by Sam Staggs
Recall how Jolie taunted young Zsa Zsa at the circus as an Indian fakir swallowed fire while climbing a ladder of razor-sharp swords on naked feet. “Now,” Jolie hissed in the darkness, “when will you be able to do that?” Any child would suffer from such an absurd and abusive challenge, and this taunt no doubt represents a lone example from a pattern of impossible demands.
It would take an Orson Welles, and a Citizen Gabor, to unpeel the petals . . . Imagine a snowy scene in wintertime Budapest, and Jolie promising trustful Zsa Zsa the world and its kingdoms, if only: “You must be a princess, and then Mamuska will love you most of all.” Eventually Zsa Zsa became that princess, at least in her own fevered fantasy. The title was a joke to everyone else, but with those fabulous words, “Princess Zsa Zsa,” ringing in her ears like golden bells, she dismissed the stark fact that the prince had paid a California photographer $5,000 for an introduction to her. He brought as tribute a pedigree written in vanishing ink. As this fairytale script played before an audience of one, Princess Zsa Zsa preferred not to question the tenability of the fairyland from whence came her liege.
* * *
From Cindy Adams’s column in the New York Post on August 14, 1986: “Jolie, the mother of the bride, won’t attend the wedding. She’s unhappy about it. ‘But you told me last week you were giving Zsa Zsa a diamond ring as a present,’ I said. ‘Yes, but that was last week,’ Jolie said. ‘This week we are not speaking.’ ”
Jolie recognized Zsa Zsa’s piece of royalty as a piece of work. She warned her silly daughter that this was a frog who, even when kissed, would remain a reptile. Although Jolie specialized in imitation jewels, hers carried the stamp of expert craftsmanship. Her hard, practiced eye could distinguish, from any distance, a real diamond from a rhinestone, or a gob of paste parading as a pearl, and as with jewels, so with people. Even when Zsa Zsa’s dream came true, Mamuska remained unpleased. Her daughter created a circus, but the Indian fakir had morphed into a German faker, and instead of flames what Zsa Zsa swallowed was a line of bull. The marriage was a circus that featured too many clowns.
Celebrity media—People magazine, tabloid dailies, Entertainment Tonight—found the match of passing interest, and Zsa Zsa was still quotable. “I’ve only had three real husbands—Conrad Hilton, George Sanders, and my first, Burhan Belge. The others were only legalized love affairs.” She also told anyone who would listen that she was fifty-five, and therefore—“It’s time to settle down.”
“I know he’s no good,” Zsa Zsa confessed to Alan Richman, a reporter from People. Echoing Judith Anderson’s line in Laura—“He’s no good but he’s what I want”—Zsa Zsa was referring to her new husband, Frederic von Anhalt, soi-disant prince, soi-disant duke of Saxony, holder of a sheaf of unlikely titles. You will not find him in the Almanach de Gotha, though he did make regular appearances in police files back in Germany. As reported in People on September 1, 1986, “according to various published reports Prince Frederic is a con man, a shoplifter, and a brawler. He denies all but the scrapes.”
The People article detailed the wedding with tongue-in-cheek thoroughness: Zsa Zsa’s Ruben Panis gown, pale glacial ice-blue with embroidered satin flowers; the groom’s Graustarkian medals strung across his ruffled shirt; the congratulatory telegram from Ronald and Nancy Reagan, read aloud for all to hear; the hundred-plus guests in formal attire; and the bridal bouquet, which Zsa Zsa, breaking with tradition, tossed before the ceremony. She pitched the bouquet to Francesca, who dropped it—a dark omen to the romantic and the superstitious.
For Francesca, the omen proved deadly. At first she planned to boycott the nuptials. Having attended so many maternal weddings, she considered this latest a mere summer rerun. A week before the ceremony, she told Cindy Adams, “I hope Mother will be happy, but I’m afraid.” Adams added, in her next column, that neither Eva nor Francesca would attend. Two days later, Adams reported that “Francesca answers her phone: ‘Royal Wedding Information.’ ” Perhaps to please Zsa Zsa, Francesca had decided not only to attend but also to act as official photographer, even though she considered the whole affair as frivolous as a skit on Saturday Night Live. Zsa Zsa was miffed at Eva not only for her refusal to attend but also for her sister’s harsh words about the groom-to-be. “She is so jealous of me,” Zsa Zsa informed the press. “If Eva married a murderer, I’d still go to her wedding.”
It was reported that Zsa Zsa had hoped for a Catholic ceremony. Defying canon law, church teachings, and social protocol, she asked for a priest to marry her and Frederic in a lavish barn owned by her friend, the horsewoman Elizabeth Whitney Tippett in Saratoga, a small town south of San Francisco. Her reasoning sounded unassailable: since none of her previous marriages, nor Frederic’s, had been recognized by the Church, this would be their first. The request was denied nonetheless. As for the venue, Zsa Zsa said, “I love animals. I’m not so fond of people.”
Was she really more audacious than Henry VIII, or did the bridegroom float this silly prank for publicity? Almost certainly the latter. Except for an article in the New York Daily News, however, the gimmick failed. Zsa Zsa, no doubt enraptured by her forthcoming title, would have supplied the witty quote when a reporter phoned. Without Frederic’s prodding, however, she would never have committed this minor sacrilege against an institution that she held in awe.
* * *
“I always marry bad men,” Zsa Zsa told the writer from People. “It’s a sickness, my sickness. The more bad they tell me they are, the more I am attracted.” Zsa Zsa did not define her meaning of the adjective “bad,” but in this case she surely got worse than she bargained for.
During the next thirty years, plot and characters resembled a Danielle Steel novel or a bad TV drama: A rich dowager, slightly off in the head, meets a much younger European man who lets it slip that he belongs to the nobility. Having found what she has always wanted, the lady takes him in, finds him compatible, and soon marries him. While she is up and running, he remains discreetly in the background. Some years after the marriage, however, she falls ill. Her condition worsens. The crafty husband now takes over her elaborate home, her millions, indeed her very life, for she has vested all power in him. He alienates her family and friends, barring them from his wife’s bedside, until at last all have either died or disappeared, so that he, left in command, mistakes himself for a real celebrity and engineers one tacky publicity trick after another while his elderly wife languishes in semiconsciousness. His final moment in the spotlight comes at her funeral, after which he retreats to his shady pastimes in the hilltop mansion that he has inherited, along with her fortune. So deluded is he—far more than his late wife—that he does not grasp his wretched status as a tattered remnant. The widower is a scrap of Hollywood notoriety as scorned and forgotten as the page of a 1980s newspaper blowing down an empty street.
* * *
For a few years after the wedding, Zsa Zsa and Frederic settled into a reasonable pattern. Sounding uncharacteristically sensible, he said, “This is a friendship marriage. We have much in common: animals, horseback riding, getting up early in the morning, working in the garden.” They traveled extensively, Europe, Australia, South America, sometimes in the company of Eva and Merv Griffin. (Eva, having predicted a brief span for this marriage, finally accepted the status quo.) Both Zsa Zsa and Frederic achieved their goals, for she became a princess and he now had access to her Rolls-Royce, her bank account, and her famous friends, who nodded politely in his direction as though to a member of Zsa Zsa’s household staff. Most important, he luxuriated in the afterglow of Zsa Zsa’s celebrity, which, like a low-burning candle, seemed ready to flicker out.
Frederic’s phrase, “a friendship marriage,” perhaps carried more truth than he intended, or was generally capable of. Francesca—who always had Zsa Zsa’s ear—claimed that the marriage was unconsummated. According to her, Zsa Zsa and the husband had an understanding. “I don’t care what you do,” she told him, “but don’t bring it into my house.” In spite of a
few public kisses for the benefit of paparazzi, their body language suggested anything but passion. Convinced that her title conferred true royalty, Zsa Zsa reigned while Frederic followed a few steps behind. If she fancied herself on a par with Queen Elizabeth II, Frederic was not her Duke of Edinburgh but rather a groom from the imperial stables.
Zsa Zsa insisted on separate bedrooms, at home and when traveling. In New York for an appearance on The Joan Rivers Show, she demanded a two-bedroom suite at the Plaza. According to a hotel employee, she said, “Dahling, there is no way the prince can see me before I have my hair and makeup done.”
And all the while, like Madame Defarge knitting as she awaits the French Revolution, Frederic waited for his day to come.
Chapter 34
He Who Gets Slapped
An astounding story, even by Gabor standards and those of Hollywood—magnificent, surreal, absurd, and bizarre, perhaps the greatest display of movie star courtroom drama since 1958 and Lana Turner’s extreme emoting after her daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed to death Lana’s gangster boyfriend.
On June 14, 1989, Zsa Zsa drove out of Bel Air in her white Rolls-Royce Corniche with no premonition that this warm day in late spring would be different from any other. The ensuing events, however, added so many layers of notoriety to the Gabor myth that when all else is forgotten, that day will live in tabloid infamy. Or will it be fondly remembered as the last great spectacle of post-studio Hollywood, a Gabor-tinged, eleventh-hour, pre-Internet cliffhanger when words such as “headlines” and “publicity avalanche” meant that the antics of a glamorous actress could upstage, in newspapers and magazines, on TV and radio, even the momentous collapse of the Iron Curtain, which was also taking place at the time?
The only undisputed fact is this: Zsa Zsa was driving on La Cienega Boulevard near West Olympic in Beverly Hills when a cop on a motorcycle pulled her over for an outdated registration sticker on her rear license plate. From that point on, the story becomes a shifting kaleidoscope of allegations, exculpatory denials, threats, contradictions, name calling, mud slinging, and great demented behavior. In the end, Zsa Zsa proved a point, if not exactly the point of her innocence: she showed the world her true calling, which was that of performance artist. This art she had so perfected by her seventh decade that she brought it off with the ease of a great ballerina or a high-wire acrobat.
Just as no one could upstage Anna Pavlova or the Flying Wallendas, no other actress could have slapped a cop and then parlayed it as CPR for a gasping career. Imagine Audrey Hepburn or Doris Day involved in such a thing! Even an outré former starlet like Mamie Van Doren would have lacked the nerve. Eva, known as “the nice Gabor,” would have rolled down the window of her Rolls, smiled coquettishly, paid the fine, and said, “Dahling, thank you for spotting my, how do you say, bottom tag. My sister switched our license plates.”
By the 1980s, the scandals of new Hollywood had become unimaginative and repetitive: drugs and sex, or both, and who really cared about the seedy private lives of a Tom Cruise or an Eddie Murphy? But a shameless old lady in a knock-down, drag-out fight with L.A. law enforcement—that was news plus old-school entertainment, and the story hung on for years to come. Some conspiracy theorists held the silly notion that Zsa Zsa engineered the cop slapping to get attention—which is like saying the Titanic was a publicity stunt. It’s true that she reaped a windfall of media attention, though she declared, reasonably enough, “I don’t need the publicity.” One commentator gushed, “Zsa Zsa is again a household word!” But when wasn’t she?
Looking back, we see that Zsa Zsa starred in a Fellini movie minus Fellini. Even so, her raucous trial is surely the only one in the annals of American jurisprudence that wanted a score by Nino Rota.
* * *
Zsa Zsa claimed to have mailed a check for one thousand dollars for a new registration sticker; either it didn’t arrive, or her personal assistant forgot to attach it. She didn’t notice the omission because she had been in Rome filming “a two-hour special for the Vatican in five languages.” (I have found no record of this holy assignment, although Zsa Zsa wore a different bejeweled cross around her neck each day at her trial. “If one has a cross to bear,” she sighed, “it might as well be diamonds.”) Her driver’s license also raised questions: it, too, had expired, and her date of birth was altered—most unconvincingly in ballpoint ink—to 1928. (The original date, 1923, was also erroneous.) Zsa Zsa explained this lapse by saying that Frederic usually drove them around town, and that “the studio sends for me a limousine,” even though that perk had ended long ago.
The exchange between Zsa Zsa and the cop, even as he put in a call to the Beverly Hills police station to verify her license, remained in dispute. She claimed that, sitting in her car for the long while it took him to check her info, she became hot and uncomfortable. (She also needed access to a ladies’ room.) Officer Paul Kramer, thirty-eight years old, six feet four inches tall, muscled, with a brush mustache and wearing dark glasses, could have doubled as a Honcho model. Although Zsa Zsa knew a hot number when she saw one, she did not flirt. He frightened her. (Seeing him on the witness stand when Zsa Zsa’s case went to court later that year, one might share her disquiet, for he recalled the two malevolent birds in her past: the ill-omened one she buried in her back garden, and the “fuck you” bird from Neiman Marcus. That is to say, he had the sinister eyes of a velociraptor. Cross-examined by Zsa Zsa’s attorney, Officer Kramer spoke in a baleful voice that somehow matched his twisted smirk.)
As the slow minutes dripped by on that hot midday in Beverly Hills, Zsa Zsa, impatient and growing angry, got out of her car and approached the officer to ask what was taking so long. “Why are you keeping me here? Am I free to go?” Perhaps more was said; did Zsa Zsa really call him an “asshole,” as subsequently claimed?
Many times on television, Zsa Zsa quoted him as replying “fuck off” when she asked whether she could leave. (She demurely truncated his obscenity to “f. off” for talk-show consumption. On the witness stand, when her attorney said, “I apologize, Miss Gabor, but when you say ‘f. off,’ does that mean that Officer Kramer told you to ‘fuck off’?” Zsa Zsa nodded shyly and cast her eyes to the floor, striking the pose of Caravaggio’s Penitent Magdalene.) Having spoken English for sixty years, she nevertheless mistook the officer’s meaning on that fateful day. She was certain it was cop lingo for “hit the road, sister.” And so she touched the ignition and drove away.
Turning onto Olympic Boulevard, she heard the scream of sirens on La Cienega, saw flashing lights from the motorcycle. Zsa Zsa found herself in a chase as blood-curdling as Gene Hackman’s in The French Connection or O.J. Simpson’s in the white Bronco. She was soon caught and hauled out of her car. Furious and frightened, Zsa Zsa slapped the cop so hard that she knocked the dark glasses off his face. He handcuffed and arrested her, calling her names that she claimed singed her ears. A passing eyewitness, wondering whether he had happened on a drug bust, saw the cop sling the suspect to the rear of the Rolls. Her handbag went flying, her arms were pinned behind her back as the handcuffs went on. According to her subsequent court testimony, the tight handcuffs bruised her wrists, leaving them black and purple for weeks. He pushed her down onto the curb where she sat in the hot sun until the secondary police unit arrived, all the while making crude remarks to her and refusing to unloose the manacles for a moment so that she could adjust her skirt, which had lodged at mid-thigh in the hurly-burly. Zsa Zsa’s high-pitched threat to have the officer fired, and to call her pals Ronald and Nancy Reagan, only fueled the combustion.
At the police station, she was charged with five offenses: battery upon an officer, disobeying an officer, driving without proper registration, driving without a license, and having an open container of alcohol, viz., a silver flask of vodka in the glove compartment. Zsa Zsa said it belonged to Frederic, who later explained that he sometimes added a drop to his Diet Pepsi.
* * *
The People vs. Zsa Zsa Gabor began in Sept
ember 1989 and dragged on for weeks. The trial came to be known as such owing to a documentary video that was cobbled together and marketed, much to Zsa Zsa’s displeasure. “When he was chasing me I thought of the Gestapo,” Zsa Zsa testified through tears. “In Hungary we had the Nazis, we had the Russian tanks. But I was more scared on Olympic and La Cienega. I was screaming ‘Help! Help!’ I was afraid the police were going to shoot me.”
Zsa Zsa, of course, left Hungary long before the arrival of the Gestapo or the Red Army. Apart from that exaggeration, however, it’s hard to doubt the substance of her fear. Although the media mocked Zsa Zsa from every angle, a Los Angeles contributor to the New York Times placed the controversy in a more sober context. Writing on September 27, 1989, Anne Taylor Fleming first described the circus-like atmosphere of the trial, then followed with this caveat: “But for the locals, there is an angle beyond Miss Gabor’s quips in an exaggerated Hungarian accent. That issue is the police and how they treat us: not just the celebrities, but any and all of us. Even as we giggle at Miss Gabor’s predicament, we are also thinking about our own feelings and fears about the police and swapping stories about our encounters with them.”
A retired police sergeant interviewed by Fleming told her, “You have to remember, cops hate losing face.” In a sense, that was the fuse that Zsa Zsa lighted. Had she been less arrogant, less the grande dame, the result might have been different. Or maybe not: Officer Kramer had previously been accused of manhandling motorists.
Summing up, the Times journalist tipped the scale slightly in Zsa Zsa’s favor: “So even though we have been having a good laugh over the whole thing, it is, for those of us who live here, much less of a farce than it might seem from a distance.” Three decades later, in view of the daily atrocities committed by police across the United States, one wonders about Zsa Zsa’s fate had she been a young male, or a person of color, a resident of Downey or East Los Angeles, and driving a nondescript vehicle. That trial might never have taken place—the officer’s statement of self-defense for the killing would have ended the open-and-shut inquiry.
