Finding Zsa Zsa

by Sam Staggs

  Two years later, a photo in the New York Daily News showed Auntie Eva and six-year-old Francesca deplaning at LaGuardia. They had just flown in from Los Angeles, and Zsa Zsa had come to collect them.

  Magda, although a more remote aunt than Eva, told a story about young Francesca that accords with Eva’s account of their niece’s sauciness. “One night at dinner with Zsa Zsa and George Sanders, when Francesca was three or four, my little niece headed off to bed. She said, ‘Good night, Eva, good night, Magda, good night, Mommie, good night, Uncle George.’ Then she walked to the door, turned around, and to George she said, ‘You Russian!’ And ran out of the room.”

  Magda thought it hilarious, but not George. “He couldn’t even laugh at that,” she said. By that time—around 1951—he was a changed man, according to Magda. “In earlier years,” she added, “George was entirely different. He supported his family, who left Britain during the war. Not only his parents but also his sister, brother-in-law, and all their children. Nine or ten people in all.” Magda hinted that marriage to Zsa Zsa, along with the pressures of a job he disliked—acting—brought on the change in his personality.

  When Francesca grew up, Eva treated her as an adult, an equal. Zsa Zsa, on the other hand, fancied a thirty-year-old child kept in a doll’s house, then a forty-year-old one, then fifty and beyond. Perhaps she dreamed of repairing earlier mistakes. Moreover, the younger the daughter in appearance and actions, the younger the mom. A demented extension of Zsa Zsa’s rich fantasy life: John Blanchette told me that Zsa Zsa urged him to marry Francesca and produce a grandchild for her. Two obstacles obviated the match: he was gay and Francesca couldn’t stand him.

  * * *

  Francesca’s school years resemble a checkerboard—not one of orderly squares but rather a jigsaw of surreal triangles and trapezoids unnervingly juxtaposed. In other words, chaos. At various times she attended the Knox School on Long Island; the Château Montchoisi, a Swiss finishing school; Marymount, a Catholic girls’ school in Los Angeles, from which she graduated in 1965. A person familiar with Francesca’s time in Switzerland said, “That poor sweet girl—she had ball gowns but no underwear.” A bit later, she made a brief stopover at UCLA.

  In 1966, Leonard Lyons quoted Zsa Zsa in his syndicated column: “I am sending Francesca to another school—in Paris—to learn to be a woman of the world. In this school she will learn how to cook, paint, sew. The courses will include visits to Dior to learn haute couture, and to Van Cleef and Arpels. It is important for a woman to know about emeralds and rubies.” Whether or not Francesca actually attended this Gaboresque institution remains unclear. It would surely have contradicted her interests.

  In 1968, Zsa Zsa gave a farewell party for herself and Francesca. They were leaving for London, where Francesca had been admitted either to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art or the Drama Centre acting school. Francesca herself claimed the latter, while newspapers reported the former. Admission to either suggests talent and promise in theatre and cinema. But like so many other intentions in Francesca’s life, drama school didn’t work out. One reason seems to have been drug use. She joked about marijuana: “While I was a student at the Knox School, I came back to L.A. with a marijuana seed that I planted in my mother’s backyard in Bel Air. The gardener watered it and it grew. Then my mother had it pulled up!”

  Unfortunately, she didn’t limit herself to pot smoking. Swinging London in the late sixties, with hashhish, LSD, cocaine—it’s easy to fill in the blanks. The story is all too common: the banal allure of drugs seducing unhappy people like Francesca, whose entire life hovered near a cliff. The miracle is that she didn’t plunge off it until age sixty-seven. A person who knew Francesca for many years assured me that the house Zsa Zsa bought for her in Bel Air was lost “to drugs and a gigolo husband.” Unlike Zsa Zsa and all the Gabors, she lacked a tough sense of money management. They worked hard; every penny must be accounted for. Francesca, by contrast, a child of plenty with time on her hands, failed to grasp the fragility of abundance. Before Frederic’s arrival, Zsa Zsa might grouse but she would not let Francesca go wanting. Eva’s legacy could have kept her niece in comfort for the rest of her life if only Francesca had learned how to invest, how to live within a budget.

  * * *

  Francesca’s companion for several years in the early seventies was the actor and director Jack Starrett, who gave her a bit part in his 1973 film, Cleopatra Jones. She also worked as a production assistant on the picture. When they were no longer lovers, she recalled him with great fondness. “He’s wonderful,” she told an interviewer. “I still see him as a friend.” In her proposal for the autobiography she never wrote, she called Starrett “one of the funniest men I ever met. He drank Jack Daniel’s a lot and wore long wavy robes. Jack played the Gabby Hayes character in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles. Mel complained that Jack stole every scene he was in.”

  In that proposal, Francesca gave short shrift to her two marriages. “1988—I married Vincent Munden for six months. Got my first annulment.” And, on the next line: “1993—Joe Piche, met him at a pool hall—Hollywood Athletic Club—married him a year and a half later.” Her companion from 1997 until her death was Michael Nateece, whom she met in Las Vegas and who seems to have provided a stabilizing influence.

  Her acting career went nowhere. After half a dozen bit parts from 1971 to 1999, including Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills, Francesca wisely retreated from the cinematic side of show business. Later she tried stand-up comedy, with short-lived results. Her wittiest line onstage: “My mother and I get along great now that we’re the same age.” Zsa Zsa, in the audience, clapped hands and rolled with laughter.

  Over the years, Francesca tried her hand at various jobs. She worked behind the counter in a Hollywood camera store. While in public relations, she managed Mickey Rooney Jr. for part of his brief film career. Her two main interests, however, were photography, which she began in childhood, and Hilton hotel management. The latter endeavor turned into a comic nightmare involving not only Barron Hilton, who ran the corporation after Conrad’s death, but hotel employees in various cities. Like Zsa Zsa, Francesca seemed unable to occupy a hotel room without epic melodrama. Once in Madrid Zsa Zsa was pulled off a plane by Spanish police and charged with failure to pay her bill. Similar incidents took place elsewhere. Francesca, like her mother, felt entitled to royal treatment in any Hilton hotel, Zsa Zsa owing to marriage and Francesca to paternity.

  At some point in the 1980s, after many a dead-end job, Francesca landed a minor position with the Hilton Hotel Corporation—in reality, a sinecure to pacify her as well as Zsa Zsa. For a time, Francesca received a free room in any Hilton hotel. That privilege ended when some in-room shortcoming led to a fracas. She threatened to fire the manager, a call was made to corporate headquarters, and Miss Hilton no longer slept gratis under the family roof.

  On another occasion, during a manic phase, she stripped naked at the pool of the Washington, D.C., Hilton, and was led away. Then, and on other occasions, her mania was further fueled by diet pills, which Francesca sometimes consumed in unhealthy doses. In 1987, Barron Hilton wrote to Francesca informing her that her monthly check from him would be reduced by half until the entire amount of $6,200, which he paid to the Las Vegas Hilton to cover bad checks she wrote, was reimbursed to him. The origin of this monthly stipend is unclear.

  As a result of continuing clamor and disorder, she was eventually barred from all Hilton hotels, an interdict that left her undeterred. For years, and literally to her dying day, this was the saucy outgoing message on her phone: “This is Francesca Hilton of the Hilton Corporation. Please leave your name and number and a message and I will call you back. If you do not leave your name and a number I will not call you back.”

  Overmedication with appetite inhibitors led to a mephitic episode that caused a two-year rift between Francesca and Zsa Zsa during which they did not speak. In September 1984, the columnist Marilyn Beck reported that Francesca had entered Cedars-Sin
ai Medical Center in Los Angeles as a result of an overdose of diet pills. In a phone conversation with Zsa Zsa, Beck learned that Francesca had not slept in four weeks owing to the pills. “We had to get those uppers away from her,” said Zsa Zsa. “She’s doing fine in the hospital, finally getting some rest. I’m begging her to stay another week. I tell you, it’s not easy being a mother today.”

  Two days later, Beck reported that “Constance Francesca Hilton phoned me to say that her stay at Cedars-Sinai is involuntary, that her mother had her committed to the psychiatric wing of the hospital against her will. She adds that she had not been taking diet pills, as Zsa Zsa claimed, and that she has informed her attorney that she wants to sue her mother for defamation of character.”

  Francesca referred to this horrific episode as her time in “the nut house,” using the same terminology that her mother used to describe her own involuntary incarceration. In a late-night phone conversation a few years before her death, Francesca recalled being handcuffed in a police car after she had run amok in the streets of Bel Air.

  * * *

  After working on her autobiography for thirty years, with few pages written, she searched for a coauthor and was turned down by several prospects. Eventually she asked me to take on the assignment. “But Francesca,” I said, “I can’t spend months, maybe a year, in Los Angeles, and you won’t come to me. So I have to say no, even though I would love to work with you.” She then suggested Skype, and again I had to decline.

  Her book’s working title was Hotels, Diamonds, and Me. The six-page outline runs from birth to 2007, the year she put it aside. I suggested that, in view of her tribulations with the Hiltons and their hotels, she might have a bit of fun at Barron’s expense. “Go back to your original title. Call it Miss Hilton Prefers the Ritz. Or,” I added, “if not that, how about Miss Hilton Regrets?” I knew, however, that none of these would see print. In life, and on the page, just when success seemed at hand, she subverted it. In this respect, she copied her mother, who sacrificed her early career to hormones. But Zsa Zsa’s implicit motto was “I won’t be defeated,” while Francesca’s more poignant one might have been “Fate always intervened.”

  * * *

  Was it fate, or Zsa Zsa, who stepped between Francesca and photojournalism? In the early 1970s, Francesca sold a few photographs to People magazine. In 1976 she traveled to the Middle East—Turkey, Iran, Syria, Lebanon—for her work. Arriving in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, she landed just as Syrian troops invaded the country. Her photographs from this period are of museum quality. “I was in the middle of a war zone,” she wrote in her book proposal, “and it was not a movie set. My mother called and pleaded with me to come home. I said, ‘Hell no!’ This is the real thing. Although I was terrified being there, it was fascinating to see it unravel before my eyes. I was the only photojournalist there and one of the photos I took ended up on the front page of the New York Times.”

  Two years later, Francesca and Zsa Zsa appeared together on Dinah Shore’s syndicated talk show. Thirty-one at the time, Francesca conducted herself as a professional woman. Smartly attired in a black pantsuit, with light makeup and blonde hair stylishly done, she looked the antithesis of florid Gabor glamour. Nor did she resemble any of the Gabors, which surely pleased her. On this occasion, the only unsettling aspect was her leveled-out behavior: she seemed artifi-cally calm, perhaps medicated, very different from the volatile woman of later years. The topic of that day’s show was mothers and daughters. Dinah’s other guests were Judy and Diana Canova, and Lee Grant with her daughter, Dinah Manoff. Of the three pairs, only Zsa Zsa and Francesca betrayed strains in their relationship.

  Unlike Judy Canova and her daughter, or Lee Grant and hers, who seemed like chums, Francesca and Zsa Zsa bristled, though subtly enough to maintain the nonconfrontational style of Dinah Shore’s show. When Zsa Zsa interrupted her daughter, Francesca snapped, “I understand the question!” For an instant, Zsa Zsa looked as if she had been bitten; next moment she was back to her shtick, fabulously giddy once more.

  Then a cutaway to photos of each mother and daughter when the girls were very young. Zsa Zsa’s commentary: “Franci was three or four, she was very good then, she didn’t answer back, she was adorable. Now she has her own opinion about everything.” This Zsa Zsa said with a laugh that betrayed low-level anger, as if to rebuke her daughter for daring to be an adult. Francesca replied sotto voce and Zsa Zsa muttered a retort. Their swashbuckling exchange was not picked up by microphones.

  Another cutaway to Francesca’s Middle East photographs. After half a dozen seen on camera, Dinah Shore and her guests applauded. Zsa Zsa did not, since Francesca’s time in Lebanon had been a source of contention. On the show, Francesca said, “When I was in Lebanon, my mother demanded, ‘Come home at once! You will come home, you must come home!’ She was very upset. I didn’t tell her I was there, she found out.”

  Zsa Zsa’s anxiety, of course, was natural and certainly not blameworthy. Who wouldn’t worry about a loved one in a war zone? Unfortunately, Zsa Zsa wanted total obedience. When she spoke ex cathedra as the mother, she expected compliance of the kind that she, Eva, and Magda gave to Jolie. But Francesca was not a Gabor sister, and so the lifelong conflicts grew and festered.

  * * *

  Whenever I traveled to Los Angeles, Francesca and I would often meet for breakfast in Hollywood at her favorite Starbucks. Her rhapsodic review of the lattes, the bagels with cream cheese, and all else on the predictable menu struck me as ironic, and a bit melancholy, in view of her lifelong experience with fine restaurants. On the last one of these occasions, I arrived early and took a seat outside to wait for her. Surrounded by millennials and others in thrall to every conceivable electronic device, I spotted Francesca on the sidewalk thirty or forty yards away. Just as I stood up to go and meet her, a cyclone of abuse erupted from her mouth that would startle a Billingsgate fishwife.

  With gorgon furrows on her face, she slung her words at the man seated to my right, who raised a bewildered head from his laptop as if upbraided by a she-devil. “You fucking piece of shit!” she screamed. “Son of a bitch, you made up lies about me on TMZ, goddamn you, rotten sewer rat!”

  Catching his breath, the middle-aged defendant yelled back something I didn’t catch, although it sounded as accusatory as what Francesca charged him with. Dumbfounded though I was by such a scene—and before breakfast—I recall that no one seated at those tables outside Starbucks seemed surprised. Perhaps they imagined we were all extras in a movie.

  I went over, greeted her, though she was too livid to do more than nod in my direction. The wildcat snarls back and forth grew louder even as I opened the door and guided her inside, making whatever anodyne small talk I could summon in the midst of such melodrama. “I’m hungry, aren’t you?” I asked. Then, “How’s your cat?” My relief was enormous when finally we found a table. Even so, Francesca’s glare at her adversary threatened to melt the plate-glass window. Soon the man sidled away, perhaps to amplify whatever slander he had perpetrated on TMZ.

  Francesca soon calmed down, and I noticed that the staff deferred to her as if she were the Grande Dame of Franklin Avenue. Were they intimidated, I wondered (as I was, a bit), or was it owing to her difficulty walking, that she received table service while the rest of us stood in line at the counter?

  Looking back, I see this altercation as more than an embarrassing scene in public. In a sense, it was the Gabor Göt-terdämmerung, all other battles having been fought and many of them won. Now, however, Eva’s ashes reposed in Westwood Village Memorial Park, Jolie’s and Magda’s farther away near Palm Springs, while Zsa Zsa, the last goddess of that fabled dynasty, lay slowly dying on a mountaintop in Bel Air, just a few miles from where Francesca battled demons—those invisible ones that plagued her body and mind, and the one of flesh and blood who had long since locked her out of paradise.

  That day, that ordinary day in Hollywood, the great Gabor Valhalla began its final, fearsome fall.<
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  Chapter 37

  Could This Perhaps Be Death?

  On June 2, 1995, Eva appeared on Geraldo, the syndicated talk show whose host was Geraldo Rivera. According to Wesley Hyatt, author of The Encyclopedia of Daytime Television, “Rivera was the first daytime talk-show host to emphasize sleazy subjects as his main selling point.” By 1995, however, his lurid subject matter had become more pastel, his tawdry format having been co-opted by a swarm of vulgarians with even lower taste.

  Appearing with Eva were three other women whose husbands had blatantly cheated on them: Ivana Trump, Melba Moore, and Beverly Sassoon. Despite their host, this segment remained above gutter level. Eva spoke of “her two big loves, Richard Brown and Frank Jameson.” (She was married to Brown from 1959 to 1973, to Jameson from 1973 to 1983.)

  Geraldo asked, “How did you find out Dick Brown was cheating on you?”

  Eva answered, “I am so sensitive I felt it. I went to his secretary’s house and there was Richard sitting. I slapped the poor girl. After the divorce, I had a collapse and a nervous breakdown. It took me a year to recuperate.”

  As to Frank Jameson: “We were in Paris. I got up in the night to have a glass of water, and I heard him talking on the phone: ‘Darling, do you want to meet me in London or Washington? Mrs. Jameson has to go to Canada to work.’ And Mrs. Jameson heard it! I was in a white satin nightgown—it was like a scene from a movie. I walked in and he had a brandy beside him. Even though I never drink, I tossed it down my throat and said, ‘There is one thing I ask from you. Don’t ever touch me again.’ ”