by Jeremy Scott
All of Zsa Zsa’s nine marriages were contracted so swiftly there was little opportunity to acquaint herself with the groom prior to the event. Now, ‘I began to learn more … [Conrad] was not a man to be controlled by a woman, he sought no approval from me; he went his own way. I remembered what Ataturk had told me, “Yes, I divorced my wife. She began questioning me – where I had been, where I was going. I will not be answerable to a woman.”’ The way Conrad put it was different: ‘Don’t fence me in,’ he told her.
He liked to retire to bed at 9 p.m. Sometimes she would suggest a movie. He’d say, ‘I’m tired. Why don’t you go with the boys.’ She, Nicky and Barron would sit together munching popcorn and candy, then come straight home like three obedient children. The boys disappeared into their apartment; she – at first – went down the long corridor to her husband’s room. She learned not to. ‘“Conrad?” I whispered. There was no answer. I tried the knob – the door was locked.’
She bought a dog for company, a German shepherd that had been mistreated. She lavished love on the beast: ‘She would nudge her nose into my palm as though she sensed my loneliness.’ At a premiere she met a European producer to whom she felt an instant attraction. She and Eva went to several lunch parties at his beach house and, while casing the joint on the pretext of visiting the bathroom, found a riding whip of beige leather on his dressing table. ‘I saw myself turn crimson with shame… This type of man I knew. One little thing I might say – one word – and he would hate me and beat me. But whatever it was, I understood this man. I knew his reactions, I understood them as he understood mine… But with Conrad I never knew where I was.’
After two years of marriage the couple was still technically together but under stress. Zsa Zsa explains their estrangement as due to the familiar characteristic of alpha-male achievers: their buzz comes from conquest. Having achieved what they want, it loses its appeal and they no longer continue to want it. But in his memoirs Conrad provides a deeper reason for his unhappiness. His failure to obtain a Papal annulment to his first marriage meant that his union with Zsa Zsa was not recognised by the Church. Catholic faith together with the work ethic formed the foundation to his character. Now, though attending church regularly, he was excluded from Mass. ‘I stayed on my knees in the pew, chained as it were to the side of my beautiful wife … to be deprived of the sacraments was a price I had not fully understood … I felt adrift, cut off, spiritually forlorn. In the end it was more than I could pay.’
Despite her performance at parties and outward show of bravado, Zsa Zsa was already in a fragile state of mind when a series of mishaps fell upon her. Then she was held up at knifepoint and robbed. While she and Conrad were out, the house in Bel Air caught fire and burnt down. Her dog, locked inside, could be heard howling by the crowd in the street but could not be saved.
She was distraught at the loss. She could not sleep and was prescribed barbiturates. They fogged her brain and slowed her speech. She was prescribed amphetamines to function. They sent her manic. Obtaining a legal separation from Conrad, at Christmas 1944, she quit the marital home to move into a suite on the Plaza in NYC, which she redecorated at a cost of $15,000 (around $250,000 today). She spent $5,000 on a bed reputed to have belonged to Josephine Bonaparte. Her weight went down to eighty pounds. She bought entire collections of clothes, had a nose job; in El Morocco she slapped the face of the club’s owner, John Perona; she woke up one morning to find her step-son, Nicky, sharing her bed. She was sliding further and further out of control and filled with guilt, tormented by her own selfishness. One morning she flung all her jewellery out the window. Conrad had her committed to a sanatorium.
After seven weeks’ incarceration, she escaped only with the help of an attorney who obtained a writ of habeas corpus. A friend, Hamlin Turner, who’d succeeded in visiting her swore an affidavit:
She was in shocking physical condition. She’d been brutally assaulted about the face, nose and body; she had been given insulin shock treatments tri-weekly and, as a result of the hypodermic injections, she displayed to me two large infected areas on both thighs which resisted healing and which were open and festering.
The writ was sustained by a judge and Zsa Zsa walked free. She was five months pregnant by Conrad when she petitioned for divorce. She was awarded $35,000 in cash and $2,000 per month for ten years, unless she remarried.
The money restored her confidence. Hormonal change brought about by pregnancy lifted her mood and helped her overcome dependency on drugs, which she achieved without therapeutic counselling. She possessed the national characteristic of all Hungarians: she was adaptable and resilient, a survivor. Beneath the elaborately confected exterior, she was quite some cookie.
Zsa Zsa’s daughter Francesca was born in 1947 into her own trust fund. ‘When I held her in my arms it was one of the happiest days I’ve ever known … when I looked into Francesca’s little face I felt complete … All at once there was purpose in my life.’
Six weeks after her daughter’s birth, Zsa Zsa spotted George Sanders across the room at a party in the St Regis Hotel. ‘Aware that I was dressed to kill, I opted for a spontaneous approach and walked over. I said, “Mr Sanders, I’m madly in love with you.”’
Raising a trademark eyebrow he murmured, ‘How very well I understand you, my dear.’
He’d won the Academy Award for his performance in All About Eve, but he was a character actor before he became a star. Born in Russia, educated at a second-rate English public school, he’d drifted into acting, a profession he despised throughout his career. ‘For a time I was considered the ideal actor to play sneering, arrogant, bull-necked Nazi brutes. Nobody, it seems, could enunciate the word Schweinehund! quite as feelingly as I.’ His first American film was Lloyds of London, when ‘a major movie villain was born’. In The Moon and Sixpence, where he plays a character based on Gauguin, the artist says, ‘Women are strange little beasts. You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them until your arm aches, and still they love you. Of course it’s an absurd illusion that they have souls.’ Women were outraged, which only encouraged him to appropriate the role of a woman-hater. It led him to express extreme attitudes that sound almost quaint today. ‘Mr Sanders, what do you think of intellectual women?’ Are there any? In a notorious interview for Photoplay he said, ‘Women should remain where they belong, in the boudoir and the parlour. Men should keep women subjugated. When they are subjugated they are happy.’ He always acted the same character: the smooth sardonic cad. He had become that character and in real life – so far as actors ever inhabit real life – he was always ‘in character’. Except, that is, during daily fifty-minute sessions with his analyst, when the mask could be set aside and he might disintegrate into an insecure bundle of raging neuroses spilled across the couch. The session over, he got up, smoothed down his lapels, donned the mask and left, once again an urbane schizo and man of the world.
Zsa Zsa adored indifferent, unapproachable men. ‘They were the great challenge of my life.’ She and George were married in Las Vegas on 1 April 1949. That evening he admitted, ‘I don’t know if I can ever make love to you ever again. Yesterday you were the glamorous Mrs Conrad Hilton now you are just plain Mrs George Sanders.’ Instead, they spent the night playing chess.
An actor may succeed in remaining in character while in public; it is another matter to maintain the role with a spouse. On their honeymoon in Mallorca George revealed himself to be both jealous and physically abusive. Suspecting Zsa Zsa to be attracted to the guitarist in the hotel band, he created a row in their bedroom, accusing her of having slept with the youth. Grabbing her by the collar of her dress, he hung her out the window demanding she confess.
She was not particularly shocked by the assault; this was the way she expected, even liked, men to behave. Her perception of the event is blithe. ‘George pulled me back into the room. I thanked my lucky stars … for the expensive Balenciaga model I was wearing. A cheaper dress might have ripped apart, sending me hurtling int
o eternity.’
George was not an easy man to live with. He abhorred responsibility, commitment, emotional ties, was happiest alone in his workshop making furniture and inventing gadgets nobody wanted. He was even stingier than Conrad. He moved into her house, where she continued to pay the bills. Though she filled his cigarette case each morning he refused to give her one when she asked. ‘I can’t afford it, buy your own.’
Moody and difficult, nevertheless he had style. He could be charming, wonderfully witty – and she loved him. And he her, in his fashion. In Memoirs of a Professional Cad, he writes:
Not for her the conventional mask of studied behaviour, she is spontaneous and genuine… No one is a better date than Zsa Zsa. No one is a better companion on a trip even if it involves roughing it… Every age has its Madame Pompadour, its Lady Hamilton, its Queen of Sheba, its Cleopatra, and I wouldn’t be surprised if history singles out Zsa Zsa as the Twentieth Century prototype of this exclusive côterie.
In 1951 when George was filming Ivanhoe in England, she was invited as guest on a TV show, Bachelor’s Heaven. Hosted by Tom Conway (George’s elder brother) and networked on CBS, it provided advice to viewers on relationship and marriage. The programme went out live in prime time; on the drive to the studio she was shaking with stage fright. Conway tried to calm her, ‘Do what you always do, yak-yak,’ he told her. Gorgeously dressed, sporting a diamond bracelet, with a twenty-carat diamond solitaire ring blazing in the lights, she made her entrance on the set, causing one of the jurors to shade his eyes and let out a whistle. ‘Oh darling,’ she drawled, ‘These are just my working diamonds.’
The studio audience cracked up. From that moment she could do no wrong. To a viewer’s question, ‘I’m breaking my engagement to a very wealthy man. He gave me a beautiful home, a mink coat, diamonds, a stove, and an expensive car. What shall I do?’ She answered, ‘Give back the stove.’ To another, ‘Do you think large families are a good idea?’ She replied, ‘Oh yes. Every woman should have at least three husbands.’ Another, ‘My husband is a travelling salesman but I know he strays, even when he’s home. How can I stop him?’ brought the advice, ‘Shoot him in the legs.’ The audience hooted with laughter, they adored her.
Overnight she became a celebrity. She was booked as a regular on the show, saluted by Winchell, acclaimed by Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, the bitch-columnists who both made and destroyed Hollywood reputations. ‘I was handed my career on a silver plate.’ In fifty minutes she accomplished what her sister Eva had failed to achieve in twelve years.
‘Part of me was a woman who wanted to be dominated by a man like George. But now there was also in me a restless, driving, ambitious woman who had to have a career.’ By the time her husband returned home she was a TV star. Over the next months she played in her first movie, Lovely To Look At, and featured on the covers of Collier’s, Paris Match, Look, Picture Post … and John Huston cast her for his forthcoming film about Toulouse Lautrec, Moulin Rouge…
† He later bought the Plaza and the Roosevelt in New York City. Hilton’s financing at this time came from Woolworth funds controlled by E. F. Hutton, Barbara’s father.
CHAPTER 9
ZSA ZSA GABOR, NEW YORK CITY, JANUARY 1953
On the morning after Moulin Rouge’s premiere, Rubi rises from Zsa Zsa’s bed at 6 a.m., whispers, ‘You’ll hear from me, mon amour,’ and goes through into his own suite to get ready to fly to the Dominican Republic with his President, Trujillo. Zsa Zsa says, ‘In the morning I knew that I never wanted to leave him again. I was madly in love with George, but after one night with Rubi I lost all sense of reality. He was exciting, sensual, passionate, primitive yet incredibly sophisticated…’
Later that same day she takes the train to Philadelphia, first city in a coast-to-coast tour promoting Moulin Rouge. On checking into her hotel, she is handed two cables. One reads, I MISS YOU TERRIBLY. I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU. GEORGE. The other is from his Hollywood agent: IMPORTANT YOU GO SOONEST ROME. GEORGE UNHAPPY NEEDS YOU DESPERATELY. ‘If George was not psychic, I have no other way to account for it,’ she says.
Stricken by remorse, Zsa Zsa cancels the scheduled tour despite the damage to her career, and flies obediently to Italy. On arrival in Rome, she soothes George, who is in a highly agitated state due to problems with his director, Rossellini, who expects him to improvise his scenes; he’s at a loss without scripted dialogue. He’s seriously unnerved. ‘Don’t leave me,’ he begs her. She promises not to, she truly loves him.
Their reconciliation is destroyed by another cable. Addressed to Zsa Zsa, this is delivered to their room by a bellboy. George snatches it from him, saying, ‘There should be no secrets between a husband and wife.’ Watching Zsa Zsa’s face while he does so, he opens the envelope with sadistic deliberation – the scene could have been scripted for him. He reads the text aloud: ‘No word from you. Miss and love you much. Wire me 46 Rue de Bellechasse. Rubi.’
Flustered, she protests, ‘George, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s over.’
He tosses the cable at her in disdain, ‘Rubirosa,’ he sneers. ‘What a conquest. You must reply, my dear.’
‘No!’ She’s panic-stricken. ‘It’s over, I’m finished with him.’
‘That would not be courteous. You must answer.’
‘Oh no, no!’ she begs him.
‘Then I will,’ he says.
On the back of the form he prints: MON CHERI I LOVE YOU AND CANNOT WAIT TO SEE YOU AGAIN. ZSA ZSA. He gives it to the bellboy to dispatch.
Zsa Zsa writes,
I meant it when I said I was finished with Rubi. I was not yet deeply involved … I fought again and again to free myself. I needed George to help keep me away from Rubi; and George, for whatever complex, self-punishing, self-mocking reasons, was throwing me into Rubi’s arms.
Only a few days later Zsa Zsa is offered a part in a movie about to start filming in Paris with the donkey-faced comedian, Fernandel, then at the height of his popular success. She hears the news by telephone, then hurries to tell George, who is seated on the hotel terrace among a group of men including John Huston.
George tells her, ‘Don’t take it, my dear. Stay here with me.’
Huston turns on him, ‘But this is a terrific break for her. You’re not going to stop her, are you?’
Zsa Zsa writes, ‘Suddenly I was sick of being toyed with. “No,” I said. “He won’t stop me.”’
When she lands at Orly a week later, Rubi is at the airport to meet her.
Rubi and Zsa Zsa
She lives at the Plaza Athénée while filming, but spends almost every night with Rubi at his house in Rue Bellechasse. In this opulent residence Rubi is attended by his giant Russian valet (who also serves as sparring partner), an Iberian chef, and two Spanish maids dressed in white aprons and lace caps. The house is opulently decorated and furnished and everywhere are trophies to Rubi’s sporting success: silver cups gained in fencing, at polo, and in the Ferrari and Mercedes he races on European and South American circuits. Discreetly absent are photographs of the women he has won, he is no braggart about his conquests.
How do you explain Rubi… What is his appeal? Zsa Zsa asks. She goes on to provide the answer, ‘He is everything a woman can want in a man – if she does not think, if she asks herself no questions of today or tomorrow. He is all male … thinking of you always as a woman to be taken and possessed and kept away from all other men because, being so feminine and desirable, you are their natural prey… He knows what goes on in your mind every moment – he has the instinct of a wild animal to sense your every mood.’
She says,
We were like two children: pleasure-seeking, hedonistic, perhaps spoiled and selfish, but full of an unquenchable lust for life and an insatiably strong appetite for excitement. For Rubi and I both suffered from the same curse … we were too greedy for life and too greedy for each other. Rubi understood me … which made him irresistible … He was like a sickness to me.
During the months tha
t follow Zsa Zsa swings between the two men in her life. ‘I found myself rushing from George to Rubi – tears in my eyes because I was leaving my husband; then, a few weeks later, rushing from Rubi back to George – tears in my eyes because I was leaving Rubi.’
On the one hand there was my husband – indifferent, supercilious, and hurting me more than anyone knew… Then there was Rubi, one of the most jealous men I ever met. He resented even the time it took me to go to the powder room. After George’s take-it-or-leave-it attitude, Rubi was a gift sent from heaven to make me feel a woman again.
Why do women marry shits? Although they became fiancés, Zsa Zsa never married him but her reasons for hanging out with this particular shit are compelling on an emotional scale. However it is not long before she encounters the violence in Rubi’s nature. The two are dining out with the couturier Genevieve Fath and her lover, a Portuguese prince. Afterwards, Rubi drops them off outside Genevieve’s house, where Zsa Zsa kisses the prince goodnight too warmly for Rubi’s taste. As the couple go toward the front door, he turns on her and slaps her around the face. She screams … Genevieve runs back and helps her out the car and into the house. Rubi drives off with a squeal of tyres.
