by Jeremy Scott
DON PORFIRIO RUBIROSA
MINISTER PLENIPOTENTIARY THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
on which is written, For a most beautiful lady – Rubi.
She’s seated at the dressing table twenty minutes later, face smeared with cold cream while blow-drying her hair, when the telephone rings. It is Rubirosa, ‘May I come over for a drink?’
She is flustered, ‘No, no. It’s impossible.’
‘Perhaps later?’
‘Perhaps. The roses are beautiful.’
‘A strange coincidence, we have adjoining suites. You have only to open your door, and I mine…’
Had he changed his room to be next to her? She says hurriedly, ‘If you will call me tomorrow, monsieur…’
Now it is tomorrow, the day of the premiere and Moulin Rouge is due to open at the Capitol on Broadway in two hours’ time. Velvet ropes are already in place slung on brass posts, and a small crowd has started to gather, watching news crews set up lights and their bulky cameras on rostrums outside the theatre, where Walter Winchell will greet the stars and celebs as they descend from their limos to cross the red carpet to attend the performance.
In her suite at the Plaza, Zsa Zsa is struggling to do up her form-fitting black dress, with a train of broadtail mink and a zip up the back. The telephone rings, it is Rubirosa. She has an inspiration, ‘It’s so silly but I can’t do up my dress and there’s no maid. If you will be good enough…’
Seconds later he steps through the inter-connecting door into her suite. He zips up the dress deftly. She turns around to face him and they stand for a moment, smiling almost sheepishly at one another. Then he helps her into her coat and escorts her down to the lobby and the waiting limo.
The premiere receives a rapturous reception; the audience stands to applaud Zsa Zsa’s performance. It’s a triumph but also a vindication; her husband George Sanders has done all he can to stop her going into movies: ‘You’d be hopeless at acting, darling. You’re just too dumb. Don’t be silly.’
Afterward she returns to the Plaza, goes to her room, still heavy with the scent of roses. She sits there exultant at her success and brimming with emotion … but she is alone, there is no one to share it. On cue the telephone rings: Rubi. ‘I’m in the Persian Room downstairs with a party of friends. Won’t you join us?’
She touches up her make-up, brushes her hair, and does so. He pulls out a chair for her at the crowded table. ‘I believe you already know Prince Bernadotte…’
She chats to the Prince, whom she’s met in Paris, all the while covertly observing Rubirosa. George spoke of him disparagingly but he does not seem absurd to her, far from it. He looked
solemn, almost tortured. His hair was black, eyebrows heavy and black, almost glowering over sombre dark eyes, and on either side of his mouth deep furrows formed … a man, I thought, who always has himself under control. He sat almost as if by himself, remote, detached… He drank steadily, quietly, responding to others’ questions with little more than a monosyllable. At one point he rose and walked to the bar. He moved with a kind of catlike grace… When he came back, he took the chair next to me…
They talk but she’s hardly aware of his words. ‘Through the haze of champagne I saw him, a dark man with glowing eyes, watching me, enveloping me in a gaze of such naked intensity that everyone else at the table seemed to melt away … I thought uneasily, fighting for my own calm: this man is a primitive, he is all purpose.’
He fills her glass. ‘You must drink,’ he says. ‘It is your night.’
The evening ends. Rubi escorts her upstairs and to her door. He asks, ‘May I come in?’
Zsa Zsa says, ‘I was drunk at that moment – drunk with power, drunk with achievement, drunk with yearning for George. I was in a daze, so over-miserable, so overexcited … because here was Rubirosa, the only man whose name could make George grow pale … I said yes. So it all began…’
Zsa Zsa invariably lied about her age, and lied so inconsistently it is impossible to determine the date of her birth in Hungary; the best guess is circa 1917. Her mother, Jolie, had given up her ambitions of a stage career at the age of seventeen to marry a man eighteen years older. Zsa Zsa’s father, Vilmos, was an autocrat who ruled his household in the old-style imperial tradition, his temper was ungovernable.
His own family had been rather grand, though the Great War had reduced his and many aristocratic fortunes. Nevertheless, home was a large over-furnished apartment in Budapest and there was a holiday house on Lake Balaton; their car was a Mercedes. Zsa Zsa and her sisters, Magda and Eva, owned their own ponies and attended classes in riding, ballet, tennis, fencing, piano, and received almost nothing by way of formal education.
The sisters were never allowed to forget they were not boys. At the theatre their mother remarked, ‘Ah, I would be up there now if only you hadn’t been girls. I gave up my career for you.’ Jolie came from a family of jewellers and through necessity her husband had been obliged to practise the same trade, déclassé though it was. It made it all the more necessary to keep up pretensions of a grander life they could no longer afford. ‘Remember who you are,’ Zsa Zsa was told. Appearance and performance were what mattered; that was an early lesson in behaviour.
Thwarted in her own career, Jolie was fiercely ambitious for her daughters. She was determined they would excel, though in nothing as mundane as a ‘job’. They would succeed as women, as paragons of beauty, glamour and style. Quite contrary to the upbringing they would have received in England at that time, they were encouraged to be both seen and heard. The family environment promoted performance. Jolie was volatile in her emotions, theatrical in her expression; Vilmos given to bouts of jealousy and rage, flinging china at the wall. He had affairs himself – he could not believe his much-younger wife did not do the same. The atmosphere at home was fraught with drama and a free range of emotions; calm was seldom permitted to intrude.
None of his daughters was cowed by their father’s behaviour. They spoke back to him boldly, raising their voices to the level required. In their tempestuous mittel-European household, rows blew out as suddenly as they erupted. And they were lavished with attention from both parents, indulged, bought clothes and always beautifully dressed in identical outfits. Presentation was the other fundamental lesson.
‘I wanted to be beautiful,’ says Zsa Zsa. ‘I delighted in wearing the Tyrolean leather shorts and flowered braces Father bought me.’ She wore it to the all-in wrestling matches he took her to.
I would sit proudly with him, imitating him as he leaped to his feet to applaud, to shout, ‘Give it to him!’ … Father was, what we in Hungary call a big style man … intensely masculine, passionate and powerful, and extremely loving toward me … I adored my mother, but it was Father I admired. He was unreasonable, he was jealous, he was violent, he was overwhelming – he was a man.
‘Sooner or later there had to come a day when I filled out my leather shorts too well,’ Zsa Zsa says.
At the age of thirteen she was sent to Madame Sabilia’s School for young ladies in Lausanne. She was not bookish, but she was smart and quick. She possessed a sharp eye and a ready tongue. She was precociously representative of that between-the-wars period in which young women bobbed their hair, shortened their skirts, drank cocktails, smoked and transformed their traditional image beyond recognition. She was not without anxieties but she kept this to herself. ‘To show fear, to admit that I was hurt, to reveal my true feelings, to be pitied – this I could not bear.’ To protect herself she cultivated the bold over-the-top persona that would become her image, fashioning an individual style that would remain hers throughout her life.
At school, ‘I adored the English girls, especially a tall languid brunette … her calm, her indifference to argument, her cool disdain seemed to me the height of all that was elegant.’
Zsa Zsa’s first letter home flags the priorities she would retain:
I’m the only Hungarian girl here, all the rest are English … They think all Hungarian gir
ls are gypsies and are amazed I know how to use a knife and fork … Mamika, I want you to burn this letter as soon as you finish it so Father won’t see it – but Mama dear, I’d love to have a garter belt. All the English girls have them…
Such values, accompanied by her vivacity, looks and talent to play the strumpet with a carnal swagger, would take her a long way; eventually, and not surprisingly, to Hollywood.
Zsa Zsa’s first theatrical break occurred when she was fifteen and in Vienna with her mother. She was spotted in a café by Richard Tauber, the operatic tenor and matinee idol. In 1935, he cast her as an ingénue in a musical, The Singing Dream. To Zsa Zsa the stage and grown-up independent life in the sophisticated city was an intoxicating experience. She was crushed when the run ended and she had to go home. ‘After Vienna, how could I return to long black stockings, penances and psalms before dinner?’
Her mother understood her disappointment. ‘I know, darling. But what else is there for you to do?’
A month later Zsa Zsa married Burham Belge, a Turk twenty years older than herself who had already divorced two wives. She’d met him often at her grandmother’s house, finding him then to be ‘a dour sinister-looking man … who looked world-weary and bored.’ Despite that impression, on her forced return from Vienna, learning Burham was in town, she telephoned him at the Turkish embassy. They made an assignation at the Ritz, where she set out to seduce him, taking with her a portfolio of glamour shots done by a theatrical photographer. In one she wore a tight red sweater as she bit into an apple; in another her blouse was open as she teased a dangling cherry with the tip of her tongue. She says Monsieur Belge regarded the shots with interest. ‘He continued to look at them, then at me, then back at them.’
‘Will you marry me?’ she asked him.
He choked on his drink and she went on hastily, ‘I’ll be a good wife to you, Excellency. You need someone like me, anyway. You are always so solemn.’
‘May I have a little time to think this over?’ he asked. It did not take him long.
Vilmos approved the match after a show of outrage; he had three daughters to dispose of, all without dowries. He came up with the gift of a ten-carat diamond, along with the advice that Zsa Zsa should never accept a smaller diamond from any man – she says she always did her best to follow his injunction.
Her mother’s counsel was equally worldly: ‘My darling, it does not have to be forever. You can always come back to me if you don’t like him.’
The oddly matched couple moved to live in Ankara, where Burham was Director of Press and Propaganda in Kemal Ataturk’s government. The charismatic fifty-year-old President had instituted a secular state in the region, abolishing the veil and fez along with links to Islam. Burham, who had studied at Cambridge and Heidelberg, was a leading member of the Young Turks helping to shape the new modern republic. The group had formed between the two world wars; he and they were supporters of Hitler and Nazi Germany.
Zsa Zsa’s social life consisted in accompanying her husband on the diplomatic circuit and as token hostess at home, where politics formed the only subject and conversation took place in Turkish – which she did not speak. She was however learning to play bridge, and at those parties was the preferred partner of the Russian ambassador. The two never failed to lose money. Asked why he always chose to play with her, he explained, ‘Because she had such a delicious décolletage.’
Zsa Zsa’s several memoirs convey a breezy insouciance, but are short on self-examination. However she does reflect that it might perhaps have been wiser to get to know at least something about her husband and his work before she married him. Now, ‘as Burham talked I would find myself yawning. He would stand up suddenly and walk away, I could not help it. At first I’d been terribly intrigued. How exciting I thought to be married to a man of such intelligence … But now as his wife he made me feel like a silly girl called before a schoolmaster.’
Zsa Zsa claims – not entirely convincingly – that she never slept with Burham and the marriage remained unconsummated. In her telling it is Ataturk who took her virginity. She saw him only once before this event, when she was dining with her husband and others at Ankara’s best restaurant. Suddenly the orchestra ceased playing, the dancing couples froze, everyone in the place stood up. The President had entered the room, followed by a retinue of elegant women and police guards. ‘He stood, framed in the entrance … impeccably dressed, surveying the room as if from a great distance utterly indifferent to what he saw … Until he sat down no one else moved. It was odd to see a man seated while women stood.’
Ataturk’s reputation was mythic. He was the saviour of his country, and founder of the Republic, a man credited with almost supernatural powers, who slept no more than four hours a night. His voracious appetites were legendary, he could outsmart, outfight, outdrink and outfuck any rival – and he would die of cirrhosis within a year.
On that night Zsa Zsa first glimpsed him. ‘I stole a glance at him again. Our eyes met; I felt the blood rush up to my face and I turned swiftly away. Yet I knew what would happen next.’
The next occasion was a few days later when she arrived for the first of what became regular afternoon meetings following her Wednesday lesson at the Riding Academy, at a house he kept expressly for assignations. They never lasted longer than one hour as she had to be home by 5.30.
In his secret hideaway we were locked in each other’s arms, while he dazzled me with his sexual prowess and seduced me with his perversion. Ataturk was very wicked. He knew exactly how to please a young girl… Mesmerised, I complied. He offered me his pipe – I took it. Then he passed me a gold-and-emerald cup… I sipped from the cup… Sometimes I think I was in an opium daze, all I know is that Ataturk, the conqueror of Turkey, the idol of a million women took my virginity.
When the Second World War broke out in 1939 Zsa Zsa was desperate to escape from her marriage and had determined to join her sister Eva in Los Angeles, where she was unhappily married to an American and under contract to Paramount for $75 a week. Within two months of Zsa Zsa’s arrival Eva had left her husband and the sisters were sharing a small house in the Hollywood Hills.
Neither had any money. They lived on the abundant capital of their wits and looks. Both were ultra glamorous, their accent was captivating, and to the sunlit capital of Moviedom they brought an exotic whiff of sophisticated European decadence. Every night they were invited. They slotted deftly into the international A-list, meeting Clark Gable, Douglas Fairbanks, Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, David O. Selznick, Cole Porter, Chaplin; also Cary Grant and his wife Barbara Hutton, whom Zsa Zsa would cross with thirteen years later as a rival for Rubirosa.
Among the non-movie ‘civilians’ she met was Conrad Hilton, the 55-year-old self-made hotel tycoon. ‘Ignoring his tacky necktie (with pictures of his three hotels embroidered on it), all I could see was his similarity to Father … he was Father, Ataturk and even more. The words were out before I could stop myself: “I think I’m going to marry you”.’
Conrad, married already and a practising Catholic, took it as a joke and roared with laughter. ‘Why don’t you do that!’ he said.
Four months later she did, at Easter 1942. The civil ceremony was conducted by a judge in Santa Fé, New Mexico (both had only just become divorced). Immediately afterward they flew to Chicago, where Conrad was negotiating to buy the Blackstone Hotel. He took Zsa Zsa to view it on the way to where they were to stay for their wedding night.
‘I was afraid of Conrad and knew that the main reason he had married me was because I had refused to go to bed with him, that he was obsessed by me and by my body…’ Zsa Zsa believed him when he said, ‘Anyone who double-crosses me, I kill.’ But it would seem the marital transaction went smoothly, ‘He was a wonderful lover, virile, well-endowed and masterful.’
Post-coitum, lying beside him, Zsa Zsa gazed into her husband’s wide blue eyes and whispered, ‘What are you thinking?’
‘By golly!’ said Conrad, ‘I’m thinking of tha
t Blackstone deal.’†
The couple took up residence at Conrad’s house in Bel Air. His sons Nicky (sixteen) and Barron (fourteen) shared a separate apartment in one of the wings; the youngest boy, Eric, lived with his mother.
Marriage meant the end to Zsa Zsa’s freedom. Conrad was a workaholic, breakfasting at 6 a.m. and flying off to another city to cut a deal at a moment’s notice. Arbitrarily she’d be summoned to join him. ‘I would be shipped across the country like a piece of Louis Vuitton luggage that its owner had suddenly decided was indispensable and sent for. My own needs were completely ignored; I belonged to Conrad … Conrad, however, did not always want me.’
Money was his god, she says, and not just Catholicism but white supremacy his religion. He struck her as a Nazi. By contrast, he could be both thoughtful and generous. When Zsa Zsa’s parents succeeded in escaping Hungary to land in America destitute, he gave them a suite at the Plaza and loaned Jolie the money to open a jewellery shop on Madison Avenue. It proved very successful.
Conrad, the son of immigrant pioneers, who had worked his way up from the most humble of beginnings and was pathologically stingy, remained convinced that Zsa Zsa had married him only for his money. Now he found himself surrounded by an environment of wanton extravagance, shopping, partying and party-giving. This and the fact that, as a divorcée, he could not receive Holy Communion, troubled him greatly. Zsa Zsa was beautiful, charming, funny and possessed of an insouciant recklessness. These were the qualities that attracted him to her. Now, having married her, he followed the pattern of many husbands and set out to change her.
He attempted to limit her spending on clothes. This was entirely unsuccessful. He was irritated, often angry with her, but she could still make him laugh. She wanted a Cadillac convertible, he bought her a Chrysler sedan. Blue, ‘the colour of a kitchen stove’, she complained. She was an appalling driver, then and always; she could rarely take to the road without causing an accident. She crashed the Chrysler into the rear of the actress Rosemary Lane’s car, halted at a stop light. Conrad, who was away on business, was apprised of the accident and sent her a note: ‘Is it true that you damaged Rosemary Lane’s car?’ She replied by return: ‘Dear Connie, I never, never damaged Rosemary Lane’s car, but if yes let the insurance pay.’
