Zsa Zsa Gábor

“I never hated a man enough to give him back his diamonds” was another gem. At her Los Angeles home, 1001 Bel Air Road, in a house built by Howard Hughes and owned by Elvis Presley, she kept a cushion embroidered with her favourite epigram: “Never complain, never explain.” Presumably somewhere else there was one with the line about the fool and his money.

Of course, Gábor did only what most women had had to do down the ages, obtaining security by trading what it was that men liked about her. She grasped what that was from an early age. “Daddy used to hold poker games with his friends,” she told Wendy Leigh, who ghosted her memoir One Lifetime is Not Enough. “He would make me parade around the table and let each of them pat my ass.”

Her father, Vilmos, was a diamond dealer in Budapest, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where she was born in 1917. The chief influence on her, however, was her ferociously ambitious mother, Jolie, who lived to be 100. She was determined that her three glamorous daughters, Magda, Sári — as Zsa Zsa was christened — and Eva would make their fortunes. The sisters would rack up 17 divorces between them.

Zsa Zsa was sent to a Swiss boarding school and made her stage debut in Vienna at 16, supposedly having been discovered by the singer Richard Tauber. She and Eva claimed to have been crowned Miss Hungary, but as Cindy Adams, who wrote Jolie Gábor’s autobiography, cautioned: “There was never any truth to anything.” For example, Jolie and her daughters were Jewish, but ostentatiously wore diamond crosses.

In about 1937, when she was 20, Zsa Zsa met a 50-year-old Turkish diplomat and intellectual, Burhan Belge. She said that he had joked that he would make her part of his harem if she were a little older. Accordingly, when a few months had passed she turned up on his doorstep in Ankara with her terrier Mishka, which her father wanted out of the house. The marriage, such as it was, foundered within six months. Gábor claimed that this was because she had had an affair with Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. More plausibly, by then she had a diplomatic passport that, with war looming and the Nazis threatening Jews, allowed her to enter the US. There her sisters and mother soon joined her.

By now she had swelled into a chic if bosomy blonde, a Dresden shepherdess with an iron will. When she arrived in Hollywood in 1941, she had only an introduction to Basil Rathbone, the screen’s Sherlock Holmes. Within a few months she was engaged to Conrad Hilton, the multimillionaire founder of the hotel chain. They had a daughter, Francesca, her only child, but the marriage was rocky for the five years that it lasted. “It was a little like holding a roman candle,” Hilton recalled. “Beautiful, exciting, but you were never sure when it would go out.”

Gábor described their relationship as a fiasco. “He thought that I was after his money,” she protested. She did admit to a fling with her stepson Nicky, who would marry Elizabeth Taylor.

Next up, in 1949, was George Sanders, suave star of The Saint films and Rebecca. (“I’m madly in love with you,” she said when they first met. “How well I understand you, my dear,” he replied.) In his Memoirs of a Professional Cad, Sanders made light of his five-year marriage to Gábor, but in fact it was disfigured by his violent jealousy.

This was demonstrated by her flagrant affair with the splendidly endowed playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, who may have been Gábor’s only real love. She said Sanders was once so aggrieved that he dangled her out of a window by her dress; fortunately it was made by Balenciaga so did not fray. The evidence that Sanders did love her was perhaps his later, very brief marriage to her sister Magda, shortly before he committed suicide.

Zsa Zsa claimed that he was also jealous of her success as an actress, although in truth there was little of that. Her sister Eva did make a career on the screen, for instance as the voice of the Duchess in Disney’s The Aristocats. Aside from starring roles in the Toulouse-Lautrec biopic Moulin Rouge (1952) and Queen of Outer Space (1958), Zsa Zsa was confined to small parts in films including Touch of Evil with Orson Welles. Later there were cameos on television in shows such as Batman, and in the sequel to the film spoof The Naked Gun.

Her fourth husband was Herbert Hutner, an investment banker. They were engaged in 1962 on their third date, her decision to accept perhaps influenced by the $3 million ring he had sent her after the second (“Daddy told me never to settle for less than ten carats”). Hutner lasted four years, for much of which Gábor was still dallying with Rubirosa, who was killed in 1965 speeding through Paris in his Ferrari. Husband No 5, in 1966, was Joshua Cosden, an oil heir. “I had gone into the marriage not really knowing him,” said Gábor, when she came out the other side, after a year. “I left none the wiser.”

“I know nothing about sex,” she also said, “because I was always married.” Neither of those claims was true, and she spent the decade until her next wedding entertaining Frank Sinatra, Richard Burton and Sean Connery, among others. These apparently included Richard Nixon. “A great mind. A big brain,” she recalled, hinting that that was not the biggest thing about “Tricky Dicky”.

In 1975, ensconced in Bel Air with her nine shih tzus — Pasha Effendi, Genghis Khan and Macho Man among them — she married her neighbour, Jack Ryan. The designer of the Ken and Barbie dolls had a penchant for swingers’ parties and was followed in matrimony after a year by the lawyer who handled their divorce, Michael O’Hara. Gábor’s eighth husband, Felipe de Alba, a property developer, lasted only a day after their wedding in international waters in 1983. There was some doubt whether she was still married to O’Hara and, in any event, “he wouldn’t have made a nice pet”.

Presumably on occasion she was upset by some of these failures. Yet unlike, say, Pamela Harriman, Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law, who also made a career of snaring rich men, she was not a thwarted romantic. Nor was self-pity her style, any more than it was Scarlett O’Hara’s. “A girl must marry for love — and keep on marrying until she finds it,” Gábor held. She found her match in 1986 in Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt. Not the name he was born with, Prinz von Anhalt changed his surname after being adopted as an adult by Kaiser Wilhelm’s daughter-in-law. Previously he had run a sauna.

Perhaps Gábor fell for the bogus title, or just for someone with as much chutzpah as her. Having hired a Rolls-Royce to convince her he was rich, and then showed his class by giving her champagne to drink, he soon moved into her $10 million mansion.

His new bride was rising 70 and, as her behaviour became more erratic, she began to need someone to see to her care. In 1989 she was jailed for three days after slapping a policeman who had stopped her for driving with an expired licence. Four years later a jury ordered her to pay Elke Sommer $2 million in libel damages after a long feud in which Gábor alleged that the German star was bankrupt.

In 2002 Gábor was left partially paralysed when a car driven by her hairdresser crashed. Having to use a wheelchair was said to have depressed her, as did the discovery that her daughter had fraudulently obtained a $2 million loan secured against her house. A lawsuit was dropped at the last moment. Francesca Hilton died in 2015.

“The secret to a long marriage is infidelity,” Prinz von Anhalt told the Daily Express in 2008, gallantly confiding to its readers that he had enjoyed a ten-year affair with Anna Nicole Smith, the former Playboy centrefold. Whatever the spark was — he and Gábor liked to watch the film Babe, about a talking pig — they remained married for three decades until her death.

Her old age was marred by ill health, which stripped from her the last vestiges of glamour. She had several strokes, broke a hip and had to have a leg amputated — because she was paralysed she only discovered this a year later. She was also rumoured to have lost millions in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

By the end, perhaps Zsa Zsa Gábor had accepted that one lifetime was enough for anyone, at least to learn the important things in life. “The only place a man wants depth in a woman,” she concluded, “is in her décolletage.”

Zsa Zsa Gábor, celebrity, was born on February 6, 1917. She died of a heart attack on December 18, 2016, aged 99