Finding Zsa Zsa

by Sam Staggs

  Eva, no doubt realizing that she would not become a permanent fixture on Broadway, built a stage career on the road. During the first half of the 1950s, she toured much of the country in regional and summer theatre productions of half-a-dozen comedies, among them Bell, Book, and Candle; Her Cardboard Lover; The Happy Time (after its Broadway run); and Blithe Spirit. Eva became such a fixture in the latter that Noël Coward, who admired her in his play and became a close friend, joked that “whenever you’re broke you do Blithe Spirit.” During a performance in summer 1956 at Ephrata, Pennsylvania, a deafening thunderclap rattled the theatre. Eva screamed and hurled herself on a settee. The play resumed when she picked up her lines.

  Around the same time, playing a mermaid in Sailor’s Delight, she earned praise from Elliot Norton, a respected theatre critic in Boston. “Miss Gabor’s performance,” he wrote, “was a notable surprise in the summer theatre season. She emerged as a comedienne of very comparable quality to Gertrude Lawrence in light comedy, deft and delightful.” Groucho Marx, attending the play in Los Angeles, had a different opinion. Enjoying a drink between the acts, he famously told the bartender, “This production needs a longer intermission and a much shorter play.”

  Sometimes Eva’s linguistic mishaps came off funnier than her dialogue. In 1952, appearing in Strike a Match at the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco, Eva confused the local press by insisting that she was playing at the Alcatraz. (The producers rushed into damage control mode.) Most of the time, however, she knew exactly what to say for a laugh. When someone asked which Gabor was the oldest, Eva said, “Mama.”

  Always serious about her work, Eva attended the Actors Studio for a short period in 1955. A photograph of Eva with Lee Strasberg shows her deglamourized in a simple sweater and string of pearls. Her plain-Jane makeup is so minimal that she seems just to have rolled out of bed and dashed off to acting class. According to press reports, she was to participate in a staged reading of Uncle Vanya for the student body and faculty. Five years earlier, during the run of The Happy Time, Eva had appeared with Boris Karloff in a TV production of the Chekhov play. Another costar in that production was Leora Dana, also in the cast of The Happy Time. Eva played Yelena, the young, restless wife of a retired professor (Karloff). She recalled that “we rehearsed Uncle Vanya for ten days, Leora and I going over our material between acts at the theatre. On the night we played it, the entire cast of The Happy Time gathered before the television set in my house to watch Leora and me perform.”

  While promoting her autobiography during 1954, Eva made the usual rounds of bookstores and interview shows. Its title, Orchids and Salami, supposedly came from the sole contents of her fridge when someone opened it looking for a snack. But since Champagne and Goulash was also in the running as a title, that refrigerator could have morphed from one of Eva’s stage comedies. Either title is more evocative than the book itself, whose ghostwriter seems to have grabbed a few fuzzy facts from Eva as she dashed from stage to screen to wardrobe fitting. The New York Times review began, “This is the autobiography, in a manner of speaking, of a highly publicized actress of Hungarian birth.”

  In addition to everything else, Eva appeared in five films in the early fifties. Paris Model (1953), shot in just ten days, is a sly little comedy that should be better known. The “Paris Model” is not a woman but a dress from a famous couturière. Despite French laws that protect against copying such originals, a version of one dress from the fashion house turns up in New York. It is called “Nude at Midnight,” copied from an $890 original. This anthology film follows several additional copies of the original “Nude at Midnight” through a series of adventures on the backs of their various owners.

  Eva, in the first episode, is Gogo Montaine, a Parisian mantrap who sets out to seduce a beturbanned maharajah, played by Tom Conway (brother of George Sanders, and thus still Zsa Zsa’s brother-in-law when Paris Model was filmed in summer of 1953). Stunning in the eponymous gown, and decked out in jewelry (Mama’s, no doubt), Eva almost nets the maharajah and his millions. But he spies a younger woman in a restaurant and ditches Gogo for her. Next, Paulette Goddard, playing secretary to businessman Leif Erickson, vamps him in her prêt-à-porter version—until his wife turns up, in her own illegal copy. Then effervescent Marilyn Maxwell almost steals the movie, and finally Barbara Lawrence, as a rather plain girl, catches her man thanks to the “Paris Model” she found in a thrift shop for nineteen dollars.

  This under-the-radar movie—a funny, well-crafted vehicle for actresses past their first youth—is more entertaining than many a big-budget behemoth of the era. It surprises with underplayed comedy and witty touches along the way, e.g., when Paulette Goddard in an I Love Lucy moment snags her own copy of the dress on a chair in a restaurant and it rips apart, leaving her stranded in a slip.

  Seeing Eva at her best, as she is here, you realize that she was the real beauty of the family and, especially in sexy comedies, an accomplished actress. Here she makes theatricality work in her favor: the wide eyes, sweeping gestures, head swerving, and coquettish half-turns as she speaks her lines. She commands a certain kind of non-naturalistic acting acquired from years on the stage. Zsa Zsa, on the other hand, being by nature overly theatrical, couldn’t tone it down before the camera. The result is that she caricatured herself. Debbie Reynolds in a wicked imitation of Zsa Zsa on The Joan Rivers Show is not very different from Zsa Zsa’s imitation of herself, or should I say, Zsa Zsa imitating the alter ego she wanted to be.

  * * *

  In Captain Kidd and the Slave Girl (1954):

  • See Eva covered by bubbles in a scalloped tub that no Carnival Cruise fantasy could duplicate.

  • Watch her row a boat from ship to shore, and capsize it.

  • Hold your breath as she draws a seventeenth-century musket and fires.

  • Witness her desolation on the beach of a desert isle after a near drowning, though with perfect piled-up hairdo and voluminous robe dry and intact.

  • Peer at Eva as she disrobes down to her bloomers and jumps into the Caribbean.

  • Hear Eva scream in defense of her virtue, not once but twice, as pirate galoots try to sample her charms.

  She plays Judith Duval, a treacherous femme fatale on the high seas aboard a British ship. Although betrothed to the Earl of Bellamont, she switches her affections mid-voyage to the pirate Captain Kidd after a bit of bodice ripping. Though made on the cheap, this energetic swashbuckler sprints from one high-drama moment to the next. It must have been great fun for kiddies who considered themselves too sophisticated for Howdy Doody and that uncool TV Captain, viz., Kangaroo. The picture’s great set piece is the rollicking cat fight between Eva and Sonia Sorrell as Anne Bonny, the legendary eighteenth-century female pirate. Eva lunges, attacks, pulls hair, and the two women roll on the ground in a knock-down, drag-out fight that won’t stop until Captain Kidd picks up Eva and carries her off into the tropical underbrush as she shrieks, “Let me go! I’ll murder her!” (Stuntwomen did the actual clawing and scratching; we see Eva and Sonia in only a few shots.)

  The Mad Magician (1954), a cult favorite set in the late 1800s, is imitation Hitchcock. Eva has little to do but wear fancy gowns and furs up to the moment when Vincent Price, as the magician of the title, strangles her.

  * * *

  The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), based on the short story “Babylon Revisited” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, droops under Richard Brooks’s dull direction and the phlegmatic screenplay. Tired, also, even in 1954, was the self-pitying myth of Scott and Zelda, the Lost Generation, and their long American hangover in Paris.

  MGM was drooping, also, and the big-name cast seems worn-out: Elizabeth Taylor, Van Johnson, Walter Pidgeon, Donna Reed, and Roger Moore. Eva, however, sparkles in the gloom. She plays Lorraine Quarl, a jaded butterfly of café society and the international set in the high-fashion costumes designed for her by the studio’s Helen Rose. In two scenes with Elizabeth Taylor, Eva is equally striking, which cannot be said of many
other stars. Two of Eva’s scenes stand out. In one, she lets the camera reveal her stripped of glamour, violating the Gabor code that you only accept roles where you look better than anyone else. When she’s caught in a downpour, Eva’s hair is mussed and makeup dribbles down her waterlogged face.

  Her next stand-out scene occurs in a nightclub. Eva’s character is having an affair with Van Johnson. In a drunken brawl, Johnson starts a fight with another man. His wife, played by Elizabeth Taylor, stalks off in a huff, leaving Eva alone at the table to witness the fistfight. The camera moves to Eva in a five-second reaction shot that may be the best acting of her career. An expression of total despair crosses her beautiful face, which seems to age five years in an instant. She lowers her eyes, then her head, in complete dejection, as if her character’s hedonistic, empty life had flashed before her to reveal the darkness of the world.

  Speaking of Elizabeth Taylor in later years, Eva said, “She wasn’t very friendly back then. We get along better now.” Elizabeth’s reserve surely had to do with Zsa Zsa, who, owing to Taylor’s marriage to Nicky Hilton, narrowly missed becoming her mother-in-law. In later decades, Zsa Zsa and Elizabeth became friends, although wary ones. Taylor liked to needle Zsa Zsa by calling her “Mother.” Zsa Zsa was quick to point out on talk shows that “this is ridiculous, since we are the same age.” Except that “Mother” was born in 1917, and Elizabeth in 1932.

  * * *

  If you must watch a Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedy, Artists and Models (1955) is perhaps the least unbearable. Directed by Frank Tashlin as a long cartoon, it offers Dorothy Malone, who was such a pro that she manages to act a bit even here; Garboesque Anita Ekberg, who can steal any scene just by standing still; Shirley MacLaine; and Eva as a Russian spy who vamps Jerry Lewis.

  Here, Eva lowers her voice to a throaty chest register and speaks in slow, seductive whispers. Owing to such careful line readings, her accent recedes. This is how she should have spoken in all her performances. Unfortunately, in many scenes she is shot in profile so that, owing to a weak jawline, she looks matronly and a bit staid. Eva required full-face cinematography in order to glow.

  Chapter 20

  Moulin Rouge

  Films about artists and their lives usually go astray. Two examples: Lust for Life, starring Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh, and The Agony and the Ecstasy, with Charlton Heston as Michelangelo. One reason for the failure of such biopics is the difficulty of showing an artist at work: it’s seldom engrossing onscreen or off, just as movies about writers must rely on everything but what a writer does. In the movies, a painter at the easel or an author at a keyboard holds as much interest as a dentist filling teeth.

  John Huston poured much love into Moulin Rouge, since Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was one of his favorite painters. The director owned several of his works. Watching the movie is like seeing the Lautrec catalogue raisonné come to life across the screen, for Huston’s color palette matches the painter’s own. The result is that Huston’s re-creation of the paintings, and of fin-de-siècle Paris, succeeds better than his scripted biography of Toulouse-Lautrec. Therein lay the aesthetic challenge, which Huston met head-on. To a great extent, his visual accomplishment hides the picture’s flaws, so that Moulin Rouge stands among the iconic films of the 1950s. “From the first,” Zsa Zsa recalled, “John Huston had a paralyzing effect on me. He was the kind of dour man who makes me feel that he thinks everything I say to him is a lie.”

  Huston didn’t want her for the part of the dancer and singer Jane Avril in Moulin Rouge, and he was hostile to her during much of the shoot. According to Stuart M. Kaminsky, author of John Huston: Maker of Magic, “Huston was unmerciful to Gabor, who had trouble with her lines. He had her repeat scenes over and over and sing [i.e., lip-synch] the film’s theme song dozens of times. He criticized her for dropping words at the ends of sentences, and she replied that this was her natural Hungarian inflection.” (Anyone studying Hungarian soon learns that this is indeed the case.)

  How, then, did Zsa Zsa land the most important role of her career, the role for which she is best remembered? Huston had nothing to do with it, although he was a producer of the film, along with Jack Clayton, who is best remembered as director of such pictures as Room at the Top (1959) and The Great Gatsby (1974). The other producers were the British founders of Romulus Films, John Woolf and his brother, James Woolf. It was the latter who chose Zsa Zsa and stuck by his choice. In Hollywood scouting for an actress to play Jane Avril, Woolf met Zsa Zsa and realized immediately what she might bring to the part. “You’re more like Jane Avril than anyone I can imagine,” he told her. As a gay man, Woolf perhaps valued the oddball quality of Zsa Zsa’s screen presence: the high-gloss mannerisms, along with the petulant, voluptuous ego of a drag queen, plus the camp accent of a Moon Goddess—all of this, plus eye-popping beauty, made her as indelible as a Dietrich or a Mae West. It was perhaps Woolf also who acceded to demands from Zsa Zsa’s agent that she receive star billing, even though she appears in a mere handful of scenes and her total screen time amounts to no more than eight or ten minutes. But her name comes second in the credits, under that of José Ferrer, who plays Toulouse-Lautrec.

  “Almost from the day the script arrived,” Zsa Zsa remembered, “I began learning my lines. In Jane Avril I saw myself—or the self I wanted to be.” Zsa Zsa was no dummy, though sometimes she might appear so. Reading the script, she grasped the melancholy subtext that ultimately turns the film, for some viewers, into a Technicolor nightmare. On page after page she found what she considered “lovely, heartbreaking scenes, as if my own heart were speaking the words.”

  John Huston surely knew that if he made Moulin Rouge in Hollywood it would end up as Dore Schary’s picture, or Darryl Zanuck’s, or Jack Warner’s. Meaning a big beached whale of an enterprise, chopped by censors, with no doubt a tacked-on happy ending to qualify as family entertainment. Huston was having none of it. The Huston of Moulin Rouge is a European director, literally and figuratively. He shot Moulin Rouge in Paris and London, with an international cast that included no native-born Americans in leading roles except for José Ferrer, whose Hispanic heritage qualified him as quasi-European although he was born in Puerto Rico and thus a U.S. citizen. (Two later Huston films, Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Dead, have the look and feel of European works.)

  * * *

  “I want this film to look as though Toulouse-Lautrec himself directed it,” Huston told his director of photography, Oswald Morris. Together they devised a system of running the film past a specialized light to fog it before it was loaded into the camera. Their next step was to produce the desired effect with the help of gauzes. Huston also hired Eliot Elisofon, a photographer employed by Life magazine, to experiment with new techniques and special filters in the use of Technicolor. In collaboration with consultants from the Technicolor laboratories—or in spite of them, according to some reports—Huston, Morris, and Elisofon created a muted palette of soft, flattened tones that contradicted the usual saturated colors of the Technicolor process. Going further still, Huston wanted his actors photographed under blue lights. Zsa Zsa recalled yet another special effect: “All about us were prop men with machines puffing blue smoke. John wanted everything to appear as Toulouse-Lautrec saw the world around him, in shadows of blue and green—the colors that haunt his paintings and express the sadness of his spirit.” These mood-colors functioned somewhat like motifs in music and literature. As in the paintings and posters, so in the film: vivid colors in the foreground, blue-green shadows behind. Zsa Zsa’s costumes, designed by Schiaparelli in crimson and regal purple, are the best example of Huston’s technique in re-creating Toulouse-Lautrec’s palette on celluloid. In one scene, she blazes in a red gown, with even redder jewelry—ruby tiara, ruby necklace and earrings. In another, gowned in black with a long boa of warmest sunflower yellow and matching plumed hat, she looks like a ravishing bumblebee.

  The happy result of such extraordinary attention to detail is a film that seems to rec
apture the light, the smoke, the very air of nighttime Paris as savored by habitués of the Moulin Rouge. But also the narrow, cobblestoned streets and the cluttered apartment of the afflicted artist, whose growth stopped in childhood owing to a fall that stunted both legs. Toulouse-Lautrec reached a height of only four and a half feet. Owing to his tortured sense of inadequacy, and to the impossibility of finding a woman to return his love, he died in 1901 as a result of severe alcoholism and other ailments. He was thirty-seven years old. During his lifetime, and ever since, Toulouse-Lautrec and the famous cabaret with the red windmill on its roof have seemed conjoined, even though the original Moulin Rouge burned in 1915. (Soon rebuilt, it still packs in tourists by the busload.) According to Gerstle Mack in his 1938 biography of Toulouse-Lautrec, “Among the picturesque cabarets, dance halls, cafés-concerts, restaurants of every sort, hole-in-the-wall dives, and every sort of establishment catering to macabre, fantastic, or hilarious tastes, none ranked higher during the painter’s prime than Le Moulin Rouge.”

  Huston wished to show all of that and more, but to ward off the howls of offended puritans he and co-author of the screenplay Anthony Veiller sanitized the Lautrec story. Even so, illicit suggestions jostle one another in the final cut: cancan dancers in lacy pantaloons flinging up skirts to show front side and back; streetwalkers; seedy taverns where the consumption of absinthe resembles an opium den; brothels; and a hint of lesbianism as two women, pressed together, twirl around the dance floor of the Moulin Rouge. Huston’s only significant clash with the Hollywood production code had to do with an advertising poster that showed a cancan dancer’s exposed thigh. The leg was soon edited, Moulin Rouge opened in late December 1952 in Los Angeles to qualify for Oscar consideration, and Zsa Zsa’s hour of triumph came in February 1953 at the New York premiere.