“Once upon a time there were three beautiful sisters with little discernible talent and one well-groomed, overly ambitious mother who, at one time wanted to be an actress herself,” begins The Huffington Post. “The Mama made a promise to her daughters that they would be ‘rich, famous and marry kings.”
“No we’re not talking about Kim, Kourtney or Khloe. We’re talking about Zsa Zsa, Eva and Magda Gabor. The original famous-for-being-famous celebrities of their day.” Just book it!
And amazingly, the two clans were perfect counterparts—even often posing in the exact same order!
From left to right, above and below: The eldest, Magda corresponds to Kourtney … Zsa Zsa and Kim {both the middle child} are the shining stars … perhaps why stage mothers Jolie and Kris are closest to them … and the youngest, Eva and Khloe are the wildest and most rebellious of the lot.
“All these years later,” talk show host Merv Griffin—with whom Eva spent her final years—wrote before his death a dozen years after hers, “it’s hard to describe the phenomenon of the three glamorous Gabor girls (below left) and their ubiquitous mother.
“They burst onto the society pages and into the gossip columns so suddenly, and with such force, it was as if they’d been dropped out of the sky.” The two most famous landed … on the cover of Life magazine … just a year apart (in 1950 and ’51).
“They came here poor, without friends, and couldn’t speak the language,” Merv mentioned at a 1986 roast of the still-living foreign foursome. “Now they are successful, rich and famous. And they still can’t speak the language.” Yet underneath it all, both families were fluent in body language.
Though, within those bodies, the 3 Hungarians had fewer outlets: “Without the benefit of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or the hit-me-with-your-selfie stick,” observed The Independent newspaper, “the Gabor women relied on their own relentless hard work and pursuit of the limelight and the inevitable slimelight. All the while making home-brand Kardashian Inc. look like desperate and pedestrian wannabees.”
So Yule not be surprised to see the classy ‘courtesans’ were way ahead … and well above … today’s Ho•liday harem:
After all, nothing beats the original.
“Long before the Kardashians, there were the Gabors,” confirms the New York Times. “Before Paris Hilton {great-grand-niece of Zsa Zsa}, Ivanka Trump and other blondes with an air of effortless wealth and exaggerated glamour, there was the much-married middle Gabor girl. Actually, Zsa Zsa was the first realityshow star and way ahead of her time.”
Before social and mainstream media, these impressive immigrants crossed borders by employing “the well-oiled Hollywood machine, movies, radio, television, gossip columns, newspapers and magazines.”
And like any good goulash, the Hungarian honeys mixed in ‘fashion, peroxide, chutzpah, beauty and their voluptuous hourglass figures” (below left)—all natural … while their Kurrent Kounterparts “will never tell.”
“The zaftig Zsa Zsa,” adds The Huffington Post, “flaunted her big bottom long before the Kardashian sisters aspired {or ass•pired} to do the same.
The ever-quotable blonde beauty said it was a matter of choice:
“Miss Gabor was not threatened but was shaken up by the incident,” her spokeswoman told the press after the actress was “robbed of jewelry estimated to be worth $70,000 by two gunmen in an elevator of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel” at 12:45 in the morning on August 19, 1970.
“I wasn’t going to argue with a gun,” Zsa Zsa said in a statement, “so I gave them the jewelry and then went upstairs and called the police”—who reported that the bandits “took two 48-carat rings and a set of diamond earrings.” Perhaps the thieves had heard Gabor had come to New York to star in—you can’t make this stuff up—the Broadway show Forty Carats.
Similarly, the burglars were alerted to Kim Kardashian’s presence in Paris last October 3rd because—how in keeping with the times?—she had just posted a picture wearing the $4.5 million engagement ring given to her by rapper Kanye West on Instagram! (below right).
“They grabbed me and took me into the hotel hallway,” she stated in the official police report—adding somewhat gratuitously that, “I was wearing a bathrobe, naked underneath. Then we went back in the room again, they put a gun to my forehead and pushed me on the bed. And they tied me up with plastic cables and taped my hands, then put tape over my mouth and my legs. I think they robbed me of 5 million dollars.”
But, in a victory for capitalism and free trade, just 4 weeks to the day later one of the hottest Halloween outfits was this ‘Parisian Heist Robbery Victim Costume Kit’ ... a steal at $69.99.
And Zsa Zsa had one-upped her current counterpart again … having been the victim of jewel thieves twice—dating back to 1949 in her Manhattan penthouse apartment: “Zsa Zsa had been reclining on the bed with a book,” read reports. “The bandit leveled the gun barrel at her forehead: ‘Where are your jewels?’ She directed him toward a chair and said: ‘There’s a tin box under there.’ After ransacking the room, the robber “produced some heavy rope” and tied the actress “to a wrought-iron love seat {sound familiar?} It was a horrible incident for Zsa Zsa.”
The theft was traced to “a suave diamond thief known to New York police as ‘Raffles’—who “had absconded with $600,000 in gems, making it the single largest jewelry heist in the 1940s!”
Not to be outdone, older sister Magda “lost jewelry in two separate apartment burglaries in 1958” … while 6 years later younger sister Eva “was pistol-whipped by intruders at the posh Racquet Club in Miami and robbed of a $25,000 diamond and lesser jewelry.”
Police suspected the culprit was legendary larcenist Jack Murphy—immortalized in the 1975 film Murph theSurf, starring Robert Conrad. After he was accused, the case had to be dropped after Eva “failed to show up for several scheduled trials” … and weeks later Murph pulled off “the biggest jewel heist in American history” by stealing the 563 carat Star of India sapphire (below right) from the American Museum of Natural History!
If only Eva (above left) had testified to the earlier theft … the suave surfer turned swiper (below left) might not have been able to parlay his notoriety from his next job into making a fortune as a “reformed Christian evangelist” …
… still bearing witness today at 79 after being counseled and converted in prison by then-Dallas Cowboys QB Roger Staubach!
Nicknamed ‘The Diamond Diva,” Zsa Zsa Gabor always avoided answering the exact date of her birth by cooing: “I wasn’t born, I was ordered from room service.”
And we know what she later asked for … since the ‘Bride of Budapest’ was wed a staggering NINE times!
As her mother Jolie joked: “Zsa Zsa’s first words were ‘I do.’”
No wonder she kept a pillow on her living room sofa till her dying day with the embroidery: “Eat, Drink and Remarry.”
Always guided by just her two simple lifelong desires:
And wouldn’t you know that one of the main mourners at the near-centenarian’s funeral two months ago was Kardashian family matriarch Kris Jenner!
The Gabor matriarch, Jolie finally admitted the obvious late in life—that the middle child was always her favorite:
“I don’t think I concealed it very well. I love her the most, and I couldn’t help myself. Call it a mother’s intuition, but I just knew that Zsa Zsa would become the most famous of my daughters, in spite of her lack of theatrical talent.”
Her talents lay elsewhere … it’s said that the sex-hungry Hungarian could run rings around other Hollywood hotties …
… because Mama Jolie passed along “amazing tricks with a certain part of her anatomy” (above) that she’d learned while running Budapest’s busiestbrothel. And daughter definitely gave dude$ their money’s worth!
Why, even that name foretold her seductive fame: Sári Gábor was given to her at birth, but she had trouble pronouncing it as a child … so Mama called her Zsazsilka. That became “Zsa Zsa”—which is a diminutive form of the popular Hungarian name Erzsébet from the Old Testament, the Hebrew name for Elizabeth {the family was Jewish, which is why they had to flee Germany for America in the late 1930s}.
The Biblical Elizabeth is the mother of John the Baptist … whose head was served up on a platter by request of seductress Salomé after she captivated King Herod with her disrobed Dance of the Seven Veils.
Which mirrors what Mama did on her wedding night in 1914 at the dawn of World War I … upon finding her inexperienced military husband Vilmos “nervous and unsure of his himself. To entice him to bed, so I could lose my virginity,” she recalled in her autobiography, “I stripped off my clothing, except for an almost transparent veil. In the living room, I fancied myself dancing the notorious dance of Salome. Vilmos, I imagined, was King Herod, but I had only one veil, not seven.”
One was enough: “It seemed to work,” Jolie confessed—she was quite a babe back then (portrait, below left, alongside one of her hot Hungarian harem).
“He escorted me to the bedroom and cut off the light before disrobing. I’d never seen a man’s pimpi before.”
Not so her precocious pre-teen daughter: “I had learned a lot by reading passages from the pornographic books of my father, which I had accidentally found in his library one day,” Zsa Zsa admitted in her autobio. “Several were illustrated. Unlike {older sister} Magda, I knew what a young man looked like without his trousers.”
And an older man would find out what it felt like beneath her dress when the budding beauty ventured to Vienna—without her protective mother—for the first time. Acclaimed nightclub singer Greta Keller—later featured in the film Cabaret and a close confidante of actress Marlene Dietrich {more on her in a bit}—promised Jolie she’d act as a chaperone “to take Zsa Zsa under my wing.”
Keller is best known for her hit album entitled Remember Me Other Intimate Songs …
… featuring the suggestive “That Old Feeling”—which is precisely what happened to teenage Gabor when Greta arranged for her to sit next to the third richest man in Austria—and intimate of Hitler and Mussoini—Fritz Mandl, the munitions dealer married to stunning star Hedy Lamarr, at an elegant recital she was giving.
“During the middle of Keller’s concert {with Lamarr just to the other side of her husband, below left},” Zsa Zsa related, “Mandl, under the table, put his hand on my knee. When I did not object, that hand became more daring and traveled north on its inevitable course.” Later she confided to Greta: “He was the first man who played with my vagina” (below right).
“He took control of it and before your parting song, he had practically masturbated me, while all the time seemingly paying all his attention to the beautiful Hedy.” Then, after Lamarr went to the powder room, her horny hubby whispered to Zsa Zsa: “Hedy may be the most beautiful woman in Austria, but you are the most beautiful woman in Hungary.”
No wonder the Austro-Hungarian Empire thrived from 1867 up until 1918 … the year after Gabor was ga•born!
Zsa Zsa would be able to retaliate three decades later by getting her hand into Hedy’s ‘business’: Offered a comeback role in the 1966 big-budget horror film PictureMommy Dead, the 52-year-old Lamarr was arrested for shoplifting an $86 pair of slippers … and the role was recast with 3-years-younger Gabor! This prompted the furious, fired fräulein to file a $499,000 breach of contract suit against its B-movie producer/director Bert Gordon—most infamous for hiring himself to sing The Hearse Song on the film’s soundtrack, which includes the familiar lyrics: “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout.”
It wasn’t in the cards for Zsa Zsa to marry Mandl after Lamarr left him—despite his generous gem offers to add to her coffers. Which she nevertheless accepted, in keeping with her strict standards on receiving presents from admirers:
And, as the Huffington Post noted: “She lived back in the day when men sent flowers and diamonds to their mistresses and not just pictures of their Weiners over Twitter.” {Quite a sense of Huma, don’t ya think?}
“He was the first of an array of powerful men I’d meet in my life,” the amorous actress reflected on being diddled by the “handsome in a terrifying way” Nazi ally.
Shortly thereafter, she’d make out better with the genial general fighting Hitler’s entry into France, Charles deGaulle! “There is no bigger aphrodisiac than power,” Zsa Zsa once admitted … and once admitted into her villa after she sat next to him at a 1939 banquet, the soldier stood at attention—all 77 inches of him {13” taller than the tiny 22-year-old}. “Shortly before midnight,” she related, “I stood on my tiptoes and kissed him passionately, which seemed to shock him. But his tongue responded. I guess that’s called French kissing. In the 1960s, I heard on the news that Jacqueline Kennedy had mesmerized de Gaulle, then the president of the French Republic, when she accompanied one of my many lovers, John F. Kennedy, to Paris” (below left). What the first lady might not have known was that I had enchanted de Gaulle and also seduced JFK long before she ever met them.”
Same goes for our other big WWII ally’s Conservative leader—and rival of Winston Churchill—Sir AnthonyEden (above right). As Hitler plotted to invade England in May 1939, dapper future Prime Minister Eden invaded Zsa Zsa: “It was the most gentlemanly fuck I ever had,” she confided to friends. “Even when he pulled off his suit, he spread it with precision across a chair. When he mounted me, he performed brilliantly, exiting only when he felt he’d satisfied me. I adored him. If he weren’t already taken, I would have agreed to divorce {her Turkish diplomat husband Burhan} Belge and marry him at once.”
But then, as she put it:
Perhaps explained by this combustible quote:
Ironic, since Zsa Zsa’s Bel Air mansion was destroyed by a 1961 blaze (above right), which Time magazine dubbed “A Tragedy Trimmed in Mink.”
Yet she was truly ‘playing with fire’ at her very first audience with iconic intellectual George Bernard Shaw, the Nobel Prize-winning writer whose play Pygmalion become the musical My Fair Lady. While his wife Charlotte demonstrated disapproval of Gabor’s glamorous gown by going "to check on lunch in the kitchen," the great mind--whom she’d “put up on a pedestal”--leaned down and whispered to Zsa Zsa: “When Marlene Dietrich first came to see me (below left), she fell on her knees and performed fellatio on me to honor me as a playwright.
“I will not expect such tribute from you,” he informed the half century-younger actress, “although you’re free to indulge, of course.” Replied the equally wise Zsa Zsa: “Perhaps on our second meeting.”
She and Marlene never met … but who can forget Dietrich’s disgust when her bust in this diaphanous dress for her Las Vegas show in 1955 {which she signed for the Sleuth} …
… was com•paired to Gabor’s fuller figure in a copycat cabaret act the very next year on The Strip?
“Well, if it’s quantity they want and not quality,” Marlene sniffed, “I have nothing to add.”
We have a whole ’nuther part to add … in our upcoming Chapter 3 of Zsa Zsa’s amazing life story -- The Later Years!
