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“Dahling, the Zsa Zsa legend cannot die,” eulogized one New York newspaper of the woman who’d have turned 100 this past week. “Even in a culture with short memories where attention-seekers jostle for camera time. She lives on, unchallenged, in the cultural ether. Meanwhile, it’s not hard to imagine her in heaven right now, tricked out with wings and a Blackgama mink {below, reunited with the Gabor Girls’ only child, Francesca Hilton, who died 23 months—and 32 years, before mom}, advising St. Peter that the Pearly Gates clash with her diamonds.”
“All three Gabor glamour goddesses parlayed {or par•laid} their extraordinary bejeweled beauty into multi-marriages and multi-millions,” writes Leslie Zemeckis {wife of director Robert}, who calls Zsa Zsa her idol. “Between Mama and the girls they had 23 husbands to boss around!” The score•card reads: Jolie 3 spouses; Magda 6 {including one of Zsa Zsa’s exes, “just for spite”}; Eva 5, and Zsa Zsa 9!!
The last … and last surviving … Gabor “flaunted sex appeal, excess glamour and an exotic accent well into her senior years,” summed up Columbian.com, “logging enough husbands to field a baseball team.” Well, it is played on a diamond …
Speaking of Our National Pastime, Zsa Zsa referred to the ol’ ballgame in relation to … breasts: “The best way to attract a man immediately,” she wrote in her memoirs, “is to have a magnificent bosom and a half-size brain and let both of those show.”
“If you already have these two things, though, you probably aren’t reading this because you don’t need to. You are too busy beating men off with a baseball bat.”
Game Gabor signed this one-of-kind, specially made ‘Big Stick’ for charity.
"Beauty to capture, brains to hold,” was what Mama Jolie Gabor taught her daughters … in addition to some pulsating pelvic practices to be “tight in the night.” Though she always insisted, “Brains are important because if a man is just looking for beauty, he can buy a beautiful painting.” Or a beauty actually painting (below left)!
“Czech mate!” Zsa Zsa might be saying to her board companion (above right). But the chess•ty Hungarian had it all thought out when playing men: “God knows I wasn’t that smart. But I wasn’t stupid either.”
Which is why her wit produced this classic quotation:
Marveled her mother: “Zsa Zsa has exquisite breasts …
… “that stand up by themselves {‘Attention Audrey Hepburn!’}.
“And are topped with two points,” Jolie emphasized the point.
“Everything on me is real—my boobs, everything,” Zsa Zsa re•tit•erated at age 75.
“Impossibly hot-tempered (she knew how to drop the F-bomb),” laughs Leslie Zemeckis, “and full chested (where did she buy her bras? They are fantastic and so uplifting).”
This unpadded sheer bra was given to her …
… a 36C cup (if you’re counting)—for her first big role as artist Toulouse-Lautrec’s model in the 1952 movie Moulin Rouge. So it seams the later Notorious Z.Z.G. was B.I.G. first!
“Move in close, I mean close,” Moulin Rouge director John Huston told his cameraman. “If they can see how beautiful she is (below left in film), they won’t notice that she can’t act.”
To compensate, Huston instructed his novice: “Zsa Zsa, forget about acting. Just make love to the camera.” Her review of the role was two thumbs up. “Now, I know very little about acting but a great deal about making love. It worked.” Though of her 29 films, the only award she ever won was ‘Most Glamorous Actress of 1957’ at the Golden Globes (above right) … with director Alfred Hitchcock holding the audience in suspense before revealing her as the winner.
“Dahink, I was the first actress in the family, and I am still the only actress in the family,” huffs youngest sister Eva Gabor. “I shouldn’t be saying it, but it slipped out.”
Alas, her nip never has … despite the adept actress’ lack of support: “I’ve never worn a bra in my life,” Eva exclaims, “and my bosom is excellent!”
Wrote the New York Times: “It was at times hard to distinguish Zsa Zsa from sister Eva, who had the same small, whittled features, coquettish voice and cotton-candy bouffant.”
Not to mention “big natural boobs!”
“What is white for her is black for me,” hissed Eva in 1990 {she had it backwards, above}. So “why should we be linked together, dahlink? That annoys the hell out of me. Of course, she’s my sister and I love her.”
“To which sister Zsa Zsa cattily came back: “I am sometimes jealous of her, but I’m smart enough not to show it.”
Whereas Eva seemingly showed them at every opportunity!
Even to friends: When producer and agent Simone Sheffield took a tour of the 73-year-old’s abode in 1992, she found a truly open house: “After exploring her closet, I walked out only to have Eva raise her T-shirt exposingher breast right in front of me, saying, ‘Dahlink, are these not the breasts of a 30 year old?’ And yes, they looked better than a 30-year-old set of knockers.”
Con•firmed Camille Belanger, a fellow friend who’d interviewed Sheffield for Gabor’s biography (below left): “Eva had a body to die for and she was very sexy, and proud of it—that is why she flashed her boobs to you, Simone.” And even went chest-to-chest with jugalicious Jayne Mansfield!
“In case you’re wondering,” reassured Vanity Fair, “there is no shame in confusing Zsa Zsa and Eva.” Even mama Jolie said in her memoir: “They look the same, sound the same, and act the same.” Why, even their lovely legs meshed.
“They are often mistaken for each other and both hate it,” Jolie added. “Even I mix them up. This led to a rivalry between the two.” And one iconic incident: While visiting a friend’s house in Florida, Eva wanted to take a swim in their backyard pool, but had no suit.
Thinking no one could see her, she went in nude, only to hear the gardener call, “Hello, Eva.” So she called back: “Oh, hello, dolling. It’s Zsa Zsa!”
Actually, says friend and neighbor Allene Arthur: “Eva had a passion for swimming in the buff.” So much for Palm Springs Life's adage that, “No one ever caught a Gabor with her glamourdown”—Zsa Zsa had a moment of revelation as well: “I am much prettier without clothes!,” the middle child asserted—citing the night “the curtains went up during a costume change and there I stood with black panty hose and nothing else on …
… “it brought the house down!”
In fact, the elder of the pair even had her own, earlier skinny-dipping debacle {she always wanted ‘to be first’}. She was invited by legendary London playwright, actor and composer Noël Coward to his house for a ‘little swim party’ in 1939—Sir Noel had written that fitting ditty about "Only Mad Dogs and Englishmen (Go Out in the Midday Sun)."
When 22-year-old Zsa Zsa showed up that afternoon, she met her fellow guests—all completely nude beside Coward’s pool! Actor Alfred Lunt and his wife Lynn Fontanne—the first couple of the stage—had stripped off and, Ms. Gabor gasped: “Vivien Leigh was there, a naked Scarlett O’Hara, draped over Heathcliff’s cock ” {referring to her husband Laurence Olivier’s role in Wuthering Heights}.
The shy starlet was even more “astonished to see the distinguished Lunts, also naked as the day they were born. ‘We get beautifully tanned,’ Alfred told me. ‘When we return to New York, people find us ravishing to behold.’” With some reluctance, Zsa Zsa stripped as well: “Here I am, lying around with these theater greats … and all of us are naked!” Speaking of ‘ravishing to behold,’ notes a biographer, “Those keen, jaded stars of stage and screen likened her figure to that of Venus de Milo!”
Eva was up in arms {sorry} about the perception she was not as alluring: “Zsa Zsa isn’t the only Gabor sister who could attract a man,” she once declared. “Everybody I met told me I was prettier than Zsa Zsa. Naturally, the opposite sex paid attention to me. I think if I really tried, I could have almost any man I wanted.”
Indeed, while Eva never ‘had’ Olivier or Leigh {who, frankly my dear, was blatantly bisexual, below right}, she did ‘go’ where big sister didn’t—into the arms of the ‘highly homosexual’ Sir Noël Coward {competing for his affection below left}.
“Everyone knows that Coward was gay,” marveled the interviewer, “how did you manage to seduce him?” Eva smiled: “Noël admitted that I turn him on and that I was the only woman in his entire life that he could not resist, at the time, and I think Noël got married after. So I think I probably changed him.”
“Eva had that power,” reveals a galpal, “a seductive power which made her a sex vixen.”
She also ‘had that Power’—literally: “I had a torrid romance with handsome hunk Tyrone Power that lasted about six months,” Eva admitted. Even though he too was notoriously bisexual—the longtime lover of fellow actor Cesar {‘The Joker’} Romero.
“He was not that good in bed, but it was fun waking up to those beautiful long lashes,” she dished. And it must’ve been even more fun beating big sister to his bed! “Dream man Tyrone Power astonished NBC folks last night by dropping into Eva Gabor’s dressing room,” wrote gossip guru Earl Wilson on May 27, 1955. “I don’t want to start any family rows, but gosh, it was just a couple of weeks ago that a confident claim was being laid to Ty by another Gabor—sister Zsa Zsa” {flying off with him, below right, days before dinner with Eva}!
“I listened to her story about Sinatra with some skepticism,” Leigh felt, “but when the book was published, Frank came out and admitted he had had sex with Zsa Zsa, but denied the rape and dubbed her ‘an iceberg.’ From everything I observed of Zsa Zsa, from the testimonies of her litany of lovers and husbands,” her collaborator concluded, “Sinatra was not only being ungentlemanly, but also dishonest.”
“I asked him to unzip my dress,” is how Eva told biographer Camille Belanger her “fling with Frank Sinatra” began—for a while they even shacked up … allowing both to sign this candid to Camille (below left).
Belanger then asked, “Is it true what Ava Gardner said in her own autobiography, that when director John Ford wondered, ‘What do you see in that 120-pound runt?' (above right), she answered: ‘Well, there’s only 10 pounds of Frank but 110 pounds of cock’?” “I guess I missed that,” laughed Eva.
When Camille gasped in amazement: “Gee, is there anybody in Hollywood who escaped you?,” the youngest Gabor grinned: “Only Cary Grant and Merv Griffin” {both bi-}. But didn’t she live with Griffin for the last decade of her life? “Merv and I are not lovers—just dear and wonderful friends,” she explained at the time. “Anyway, these days I prefer scrambled eggs to sex.” We’d have guessed ‘over easy.’
“Fundamentally,” the 5-times-wed wench noted, ‘the major thing that divides the European male from the American male lover is the Atlantic Ocean.” As evidenced by Eva asking, ‘Do I know you?’ to a man who greeted her in an elevator. “Yes,” he replied, he being Dr. John Williams, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. “I was your third husband.”
It seems her first, ‘Chiropractor to the Stars’ Dr. Eric Drimmer, was the most memorable: “Resisting Eric was useless,” Eva wrote of losing her virginity at 18 to him in 1937. “Surrender was the only course for me.” Revealing that they spent 3 days and nights in Drimmer’s suite at the Ritz Hotel, she sighed: “We didn’t need to go out. There was always room service. He had only a short time before he had to fly back to Hollywood.”
Where the chiropractor’s top client was actress Greta Garbo, then in her prime. “As he flew away, I thought of him massaging all those nude movie stars. My future husband facing a naked Garbo. I’d heard she was a secret lesbian, so maybe my beautiful Eric would be safe.”
Yet her sister wasn’t: “Greta Garbo was after me for years when I first came to America,” Zsa Zsa confided. “I was madly in love with her too, but I didn’t know what lesbianism was—I was just a young wife.” Inviting the naïve nymph back to her apartment in Manhattan, Z.Z. relates, “Garbo kissed me straight on the mouth.
Though she’d only practice on Eva later in life (above left), big sis says: “I couldn’t help kissing Greta back because she was so overwhelmingly strong and so beautiful. I’ve never had lesbian tendencies—but if I ever had them, the woman of my life would definitely have been Greta Garbo!”
Not surprising, since Gabor and Garbo are anagrams!
Zsa Zsa made her lesbian love confession to {who else?} Howard Stern … when he impersonated Tonight Show star Johnny Carson after getting his own late night talk show on WWOR-TV in 1992 {as Carson was about to retire}. “Do you prefer a man’s tongue to a woman’s?” Howard queried the buxom blonde after her Garbo revelation. “I don’t know what you mean—you are very vulgar,” Gabor glowered. Which only spurred Stern to wonder if she ever used handcuffs in her sex life {3 years after her DUI arrest and cuffing, coming up} … or “something like this?”—holding up a white vibrator (bottom left).
“It’s too small,” guffawed Gabor. “In Hungary we don’t have those—we don’t need them.”
But Johnny Carson would need smelling salts when the curvy cat lover visited his show two decades before.
Sitting with her favorite feline resting in her lap during the 1962 interview {which, sadly, has been taped over by NBC}, Zsa Zsa purred to her host: “Johnny, vould you like to pet my pussy?”
To which Carson quickly ad-libbed: “I’d love to, but you’ll have to remove that damn cat!”
Sleuth is suddenly feeling ‘pussy quipped’—and must now move on to the fourth and final part of Zsa Zsa …
