Finding Zsa Zsa

by Sam Staggs

  • Making a personal appearance in Kansas City, Eva signed autographs in exchange for donations to the Hungarian Relief Fund. Total amount raised: $500. She made similar appearances in San Francisco, Houston, and Pittsburgh.

  • In Philadelphia, Zsa Zsa, Ginger Rogers, and Anna Maria Alberghetti each got a $10,000 contribution for the Relief Fund in exchange for a single dance.

  • Magda, working closely with the International Rescue Committee, headlined a five-hour pledge drive for the Relief Fund at a theatre on Long Island, raising an impressive $7,000.

  In 1958, Eva was reported helping Hungarian refugees to find jobs. And in 2016, after Zsa Zsa’s death, it was revealed that she donated half a million dollars of her own money to the refugee cause. One source even said that she had joined Ilona Massey’s picket line outside the Russian consulate in New York, though I have found no further confirmation.

  Before the decade ended, Zsa Zsa and Nikita Khrushchev found themselves in the same room, although, as far as anyone knows, they did not speak nor even nod to each other. This bizarre near-encounter took place on September 19, 1959, in the commissary at 20th Century Fox. Incongruously named the Café de Paris, the commissary could accommodate four hundred people, while at least twice that number clamored for invitations. The Soviet premier had come to the United States at the invitation of President Eisenhower, who apparently soon regretted the presence of such a rowdy guest. Diplomacy and suave talk were not Khrushchev’s strong points; he spoke his mind even if his words offended his hosts.

  Le tout Hollywood clamored for an invitation to the luncheon for Khrushchev and his entourage, the only exceptions being those on the political far right. Among the refuseniks were Bing Crosby and Ronald Reagan. Otherwise, Eisenhower Republicans—not to be confused with the latter-day brand—probably outnumbered Democrats that day.

  The story of this event is delicious, and Peter Carlson has covered it in detail in his book, K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America’s Most Unlikely Tourist. An excerpt from the book appeared in Smithsonian magazine, July 2009, and is available online. Since Carlson has done such an admirable job, I limit my focus to Zsa Zsa and the names of a few other glittering guests, among them Judy Garland, Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Marilyn Monroe—on time for once. Surveying the crowd, director Mark Robson quipped, “This is the nearest thing to a major Hollywood funeral that I’ve attended in years.”

  Ilona Massey, of course, did not show up. As for another unlikely Hungarian, viz., Zsa Zsa—why was she there? Her opinion of Khrushchev and of Soviet brutality matched Ilona Massey’s. The question teased me for years, without resolution. Nor did Peter Carlson have an answer. In an email, he said, “I have no idea why they invited Zsa Zsa, considering her Hungarian background. It does seem odd, doesn’t it? Tickets to the Fox lunch were hard to get; Zsa Zsa must really have wanted to go and she must have had good connections.”

  Finally, however, her probable reason for attending the event occurred to me. She did it to benefit Vilmos and others still in Hungary. The guest list would, of course, be scrutinized in the Kremlin, and the fact that a lone native Hungarian turned out to honor the Soviet leader would carry incalculable weight. No doubt it eased communications between the Gabors and their father, and made it easier for Zsa Zsa in future years to obtain a visa for visits to communist Hungary.

  Francesca, age thirteen, writing from California to Zsa Zsa in Paris in 1960, inquired, “Were you able to telephone Granddaddy?” Thanks to her mother’s shrewd diplomacy, the answer was yes.

  * * *

  A decade after the Hungarian Revolution, Eva divulged to syndicated columnist Hal Humphrey that she had flown to Austria in 1956 at the height of the uprising. Her mission: to bring Vilmos out of Hungary among the floods of refugees crossing the Austrian border.

  Disguised in black wig and nondescript coat, she slipped into Vienna unrecognized and from there to a point near the Hungarian border. Through friends and other connections, she found a peasant who told her that for a thousand dollars he would conceal her father under straw in a wagon, along with other refugees, and deliver him into Austria. As battles raged in Budapest and across the country, the border had become porous.

  The peasant told Eva that the last mile or so would be risky. “I called my father on the phone,” Eva said, “and told him we were planning to take him to the hospital, which was our code word.” Vilmos, old, infirm, and forgetful, spilled the beans. He said, “Oh, it will be wonderful to fly to America and all of us be together again.”

  “I was petrified,” Eva said. “I was sure someone must be listening.”

  There were delays, and Eva made several more trips to the border where she spoke with arriving refugees. The more she heard from them about the horrific gunfire in Budapest, the more nervous and frightened she became at the daring plan. She conferred with Jolie, Magda, and Zsa Zsa by phone. The consensus was that Vilmos would be safer to remain in Budapest.

  Eva left Austria. Not until two years later, in October 1958, did the family see Vilmos. Speaking in 1967, five years after her father’s death, Eva said that in Vienna, at that reunion, they tried to persuade him to come back to America with them. “No,” he said, “I am too old a tree to replant.”

  Zsa Zsa expanded further on their week in Vienna with Vilmos. “When we heard Father talk about his ugly little apartment, we all started to cry. He spoke with such enthusiasm. After his stroke in 1954 he lost much of his hearing and I bought him a hearing aid. He would rather die than wear it. He was too vain to admit he couldn’t hear.”

  Jolie was less bothered by her former husband’s circumstances. At the reunion in Vienna, she whispered to Zsa Zsa, “Now he is really happy for the first time in his life.” Later on, Zsa Zsa came to believe that her mother had a point. Jolie continued, “He was never happy in the big apartments, in the big houses. He was always worried about expenses, about taxes, about his businesses.”

  Although Zsa Zsa, her sisters, and her mother betrayed no annoyance with the invasive cameras and intrusive reporters in Vienna—on the contrary, they smiled for the whole world—in private, Zsa Zsa was furious. “The press insulted me,” she said off the record to her ghostwriter, Gerold Frank, in 1960. “They wrote that I made a grand exit from the plane. They even said I repeated it four times for photographers!” (Newsreel footage contradicts this outrageous claim.) “And,” she continued, “they hounded us for interviews, didn’t give us a minute to be alone with Father.”

  By 1968, when Zsa Zsa returned to Hungary for the first time since 1941, the country had changed. Although still communist, still repressive to political dissidents, for the average Hungarian daily life now more closely resembled the milder totalitarianism of Yugoslavia than the severity of East Germany or Bulgaria. In Budapest, Zsa Zsa received a royal welcome. She was photographed endlessly, for instance, at a fitting in the salon of couturière Klára Rothschild in Vaci Street.

  She returned several times in later years, always to acclaim and always doing more or less as she pleased. In the early 1990s, Eva returned and her nostalgic visit in Budapest to sites from her childhood formed the basis for a teary episode of Robin Leach’s television show. Around the same time, Zsa Zsa, still in the afterglow of her cop-slapping publicity, appeared on the popular Hungarian talk show hosted by Sándor Friderikusz.

  She and her ninth husband, Frederic von Anhalt, roll onstage in a small automobile. The host, dressed in cowboy gear, opens the door and, playing western sheriff, demands her driver’s license and registration. “I have it right here,” she says, “but do not look at my birth date because I am ten years younger.” Zsa Zsa is, of course, elegantly begowned and bejeweled. She is unusually relaxed speaking Hungarian with a host who, unlike the Phil Donahues and Maury Poviches of American tabloid TV, treats her with respect even while spoofing her recent exploits. Zsa Zsa also makes sport of herself. The youngish audience, too,
finds her unlike anything homegrown they have encountered.

  “So you were born in 1948?” asks the sheriff.

  “Yes,” she answers. “Nowadays I’m younger than my daughter.”

  “You must blow into a breathalyzer,” he says, hauling one out.

  “And now I slap you,” she informs him, and does exactly that, as the audience peals with laughter.

  “I must now arrest you,” he rejoins, “and incidentally I have diamond handcuffs.”

  “Very pretty,” she exclaims. “With that you can arrest me.”

  “The verdict is that you must sit and talk with me,” and from there Zsa Zsa’s more or less standard talk-show spiel unfolds.

  It was on this visit that Zsa Zsa obtained a souvenir that she kept on a coffee table in her salon for the rest of her life: a five-inch piece of the barbed wire barrier that had been a part of the Iron Curtain.

  Chapter 26

  If Mama Was Married

  Jolie Gabor, having passed beyond middle age into a state of not-young, not-old, imagined herself permanently girlish, like her menopausal daughters. By the mid-1950s, however, when she had reached her sixties, Jolie acknowledged that her time for great love, and a third marriage, had probably lapsed. But—“the heart has no winter,” she said, as if quoting a Harlequin romance.

  She had become sensitized not only to wrinkles but to the extra pounds that refused concealment under tailleur or ball gown. Always zaftig, but unable to lower her calorie intake, Jolie went to comic extremes to hide her embonpoint. During one of Zsa Zsa’s many solo appearances in Las Vegas, Jolie joined her at the Flamingo Hotel for opening night. “She was overweight at the time,” Zsa Zsa confided off the record to Gerold Frank, “but she wanted to swim in the hotel pool. So she draped herself in a large terry cloth robe but hesitated to take it off. She said, ‘I shouldn’t look too fat—after all, I am the mother of the glamorous star who is appearing tonight.’

  “This was her big dilemma, how she could swim before sundown and not be criticized for the little tire around the waist. Finally we agreed that I would walk with her to the edge of the pool and just as she jumped I would pull the terry cloth robe off her. At the last minute she was in mid-air when I pulled the robe and then she swam like a little duck. When she was ready to come out, I had to walk into the pool up to my knees holding the robe and throw it quickly around her before anybody could see.”

  Nor did Jolie relish the role of grandmother. “You don’t know what sacrifices I make for your daughter,” she groused to Zsa Zsa.

  “This is your only grandchild!”

  “She ages me.”

  And so, in December 1956, feeling past her romantic prime, Jolie busied herself with activities in aid of the 30,000 Hungarian refugees temporarily housed in army barracks at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. At a holiday party for seventy of these displaced Hungarians that Jolie gave in her Manhattan town house, she chatted briefly with a man two decades younger than herself. He seemed shy, or was he merely reserved? She made inquiries, and learned that his name was Edmond de Szigethy.

  Excited by the “de,” which suggested a pedigree, Jolie inquired further. She learned, from reliable sources or otherwise, that he was an aristocrat from a landowning family. After the communists seized their lands, Edmond earned his living in the textile business. Jolie found out also that although Edmond was a Catholic, he had sheltered several Jews in his apartment when the Nazis invaded Hungary. During the recent revolution, he escaped to Vienna with twenty-seven dollars in his pocket and the clothes he was wearing.

  Edmond wrote Jolie a thank-you note after the party. Its proper phrasing, neither flowery nor stilted, helped capture her unwintered heart. So elegant, so handsome was he that she did not hold poverty against him.

  Jolie’s account of their courtship echoes romance novels and Cosmopolitan raciness. In her town house was an apartment seldom occupied, although rented to Harry Karl, the future second husband of Debbie Reynolds. Jolie’s description of the apartment perhaps explains why the tenant avoided it, for she had decorated it “not for a businessman but for a French madam, with gilt chairs and a round red velvet bed.” Becoming fonder of Edmond, she rang up her absentee renter to ask whether she might use his apartment “for a beautiful Hungarian who is broke and good-looking.”

  “Okay,” Harry chuckled, “but only if you promise to sleep with him in my round red velvet bed.”

  For the sake of propriety, Jolie would traipse upstairs late at night in her pajamas, or Edmond would descend to her. Head over heels in love, she nonetheless hesitated. He was so much younger, and really, how well did she know him? Jolie was able to reach her sister Dora in Budapest, who sent a cable with distressing news: “He is a heavy drinker. He beat up his former wife. He is impulsive, throws money away but is smart and can make life even on an iceberg.” When Edmond explained that this report came from the divorce papers of his angry ex-wife, Jolie’s anxiety eased. She would marry him and put him to work in her jewelry store.

  * * *

  During the period from 1955–1958, Jolie was at the peak of her creativity in the world of costume jewelry. A columnist called her the Queen of Madison Avenue, and with reason: she would not have survived in that high-end location if she merely sold jewelry. She had become an institution: a Hungarian Auntie Mame. Everybody went to Jolie’s—to her shop came wealthy matrons, movie stars, and ladies of the stage, and at night these and others partied in her town house with husbands and escorts. They laughed at her outrageous pronouncements as they shelled out hundreds of dollars, and an invitation to her soirées meant more than tea with Mrs. Vanderbilt. Jolie was madcap fun, nutty, wacky, and only too eager to tell you whether you looked good, or lousy.

  Her wedding to Edmond took place on March 3, 1957, in the Gallucci town house. Zsa Zsa and Magda gave their mother away, years too late they joked, and everyone lamented that Eva could not be present. She was dealing with the opposite end of marriage, viz., her divorce from that Dr. Williams whose ringing telephone disgruntled her sleep.

  Soon the family chronicles anointed Edmond as “Count de Szigethy,” and Jolie as a consequent countess. But a counternarrative reached American shores. Some who knew him in Hungary claimed that he purchased the title and that he never had more money in his pocket than those twenty-seven dollars that were in it when he left Hungary. Whatever the illusions, their marriage endured as perhaps the family’s happiest. It ended with Edmond’s death in an automobile accident in 1989.

  * * *

  Although the protracted Rubirosa affair had tarnished Zsa Zsa’s reputation, she did some of her best screen work—and some of her most errant—post-Rubi. While Death of a Scoundrel qualified as a solid noirish B-picture, her next one, The Girl in the Kremlin, almost demanded a laugh track. Or so moviegoers imagined, without bothering to see it. The gaudy title kept all but the desperate out of theatres. Directed by Russell Birdwell, Zsa Zsa’s sometime publicist, in a wet-cement style, it’s a Cold War exploitation movie that’s creepy despite its cheap sluggishness.

  Zsa Zsa plays twins, Lili and Greta Grishenko. Lithuanian by birth, they were separated by the war. Lili went to the U.S., Greta to Russia, where she became a nurse who, in the opening sequence, assists a plastic surgeon doing a makeover on none other than the old monster, Joseph Stalin. The reason: coup plotters in the Kremlin plan to assassinate the mega-assassin himself. The writers should have brushed up on surgical procedures: Stalin is given only a local anaesthetic, as though for removal of a skin tag. In an anticipatory scene Zsa Zsa slaps costar Lex Barker, as she was to slap the Beverly Hills cop thirty-two years later.

  Asked by a reporter about taking on a dual role, Zsa Zsa replied, “I have to be careful not to steal scenes from myself.”

  Albert Zugsmith produced The Girl in the Kremlin in 1957. Filming at Universal lasted a mere two and a half weeks, from February 4 to 22. On February 18, Zugsmith’s production of Touch of Evil began shooting, also at Universal, with Orson Welles a
s director. Since Zsa Zsa was still on hand at the studio, Zugsmith put her into one of the most prestigious films of her career, although for less than a minute and with two brief lines of dialogue. Zugsmith liked the Gabors; in 1953 he had chosen Eva for a lead in Paris Model.

  Marlene Dietrich and Zsa Zsa, in that order, are listed as “guest stars” in Touch of Evil. Among the collection of grotesques in this Dickensian film noir, Zsa Zsa stands out as almost wholesome. Playing the madam of a bordello in a Mexican border town in a story that oozes corruption, Zsa Zsa descends a staircase to answer questions for the sheriff, played by Welles, about one of the strippers.

  “Zita? I didn’t know her. She only joined the show a few days ago.” That’s all we hear from Zsa Zsa, a silvery presence, slightly tarnished, floating above this slimy firmament.

  According to Universal-International production notes, Zsa Zsa was paid a thousand dollars plus an additional eighty dollars under her day player agreement with the studio, meaning of course that she worked for a single day. Zsa Zsa’s contract stipulated that “if the name of any other guest star is accorded credit so must she [be credited] as a guest star. The name of no other guest star shall be in size of type larger than that used to display her name.” Dietrich, on the other hand, demanded contractually that “no other guest star may precede her name.”

  * * *

  Another Gabor made an even briefer appearance in Touch of Evil. Or did she? For the first time around 2015, on IMDb.com, the name of Eva Gabor appeared near the bottom of the film’s complete cast list. My first thought was, “Not again! Why do they always confuse Zsa Zsa and Eva?” But according to this reliable website, Eva is a stripper sitting at the bar. And uncredited onscreen. To be sure, there is a woman seated at the bar who looks like Eva. She appears for a split second in one shot, as the camera tracks toward Zsa Zsa descending the staircase. But is it Eva? I have scrutinized the shot on DVD and Blu-Ray, both the release version from 1958 and the 1990s restoration. Just when I’m certain that it’s Eva on the bar stool, I become equally convinced that it isn’t. (The American Film Institute’s online Catalog of Feature Films does not list Eva Gabor in the Touch of Evil credits.) Given Orson Welles’s playfulness in casting the picture, however, it fits that Eva, in profile, might be half hidden under makeup. After all, several other stars appear uncredited, unrecognizable, or both. When I contacted the University of Iowa Libraries, where Zugsmith’s papers are housed, I learned that neither Gabor is named in the producer’s documents for Touch of Evil.