In the spring of 1944, German forces occupied Hungary and swiftly began implementing a policy of mass murder that would ultimately claim the lives of more than 500,000 of the country’s Jews. Among those who fled were three sisters from a prominent Jewish Hungarian family in Budapest, known for their striking beauty and ambitious social ambitions. They were Magda, Eva, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, and their escape from the shadow of the Holocaust set them on a path that would make them some of the most famous, and infamous, figures of Hollywood’s golden age. The sisters were born into an affluent household in Budapest, where their parents worked as jewelers and porcelain traders, a profitable trade that allowed them to weather the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression with relative ease.
Hungary had a large Jewish community of over 700,000 in the interwar period, and the Gabor family enjoyed a prominent social position despite the prevailing anti-Semitic sentiments across Europe. From a young age, the three sisters were known for their beauty. In 1936, at just nineteen years old, Zsa Zsa was crowned Miss Hungary and began a career as an actress in Vienna. The youngest sister, Eva, married a Swedish doctor named Eric Drimmer in 1937 and immigrated to the United States shortly thereafter, establishing a crucial link with America that would later shape the fate of all three sisters.
When war engulfed Europe in September 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Nazi party began systematically turning Jewish people in the territories it controlled into second-class citizens through restrictive laws. For much of the war, Hungary, allied with Germany, managed to avoid the worst persecution of its Jewish population. But the German occupation in 1944 changed everything. Facing racial extermination, the Gabor family fled their homeland, passing through Portugal and Brazil before sailing onward to the United States to join Eva.
Arriving in America in stages, the sisters quickly became leading actresses and social figures of the 1940s and 1950s. Of the three, Magda, the eldest, born in June 1915, achieved the least success on screen. She arrived last, reaching the United States in 1946, and even then did not appear on screen for several years. Her peak fame came in the mid-1950s with appearances on television shows like the Four Star Review and The Colgate Comedy Hour, after which her screen career faded.
But while Magda’s on-screen roles were brief, her marital life became a source of intense interest in American social life for decades. Magda had already been married once before fleeing Europe, to a Polish air pilot and minor noble named Jan Bychowski, though the union had ended by the time she left Europe. She quickly married William N. Rankin, an American playwright and screenwriter, on December 3, 1946, a connection that aided the sisters’ Hollywood networking in the short term, but the marriage ended in divorce by August 1947.
Another brief marriage to New York lawyer Sydney Robert Warren followed in the summer of 1949 and ended in 1950. In 1956, Magda married Arthur Gallucci, an Italian-American building contractor from New Jersey, and their union lasted over a decade, ending only with his death from cancer on January 22, 1967, a rare outcome for the Gabor sisters, whose marriages typically ended in divorce. Over the next decade, Magda brought her total number of husbands to six, marrying British actor George Sanders in early December 1970 for just four weeks, and then Frank H. Welch, an economic consultant, in August 1972.
That final marriage lasted three years on paper, though the couple separated just a year after the nuptials, and Magda never married again. Zsa Zsa Gabor, born in February 1917, became the most celebrated of the sisters. In the 1950s, she was one of the most acclaimed stars of the American screen, known for her beauty and European sophistication. She appeared regularly on television and starred in numerous films, including Moulin Rouge in 1952, directed by John Huston, and a peripheral role in Touch of Evil in 1958, one of Orson Welles’s most celebrated films, starring Welles himself and Charlton Heston.
By the 1960s and 1970s, however, Zsa Zsa began to fade from major productions, in part because her bustling social life and Hollywood lifestyle distracted her from her craft. Zsa Zsa married an extraordinary nine times. One marriage, to Burhan Belge, a Turkish diplomat, ended in 1941, shortly before she left Europe. In 1942, she married Conrad Hilton Sr.
, a major heir to the Hilton Hotel fortune, a union that lasted until 1947. She then married British actor George Sanders, a marriage that lasted until 1954 and is especially curious because Sanders would later marry Zsa Zsa’s elder sister Magda in 1970. Many of her subsequent marriages were brief. Her unions with Joshua Cosden Jr.
in 1966 and Jack Ryan in 1975 each lasted about a year on average. A marriage to Mexican actor Felipe de Alba in 1983 was declared invalid because she was still legally married to Michael O’Hara, an Irish-American actor she had married in 1976, just weeks after divorcing Ryan. Finally, Zsa Zsa entered a long-lasting relationship when she married Frederick Prinz von Anhalt, a German-American businessman nearly thirty years her junior, in 1986. That union lasted until her death.
Eva Gabor, the youngest, born in February 1919, married almost as many times as Magda. Her first marriage to the Swedish doctor Eric Drimmer collapsed in the early 1940s after their immigration to America. She then married American investment broker Charles Isaacs in 1943, a union that lasted until 1949. Her third marriage, to plastic surgeon John Albert Williams in 1956, lasted less than twelve months.
Two relatively long-lived marriages followed: one to Richard Brown, a textile manufacturer, from 1959 to 1973, and another to Frank G. Jameson Jr. , a former vice president of Rockwell International, a company that played a massive role in the American aerospace and technology industry during the space race of the 1960s. This fifth and final marriage, initiated in 1973, lasted until divorce in 1983.
Throughout these decades, Eva enjoyed a significant television and film career, appearing in dozens of shows and films. Between 1953 and 1954, she even fronted her own television show, The Eva Gabor Show, featuring celebrity guests of the Hollywood studio system, with Magda and Zsa Zsa also making guest appearances. Inevitably, as the sisters entered their forties and fifties by the 1960s, their screen work dried up. Hollywood lionized youth and good looks, especially for women, and the sisters found themselves getting less and less work.
Some later cameos did attract attention, however, including Zsa Zsa’s appearance in the Naked Gun series with Leslie Nielsen in the early 1990s and Eva’s appearances on The Beverly Hillbillies television series, one of the most viewed programs of the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was Eva, the youngest, who died first, in Los Angeles on July 4, 1995, at seventy-six years of age. Magda died in the summer of 1997 at eighty-one. Zsa Zsa, the most famed of the three, lived to the remarkable age of ninety-nine, dying in Los Angeles on December 18, 2016.
Despite the fact that the three Gabor sisters married twenty times between them, their many relationships produced only one child. On March 10, 1947, Zsa Zsa gave birth to a daughter named Francesca, whose father was Zsa Zsa’s second husband, Conrad Hilton. In the 1990s, it was claimed that the pregnancy was the result of Conrad forcing himself upon Zsa Zsa while the couple was about to divorce, though the evidence remains unclear. What is certain is that Francesca predeceased her mother, dying at sixty-seven from a massive stroke.
Zsa Zsa, incapacitated by dementia at the time, was never informed of her daughter’s death. With that, the Gabor dynasty passed from American life, leaving behind a legacy of a family that was at once colorful and somewhat tragic.