Three women, 19 husbands between them, a cop slapping incident that ended in jail, a mother who charged her own daughters two cents for a hug, millions lost to Bernie Maidoff, a prince who may or may not have been a real prince, and a legacy so outrageous that historians of American celebrities still can’t quite agree on what to do with it.
Before the Kardashians, before Paris Hilton, before anyone had invented the phrase famous for being famous, there were the Gabbor. This is their story. The mother who manufactured legends. To understand the Gabbor sisters, you first have to understand Jolie Gabbor. Because without Jolie, there are no Gabbor.
There is just a middleclass Hungarian family from Budapest that history would have ignored entirely. Jolie was born Janiska Tieleman around 1896 in Budapest in what was then the Austrohungarian Empire. She was clever, beautiful, and possessed of an ambition that outran the circumstances she had been handed.
She had dreamed of becoming an actress. when her parents sent her to a Swiss finishing school and then arranged her marriage to a businessman named Vilmos Gabbor, who was roughly twice her age and whose family name had been changed from the Jewish sounding Grun to the more assimilated Gabbor, specifically to ease their passage through an increasingly anti-semitic Hungarian society.
Jolie asked for a divorce within 6 months. She did not get one. She discovered she was pregnant. The divorce was postponed and the marriage endured for another 22 years producing three daughters. Magda in 1915, Shahza in 1917 and Eva in 1919. Jolie ran a jewelry boutique in Budapest. She was not a warm mother in the conventional sense.
She has been described, including by her own daughters, as a woman who charged them two cents for a hug, and who pit the sisters against each other as a matter of management strategy. She wanted them perfect, competitive, and attractive to powerful men. Because those were the qualities she had decided would get them out of whatever ordinary life might otherwise have been their fate. She sent them to private schools.
She had them tutored in languages. She made sure they could carry themselves in any room they walked into, that they spoke with grace, that they could dance, that they understood the social mathematics of mixing with wealthy people without appearing desperate. The Gabbor family had converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1928, a decision driven by the practical calculation that Hungary’s growing anti-semitism made Jewish identity a liability.
The conversion didn’t protect them from everything that was coming, but it bought time and navigating room that would prove important. What Jolie was building essentially was a brand. The Gabbor girls were to be a product that she had designed and that the world would want. In this she was, by any honest reckoning, extraordinarily successful.
She was also, by most accounts, a difficult person to have as a mother, and the particular combination of ambition and emotional unavailability she brought to parenting left marks on all three of her daughters, that the diamonds and the husbands and the television appearances never fully covered over.
Zaza would later say that Jolie had been a complicated woman to grow up with, that she was funny and sharp and totally focused. But that warmth was not her primary offering. The two cents for a hug was not simply a family joke. It was a description of an emotional economy that all three daughters had grown up navigating. The first to leave Budapest was the youngest, Ava, who married an American osteopath named Eric Dmer in 1937 at the age of 18 and moved to the United States with him.
Then Jarza, who had already married a Turkish diplomat and made a name for herself in Vienna, then eventually the family chaos of World War II would accelerate everything. The War and the Escape. By the early 1940s, the Gabbor family was scattered across three countries and a gathering storm. Eva had arrived in the United States in 1939 ahead of her sisters, having moved there with her first husband, Eric Dmer.
She was signed by Paramount Pictures, took acting lessons, and made her first American film, Forced Landing, in 1941. She was the first of the sisters to build something in America, and she did it largely alone, without Jolie beside her, and without the accumulated social momentum that the three sisters would develop when they were finally together.
Zaza had been in Vienna where at around the age of 17 she had been discovered by the famous oporatic tenor Richard Ta who invited her to perform in his new opereta at the theater on devine. She had attended acting school in Vienna had won the Miss Hungary beauty pageant in either 1935 or 1936. The stories about the year shifted depending on which account you consulted and how old Zaza was comfortable admitting to and had subsequently been disqualified from the pageant records when it emerged she had misrepresented
her age. She had then, in a gesture entirely characteristic of who she was, proposed to Bourhan Assaf Belg, a 35-year-old Turkish intellectual and government official, married him in 1937 and spent several years in Anchora before the marriage deteriorated and she made her way toward America in 1941. During a layover at an airport in Omaha, Nebraska on her way to Hollywood, she made headlines by casually mentioning to an associated press reporter that she had once danced with Adolf Hitler twice at a Vienna party. The comment was
reported worldwide. She had been in America for approximately 48 hours. Magda, the oldest, had stayed in Hungary longer and had become entangled in something far more dangerous. She had taken a position as secretary at the Portuguese embassy in Budapest, working for the ambassador, Carlos Saio Geredo. She had also by this point become his lover.
More significantly, she had been involved in anti-Nazi resistance activities for several years, work that, if discovered, would have carried severe consequences. She was also helping Geredo in a wider humanitarian operation, using his diplomatic status to issue passports and papers to Jewish Hungarians who needed them.
An effort that ultimately helped save the lives of nearly a thousand people. Gerredo has since been recognized by Yad Vashm, the Holocaust Memorial and Research Institution in Israel, as one of the righteous among the nations for this work. When the Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944, Magda, her mother Jolie, and her father Wilmos were all arrested.
The family had converted to Catholicism, but that was not sufficient protection against a regime that defined Jewish identity by ancestry. rather than practice. The Portuguese ambassador’s connections and his willingness to use them intervened and secured their release. The three of them eventually made it to Portugal and then to the United States where they rejoined Eva and separately Jaza.
The reunion of the family in America, specifically in New York and then in Hollywood, was the beginning of something genuinely new. MV Griffin later described what it was like when the Gabbor sisters arrived on the American social scene. He wrote that all these years later, it was hard to describe the phenomenon of the three glamorous Gabbor girls and their ubiquitous mother.
They burst onto the society pages and into the gossip columns so suddenly and with such force it was as if they’d been dropped out of the sky. That description is not an exaggeration. The Gabbor arrived in postwar America with something that the entertainment industry and the social establishment of the era were not entirely prepared for.
Three strikingly beautiful, impeccably dressed women with thick Hungarian accents, a talent for witty conversation, and an attitude toward wealth and marriage that treated both as both a game and a serious pursuit. They called everyone darling. They wore jewelry that was larger than anyone else’s.
They showed up at the right parties and then made those parties more interesting by the simple fact of being there. They were also quite deliberately keeping Jolie’s vision alive. The brand she had built in Budapest was now being rolled out on the most visible stage available. Zarza, the middle sister and the center of everything. Of the three sisters, Zarza became the most famous, not primarily because of any film role or stage performance, but because of a personality that was simply impossible to look away from, and because of a series of marriages that
became the running comedic narrative of her public life. She had married Conrad Hilton in 1942. She was 25. He was 55 and the founder of what was already a significant hotel empire. He was also by Ziadza’s own account a deeply controlling man who tried immediately after the wedding to change her name from Zja to Georgia.
A gesture she later described in her autobiography as an attempt to erase her Hungarian identity and replace it with something more manageable. She resisted. She wore jewelry he hadn’t given her. She refused to become what he wanted her to be. And the marriage deteriorated through jealousy, control, and incompatibility before ending in divorce in 1947.
Their daughter, Francesca Hilton, was born in 1947. She would go on to spend much of her adult life in a complicated and sometimes painful relationship with the Hilton family’s wealth and with both of her parents’ fame. Francesca died in January 2015 at the age of 67, leaving Jaza, then 97 years old and in poor health, without her only child.
During the marriage to Hilton, Zazar’s mental health had become a serious concern. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, then described in different terminology, and in 1945, Hilton had her institutionalized against her will. This episode, which was both traumatic and telling about the marriage’s power dynamics, was something she spoke about relatively rarely in public.
The version of Zarzar that the world got to see was the confident, arch, self-deprecating performer who made jokes about her marriages with perfect comic timing. The person who had been committed against her will, while her husband held the legal authority to make that decision, was someone she kept largely offscreen.
After Hilton came George Saunders, the British actor known for his sophisticated sardonic screen presence. They married in 1949 and remained married until 1954. Sanders was by most accounts genuinely fond of Zazar and she of him, but the marriage was too volatile to hold together over the long term. What happened after the divorce was one of the more spectacularly strange footnotes in the entire Gabbor story.
Sanders after divorcing Ziaza went on to marry her sister Magda. The marriage lasted one month. Most observers assumed it was either a revenge gesture against Jaza, an act of residual longing for the marriage he had just ended or some combination of both. Sanders himself characteristically said very little about it that could be taken at face value.
The husbands continued to accumulate after Sanders. Herbert Hutner, a financier whom Zazar described in her autobiography as having nearly destroyed her ambition through excessive kindness and generosity. She wrote that his thoughtfulness almost annihilated her drive, that she had always been the kind of woman who needed excitement and achievement rather than simply being taken care of.
Joshua Cosden Jr., an oil tycoon from a Texas family. Jack Ryan, an inventor best known for creating the Barbie doll and developing various military hardware for the US government. A combination of resume entries that was genuinely unusual. Michael O’Hara, a Beverly Hills attorney, Felipe De Alba, a Mexican actor whose marriage to Zazia lasted exactly one day before it was enulled.
It emerged almost immediately after the ceremony that Zarza was still technically married to Michael O’Hara, making the wedding to Di Alba legally void from its first moment. That episode, the one-day marriage, captured something essential about the Gabbor story. It was farcical. It was also in its way entirely characteristic of a life that had been arranged so relentlessly around the performance of romance that the actual logistics of that romance sometimes became secondary.
Each marriage produced press coverage. Each divorce produced more. Zjadia’s approach to discussing her marriages in public was one of the genuinely original contributions she made to American celebrity culture. She talked about them with a combination of self-deprecation, genuine humor, and just enough bitterness to keep things interesting.
She remarked that she was a great housekeeper because every time she got a divorce, she kept the house. She observed that a man in love was incomplete until he was married and then he was finished. She believed in large families, she noted, and thought every woman should have at least three husbands. She treated the whole romantic catastrophe of her life as material and the material was excellent.
The 1989 incident when the persona became the story. For most of Zaza’s career, the distinction between the real woman and the persona she had constructed was clear enough that the persona could operate freely. She was Zaza Gabbor, a performance as much as a person. And audiences understood they were watching a highly skilled entertainer play a version of herself that was about 30% more outrageous than the truth.
In the summer of 1989, the two collapsed into each other in spectacular fashion. On June 14th, 1989, Ziaza was driving her Rolls-Royce Cornesh convertible through Beverly Hills when a police officer named Paul Kramer pulled her over for expired license plates. What happened next became one of the most widely reported celebrity incidents of its era.
When Kramer approached the car, Zardzar did not simply accept the citation. She challenged him. When the interaction escalated to the point where Kramer asked her to step out of the vehicle, she drove away. He pulled her over again. When he attempted to remove her from the car, she struck him. She was arrested on the spot.
The trial that followed was by any standard a circus, and Zaza, whether by design or by sheer force of personality, was its ring master. A Zilzar Gabbor impersonator appeared at the courthouse. A man wearing a t-shirt with an anti-zar Zetszar message got into a fight with the impersonator outside. The judge presiding over the case accused her directly of treating the proceedings as a publicity opportunity and described her behavior as a mockery of the justice system.
The district attorney of Los Angeles County criticized the entire spectacle. She was convicted. The sentence was 3 days in jail, fines and restitution totaling $12,937, 120 hours of community service, and a psychiatric evaluation. This last element was its own kind of irony, given that she had been institutionalized against her will 44 years earlier.
She served the 3 days in jail between July 27th and July 30th, 1990. She refused to complete the community service. She went to jail with her typical composure and came out in the same condition. She subsequently appeared in the Naked Gun two and a half, a Fresh Prince of Bair episode and a film version of the Beverly Hillbillies, all as essentially herself, all explicitly trading on the notoriety of the arrest.
The incident had, in a strange way, given her a second career moment. She was 72 years old, and she had managed to make a traffic stop into a national conversation. The last husband arrived in 1986 when Zaza was 69. Frederick Prince Fon Anhalt was a German American who had acquired his noble title through an adult adoption by Princess Marie August of Anhalt.
A process that some royal genealogologists found unusual and others found irregular. He was roughly 30 years younger than Zara. Their marriage, which technically made her a princess with a title, lasted until her death in 2016, making him by a considerable margin her longest serving husband. During the marriage, he ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for governor of California and for mayor of Los Angeles.
He also briefly and improbably claimed to possibly be the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s child, a claim that, like much else surrounding him, did not survive close examination. Zaja’s final years were defined by accumulated physical misfortune. A car accident in 2002 left her frail and in a wheelchair.
A stroke in 2005 further diminished her. A fall in 2010 broke her hip. In 2011, her right leg was amputated below the knee following a severe infection and she spent her final years on life support unable to communicate. She died on December 18th, 2016 at the age of 99 at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, 50 days short of her 100th birthday.
Her ashes were eventually reenterred in Budapest in 2021 at Kerapesi Cemetery, fulfilling a wish she had expressed to return to Hungary. She had been famous for 70 years. Eva, the sister who actually could act. Of the three Gabbor sisters, Ava was the one who most consistently used the platform the family name provided for actual performance work.
and whose career arc, when examined honestly, is more interesting than the marriages narrative usually allows. She had arrived in the United States in 1939 ahead of her sisters and was picked up by Paramount Pictures, which gave her acting lessons and cast her in her first American film, Forced Landing, in 1941. Through the 1940s and early 1950s, she worked steadily in films and on Broadway.
She appeared in the original Broadway production of The Happy Time in 1950 alongside Claude Dofa in a run that demonstrated she had genuine range and was capable of holding her own on stage alongside accomplished theatrical performers. Her first significant film role in an American major production came in 1954 in The Last Time I Saw Paris alongside Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson.
Critics noticed her. She was not playing the Gabbor persona. She was doing actual acting in a real dramatic story and holding her own in the presence of one of the most charismatic stars of her generation. But the role that defined her career and that gave her a permanent place in American popular culture arrived in 1965 when she was cast as Lisa Douglas in Green Acres, a CBS sitcom about a glamorous New York socialite reluctantly transplanted to rural life on a farm with her husband played by Eddie Albert.
The premise was essentially a comedy of contrasts. Lisa Douglas with her French cooking, her chiffon gowns, and her unshakable conviction that she was the most civilized person in any room against the actual roosters and pig farmers of Hooterville, where nothing worked the way it was supposed to, and the only person who seemed to truly understand the telephone was the local operator.
Eva was perfect in it. She played Lisa Douglas with a combination of genuine comedy timing, physical expressiveness, and a willingness to be fully, gloriously absurd in service of a joke. Something that went well beyond simply being beautiful with an accent. The role required her to do things that a veiner performer would have quietly declined.
She had to be the butt of jokes. She had to cook terrible food with complete, serene confidence. She had to react to situations that defied logic with a cheerful inability to notice they were illogical. She did all of it without apparent hesitation, and the result was a character that American audiences loved with a warmth that exceeded what the show probably deserved on paper.
Green Acres ran for six seasons until 1971, and its reruns have never entirely stopped. She reprised Lisa Douglas in crossover episodes of the Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, and the character became the role most people thought of when her name came up, which was, all things considered, a considerable achievement for a woman who had spent years trying to be taken seriously as a dramatic actress.
She had also, by most credible accounts, built a genuine business. She founded a line of wigs and hair products that became commercially successful. A venture she developed and managed with real acumen rather than simply putting her name on someone else’s operation. The business added a dimension to her public identity that was more than decorative and it provided financial independence that did not depend on the current state of any marriage.
Eva’s marriages were five in number and considerably less dramatic in their public dimensions than Zarza’s nine. She had married Dr. Eric Dmer, the osteopath who had brought her to America in 1937. That ended in divorce, as did marriages to wealthy socialite Charles Issacs, actor John Williams, and real estate developer Richard Brown.
Her fifth and final marriage was to businessman Frank Jameson, whom she married in 1973. They remained together until 1983 when they divorced. Eva never remarried after Jameson. She spent the last years of her life in a close friendship with MV Griffin, the television host and entertainment mogul who had known the Gaba family since their early Hollywood years.
Griffin was gay, and the relationship between him and Eva was one of genuine affection and practical mutual support rather than romance. She lived near him, spent considerable time with him, and the two of them moved in the same social world without the complications that romantic involvement would have added. Griffin later wrote about her with evident warmth, describing her as one of the most genuinely amusing people he had known and someone whose friendship had enriched his life in ways he was not always sure she fully understood.
In the final period of her life, she found in that friendship something stable and uncomplicated that most of her previous decades had not provided. She died on July 4th, 1995 in Los Angeles. She was 76 years old. The cause was pneumonia following complications from hip replacement surgery. Surgery that had become necessary after a car struck her on the street outside a building.
The complications were serious and she did not recover. Her death came first among the sisters, and it devastated both Magda and Zaza and their mother, Jolie, who was told the news so gently and so incompletely that she apparently never fully understood what had happened. Jolie died in April 1997 at roughly the age of 100, still not fully knowing that her youngest daughter was gone.
The information had simply been too painful to deliver to a woman that old, and so it was withheld, and she departed from the world without the grief that the truth would have brought. Magda, the sister the world forgot. If Eva was the one who could act, and Ziaza was the one who became the performance, Magda was the one the public largely forgot, which is in its own way one of the more interesting things about the Gabbor story.
She was the oldest of the three. Born in 1915 and by most accounts the most practically capable, she had survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary through a combination of intelligence, political involvement, and the protection of a lover with diplomatic immunity. She had helped save lives, her own and many others, through the operation connected to the Portuguese embassy.
She had crossed the Atlantic and rebuilt her life in an entirely new country in middle age. She had done all of this without the film contracts and the television roles and the tabloid coverage that sustained her sister’s public profiles. She appeared in one Hungarian film before the war and in a handful of American television appearances in the 1950s.
She was not an actress in any serious professional sense. What she was instead was a skilled social operator, someone who understood how to cultivate connections, build networks, and make things happen for the family through practical rather than spectacular means. In 1953, it was Magda who negotiated the contract for the entire Gabbor family, Jolie, Magda, Zia, Ja, and Eva, to perform together at the Last Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas.
The show called This Is Our Life ran as direct competition to Marleene Dietrich, who was at that point the top nightclub act in Las Vegas. The Gabbor held their own. Eva later described the show as horrible, but audiences disagreed, and the engagement was a commercial success that only Magda’s business instincts had made possible. She had married six times.
Her husbands included an American businessman, a Hungarian nobleman, and George Sanders. But also in her later marriages, a man named Tibbor Heltai, with whom she spent what appears to have been her most settled period of partnership. None of the marriages lasted indefinitely, but Magda accumulated them with rather less fanfare than Zaza and considerably more dignity than most of the tabloid coverage of the family suggested was possible.
She also had the most macabra footnote in the sister’s marriage history. After George Sanders divorced Zazar in 1954, he married Magda. The marriage lasted one month and was enulled. Nobody ever entirely explained what Sanders had been thinking. The most generous interpretation is that he missed Zarza and this was the closest he could get to her.
The least generous interpretation is that it was an act of deliberate provocation directed at a woman who had ended their marriage. Sanders himself died in 1972, leaving behind a note that described his feelings about the world with characteristic bleak clarity. He was bored of it, he said, and had lived long enough.
It was the kind of exit line that would have impressed even Zaza. Magda’s later life was quieter than her sisters. She suffered a stroke that left her partially paralyzed which ended her mobility and curtailed her social life significantly. She spent her final years in Rancho Mirage, California near her mother, Jolie, managing declining health with a pragmatism that had always been her defining quality.
She died on June 6th, 1997, 5 days before her 82nd birthday and just 2 months after Jolie. The timing of the two deaths within such a short span was its own kind of melancholy footnote. By the time Magda died, Eva was already 2 years gone. The three sisters and the mother who had invented them had all departed within the space of 2 years.
the money, the title, and the things that didn’t hold. The Gabbor story is, among other things, a story about money, specifically about the gap between the impression of wealth and the actual accounting of it. The sisters had arrived in America, presenting themselves as scions of European aristocracy, which was not entirely accurate.
They were the daughters of a Budapest businessman who had changed his name to avoid anti-Semitic discrimination and a jewelry shop owner who had channeled her thwarted ambitions into her children. They were not poor by any reasonable measure of early to mid 20th century Hungarian bourgeois life, but they were not the titled nobility that their effect suggested.
They spoke of Hungarian high society with the authority of people who had been born to it. While the reality was that Jolie had used it as a model rather than a birthright, the daughters absorbed the style and the language of aristocracy and reproduced it so convincingly that the distinction between the real thing and the performance became, for most practical purposes, irrelevant.
The accents were real. The jewels were real, though financed variously by marriages, divorces, appearances, book deals, and in Jazar’s case, the shrewd management of her own celebrity as a commercial asset. The lifestyle was real in the sense that they actually lived it as long as the money from the current husband or the current contract held out.
What was less real was the underlying structure of genuine intergenerational wealth that the performance implied. Zisia, who was the most extravagant and the most visible, was also the most financially exposed as she aged. In 2007, it emerged that she had lost approximately $7 million through Bernard Maidoff’s investment fraud, one of the largest financial schemes in American history.
She acknowledged it publicly, noting that the loss had left her unable to pay approximately $118,000 she owed to the IRS. A woman who had once been photographed in enough diamonds to ransom a small country was being chased by a tax bill in an amount that was, by the standards she had spent her life projecting, genuinely modest.
It was an undignified situation, but she addressed it with the same dry humor she had brought to everything else. The noble title that her final husband brought was also subject to questions that became louder over time. Frederick Prince Fon Anhalt had acquired the prince designation through an adult adoption arrangement with an elderly German princess, a process that was legal in Germany, but that royal genealogologists and historians considered a somewhat unconventional route to aristocratic status.
The title made Zajar Zizar technically a princess with the designation of the duche of Saxony, something she took considerable and unapologetic pleasure in. But the more carefully one looked at the genealogy, the less straightforward the lineage appeared to be. Fonanhalt himself seemed unbothered by the scrutiny, and Zazar seemed even less bothered.
Eva’s business success with her wig and beauty line was real and substantial, but the financial comfort of the Green Acres era did not survive entirely into her final years. Magda’s financial situation was further reduced by the medical costs of her final years and the circumstances of her partial paralysis. What the Gabos had was the performance of wealth, and they had it at a level so consistent and so sustained that for most of their public lives, the performance and the reality were functionally indistinguishable.
It was only in the final accounting, when the marriages had ended, and the television appearances had stopped and the dust settled, that the gap between what they had seemed to have and what they actually possessed became visible. The legacy of the Gabbor. Television host and producer MV Griffin, who knew the Gabers better than most, and who watched their ark from Budapest bombshells to American cultural fixtures to elderly women in declining health, once described them as people who had been dropped out of the sky into
American celebrity. He meant it as a compliment, and it was accurate in ways he may not have fully intended. What the gays actually invented, or perhaps more precisely, what Jolie invented and her daughters executed with extraordinary consistency, was the template for the celebrity that exists outside of any particular skill or achievement.
They were famous because they were glamorous and because they were entertaining and because they said things that were quotable and because they were always somehow in the room where things were happening. The acting was real, particularly for Eva. The personality was genuine, if also constructed. The marriages were a constant source of material and the accent, the diamonds, the darling, those were the costume that made the character immediately legible from across any room at any party in any decade.
They appeared on talk shows for 40 years. They guest starred on every major television program that wanted a reliable injection of glamour and wit. They were photographed with kings and politicians and movie stars. They were quoted in newspapers and gossip columns consistently from the early 1950s through the late 1980s.
They adapted their material constantly. When the films dried up, they did television. When the television opportunities narrowed, they did talk shows and cameos. And when even those became rarer, they simply continued being themselves in public, which had always been their most reliable act. Film historian Neil Gabler in 1998 coined the term the ja factor to describe a specific kind of celebrity that exists independent of any quantifiable talent.
Famous for being famous, which is to say famous for the performance of fame itself. The description was not intended as a compliment, but it captured something real. Sardzia was the template. The Kardashians, Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith, these are the lineage, whether they acknowledge it or not, and whether Zia’s former publicist found the comparison offensive or not.
But the Gabbor story is also genuinely a story about women who survived things that the glamour narrative tends to obscure entirely. Magda survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary through courage, strategic thinking, and considerable personal risk and was involved in saving the lives of nearly a thousand people in circumstances where exposure would have cost her own.
Saja survived being institutionalized against her will by a husband who held the legal power to make that decision and then spent decades not discussing it, channeling the experience nowhere except perhaps into the particular edge that her humor about men always carried. Eva survived the loss of her first love, built a career on stages and screens that required real work and real skill, and then watched her health deteriorate through events she had no control over, with a composure that the people around her found remarkable.
All three of them survived the particular form of social pressure that demanded they be objects of desire and entertainment without ever quite acknowledging the full range of what they actually were. And they survived it by making the performance so complete, so thoroughly embraced, so consistently delivered that the world largely accepted their terms for decades.
They were not victims. They were not helpless. They were three women with a significant talent for self-presentation, who deployed that talent in an era when self-presentation was becoming a profession in its own right, and who got further on it than almost anyone who came after them. The last of them, Zadia, died in 2016, barely short of a century old.
By that point, her ashes sat in a gold box at a cemetery in Westwood, California, waiting to be moved to Budapest, waiting, in other words, to go home. The America that had received her in 1941 as a divorced Hungarian beauty queen, with an accent and a determination to make something of herself, had given her more than she had perhaps had any right to expect.
She had given it back in full measure. The gaboros are gone now. All of them. Magda, Eva, Jaza, and Jolie, the woman who had started it all in a Budapest jewelry shop with a plan for her daughters and an ambition that had nowhere else to go. They left behind a body of work and a body of chaos that is in its own way as complete a picture of a certain kind of 20th century life as anything else in the American cultural record.
They had 19 husbands among them. They had an accent nobody else has ever quite replicated. They had a word, darling, that they made into a brand, a philosophy, and a farewell all at once. And they were dropped out of the sky, and they landed, and the ground was never quite the same. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.
