Three sisters from Budapest racked up 20 marriages between them. Magda Gabor walked down the aisle six times, Zsa Zsa Gabor nine times and Eva Gabor five times, and one British actor, George Sanders, managed to marry two of them.
One husband, two sisters
The strangest twist belongs to George Sanders. The British actor was first married to Zsa Zsa, from 1949 to 1954. Years later he married her older sister Magda, though that marriage lasted only about a month.
Magda, the eldest, made her name mostly as a socialite and married six times in total. Eva, the youngest, was the first of the three to reach the United States, shortly after marrying a Swedish osteopath, Eric Drimmer, in 1937, when she was 18. She went on to marry five times.
Zsa Zsa’s nine husbands
Zsa Zsa set the family record. Her husbands, in order:
- Burhan Belge, 1935 to 1941
- Hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, 1942 to 1947
- Actor George Sanders, 1949 to 1954
- Herbert Hutner, 1962 to 1966
- Joshua S. Cosden Jr., 1966 to 1967
- Jack Ryan, 1975 to 1976
- Michael O’Hara, 1976 to 1982
- Felipe de Alba, April 13 to 14, 1983, annulled
- Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, from 1986 until her death in 2016
Seven of those marriages ended in divorce and one was annulled. The range is startling. Her union with Felipe de Alba lasted a single day, while her last marriage, to von Anhalt, ran for 30 years, longer than her first seven marriages put together. By our count, working from the wedding and divorce dates, those seven added up to just under 30 years, against a little over 30 for von Anhalt.
She turned the whole saga into material. “I am a marvelous housekeeper: every time I leave a man I keep his house,” she once joked. In her autobiography she was more sincere: “All in all – I love being married.”
Fame beyond the weddings
The Gabor sisters were born in Budapest to Vilmos and Jolie Gabor: Magda in 1915, Zsa Zsa in 1917 and Eva in 1919. After World War II the family settled in the United States, and with their mother in tow the trio headed for Hollywood. They became fixtures of American celebrity culture for decades, as famous for their weddings as for their work.
Eva built the steadiest screen career. She hosted her own TV talk show, The Eva Gabor Show, for one season in 1953 and 1954, with both sisters as guests, and from 1965 to 1971 starred in the hit sitcom Green Acres. Zsa Zsa appeared in more than 70 films, with the 1952 drama Moulin Rouge her best-known role, and later popped up in cameos from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors to The Beverly Hillbillies.
Talk show host Merv Griffin, who knew Eva socially, summed up the phenomenon in his autobiography: “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.”
Their story belongs to the same golden age of Hollywood celebrity as Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant’s 1963 hit Charade, and to a long tradition of stars reinventing themselves, as with Whoopi Goldberg, who was born Caryn Johnson. Even Zsa Zsa’s name was a reinvention: she was born Sári Gábor and was called Zsa Zsa because she could not pronounce her own name as a little girl.
The sisters appeared together on screen several times, including a 1955 episode of The Colgate Comedy Hour. Zsa Zsa, the last of the three, lived to 99, just 50 days short of her 100th birthday.
Further reading
Image: Pierre Blaché, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
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