Zsa Zsa Gabor

Born Sári Gábor on Feb. 6, 1917, in Budapest, the middle sister of a middle-class Hungarian family — between younger sister Eva (1919 – 1995) and older sister Magda (1915 – 1997) — Zsa Zsa has been in the public eye for more than six decades. Beautiful, glamorous and disarmingly funny; married nine times, divorced seven (one marriage was annulled); friend and lover to the famous; accused traffic cop-slapper (remember that weirdness back in 1989?); Bernie Madoff victim to the tune of something like $10 million; best-selling author; actress with scores of movies and TV appearances to her name. Time, alas, has not been kind to Gabor. Over the past decade, she has suffered strokes, been confined to a wheelchair and, two years ago, had her right leg amputated above the knee to combat an aggressive infection. Her obituary has been written and prepped — and then shelved — several times in the past few years by media outlets, as she fights on against mounting odds, diminished but far from forgotten. As a teenager in her native Budapest, she proposed to a Turkish diplomat over his teacups and became Mrs. Burhan Belge. But, says Zsa Zsa, “I was still a little girl playing with dolls,” and so in 1941 they were divorced. Zsa Zsa, whose given name is Sari, made her way to the U.S. and married hotel-man Conrad Hilton. After five hectic years of marriage, which were enlivened by a jewel robbery and Zsa Zsa’s tales of being mysteriously drugged and held captive in a Hollywood hotel, she and Mr. Hilton were divorced. In 1949 she married actor George Sanders. When he left for a movie role in England Zsa Zsa took a television job to fill her idle time. Zsa Zsa, who divorced seven of her eight husbands, was first married to Burhan Belge, a Turkish diplomat in Budapest, from 1937 to 1941. Her second marriage, to Mr. Hilton, lasted from 1942 to 1947. Their daughter, Francesca Hilton, an actress, was Ms. Gabor’s only child. She died in 2015. Her other marriages were to Mr. Sanders (1949-54), who later married Magda Gabor; the investor-industrialist Herbert L. Hutner (1962-66); the oil magnate Joshua S. Cosden Jr. (1966-67); Jack Ryan, an inventor and toy designer who helped create the Barbie doll (1975-76); Michael O’Hara, a lawyer (1976-82); and Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, whom she married in 1986. Some biographies of Ms. Gabor also mention a 1983 marriage to Felipe de Alba, a lawyer who appeared in films in Mexico in the 1940s and ’50s, but Ms. Gabor said it lasted only a day. There were also notorious affairs with Porfirio Rubirosa, the Dominican playboy, and with Rafael Trujillo Jr., the son of the Dominican dictator. In early 2009, Ms. Gabor discovered that she had joined a long list of celebrities who were victimized by Bernard L. Madoff, the financial swindler whose worldwide Ponzi scheme that cost investors tens of billions. Her lawyer Chris Fields said she lost at least $7 million and possibly as much as $10 million. She died on Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 99.