Marlene Wagman-Geller

Feb 06, 2026 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

 “He taught me housekeeping. When I divorce, I keep the house.”

–Zsa Zsa Gabor on her fifth husband, Ned Sherrin

 

The 1950 Gene Wilder classic revolved around Norma Desmond, a recluse in her mansion located on Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles. Inside, the aging actress endlessly relived her glory days when she was the golden girl of the silver screen. Her non-cinematic counterpart was Zsa Zsa Gabor, a fellow femme fatale who also feasted on public adulation-even in her sunset years. The blonde siren had traversed the road from Europe to America in a story that could have sprung from a Hollywood studio script.

 

Zsa Zsa hailed from the aptly named Hungary, as she was voracious in her appetite for the good-ah, rather, the grand life. Born in Budapest, her parents christened her Sari, after opera Prima donna Sari Fedak; she became known by the singer’s nickname: Zsa Zsa. She was the middle of three daughters of Jewish parents, Vilmos and his twenty-year younger wife, Jancsi, “Jolie” Gabor. Vilmos was in the diamond business and told Zsa Zsa never to accept one less than ten carats. Zsa Zsa, later quipped, “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend and dogs are a man’s best friend. Now you know which sex has more sense.” Sisters Magdolna (Magda), Zsa Zsa, and Eva attended Madame Subilia’s School for Young Ladies in Lausanne, Switzerland. In Budapest, a chauffeur transported the girls to acting, and dancing classes.

 

After falsifying her daughter’s age, Jolie entered Zsa Zsa in the Miss Hungary beauty pageant. Although mother and daughter claimed she had won, the judges disqualified her, as she had not submitted her application in time. The teenaged Zsa Zsa met the fifty-year-old Turkish diplomat, Burhan Belge, who joked that if she had been older, he would have made her a member of his harem. A few months later, she showed up at his Ankara home with her terrier, Mishka.  During their marriage, she accompanied her husband on a lecture tour of London, where she captivated writers H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. The marriage collapsed after six months; Zsa Zsa laid the blame at her door as she had embarked on an affair with Kemall Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. With her diplomatic passport, on the eve of World War II, Zsa Zsa decamped from Ankara with twenty-one trunks of clothes-minus her husband. With their beauty, and talent–well, their beauty, the Gabor sisters cut a wide swath. Jolie said of her girls’ allure, “My daughters know how to ride, to play tennis, ice skate and all the sports. 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.''

 

Zsa Zsa made Jolie proud when she bagged a billionaire ten months after immigrating to the States. Hotel tsar Conrad Hilton was having a drink at Ciro’s on Sunset Boulevard when the blonde beauty made a grand entrance on the arm of Lana Turner’s former fiancé. Despite his conflicted feelings over the Catholic church’s refusal to recognize his divorce, Conrad giftted Zsa Zsa a twenty-five-carat diamond engagement ring. In 1942, the fifty-five-year-old groom and his twenty-five-year-old bride wed at the Santa Fe Hotel. What put the damper on the diamonds was Conrad, in a nod to his Catholic guilt, insisted on separate bedrooms. Zsa Zsa decorated hers along the décor of the film, Gone with the Wind. Although able to bring the divorced Jolie to the States, her grandmother, and her son, Sebastian Tilleman, perished in the Holocaust. Zsa Zsa relinquished her Judaism and was a lifelong practicing Catholic.

 

The Hilton-Gabor marriage sagged under the weight of crosses in addition to his Catholic guilt: horror over her grandmother’s murder, and Zsa’s Zsa’s affair with her seventeen-year-old stepson, Nicky. Despite her bubbly persona, Zsa Zsa suffered from bipolar depression. Her family sent her to a sanatorium that subjected her to shock treatments that she likened to torture. Of the nightmare experience, she recalled, “How shall I describe the nightmare of the next weeks, days and nights and horrors that might have been invented by Dante? No one came to visit me: Not Conrad… not Eva… no one.”

 

When the Hilton-Gabor marriage imploded, Zsa Zsa confessed, “How could I separate him from his money? Would I have been interested in a man twice my age if he wasn’t rich? I don’t think so." At the time of their break-up, Zsa Zsa was pregnant with daughter Francesca-Jolie’s only grandchild. In the belief paternity would not bear too much scrutiny, Conrad never developed a close relationship with Francesca. Of his billion-dollar fortune, he left her $100,000 that she mainly used to contest his will. Her comic crowing regarding her divorce from the hotelier, “Conrad Hilton was very generous to me in the divorce settlement. He gave me 5,000 Gideon Bibles.”

 

 Zsa Zsa’s took her third walk down the aisle with actor George Sanders. While Conrad put Zsa Zsa on the financial map, George put her on entertainment’s demographic. While waiting for him to return from London, she accepted a last-minute slot on Bachelor Haven, a television show that offered advice to the lovelorn. When asked about her jewelry, she answered, “Dahling, Oh zese! Zeese are just my vorking diamonds.” A star was born. The kryptonite in their marriage was George’s paranoia his wife was dabbling in infidelity. Sixteen years later, in a nod to keeping it in the family, George married Magda. Their marriage lasted six months; George died by suicide.

 

A male magnet, after Zsa Zsa threw a Hollywood party for the son of the Dominican dictator, General Rafael Trujillo, he sent her a $17,000 chinchilla coat and a Mercedes-Benz. Mother Dahlink’s response to the lavish gift, “So, what do you expect-for him to send flowers to a girl like Zsa Zsa?” A U.S. Congressman had a different take and called Zsa Zsa “the most expensive courtesan since Madame de Pompadour.”

 

Additional trophy husbands kept Zsa Zsa dripping in diamonds. She became engaged to her fourth husband, investment banker Herbert Hutner, on their third date, a decision influenced by a $3 million ring. Hutner lasted a year more than the number of carats. The next ring came via oil heir Joshua Cosden Jr. who she left as “he bored me interminably.” Hubby number six lowered the bar on the bizarre. In 1975, she married her neighbor, the five-time married Jack Ryan, the engineer behind the Barbie doll. His mansion, dubbed the Castle, was home to flesh and blood Barbies who charged by the hour. When Jack did not prove to be her Ken, he responded, “That marriage cost me $260,000 a bang.” Her eighth spouse, Michael O’Hara, was the lawyer who handled her divorce from Jack. The wedding ceremony to Felipe de Alba was of a day’s duration. She expressed her ill-advised nuptial as a “momentary craziness.”

 

With an estimated fortune of $40 million accumulated through beddings, weddings, and entertainment earnings, Zsa Zsa purchased a palatial Los Angeles villa located at 1001 Bel Air Road Bel Air that Howard Hughes had built, and Elvis Presley had once owned. She shared the estate with her nine shih tzus —some who bore the names Pasha Effendi, Genghis Khan and Macho Man. Her love of her canine companions was evident by the bell at her front gate that bore a bas-relief of St. Francis stroking a dog. A diva in the air as well as on the ground, Delta airlines security officials removed her from a flight for her refusal to keep her retinue of dogs in their travel kennels. The mid-century material girl’s hangar-sized closet held 5,000 garments; red carpets covered the floors. The estate had a cushion embroidered with her favorite quotation: “Never complain, never explain.” Zsa Zsa’s real estate portfolio also contained a Palm Springs home that sported a bright pink exterior and front yard pool, formerly owned by Magda. A third property was a thirty-acre California ranch where she housed her nineteen racehorses and well as her prized white Arabian, Silver Fox. An accomplished horsewoman, she rode in a Rose Parade.

 

Her final–the ninth spouse–was the twenty-seven-years younger, six-time married, Prince Frédéric von Anhalt, Duke of Saxony, who had started life as Hans Robert Lichtenberg, the son of a German police officer. He had gained his title after Princess Marie Auguste of Anhalt, the Duchess of Saxony, Kaiser Wilhelm’s daughter-in-law, had adopted him as an adult. To meet the woman who could provide the lifestyle to which he aspired, he rented a white Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible and hired two students to act as his driver and bodyguard for the night. He crashed a black-tie party at the Holmby Hills estate of writer Sidney Sheldon where he “ran into” Zsa Zsa. Smitten, she invited her prince to move into her $10 million dollar mansion. On their wedding day, Jolie staged a heart attack, but her ruse failed. They took their vows in Zsa Zsa’s stable so Silver Fox could serve as best man.

 

The couple weathered many storms, one was financial as they lost a reported $10 million though Ponzi financier Bernie Madoff. Another issue was infidelity. The aristocrat observed, “The secret to a long marriage is infidelity.” Reflecting on her multitude of romances, she espoused her philosophy on how to keep men from straying, “Shoot them in the legs.”

 

Although Zsa Zsa shared she disliked living in sin, she had liaisons with entertainers Frank Sinatra, Richard Burton-who she said liked to talk dirty in bed, Sean Connery, and the spectacularly endowed Dominican playboy, husband to heiresses Barbara Hutton and Doris Duke, Porfirio Rubirosa. Another horizontal conquest Zsa Zsa laid claim to was President Richard M. Nixon, of whom she reminisced, “A great mind. A big brain,” and she insinuated that was not the biggest thing about “Tricky Dicky.” In her memoir, One Lifetime is Not Enough, she wrote that Nixon had set her up with Henry Kissinger “but clothes never came off.” Journalist Dan Zak of the Washington Post imagined their hypothetical flirtation with their German and Hungarian accents, “Vut do you vunna do?” “I dunno, dahling, vaatever you vaant.” He had to beg off a second date, as he had to invade Cambodia. Other purported paramours were John Paul Getty and the Aly Kkan. Gabor’s romantic dalliances included a flirtation with the actress Greta Garbo. The men spurned were John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley, Henry Fonda, John Huston. Zsa Zsa philosophized, “There is nothing wrong with a woman encouraging a man’s advances, as long as they are in cash.” 

 

While the Gabor sisters were of the ilk of “being famous for being famous,” they appeared in movies and television. In her glory days, Zsa Zsa acted for director Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, and John Houston in Moulin Rouge. On the Late Show with David Letterman, in her heavily accented Hungarian accent, she peppered her conversations with her ubiquitous use of “Dahlink;” she claimed she used the term as she had trouble remembering names. She also charmed audiences with her Zsaisms, “Husbands are like fires. They go out if unattended” and “I want a man who is kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?” In later years, she had a cameo on Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hollywood Squares. As a guest on Laugh-In, she sprouted her philosophy, “I always said that marriage should be 50-50 proposition — he should be at least 50 years older and have at least 50 million dollars.”

 

Age did not diminish Zsa’s Zsa’s unabashed nature. In 1989, she was driving her $215,000 Rolls-Royce Corniche in Beverly Hills when police officer Paul Kramer stopped her for expiration tags and possessing an open bottle of vodka. Bored with the procedure, the actress drove off. When he pulled her over again, she shouted, “I’m bringing the Reagans in on this!” and then accosted him in a slap heard around the world. For her day in court, 100 reporters, some from Europe, were present.  When asked if she was prepared for a long trial, she cooed, “I have enough outfits to last a year.” Talking to the cameras that had followed her for decades, she announced, “I am a horsewoman. I am a princess. I am Zsa Zsa.” Fans and foes wore t-shirts that expressed their perspective: “Hang Zsa Zsa: or “Free Zsa Zsa.”

 

 The diva wronged pled her case, “When he was chasing me, I thought of the Gestapo. I can't help it. I wasn't scared in Europe. We had the Nazis, the Russian tanks. But I was here scared on Olympic and La Cienega. I didn't believe that an American taxpayer could be treated like this.'' She spent seventy-two hours in jail.

 

The golden years were devoid of lustre. Frédéric sued Francesca, claiming she had forged her mother’s signature with the purpose of taking out a $2 million loan against her mother’s $14 million home. Francesca’s countered her mother was the victim of elder abuse perpetrated by her husband. The court threw out the lawsuit when Zsa Zsa failed to show up at court. The countless photographs featuring Zsa Zsa could serve as her visual diary, and a 2016 mug shot contrasted with her early ones where she wore pink mink, designer dresses, dripping with diamonds. Perhaps to prove he was still vital and virile, Frédéric leaked the tidbit to the Daily Express that he had conducted a decade-long affair with Playboy centerfold Anna Nicole Smith and had fathered her baby, Dannielynn, a claim without merit. He also alleged lesbian robbers had tied him, naked, to the steering wheel of his Rolls Royce. In an astute observation, Zsa Zsa admitted, “You know, the moment a man is bad I fall in love with him. I always marry bad men. It’s a sickness, my sickness. The worse they tell me they are, the more I am attracted. That’s my tragedy.” WWJS? What would Jolie say?

 

In 2002, Zsa Zsa was hospitalized for a month after a car driven by her hairdresser, Jared Millard, struck a utility pole in West Hollywood. She sued him for $108 million. The accident left her in a wheelchair, and she retreated from the spotlight. Further physical afflictions followed: a leg infection, a stroke, and a hip replacement. The most devastating health horror was when surgeons amputated her right leg above her knee after an infection proved resistant to antibiotics. Her penchant for tying the knot, and clinging to her sex symbol status, led to Bob Hope’s joke, “You can calculate Zsa Zsa Gabor’s age by the rings on her fingers.” The Prince had his own health scare; in 2010, mistaking his wife’s nail glue for eye drops, he glued his eye shut.

 

The Grim Reaper paid a visit to the ninety-nine-year-old force of nature. The world did not remember her for her unforgettable film roles, only for the one she played to perfection: being Zsa Zsa Gabor. According to her will, she expressed her wish that she be buried in her homeland, the former Austrian-Hungarian empire. Five years after his wife’s passing, Frédéric carried an urn with three quarters of Zsa Zsa’s ashes, (the rest remained in Los Angeles), to London, then Germany, and lastly to Hungary. He interred his late wife in a prominent Budapest cemetery, the final resting place of famous Hungarian actors and writers. A white satin ribbon over her grave bore a single word, emblazoned in gold: Darlink.

 

For her final interview at age ninety, dressed in Chanel, eyes curtained by false eyelashes, hair a silver cloud, the star reigned from her wheelchair. For those who bend the truth–a trait in which the Gabor sisters excelled­–it would have been easy to have reported that Zsa Zsa, in the spirit of Norma Desmond, arose from her wheelchair with the words, “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.”
(excerpted from The World's Wealthiest Women)

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