The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty (15 page)

After Zsa Zsa returned to Los Angeles, Conrad tried to go his separate way from her. She made it difficult, though. He put her up in a suite at the Town House, but she was on the telephone with him constantly, arguing with him about one thing or another about the way things had gone between them. He kept giving her money in an attempt to assuage his own guilt, but it was never enough. She wanted more and she felt she deserved it, even though they had a separation agreement in place. There were some months when he would give her as much as $5,000 in the hope that she would just stop pestering him, but it never worked. As if out to prove the old adage that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, she continued her verbal assaults on a nearly daily basis, seemingly determined to make him as miserable as she felt he had made her.

One day, Conrad received a telephone call from a close friend who told him that he had seen Zsa Zsa with another man at the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank. Together, they looked cozy in the commissary, holding hands—or so Conrad was told—and even sharing a kiss or two. Was Zsa Zsa having an affair?

Since she was officially separated from Conrad, it would seem that she had a right to do whatever she pleased; at least that’s how most people might have viewed it. Not Conrad, though. He had his attorney hire a private detective and put him on her trail, following her for about a week. Sure enough, according to the attorney’s recollection of events, the report came back that Zsa Zsa was involved with a successful movie studio executive. The private detective told the lawyer he believed he even caught Zsa Zsa with the executive in the man’s cream-colored Mercedes-Benz convertible late one night, parked in an empty lot behind the studio. He produced a series of black-and-white photographs that, though shadowy, seemed to suggest that something was going on in that vehicle between Zsa Zsa and the studio exec. He also said that afterward, the two seemed to be arguing. The man suddenly bolted from the car and stormed down a nearby street into the darkness. Meanwhile, Zsa Zsa put her head on the steering wheel and appeared to sob uncontrollably.

“Get out of here right now,” the attorney hollered at the detective. The notion that Zsa Zsa had been intimate with someone in an automobile genuinely upset Hilton’s lawyer. “What the hell kind of a person are you, saying this about Mr. Hilton’s wife? Even if it’s true, you don’t say that about a man’s wife! What’s wrong with you?”

“But that’s what you paid me for,” the detective said. He was dismayed, and, it could be argued, with good reason. What kind of news did the attorney expect from him, if not of the good and grimy variety? He had trailed Zsa Zsa every day for a week, he said, and he had much more to report. “That lady ain’t no lady,” he concluded. “Put it that way.”

“Just get out of here,” said the attorney as he slammed the door behind the private eye.

The lawyer decided not to give Conrad the lurid details or the photographs, just the information that his wife was likely involved with someone, and that maybe it wasn’t going so well. When told this, Conrad decided to confront Zsa Zsa. He immediately raced to her suite at the Town House, and in front of a number of people, including a woman who was Zsa Zsa’s personal secretary at the time, Lena Burrell, he laid it on the line with her. “Are you having an affair with some studio guy?” he demanded to know. “Tell me the truth this instant.”

“Oh my God!” Zsa Zsa exclaimed, sizing him up. “You’re an absolute wreck,” she said. She suggested that he pour himself a brandy to calm his nerves. But he didn’t need a drink, he told her. What he needed was an answer to his question: “Are you or are you not having an affair?”

“Of course not,” Zsa Zsa said.

“She seemed unfazed by the question,” recalled Lena Burrell of her employer. “I recall that she was formally dressed in a white strapless evening gown, prepared for a night on the town at Ciro’s. She went into her purse, pulled from it her lipstick and compact, and began to apply the cosmetic, all the while looking into the mirror with what I think could only be described as the greatest of affection. This drove Conrad crazy. She once told me that nothing bothered him more.”

“Must you do that now?” Conrad asked.

“What’s it to you?” she remarked, still looking into the mirror rather than at him.

“One more time,” he said. Then, punctuating each word with a period, he asked, “Are. You. Having. An. Affair?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“So what?” she asked, still acting disengaged. “Who cares? Our marriage is over, anyway.”

“That still doesn’t give you the right to lie to me,” Conrad said, “and to make a fool of me.” He looked more hurt and wounded than he did angry, which seemed to throw Zsa Zsa. Again, what would it take to upset this man? It was as if there was nothing she could do to make him explode. Why was he always in such perfect control, and what did it say about her as a woman that she was unable to make him furious with jealousy? It was maddening.

According to Lena Burrell, Zsa Zsa put her compact and lipstick back into her purse, took out a pair of embroidered and jeweled white opera gloves, and then walked over to Conrad. She stood as close to him as possible, raised her head to look up at him, and, in an even, dispassionate tone, reminded him, “I am a very beautiful woman, in case you haven’t noticed.” Many men were after her, she claimed, and yes, she
had
slept with quite a few of them. He might not have any desire for her, she said angrily, but others certainly did. “In fact, since we broke up, I have had more men than you will ever know,” she declared, spitting the words out at him. “Now, if you don’t mind,” she said in finishing, “that will be all.
Husband
.” She smacked him hard on the chest with her gloves, and then turned her back on him.

“Mr. Hilton looked completely crushed,” recalled Lena Burrell. “Who knew if what Zsa Zsa said to him was true or not? What was clear to me, though, was that she fully intended to hurt him with her words. He said, ‘I will ignore what you have just said because I know you didn’t mean it.’ And she said, ‘Oh,
really, now
?’ ”

Shaking his head, Conrad bolted from the room, slamming the door behind him so hard it rattled the walls. Zsa Zsa smiled to herself. “There,” she said, seeming satisfied. “That should do it.” After slipping her fingers into the gloves, she rolled them up her arms to her elbows and then turned to Lena Burrell with her wrists held outward so that the assistant could fasten the buttons. “Do you think it will be chilly this evening?” she asked. “Because if so, perhaps I should wear my platinum mink.”

“Oh yes, do wear the mink,” Lena said. “You look marvelous in it, Miss Gabor.”

“I know I do,” Zsa Zsa said petulantly. “That was not my question. You do have my medication now, don’t you?” Zsa Zsa then asked, using her euphemism for the prescribed amphetamines she had begun taking of late.

“Yes, ma’am,” Lena said. She reached into her purse and pulled out a large plastic bottle of capsules. When Zsa Zsa extended her hand, the secretary dropped two of the capsules from the bottle onto her palm. Zsa Zsa popped both into her mouth and swallowed. “Well, just look at that!” she exclaimed proudly after they went down. “Without even a drop of champagne. How about
that
,
dah-ling
!”

Zsa Zsa Is Institutionalized

I
n the spring of 1945, Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor finally received word from their mother, Jolie. She, her husband, and Magda had somehow made it to Lisbon and, thanks to Cordell Hull, would soon be on their way to the United States. Their arrival was still a few months away due to a paperwork delay, but at least they were en route to Manhattan. “I think you should go to New York and wait for them there,” Conrad told Zsa Zsa. Even though he was angry at her, he was still trying to be supportive. “I will put you up at the Plaza for as long as it takes,” he told her.

For the next few months, Zsa Zsa would live in a suite at the Plaza, and while there would do everything she could think of to escape the blues, including taking pills prescribed by her doctor not only to sleep but also to stay awake. Frustrated and bored, she also spent a fortune on designer clothing, on late nights out on the town, and on long-distance telephone calls. She was miserable, lonely, and worried about her future. “I wondered, if I could not be Mrs. Conrad Hilton, who would I be?” she recalled. “I was very much afraid.”

When Conrad would speak to Zsa Zsa on the telephone, she seemed unreasonable to him, screaming at him in Hungarian and not making much sense. She wasn’t eating, wasn’t sleeping, and was consumed by worry. She actually seemed on the verge of an emotional breakdown. She had even taken all of her prized jewels and tossed them out the window of her suite, Eva told Conrad, blaming the baubles for her unhappiness. Eva was worried. Though not really a fan of Conrad’s, she felt she needed his support, and so she decided to reach out to him.

“Oh no. What fresh hell is this?” Conrad said when Eva called to say she needed his assistance. When the two later met in his office to discuss the matter, Eva said that she felt something needed to be done for her sister, and it needed to be done quickly.

According to what she would later testify to during her sister’s divorce hearing, Eva told Conrad that she had consulted with several doctors and was told that the only way to help Zsa Zsa was to admit her to a sanitarium for intense psychological treatment. “There’s really no other alternative,” she told Conrad.

Eva’s logic made no sense to Conrad. Surely there had to have been some doctor somewhere who could tell them whether or not Zsa Zsa needed to be in a hospital or whether she was just play-acting. “He had a bad feeling that another reason Zsa Zsa would fake an emotional illness—besides wanting his sympathy—was to later use it as a way to secure more money from him in a divorce settlement,” said his attorney Myron Harpole. “This does not sound like a charitable assessment of the situation, I admit. He was loath to make it. It was not like him to make it, and he would never have verbalized it to just anyone. However, I know that this is how he felt.”

Eva Gabor told Conrad that she had already consulted with several doctors, and they suggested institutionalizing her. It was clear that Eva had her mind made up about it. Since he was separated from Zsa Zsa, Conrad felt that he should probably acquiesce to her sister’s desires. However, he could not fully support her decision. He truly did not feel that Zsa Zsa needed to be institutionalized, and he wanted it on the record that this was her idea, not his. “I suppose you should do what you believe is best for your sister,” he said, “but I cannot condone this,” he told Eva before leaving her.

“Do you really care for her, Conrad?” Eva asked him.

“Of course I do,” he said. “I will always love her. I’m just sorry it’s going so badly right now. I want her to be well, Eva.”

“I am sorry, too,” Eva said sadly. “I truly am. But I don’t know what else to do.”

A week later, Eva called Conrad to tell him that Zsa Zsa had come at her with a knife in her apartment. They’d had an disagreement about something, she said, and the next thing she knew, Zsa Zsa was trying to attack her. She managed to get the weapon away from her, but now she was frightened. She was also more convinced than ever that her sister needed psychological help. Therefore, she came up with a master plan to get Zsa Zsa into a mental facility.

One morning soon after the attack, Eva and the sisters’ friend Andrew “Bundy” Solt brought a bespectacled gentlemen to Zsa Zsa’s suite and introduced him as a Rudolph Stein, a Viennese producer interested in meeting her so that he might cast her in an exciting new play. The gentlemen convinced Zsa Zsa that she should probably take a nap before discussing such important business, because she did seem to be exhausted, or at least that’s what he told her. “You’re a tired little girl,” he told Zsa Zsa. At first she was insulted. But then she realized that she actually couldn’t remember the last time she had slept, so she agreed to the nap. While she was lying grandly in her Empress Josephine bed, Mr. Stein pulled up a chair and sat down next to her. “There’s nothing so urgent,” he said, in a lilting, calming voice, “nothing at all. You must rest. You are tired. You are growing more tired by the moment.” Then, as she listened to him repeat certain words and phrases in his ever-calming voice, she drifted off.

Rudolph Stein wasn’t a Viennese producer at all, as Zsa Zsa would soon learn—he was a psychiatrist. Within hours, Zsa Zsa found herself committed in a sanitarium in New York, where she would stay for the next six weeks. Once there, things then went from bad to worse, as she has told it in her memoir:

How shall I describe the nightmare of the next weeks, days and nights and horrors that might have been invented by Dante? I lived in a world of strait jackets, insulin shock treatments, endless injections—and always the unreal, terrifying realization that though I saw what went on and I knew and heard and understood the enormity of what was happening, no one would listen to me. No one came to visit me: Not Conrad… not Eva… no one. I felt rejected, utterly abandoned.

When she finally emerged from the sanitarium, Zsa Zsa Gabor practically didn’t even know who she was. “I emerged a stranger in the world,” she recalled. She was thin, unwell, and angrier than ever. Eva wasn’t her target, though; Conrad was. She was convinced that the idea to have her committed was his, and she would never forget it, nor would she ever forgive him for it.