by Sam Staggs
Burhan Belge was later elected to Parliament in 1957, though this took place long after his divorce from Zsa Zsa in 1941. Belge himself told a reporter for the New York Post in 1958, “I am a serious man. I do not care to discuss such a frivolus topic [as Zsa Zsa’s fantasies]. But I will say this. I have never been a senator. I have never been an ambassador. And I have never been a minister of press and propaganda.” And then, added the reporter, “He laughs again.”
Murat Belge is more blunt than his late father, who died in 1967: “Zsa Zsa was a great and unscrupulous liar.”
* * *
At the end of the previous chapter, Zsa Zsa, age seventeen and out of work after Der Singende Traum, was en route back to Budapest in December 1934. After the holiday festivities, she boarded another train, this one again headed to Vienna, where she landed a job as a nightclub hostess or, in some accounts, a singer or chorus girl. Zsa Zsa herself omits this career move from her memoirs. Her mother wrote that “she went to work as Mistress of Ceremonies” whose job was to “come out in beautiful dresses and announce the next act. She didn’t sing; the truth is she couldn’t sing.”
Let us recall that the profession of nightclub performer has a vivid history as a popular euphemism in Hollywood movies of the 1940s and ’50s for a profession that predated all others. Two glaring examples: Rita Hayworth in Miss Sadie Thompson (1953) and Jane Russell in The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956). Closer to Zsa Zsa’s Vienna in time and space, there’s Marlene Dietrich in A Foreign Affair (1948) singing her come-hither song, “Black Market” in the shambles of postwar Berlin. Since Zsa Zsa didn’t—couldn’t—sing a note, the question remains unanswered as to how she delighted patrons of that Viennese night spot, the Club Femina, which was reputed to be a showplace for the display of female flesh. Zsa Zsa appeared there under the name of Georgia Gabor. (Orson Welles, casting her in 1958 as manageress of that sleazy honky-tonk in Touch of Evil, was perhaps winking at her résumé.)
Vilmos Gyimes, owner of the tiny club, was living in New York in 1958 when the Post ran its eleven-part series on the Gabors. Like Burhan Belge, he spoke to a reporter from the paper, recalling that he hired Zsa Zsa for the chorus but that she was not the star of any revue. Perhaps he shared her delusions, for he said, “Femina was like the Latin Quarter in New York.” In fact, it was a pint-size cabaret that employed half-a-dozen young women in the chorus. The Latin Quarter, on the other hand, sprawled like the set of an MGM musical.
Gyimes took credit for introducing “Georgia,” as Zsa Zsa then was, to Burhan Belge, who was passing through Vienna en route to Istanbul after a government assignment in Germany. This, surely, makes for a more credible scenario than the one Zsa Zsa later created, viz., that she had met Burhan on many occasions at her grandmother’s dinner parties and glittering soirées.
Nor could she leave it there. In her handcrafted tableau vivant, Zsa Zsa proposes to him in the bar of the Hotel Ritz: “Excellency, will you marry me?” He almost chokes on his Scotch, but a short time later they are honeymooners on the Orient Express, a fitting first step in the orientalization of Zsa Zsa. As the night deepens, and preparations are made for bed, Zsa Zsa trembles in suspense. Clutching her little dog, Mishka, a Scotty, she awaits the approach of this older man, a virtual stranger to her. But then—he kisses her on the forehead and retires to his own berth. “How could I know,” she later said, “that to a Muslim dogs are unclean, that Burhan would never sleep where a dog had lain?”
Such calculated naiveté on Zsa Zsa’s part, easily mistaken for wide-eyed daffiness, is one of her fascinations. It’s also part of her brilliance as a comedienne. She parlayed this goofy side of herself into decades of froufrou fame.
Dogs, it seems, interfered forever in Zsa Zsa’s love life. In 1987, on Dr. Ruth’s talk show, she had the audience in stitches with this tale from a couple of years earlier, just before her marriage to the soi-disant prince, Frederic von Anhalt, husband number nine. “One morning I had to ride my horse in the Rose Bowl parade. I said to Frederic, ‘Please be on time.’ He was staying in my house but he didn’t come up from the kitchen until too late. I was furious! I said, ‘Go back to Germany!’ So he went back, and a couple of weeks later I found out that he tried to eat a piece of salami at breakfast, the salami fell on the floor, and when he tried to pick it up one of my dogs bit him. He was bleeding! He was afraid to tell me he was bleeding because who wants a bleeding prince?”
* * *
Readers of Patrick Dennis, and especially of his 1961 parody novel Little Me: The Intimate Memoirs of That Great Star of Stage, Screen, and Television, could surely make the case that it’s a roman à clef with a certain Gabor as the clef. (Dennis’s biographer, Eric Myers, wrote that the author had in mind such “pompous Great Female Star autobiographies” of the time as those of Pola Negri, Mae Murray, and Zsa Zsa.) Little Me, and of course Auntie Mame, are both camp classics, intentionally so. Like those Dennis novels, Zsa Zsa’s two autobiographies, My Story in 1960 and One Lifetime Is Not Enough, 1991, make for delicious camp reading. They are all the more amusing because she expected them to be read as factual accounts.
In spite of such jiggery-pokery in Zsa Zsa’s memoirs, it’s true that she did live in Turkey as the wife of Burhan Belge for almost six years, and so I will extract the more likely parts of her narrative like a specialist chef serving up edible parts of the puffer fish while shunning its toxic bulk.
In the midst of much vanity and frivolity in My Story, she inserted a serious note, and a telling one. Referring to the time of her marriage, she wrote, “These were critical days. The future of Europe, of Hungary, was uncertain. Budapest was gay, because Hungarians hate to face reality. But it was impossible, with Hitler on the march, not to know that anything might happen. For me to be the wife of a high-ranking Turkish government official, protected by a diplomatic passport, was no small thing.”
Even though this passage has the advantage of hindsight, it suggests that Zsa Zsa herself, or certainly her parents, considered her removal from Hungary a safety measure quite apart from any prestige the marriage might confer. The same with Eva, whose first marriage, in 1939, took her to California. The Gabors, whatever their level of denial, were known to be Jews, or at least former Jews. From Budapest to Munich, a Nazi hotbed, was some 350 air miles, with no buffer between except German-speaking Austria, Hitler’s homeland. Then, too, in 1935 Hungarian fascists founded the Arrow Cross Party, which remained in lockstep with other European fascists, especially those of Germany and Austria. That same year, anti-Semitic agitation increased sharply.
As Hitler gained power in the mid-1930s, Admiral Miklós Horthy, regent of Hungary from 1920 to 1944, maintained an uneasy alliance with Germany. Rabidly anti-communist, yet lacking the fascist fervor of Hitler or Mussolini, Horthy assessed Hungary’s untenable position: a small country trapped and helpless between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich. For a host of complex reasons, Horthy, as head of state, leaned toward Germany, so that during World War II, Hungary was an Axis ally. Owing to that official stance, many Hungarians, whether Jewish or not, and among them Jolie and Vilmos Gabor, felt relatively safe. According to this faulty syllogism, Hungary was Hitler’s friend; he needed all the friends he could find; therefore, why would he attack? For those who might have left, but didn’t, such reasoning proved fatal. When Hitler finally invaded Hungary in March 1944, Jolie, Vilmos, and Magda were arrested. Their hours on the razor’s edge, their release from custody, and their spine-chilling escape read like the climax of a Hitchcock thriller, as we will see.
* * *
Turkey, far from Germany and considered a fierce opponent in battle, had few immediate worries. Officially neutral, the country maintained correct, though ambiguous, relations with Germany as well as with many countries in Hitler’s crosshairs. With Zsa Zsa ensconced in Ankara, the capital, and Eva breaking into movies in Hollywood, those Gabors left in Budapest carried on as before. Almost from the day of his marriage to Zsa Zsa, however, Burhan Belge urged h
is in-laws to leave Hungary. Keenly aware of developments throughout Europe, he had no illusions about Hitler’s neighborliness. Years later, Jolie recalled her son-in-law’s dramatic warnings.
“Jolie,” he said, “go out from this country. Go to America. Go to Mexico. It is only beginning. All of Europe will burn. Everyone will be killed. The Jewish intellectuals will be massacred by the Nazis. The Christian aristocrats will be massacred by the Reds. I tell you, Jolie, leave Hungary. Immediately! Today.”
If Zsa Zsa heard these conversations, she seems to have brushed aside dire warnings that might interfere with her Turkish romp. From the moment she stepped proudly off the train, she played the role of Madame Belge as grandly as Tallulah Bankhead barging down the Nile as Cleopatra—although without La Bankhead’s flamboyance, which Zsa Zsa would perfect only later. In her early days in Turkey Zsa Zsa was held in check by her husband and by her own youthful uncertainty. His restraint accounts for her subsequent description of him as dour and humorless. Burhan no doubt realized early on what he had on his hands. He determined to capitalize on his young wife’s assets, for she was pretty, fashionable, vivacious, and easily assimilated into the sophisticated yet provincial society of the Turkish capital. Owing to her youth and the unfamiliarity of her new situation, she seldom rebelled. Soon after their arrival, he hired a tutor to coach Zsa Zsa in Turkish, which she learned readily enough. These assets Burhan valued, though he pondered how to prevent her running loose. Clever, wily, and practiced in matrimony—there were several Madame Belges before this one—he well knew how easily his new wife could create mayhem and make him a laughingstock. He did not covet the title of “husband to that screwy Hungarian.”
How could someone like Zsa Zsa not stand out in a place like Ankara? Although the city’s population in 1935 was 123,000, it retained the rustic character of the outpost it had been since ancient times. In photographs taken that year, Ankara resembles drowsy, remote towns in nearby countries, such as Tirana, Albania, or Plovdiv, Bulgaria. When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk became president of Turkey after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, he transformed the country from an essentially medieval to a modern nation in just a few years. His aim, largely accomplished before his death in 1938 at age fifty-seven, was to remake the country as a European entity, a secular state rather than a theocracy mired in the backward, self-defeating politics of the Middle East. In 1923 he moved the Turkish capital from Istanbul to Ankara.
Other photographs of Ankara in the 1930s show Atatürk Boulevard, the so-called Embassy Row where the Belges lived, as the elegant part of town. Wide and spacious, punctuated with young trees and shrubs planted in formal rows as in French cities, this part of Ankara turned its face toward Europe. As a reminder of the town’s rural setting, however, diplomats recounted sightings of the occasional wolf when returning at night from government receptions, especially in winter when snow covered the ground several feet deep.
Eva, in tears when Zsa Zsa left Budapest, gave her a code word to use if ever she desperately needed help. “Just send me a wire,” Eva sniffed, hugging her sister close. “Use the word cigány [Gypsy] and I’ll be there as fast as I can.” Such reassurance made Zsa Zsa, at age eighteen, feel better about the wild adventure she was about to embark upon. After the honeymoon spent with Burhan’s family in Istanbul, however, in their fine old house overlooking the Bosphorus, intuition told her she had triumphed again, although she must wait to see exactly how.
Burhan’s father welcomed Zsa Zsa in French. Burhan’s dignified and very proper sister, Leman, and her worldly husband, Yakup Kadri, occupied the social position that the Gabors in Budapest so yearned for. Kadri was Turkey’s ambassador to Albania when Zsa Zsa first knew him; later he was posted to Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Iran. He and his wife traveled from their home in Ankara to welcome Burhan and his bride to Istanbul.
Since Zsa Zsa, on arrival, understood not a word of Turkish beyond merhaba, meaning “hello,” we can imagine the buzz of conversation between Burhan and Leman as they stepped aside from Belge père with his florid compliments, and his wife, whom Zsa Zsa described as “a tiny woman with a fiery red Mohammadan säl [i.e., a square piece of cloth worn as a covering for the head, neck, and shoulders] sitting with her legs crossed under her like an Oriental queen.”
“That damn dog,” says Burhan to his sister, and explains what happened—or didn’t happen—a few nights earlier on the train. “Tonight will be different,” his sister certifies. After this tête-à-tête, Leman leads the couple upstairs to their bedroom in the center of which is an enormous double bed. Lush wall hangings, plush bed clothes with tiny blue pearls embroidered on each pillow to ward off the evil eye, draperies as thick as the curtain at the Budapest Opera—this bedchamber could double as a set for The Abduction from the Seraglio.
Leman gestures to Burhan to make himself scarce. A servant glides in, and she and Leman help Zsa Zsa dress for dinner in the tailored white satin gown that Jolie packed in the trousseau of her first daughter to require one. After dinner, the ladies retire from the dining room where the men smoke, drink brandy, and perhaps make jokes about the traveling salesman who went to Budapest and....
Leman to Zsa Zsa, when the others had discreetly vanished: “My brother seems to be very fond of you. I think I should tell you that he has been spoiled by many women. You must submit to him and be good to him.” A pause. “You must learn to please him. Do you not wish to retire? Now I think you should go upstairs. I will send him to you presently.”
Imagine the jokes Joan Rivers or Johnny Carson might have cracked had Zsa Zsa recounted this story on TV, because once again there was that damn dog! “I turned to call Mishka,” said Zsa Zsa, “who was worrying a bone under the table, but my sister-in-law, taking me by the arm, said firmly, ‘We will make a place for him in the kitchen tonight. ’ ”
For once, Zsa Zsa had no comeback. Like it or not, she recalled years later, “the honeymoon had begun.”
Chapter 6
Turkish Rondo
Burhan Belge’s disavowals notwithstanding, he seems to have claimed a more crucial portfolio than “minor official.” He surely had duties in the government, along with foreign affiliations, that Zsa Zsa was not privy to. Moreover, his frequent prewar travels to Germany, France, and England suggest missions of a sensitive nature. Fluent in German and several other languages, he shuttled between Ankara and Berlin in the years just prior to World War II. As an expert in foreign relations, Belge made a Saturday radio broadcast from Ankara in which he gave his analysis of world affairs and how various international shifts and upheavals might affect Turkey.
At home, he warned Zsa Zsa not to exaggerate his importance, for he had overheard her boasting, “My husband is Minister of Press and Propaganda.” Again and again he told her, “I am only a newspaperman.” But even a child bride wasn’t so easily fooled. A mere journalist, after all, would not travel on a diplomatic passport, nor would his wife, and yet Madame Belge’s Hungarian passport had been replaced with a more commanding one. Looking back on the dangerous intrigues of those years, Zsa Zsa eventually realized that she had landed in a “bewildering world of political intrigue.” But she couldn’t decipher the arcane static that buzzed about her, whether at gatherings in their home or embedded within the round of embassy parties, dinners for visiting dignitaries, and national celebrations. Her husband warned her to be careful what she said on the telephone. He cautioned never to repeat what she heard in their house, whether half-understood in Turkish or completely clear when overheard in German, French, or English. Ankara, and all of Turkey, resembled Casablanca: crackling with secrets, gossip, rumors, and filled with refugees and foreign agents. The ears of Turkey gathered secrets from all corners of the world. Owing to Turkey’s quasi-European location and its semi-Asiatic identity, Axis powers and Allied nations viewed it as a strategic bridge between East and West.
“And Burhan played a more important role than he cared for me to know,” Zsa Zs
a said long after she had left Turkey and when the terrors of war were a fading memory. At the time, however, Burhan’s attempts to brief her on the Nazi engulfment of Europe and Hitler’s plan for world domination, or the distant but equal threat from Japan, provoked yawns. When not bored, she found his lectures irritating, for they made her feel “like a silly girl called before a schoolmaster.”
His own irritation sometimes exceeded hers. At times, perhaps, he wished that he could ship her back to Hungary. One day, after riding Fatushka, the white Arabian mare that Burhan had bought for her, Zsa Zsa strolled into town with Ali, her fifteen-year-old houseboy from Turkestan who, according to Zsa Zsa, had never worn shoes until hired by the Belge household. They passed a gnarled farmer who had something live in the battered old hat he held out to them. “Buy! Buy!” he cajoled. Thinking it a puppy or a kitten, and always eager to increase her menagerie, Zsa Zsa picked up—a tiny bear cub!
“Wait here,” she told Ali and the farmer. Cuddling the baby bear, she ran to Burhan’s office not far away, pounded on the door, and burst in. “Burhan, darling, may I have this little bear?” she said, mixing Turkish and German. Then she noticed: the room was full of important members of the government, and she had interrupted a conference. Some smiled, others looked stern, and Burhan glared at her. “Let us, please, talk about this later.” After the icy discussion at home, and Zsa Zsa’s tears, it was decided that before very long a bear might pose a threat to Mishka, and so the cub was donated to the zoo. Not long after that, Eva paid a visit to Ankara and, once back in Budapest, held Jolie and Vilmos spellbound with a thousand details of her sister’s life among the diplomats.
According to Zsa Zsa’s anecdotes—all of which must be microscoped—at a dinner party she made a catty remark about the Nazis to Franz von Papen, German ambassador to Turkey. Other evenings she played bridge with Lev Mikhailovich Karakhan, ambassador from the Soviet Union. Another remark, this one unfavorable both to his country and to Germany, elicited a veiled warning beneath his handsome diplomatic smile. The warning boomeranged, however, for in 1937, during the Stalinist terror, Karakhan was arrested and shot.
