Finding Zsa Zsa Read online

  Some girls are thrilled by the prospect of finishing school in Switzerland, but not Magda Gabor, and certainly not Zsa Zsa. Although forced to live Jolie’s dream, to learn languages, to acquire social graces, and most of all, as Jolie drummed into the heads of her young show ponies, to be agreeable to a man, her daughters disliked Madame Subilia’s School for Young Ladies, near Lausanne, from the start. Hoping to win over Vilmos, Jolie veiled from him what she told unhappy Magda and Zsa Zsa: “In Switzerland, you will learn how to make glamorous, rich marriages.” Rather, she emphasized to her skeptical husband the high morality of Madame Subilia, for this lady was around fifty years of age, well seasoned in the transformation of tomboys (which Zsa Zsa was) and burnishing the rough edges even of a studious, reticent girl like Magda. “Vilmos,” stated Jolie in unusually pious tones, “Madame is very strict. Her girls wear uniforms, proper hats, and black stockings. They pray before lunch and they sing religious songs before dinner. Best of all for our Gabor night owls, they are in bed with lights out by ten o’clock. Why, the discipline is almost like the military. When they come home, they will know how to pour tea and hold a teacup just like Sybil Thorndike!”

  A classmate of Zsa Zsa’s, who will soon have more to say about their schooldays, realized, many years after leaving Madame Subilia’s, that the headmistress was probably a lesbian. She shared an upstairs apartment with another woman, who was either a teacher in the school or otherwise employed there. Those two ladies formed a couple. Each one of the girls had an assigned week of duty during which she brought their dinner up from the refectory. These girls were under strict orders to set down the food tray outside the door, knock, and depart. No pupil ever saw the inside of the apartment, though speculation was rife.

  In English, the term “finishing school” carries echoes of Jacqueline Kennedy, Mrs. Astor, and other high-toned ladies. Eva, who did not attend Madame Subilia’s, called it a “pension,” in Europe an ambiguous term that means anything from a B and B to the down-at-the-heels rooming house in Balzac’s Père Goriot. She surely meant “pensionnat,” a boarding school that does not necessarily imply the snob appeal of a Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut. To Jolie’s febrile mind, however, it could have been a flophouse so long as the address was francophone Switzerland.

  It happened that Jolie’s sister Janette had a daughter, Ila, near Magda’s age, so the four of them boarded a train for Lausanne. Having deposited the girls, Jolie and Janette charged into town for a day of shopping. When the shops closed, Jolie, prepped for an evening of flirtation à la suisse, decked herself out in finery, sprayed perfume on her bosom, admired herself in the mirror, and—the phone rang. It was Madame Subilia.

  Young Magda, finding herself in a drafty bedroom on a hallway with a gaggle of girls of international provenance—a sort of adolescent Magic Mountain minus the respiratory afflictions and ponderous philosophy—felt herself abandoned in an alien land.

  “What am I to do with this girl?” Madame Subilia demanded. “She hasn’t stopped weeping since you left. Homesick, desperately homesick and it’s only the first day.”

  “I was delighted,” recalled Jolie. “This meant I stayed on in Switzerland without Vilmos.” She wired him a dark version of Magda’s plight. Among Magda’s nicknames in the family were “the Duchess,” for her high-minded standards, and “the General,” for her stoicism and iron will. And so, after a few days at school, she began to relax into the Swiss orderliness and sanity that struck her as so different from home.

  Great ambiguity exists as to the number of prayers offered and the number of hymns sung in chapel at Madame Subilia’s. The school seems to have been nondenominational, although for form’s sake the girls learned the basics of high-church behavior. More important than theology was the ladylike protocol of covering one’s head in a house of worship with a stylish hat and bedecking one’s person in Sunday best.

  The following year, Zsa Zsa arrived at Madame Subilia’s and shed not a single homesick tear. Her two years there, as recounted by Zsa Zsa and by her roommate, conjure a mix of Mädchen in Uniform, the 1932 German film about schoolgirls and their Teutonic teachers, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Despite the restrictions of “long black stockings, penances, and psalms before dinner,” as Zsa Zsa recalled, the staff lamented that she still was not quite house trained. In her first letter back to Budapest, she begged Mamuska for two favors: please send me a garter belt, and burn this letter before Papuska can read my request. “I am the only Hungarian girl here, and the others think all Hungarians are Gypsies and are amazed that I know how to use a knife and fork.”

  Looking back on her teenage self from her early forties, Zsa Zsa admitted that “I was not a good student but I was a quick one. My mind was amazingly fast; I always seemed to know more than I really knew because of a word here, a phrase there, and I was able to catch meanings instantly.” When her answers in class fell wide of the mark, the other girls tittered. They also laughed, though not maliciously, at her French, which she spoke with a Hungarian accent, and at her Hungarianized English.

  Then and always, Zsa Zsa was an Anglophile. Her closest friend was a British girl named Phyllis who decided one day to tame this feral specimen. “She put her arm around me and announced, ‘I’m taking this little barbarian under my wing.’ ” Zsa Zsa loved it. “I became her slave,” she said. Already Zsa Zsa manifested what her third husband, George Sanders, called her “colonial complex,” i.e., blind admiration for everything British: men, women, clothes, customs.

  Neither at Madame Subilia’s nor elsewhere did anyone mistake Zsa Zsa for a polymath. She was, however, always street smart and fearless, a daredevil and an egoist. Despite her unstudious nature, however, in Switzerland she perfected her command of foreign languages. French and German she soon spoke with near-native fluency and minimal accent. In English, the accent became a trademark, although when she braked the logorrhea she could lose half of it.

  A rare example of this: In 1971 she narrated the shaggy-dog saga Mooch Goes to Hollywood. Unseen on camera, she sounds like a calmer, less exotic Zsa Zsa Gabor. Eva, the year before, as the voice-over of Duchess in The Aristocats, also sounded unlike her ususal self. In that animated film, Eva the cat purred her English with only a fraction of the Gabor accent. One might theorize, therefore, that both sisters were so concerned with how they looked on TV or in movies that they neglected enunciation. Or perhaps they increased the accent for effect, playing it as an instrument. Like Garbo, they were instantly recognizable by the gold in their throat.

  Eva, who spoke French, German, and English in addition to Hungarian, said, “I can talk about nothing in four languages.” Nor could she spell. On one of her many Match Game appearances, the word to match was “burp.” Eva knew the synonym “belch” but wrote on her card “belczze.” The audience roared and copanelist Richard Dawson leaned over and said, “Eva, ‘belch’ has only one Z!”

  Zsa Zsa once told an interviewer that she spoke Hungarian no better than English and that she couldn’t spell in any language. Nevertheless, she learned enough Turkish to get by while married to her first husband and living in Ankara, and later on she could hold her own in Italian and Spanish. At Madame Subilia’s, her favorite subject was art, and throughout her life she remained a talented Sunday painter. (As did Eva, several of whose well-executed landscapes fetched enviable prices on eBay a few years ago.)

  Report cards did not concern Jolie. When Zsa Zsa returned to Budapest at holidays, her mother inspected her for auguries of a femme fatale in the making. If Madame Subilia, or other teachers, attached a note that Zsa Zsa’s deportment fell below expected standards, Jolie shrugged it off, for Zsa Zsa, like her mother before her, read slapdash romance novels under the bedcovers after lights out. Caught up in these bodice rippers, she fancied herself swept off to remote castles by dashing young counts and aging barons. And who cares, sighed Jolie, if young girls climb out of windows at midnight to meet boys. To improve Zsa Zsa’s taste, Phyllis lent her a clande
stine copy of Nana, Zola’s novel about a streetwalker who rises to Parisian fame and fortune thanks to the powerful men she seduces. Zsa Zsa, in later life, seems to have updated some of Nana’s enticements.

  * * *

  Zsa Zsa’s roommate during much of her sojourn at Madame Subilia’s was Elisabeth Rucklander, a Swiss girl from Zürich whose native language was German and whose parents sent her to Lausanne to perfect her French. A few years later, Fräulein Rucklander married a Mr. Nussbaum, who had escaped to Zürich from Nazi Germany, and after the war the couple settled in Seattle. Although Mr. and Mrs. Nussbaum are now deceased, I recently spoke with their son, Tom, and their daughter, Dorie.

  Asked about his mother during her time at Madame Subilia’s, Tom Nussbaum had this to say: “I believe my mom had certain personality disorders. Today she might be placed in a high-functioning level of special education. For example, she just didn’t know when to shut up, or when to filter her thoughts.”

  “Exactly like Zsa Zsa,” I said.

  “Mom always called Zsa Zsa ‘that beast.’ Which was her word for ‘bitch.’ In hindsight, I realize it was because the two of them were so much alike. Mom couldn’t stand her, and she probably couldn’t stand my mother because they both babbled a mile a minute, giving out every thought and opinion that nobody asked for.” In Zsa Zsa’s case, this unfiltered flood of talk was an early manifestation of the bipolar disorder that would become more pronounced with passing years, often with scandalous or outré consequences.

  It was Elisabeth Rucklander Nussbaum who realized, late in life, that Madame Subilia and her female companion were probably lesbians. Whatever her later feelings about Zsa Zsa, however, as girls they must have shared some good times, for Tom and Dorie Nussbaum showed me a letter that Zsa Zsa wrote to their mother around 1930. My translation from Zsa Zsa’s imperfect French and her unwieldy handwriting:

  My dear Lizon [i.e., Lizzie]

  I must write to tell you that I’m happy to be going home even though it’s sad to leave behind those I’ve known for almost a year and a half, and every day, almost every minute. Remember when we shared a room how we laughed and carried on. And on our excursions, what funny things you said. My dear, I will never forget my little chum from Munich [Zsa Zsa’s mistake; her friend had no connection to Munich] who was so lively and so “obedient.” I hope that if one day you come to Budapest you will pay me a visit.

  Be happy!

  A thousand kisses,

  Zsa Zsa

  Eva seemed grateful to have dodged Madame Subilia’s. In her tell-very-little autobiography, Orchids and Salami, published in 1954, she had this to say: “When my turn came, the money market shuddered. Hungarian pengös went down and Swiss francs went in another direction. The cataclysm in the money market spared me instruction in such matters as cooking, needlepoint, deep-frozen etiquette, and other idiocies whereby a young girl was made totally incompetent.” She attended instead the Forstner Girls Institute in Budapest, an establishment later obliterated either by war or urban renewal. Despite many inquiries in Hungary and myriad searches online, I have found not a trace.

  No Gabor ever admitted to hard times, though Eva inadvertently revealed an acquaintance with household drudgery that she perhaps acquired with the fall of the pengö. “Life for me has not always been a never-never land. Blonde as I am, I do know the shape of a broom and the function of the wet end of a mop. I have used them both, spiritlessly to be sure, but competently enough.”

  No precise documentation exists that maps the activities of Zsa Zsa, Eva, and Magda from the early 1930s, when they completed their schooling, to the later thirties, when all three began their adventures in matrimony. Several reports by Hungarian émigrés in the 1950s that were printed in newspaper and magazine articles about the Gabors placed them behind the counter of one family shop or another.

  At some point, the Gabors claimed, Vilmos joined his wife’s family in the jewelry business, although he loathed his in-laws. Some of those same Hungarian émigrés, however, remembered him as a watchmaker who worked in a cubbyhole of a shop cluttered with watches, clocks, and spare parts for timepieces. Bundy Solt, the childhood friend of the Gabor sisters, modified these claims as well as the more grandiose ones of his friends. “Papa Gabor’s main business,” he said, “was catering to a middle-class clientele. Young men would come to the shop to buy their engagement and wedding rings. Fathers would come to buy the first gold wristwatch for their sons. It was not the chichi type of Cartier or Van Cleef and Arpels, but rather a jewelry store catering to the masses.”

  Contradicting what he considered the false witness of anti-Gabor Hungarians in the United States, Solt said, “No group hates the Gabors more than the refugee Hungarians. They cannot forget that the descendants of a bourgeois merchant could become so famous, whereas most of the so-called elegant aristocratic Hungarian refugees in New York and California didn’t get anywhere.”

  According to Zsa Zsa, her father’s store, at number 6 Rákóczi út, was down the street from Franceska Tillemann’s own Diamond House. Perhaps Vilmos’s hatred of his mother-in-law grew out of envy. Hungary, of course, was not spared the hardships of the worldwide Depression in the 1930s, so that it is reasonable to assume that Vilmos tried to keep up his other enterprises. People might pawn their clocks and watches and never replace them, but their hunger for fresh produce would go on.

  By the time the Gabor sisters reached their mid- to late teens, Jolie had acquired two stores. Bundy Solt again: “Mama Gabor’s shop was called ‘Jolie.’ She became so successful selling the same type of jewelry that she sells today [he was speaking in 1958]—costume jewelry which incorporated the fine workmanship of genuine jewelry—that she opened a second store around the corner from her little boutique. This was called ‘Crystallo.’ Here she specialized in selling crystal glass and porcelain.” Mrs. Lantos recalls another one of her aunt’s shops called “Bijou.”

  With both parents running busy establishments, it is more likely than not that Zsa Zsa, Eva, and Magda helped behind the counters. Whatever their teenage reluctance, they would have required lower wages than hired shopgirls, or perhaps no cash stipend at all, meaning that money stayed in the family. And under Mamuska’s tutelage, they learned that everything comes with a price tag.

  Chapter 4

  Tempest on the Danube

  Zsa Zsa, age fifteen, having learned all she could be taught at Madame Subilia’s, returned to Budapest. Scarcely was she off the train than Jolie decided that her middle daughter should become Miss Hungary. And so she did—but only in the imagination of two Gabors: Jolie, and Zsa Zsa herself. For the next sixty years, they repeated that fiction so often that to them it became an article of faith. Neither Eva nor Magda, however, fostered the fabrication.

  The truth about Jolie’s shady machinations to insert Zsa Zsa into the Miss Magyarország contest, as it was officially known, would require an investigation as vast as that of the Watergate scandal. (“Magyarország” is the Hungarian name for Hungary.) Although in later years Zsa Zsa would vow in interviews that she had been chosen Miss Hungary, she didn’t specify the year. As she moved up her date of birth—eventually to 1928—journalists began to mock her by pointing out that she would thus have been Miss Hungary at age five. Squeezed by chronology, she pushed forward the phantom event to 1936 . . . 1938 . . . 1939. After so many prevarications, however, savvy writers in the press knew that during those years she was married and living in Turkey. In her first autobiography, published in 1960, Zsa Zsa gave a more accurate account. At the Grand Hotel Royale, the contest venue, “Mother was hugging me ecstatically. ‘You’ve won—you’re Miss Hungary!’ But I was not Miss Hungary. I was not sixteen and I had to be sixteen. The judges met in emergency session; there was nothing to do but name the runner-up as Miss Hungary, and name me also a runner-up, or first Maid of Honor.”

  Based on my research in Budapest, and on archival film footage of the event, I submit this report. The year was 1933, in the month of Ja
nuary. Zsa Zsa had recently come home from Switzerland, either having graduated at midterm or, owing to some misdemeanor, been expelled. In that winter month, Zsa Zsa was fifteen years old; she would not turn sixteen until February 6, and sixteen was the minimum age for contestants.

  Both she and Jolie later claimed that several of the contest judges had recently attended a party at the home of Franceska Tillemann, Jolie’s mother, and that Jolie had engaged in the kind of electioneering that might sway a venal judge or repel the more scrupulous. Vilmos, meanwhile, opposed what he labeled his wife’s attempt to sell Zsa Zsa into white slavery. “I won’t have my daughter put on display!” he railed.

  Archival footage from January 1933 contradicts the Gabor version of Zsa Zsa stripped of her title upon discovery of her true age. In it, the three finalists march onstage, Júlia Gál is crowned as winner, and Zsa Zsa and the other runner-up exit. In the press, she was called “udvarhölgy,” or “lady in waiting.” No doubt this designation rankled. It recalled those trays of hot food left outside the closed door of Madame Subilia and companion, as well as afternoons spent waiting on customers in parental emporia.

  A different version of Zsa Zsa’s loss appeared in the New York Post in 1958, in a series of eleven articles on the House of Gabor. At that time, Sándor Incze, a Hungarian refugee, was living in Manhattan, and available for an interview. Years earlier, in 1933, he had been publisher of Szinházi Élet (Theatrical Life), whose cover issue for January 29–February 4 that year bore a photograph of the contest winner, Júlia Gál, flanked by the two runners-up. Szinházi Élet was sponsor of the beauty contest.

  “I came home to Budapest from a trip to London on the morning of the contest,” Incze recalled, “and my secretary told me, ‘Oh, we have a wonderful girl.’ The girl was Zsa Zsa, and the whole staff thought she should be Miss Hungary. But the whole staff also had been over to dinner at Zsa Zsa’s house the night before. Her mother, Jolie, had invited them. Well, I was annoyed because it looked like a fix. Zsa Zsa was the most beautiful girl in the contest, but I put on a real fight against her. If people found out about that dinner, they would say it was rigged.” According to his account, age had nothing to do with it.