Will Zsa Zsa Face the Wrecking Ball?

     Yes, it's true: after two years, on and off the market, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Frederic Prinz von Anhalt, husband number 8 (or is it 9?), have finally sold their Bel Air manse for a reported 11 million dollars which, sadly, is a tad under their original 15 million dollar asking price. Ah well, there goes the neighborhood.

     Zsa Zsa bought her home in the early 1970's, for $280,000. I'm guessing that's the last time any updating or decorating was done so she's still walking away with a nice bag of change. I'm not sure exactly how one would describe the style of the interior...

...Louis XIV? Viennese Waltz? Maybe what my grandmother (whom we'll get to shortly) called Jewish Provincial. And it's nice to know that the Prince has a hobby....

...although the couple does seem to have a predilection for pushing all their furniture to the corners of the rooms.

  All in all, the almost 9,000 square foot house has 6 bedrooms and 7 baths which, I'm guessing, Zsa Zsa made the most of.

   According to the listing agent (and we know they never exaggerate) the home has welcomed guests such as "Queen Elizabeth, US Presidents, CEO's, dignitaries and celebrities." It's not so clear whether Zsa Zsa was their hostess or if they had visited some of the rumored earlier owners, namely Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley. Personally, nothing makes me happier than imagining Elvis and The Queen chowing down together.

   And though maybe the house is more of Pink Elephant than a White Elephant, you'd still have to admit it wasn't an easy sale, which was made even more difficult by a proviso added by a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge allowing the loving couple to take $3,275,000 from the sale immediately but granting them the right to stay in the house for another three years, or until Zsa Zsa dies (which ever comes first).  Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick...The new owner is hidden behind an LLC and is said to be a developer with intentions of knocking the whole thing down and starting over. Welcome to Hollywood.

    And poor Zsa Zsa-things have not been easy for her lately. In the last 8 years she has suffered through 2 strokes, numerous surgeries and emergencies as well as a partial leg amputation.  Then there was that incident back in June of 1989 which landed her in quite a legal snafu, when a Beverly Hills police officer stopped her for a traffic violation and her response was to slap him in the face. Then again, the Beverly Hills Police are known to wear shorts in the summer months, so are we really supposed to take them seriously?

   I'm guessing that just as many of her problems have come from her less than spectacular taste in husbands, who have included George Sanders and Conrad Hilton (while also having an affair with his son). While her appeal to men would seem obvious, she was once quoted as saying it lay elsewhere: "I am a marvelous housekeeper," she announced. "Every time I leave a man, I keep his house."        

     Her last  matrimonial choice however, Prince Anhalt, whom she married in 1986, really takes the cake. Yes, he's 26 years younger than she but according to the Prince it wasn't really a cougar thing. "We didn't marry for love," he has been quoted as saying. "It was a friendship, but when you're with someone over a certain time you fall in love." Perhaps this also explains the three grown men he has legally adopted during their marriage, although he also says he had a long affair with Anna Nicole Smith and at one point announced he was probably the father of her child (he's not).

     Not to mention the dubiousness of the whole 'Prince' thing. According to research, he's a former masseur, his real name is Hans Lichtenberg and he was one of 5 children of the chief of police in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1980, at the age of 36, he was adopted by Princess Marie-Auguste of Anhalt via a document created by one Hans Hermann Weyer, a window dresser, who was known for selling certificates of nobility and fictitious doctoral degrees. The Princess, who was bankrupt at the time, no doubt got a little kick back on the deal; she died 3 years later. It stands to reason that in no time at all, he found his way to Los Angeles.

   But let's not get down on the Prince; he's certainly had his share of recent hardships as well. 2010 seems to have been a particularly hard year for him. At the beginning of that year he announced his candidacy for the governorship of California, but had to withdraw due to his wife's health problems (giving great relief, no doubt, to Jerry Brown). Later that year he ended up at Cedars Hospital twice-once after he swallowed a bee and once after gluing his eye shut with nail glue (and you wonder why men don't wear false eyelashes?). Things must have been looking up in 2011 when he then announced his candidacy for mayor of Los Angeles, recycling the same billboard that he had used on Sunset Boulevard earlier in the year announcing their 25th wedding anniversary. I guess he just cut Zsa Zsa out of the picture.

    

      Then again, nothing could have been as trying for him as 2007, when he was found by police, naked in his Rolls Royce. He told the police that he had been approached by three attractive women while sitting in his car; they asked him to pose for pictures with them, which I suppose seemed perfectly natural to him. He said they then  handcuffed him (fun! though no handcuffs were present when the cops showed up) robbed him at gunpoint and took his car keys, his wallet, his jewelry and his clothes and then drove away in a Chrysler convertible. When they could have had a Rolls Royce? Sounds a little fishy
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    But somehow, I can forgive Zsa Zsa all of her bad choices. At the end of the day-I admire her. She, along with her two sisters and their mother, fled Europe in 1941, came to America and thrust themselves on the public as a set of Hungarian bombshells. But while most women who are serial brides are usually are looking for financial security from men, Zsa Zsa seemed much more interested in working, as an actress or a celebrity, or whatever the world would see her as. She indeed started her career in proximity to the top of the heap in films such as "Moulin Rouge" and "Lili". As here career continued, the films went from "The Queen of Outer Space" (1958) to "Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood" (1976) to "Frankenstein's Great Aunt Tillie" (1984) and, ultimately, "A Very Brady Sequel" in 1996. But the real point here is that she continued working. And it didn't stop with film or television roles; there were endless talk show appearances for years, which is where she really shined as the creation of her own doing: Zsa Zsa Gabor. Basically, she would have gone to the opening of an envelope if it meant publicity and the chance to continue working.

     Like my own grandmother, she worked well into her 70's because she wanted to. Perhaps the soft spot in my heart for Zsa Zsa is because, in my mind,  she will always be connected to my grandmother. And it was my grandmother who gave me the scoop on Zsa Zsa Gabor, very early on in my life.
  To picture my grandmother, think of Ruth Gordon in "Rosemary's Baby", only taller and prettier. In my entire family, it was only my maternal grandmother who expressed any desire for a connection to a world larger than the one that surrounded them in their daily lives. For example, at the age of 10, she thought it important I visit the United Nations, so we did. On our occasional trips to Manhattan (she still lived on the Grand Concourse, in the Bronx) we would visit her best friends, Irving and Molly, who had long ago moved on to 51 5th Avenue, in Greenwich Village.

    Irving and Molly were both attorneys and had only one other partner in their firm, Sam. According to my grandmother, Sam was the legal genius but given the fact that he was both highly opinionated and extremely unsightly, it was Irving who was the public face of the partnership, the one who went to court, as he looked a lot like Spencer Tracy. In other words, maybe not the sharpest knife in the drawer but he looked good in a suit and had a winning personality. In the mid 1930's they were my grandmother's attorneys when she divorced my grandfather. She found out he was about to sail back to England with his new girlfriend and somehow determined that the wisest course of action was to grab my then adolescent mother and head down to the West Side pier to wave them off from the dock, so he'd know he'd been caught. Apparently he didn't much care, as he took the apartment keys out of his pocket and tossed them from the ship to Grandmother. That was the last that was seen of him for many years.

   To my 10 year old mind, Irving and Molly were indeed the picture of New York sophistication, which I think is exactly why my grandmother had me visit them. It was hinted that they had some very glamorous clients, such as Prince Alexander Hohenloe, an Austrian expat, who attempted suicide in his early 30's when his first wife left him but rebounded quickly when he fell under the spell of one Patricia Wilder, better known as Honeychile, a southern Belle turned  bit-part actress who took New York by storm, loved to carouse at the 21 Club (when it was still a speakeasy) and is rumored to have been the model for Truman Capote's Holly Golightly. Eventually she became Princess Alexander Hohenloe, or as she preferred, Princess Honeychile. 

Irving with Prince Hohenloe and Princess Honeychile

     According to my grandmother, during this period of time what occupied much of Irving's professional time was getting another client of his out of numerous legal scrapes and numerous mental institutions-Zsa Zsa Gabor. According to my grandmother, she was very crazy. When I got a bit older, while repeating these stories again, she gave me the ultimate lowdown on Zsa Zsa- "She was a nympho," my grandmother told me. Could you possibly describe any more desirable quality to a teen-aged boy? Yes, I think this gave me a bit of a life-long Zsa Zsa crush.

    As time went on, Irving, Molly and my grandmother all migrated to Florida (giving validity to the notion that Sam was the brains of the group, as he never considered Florida a reasonable place to live). Molly and Irving retired there, but my grandmother continued to support herself, well into her mid 70's, selling hair products by phone to beauty parlors all over the country. She, like Zsa Zsa, enjoyed working; it connected them to the world; it probably gave them a reason to get up each day.

    Not long after Molly died, Irving confessed to my grandmother that he had always had a crush on her, and asked her to marry him. "Can't we just live together?" was my grandmother's response, but he was having none of it, so they did indeed wed and spent the next 10 years bickering with each other and going out to dinner at 4:30. From the day she moved in with Irving, my grandmother only referred to Molly as "that lesbian" unless Irving was within earshot. This did bring into question the validity of many things my Grandmother told me, but then again-who knows?
     When, as newlyweds, my wife and I would visit them in their condo in Florida, my Grandmother would invariably slip us something as we were leaving- ivory knicknacks, vases, things that had clearly belonged to Irving and Molly. "He'll never know they're gone," she'd tell us. One time she handed us a very heavy airline shoulder bag that turned out to contain  full silver service for 12 and which must have been Molly and Irving's. We discovered it had been created by Michael C. Fina in the 1920's and it could not have been uglier. It did, however, pay our rent for several months.

    Irving died first; my grandmother and Princess Honeychile, it turns out, both died in 1995. But Zsa Zsa lives on and it makes me sad that, as architecturally uninteresting as it is, her home may be leveled to the ground in the next few years. I'd so prefer it if her home remained standing as a tribute to her and what she embodied-the American ideal that with ambition, drive and long, hard work one can rise to the top. Or at least somewhere above the middle.


                                         Grandma Eve