She’s famous for being famous—a minor actress who paved her way to celebrity through reality television, gossip rags and a touch o’ scandal. She’s been a sex symbol, a red-carpet fixture and a resident of the California penal system.
She’d be a fitting icon for today’s celebrity-obsessed culture—if her celebrity heyday hadn’t been in the 1960s and ’70s, that is.
Zsa Zsa Gabor is dying, we’re told: The Hungarian-born actress checked out of a Los Angeles-area hospital yesterday to spend, according to Reuters, her “final days at her Bel Air home.” If true, that means that we might be watching the last Gabor media blitz ever—a tradition that’s been ensconced in Americana since the time of Eisenhower. So it seems fitting that we pay tribute to the woman who, with her thick Hungarian accent and fine fur coats, showed the world how celebrity is done. Jon Gosselin and Levi Johnston, take notes.
We tend to think that folks like Paris Hilton and Jersey Shore‘s Snooki are products of our celebrity-soaked culture—stars made possible through the strange alchemy of reality TV, the Internet and their own outrageous personalities. But really, the template for such fame was set decades ago by Gabor.
She was an actress, appearing in several movies and on television in the 1950s and ’60s (and her sister, Eva, appeared in the much-beloved 1965-71 sitcom Green Acres). But it didn’t make her famous: Rather, Zsa Zsa parlayed her exotic accent, knack for glamour and penchant for getting divorced into a Hollywood career.
“I never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back,” she told The Observer in 1957, when she was between husbands No.’s 3 and 4. She married eight times, all told (nine, if you count the time she got married while she was technically still wed to someone else)—all rich, all colorful, all wonderfully suited to helping keep Gabor in the public spotlight. (Her current husband, Prince Frederic von Anhalt, has been married six times himself and once suggested he might be the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter, Dannielynn, born in 2006.)
Her notoriety cemented and her quotability assured, Gabor became a favorite fixture on game and talk shows and landed a shower of guest parts on everything from Bonanza to Batman, from Gilligan’s Island to The Love Boat. She rarely played anything but a version of herself—but when you’re Zsa Zsa Gabor, it’s enough.
Because, of course, the person who we knew as Zsa Zsa was likely as much fabricated as any fictional character written for the screen. Gabor fulfilled the public’s expectations of her, just as everyone from Dolly Parton to Lady Gaga have done since. And she played her part well, weaving a dash of humor and self-depreciation into her long lashes and white fur coats. When she was tossed in jail for three days for slapping a police officer in 1990, “Other actresses might have crawled away from Hollywood, tail between their tanned toned legs,” wrote ABC News’ Sheila Marikar. “Not Zsa Zsa. She made good of the incident by mocking it in a variety of movie and TV cameos, including The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear, The Beverly Hillbillies and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Gabor showed us all that you didn’t need extraordinary talent to become a celebrity. All you need is a shtick, a sense of humor and a stage on which to play.
Our culture, for better or worse—perhaps both—is covered in Zsa Zsa’s glove-covered fingerprints. She’s a celebrity’s celebrity, dahling, and should she leave us, celebrity tabloids can rest easy knowing she’s helped create many, many more to fill her high-heeled shoes.
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