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When her bosomy buds Jane Russell and Elizabeth Taylor both passed away at age 89 just 23 days apart in early 2011, then-94 year old Zsa ZsaGabor had to be hospitalized with high blood pressure. “It’s me now,” she gasped—believing the superstition that celebrity deaths occur in threes {e.g., Bowie, Vanity, Prince at the same time last year}. “Oh God, Jane Russell and Liz Taylor—I’m next.”
A cartoon confirmed the aged actress’ ascent to the top of the ‘Dead Pool’ predictions (above right) … yet somehow she’d last nearly six more years!
“A woman who tells her age tells everything, and I won’t tell it,” is how Zsa Zsa explained her reticence to reveal her actual birth year. “She always gave her birth day as either February 6 or7,” reported the New YorkTimes in her full page obituary.
Since Sleuth feels she’d appreciate one final gesture, let’s make the Great Gabor a day younger … and celebrate that TODAY would have marked her 100th birthday!!
“The only way you can tell the age of a Gabor is from the rings around their gums,” sneered gossip Cindy Adams—a snide swipe at the famed family’s “fellatio foundations.”
“Whenever conversation drooped at a Palm Springs party,” muses socialite Allene Arthur, “you could always fall back on speculating about the true Gabor ages. They will not be pinned down and records in Hungary perished along with the government.”
Yet Sleuth has been able to locate the birth record of matriarch Jolie Gabor—showing she lived the longest: born Janka Tilleman in Budapest on September 30, 1896, she died on Apri1 1 {no fooling!}, 1997.
In keeping with Zsa Zsa’s line when asked which Gabor is oldest? “Mother,” was her reply.
And surely the wisest: “Mama Jolie raised her three Hungarian puff pastries with precision,” notes one observer. Standing left to right, in order of age, she tutored Magda, Zsa Zsa and Eva in all the finer things.
“The mythology depicts her as the heiress to a jewelry fortune, and her family as the aristocratic scions of pre-war Hungarian society,” writes the Daily Mail. “The truth was considerably less romantic. A large proportion of her mother’s income came from running one of Budapest’s most thriving brothels.”
A portrait of Madam Gabor that hung in her house of ill repute {and later her house} is above—she was still a “working girl” planning her daughters’ love liaisons in later years.
Zsa Zsa learned her lessons especially well—operating a sex club in 1958’s Touch of Evil …
… before heading a bordello in the aptly named F Troop in 1966.
Not that she herself was ever a ‘Call Girl’:
“My daughters know how to ride,” Mrs. G proudly proclaimed {we presume she meant horses}. ‘Not too much can they do these things—not too much to make big muscles—but enough to be a charming companion to a man.”
And perhaps offer a bit extra: “Jolie supposedly taught her daughters (when they were teenagers),” confided an old family friend, “to do wild and amazing tricks with a certain part of their anatomy!”
And it wasn’t just their upper lips …
As the actress asserted in one of her many famous quotes {she was basically the blonde Yogi Berra}: “There is nothing wrong with a woman welcoming all men’s advances as long as they are in cash.”
As usual, she was right on the money.
“As I have always said,” she always said, “Three’s company, but four’s an orgy.” No wonder she was happily accused of being the “most expensive courtesan since Madame de Pompadour” (the mistress of King Louis XV whom she portrayed, below left).
“To a smart girl men are no problem—they are the answer,” the Queen of the Quips never grew tired of saying. Bushed bedmate Tony Curtis (above right) looks like he’s forgotten the question.
“As a sexual adventuress, which she remained all her life, Zsa Zsa started young,” the Daily Mail reports. “That girl will come to a bad end,” predicted her mother, before packing her prodigy off to an expensive Swiss boarding school.
“I learned in school that money isn’t everything. It’s ‘happiness’ that counts,” the daring daughter recalled. ‘So momma sent me to a different school.”
And entered her in the Miss Hungary beauty contest—which she won (below left)—“only to be disqualified because I was too young.”
Meanwhile, younger sister Eva would beat her to Hollywood … and become a sexy starlet shooting scary stills (above right).
Zsa Zsa dropped out of her finishing school—and finished her virginity by “seducing a Roman Catholic priest during a midnight trip on an Italian train,” she confessed.
The tempting teen next informed the “dark and handsome” Turkish propaganda minister Burhan Belge {think Sean Spicer with better suits, below} that she was “ready” for him …
… and agreed to elope and marry His Excellency “if she could keep her Scottie terrier Mishka. The newlyweds boarded a train for Turkey,” narrates the Celebrity Sex Register, “and young Zsa Zsa was relieved that Belge did not slipinto her bridal berth”: “How could I know that to a Moslem, dogs are unclean,” she discovered. “Burhan would never sleep where a dog had lain.” So the marriage “remained unconsummated.”
Fortunately she soon met her husband’s boss … Kemal Atatürk, the all-powerful ruler and founder of modern Turkey … and dropped ‘Ankara’ {sorry} in the old city for two years of secret rendezvous with him (unbeknownst to hubby}. “He dazzled me with his sexual prowess and seduced me with his perversion,” the blushing bride explained.
He presented her with “a ruby-encrusted holy ‘Hand of Fatima’ (inset above left) as a symbol of our romantic destiny,” and in Zsa Zsa’s eyes was “half man, half god.” Likewise to his people—the clock in his bedroom where Atatürk died in November 1938 “is still set to the time of his death, 9:05 in the morning” {Sleuth has visited it}.
With no lover to fill her nights and the Germans invading Europe, the ambitious adulteress snuck away from cuckolded husband Belge in the middle of the night—they had never shared a bedroom—and using his diplomatic passport to dodge the Nazis, embarked on the luxury Orient Express train {with 21 pieces of luggage} to visit sister Eva in Hollywood. Blinded by the lights of La La Land, she cold-Turkeyed and never returned.
Within months, she managed to meet billionaire American hotelier Conrad Hilton and said to herself, “This man I could marry.” As her mother had sagely advised: “It is just as easy to love a rich man as a poor man and, although money has no odor, poverty stinks.”
“I’ve always said that marriage should be a fifty-fifty proposition,” was another of Zsa Zsa’s priceless pronouncements. “He should be at least fifty years old, and have at least fifty million dollars.”
Hilton fit the bill on both counts: he was 55—she 25—when “they wed in April 1942. “First a Turk, now a Texan,” sighed sister Eva … though her longhorn lover was reluctant to climb into the saddle. Conrad claimed that his “Catholic guilt for marrying a divorced woman” made him kneel in prayer just when his bride was feeling amorous. “Damn it, go to your room and wait for me,” he would order—which Zsa Zsa said “made me feel like a scarlet woman.” Frankly ‘Scarlet,’ he didn’t give a damn, and soon ventured to the red light district—‘Catholic guilt’ can be pretty original when it comes to sin—taking his wife to a brothel on Long Island to have sex there while she {again} waited for him.”
In retaliation, his Hungarian Goulash began an affair with her teenage stepson Nicky Hilton, and “continued to do so throughout the marriage to his father and even after Nicky’s own marriage to Elizabeth Taylor!” Of course, that means Gabor “got” both the great-grandfather (below left) and granddad of the current “famous for being famous” heiress who’s often compared to her, Paris Hilton (below right). And Zsa Zsa also got the patriarch to purchase her favorite NYC hotel, the Plaza—later bought by Donald Trump!
She took an instant dislike to Ivana Trump, says a friend. “Zsa Zsa much preferred being with Donald.”
Perhaps even enough to let him “grab her by the pussy?”
When he discovered she was allowing his son to do that and more, Conrad Hilton “called his wife and told her the marriage was over. She wanted money.” To get rid of her, Hilton hired a private eye, who caught Gabor having sex “with a studio executive in the back seat of a convertible parked in an empty studio lot.”
When the hotel magnate confronted her with the evidence, Zsa Zsa was ready to check out: “Who cares? Our marriage is over anyway. In fact, since we broke up, I have had more men than you will ever know!”
Chief among them suave actor George Sanders——whom the actress approached at a party while still Mrs. Hilton and confessed, “Mr. Sanders, I’m madly in love with you.” To which he smiled downed at her condescendingly and murmured in his impeccable British accent, “Indeed, how very understandable.” And equally unsurprising is that the gentleman “took me home that night … and stayed.”
And stayed for ‘seconds’: they wed in 1949 (below left)—at which time the groom remarked “that now that she was no longer the glamorous Mrs. Conrad Hilton, just the plain Mrs. George Sanders, he wasn’t sure he could make love to her anymore. Somehow he managed.”
But not for long. While his insatiable spouse basically spoon-fed him sex every night (above right), Sanders—“a cad and an emotional sadist” like the character than won him the Best Actor Oscar for 1950’s classic All AboutEve—told Zsa Zsa he was all about eavesdropping … as a voyeur George “urged his beautiful wife to make love to a handsome young Italian priest while he watched from behind a screen.”
Luckily, she had train’d for just such a situation from the moment she lost her virginity.
“George Sanders was the great love of my life,” the ever-resilient Gabor maintained, “even though he was cold and cruel to me. We were both in love with him. I fell out of love with him, but he didn’t.”
Instead, the Budapest Bombshell “became obsessed” with ‘The Ultimate Playboy’—Dominican Republic romeo Porfirio Rubirosa, who seduced Sanders’ wife when they first met … in an elevator at her prior hubby’s Plaza Hotel. “Zsa Zsa invited him to bed,” recounts the Daily Mail … and the duo went up and down till the wee hours. “After one night with Rubi,” she recalled, “I lost all sense of reality. I was hooked.”
“So what exactly was it that made this freeloader the most desirable man on the planet?” the Mail mused. “Famously, his attraction lay not only in his mesmerizing charm but his bedroom prowess—and his remarkable physical endowment (try to take in the ‘trouser snake’ below left). Along the Riviera and in the nightclubs of Paris and Manhattan, Rubi was known as Toujours Prêt—always ready—and the extra-large peppermills in restaurants came to be known as ‘Rubirosas’ (below right) in homage to his impressive appendage.”
Writes the Huffington Post: “She apparently had good taste in all kinds of jewels, including the family ones. In the midst of a heated affair with well-hung (at least 11 inches, yowza!) Porfirio Rubirosa, Zsa Zsa kept tabloid readers enthralled.” Throughout 1952, she later admitted, “I found myself rushing from George to Rubi, then rushing from Rubi to George.” When Sanders filed for divorce in 1953, Rubirosa “intensified his pursuit” and mounted his mistress like a stallion.
Even though he was hung like a horse (below left), the possessive stud “frequently hit her, once giving the actress a ‘shiner’ just before she was due on stage.” Ever the trouper, she held a press conference instead—sporting a black eye patch as the cameras clicked (below right).
Revealed biographer Wendy Leigh: “Zsa Zsa once confided to me that she liked a man to be rough in bed.” Thus, she found her jealous gigolo “irresistible,” describing him as a “sickness. Everyone knows Rubi was the world’s greatest lover. I lived with him for four years—though he never handcuffed me, he didn’t have to.”
“I’d rather be hit by a gorgeous man than an ugly one,” she rationalized … but later realized, ‘Macho does not prove mucho.”
So the actress altered her philosophy to insist: “I now want a man who’s kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?”
Nor even of a billionaire … as her romeos on the ‘rebound’ from Rubi included two of the world’s wealthiest womanizers: first ‘up,’ the legendary ‘Love Prince,’ Aly Khan of Pakistan—who confided his marriage to sex queen Rita Hayworth was “collapsing” and told Zsa Zsa: “You’re one of the few women in America I’ve longed to meet” {make that meat, below left}.
When she began to sense he wanted “a new adventure,” she embarked on one with oil oligarch J. Paul Getty (above right)—just after Fortune magazine named him ‘the richest living American’ in 1957. The brilliant billionaire begged the blonde beauty to marry him, yet she decided: “No matter what a man is an expert in, he always thinks he’s also an expert in being a lover.” And evidently, her petrol pursuer didn’t make the grade.
Speaking of gas, coincidentally Zsa Zsa’s other spurned suitors—Rubirosa and Prince Aly—never got over her … dying in fiery sports-car crashes in Paris within 5 years of each other!
Told that romeo Rubi’s last words—while being crushed to death by his own auto—were: “Zsa Zsa, I love only Zsa Zsa,” she snorted: “What rubbish! He had a Ferrari on his chest—the last thing he would be thinking about was Zsa Zsa!”
But one of the first things she thought about after her royal romance with Khan was another crowning achievement: It was confirmed by her biographer that she “had a long-running affair” with England’s PrincePhilip—which he was forced to confess to wife Queen Elizabeth when it hit the tabloids in 2013!
“He wanted to try and soften the blow himself and explain that it was a million years ago {well, 1956} and better left in the past,” the Globe reported. “Unfortunately Elizabeth isn’t totally in agreement.”
Amazingly, garrulous Gabor was discovered the very next year by the Queen’s fourth cousin, actress Anna Neagle—the future Dame known as ‘Regal Neagle’—when the latter innocently pushed open the dressing room door of Shakespearean co-star Anthony Quayle (together below right) during a break on the set of The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk.
Well, the Woman sure did: “The sight that confronted her was not one she expected,” Anna’s autobio confirmed. “Quayle, inflagrante, lay naked on the floor. The film’s third star, the blonde Hungarian sex symbol Zsa Zsa Gabor, also naked, sat astride him, her voluptuous breasts bouncing like balloons!”
Neagle nearly also hit the floor—despite earlier having been diaphanous by the door (below left)—and later lashed out at her close friend Quayle: “What on earth are you thinking of, Tony? To give up everything you have {an actress wife and 3 kids} for this? Just how long do you think it could possibly last with a woman like that?!”
At least till they’d finished shooting (above right) … and the actor returned to his wife. “That beautiful man, Tony Quayle, was the real love of my life,” Gabor later confessed to writer Michael Thornton. “I would have married him in a moment if I had been allowed.”
Which might have inspired Zsa Zsa’s all-time wittiest response:
Indeed, two particular married politicians might make her a candidate for the Guinness Book of World Records: as the only women ever to have slept with presidential election rivals, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon!
“President Kennedy, when I was in America he took me out for three months,” Gabor gabbed to reporters in 1988 {35 years after their romance and 25 after he died}.
Flying back from London with a roving photographer she didn’t know {but noticed ‘she had kinky hair and bad skin’}, the blonde told the brunette she’d be met by a “young man who’s going to propose to me.” When they disembarked, Zsa Zsa spotted young JFK, threw her arms around him and gushed: “My darling sweetheart … I was always in luff with you!” Her sedate seatmate, Miss Jacqueline Bouvier, “was not amused.”
Nor would fellow First Lady Pat Nixon have been if she knew her husband “had an affair with me when he was in the White House!”
Revealed her friend of 35 years, writer Wendy Leigh: “The romance with President Richard Nixon consisted in part of him quizzing Zsa Zsa on Turkish politics (her first husband was in the Turkish diplomatic corps) and part Zsa Zsa praising him for his ‘sexual prowess’ and ‘vast endowment.’”
“All men have to be told they are the biggest and the best, dahlink,” she later told Leigh. “And vhy not, dahlink, it doesn’t cost anything.”
Since this blog is free … and Gabor was never precise as far as (calendar) dates were concerned … let’s continue our tribute to her long and lustful life—and 100th Birthday—throughout the week!
