It's Not Over Till the Fat Lady Writes Her Memoirs

When stars' careers hit the skids, they inevitably write up their own account of their glory days. What can be learned by perusing the pages of the autobiographies of such stellar talents as Bette Davis, Tony Curtis and Zsa Zsa Gabor? As our intrepid reviewer discovers, "We learn that we should find better things to do with our time."

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I awake from a dreamless sleep and plunge straight into a nightmare," read the first words of Zsa Zsa Gabor's autobiography One Life Is Not Enough. I know the feeling; I recently awoke from a dreamless sleep and plunged straight into Zsa Zsa's 1991 autobiography. Then, unable to get back to sleep, I plunged straight into Tony Curtis's 1993 autobiography Tony Curtis: The Autobiography, and after that, still too unnerved to get back under the covers, I plunged straight into Bette Davis's 1962 autobiography The Lonely Life. . . followed by the 1988 autobiography of her dipsomaniacal fourth husband, Gary Merrill... followed by the 1985 autobiography of her vengeful daughter, B.D. Hyman. My nightmare over, I plunged back into a fitful sleep filled with Gorgons, harpies, asps and people who look like Eric Stoltz in Mask, but, thankfully, nobody named Zsa Zsa.

Why was I reading these books? Because Movieline thought it would be an interesting intellectual exercise to study the autobiographies of washed-up movie stars and find out if the books had anything in common. Boy, did they ever: Two of the stars were of Hungarian descent, two had appeared in the enduring classic Arrivederci, Baby, and one book was co-written by a bimbo with the same last name as one of the movie star's wives. All three of the stars had worn lingerie chosen by famous designer Orry-Kelly, two had not appeared in Tarns Bulba with Yul Brynner, and all three had daughters whose parents were totally fucked up.

Yes, in Zsa Zsa, Tony and Bette, we had stumbled upon a richly variegated control group: a dimwit celebrity who was never really a movie star; a dimwit movie star who was never really an actor; and a bona fide actress, celebrity and movie star who often behaved like a dimwit and had a lot of dimwit relatives. What the books had in common was this:

1) Their authors, even in the late twilight of their careers, categorically refuse to admit that their careers are over even when they're making movies like Lobster Man From Mars and Queen of Outer Space, which are really little more than extraterrestrial versions of The Whales of August.

2) The stars, having spent their entire lives trying to avoid public disgrace, now feel a positively over-whelming urge to humiliate themselves in public, serving up horrifyingly graphic anec-dotes about dogs, enemas, poison ivy on the genitals, and Liz Taylor.

3) The books really suck.

One legitimate question the reader may feel constrained to ask at this point is: if you're reviewing Tony Curtis's autobiography when it's still reasonably hot off the presses, why did you wait 32 years to review Bette Davis's autobiography, and why did you wait three years to review Zsa Zsa's? The answer to the first part of this question is simple: Movieline wasn't around 32 years ago, so we've got some catching up to do. (Next month: "Fatty" Arbuckle.)

As for One Lifetime Is Not Enough, while it is indeed true that this book, co-written by a person with the suspiciously bimbonic name of Wendy Leigh, was actually published by Delacorte Press in 1991, it's worth noting that at the time the publisher was holding out for $21 a copy. Movieline has a strict policy of not reviewing books until they are marked down to a price commensurate with their literary merit. So we waited three years. Last week, we spotted the book languishing in the bargain bin at $4.99. We may still have overpaid a bit, but at $4.99 we're at least getting into the ballpark. As for Tony Curtis's book, well, we got a free review copy from the publisher.

Let us begin our examination of dismal movie-star memoirs with a look at One Lifetime Is Not Enough. Zsa Zsa Gabor is arguably the greatest actress with Attila the Hun's blood flowing through her veins to ever come out of Budapest. Born into a family of aggressive Hungarian social climbers--her mother once dropped a note to the Prince of Wales when Zsa Zsa was only 12, hinting that he should marry her daughter when she was of age--this Carpathian cutie's career seemed to be going in the wrong direction when she moved to Ankara in the mid '30s and married a Nazi-loving Turk named Burhan Belge, which literally means Burhan the Belgian, though not in Turkish. Zsa Zsa, not yet the radiant movie star she would never actually become, did not consummate this marriage because Burhan's religious beliefs prevented him from making love to a woman who brought a dog to bed. As would mine.

Dismayed that the sweetness of her sultry Danubian flower might be wasted on the desert air of the Dardanelles, Zsa Zsa soon began humping Kemal Ataturk, a firebrand revolutionary who was less offended by Mishka the Wonder Dog than was Burhan the Belgian. But then the whole unsavory Third Reich thing got going in a big way, so Zsa Zsa decided to abandon romantic, mysterious Eastern Europe and move to greener acres in Beverly Hills, where her sister Eva had already married a doctor. After dating Charlie Chaplin, who didn't mind dogs or Hungarians, she fell in love with flashy hotel magnate Conrad Hilton. But things didn't work out in the boudoir, so she started screwing around with Conrad's son, Nicky, who was already married to Elizabeth Taylor.

This raises the fascinating possibility that Nicky Hilton may have been the unwitting carrier of a urinary infection or scrotal virus that made every female who came into contact with him want to marry at least eight men, preferably assholes. Zsa Zsa also discloses that in a fit of parental pique, Conrad Hilton once hit Nicky so hard that she thought the youngster might have sustained a concussion. This would explain his subsequent decision to marry Liz.

Tired of billionaires with dubious parental skills, sexually unadventurous Turkish caninephobes, and cranially damaged stepsons who would voluntarily marry Liz Taylor, the Hunnish Hellcat next fell in love with and married the famous British sourpuss George Sanders, but not before a brief interlude where Greta Garbo kissed her on the lips at a party. "I've never had lesbian tendencies," co-writes Zsa Zsa, "but if I had ever had them, the woman of my life would have definitely been Greta Garbo." I've never had lesbian tendencies, either, but if I had ever had them, the woman of my life would have definitely been Greta Garbo, too.

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