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

Shortly after Garbo stopped hitting on the Magyar Mata Hari, Zsa Zsa began her mercifully brief acting career, snagging a supporting part in Moulin Rouge, whose director, John Huston, for some unfathomable reason, did not think she was right for this, or any other role.

"Move in close. I mean close," John Huston admonished his cinematographer Ossie Morris. "If they can see how beautiful she is, they won't notice that she can't act."

Obviously, Morris did not move in close enough.

Although Zsa Zsa was still madly in love with hubby Sanders, she now began a torrid affair with Porfirio Rubirosa, a dashing playboy from the traditionally undashing Dominican Republic, where women are a dime a dozen, as are men named Porfirio Rubirosa.

"Sometimes, when I looked into his eyes, I saw myself," says Zsa Zsa, in a statement of unrivaled optometrical tautological-tude. Porfirio wanted the Belle of Budapest to divorce Sanders and marry him, primarily so that he could see what the name Zsa Zsa Rubirosa would look like on the place settings, but Zsa Zsa was still madly in love with Sanders who, even though he was suffering an endless series of nervous breakdowns, kept her amused with antics such as almost getting her to screw a priest named Guido.

As Gabor recalls the incident, she greeted Sanders that night with the words: "Don't ask me what I did with Guido. Let me show you."

Sanders must have been pleased, because his only comment afterward was, "I assume Guido is leaving the church."

Although Sanders was still very much in love with his Hungarian Honey-pie, he soon divorced her in order to marry her sister Magda. (At this point, Guido drops out of the story.) Infuriated that her sister was now screwing her ex-husband, Zsa Zsa began sleeping with Richard Burton, who had not yet married Liz Taylor, who was no longer married to Nicky Hilton, who'd long ago had a roll in the haystack with his stepmother Zsa Zsa. Gabor recalls that she and Burton celebrated New Year's Day by eating "Hungarian sausage as spicy and hot as our new romance"; he later died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Draw your own conclusions. After renting her home to Richard Harris, who, inexplicably, never shared her bed, Zsa Zsa went for the U.K. hat trick by sleeping with Sean Connery.

Meanwhile, her career languished, as does the second half of the autobiography. Sadly, as Zsa Zsa gets older and chunkier and actually starts to resemble a Hungarian sausage, she receives fewer and fewer marriage offers from right-wing Turkish firebrands and men named Porfirio, and more marriage proposals from losers named Herbert and Frederick, Duke of Saxony. Reduced to making films such as Queen of Outer Space and appearing on "The Merv Griffin Show," Zsa Zsa is soon getting snubbed by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who ducks out of an invitation to come over and sample her spicy Hungarian sausage by saying, "I can't fly down because we are invading Cambodia tomorrow." This is, without question, the best excuse for not screwing Zsa Zsa Gabor that any human being has ever devised.

The last 100 pages of the book are dreary indeed, as Zsa Zsa suffers through a seven-month marriage with a man who has a secret torture chamber in the basement, and virtually no interest in Eastern European sausage products. Bondage again surfaces in her life when a kinky Beverly Hills cop pulls her over for an expired registration on her Rolls-Royce, then later arrests her for a slap--an incident that resulted in her being handcuffed, jailed, and forced to accept unsolicited floral arrangements from Roseanne Barr/Arnold. The whole incident, she says, was a terrible affront to her "dignity."

Actually, the worst affront to her dignity is the 32-page photo spread which includes a publicity still of Zsa Zsa posing with two large canines in a dog sled in Anchorage, Alaska. Gabor of the Yukon looks happy. The dogs don't. I think her first husband may have been on to something.

Pages: 1 2 3 4