Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,081

This is the grave of Eva Gabor.

Born in 1919 in Budapest, Gabor grew up in a glamorous Jewish household. Her father was a prominent officer and her mother came from a major jeweler family and unlike many women, she was actively involved and had her own shops in Budapest. In 1937, Eva married a Swedish doctor who wanted to move to the United States. So Hollywood it was. Eventually, most of the family would end up in the U.S., largely due to fleeing the Nazis. Her mother would not get there until after World War II though, having made it to Portugal in 1944, just before the Nazis went into full extermination mode in Hungary.

The Gabors would be one of the strangest families in Hollywood history. All glamor and some pretty big acting roles in promoting this. From the present, I confess that it’s hard to see the appeal. But Eva and her sisters Zsa Zsa and, to a lesser extent, Magda would be Hollywood presences for the rest of their lives. They all lived hard and parties and divorced and remarried repeatedly. Zsa Zsa is the one who really went in for famous men, being married to Conrad Hilton and George Sanders among her nine marriages. Eva kept it to a mere five marriages and none were to famous people, though they were all to rich guys. Later in life, she claimed to be in a relationship with Merv Griffin, but some believed this was a coverup since Griffin was gay. She also had a long-running affair with Glenn Ford that lasted over a decade. But we are getting ahead of ourselves a bit here perhaps. It seems that her first husband was supportive of Gabor going to Hollywood and getting jobs in the film industry. She was beautiful and exotic and glamorous and spoke good enough English.

Now, Gabor didn’t get major parts per se, not early on. But she was in the media as a glamour queen often enough that people knew who she was. She had a major role in 1941’s Forced Landing, basically playing herself but involved with a pilot. She would be around in small but recognizable parts for the next twenty years. She was the 5th billed star in 1954’s The Last Time I Saw Paris, directed by Richard Brooks and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited.” She was 6th billed in the 1955 film Artists and Models, directed by Frank Tashlin and starring Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, along with Shirley MacLaine. Basically she had enough glamour and that over the top accent and could play a role in a comedy.

But what Gabor really did was be famous for being famous. This is something I more associate with the 70s, or today for that matter. But if you were to ask the everyday person back then “What are the Gabor sisters famous for?” I wonder what they would have said or how they could even answer. They were the ultimate in “hey, I know that person!” and because of the accent and of course Zsa Zsa’s unusual name, maybe the answer would have been more precise than the reasons other rich socialites are famous today. I mean, why are the Kardashians famous today? And in fact, reality TV would have been gold for the Gabors, given their fashion and wild relationships and constant moving through various forms of media. The version of this in this earlier period was the talk show, and Gabor in fact had her own 15 minute talk show in 1953 and 1954, but it didn’t really go anywhere. She was on all the game shows, another place for the famous for being famous crowd and of course this early TV era was huge on game shows with marginally famous people showing up and being funny or funnyish anyway.

This brings us to what I and probably many of you knew Gabor for, which is Green Acres. A completely ridiculous show, it was also syndicated like crazy when I was a kid in the 80s and early 90s and so I probably saw every episode. Incredibly, the show lasted from 1965-71, with a mere 170 episodes. This was the height of redneck TV. This is a weird mid-60s phenomenon. Why did people so want to see ridiculous displays of supposedly rural white America on network TV. The Beverly Hillbillies is what really got this kicked off. Sure there was The Andy Griffith Show before that, but that’s kind of a different category of television, more toward the wholesome early days of the genre rather than the broad comedy making fun of rural people that dominated the oh so urbane mid 60s (Barney Fife obviously was an exception in that show but then Don Knotts was also a comedy genius). Between Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, TV executives realized that redneck shows were gold and so they greenlit a bunch of them, with Green Acres among the most prominent. Eddie Albert played the big shot New York attorney and Gabor his glamorous Hungarian wife who loved fur and jewels (don’t stretch yourself too much there Eva). They decide to move to the country and start over by living the simple life. Comedy gold ensues as they interact with the local yokels. And let’s not forget Arnold the Pig. Now that’s entertainment!

Gabor stayed active, playing and being slightly different versions of herself for the rest of her life. She started a fashion line in the 70s with Luis Estevez as the designer. She was very popular for voice-over work in cartoons, which makes tons of sense since unique voices work so well in that format. A lot of what she worked were Disney films, including The Aristocats, from 1970, The Rescuers (which is also the first movie I ever remember attending, a drive-in theater in Oregon with my parents) from 1977, and The Rescuers Down Under, from 1990.

It was a fall that got Gabor in the end. She was on vacation in Mexico. She fell in a bathtub and never really recovered. It was respiratory failure and pneumonia, technically, but this was a body shutting down kind of thing that happens to older folks after falls. She was 76 years old.

Eva Gabor is buried in Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles, California.

If you would like this series to visit other people from Green Acres, and what a group that is, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Turns out Eddy Albert is in the same cemetery as Gabor, so I guess I can return. Tom Lester is in Laurel, Mississippi. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.