Finding Zsa Zsa

by Sam Staggs

  Mr. Stein, of course, was no producer but a doctor. He had flown in from California with Eva and Bundy. One look told him of Zsa Zsa’s distress, and her jerky movements supplied the rest. The doctor had come at Conrad’s behest, as had Eva and Bundy. Although Zsa Zsa had filed for divorce, and Conrad felt that she had made the right decision, still he cared about her welfare and therefore had consulted with her sister and their close friend from childhood, Bundy Solt. To some it might look like revenge on the husband’s part, but no one ever accused Conrad Hilton of such an act. On the contrary, after three years of marriage he surely felt relief. For a year or longer, they had been a married couple in name only.

  When Zsa Zsa woke up, Eva helped her pick out a flattering new dress, jewelry, and a mink coat. Having filed for divorce, Zsa Zsa considered herself a free woman, and Eva encouraged the notion that an intriguing older man was eager to meet her. Zsa Zsa told the Post reporter in 1958, “When they took me to the sanitarium, I thought I was going to meet a boyfriend. They drove me up to this cottage and inside there were two nurses, and one was a man and one was a woman, and I thought they were going to rob me. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know that it was a nut house. I fought with them and I was knocked down and broke my tooth and was put in a straitjacket. They kept me there weeks and weeks and I didn’t think I was ever going to get out. I suppose you can say that this was the worst time of my life.”

  Speaking to Gerold Frank, her collaborator on My Story, Zsa Zsa recalled a scene that he considered too strong for the book; it was omitted: “After breakfast, we went to walk with other people, all terribly broken down—insane people. We walked around the park and that’s when we passed by this cage where human people were there without combed hair, those were really the very serious cases. They used to scream at us.”

  Blanche DuBois, led away at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire, depended on the kindness of strangers. For seven long weeks, Zsa Zsa had only herself and the survival instinct that had served her well so far. And then a stranger saved her.

  Although inmates were permitted neither radio nor newspapers, the news on May 1, 1945, could not be kept secret. It was the only topic, and so the new night nurse whispered it in Zsa Zsa’s ear: “Hitler is dead!” She recounted as much of the story as she knew, Zsa Zsa shed tears of relief, and from that point on the nurse treated her with special attention and kindness. After a couple of weeks, the nurse said, “Sweetheart, you don’t belong here. Don’t worry. I’m an Irishwoman and I have a heart. I’ll help you.”

  “Pray for me, please pray for me,” Zsa Zsa pleaded.

  She remembered the telephone number of a Hungarian friend, whom the nurse called the next day. That friend immediately found a lawyer who filed a writ of habeas corpus charging wrongful arrest. A court hearing took place in the Bronx, the judge ruled in Zsa Zsa’s favor, the writ was sustained, and she was released.

  * * *

  The scars of such involuntary incarceration heal slowly, if at all. How does one spotlight the worst part of it—the isolation; the bare walls in a room with only a narrow bed and no personal items; the regimentation of supervised meals and daily walks accompanied by nurses; no visits from Eva, Bundy, or Conrad. Whether the doctors discouraged visits or whether the absences were voluntary never became clear in Zsa Zsa’s mind.

  Far more dreadful than any of these, however, were the insulin shock treatments. The reason for this barbaric therapy in Zsa Zsa’s case, rather than the equally barbaric electroconvulsive shock, is now clear: Zsa Zsa had fallen victim to Manfred Sakel, an Austrian psychiatrist who, in the 1920s, pioneered insulin shock. Having washed up on the arrogant shores of American psychiatry, he became the star acquisition of West Hills Sanitarium. Sakel’s treatment, widely used internationally in mental institutions, at last fell into disfavor in the 1950s. Untold damage had been done, however, with countless adverse reactions and many fatalities, often unreported lest the psychiatric religion be blasphemed.

  Let us imagine that you, like a significant percentage of the population, suffer from hypoglycemia, which in everyday language means low blood sugar. If you are otherwise in good health, and not diabetic, you may feel few effects from skipping a meal, or from drinking strong coffee on an empty stomach. If, however, you are especially susceptible to a drop in blood sugar, you may suddenly feel shaky all over, break out in a cold sweat, feel your heart racing, become confused to the point of difficulty in speaking. You might be mistaken for a drug addict, a drunk, or a danger to yourself and others. You might be locked up.

  The effects of insulin shock magnify tenfold all of these symptoms of hypoglycemia. Disorientation, mental confusion, muscle weakness, panic, and the feeling that doom or death is imminent. Screams and weakness, and eventual collapse, may also ensue. There you have a picture of Zsa Zsa after a needle is jabbed into her thigh three times a week for seven weeks.

  * * *

  For a long time I have suspected that Zsa Zsa suffered not only from bipolar disorder but also from some form of hypoglycemia. This helps to account for the erratic behavior, such as temper tantrums while under stress and sudden mood swings. She exacerbated the problem by excessive coffee drinking, over twenty cups a day! “I know I shouldn’t,” she said, “but I’ve been doing it all my life and can’t break the habit.” She even kept a coffee thermos by the bedside. Less caffeine, more sleep, and fewer Hungarian sweets might have calmed her jumpy nerves and leveled out her blood sugar. In her favor, however, were an unbreakable constitution, moderate alcohol intake, mainly wine, and recreational drugs never. It seems that in Zsa Zsa’s case overwork and a dizzying social life contributed to longevity.

  * * *

  In some ways, Zsa Zsa’s torture at West Hills Sanitarium parallels the sufferings of concentration camp victims, the last of whom were rescued around the same time as Zsa Zsa. Like them, she was an unwilling participant in medical experimentation. How different, one may well ask, was the work of Manfred Sakel and others like him from that of Josef Mengele, whose experiments at Auschwitz proceeded without regard for the health and safety of his subjects, nor for their physical and emotional pain? The difference between the crimes of the one and those of the other was a matter of degree. Both escaped punishment for their misdeeds.

  “I recuperated slowly,” Zsa Zsa said. After her release from West Hills in late May 1945, she borrowed money from a Hungarian acquaintance in New York and retreated to a small apartment on Long Island. “A stranger to the world,” as she put it, Zsa Zsa emerged from her trauma an emotional displaced person, as damaged and fragile as many who had survived the war.

  We have only Zsa Zsa’s account of the aftermath of West Hills, and that in bits and pieces. Her sketchy narrative raises many questions: Was she in touch with Eva, Conrad, or anyone else from her Los Angeles circle? Neighbors on Long Island treated her kindly, unaware of exactly who she was, for she used the name Sári Gabor. Somehow she retrieved her two dogs—surely Eva placed them in safekeeping with New York friends pending Zsa Zsa’s release—and she spent the summer days of 1945 walking, resting, painting, and lingering over meals at a seaside lobster bar owned by a couple from Poland. They became friendly with one another, and one busy Saturday night when the husband was ill the wife asked Sári to help her wait on tables. This routine work, which continued for a time, proved therapeutic. Although Zsa Zsa never breathed a word of it, it is reasonable to assume that she had mentioned to the Polish woman, as they became friends, that back in Budapest she worked behind the counter in her family’s jewelry shops.

  Zsa Zsa’s days and nights in the unnamed town on Long Island resemble an Impressionist painting, in particular a misty work by Monet or Whistler, of a distant lady, her back to the viewer, who gazes over ocean fog and whose identity, if ever it was known, has now merged with the elements.

  Chapter 14

  The World Was All Before Them

  “All the silly, wonderful nonsense began again the moment Mother arrived from Lisbon
,” said Zsa Zsa fifteen years later, having not only survived but prospered as an international movie star, a Hollywood glamour queen, a devil-may-care comedienne on TV talk shows—call it sit-down comedy—and almost daily in the press, where her antics were reported with the regularity of White House briefings. Anyone trying to pinpoint the day or the year when that phenomenon known as “the Gabor sisters” first took shape faces a paradox. It was neither Eva’s arrival in 1939, nor Zsa Zsa’s in 1941, but rather Jolie’s alighting on American soil on December 31, 1945, that acted as yeast for their rise into celebrity and notoriety. She resumed immediate control of the two daughters who had languished outside her dominance for six years and four years, respectively. Magda she had never relinquished, and now all three regressed to some juvenile state where the only voice to be heeded was that of Nyuszi, Nyuszika, Mamuska—in other words, Jolie the Total Mother. Her mere presence, however, was not sufficient to trigger the blast-off that Jolie demanded and that her girls desired for themselves. She reminded them of their granny’s favorite saying: “It’s not enough to be Hungarian—you also have to work.”

  Although Eva’s career had languished since 1941, she at least had a toehold in the movies and so, Mama said, she must toil even harder at her calling. Jolie reminded her that since childhood she had dreamed of nothing but acting in theatre and cinema. “Make Nyuszi proud” was the ongoing subliminal directive.

  For a week or so in late summer 1945, and while Zsa Zsa was waiting tables on Long Island, Eva worked with director Edgar G. Ulmer in The Wife of Monte Cristo, an enjoyable costume drama released the following year. When not on call for the picture, she appeared in minor plays, popular in their day, at small Los Angeles venues. On her meager resumé were Arthur Schnitzler’s comedy-drama The Affairs of Anatol at the Las Palmas Theater and Molnar’s The Play’s the Thing in Sherman Oaks.

  In the midst of her professional drought, Eva accepted an invitation from comedian Phil Foster to appear in his nightclub act at El Rancho Vegas just when the desert town had hit upon the combination of gambling and glitz that would draw the world to Las Vegas. Eva’s comic timing got big laughs. For instance, when Foster, during the act, asked her favorite perfume, Eva answered, in a foreshadowing of Lisa Douglas on Green Acres, “I prefer Chanel 9 to 5.” She appeared with him several times.

  * * *

  The publicity of Zsa Zsa’s divorce from Conrad Hilton might almost have served as her screen test, for in every newspaper photo it was obvious that the camera loved her. That divorce remains the most full-bodied of them all in a family total of some two dozen if you throw in the occasional annulment, Francesca’s one or two marital mishaps, and at least one marriage over so quickly that no Gabor bothered to count it. The Hilton divorce involved heaps of money, lawyers, court hearings, tears, whispers of adultery, witty insults from a fully recovered Zsa Zsa, a mysterious pregnancy, and a background chorus line of big names, small names, gossiping servants, in-laws, and barking dogs. A film version of these bewildering arabesques would have been titled My Favorite Divorce.

  It could only be a screwball comedy. Over the course of 1946, with all Gabors present and accounted for, Zsa Zsa and Conrad rekindled their early passion. That, at least, remained her version of the year’s events. They maintained separate residences, and divorce proceedings continued, although at a somnolent pace. Both traveled constantly, so that when they met up it seemed more like a romance than marriage ever could.

  A bit later, Conrad fronted the money for Jolie’s first jewelry shop, called simply “Jolie Gabor,” which opened in the West Forties near Broadway in the spring of 1946. No one in the family ever mentioned this location, which was decidedly less chic than her later one at 699 Madison Avenue between East Sixty-second and East Sixty-third streets, where the “Jolie Gabor Pearl Salon” opened in fall 1948 and remained for decades. A newspaper photo of Jolie in that first Manhattan location shows her still carrying a few too many pounds, along with a matronly visage that has been hacked, and none too smoothly, by a surgeon’s scalpel. Or was it a putty knife that gave her the spackled look? She even retained half of a superfluous chin. Soon, however, that botched face vanished like April snow, along with her West Side shop. Thanks to the eponymous salon on the East Side, Jolie became an institution—the Queen of Costume Jewelry.

  On November 8, 1948, the Times-Herald reported that “the three glamorous Gabor sisters” were seen hanging magenta satin in the windows of their mother’s new Madison Avenue jewelry shop. “Wearing overalls and bandannas, and using hammers and stepladders, Magda, Sari, and Eva caused quite a stir among pedestrians on the street.” This is probably the first notice in print of that phenomenon known from that day to this as “the Gabor sisters.”

  In winter of 1949 Eva worked on Song of Surrender, directed by Mitchell Leisen. In her small role she received ninth billing. Still, this might be considered her most important early picture owing to Leisen’s prestige as an outstanding director of actresses (among them Stanwyck, Dietrich, and Joan Fontaine) and to the elegance of his films. Having begun his career as a costume designer and art director, Leisen had a keen eye for accuracy in dress. While planning Song of Surrender he acquired the wardrobe of a wealthy elderly lady who had just died. Since the picture is set in 1906 in a small New England town, these outmoded fashions were perfect. “They were originals from the great French couturiers of the period,” Leisen said. “We didn’t change a thing. We just altered them to fit the actresses. Eva Gabor had a black net dress studded with real turquoises.” It was perfect for her role as Countess Marina, a piano-playing, csárdás-dancing vixen calculated to rattle the local puritans.

  When the picture wrapped, Eva at last heeded Tallulah Bankhead’s advice and went east. There she appeared in the early TV dramatic series Your Show Time (later syndicated under the title Short Story Theater). This small-screen exposure gave Eva a boost in the early 1950s as she established herself in summer stock. Audiences on the straw-hat circuit flocked to see this fledgling star of stage, screen, and television.

  In late summer 1949 Eva made her first East Coast stage appearance in Samson Raphaelson’s Accent on Youth, costarring fellow Hungarian Paul Lukas. A few months later she made her Broadway debut in The Happy Time. Eva had finally burst from her starlet cocoon into the dazzling brightness of show business acclaim. All too soon, however, at least from Eva’s point of view, a new cocoon, vast and inescapable, enveloped her. Spun by Jolie, this silken prison yoked Eva to Zsa Zsa, and forever after she was mistaken for her older, more outrée sister. Magda, also one of Mama’s brood, acted as peacekeeper and referee. But Jolie, spinner of fates, held illimitable dominion over all.

  * * *

  Sometime in the late forties Eva made a picture called Love Island, a Poverty Row turkey that was shelved until 1952, when its release caused her great embarrassment. By then, Eva really was a star of early television. In 1951 she made more than fifty appearances on network and local shows. In addition, during the 1950–’51 season The Eva Gabor Show was a hit in the New York metro area, followed later in 1951 by another, this one called Famous Women of History, in which Eva portrayed the likes of Marie Antoinette (or “the cake lady,” as Eva called her). During that same period, while still appearing nightly in The Happy Time, she hosted two radio shows and still found time for summer theatre productions and countless appearances at charity events and fashion shows. This nonstop chronology disproves the silly clichés about the Gabors as famous for being famous. They were famous because they never stopped working at it. Eva’s last TV appearance, for example, took place exactly one month before she died.

  In Love Island Eva wears a black wig, with a succession of orchids and hibiscuses over one ear. The plot: male lead Paul Valentine parachutes onto a tropical island and falls in love with native girl Sarna and her ebony hair. About one-fourth of this sixty-two-minute picture is intercut footage from a 1935 quasi-documentary called Legong: Dance of the Virgins, which was actually filmed in Bali by H
enri de la Falaise, ex-husband of Gloria Swanson. Along with the louche dances and temple ceremonies of Legong, Eva’s hapless performance seems snatched from a cautionary training film for tight-lipped missionaries.

  * * *

  On September 17, 1946, a year and a half after proceedings began, Zsa Zsa’s divorce from Conrad Hilton at last became final. None of the parties involved could have known that in a sense the matter would never reach resolution. The reason: in mid-June of that year Zsa Zsa became pregnant, and nine months later—on March 10, 1947—her daughter, Constance Francesca Hilton, was born. “When they brought my child to me, I think really it was the happiest moment of my life,” she said. Zsa Zsa never wavered in her claim that Conrad was the baby’s father. According to many accounts, however, Zsa Zsa’s sexual activity in those warm summer months amounted to a cottage industry. If such reports were accurate, then in a game of Gabor roulette neither Zsa Zsa nor anyone else would know the father’s identity. Many years later, when I became friends with Francesca, I occasionally studied her face in search of genetic clues. Yes, there were Hilton traits, although none strong enough to convince a casual observer. Nor did she look very much like the Gabors.