters. She alone bears no stain, and from the very first paragraph her boasting soars like a beanstalk that can’t be chopped down: “For my age I am a miracle. I am attractive. I am talented. I play the piano. I am the life of a party. I have always friends. I have a younger husband who adores me.”
Typical of those who find truth unattractive, Jolie often gives herself away. One example is her repeated assertion that, after an ugly-duckling childhood, she blossomed into a great beauty—a claim belied by photographs in the press and in family albums. In reality, her features resembled an unfortunate blend of Marjorie Main and Caitlyn Jenner. Eventually, after myriad surgeries, her face morphed into the pastel abstraction of a Sherwin-Williams wall.
Jolie’s daughters, on the other hand, showed early signs of allure, especially little Zsa Zsa. In a group photograph from around 1922, she has the Cupid’s bow mouth that would always be hers, a smoldering look in her knowing eyes that’s unsettling on a five-year-old, and a full head of auburn hair. Blonde Eva, still babyish at three, has huge dark eyes and a perfect oval face. Magda, then and later, bore the least resemblance to her parents or to her sisters. Her face was round and chubby. (Magda’s childhood nicknames lingered in the family: “Vörös,” redhead, and “Duci,” big-boned.) As an adult, however, Magda was the sister who might most convincingly have claimed Mongolian ancestry, for her eyes were smaller and more tapered, her cheekbones higher than Zsa Zsa’s or Eva’s. Even as children, they showed the feline promise, and threat, of tiger kittens poised to pounce.
All three girls inherited the best features of Jolie and Vilmos, and few of the flaws, though Zsa Zsa always felt self-conscious about her large, pearly ears, and tried to keep them covered with hair, wigs, or hats. Even without the cosmetic enhancements that began in the 1940s and continued for the next fifty years, the Gabor sisters might have stood out as very attractive women.
Had Jolie been a present-day soccer mom, she could not have hovered closer to her girls nor signed them up for more instruction. “I gave them ballet lessons, tennis lessons, riding lessons,” she recalled. Then, one glacial day in the Budapest winter, she decided they needed to learn ice skating, so off they went to Városliget, the largest city park in Budapest and as fashionable as the Bois de Boulogne. To these accomplishments were added fencing lessons and tutors in all subjects, for the Gabor girls took but a distant interest in book learning. This relegation of academics they surely absorbed by osmosis from Jolie, who valued the female mission of man trapping above all else. Poise, makeup, hair, jewelry, clothes, furs—Jolie preached the skilled and profitable exploitation of these. She believed, like Joan Rivers, that “no man is ever going to put his hand up your dress looking for a library card.”
Some of these childhood lessons paid off. Zsa Zsa became an accomplished horsewoman, and so did Eva to a lesser extent. Both played tennis, and ballet knowledge transferred to the ballroom. Then and later, at parties, in nightclubs, and eventually onscreen, they commanded the dance floor with grace and aplomb, whether in a gliding waltz or an energetic caper—watch Eva, for instance, along with Maurice Chevalier, Joanne Woodward, Thelma Ritter, and several dozen extras in a slightly arthritic cancan in A New Kind of Love (1963). In the same picture, she does the twist with George Tobias.
The Gabor fingers, however, proved less agile than their legs, for ten years of piano lessons left the sisters unable to play anything more demanding than “Chopsticks.” Jolie recalled fighting off sleep as she sat listening to “my musically untalented daughters as they practiced their terrible piano.” Zsa Zsa inadvertently proved her right when, in 1964, on The Jack Paar Show, she sat at the piano with Liberace. For their duet, he assigned her a three-note cadenza to play when he gave the signal. “Black keys don’t match my dress,” she giggled. He launched his florid arrangement of “Night and Day,” but Zsa Zsa’s three notes soon proved beyond her meager abilities.
“That’s the first time I ever saw Zsa Zsa flat,” Paar bantered. To Zsa Zsa he said, “Liberace was practicing piano when you were practicing marriage.”
* * *
Throughout their childhoods, Magda, Zsa Zsa, and Eva contended with their parents’ endless fighting, the daily threats of divorce, the maledictions flung by Jolie at her husband’s family and by Vilmos at Jolie’s. “I will kill your Jewish mother,” he stormed during one of their knock-down drag-outs, referring to Franceska Tillemann. And he often damned Madame Tillemann as “that kurva,” the Hungarian (and Yiddish) word for “whore” or “bitch.”
“My mother-in-law was an awful woman,” countered Jolie. “She was dreadful and common.”
If Jolie so much as glanced at another man in the street, Vilmos exploded in a jealous rage. Again his threats, and again her vow to divorce him. The girls, at least, had one another, and being made of tough fiber they became inured to domestic strife. Early on, they joked about the divorce that never happened, at first among themselves and then openly to Jolie and Vilmos. “Divorce today?” caroled Magda, returning from school.
“Why don’t you get a divorce so that I can stop piano lessons?” taunted Zsa Zsa.
Vilmos, with conventional ideas about the proper behavior of young ladies, blamed Jolie for their daughters’ cheekiness. He surely had a point, for Jolie lived out her actressy fantasies through her girls. “I wanted for them the glamorous life I had so desperately wanted for myself,” she said years later. “Your mother is crazy,” he said to the girls, in Jolie’s presence as in her absence. “She has everything and she still wants more.”
Jolie’s niece, Mrs. Lantos, who witnessed these goings-on as a young person, had this to say: “Very few men could have dealt with Jolie. She provoked Vilmos, but he was not a likeable man.”
Jolie stirred the pot and kept life constantly off-balance for the family. “I always lied to Vilmos. Even when I had not things to lie to him about I would lie.” Vilmos, when not goaded to fury by his wife, sometimes displayed a courtly side. He would greet ladies at a party with “Kezét csókolom,” meaning literally “I kiss your hand,” which in old Budapest was considered gracious and a sign of good breeding. He and Jolie had nothing in common but sex, plus love for their daughters, however screwy that love may have appeared from a distance.
Jolie, then and later, couldn’t resist a sharing violation. She incurred Zsa Zsa’s wrath with an anecdote in her autobiography about their adventures on the skating rink at Városliget. Flirting with a handsome, uniformed young skater, Jolie
became so enchanted with his finesse that she neglected her three small girls, who “screamed as around I went with my captain.” Eventually, upon looking more closely, she discovered that her captain wore the uniform of a letter carrier. Deflated in her status search, she suddenly remembered her daughters and slid over to them, where tears were freezing on their puckered faces.
Arriving back home, Jolie said, “I herded my children into their big bathroom. My three treasures were blue with frost. Cuki [their governess] filled the bathroom with steam from the shower and showed me that Zsa Zsa had icicles hanging off her little pinuska. She had made pipi in her panties and it was so cold that ice formed.” Always one to provide too much information, Jolie failed, in this anecdote and others, to realize that the childhood potty habits of glamour queens can only be read as macabre.
Under duress, however, her Belle Watling bawdiness yielded to the straightlaced notions of her husband. “We never discussed sex with the children,” she said. “With prudish Vilmos I was afraid even to mention the word in the house. He had them so frightened that they believed they could get pregnant from a kiss.” When pubescent Zsa Zsa plucked her eyebrows and appeared at dinner with her nails painted a garish heart-disease purple, her father shouted, “I won’t have my daughters growing up to be bad women!” He accused Jolie of not raising them as normal human beings, a point not easily contradicted.
* * *
Along with abundant vulgarity, Jolie also had a charming side. In small doses, she was as amusing as a page from Dan Greenburg’s How to Be a Jewish Mother. Virginia Graham said of her, “She is the original; her girls were made in Japan.” Jolie never ran short of slightly ribald remarks, and she would sometimes lament, “Oh, I’m an old hag”—which everyone, of course, was expected to contradict. Once at a Chinese-themed costume party in Hollywood, she came as Confucius and passed out fortune cookies that advised, among other wise sayings, “Never mistake asthma for passion.” On a more personal note, when I was eight years old I wrote her a letter, to which she responded with a glossy color photo of herself and her daughters, with a handwritten reply that read, “Thank you for your nice letter. Sincerely, Jolie Gabor.”
And despite her pushiness and rampant egotism, she possessed a sometimes benevolent nature. During the Spanish flu pandemic beginning in 1918, Jolie took in the orphaned daughter of a couple who both had died within days of each other. Unfortunately, Jolie caught flu from the child and spent several weeks in the hospital. In later years, she attracted many friends with her earthy humor, her refusal to be depressed, and her talent for turning ordinary moments into amusing theatrical tableaux.
Some of Jolie’s most serious moments came about in 1956, at the time of the Hungarian Revolution. On The Tonight Show Starring Steve Allen, November 22, 1956, she spoke in grave tones in her plea for funds to aid refugees who had fled Hungary during the recent uprising against Russian occupation. Then, in December, Jolie recorded another appeal for refugee aid. This one, a seventy-eight-second recording, was played on radio stations around the United States.
* * *
Long before the term “dysfunctional family” gained currency, the Gabors lived the prototype. Or did they? One might well ask how different they were from all others of their social class, if other families’ secret chambers had been exposed to media scrutiny. No Gabor was beaten or abandoned, none shot, and despite their many stresses everyone spent money, laughed, ate their fill, and kicked up their heels.
During the Gabor sisters’ childhood and coming-of-age years, the family lived in a number of locations, all on the Pest side of the Danube and most in neighborhoods identified as traditionally Jewish. Tracing their movements, however, would baffle the most Holmesian biographer. That’s because every Gabor, even when giving a specific address, managed to obscure when, why, and how long they lived there. Then, too, much of Budapest was destroyed in World War II, with even more of the city reduced to rubble in the 1956 revolution. Add to that almost fifty years of communist rule, with gimcrack apartment blocks thrown up without thought to aesthetics, followed by Hungary’s eventual membership in the European Union and greatly improved architecture replacing many buildings where the Gabors had lived, and the problem of determining their probable economic and social status in the 1920s and ’30s is almost insoluble.
As mentioned earlier, Jolie and Vilmos were married at Rákóczi út 54, a building still in place on one of Budapest’s principal streets. (Rákóczi has been called the Forty-second Street of Budapest.) Number 54 is a typical Belle Epoque building with a decorative façade, though the street, and the building, now look a bit seedy. Many parts of the city gleam, but that glow has not yet reached number 54.
Everyone in the family agreed that Zsa Zsa was born at Múzeum körút 31, a handsome building destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944 and later replaced by a drab postwar structure. At the time of Zsa Zsa’s birth, this neighborhood matched parts of upper Fifth Avenue. The address is directly across the street from the Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum (Hungarian National Museum), a vast neoclassical building completed in 1846.
Jolie portrayed that dwelling in terms that might seduce a high-end buyer. “The apartment was in one line. It was ten rooms but we had a mirror at the end of the hall and it looked like twenty rooms. It was enormous, with pillars and high ceilings, gigantic burgundy silk brocade upholstered chairs, heavy rosewood furniture, two immense salons, and two pianos.”
When I read this description to Jolie’s niece, Mrs. Lantos, she laughed and called it inflated. “Jolie counted the closets, bathrooms, and hallways,” she said. “It was probably closer to four or five actual rooms.” Jolie herself inadvertently revealed that the girls shared a single room. Surely that spacious flat of her imagination would have allowed separate bedrooms for her disputatious daughters.
No matter the location of their home, or the floor plan, one thing is certain. Mama planned her daughters’ future. “I was determined not to send my children to college.” This statement, chilling today, sounds less cruel when we recall that in many parts of the world, in the 1930s and later, college-educated women—and men—were the exception. Nevertheless, it seems that Magda, Zsa Zsa, and Eva were not consulted in the matter. “To use a checkbook they did not need geometry or algebra,” reasoned Jolie. “It was my plan to send them to finishing school to learn to play music and be elegant, accomplished ladies with good manners and obviously good upbringing. I wanted them to be actresses and they are. They’re not so talented like me but they are actresses.”
She sounds like Mama Rose. If Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim had had her book in hand as they wrote Gypsy, the show might have morphed to Jolie: for she, too, had a dream. A dream about Zsa Zsa, Eva, and Magda, who were gonna be stars, though never as good as Mama. For them, everything was coming up diamonds. Then at last, telling her story in 1975, there she was at last, world, and it was Jolie’s Turn!
Chapter 3
The Best Little Finishing School in Switzerland
In later years, when asked about her school days, Zsa Zsa’s refrain was, “I was raised in a convent.” As in so many instances, her childhood memories allowed for sweeping poetic license. In reality, she attended Notre Dame de Sion, a day school in Budapest operated under the auspices of nuns. Classes were taught in French, and there Zsa Zsa, along with her sisters, studied not only French language and French literature (of the morally uplifting sort), but also English, history, and mathematics. The school was located on Mária útca, a short distance from the Gabor apartment. It is interesting to note, in the case of the Gabors, that the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion (“Sion” being French for “Zion”) was founded in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century by two priests, the Ratisbonne brothers, who were Jewish converts to Roman Catholicism. The various schools run by Notre Dame de Sion served as outreach to Jewish children, those whose families had converted as well as those who were culturally assimilated but still technically of the Jewish religion. Until recent times, conversion was
at least one aim, however submerged, of the schools.
Here we find ourselves again on Gabor quicksand, for one of their contemporaries, a New York woman who knew them in Budapest, had this to say: “They were Jewish. I was in Hebrew school with them.” Her statement does not necessarily negate Zsa Zsa’s claim to a Catholic education, for the term “Hebrew school” can mean both a full-time curriculum and also the equivalent of a Sunday school that meets for an hour or so each week to teach children Jewish history and the rudiments of biblical Hebrew.
Jolie and her daughters filled their sequined autobiographies with governesses enough to rival P.L. Travers. Their own Mary Poppins, however, was Cuki, whom they sometimes called their nanny; we met her a few pages back as she attended to little Zsa Zsa’s ice emergency after Jolie’s negligence at the skating rink. Eva described Cuki as “our German governess” who was “warmhearted, lovable, and fat.” Since the Gabor fortunes rose and fell during the ’teens, twenties, and thirties, in actuality those governesses were most likely short-term help. According to family legend, they remained but briefly in the household owing to the decibel level of parental quarrels and the ungovernability of the girls. While lack of job satisfaction no doubt played a role in the governess merry-go-round, Hungary’s economic crises, and the Gabors’ own, contributed to the volatility. But Cuki endured.
When each Gabor daughter reached the age of thirteen or fourteen, it was time to look beyond home instruction, tutors, and Notre Dame de Sion. Jolie, as usual, had a grandiose plan for the advancement of her “treasures,” for they were truly valuable investments.
* * *
