When you want to build a house, do you consider choosing an architect who has built one home or twenty? When you wish to engage a babysitter do you pick the girl who cared for one baby or ten? When you want marriage advice do you ask the woman who has been married once or seven times? Ah yes dahling, we knew you'd see the wisdom in this!
Below we have gathered together some of the choice bits of sage advice given by Zsa Zsa Gabor - the-Budapest-born-beauty-queen-turned-actress-turned-socialite-turned-tabloid-fixture. Zsa Zsa is the most famous member of the Gabor sisters which included Magda, the eldest, and Eva, who became popular on the classic television sitcom Green Acres. Those delectably stylish Hungarian dumplings shared a grand total of twenty marriages between the three of them. Now that's alot of rice!
As Eva once declared, " Marriage is too interesting an experiment to be tried only once "
Zsa Zsa was the reigning queen of marriages, racking up a total of nine herself. Currently she is married to Prince Frederick von Anhalt. Some of her husbands included Herbert Hunter, Jack Ryan ( creator of the Barbie doll ), and Felipe de Alba. Her third husband was the suave actor George Sanders. Even though the marriage ended in divorce Zsa Zsa remained lifelong friends with Sanders. Her reasons for divorcing him were quite simple : " Ven I vas married to George Sanders, we were both in love with him. I fell out of love with him, but he didn't ". George must have missed the excitement of being apart of the Gabor family because he later married older sister Magda, although that union only lasted six weeks.
Sister Magda's happiest marriage was to her fourth husband Tony Gallucci, whom she married in 1956. Gallucci died in 1967 of cancer and Magda was heartbroken...she only married twice after that and then chucked the whole institution.
Interestingly enough, of all the marriages the sisters had ( not counting the affairs they had! ) only one child was born among them - Zsa Zsa's daughter Constance Francesca Hilton, whose father was the famed hotelier Conrad Hilton.
In 1970, Zsa Zsa penned a book based on all the lessons she learned from her marriages...." How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, and How to Get Rid of a Man ". She knew how to do all three. This book contained some vonderful advice that we thought we'd share....believe me you, if you can't follow Zsa Zsa's dating advice whose can you follow?
On Dating :
“The best way to attract a man immediately is to have a magnificent bosom and a half-size brain and let both of them show. If you already have these two things, though, you probably aren’t reading this because you don’t need to. You are too busy beating men off with a baseball bat. Also I hope for you that you don’t spend too much of your time reading.”
“Emphasize your good points, your face or your legs or your derriere or something else that men normally find attractive, rather than your elbows or your feet. Although Goethe, the famous German poet, said, ‘A pretty foot is a great gift of nature,’ you don’t run into men like Goethe every day.”
“One of the best places to definitely not find a man is Hollywood.”
“You are much better off staying home and being the prettiest girl in Paris, New York, Chicago and Budapest rather than the 27,304th prettiest girl in Hollywood.”
“If you even can just barely stand a man in, say, Pittsburgh, you’ll adore him in Paris. I guarantee it. On the other hand, if you should find a man in Paris, by all means leave him in Paris, because if you take him somewhere else, you’ll find that it wasn’t the man, but, as the song goes, it was Paris that you loved.”
“A successful romance is like a game of tug-of-war. But remember, playing hard-to-get comes after he thinks he’s got you. If you play hard-to-get while he’s playing hard-to-get then nobody gets anybody.”
On Love :
“If you catch that wonderful man, what does age matter? After all, love is blind, and it is also not good at arithmetic.”
“Unfortunately, it’s true that most of the men I choose are the type most women would be attracted to, because I’m such a careful shopper.”
“If you are insanely mad about your husband, then you are mainly lovers, not married people. It’s the biggest luck in the world to have a love affair which is legal. But, La Rochefoucauld was so right when he said ‘True love is like seeing ghosts, we all talk about it, but few of us have ever seen one.’”
“I couldn’t endure living in a harem, not even if I were the favorite (which, of course, I would be, if only because I would have poisoned all the others). Also, in a harem the only men you would be allowed to talk to, besides your husband, would be eunuchs, and I’ve had enough of them since I have lived in Hollywood.”
On Marriage :
“It is unfortunately true that the only man who will always ask you to marry him immediately is the one you would never marry.”
“A man in love is incomplete until he is married, then he is finished.”
“If you like a man and he likes you, you should get married as fast as you can. Otherwise, you both are going to change your minds. There’s plenty of time for that after marriage.”
“I would not advise any girl to marry a man just because he is rich. I absolutely believe in that Scottish proverb that says, ‘Don’t marry for money; you can borrow it cheaper.’”
“I would take an American man for a husband three times out of five. In fact I did take an American man for a husband three times out of five. No other men can fix your dishwasher and your electric gate as well as American men. European men absolutely refuse to fix anything. It’s beyond their dignity.”
“When the young girl who is married to the older man gets mature herself, the man she has been married with has probably dropped dead. This, of course, is an ideal marriage.”
“Men are like fires : they go out if left unattended.”
“Any woman who slops around the house all the time with grease on her face and curlers in her hair in front of her husband is a dumb woman. If he stands for it, he’s not genius himself.”
“Remember, if you wear the pants in your family, your husband’s mistress is going to wear the sables.”
“Don’t ever let your husband take a vacation without you, unless it’s somewhere like on a mountain climbing expedition up Everest with only other men and sherpas, or maybe down a river fastened into a kayak so he can’t get out when he passes through a town. But even then to be on the safe side, you should send along with him your mother, as long as she isn’t your stepmother who looks just your age or younger...”
“I have noticed that often the more romantic a man is before marriage, the less he is after. At least with his wife.”
“The minute I understand a man, he is no longer exciting and a challenge to me. And the last thing in the world I want is for a man to understand me and know what’s always going on inside my head. It takes away from all my mystery, which, as I’ve told you before, is the most important thing between a man and a woman.”
On Divorce
“If it’s okay to have your nose fixed if it’s messing up your face, it certainly ought to be all right to get a divorce, if it’s your whole life that’s being messed up by your marriage.”
“The truth is, you never really know a man until after you have divorced him.”
" I believe in large families : every women should have at least three husbands "
Vell dahlings, there you have it...everything you'd want to know about dating and marriage from the Queen of Matrimony.....whether you want to take it seriously or not is up to you. As Zsa Zsa so aptly put it,
" I tell you, in this world being a little crazy helps to keep you sane ".
