RIP Zsa Zsa Gabor

[Robert]

One short of her century.

You have to admire her for her wit and her gutsy stubbornness in making it to 99 after much illness in her 80s and 90s.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-10678271

[Svensson]

"A man is incomplete until he is married. After that, he is finished"

- Zsa Zsa Gabor

[Robert]

"Zsa Zsa's bathroom has two towels marked 'hers' and 'whoever's'." (Bob Hope)

[Mayerling]

Another human "milestone" from the 1950s - 1960s who is passed this year. She was a real personality, though only mediocre as an actress (compared to her sister Eva, co-star of "Green Acres" on television). However, Zsa Zsa did pop up in some notable movies, most of all as one of the lead French entertainers who knew Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (Jose Ferrer) in John Huston's bio-pic, "Moulin Rouge" (the original 1953 film of that name). She was the star of the cheezy, but cult classic, "Queen of Outer Space" (a monarch on Venus who delivers her space dialog in a Hungarian accent). She had smaller roles later on in "Youngblood Hawke" (a fictionalization of the life of the original novelist/writer Thomas Wolfe), and as a walk-on joke at the end of the James Garner - Kim Novak - Tony Randall comedy, "Boys Night Out".

Married to George Sanders (who divorced her when he discovered her having an affair with a notorious playboy, Porfirio Ruberosa), before that they did do a movie together called "Death of a Scoundrel (1956). That film is of some interest to us on this board, as it is based on one of the few unsolved murder mysteries that everyone who looks at leaves feeling satisfied that it wasn't solved - the 1955 slaying (in his New York City townhouse) of the notoriously greedy and selfish financial buccaneer Serge Rubinstein. Rubinstein's career was all-to-well known to the public, wrecking foreign countries restructured economies by currency attacks (he did a real number on the Japanese Yen), stealing and bilking corporations of their assets to the cost of the co-stock owners, debt holders, and work forces, and (despite a small prison term) being a draft dodger in World War II, jeering at the "idiots" who went to fight it, and being shot (after his release) at night spots with glamor girls like "El Morocco" and "the Stork Club". One detective was quoted as saying, "we have begun narrowing the suspect list to just under 10,000." One of my old friends had a term for this type of murder - a "public service" murder. It's hard to really argue about that.

For those interested, Rubinstein was strangled when trussed up in his town house on Madison Avenue.

Jeff