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Zsa Zsa Gabor Didn’t Always ‘Keep the House’ After Divorce: Here’s Why

Zsa Zsa Gabor is no more: The Hungarian drama queen—famous for her glamorous lifestyle, many divorces (eight to be exact), and slapping an unfortunate traffic cop who dared to pull her over—died Sunday from a heart attack. She was at home in Bel Air, CA.

Her many friends and family are no doubt in the midst of reminiscing about her colorful life, and her infamous quotes. One of her best, quipped during a military tour in response to Bob Hope asking about her domestic skills: “I’m a great housekeeper. Every time I get a divorce, I keep the house.”

Which got us wondering: Is that really true? Did she always “keep the house” after divorce?

To find the answer, we talked to Darwin Porter, a Gabor family friend and author of the biography “Those Glamorous Gabors.” And it turns out the reality of her divorce settlements may have not been the windfalls her famous phrase let on. 

“I think it was just a clever line she pulled,” Porter argues. In fact, he thinks the opposite is more accurate. As for how accurate, well, where do we start?

How about Gabor’s first husband, Burhan Belge, a Turkish diplomat whom she divorced in 1941 after four years of marriage. “He left her virtually nothing,” says Porter.

But surely she must have fared better with her second husband, Conrad Hilton (yes, of the hotels), whom she was hitched to from 1942 to 1947? Despite his massive fortune,”she didn’t get their house since she was living in his,” Porter says. “She got very little out of that settlement, not even free privileges to stay in Hilton hotels.”

Moving on to husband No. 3, George Sanders (1949 to1954). “Sanders was not a wealthy man, so he lived in her home,” Porter continues. “So she kept the house, but she always had the house.” So, Gabor was not exactly making off like a bandit.

Even her final husband, self-proclaimed “duke” Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, a man 26 years her junior, whom she married in 1986 and who remained by her side to her death, was reportedly not at all someone she could bleed dry.  

In 2013, Gabor sold the home where she was currently living in Bel Air in a deal that allowed her to live there until her death—much like the deal Hugh Hefner forged earlier this year specifying that he could remain in the Playboy mansion until his last breath. But now that Gabor is gone, Anhalt will likely have to go, too. He wasn’t part of the deal.

So what property did she own, if any? It’s hard to say, says Porter, because she lived in at least 21 homes over the years. But where they are and whether she’s the one who sold them is murky at best. The only one on everyone’s radar is a Palm Springs Mid-Century Modern home that she used to own that was recently put on the market for $969,000. But that property passed ownership decades ago.

Yet if there’s any truth to Gabor’s clever quotes, it may be found in another famous line of hers: “I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back.” Unlike her overblown claims about her vast postdivorce property empire, this line about all the bling she clung to is totally true.

“She always kept the jewelry,” says Porter. And, he’d wager “the jewelry was worth more than the real estate. A couple of those diamonds rings would buy you a mansion.”

So in a way, Gabor really did know how to keep house.

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