by Sam Staggs
Sometime after nightfall, she woke up to a suite full of red roses. Rubi strikes again! Full of liquor and remorse, he had roamed around Vegas, taking in Marlene Dietrich’s show at the Sahara and Lena Horne’s at the Sands. He had lost thousands at the gambling tables. He cared nothing for Barbara Hutton, but he was determined to marry her.
When he knocked, Zsa Zsa let him in. The Q and A recommenced. He bent over her bed of woe and kissed her. “Darling, I love you,” he said as he left for the airport. At the time, Rubi denied having struck Zsa Zsa. Some years later, however, he confessed that “once, during a tiff, she received a black eye,” adding, “then she gave a party to show it off and have it photographed.”
A party indeed, with everyone invited. In the early afternoon of December 28, just hours before Zsa Zsa, Eva, and Magda were to go onstage for their first show, Marlene Dietrich knocked on Zsa Zsa’s door. Although she and Zsa Zsa were not fond of each other, Dietrich and Eva had formed a liaison and now, in the interest of damage control, Eva enlisted Marlene’s help. “I’ve brought you some panstick to cover that eye,” said Dietrich. She sat down on the bed. “He’s a beast,” she opined, “but he must love you very much to strike you like that.” Zsa Zsa claimed that Dietrich, from the bedside, phoned gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen with the scoop.
Was Zsa Zsa properly grateful for such ministrations? Unfortunately not. “Next day Marlene turned against me,” she said. “When she saw all those headlines, it was too much for her. She even denied she saw the black eye.” Denial or not, it is true that Dietrich did not like being overshadowed by someone she considered an upstart.
Russell Birdwell spotted gold in Zsa Zsa’s purple bruise. “Tell everybody!” he ordered. “And cover it with a black eye patch.” After convincing her that such patches were not limited to pirates and the male models in Hathaway shirt advertisements, Birdwell called a press conference. “Make a lark out of the whole thing,” he whispered as Zsa Zsa entered like a giddy buckaneer to flashbulbs and whistles.
Chapter 23
It Didn’t Stay in Vegas
In a matter of hours Zsa Zsa and her eye patch became an iconic image, as famous as the picture of Marilyn Monroe’s skirt blowing up on a New York sidewalk. The next night, dancers in Dietrich’s show appeared in eye patches. At New Year’s Eve parties around the country, black patches were the dernier cri, especially those encrusted with rhinestones. After the Vegas show closed and Zsa Zsa flew to New York, every reporter who met her plane had on a patch. Eva, Magda, and Jolie didn’t find it funny: she had stolen the show. “Thank God, I only have one of you,” chided Jolie. Eva especially resented being caught up in Zsa Zsa’s exhibitionism. She guessed, and with reason, that her sister’s ongoing sideshow diminished the chances that producers and casting directors would take her seriously as an actress. Who could gainsay her apprehension, for Eva would always be a Gabor, with all the perks and liabilities of the name.
* * *
Surely the most interesting feature of the Rubirosa-Hutton nuptials was the headlines. A typical one, from the New York Daily News on December 29, 1953: RUBIROSA, SPURNED BY ZSA ZSA, TO WED BABS HUTTON TOMORROW. The marriage, such as it was, took place on December 30. A writer for the Milwaukee Sentinel captured the funereal atmosphere of the ceremony with this line: “The bride, for her fifth wedding, wore black and carried a scotch-and-soda.” The coupling lasted fifty-three days, until February 20, 1954. Hutton was forty-one at the time, and owing to prescription drugs, alcohol, and myriad illnesses, could have passed for sixty. The quid pro quo of the marriage was always clear: sex for her, money for him. Whether the Woolworth heiress was really the world’s second-richest woman or not, she paid well. In this case, two and a half million in cash, along with miscellaneous gifts including a coffee plantation back home in the Dominican Republic.
A week after the Las Vegas engagement, Zsa Zsa was in New York to emcee a fashion show. Early one morning the phone rang in her room at the Plaza. It was, of course, Rubirosa, bored and annoyed by the new wife he could barely tolerate. He was nearby; he begged to come up. Zsa Zsa refused, he hung up in a fury, but a few days later he telephoned from Palm Beach, where reporters swarmed day and night around the newlyweds. He bombarded Zsa Zsa with calls wherever she went. If the concept of stalking had existed at the time, Rubirosa might have been judged guilty.
The headlines would not go away, nor the feeding frenzy, and for a time newspaper stories about the pair—Zsa Zsa and Rubi, since Barbara Hutton, after fifty-three days as Mrs. Rubi, was both gone and forgotten—eclipsed the first issue of Playboy with its pictures of a nude Marilyn Monroe; the coronation in London; and the threat of nuclear war. From 1953 until 1955 and beyond, Zsa Zsa and Rubirosa’s media avalanche foreshadowed that of Taylor and Burton in the early sixties and the much later downmarket one of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
Zsa Zsa, determined to forget him, signed for a Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis picture, 3 Ring Circus. The shoot began in the middle of February 1954 at Paramount, then moved to Phoenix in April for several weeks of exteriors. While still at the studio, Zsa Zsa left the set to testify in George’s divorce suit. “In spite of myself I cried on the stand,” she said. “It was the first time I had ever shown my true feelings in public.”
Accustomed to actressy tears on the witness stand, several costars and others at Paramount turned Zsa Zsa’s distress into a comedy. “Lucky girl, you’re free again,” someone called out. This time it wasn’t Kathryn Grayson who came to her rescue, but Grace Kelly, on break from a nearby set where she was filming The Country Girl. “Why don’t you stop teasing her,” she admonished the jokesters. “She’s unhappier than you think.” Remembering Grace’s kindness, Zsa Zsa said, “I have always been grateful for her friendship that terrible day.”
3 Ring Circus belongs, of course, to Martin and Lewis. Zsa Zsa and the other female costar, Joanne Dru, serve as accessories, each with a few brief scenes scattered through the picture. They did not like each other, and clashed often. After one dispute in which Joanne came out the winner, Zsa Zsa threatened, “I’ll get even with you if it takes forever.” Her adversary shot back, “It probably will, but aren’t you rather old to talk about a future?”
To continue Zsa Zsa’s Rubirosa-as-sickness metaphor . . . he trailed her to Phoenix, and she could find no antidote to his viral obsession, nor her own. In reality, if a cure existed she didn’t want to find it. Even so, the world grew tired of Zsa Zsa and Rubi. Newspapers and magazines, however, must fill pages, and so paparazzi and reporters kept at it, famished for any new detail. Rubirosa, like Zsa Zsa, had a keen wit. He flew to Arizona in the private plane that Barbara Hutton had given him to replace the one from Doris Duke. Reporters surrounded him, demanding, “Where is Zsa Zsa?” and “What are you doing in Phoenix?”
“I was headed for Nicaragua,” he answered, “but I was blown off course.”
In spring, with Barbara Hutton divorced and Rubi a free man, he and Zsa Zsa announced their engagement. In June 1954 came an even more amazing announcement: they would costar in a film for Republic Pictures to be called Western Affair, with a script by Bundy Solt. Other working titles included Zsa Zsa Goes West, Zsa Zsa the Kid, and Rubi Rides Again. Fortunately for moviegoers, and for the shreds of Zsa Zsa’s career, Rubi was denied a work permit by the U.S. State Department.
Ironic, and sadly indicative of Zsa Zsa’s future trajectory, was her fall from MGM, Fox, and Paramount to Poverty Row and Republic Pictures. Even though the bizarre horse opera didn’t materialize, from 1954 onwards she would be thought of as a trash actress, and often named as such along with Vera Hruba Ralston, wife of Herbert Yates, founder of Republic Pictures and studio head for many years. Anyone familiar with the word “camp” is likely to name Vera Hruba Ralston as the concept’s leading lady, even in such a crowded field. (The authors of The Golden Turkey Awards, a 1980 book, nominated her, along with Candice Bergen and Mamie Van Doren, as “Worst Actress of All Time.” All three lost to Raquel We
lch.)
Like a summer cold that lingers with low-grade fever, Rubirosa was unshakable. The precise reason that he and Zsa Zsa never married was her refusal to abandon her career. In 1956, he found a woman who would, the nineteen-year-old minor French actress and model Odile Rodin. Their marriage lasted until his death nine years later.
He telephoned Zsa Zsa from Paris the day before the wedding so that she would hear it first from him. On the verge of great tears, she could say only, “I wish you all happiness.” When nine-year-old Francesca heard the news, she said, “Mother, is it true that Uncle Rubi got married?”
“Yes, darling.”
“But I thought he loved only us.” She had lost two fathers already, Conrad Hilton and George Sanders, and now Uncle Rubi was gone. Francesca’s quest would go on and on, until at last no fathers remained.
* * *
Even at the eleventh hour, hope was not lost for Zsa Zsa’s career. Before the final break with Rubi, she and George costarred twice, first in a TV drama and then in the feature film, Death of a Scoundrel. On television in April 1956, the comedy-drama Autumn Fever shows Zsa Zsa in the afterglow of her good performance in L’Ennemi public. Again she lowers her voice to a breathy whisper. As Countess Dara Szabo, she almost succeeds in breaking up the marriage of a middle-aged grandfather, played by George. He is one reason for Zsa Zsa’s good performance. She was still in love with him, and together they effervesce. When they kiss, we see what drew them together onscreen and off. They dance the mambo and it’s their entire relationship in miniature: Zsa Zsa the aggressor, and George passively willing. We’re like voyeurs peeping into the marriage, now defunct, of Zsa Zsa and George.
In Death of a Scoundrel, we ascertain more clearly the eccentric chemistry of their match. The scoundrel, of course, is George Sanders as Clementi Sabourin, a Czech refugee who arrives in New York after World War II and amasses a fortune through a nexus of corrupt deals. The character is based on Serge Rubinstein, whose millions came from currency manipulations and other shady schemes. In 1955 he was found murdered in his Fifth Avenue town house. The murderer was never found, but Time magazine quoted a reporter as saying, “They’ve narrowed the list of suspects to 10,000.”
Described as “the most hated man on earth” and “an evil genius,” Sabourin in Death of a Scoundrel engages in nothing that every crooked politician in Washington isn’t guilty of: financial chicanery, insider trading, money funneled to mistresses, fraud of every sort. But because this is a noirish morality play, the title’s prediction must come true.
Zsa Zsa, a wealthy widow who plays the stock market, falls in with Sabourin’s scheme to get richer quick. She also falls for him, but so does Yvonne De Carlo. Others in the cast include Victor Jory and Sanders’s brother, Tom Conway. Photographed by the legendary James Wong Howe, the picture should have turned out better. It was doomed from the start, however, by the inexpert and inexperienced Charles Martin as writer-producer-director.
In her scenes with Sanders, Zsa Zsa the coquette seems as amused by the challenge of George as when they were home alone and inventing their own Albee-esque scripts. “Don’t play with me,” she warns. “I’m a tigress. I’ll bite you.”
“I accept the offer,” he purrs.
Her militant flirtation, and his effete response, suggest a parallel universe: a home movie of Zsa Zsa and George as they were just a few years earlier, so happy to be unhappily wed. His campy line in the movie—to Colleen Gray, at an intimate dinner—should have been delivered to Zsa Zsa: “I flew the lobster in from Maine and the onions from Bermuda.”
Yvonne De Carlo and Zsa Zsa have one scene together. De Carlo plays a wiggling tart from the New York waterfront, and Zsa Zsa snubs her when they meet in Sanders’s office. This is how Zsa Zsa sometimes reacted in real life to women she instinctively disliked or who made her feel insecure. (A psychological graph might show fifty percent Zsa Zsa and the other fifty percent insecurity.) Not deigning to speak, she lifts her head like a Persian cat in a Disney film—so high that her nose nears the ceiling. With a slight grimace, as if catching a whiff of soiled laundry, she sashays out of the room. A famous photograph of Rubirosa introducing his new wife, Odile Rodin, to Zsa Zsa captured the very same look.
Chapter 24
Mama, Don’t Cry at My Wedding
In the early 1950s Eva bought a five-story, one-family townhouse at 1033 Fifth Avenue, between Eighty-fourth and Eighty-fifth streets, and one block north of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Owing to the long run of The Happy Time and to her radio and TV appearances, she felt financially secure. Eva daydreamed of a gilded life in her spacious multistory, with herself as chatelaine and vassals at her side. Before applying for a mortgage, however, she sought Jolie’s opinion. “Mama dashed over to look at the building and deliver final judgment,” Eva recalled. “She told me I am not her smartest daughter, since it was evident to anyone with eyes that ten apartments could be made in the building.” Eva swapped vassals for leases.
A year and a half later, there were exactly ten apartments in the 9,752-square-foot building, with a doctor’s office on the ground floor and Eva’s floor-through apartment on the second. In 1956, in the high-ceilinged, mahagony-paneled drawing room of that apartment, Eva took husband number three, but not for long.
The magistrate who performed the ceremony on April 8, 1956, was careful to follow’s Eva’s instruction that he omit the word “obey.” Whether or not the phrase “till death do us part” was also omitted, the parting of ways took place a few months later and their divorce became final in March 1957. In public, Eva said nothing about the match. In 2007, however, her abbreviated husband, John Williams, MD, devoted a chapter to it in his self-published memoir, Chasing Pig’s Ears: Memoirs of a Hollywood Plastic Surgeon.
He must have seemed, to every Gabor, dropped like the gentle rain from heaven. And, should Dr. John be unable to cut and lift and sew with expert craft, he had a twin brother, also a plastic surgeon. Eva and John met in Los Angeles. After a few dates, she returned to New York for rehearsals of The Little Glass Clock, which opened on Broadway on March 26, 1956. Ebullient at the prospect of another theatrical triumph, Eva invited John to come for opening night of what she predicted would be “a hit play.”
“After the final curtain,” he recalled, “a party was held at mother Jolie’s home to await the early morning editions of newspapers and to read reviews of the play. They were all bad. The mood of the party changed to resemble a wake.”
A few days later, having recovered from the depression of failure, Eva phoned her new friend. “Dahling, since the play failed I don’t have anything to do. Why don’t we get married?” If that’s really what Eva said, perhaps it was a recycled line from her recent flop, or from a better play she had done last summer.
All the Gabors attended the nuptials, along with thirty or so friends, most of them Eva’s. Reginald Gardner, her costar from the hit manqué, gave the bride away. Zsa Zsa served in her recurring role as matron of honor, with John’s twin brother as best man.
After a honeymoon spent at Jolie’s weekend house in Connecticut, the couple settled for a time in Beverly Hills. Williams joined the practice of an elderly surgeon, and almost immediately Eva left on tour with Blithe Spirit. John’s companions after office hours were a Cockney maid whose dentures clicked when she talked, and two dogs. He soon gauged his importance in Eva’s hierarchy as somewhere between the click and the bark. The tour ended, Eva returned to Beverly Hills, but to her chagrin she learned that doctors often receive late-night calls from patients. “Sveetheart,” she cajoled, as her smile congealed, “can’t you move that goddamn phone out of our bedroom?”
Remembering the manners of his Texas boyhood, he tried to explain that if the phone left the bedroom, he must remove himself with it. And so they met over coffee at breakfast, but rarely in the evenings. As tax time approached, and year-end forms showed that Eva had made four times as much as John, the real reasons for the marriage emerged. He wanted a Gabor in
his life. She wanted a doctor, but a rich doctor. “Dahling,” she said, her voice now less friendly with him than with her dogs, “the man should take care of all his wife’s expenses, including the taxes.”
And then someone called him “Doctor Gabor.” As the moving van departed, Eva’s valediction struck him as terribly wise. Now why didn’t we think of that before, he wondered. “Dahling,” she said, with genuine affection, as if expecting a slow curtain and waves of applause, “we should never have married, we should just have lived together.”
* * *
“Eva was a lesbian. Did you know that?” So said Francesca one afternoon over coffee at her favorite Starbucks in Hollywood. I had heard the rumor years before, but a more accurate term for a woman who married five times is surely bisexual. All the same, I listened as Francesca reeled off the names of some, but not all, of the usual suspects.
In a previous chapter I said that Eva and Marlene Dietrich had formed a liaison. In contemporary parlance, they were friends with benefits. This Jolie must have known, for she told a revealing story about Eva, Marlene, and John Williams, a story with a loud subtext. According to Jolie, Eva telephoned to tell her, “We’re getting a divorce. We had a terrific fight.”
Eva continued, “Thank God for Marlene Dietrich! She is such a good friend. I called Marlene and she came rushing over and you know how Germans are. With such strength she shouted to him, ‘Out!’ She all but threw him out bodily.” Whether Marlene stayed on to console her young friend is not recorded in any book . . . but it’s well known how friendly this German could be.
Behind these versions of the marriage, however, lurks a sinister scenario. What if Confidential or another scandal magazine had a tip-off about Eva’s bisexuality? So feared were these publications, especially by gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, that stars considered vulnerable were either ordered by their studio to marry fast, or, if not under contract, their agents and managers issued similar orders.
