Zsa Zsa photos shock Germans, hubby accused of cashing in on plight
12/11/2002
By Ernest Gill
Hamburg (dpa) - A photo of a bed-ridden and semi-conscious Zsa Zsa Gabor shocked German newspaper readers Wednesday, spawning reports that her German husband Prince Frederic von Anhalt may be taking advantage of the screen diva.
The colour image, published in Bild newspaper, showed von Anhalt bending tenderly over the bed, a be-ringed hand caressing the chin of his wife, critically injured November 27 in a car wreck on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
The photo showed the 85-year-old actress lying slack-jawed in a hospital bed, her white hair strewn across the pillow, her eyes half open.
;It is to very dreadful,'' von Anhalt, 59, was quoted as saying. Gabor was being chauffeured home from a hair salon Wednesday when the driver of the car lost control of the late model Lincoln and the vehicle left the roadway and struck a post.
Suffering from multiple fractures, Gabor is in a room measuring 40 square metres at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Curtains are drawn to keep out the sun and adorning a bedside vase are pink lillies from Elizabeth Taylor.
Next to her bed is a wheelchair but attempts by hospital staff to rouse Zsa Zsa to sit in it meet with stubborn resistance, according to the paper.
She also brushes away any attempt to comb her hair, saying, ;Go away. I don't need my hair any more. I don't need my looks any more.''
She is said to have lost her will to live. In Germany, a spokesman for the family in Kommern largely confirmed the contents of the tabloid report, telling Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa: ;I believe the emotional trauma is worse even than the physical injuries. She knows she will probably be confined to a wheelchair the rest of her life.''
But the photograph spawned criticism of von Anhalt, with RTL television airing a report Wednesday evening highly critical of the prince, accusing him of ;taking advantage of his wife's plight for publicity purposes''.
RTL aired a taped interview with von Anhalt in which he said: ;If she ends up in a wheelchair I will personally push it. The servants won't have to do that. I'll push her chair myself.''
RTL said those remarks were made only days before the photo appeared in the newspaper. It quoted ;a former friend'' as saying, ;This is an egregious act by her husband in making these pictures public. There is no way that she would have okayed their release.''
Although she has always been cagey about her age, Gabor is generally believed to have been born February 6, 1917, in Budapest, the daughter of a military officer and an actress.
She spent her youth in Lausanne, returning to Hungary to attend a music academy, and winning a role in an operetta.
She won the Miss Hungary pageant in 1936. That date has been used to nail down her birth date since she has subsequently given years as her date of birth which would have made her barely 13 when she won that title.
In the 1940s she emigrated to the United States where she parlayed her buxom blonde looks and her Hungarian accent into a brief film career.
Her most notable role was in ;Moulin Rouge'' in 1952 but her acting career quickly deteriorated into a string of parody appearances in low-budget pictures with titles such as ;The Queen of Outer Space''.
While never winning an acting awards, she received a special Golden Globe in 1958 as Most Glamorous Actress.
Her status as a celebrity and diva survived her acting career, and her eight marriages became staples of tabloid journalism for decades to come. She in fact went down the aisle nine times, but her 1982 marriage to Felipe De Alba was annulled after one day because her latest divorce had not yet gone through.
Her husbands included the actor George Sanders, hotel owner Conrad Hilton, industrialist Herbert Hunter, Texas oil magnate Joshua S. Cosden and Barbie doll inventor John W. Ryan.
She and von Anhalt were wed August 14, 1986, making her a German princess on paper, although the nobility has been stripped of all privileges in Germany since the fall of the kaiser in 1918.
In 1989, she spent three days in jail for slapping a Beverly Hills police officer. She was also embroiled in a lengthy legal battle with German actress Elke Sommer in the early 1990s.
A frequent talk-show guest, she cannily poked fun at her marital career with punny one-liners. She called everyone ;dahlingk'' and termed everything ;mahvelous''. If she could think of nothing else to say to someone, she would say, ;You are mahvelous, dahlingk.''
She once famously said she was the best housekeeper in Hollywood. ;After every divorce I always end up keeping the house.''
When asked how many husbands she had had, Zsa Zsa replied: ;You mean, other than my own?''
Another Zsa Zsa aphorism is, ;Husbands are like fires. They go out if unattended.''
Spoofing her carefully cultivated image as a bubble-headed blonde, she often claimed, ;Dahlingk, I can't possibly remember your name. How do you think the 'dahlingk' thing got started?''
Always insisting she would only say something good about her ex-husbands, she became famous for her back-handed compliments. ;Conrad Hilton was very generous to me in the divorce settlement,'' she said after an acrimonious court battle. ;He gave me 5,000 Gideon Bibles.''
Asked for her philosophy about the male sex, she said, ;A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.'' dpa eg sc
