by Sam Staggs
Zsa Zsa’s Turkish chapter reached its apex in London in 1939, when Burhan was invited to lecture on “Modern Turkey” at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. The Belges came with five other Turkish journalists and their wives as guests of the British Council, an international organization for cultural relations and educational opportunities. (It is noteworthy that the London Times on May 31, 1939, identified Burhan as “Director of Press, Turkish Foreign Ministry,” a title he himself did not claim.)
Burhan’s invitation came through the auspices of Sir Percy, for he and Lady Loraine had found much to admire in the oddly matched Belges. Burhan, of course, stood out as an intellectual, capable in international affairs, and a conduit to sources that Sir Percy deemed essential in promoting British interests in Turkey. As for Zsa Zsa, the Loraines responded to her anglophilia. As an older couple—Sir Percy in his fifties, Lady Loraine in her forties when Zsa Zsa arrived in Ankara—and childless, they found this exotic child-wife an intriguing blend of ingenue and coquette. Then and later, Zsa Zsa had winsome qualities that she herself often obscured behind a self-serving façade.
In Ankara, Burhan and Zsa Zsa sometimes dined with Sir Percy and Lady Loraine, who in turn invited Zsa Zsa to tea during her husband’s absences. This sophisticated British couple helped her to gain savoir faire in matters of etiquette and protocol, important attributes for the wife of a highly visible government official. With them, also, she practiced speaking English.
H.G. Wells, the novelist and historian, attended Burhan’s lecture in London. Sir Percy had told Wells that he would learn much there, which Wells was eager to do. He knew of Atatürk’s great admiration for his writings. Indeed, not long before the president’s death in 1938, Atatürk ordered the government printing office to translate and publish Wells’s The Outline of History. The author had become a hero to Atatürk.
After the lecture, Wells came forward to congratulate Burhan. Owing to his enthusiasm, and to that of Sir Percy, invitations flooded the Belges. They met Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin and Anthony Eden, a former secretary of state for foreign affairs and himself a future prime minister. Zsa Zsa’s picture appeared in a number of London newspapers, and H.G. Wells invited her and Burhan to lunch with George Bernard Shaw and his wife. After lunch, Burhan snapped a picture of Zsa Zsa with two of the most famous men in England, Shaw and Wells, a photograph presumed lost until my recent rediscovery.
Chapter 7
Eva and Eric
Eva’s first marriage took place on June 3, 1939, at the time of Zsa Zsa’s heady visit to London. Several versions exist of the youngest Gabor’s introduction to matrimony, the least convincing one being Eva’s own as set forth in her evasive autobiography, Orchids and Salami. Picturing herself as a teenager awash in romantic fantasies, she claims to have met Dr. Eric Drimmer at one of Magda’s parties. Eva said that Magda, as a young divorcée recently returned from life in Poland with her own first husband, considered her sister, at seventeen, too young and unsophisticated for this party. In fact, however, Eva was already either nineteen or twenty, for the time of her meeting with Eric was late 1938 or spring of 1939.
Whatever the circumstances, Eva met him and at some point he proposed. It’s unlikely that his proposal issued the night they met, as Eva claimed. Nor did anyone explain what brought Eric to Budapest, for he was a Swede resident in Hollywood and a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Eric Valdemar Drimmer (1910–1967), born in the Swedish village of Järvsjö, has been variously identified as an MD, an osteopath, a chiropractor, a psychologist, a physiotherapist, and a masseur. In one capacity or another, he was said either to massage Greta Garbo’s tired muscles during her MGM years, or her mind. Others listed as his clients for services rendered include Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, and Mickey Rooney. Any one of these names, dropped in the presence of the Gabors, would have done much to establish him as a marital catch. From the scant evidence available, however, Drimmer’s character bears a shady tint. In apparent violation of doctor-patient confidentiality, he wrote about Garbo in an article published in Photoplay in 1942, and again in 1959 in a Swedish women’s magazine. And when he and Eva divorced, she made him sound like a villain. “Forced to Act, Wife Testifies” ran the headline in the Los Angeles Times on February 25, 1942. Eva told the judge that her husband drove her into the life of a film actress when she preferred to remain a simple housewife. “I wanted to raise a family—to have babies,” she informed the court, “but my husband didn’t agree with me. He also objected to my having friends of my own.”
Asked by the judge to name her husband’s profession, Eva replied: “He’s a doctor specializing in psychology, and he always treated me like one of his cases.” Perhaps, on closer inspection, Dr. Drimmer is no more blameworthy than his wife, for in Orchids and Salami her story differs from the court testimony. “I tried to convince myself that in Hollywood my only genuine interest would be my marriage and my home, but deep down I knew I was trying to sell myself a three-dollar bill. I couldn’t possibly live in Hollywood and not try to become an actress.”
* * *
Zsa Zsa’s version of Eva’s meeting with Eric differs from her sister’s. According to Zsa Zsa, their maternal grandmother, Franceska Tillemann, gave a party to which both Eva and Magda were invited. Eva, however, was too tired to attend; perhaps she had been all day on her feet behind the counter of a family shop. She returned home, creamed her face, and went to bed with a plate of salami and scallions. Still licking her chops, she heard the telephone down the hall. Magda on the line, telling her to come at once: “The most beautiful man in the world is here.”
It’s true that he stood six feet, four inches, he had Scandinavian features—blond hair, blue eyes—and a good profile. In pictures taken a bit later in Hollywood, however, he is not the most beautiful man in the world, though he does resemble the character actor Leif Erickson.
Zsa Zsa added that Eva joined Eric in London and they married there at the Registry Office, where Zsa Zsa, as the closest family member, gave her away. Back in Budapest, Vilmos fumed, although the reason for his displeasure remains unclear. According to Zsa Zsa, she and Burhan saw Eva and Eric off at Victoria Station immediately after the ceremony. From there they went by train to Southampton to board the boat for New York.
Eva, however, wrote that she and Eric spent several months in London while awaiting her entry permit to the United States. In this case, her memory is correct, for after their marriage on June 3, they did not board the SS Ile de France until August. Their timing, though coincidental, was extraordinary. Had they waited a few weeks longer, their passage would have been complicated by the Nazi invasion of Poland, and the outbreak of war. In view of Hungary’s alliance with Germany, Eva would have been considered an enemy alien in both Britain and the United States and perhaps deported to Hungary.
While in London, the couple were house guests of the writer-translator Ivy Low Litvinov and her husband, Maxim Litvinov. He served as people’s commissar of foreign affairs (i.e., foreign minister) of the Soviet Union 1930 to 1939, and as Soviet ambassador to the United States from 1941 to 1943. It is likely that H.G. Wells, Zsa Zsa’s new admirer and a friend of Ivy’s father, introduced the two couples.
Eric Drimmer’s travels, his ambiguous profession, and his connection of whatever sort with the Litvinovs—taken together, these raise the question of whether his real job was that of foreign agent. The question, intriguing though it is, will remain unanswered, even as one speculates: Was he perhaps an emissary of neutral Sweden, sent to Litvinov to seek Soviet intervention if Hitler violated Swedish neutrality? Lending credibility to this scenario is the fact that one of Litvinov’s most trusted friends was Alexandra Kollontai, chargé d’affaires in the Soviet embassy in Stockholm; she later smuggled his writings out of the USSR. Could Drimmer have been part of this nexus? Working against my theory, however, is this: the Litvinovs were in Russia in the summer of 1939. Still, Drimmer could have met with operatives from the Soviet embassy in the Litvinov h
ouse.
If not working with the Russians on behalf of Sweden, was he a spy for Washington? Or even a communist sympathizer receiving instructions as war seemed more likely every hour? Drimmer’s young wife would have been easily deceived by his clandestine mission. Though Eva later became astute at reading people and situations, at twenty she was an ingenue eager to believe whatever her husband said.
* * *
The next version of Eva’s marriage comes from her cousin, Mrs. Annette Lantos, whom we met earlier. Mrs. Lantos is certain that Eva and Eric married in Budapest, in the Gabor apartment. A “big reception” followed at the home of Franceska Tillemann, Eva’s grandmother. The newlyweds being short of money, it was Sebestyn Tillemann, Mrs. Lantos’s father, who bought their plane tickets to London. This report seems credible for several reasons. First of all, Mrs. Lantos, as an intelligent girl of nine or ten, would have been interested in the romance and grown-up activities that swirled around a wedding. Then, too, her father was perhaps the wisest member of the extended family, and the one who, like Burhan Belge, guessed the full, sinister meaning of the swastika.
In 1938, Mrs. Lantos recalled, her father obtained U.S. visas for himself and his family. Both he and his wife felt the impulse to leave, and yet... “They stayed on in Hungary,” Mrs. Lantos said, “because life in Budapest, they thought, was too comfortable to give it up.” Although Sebestyn Tillemann and his family stayed on, he would have been acutely aware of the escape clause that his wedding present provided for his niece. Eva and Eric, happy and in love, thanked him for his generous gift. Promising a return visit to Hungary in a year or so, Eva kissed her uncle repeatedly as they said goodbye; Eric shook his hand and invited him to visit them in Los Angeles.
They never saw him again.
Chapter 8
E.G., Phone Home
If only Eva could have dialed direct! Desperately homesick, she needed to hear Mama’s voice, or Magduska’s, or Papuska’s. But from Los Angeles such a call took hours to place, and cost a small fortune. Before long, war in Europe made phone calls to Hungary virtually impossible. At least, however, Eva soon had the mixed blessing of Zsa Zsa, who arrived in California in June 1941.
After spending several months in Budapest during the winter of 1940, Zsa Zsa returned to Turkey more discontented than ever. Ankara held no new surprises for her. Marriage to Burhan, which for a time had amused her in spite of its lack of love, now seemed stale. He wanted a child, but his mother-in-law back in Hungary was too vain to accept the role of grandmother. “Jolie takes you away from me,” he chided. “I have no wife, and because of her no children!” Burhan, and all future Gabor husbands, soon learned that Jolie possessed her daughters body and soul, keeping them under psychological lock and key.
Another reason for Zsa Zsa’s wish to leave Turkey was Eva’s minor success in Hollywood, for not long after her arrival Paramount Pictures signed her as a contract player. At that time the studios were tossing contracts to all comers, or so it seemed. After making the rounds, Eva found a place at Paramount in the studio’s B-movie unit. Blondes with foreign accents were in vogue, although immediately she was told to lose ten pounds. Studio brass disliked the baby fat and Hungarian hips. Thus began Eva’s lifelong habit of dieting, so that in later years she stayed trim while Zsa Zsa’s weight zoomed—yet another source of sisterly friction.
Other than abundant blonde hair, the accent, and malapropisms that always got a laugh—“I wish to buy a dress for street walking,” she told a saleslady; “We sang ‘Old Anxiety’ on New Year’s Eve”—she had no particular silver-screen assets and the studio regarded her as one new face in the swarm of young women and men who landed contracts each year and then vanished. Or rather, many went back where they came from while others took menial jobs and never relinquished their shattered dream. To Zsa Zsa, however, far away in Ankara and bedazzled by the lure of movie stardom, Eva looked already like the new Garbo. Sibling rivalry overspread Zsa Zsa like hives.
Another reason to leave Turkey was the menace of fascism, not only from Germany but from Italy, as well, and from various European countries with fascist leanings: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the pro-German government of Vichy France. In Turkey itself were many who admired Hitler and Mussolini and who lacked sympathy for the beleaguered Jews. Zsa Zsa’s Mongolian cheekbones notwithstanding, anyone interested in her ethnicity knew she had Jewish blood.
According to Zsa Zsa in later years, Jolie urged her to leave Burhan and go to comfort Eva, whose marriage to the most beautiful man in the world had devolved from storybook to housework. After their arrival in Los Angeles, she and Eric lived in a small hotel, which suggests that his income did not match that of the average medical doctor. When he went to work each day, Eva lacked occupation. Her English was imperfect; she had little money; she knew no one; and Hollywood, then and now, takes on the bleak lineaments of an Edward Hopper canvas if you’re broke or depressed. Eva was both.
“I went back to bed every morning as soon as my husband left for the day, and wept all over the linen,” said Eva. Jolie, always the fixer, wrote to Eva that she must look up Ilona Massey, the Hungarian actress then at the peak of her career in Hollywood. Although Jolie and Ilona were acquainted, Eva was not granted an audience. In later years, however, Ilona and the Gabors crossed paths as did all Hungarians in American show business.
Shortly after Eva’s arrival at Paramount, the studio sent her on a modeling assignment. Her portfolio comprised only a scattering of print ads for Jolie’s shop that had appeared a few years earlier in local papers in Budapest. Despite limited experience, but with shiny new teeth (Jolie claimed she sent two thousand dollars to pay for crowns), Eva posed for a pictorial spread, “Five Steps to Winter Beauty,” that ran in several movie magazines in 1940. In the layout, a smiling Eva preps her skin for winter using such products as Palmolive soap, Woodbury face cream, and Yardley hand cream, along with cosmetics by Max Factor.
* * *
Zsa Zsa did not so much as throw Burhan a kiss from the train. On her final prewar visit to Budapest, she decided—with Jolie’s collusion—not to get off in Ankara but rather to head for Hollywood. When she boarded the train on February 15, 1941, these countries, either all or in part, were under German occupation: Austria, the Baltic states, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway. Bombs were falling on London and across the United Kingdom, and on the very day that Zsa Zsa left Budapest Austria began mass deportation of Jews to Poland.
Despite her diplomatic passport, she could not travel west across occupied countries, so that her sole option was to travel east. Although Bulgaria was still officially neutral, fighting had broken out in the southern part of the country and some railroad tracks had been bombed. As Zsa Zsa’s train approached the Turkish frontier, the announcement was made that passengers must detrain and walk across the border. All luggage, including Zsa Zsa’s twenty-one suitcases, arrived safely in Istanbul after having been inspected and loaded onto a different train. Passing through Ankara, she almost got off. After all, she had invested six years of her life there, and despite her fatigue with Burhan, she found much to admire in him. He had treated her kindly, and the Turks had welcomed her. But she stayed on the train, eventually changing numerous times as she made her way along the Syrian border and into Iraq.
In Bagdad she waited almost two months to arrange ongoing transportation. Each day she had to report to police headquarters. Her presence in Iraq, everything about her, aroused suspicion. Why was she traveling alone? Where was her husband? How did she obtain a diplomatic passport? Why was she headed to the United States? To the authorities, she was as suspect as a Mata Hari or a Tokyo Rose. Fortunately, she made the acquaintance of a young sheik and lived with him during her Iraqi sojourn. He, like so many who wanted to and the nine who did, wished to marry her. Zsa Zsa liked the sound of the matrimonial title he offered—sheikha—but the gravitational pull of Hollywood won out. Epithets such as “actress” and “movie star”
dazzled her like a mirage on the Arabian desert.
Finally cleared to leave the country, she flew to Karachi, then part of India before Partition, and from there to Bombay, where she boarded the SS President Grant on April 27, arriving in New York on June 3, 1941, along with her twenty-one battered suitcases. She had traveled from the Indian Ocean across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, over the Caribbean, around the tip of Florida, and up the Atlantic Coast to New York. Curiosity, and a certain notoriety, awaited her in Manhattan. Although not yet a celebrity, she had accrued a reputation as an exotic adventuress. Someone photographed her on deck before disembarkation, and in that picture she looks as though she has just come from a makeover spa. Blonde, rested, aglow with a confident smile, she was no doubt rejuvenated by ocean air and a new continent to conquer.
Always one to keep her address book up to date, Zsa Zsa had sent a telegram to a retired industrialist in New York whom she and Burhan had entertained in Ankara. He met her at the pier and within hours of touching the Manhattan pavement, she was dining at ‘21’. The next day several newspapers carried her photograph, announcing “Turkish Beauty Arrives.” Eva flew to New York to welcome her. “We fell into each other’s arms,” Zsa Zsa said, “babbling ecstatically in Hungarian.” A day or two after that, they flew to Los Angeles.
One may wonder how a woman of twenty-four, unemployed, a spendthrift, indulged by parents and then by her husband, collected the means to travel halfway around the world, and to do so in style. The only explanation comes from the pen of Jolie, who asked Zsa Zsa in Budapest, before departure, “How will you be for money?”
“I have some from Burhan,” she answered. “I also have from Grandmother plus the twelve-carat ring which Grandmother gave me plus some other little bits of jewelry like the ruby necklace Papa gave me for the wedding present.” Her perilous journey in wartime across hostile countries and oceans under threat of bombs raises another question: Where did she find such courage? The best answer comes from George Sanders, her third husband, who said, some years after their divorce, “Whatever else could be said about Zsa Zsa, and a great deal could, and is, being said about her, one thing is certain, she has a lot of guts.”
