Zsa Zsa Gabor died in December 2016, falling just short of a life that lasted a century. (Allegedly. It was always tough to ascertain her age. She kept changing it.) Gabor was born in Hungary and emigrated to the U.S. in 1941, where she was an actress and woman-about-town who said things like “I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house.” She may or may not have simply joked about this ex-husband house thing, but she definitely lived in a big Bel Air mansion, chock full of her favorite things—diamonds, French furniture, self-portraits, and more—until the end. It’s only human to wonder after the death of such a social stalwart, what’s going to happen to all that stuff? The answer, as it usually is for people like Zsa Zsa, is a great, big, public auction.
Last December, Heritage Auctions announced it would hold one in April 2018, and ahead of the bidding, Prince Frédéric von Anhalt, Gabor’s final husband (he says tenth husband, she said eighth), spoke with the Hollywood Reporter for a piece published Thursday, using his own legendarily dubious past to drum up interest.
And what a legendarily dubious past it is! The story of how they met, which he told to T.H.R., vaguely resembles the story he described to Vanity Fair’s Leslie Bennetts, when she toured the couple’s home in 2007. In the new telling, he rented a white Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible and hired two students to act as his driver and bodyguard for the night, as he crashed a black-tie party at the estate of writer Sidney Sheldon and his wife, actress Jorja Curtright, in Holmby Hills. Curtight saw the epaulets von Anhalt was wearing and let him in her party, where he met Gabor.
When he told the story to Bennett ten years earlier, however, he said they met in a restaurant after von Anhalt paid a famous photographer $10,000 to take his picture with “a movie star—if possible, Zsa Zsa Gabor.” The photographer led him to a restaurant on Melrose, where Gabor was, indeed, present. No matter which one is true, or if that magic moment happened some other way, both are bizarre methods for meeting your future betrothed. At least one other person agreed. On the day they were to be married, Gabor’s mother Jolie faked a heart attack. They married anyway.
How the prince came across his title has also long been out in the open. He was born Hans Robert Lichtenberg; he’s now Prince Frédéric von Anhalt, the Duke of Saxony and Westphalia, Count of Ascania. The change came when Princess Marie-Auguste von Anhalt, daughter-in-law to the last German kaiser, adopted him. All he had to do was give her 2,000 marks monthly (he told Bennett $4,000). Prior to that he owned restaurants and saunas and was in the loan-shark business. Later he sold titles himself, one through marriage and five others through adoption, plus a few knighthoods here and there. He told T.H.R. that the title business netted him over $10 million.
The prince has said a lot of extraordinary things over the years. Though he’s often seen in local gay spaces, he’s claimed paternity to the late Anna Nicole Smith’s child (he’s since dropped that claim but maintains he slept with her), and that three members of a lesbian street gang robbed him and left him tied up and naked one summer in the early aughts. When Francesca Hilton, Gabor’s only child, died in 2015 of a heart attack, von Anhalt said he couldn’t tell his wife. “I didn’t want to upset my wife, because she loved Francesca,” von Anhalt told T.H.R. “She would have gone out right away, exactly like [her friend] Debbie Reynolds [Reynolds died days after her daughter Carrie Fisher]. When I heard about Debbie, I was almost in tears. I thought, ‘I did the right thing not telling Zsa Zsa.’ ” (Hilton and von Anhalt had been engaged in various legal battles for years.)
And now, a piece of all this drama and more could be yours, should you bid on one of the 400-plus items available on April 14, left to von Anhalt along with everything else after her death. The items span back through her nine husbands (eight divorces, officially, one annulment). Back when the auction was announced in December, Carolyn Mani of Heritage Auctions spoke of a “small mountain of Louis Vuitton luggage,” Hermès bags, gobs-and-gobs of designer clothing, fine art, silver, a gilded piano once owned by her third husband, actor George Sanders, and Gabor’s close personal friend: diamonds. Because what’s a man like von Anhalt going to do with those?
