by Sam Staggs
Nevertheless, if tribute had been paid to nubile feminine poise on that January day in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel Royale in Budapest, young Zsa Zsa would have won. The actual winner, Júlia Gál, and the other lady in waiting, Lilly Radó, both seventeen, could pass for middle-aged matrons. Both look rather used-up, with mousy hair, undistinguished facial features, and slightly stooped posture. Sandor Incze again: “When we elected Júlia Gál, she didn’t even smile. In fact, all through the contest she kept a serious expression on her face. We started to take pictures, and I told her to smile. ‘I can’t,’ she said, ‘because my teeth are bad.’ ” Incze rushed her to the dentist, then to a later photo shoot.
Zsa Zsa, by contrast, is sweet-faced. If her expression is not exactly innocent, she has nonetheless the patina of virtue. Even then, at fifteen, she possessed the extraordinary Zsa Zsa face in embryo, although her eyebrows, plucked thin, suggested an unfortunate resemblance to Eva Braun, and so did her limp, sallow hair. But those high cheekbones were in place. In Budapest, viewing footage of the event, I wondered who taught Zsa Zsa to walk like that, for even then her gait was the chest-out, movie star stride that continued throughout her life, whether sweeping onstage at the Pantages Theatre to present an Oscar to Edith Head in 1952, making her entrance on Broadway in 1970 in Forty Carats, or, at age seventy, greeting Dame Edna Everage on TV in London in 1987 with that same alluring, though slightly macho, prance.
* * *
As Jolie told it, Vilmos sent her and Zsa Zsa to Vienna for a week to console their loss. The loss was indeed a joint one, for Jolie suffered more than her child. Zsa Zsa, after all, had a future, whereas her mother bewailed the prospect of bleak years in an empty nest with an even bleaker husband.
That Viennese journey, however, did not take place for over a year. Zsa Zsa’s beauty-pageant defeat occurred in January 1933, and not until summer of the next year did she and Jolie end up in Vienna. It is likely that Zsa Zsa spent that gap year once more behind the counter, for Hungary, like the rest of the world, had plunged into the Great Depression. It was just then that Eva, had money been plentiful, would have gone off to finishing school in Switzerland. But instead she stayed in Budapest and perhaps wielded her first broom and mop.
Zsa Zsa and Jolie arrived in Vienna one warm August day in 1934. A few days later they traveled with friends to Grinzing, a suburb near the Vienna Woods. There they attended an outdoor concert, where, Zsa Zsa recalled, “We had all been given tall, thin tumblers of heady wine.” Into this romantic setting there suddenly came a handwritten note which, in keeping with romantic stories, proved fateful for the young heroine. It was, of course, from a man, and though Zsa Zsa’s narrative of the follow-up to that afternoon seems unlikely, the facts stand up to scrutiny. We’ve caught Zsa Zsa in the truth.
A waiter brought the folded note to Jolie, telling her that a gentleman at a distant table wished her to have it. That gentleman was none other than Richard Tauber, the world-famous Austrian tenor whose name, and voice, were as familiar in the music world of the day as Plácido Domingo’s today. Tauber was forty-four years old, heavy-set, and he bore a resemblance to both Vilmos Gabor and to Josip Broz Tito, the ruler of postwar Yugoslavia. For added distinction, he wore a monocle perched over his right eye. Tauber’s vast repertoire included roles in operas and operettas, and his countless worldwide appearances in both, along with recordings, had made him a matinee idol to match any in Hollywood. Adulation by his fans turned him into the rock star of his day. (Tauber’s voice can still be heard on CD compilations and on youtube.com.)
The legend of Lana Turner discovered sipping a Coke at Schwab’s Pharmacy had not yet been invented. Zsa Zsa’s own discovery by Tauber predated that fanciful press agentry by three years. The note to Jolie was written in German. Zsa Zsa’s translation ran like this: “Forgive me, Madame, but I am seeking a girl to play an American debutante in my new operetta. If it is your daughter with you, may I have a word?”
Zsa Zsa’s animation, fueled by nerves and nerve, had caught his eye, and no wonder. The flightness and the unfiltered chatter that so annoyed her roommate, Elisabeth Rucklander, at Madame Subilia’s, gave Tauber the idea of auditioning her for Der Singende Traum (The Singing Dream), the operetta he had recently composed. The premiere was set for August 31 at the Theater an der Wien, a prestigious historic venue.
Tauber’s widow, the British actress Diana Napier, recounted the plot: “The story was not new: it was about a man, terribly in love, who hypnotized an actress. Only under his spell does she sing successfully but he cannot hypnotize her into falling in love with him.” Typical of Viennese operettas, Tauber’s floated on clouds of honeyed melody with faint suggestions of naughtiness and a plot guaranteed free of realism. The role of the actress was sung by Mary Losseff, Tauber’s lover before his marriage to Napier. He wrote Der Singende Traum for Losseff, his stated purpose being “to make her the biggest singing star in the world.”
Tauber cast Zsa Zsa as Violetta, a teenage soubrette. A problem loomed, however, one that seemed insurmountable: the part required singing and dancing. We have seen Zsa Zsa as a passable dancer but a lamentable chanteuse. An unfortunate singing voice, however, seldom stops the casting of a performer in a musical role, whether on Broadway or in Vienna, especially if the producers find the performer endowed with other qualities, such as stage presence or a star name. In Zsa Zsa’s case, not only was the voice unlovely; she was also tone deaf, with a tin ear and vocal cords to match. But Tauber found something he liked. Perhaps her walk, so noticeable a year earlier in the Miss Magyarország competition, won him over. Or was there a quid pro quo?
Jolie knew how things got done, in the theatre and elsewhere. What her zealous imagination didn’t supply, she learned from acquaintances among the demimondaines of Budapest who visited her shop. She realized that girls must sometimes make sacrifices, and so must older ladies.
Tauber’s love for Mary Losseff did not obviate his attraction to other pleasing females who came into view. He pounced like a bobcat on Diana Napier, whom he married in 1936. They enjoyed an open relationship until his death in 1948. And groupies flocked to his dressing room, to the stage door, to his hotel suite. As for Zsa Zsa, apparently no intimacy took place beyond what she reported: “Now and then as I passed him backstage, he would pat me approvingly on the rear. ‘Solid, solid,’ he would say teasingly, and burst into laughter.” Otherwise, Tauber was involved with Mary Losseff around the clock, onstage and off. And Zsa Zsa had a different admirer, whom we will soon meet.
Had Tauber known the Gabor backstory, he might well have composed an opéra comique filled with their antics. What a team he and Jolie would have made, a pair of Falstaffs. Tauber, with schmaltz and schlag aplenty in his music, kept it up offstage, as well. He could have qualified as an honorary Gabor.
* * *
The morning after the presentation to Jolie of Tauber’s folded note, she and Zsa Zsa kept their appointment at the Theater an der Wien. Seated in the darkened auditorium, Jolie clenched her moist fists in anxiety as insouciant Zsa Zsa began her number, first singing in German, then trying out the dance steps. “I got through it,” she recalled. “A dance instructor had coached me for ten minutes; in his arms I stumbled and giggled and somehow managed one of the routines. Perhaps I should have been more awe-struck by it all, but I took it almost as a lark.”
Here we see the first indication of Zsa Zsa’s refusal to accept the discipline and the drudgery required for an enduring show business career. In 1950s Hollywood, except for Moulin Rouge and a couple of other films, she put forth minimum effort for each performance, seldom more. Soon she acquired the reputation of only playing herself.
Onstage in Vienna, also, there appears evidence of how Zsa Zsa’s flippant approach differed from Eva’s, for Eva toiled to improve her abilities. She sought to burnish her talent so that every performance lifted her above all previous ones. When, in later years, a script called for her to dance onscreen, she rehearsed until her short
legs throbbed. For Eva, work was never a lark, though sometimes—as in Green Acres—she made it seem so.
Unready for a debut on any stage, let alone in sophisticated Vienna, Zsa Zsa found herself in theatrical boot camp. For three intensive weeks, voice coaches, along with acting teachers and dance instructors, worked to transform this Hungarian sow’s ear into lovely Viennese silk. Everyone chorused, “You can’t sing, you can’t dance, you can’t act!” (Eighteen years later, John Huston yelled the same at her on the set of Moulin Rouge.) Her vocal coach, who carried a violin bow in his hand to beat out rhythm, rapped poor Zsa Zsa over the head with it while telling her how awful she sounded. Finally he told her to lie supine, and he put three heavy books on her stomach. “Now sing from down there,” he ordered. The result did not please him. At length the producer lost his patience. “Since you can’t do anything else,” he thundered, “at least keep that pretty face of yours to the audience!” This suggests that Zsa Zsa had been demoted to stage decoration while others did the musical heavy lifting.
In view of such staggering lack of talent, I recently asked an experienced vocal teacher whether she could take a student with zero ability and in three weeks squeeze out an acceptable sound. “No,” she answered. “I did that with a boy of seven, but it took two years.” She also remembered an unlikely man of seventy-five who made somewhat faster progress, but not in three weeks. Finally I said, “Suppose you absolutely had to teach someone to sing in that amount of time. Opening night is up to you. What can you do?”
She said, “If the music was of a very limited range, a few notes around middle C, then it might work. I’m not sure. That student could perhaps sing ‘Hot Cross Buns,’ or something like it, especially if the orchestra covered her worst blunders.”
On August 29, two days before the premiere, Zsa Zsa was fired. Once more Jolie the Tiger, burning bright, leapt onto the producer. No doubt sore from Gabor teeth marks, he relented. On August 31, 1934, Der Singende Traum opened, with Richard Tauber and Mary Losseff in the leads, and Sári Gábor billed fifth.
But which Gabor was that? It was, of course, our Zsa Zsa, whose birth name was Sári, a form of the Hungarian Sára. She was named for one of Jolie’s maternal aunts, and also for Sári Fedák (1879–1955), Hungary’s most famous actress in the early years of the twentieth century. Fedák’s nickname, in her family and among fans, was Zsa Zsa, and so little girls with the same name also became Zsa Zsa. Fedák, however, eventually proved an unfortunate namesake. The second wife (1922–1925) of playwright Ferenc Molnár, she became famous in Hungary and elsewhere in Central Europe as a splendid actress and singer. Her politics shifted from left to right until at last she became a Nazi sympathizer. In the 1940s, Fedák made propaganda broadcasts from Vienna in which she urged Hungary to continue as an ally of Hitler’s Germany. After the war, she was sentenced in Budapest to an eight-month prison term.
* * *
Zsa Zsa offered several coy versions of how she lost her virginity, none involving Tauber. Perhaps the loss was serial, for she once implied that a warm bath restored a woman to her original state.
Zsa Zsa was kept on for the three-month run of Der Singende Traum in Vienna. To everyone’s surprise, she received positive reviews. “Extremely amusing was the charming Sári Gábor,” wrote one critic. “Miss Sári Gábor, who plays Violetta, bears great promise for the future,” echoed another. During the run, Zsa Zsa spotted a man in the first row of the orchestra whose eyes seemed to follow her like a key light. “He was a wild, passionate-looking man in his late forties, with a square, Mongolian face and a great mane of iron-gray hair.” In other words, just her type. And since Herr Tauber’s flirtation stopped at butt-slapping, she returned the gaze of the man in front row center. (Then and later, she didn’t hesitate to break character.)
The man was Willy Schmidt-Gentner, a well-known composer of film music. Born in Germany in 1894, he had just turned forty when he and Zsa Zsa met; perhaps to her teenage eyes he looked much older. (Years subtracted from her own age she often added onto others, usually women.) Soon they were seen around town. He plied her with vodka and compliments, eventually revealing that he had a wife in Switzerland. Some girls, learning such news, would have suffered. Not Zsa Zsa, because, as she said later, “In the world in which I grew up, one did not marry for love: a man took as his wife a suitable young woman of good family who became the mother of his children, who was skilled in running his home and entertaining his friends. For love he turned to someone else. Love in marriage was a luxury which only the very poor could afford.”
Her recollections, years later, gave this May–December romance the lineaments of—well, a Viennese operetta. Willy didn’t hypnotize her, or not literally, but he did use every line in the book except the one about his etchings. “With proper guidance and hard work,” he said, gazing into her avid eyes, “you can make a real career.” Although he probably didn’t believe a word of it at the time, by the end of his life, in 1964, his prophecy had come true beyond his imagination, or hers.
In the final weeks of 1934, Willy was called away from Vienna to compose the score for a new film. He begged Zsa Zsa to come along, and she actually accompanied him as far as Klagenfurt, the last Austrian city before the international border. Frightened at the gravity of eloping to a foreign country with a married man, she left the train at midnight. The next train in the opposite direction, back to Vienna and from there to Budapest, was not due until 5:00 a.m. Sitting in the drafty waiting room on a hard, wooden bench, she pondered her situation: “What was I doing here, away from my home, my parents, my family?” In those snowy predawn hours, the sophisticated young woman deliquesced. Tears rolled down her cheeks and into her cup of black coffee. Like a heavy bell, the question tolled, What now? What now?
Chapter 5
Starter Marriages
Whether by design or coincidence, the Gabor girls almost married in order of age, eldest first, as in a Jane Austen novel. Zsa Zsa, however, like Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, jumped the gun at eighteen and married Burhan Belge, a minor official in the Turkish embassy at Budapest. He was thirty-six at the time of the marriage, which took place on May 17, 1935.
Two years later Magda married, and Eva in 1939. Jolie, like Austen’s fluttery Mrs. Bennet, reacted with fulsome pleasure as each daughter made what she, in her rhapsodic mind, fashioned into an exalted match. Each daughter’s subsequent departure for a foreign land served to further engorge Jolie’s sumptuous fantasies: Zsa Zsa in Turkey and supposedly addressed as “Your Excellency” owing to her husband’s diplomatic status; Magda a countess in Poland; and Eva in Hollywood, married to a doctor—what could be more enchanting for Jolie’s demented propriety? The only shadow over this Hungarian version of correct Janeite lives is the mouse-like rumor that darted here and there in the fifties, viz., that Zsa Zsa eloped at fourteen with a Gypsy boy. Perhaps the rumor arose when someone spied her innocently climbing out a Swiss window at midnight.
A more potent rumor, this one equally fanciful and unverifiable, is the one that bestows on Magda the title Countess of Warsaw. Her first husband, Jan Bychowski (also given as de Bichovsky, Bychowsky, et al.), was reputed to be a count. But reputed only by the Gabors. He is nowhere in the Almanach de Gotha. The closest you’ll come to a title for him is a coat of arms for the Bychowsky family, which means only that someone paid to have one designed. (You’ll find a plethora of coats of arms for the families Smith, Jones, and any other with money to buy one.)
It is true that Magda married Jan Bychowski in 1937. Before the marriage took place, however, she appeared that year in two films. Tokaji Rapszódia (Tokay Rhapsody), with a fleeting appearance by Magda, involves a romance in the vineyards. Its title suggests an advertorial for Hungary’s most famous wine. Magda’s second film that year, Mai Lányok (Today’s Girls) derives from the fluffy musical comedies of Hollywood and those of Germany. By the time of her films’ limited release, Magda had left Budapest for Poland, where she lived for a time with her
husband in Warsaw.
An enduring Gabor mystery is why no one in the family ever mentioned in interviews, nor in their ghostwritten memoirs, Magda’s brief film career. I can only speculate that her later distaste for show business, along with the realization that two insignificant films might detract from her American persona, caused Magda to issue a ukase at a closed session of the Gabor politburo: “Kuss!” And when Magda said, “Keep it quiet,” even Jolie complied.
Just before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Magda returned to Hungary. Bychowski escaped to England. It seems that their marriage had been troubled for some time. After the fall of France in 1940, Polish units were formed as a part of the Royal Air Force in Britain; these were blended into the RAF and known as the Polish Air Force. Jan Bychowski was killed in action during a bombing raid on May 22, 1944. He was forty-two years old. Beyond these stark facts, nothing more is known.
* * *
Zsa Zsa’s versions of her first marriage, how she engineered it, along with the fantastic adventures and disgruntle-ments that ensued, might be compared to a cluster of tales in the Arabian Nights. Whatever her enhancements, however, many events happened more or less as reported. The titles she bestowed in later years on Burhan Belge summon up a one-man governmental bureau: “Press Director in the Foreign Ministry of the Government of Turkey,” “former Turkish ambassador to Hungary,” “Senator,” “Minister of Propaganda,” and so on. Here, however, I quote from an email from his son, Murat Belge, a professor of comparative literature at Bilgi University in Istanbul: “He was in Hungary as a minor official in the Embassy. Maybe something like ‘political officer.’ ”
