There’s a woman most people think they know. A glamorous blonde with a thick Hungarian accent, a laugh that could fill any room, and a habit of walking into scandal the way most people walk into a room, completely unapologetically. She was one of the most photographed women of the 20th century. She was everywhere.
Magazine covers, television screens, Hollywood parties, courtrooms. And yet, behind all the fur coats and the diamonds and the quotable one-liners, there was a life that was far more complicated, far more painful, and far more human than any headline ever captured. Nine marriages. Nine times she stood at an altar. Nine times she believed, or at least hoped, that this one might be different.
And with each one came a new chapter in a story that stretched from pre-war Budapest all the way to the very last years of a long, difficult life in Bel Air. What drove her from one marriage to the next? What happened behind the scenes of those relationships that the cameras never caught? And which of those nine men left the deepest mark on a woman who always seemed to be running toward something she could never quite name? Stay with us.
Because the real story of Zsa Zsa Gabor is nothing like the punchline the world made her out to be. Segment seven. The girl from Budapest. She was born Sári Gabor on February 6th, 1917, in Budapest, Hungary. A city that in those years sat at the crossroads of old European grandeur and the coming storms of the 20th century.
Her parents, Vilmos Gabor and Jolie Tilleman, were part of a prosperous Jewish family, and they raised their daughters, Eva, Magda, and Sári, who would later become Zsa Zsa. With a sharp eye for beauty, ambition, and the kind of social grace that turns heads in a room. From the very beginning, her mother, Jolie, was the driving force behind the Gabor girls.
She was a formidable woman who believed deeply that her daughters were destined for something extraordinary. She enrolled young Sári in singing and acting lessons. She pushed her toward pageants and performing stages. And she made clear, sometimes gently and sometimes not, that beauty was a currency, and that a woman who knew how to use it could go anywhere in the world.
At the age of 15, Zsa Zsa entered the Miss Hungary beauty pageant. The records on whether she actually won or placed are somewhat tangled. The story changed depending on who was telling it and when. But what is clear is that the experience put her in front of an audience in a way that lit something in her. She had a presence.
People noticed her. And in Budapest in the early 1930s, being noticed by the right person could change the entire direction of your life. The city itself was a world caught between eras. Budapest in those years was still one of the great capitals of Central Europe. A city of coffee houses, opera houses, grand boulevards, and a Jewish intellectual culture that was producing writers, scientists, and artists at a remarkable rate.
But the political climate was shifting underneath all of it. The rise of nationalist movements across Europe was casting long shadows. And for Jewish families like the Gabors, the future was not as certain as it might have appeared on the surface. Jolie Gabor understood this, even if she didn’t say so directly.
The urgency with which she pushed her daughters toward visibility, toward marriage to men of means, toward lives that would carry them beyond the borders of Hungary, that urgency had a context. She was not simply an ambitious stage mother in the theatrical sense. She was a woman who understood that the world her daughters had been born into might not hold, and that the best insurance against whatever was coming was a life built somewhere else with someone stable.
Or at the very least, with a name that opened doors. Zsa Zsa’s first meeting with a man of significant standing came through the social world of Vienna, where she had gone in her late teens, likely around 1936, to study at the Reinhardt Seminar, a prestigious theatrical school. Vienna in the mid-1930s was still a magnificent city, though it, too, was under mounting political pressure.
It was there, or in circumstances closely connected to that period, that she encountered Burhan Asaf Belge. Belge was a Turkish diplomat, journalist, and intellectual. A man considerably older than Zsa Zsa, well-connected in the cultural and political circles of Ankara, and someone who moved through the world with the confidence of a person accustomed to being taken seriously.
He was part of the modernizing cultural establishment of Atatürk’s Turkey, and he had the standing and the bearing that matched the image Jolie Gabor had spent years preparing her daughters to attract. They married in 1937 in Ankara, when Zsa Zsa was around 20 years old. She followed him to Turkey and spent several years there, moving through the diplomatic and intellectual world that Belge inhabited.
It was not the life of a Hollywood actress or a Manhattan socialite. It was a quieter, more formal kind of life, and it clearly did not fit her particularly well, because by 1941, the marriage was over. She never spoke in great detail about those years, or about what specifically ended the marriage. In her memoir and in various interviews, she was characteristically vague about the Belge chapter, and the Turkish press of the era left very little public record of her time there.
What is known is that she left, and that she left heading west toward a new world, carrying very little except her name, her looks, and the education her mother had given her in how to enter a room. By 1941, she had made her way to the United States, settling first in New York before eventually making her way to Hollywood.
The world was at war. Europe was becoming increasingly dangerous, particularly for Jewish families, and the Gabor family’s decision to scatter, Jolie and Vilmos eventually also emigrating, each of the sisters making their own way to America, was not simply about ambition. It was survival. And it was in New York in 1942, at a dinner party that could have been any of a hundred dinner parties in that city at that moment, that Zsa Zsa Gabor met the man whose name she would carry for the rest of her life, even long after she stopped being his
wife. Segment six. Conrad Hilton and the making of a name. When Zsa Zsa arrived in New York in the early 1940s, she was not yet anybody in particular. She was a striking Hungarian émigré with an accent that charmed some people and confused others, a quick wit, and an ambition that had no visible ceiling. The city was full of people trying to remake themselves during wartime, and she was among them, though she went about it with considerably more flair than most.
The meeting with Conrad Nicholson Hilton happened in 1942 at a dinner party in New York. Conrad Hilton was already a towering figure in American business. He had built his hotel empire through the 1920s and 1930s, weathering the depression, acquiring properties across the country, and establishing himself as one of the most powerful men in American hospitality.
He was 55 years old when they met. She was 25. The attraction between them appears to have been immediate and genuine, though the nature of it was complicated from the start. Conrad Hilton was a devout Catholic, a man whose faith was not decorative, but deeply held. He had been previously married and divorced from Mary Adelaide Barron, the mother of his three sons, which placed him in a difficult position within his own religious framework.
He was also someone who was very much accustomed to being in command, a man who moved through rooms with the certainty of someone who had never been seriously told no. They married on April 10th, 1942, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was her second marriage and his second as well. Whatever romanticism surrounded the early days, the realities of the relationship were complicated almost from the beginning by two people who were profoundly different from each other in temperament, values, and expectations.
Conrad was reserved in certain respects, rigidly structured in his daily life, and deeply serious about his Catholic faith and his business empire. Zsa Zsa was vivacious, theatrical, and accustomed to being the center of attention wherever she went. She loved to entertain, to perform, to be in the company of artists and creative people.
These were not natural companions in a marriage, and the friction between their worlds became apparent relatively early. There were also long separations. Conrad traveled constantly for his business, acquiring hotels in cities across the country and eventually internationally, building the Hilton brand into something that would outlast him by decades.
Zsa Zsa was left for stretches in a domestic life that did not suit her. The social world of Hollywood and New York kept pulling at her, and Conrad’s world pulled in the opposite direction, toward discipline, toward privacy, toward the serious business of building an empire. They had one child together, a daughter named Francesca Hilton, born March 10th, 1947.
Francesca would grow up navigating the complicated space between two enormous personalities and an enormous fortune that would not, in the end, fully include her. She spent portions of her adult life in difficult financial circumstances, engaged in protracted legal disputes over her father’s estate, and was quietly estranged from much of her family for long stretches.
Her life ended in January 2015, when she passed away at the age of 67, before her mother, which is the kind of tragedy that doesn’t fit neatly into any story about glamour or fame. The marriage to Conrad ended in divorce in 1947, the same year Francesca was born. Conrad Hilton later wrote about the relationship in his 1957 memoir, Be My Guest, with a candor that left little room for sentimentality.
He was honest about his sense that the marriage had been a mismatch, and his reflections on it was shaped by the guilt of a devout man who had divorced twice, and by a genuine uncertainty about where things had gone wrong. For her part, Zsa Zsa walked away with the Hilton name, and she kept it through all the marriages that followed as a kind of brand that the world already recognized.
She was canny enough to understand what that name was worth, even as she moved on from the man behind it. But the Hilton chapter also handed her something she had not planned for. A daughter who would spend her life partly in the shadow of that famous name, and partly shut out from its benefits. It was one of the quieter ongoing sorrows of Zsa Zsa’s life, visible mainly to those who looked closely.
The next man who entered her life was, by most measures, the most consequential of all. Not because of what he could give her materially, but because of how deeply she felt for him, how badly it ended, and how long the grief lasted. Segment five, George Sanders, the love that broke her. Of all the men in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s life, George Sanders is the one most people know the least about, and the one who, by most accounts, she loved the most deeply and the most painfully.
Understanding their relationship means understanding something about both of them that goes well beyond the glamour and the press coverage. George Sanders was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1906 to British parents who were living there at the time. He grew up in England, studied at Brighton College, and eventually found his way to acting after a series of failed ventures in business.
He had a voice, low, languid, carrying a perpetual undercurrent of cultivated contempt, that became one of the most distinctive instruments in Hollywood. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1950 for his role as the acid-tongued theater critic Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, and many people who knew him said privately that the character required very little acting on his part.
He was witty to the point of cruelty, self-aware to the point of nihilism, and charming in the way that certain genuinely dangerous people are charming, so completely, so effortlessly, that you don’t fully notice what it costs you until much later. Zsa Zsa met George Sanders in the mid-1940s, most likely around 1946, through the overlapping social world of European emigres and Hollywood professionals that both of them inhabited.
The chemistry between them was immediate and obvious to everyone around them. Both were transplants from the old world navigating Hollywood with a knowing detachment. Both had a flair for the theatrical. Both understood that celebrity was partly costume, partly performance. But where Zsa Zsa used that understanding to push herself forward with energy, warmth, and a genuine desire to connect, Sanders used it as a reason to step back from everything, including the people who loved him.
They married on April 2nd, 1949 in Las Vegas. She was 32. He was 43. The years that followed were marked by a kind of passionate turbulence that the people around them often found difficult to observe. Sanders was not cruel in any direct physical sense, but he was emotionally withholding in ways that could be just as cutting.
He was prone to long silences, to sudden withdrawals, emotional and physical, and to expressing his dissatisfaction with life in terms that left very little room for hope or lightness. He drank too much, spent money recklessly, and moved through relationships with the air of someone who found everything, including his own life, mildly amusing and ultimately pointless.
He had written, in correspondence and in his own memoir, about finding existence largely absurd. This was not posturing. It was a genuine philosophical position that he held with the same consistency he brought to everything else. He lived accordingly, and the people closest to him had to find ways to live alongside it.
Zsa Zsa was not a passive figure in the relationship. She had a temper, a fierce sense of her own worth, and a tongue that could match his on any given day. Their arguments were reportedly spectacular, loud, theatrical, and occasionally conducted in public. Their reconciliations were apparently equally memorable.
They were the kind of couple that friends found both compelling and exhausting to spend time around. The marriage lasted until 1954, ending in divorce after five years. Though even after the divorce, they remained entangled in each other’s lives in ways that neither of them seemed fully able to control.
Four years after their divorce, in 1958, George Sanders married Zsa Zsa’s own sister, Magda Gabor. The marriage between Sanders and Magda lasted only a matter of months before ending in annulment, but the event sent shockwaves through the Gabor family and through their broader social world. Zsa Zsa’s reaction was characteristically public and characteristically colorful.
She made no secret of her feelings, and the episode strained family relations for some time. Whatever had existed between Zsa Zsa and Sanders, this particular chapter made clear that it was not simply a finished story. And then, in April 1972, the story ended in the most permanent and most heartbreaking way possible.
George Sanders checked into a hotel room in Castelldefels, near Barcelona, Spain. He was 65 years old. He left behind a handwritten note, brief, direct, and in its own way entirely characteristic of the man, in which he expressed that he found life unbearable, that he was simply too bored to continue, and that he was choosing to leave.
He had taken a large quantity of barbiturates. He passed away on April 25th, 1972. When the news reached Zsa Zsa, she was deeply shaken, more so than her public composure in those years generally allowed the world to see. In interviews in the years and decades that followed, she returned to George Sanders in a way that she never returned to any of the other men in her life.
She described him openly as the great love of her life. She said, more than once, that the grief of losing him, not in 1954, when the divorce happened, but in 1972, when he was truly gone, was something that never entirely left her. That admission, made by a woman who had married nine times and who projected to the world an almost theatrical cheerfulness about the whole business of love and loss, says more about her interior life than almost anything else ever recorded about her.
She was 40 years old when she divorced him. She was 55 when he died. And yet he remained, by her own account, the one who mattered most. The marriages that followed in the late 1950s and 1960s would tell a different kind of story. Shorter chapters, less depth, and in some cases more confusion than clarity. But they were all, in some way, happening in the long shadow of the one that had come before.
Segment four, Herbert Hutner, Edmond de Szigethy, and Joshua Cosden Jr. The years between the end of her marriage to George Sanders and the mid-1960s saw Zsa Zsa’s romantic life shift into a register that was harder to follow and, frankly, harder to explain. The marriages that fell in this period were shorter, quieter, and less fully documented than what had come before.
And they speak to a woman navigating a great deal of internal turbulence behind the glittering public surface. Her fourth marriage was to Herbert L. Hutner, a New York investment banker, in November 1964. Hutner was a very different kind of man from either Conrad Hilton or George Sanders. He was quieter, less theatrical, more at home in boardrooms than in ballrooms.
The marriage never attracted much public attention, which, given Zsa Zsa’s general relationship with publicity, says something about how little heat the relationship generated for either of them. It lasted until 1966, just under two years. There were no dramatic public scenes, no memorable quotations attached to the split, no lasting story that entered the cultural record.
It was, by any measure, one of the quieter chapters in a biography that was otherwise anything but quiet. The fifth marriage followed quickly. In 1966, she married Edmond de Szigethy, a businessman about whom history has preserved very little beyond the fact of the marriage itself and its rapid dissolution. The union lasted approximately one year, ending in 1967.
By this point in her public story, the press had largely settled into treating her marriages as a kind of ongoing feature, a number to be updated, a punchline to be refreshed. And the brevity of this particular chapter made it easy to slide past without much examination. Her sixth marriage, to Joshua S.
Cosden Jr., an oil heir from a prominent Texas family, overlapped in timeline with some of the accounts of the Szigethy marriage, creating a period of her romantic biography that is genuinely difficult to reconstruct in clean chronological order, partly because the public record is inconsistent, and partly because Zsa Zsa herself was not always a reliable narrator of her own history.
What is clear is that the marriage to Cosden was also brief, ending within roughly a year of its beginning. What this succession of short marriages in the 1960s points toward is not frivolity, exactly, but something more like exhaustion. An exhaustion with looking, with trying, with maintaining the public performance of a woman who moved through the world on her own terms, while privately searching for something that kept proving elusive.
She was in her late 40s and early 50s during these years, aging in a Hollywood culture that had very little tenderness for women past a certain point, particularly those whose identity had been so bound up with physical beauty and romantic appeal. She was also watching the people around her age and change. Her sister, Eva, was navigating her own career and personal life.
Her mother, Jolie, who had been such a defining presence in all of the Gabor sisters’ lives, was growing older. Her daughter, Francesca, was a young adult living largely on her own terms, estranged in various ways from the Hilton world she had been born into. None of this made it into the interviews of the period in any direct way.
She was too disciplined a public performer for that. But the pace of the marriages, the speed with which she moved in and out of them during these years, gives a sense of a woman who was not finding what she was looking for, and was not entirely sure anymore what she was looking for in the first place. The next chapter brought a man who, briefly, offered something that felt genuinely different, and then upended it in ways that made headlines of their own.
Segment three, Jack Ryan and the Barbie connection. The seventh marriage, to Jack Ryan in 1975, is one of the stranger and more genuinely fascinating chapters in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s romantic story, because Jack Ryan was himself an extraordinary figure whose life existed on a completely different plane from the usual Hollywood social world that surrounded her. John W.
Jack Ryan was a Harvard-educated engineer who had spent a significant portion of his early career working as a weapons systems designer at the Raytheon Corporation. In that role, he contributed to the development of the Hawk and Sparrow missile systems, sophisticated, classified defense projects that placed him at the center of American military technology during the Cold War.
He was not a celebrity. He was not a social figure in any conventional sense. He was a serious, highly trained engineer working on some of the most consequential defense projects of his era. And then, in one of the most improbable pivots in 20th-century design history, he left defense work and joined Mattel, where he played a central role in developing the Barbie doll, which launched in 1959.
The articulated body, the structural engineering that allowed the doll its distinctive form, these were partly Ryan’s contributions. He went on to hold over a thousand patents across his career, spanning military systems and children’s toys in a combination that is almost too strange to be believed, and yet entirely documented.
He was also, in his personal life, a famously extravagant and unconventional personality. He had designed and built an elaborate home in Bel Air that was known informally as his castle, fitted out with a range of eccentric features and used as the setting for parties that became genuine Hollywood institutions during the 1970s.
He was not a quiet man, and he was not particularly interested in conventional domesticity. Zsa Zsa and Ryan married in 1975. She was in her late 50s, he was in his early 50s. The marriage lasted until 1976, barely a year. The specific details of the breakdown were not extensively publicized, but the broad picture was of two very forceful personalities who occupied adjacent worlds without ever quite meshing in the sustained, daily way that a marriage requires.
Ryan’s later years were marked by declining health. He suffered a stroke in 1989 and passed away in August 1991 at the age of 65. For Zsa Zsa, the marriage left behind very little in the public record beyond the number seventh, and the curious, memorable footnote of Jack Ryan’s remarkable double life as both Cold War engineer and the man who helped bring Barbie into the world.
But the eighth marriage, which followed just months after the end of the Ryan union, would carry her into a more settled chapter. And the ninth would be the one that lasted until the end of her life. Segment two, Michael O’Hara and the brief eighth chapter. Before the marriage that would define her final decades, there was one more chapter, the eighth, with Michael O’Hara, a lawyer who served at various points as her attorney, and who was already part of the professional world that orbited her life.
They married in August 1976, just months after the end of the Ryan marriage. The union lasted until 1982, making it, by the standards of her post-Sanders life, one of her longer relationships. O’Hara was a private figure who did not seek the spotlight and did not generate public controversy. And the marriage, accordingly, unfolded with very little external drama.
These were years in which Zsa Zsa remained a vivid and active public presence, even as the nature of that presence was shifting. The great Hollywood career she had once seemed on the verge of building in the early 1950s had never fully materialized. She had appeared in Moulin Rouge in 1952, in Lili in 1953, and in a handful of other films, but she had never become the film star that her looks and presence might have suggested.
What she became instead was something harder to categorize, a celebrity in the modern sense, famous for being famous, beloved by talk show audiences for her wit and her complete refusal to be anything other than exactly herself. The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson was a particular home for her during this era.
She appeared on it dozens of times over the decades and the relationship between Carson and Zsa Zsa was one of those rare television pairings that felt genuinely warm and unrehearsed. She was fast. She was funny and she had the rare gift of seeming completely spontaneous even while saying things she had probably said a hundred times before.
Audiences loved her for it, loved the accent, the self-awareness, the particular brand of self-deprecating glamour that she had perfected over decades. The marriage to O’Hara ended quietly in 1982. She was in her mid-60s. The world expected her to slow down. Instead she was about to begin the last and in many ways the most complicated relationship of her life.
Segment one. Frederic Prince von Anhalt and the final chapter. His name was Frederic Prince von Anhalt, though he was not born with that name or that title. He was born Hans Robert Lichtenberg in 1943 in Bad Wimpfen, Germany. His path to Princehood involved a legal adoption. In 1980, he was adopted by Marie Auguste, Princess of Anhalt.
A woman from a minor branch of the German noble house of Anhalt in a practice that had some precedent in European aristocratic families looking to extend their line. The adoption gave him the title and the surname von Anhalt and Frederic used both to considerable social effect. He met Zsa Zsa in the early 1980s and on August 14th, 1986, they married in a ceremony in Los Angeles.
She was 69 years old. He was 43. It was her ninth and final marriage. From the beginning, the relationship attracted a great deal of skepticism. The age difference was substantial. His title was acquired by legal adoption rather than by birth into a royal family. His background before the adoption was not particularly distinguished.
Critics were direct. Many questioned whether he was a genuine life partner or a man who understood the considerable value of attaching himself to one of the most recognizable names in the world. Frederic was not someone who avoided attention. He gave interviews regularly throughout the marriage, particularly as Zsa Zsa’s health declined in her later years.
And he cultivated a public persona that many observers felt was out of proportion to any role he had earned. He also generated controversy entirely on his own most notably in 2007 in the immediate aftermath of Anna Nicole Smith’s death when he publicly claimed to be the biological father of Smith’s newborn daughter, Dannielynn.
DNA testing did not support the claim and the episode was widely interpreted as an attempt to insert himself into one of the most intensely covered media stories of that year. But before all of that in 1989 came the incident that would, for better or worse, become the defining public moment of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s final decades as a celebrity.
In June 1989, while driving in Beverly Hills, she was pulled over by a motorcycle officer named Paul Kramer. What happened during that traffic stop became one of the most talked about minor legal incidents of the late 1980s. She was accused of striking the officer during the stop. She was arrested. She was charged and the case went to trial.
The trial itself was a genuine spectacle. She arrived in court dressed impeccably on every occasion. She was combative on the stand. She disputed the officer’s account of what had happened and did so with the particular self-assurance of a woman who had never particularly accepted that authority figures had the right to tell her what to do.
She was found guilty of battery against a police officer of having an open container of alcohol in her vehicle and of driving with an expired license. The judge sentenced her to three days in jail, 120 hours of community service and a fine. She served the jail time. Reports from inside the facility suggested she navigated it in something approaching her own style.
There were accounts of other inmates seeking her autograph. The footage of her arriving at the courthouse, the trial coverage, the sentencing all of it was replayed endlessly on television news programs and it became the image that many people, particularly younger viewers, would most associate with her name.
It was unfair in the way that late career reputations are often unfair reducing a life of genuine complexity to a single moment, a single headline, a single clip. But it was also, in a distinctly Zsa Zsa Gabor kind of way completely unforgettable. The years following 1989 were quieter. She and Frederic remained at their home in Bel Air which had long been one of the more recognizable private residences in that neighborhood.
She made occasional public appearances and gave occasional interviews, aging with the peculiar visibility that comes from having been famous for long enough that the world simply expects you to continue. Then in 2002 a car accident in which another driver ran a red light left her with serious injuries that had lasting effects on her mobility and her overall health.
She went through rehabilitation but she was not the same physically after it. Her ability to move through the world on her own terms, which had always been one of her most defining characteristics was increasingly limited. In 2010 she suffered a severe stroke at home. She was 93 years old. The stroke left her largely bedridden.
The years that followed involved round-the-clock nursing care, multiple hospitalizations and a steady narrowing of the world she could inhabit. In 2011, her right leg was amputated due to circulation complications that had developed in the aftermath of the stroke. The woman who had once walked into rooms and instantly commanded them now could not leave her bed.
Frederic continued to give press statements and interviews throughout this period. Statements that drew criticism from observers who felt they were more self-serving than informative and that sparked ongoing disputes with Francesca Hilton who made several public statements about her concerns for her mother’s welfare and her frustration at being kept at a distance from her mother’s care.
The family tension around Zsa Zsa’s final years was largely quiet but persistent adding another layer of sadness to a chapter that was already deeply difficult. Zsa Zsa Gabor passed away on December 18th, 2016 at her home in Bel Air. She was 99 years old. The cause was heart failure. She had outlasted two World Wars, the destruction of the Budapest she had grown up in nine marriages decades of Hollywood a lawsuit-filled estate dispute and the death of her daughter, Francesca who had passed away in January 2015 just under two years before her mother.
She was buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles not far from some of the great names of Hollywood’s classic era. Nine marriages. Nine times she stood in front of someone and declared that she believed in the possibility of a life built with another person. That number became a joke for decades a shorthand for excess, for frivolity for a woman who couldn’t seem to get it right.
But when you go through those marriages one by one when you sit with what each of them actually meant, what each of them cost what each of them left behind the picture that comes into focus is not of a woman who took love lightly. It is of a woman who kept reaching for it despite everything and who paid a real price every time it didn’t hold.
She came from a country that no longer exists in the form she knew it. She built a life in a new world from essentially nothing. No established family connections in America no existing career nothing but her own intelligence and presence and stubborn refusal to be invisible. She raised a daughter largely on her own. She outlived that daughter.
And she spent her final years confined to a single room in a house that had once been the setting for some of the most glamorous social gatherings in Los Angeles. The world remembered the slap. The world remembered the marriages. All nine of them. The world remembered the accent, the diamonds, the one-liners.
But behind all of that was a woman who had survived more than most people ever have to, who had loved and lost and chosen to keep going in the particular way that only the genuinely stubborn managed to pull off. She was not a saint, and she never came close to claiming to be one. She was often difficult, sometimes reckless, occasionally completely impossible.
She could be vain and demanding and supremely difficult to reason with. But she was also brave in a way that gets routinely overlooked. Brave enough to keep beginning again over and over in a world that had very little patience for women who refused to disappear quietly when the spotlight began to move. Whatever you make of the nine marriages, whatever you think of the woman who collected them, there is something undeniably moving about a life lived so fully, so publicly, so stubbornly on its own terms.
She arrived in the 20th century as Sári Gábor of Budapest, Hungary. She left it 99 years later as Zsa Zsa Gabor, and somehow, impossibly, that name still carried weight. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.
