Farewell, Zsa Zsa Gabor. You Were a One-of-a-Kind Delight.
This year has continued its grisly and merciless death march straight to the end, claiming yet another seeming indestructible victim: Zsa Zsa Gabor, the socialite, media personality, convict, and sometimes actress who delighted the world with her talk show witticisms and colorful personal life died Sunday in Los Angeles of heart failure after years of ill health. She is survived by her eighth or ninth or possibly tenth husband, Frederic Prinz von Anhalt, which is a mesmerizing sentence to write. A globe-trotting, diamond bedecked Hungarian adventuress who flitted from husband to husband and love affair to love affair (and the infamous stint she served in prison in 1990 for imperiously slapping a cop with her glove during a routine traffic stop), her like will never be seen again.
It’s impossible to open an obituary of Zsa Zsa Gabor with the customary chronological accounting of her life, since it’s impossible to know precisely when that life began. The conventional wisdom is that she was “probably 99,” although some who knew her well, including the ur-gossip columnist Cindy Adams, believe her to have been much much older, well over a hundred. She was born in Budapest, the middle daughter—her sisters, Magda and Green Acres star Eva, were colorful characters in their own right—of a well-to-do Jewish couple, although the Gabors Jewishness, like everything else about them, could fluctuate according to need. According to Adams, who wrote an biography of family, Jolie, the Gabor matriarch, once explained away a bejeweled crucifix being sported by Eva on her wedding day thus: “Eva’s new, soon-to-be-husband hates the Jews, so in the book you make us Catholic.”
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