Finding Zsa Zsa

by Sam Staggs

  Cox phoned Rogers and Cowan, Eva’s PR firm at the time, telling them how she embarrassed him in front of a number of people at CBS. The gist of their response, according to Cox, was, She gets a little batty at times. Now you know what we have to deal with. In twenty minutes it’s gone from her head and from everyone else’s.

  Although this incident shows Eva in an unflattering light, it is important to fathom the desperation behind it. At seventy-four, though still beautiful and full of energy, she qualified for that dreaded category: a has-been. She had done nothing of significance for years. Her last picture was The Princess Academy, released in 1987. On TV, she turned up sporadically on sitcoms, and she lived alone, having divorced Frank Jameson, her fifth husband, in 1983. Merv Griffin, for years considered her great romance, was a friend. He was gay, she was his beard, and her own low-key lesbianism satisfied only the occasional longing. Nothing remained for Eva but mediocre and repetitive talk shows. She did have her highly successful wig business, but that spotlight shone too dim. Like so many stars of the studio era, now lost and wandering, Eva craved acting assignments. For most of her life, the camera had been more present, and more faithful, than her husbands. Nor did she ever quarrel with a camera as she did with her sisters, her niece, even the indomitable Jolie. Given Eva’s desolation at this time, the notion of a Green Acres cookbook with her name on it must have seemed momentous, like a return to those busy years of summer theatre, personal appearances, so many offers from TV and Hollywood that her agent stayed busy turning them down. Now she felt she must grab any morsel dragged to her doorstep, and growl at the hand reaching to snatch it away. When she snarled at Stephen Cox, it covered a wailing cry of pain.

  * * *

  The Beverly Hillbillies movie came out in October 1993, and Cox was invited to the wrap party. Zsa Zsa was there, since she played herself in a cameo in the picture, and Cox met her. “It was a quick encounter,” he said, “nothing more than hello, good to see you.” Paul Henning told him, however, of his own encounter with Zsa Zsa a year or so after Green Acres ended. She said, “You should have hired me, dahling, instead of Eva.”

  Had Zsa Zsa forgotten that midway through the run of Green Acres, she had a crack at her own show? In 1969, KCOP-TV in Los Angeles aired the pilot episode of The Zsa Zsa Gabor Show—a trainwreck of epic proportions, mercifully short-lived. It was obvious from the opening moments that the show would flop. A talk-show host must appear interested in the guests, but Zsa Zsa was glued to herself. Among the many duties of the host is to keep guests in place both literally and figuratively while avoiding lags in the conversation, and to steer the show along in what seems an effortless direction. Poor Zsa Zsa looked like a YouTube amateur facing the camera: thrilled but strained.

  Her first guests were Adam West, of TV’s Batman, and Marty Allen, the comedian. After a stretch of lame, rhythmless repartee with them, Zsa Zsa introduced “my dear, dear friend, Miss Lucille Ball.” The problem with this big-name guest, here and elsewhere, was that everyone wished for hilarious Lucy Ricardo rather than staid Lucille Ball. Even such pros as Johnny Carson and Joan Rivers labored to squeeze a funny line from her.

  Upon entry, each guest stood about for several minutes as if waiting to hail a taxi; they probably wished they could. Zsa Zsa, so confident as a talk-show guest and so much in control as hostess at her own parties, lacked all sense of traffic control. And the script, if one existed, was abominable.

  Zsa Zsa: “Who was the most fascinating man in your life?”

  Lucille Ball: “Are we on that subject already? I’ve met some fascinating men. I think you married some of them.” After a long pause, she came up with Bernard Baruch, the financier, statesman, and political advisor to Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Zsa Zsa: “I love gray-haired men.”

  Lucille: “He had a lot more than gray hair. He had a lot of gray matter. FDR was another fascinating man.”

  Zsa Zsa: “I used to date him.” No one even chuckled at her preposterous joke.

  Lucille: “I thought it was Kennedy.” She grew visibly ill at ease with this surreal conversation.

  To make matters worse, the set looked like a funeral parlor: off-white walls, tight floral arrangements, possibly artificial—and then Marty Allen presented Zsa Zsa with flowers in the shape of a casket wreath. You can almost smell the sickly-sweet odor of mortuary carnations.

  As if to quadruple the show’s awfulness, the final guest was a lounge lizard vocalist. Ostensibly from Hawaii, he revealed that he came from the Bronx.

  Okay then, a Bronx cheer for the show and everyone on it.

  Chapter 31

  Another One Gone, and Another

  One Bites the Dust

  Whether Zsa Zsa guessed it or not, post-Rubi and après Trujillo, her long-running future role would require no memorizing of lines, no study with drama coaches, no auditions or screen tests. She had learned the character by heart, having played her already for four decades. Hereafter, she would act the part of Zsa Zsa Gabor, and her evolution as actress-personality would take place as slowly as that of Little Orphan Annie in the comics. Unlike that famous ragamuffin, however, who wore the same dress for eighty years, Zsa Zsa’s appearances on TV and elsewhere resembled an haute couture runway that stretched to the vanishing point. And so well did she know her craft that even when audiences thinned and applause grew anemic, she played her part upon that long, narrow stage to the last syllable of her allotted time.

  * * *

  One of Zsa Zsa’s smartest moves in her transition from big screen to small was to accept an invitation for The Jack Paar Tonight Show. Making her most significant debut on late-night TV (earlier, she had been Steve Allen’s guest in the same time slot), she sashayed into camera view on May 9, 1958, in the first of dozens of appearances with Paar. As Paar’s guest, she was everything she wasn’t in that disastrous pilot for The Zsa Zsa Gabor Show eleven years later.

  Her host, who in retrospect seems unattractively sentimental and mercurial, as well as deficient in the sincerity he worked so hard to project, nevertheless put together a sophisticated lineup of talk and variety that showcased talent from New York, Hollywood, and elsewhere. He invited actors, writers, politicians, comedians, musicians, and eccentrics, among them the established as well as newcomers who, in Paar’s opinion, deserved nationwide exposure. Conversation occupied over half of each Tonight Show, and the talk ranged from serious discussions to witty, even goofy, repartee, from barbs to bonhomie. Considering the time and place—late fifties into early sixties on American TV—Paar’s conversations with such guests as JFK, Richard Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Fidel Castro set a gold standard matched by few subsequent shows. In later years, some television historians named Paar as an auteur of early TV. Egos were not absent, of course, but neither did guests parrot only preapproved, manager-scripted plugs for their latest endeavors. Controversy also shadowed the Paar show. He and his guests made headlines, most famously when Paar himself, angered by network censorship of an opening monologue, quit the show after an on-air tirade.

  Writing about Zsa Zsa in I Kid You Not, the first of his several books, Paar echoed the tone of his nightly opening monologues: “Zsa Zsa is like the girl next door—if you live next door to Tiffany’s. The first time she came on the show I thought she was carrying a flashlight; her engagement ring looked so heavy I suspect she had to starch her finger to support it. Just before coming on, Zsa Zsa asked me what I wanted her to do.

  “ ‘Just be yourself,’ I told her.”

  “That was my first mistake. She burbled on about her romances, interrupted the commercials and otherwise confused the National Broadcasting Company. Her performance was unbelievable, and, as Earl Wilson said, I unbelieved.

  “Mama Gabor is a friend of mine, too, as are her other daughters, Magda and Eva. Once on the show Eva reported that Mama planned to sell her jewelry store in New York and move to Palm Springs but there were so many protests that she changed her mind. Eva
didn’t clarify whether the protests were from New York or Palm Springs.”

  During the 1960s and thereafter, Zsa Zsa was unstoppable, everywhere at once: premieres, nightclub acts, dinner theatre, summer stock, personal appearances, TV specials, and if you name a network show from the period, it’s likely that she made at least one appearance on it. Overexposure led to surfeit, at least to TV viewers who had heard it all before. The wisecracks began to seem older than Zsa Zsa herself, while the tales of her marriage at “fifteen” to a Turkish diplomat, the miserliness of Conrad Hilton, the lazy vanity of George Sanders, came to sound as hollow as a politician’s promise to make America great again.

  * * *

  In November 1961, seventeen years after fire destroyed Zsa Zsa’s wing of the Hilton estate, she lost another home. This time the conflagration swept through Bel Air and Brentwood, destroying 484 residences. Zsa Zsa, in New York at the time, flew back to Los Angeles to find nothing standing of her house on Bellagio Road except three forlorn chimneys. “The whole house went,” she said, “furs, jewelry, silver, everything.” The fire also destroyed her personal memorabilia. She was photographed in skirt and blouse, hair mussed, with shovel in hand as she dug through ashes in search of jewelry.

  * * *

  Love, marriage, and remarriage became her logo and her leitmotif, on TV and in the few hours of private life remaining to a celebrity of Zsa Zsa’s exposure. In 1970 an editor at Doubleday, working with a ghost-for-hire, cobbled together 155 pages of her wit and wisdom, giving it the gaudy title How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, How to Get Rid of a Man. Ultimately, she proved so adept at all three maneuvers that the book title became her de facto trademark. Keeping that Gabor trademark burnished, however, required periodic rebranding (translation: preowned husband swapped for newer model), so that during the sixties, seventies, and eighties, she was quick to propose if her intended moved too slow. Or to divorce him if he tarried too long. In the end, she kept one husband for thirty years—probably twenty-nine years too long.

  Her romances outnumbered her offers of work, or so it seemed. Work, that is, of any substance, work that might require—what? After all, what could she do? Her creditable performances from the fifties were forgotten, and no one dared bring her a script with the message, “They want you for the mother.”

  For she had grown sequins on her soul. Occasionally they flashed a brilliant idea, as when she went to visit Mae West. Her mission: to obtain rights for a revival of Mae’s 1928 play, Diamond Lil. (“When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better.”) If a transcript of that meeting existed, it would be a camp playlet in its own right. Alas, we have only Zsa Zsa’s report: “She said to me, ‘Oh honey, you’re far too young!’ ”

  Trapped in her celebrity cocoon like a scarab in amber, she no longer tried to emerge. Zsa Zsa’s situation gave a new spin to the question of vocation vs. marriage: How many husbands will it take to indemnify my career?

  * * *

  After her divorce from George Sanders in 1954, she took an eight-year sabbatical from the marriage bed. Then, in 1962, she married the best one of the lot, Herbert Loeb Hutner. “He was an angel,” Zsa Zsa said. And he bored her. Everything about him was good, but had she quoted her new friend, Mae West, Zsa Zsa’s lament might have been “Goodness had nothing to do with it.” “I loved him as a human being,” she said, “but I was not in love with him.” After enduring three years of unbearable benevolence, Zsa Zsa realized that her grounds for divorce were unique and “completely unacceptable to any judicial system in the world: divorce on the grounds of mental kindness.” Eva accompanied Zsa Zsa to Mexico for the happy divorce.

  The couple’s parting presents to each other sound like suggestions for divorce gifts from the Harrods catalogue: from Hutner to Zsa Zsa, two strings of pearls. She reciprocated with a Rolls- Royce, slightly used, and a silver whistle in case he should want to summon her back.

  In 1969, Hutner married the actress Juli Reding, who has a smallish cult for her 1960 film, Tormented, in which she plays a ghost. In a recent conversation, Juli Reding Hutner spoke of her own friendship with Zsa Zsa. “We went to many parties at her home, and she was always very cordial,” Juli said, “and constantly witty. I’ll give you an example. I had a male friend who held an important position in Los Angeles, and one day I took him to lunch at the Bistro Gardens. By coincidence, he and I were seated near Zsa Zsa and her entourage. Spotting me, she came over and whispered in my ear, ‘Dahling, are you cheating on our husband?’ ”

  Juli and Eva also became friends. The Hutners were neighbors of Eva and Frank Jameson, her fifth husband. “We often went out with them,” Juli said, “especially because Herbert and Frank knew each other through business. Eva would say to me, ‘Don’t let Zsa Zsa find out we’re friends. She would be very jealous.’ ”

  “Does that mean Zsa Zsa was the boss of the family?” I asked.

  “I think she probably was. I used to say to Herbert that the only reason Zsa Zsa is better known than Eva is that silly name. I think that had a lot to do with her fame, her notoriety.”

  Although Juli was fond of Zsa Zsa, she had greater affection for Eva. “When I heard the news of her death,” she said, “I couldn’t stop crying. I attended her funeral at Church of the Good Shepherd. I had gone there to services with her. She loved going to church, and wanted to be involved with the Catholic faith.”

  * * *

  Zsa Zsa’s fifth husband, Joshua S. Cosden Jr., came from Texas oil wealth. Most of it, however, had disappeared when she met him in 1966, leaving him a thirty-thousand-dollar millionaire. Contrary to Gabor repute, he married Zsa Zsa for her money. It turned into a marriage for the birds—literally. She bought a new house in Bel Air, and just prior to moving in she arrived one Monday morning to find a bird lying dead on the drawing room floor. It had flown into the house before the workmen left on Friday and starved to death. “With tears in my eyes,” Zsa Zsa recalled, “I picked up the body of the bird and buried it in the garden, knowing that now I could never live in the house.” Such an ill omen was it that Zsa Zsa sold the house at a loss.

  Soon another bird entered the marriage. While shopping at Neiman Marcus on a trip to Dallas, Zsa Zsa bought a large macaw. She named him Caesar, and followed the store’s care instructions: a piece of orange every morning in addition to his other food. For months Zsa Zsa did not fail, until . . . the morning that she forgot the slice of orange. “On my way to the kitchen I passed Caesar’s cage. Our eyes met and he fixed me with what, at the time, seemed to be an evil eye. In the clearest voice possible, he pronounced the words, ‘Fuck you!’

  “Totally unnerved and remembering my omission, I fetched the piece of orange for Caesar, careful to avoid his eyes. In silence he ate it. I breathed a sigh of relief. Prematurely. Because from that moment on, all Caesar would say to me, to Joshua, or to anyone who crossed the threshold of our house, was ‘Fuck you!’ ”

  Whether Zsa Zsa’s ears were more offended by the horrendous language, or whether she feared the evil menace of that ornithological eye, she did not elaborate. Neiman Marcus, tops in customer service, accepted Caesar’s return with a full refund to Zsa Zsa, plus shipping charges. For once, however, she did not have the last word. Caesar did. As if channeling another bird of vocal renown—the one made immortal by Edgar Allan Poe—Caesar took leave of his mistress with the unfriendly adieu, “Fuck you!”

  After a six-month marriage, the Cosdens also bid each other farewell. Their divorce was almost as effortless as returning a purchase to a department store, nor was the marriage more memorable. If their goodbyes included that frightful macaw malediction, Zsa Zsa didn’t mention it.

  In simplest terms, the reason for Zsa Zsa’s serial marriages was this: she could not bear to live alone. And although a strong woman, she firmly believed that without a man she was incomplete. As she aged, not to be married, or at least in the market for a consort, came to be as unthinkable as wearing only one shoe. Or revealing her date of birth
.

  One can safely assume, also, that from about 1960, when Zsa Zsa was forty-three years old, her mental state was not in the category usually considered normal, meaning reasonably sane. Plagued by bipolar disorder, she often seemed not fully aware of what she did. Then and later, according to Francesca, Zsa Zsa often skipped her medications because “they made her fat.” Unlike many in Hollywood, however, she avoided other pills and alcohol. And while she spoke the word “menopause” only to her doctors and within the Gabor circle, that phenomenon added to her behavioral anomalies.

  * * *

  Jack Ryan, husband number six, also suffered from bipolar disorder, along with alcoholism, drug abuse, and a compendium of bad traits. Born in 1926, and thus nine years Zsa Zsa’s junior, he became well known, while employed by the toy manufacturing company Mattel, as the creator of the Barbie doll. (Ryan’s claim was later disputed by a female colleague at Mattel. His biographer, Jerry Oppenheimer, nevertheless credits Ryan with the doll’s invention.) A few years afterward, in a reversal of the biblical creation story, Ryan formed Ken as Barbie’s companion, although not from Barbie’s rib.

  His Bel Air mansion stood not far from Zsa Zsa’s, and they became acquainted when she complained about loud music from his parties. He invited her to the next one and others after that. She should have fled the vulgarity of his over-elaborate estate, which he called the Castle; instead, she accepted the proposal which, Oppenheimer believes, Ryan made while off lithium and atop a bipolar crescendo.

  They lived together less as spouses than the neighbor husband to the wife next door. He had no intention of forsaking his swinger habits, and Zsa Zsa demanded fealty, at least on the surface. When not fighting, they sometimes had fun. Jack Ryan was a Groucho Marx kind of cutup, Zsa Zsa his Margaret Dumont. When Zsa Zsa and Eva appeared together in a production of Arsenic and Old Lace in 1975 in a Chicago suburb, Ryan was there—but not in the audience.