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eye-catching pair—actress Eva Gabor from Hungary and her date, G. Bentley Ryan, a partner in Bautzer’s law firm. Eva had just begun her career as an actress, having recently made her debut in a small part in the Paramount film Forced Landing . Though she was quickly becoming well-known, it was not for her acting ability as much as for her beauty and charm. At twenty-one, she was an exotic young woman, blonde and shapely, with a thick Hungarian accent, a quick wit, a vivid intelligence, and a delicious sense of humor. Her march toward fame began at the knee of her ambitious, wellborn Jewish mother, Jolie (Jansci) Tilleman Gabor, a Budapest debutante and heiress to a jewelry fortune. Eva’s father was Colonel Vilmos Gabor, a self-absorbed, domineering product of the Hungarian military establishment, twenty-two years older than Jolie. By 1939, Eva, the first in the family to journey to the United States (with her then husband, Erik V. Drummer, from whom she was now separated), had obtained a Hollywood agent and a Paramount studio contract.
    The woman who caught Conrad Hilton’s attention was not Eva, though, it was her older sister, twenty-four-year-old Zsa Zsa, * the alluring redhead in the satiny blue dress. Zsa Zsa (born Sari) was the second of three daughters—the third being her older sister, Magda—born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, in 1917. She had been in America for just three months, having also migrated from Hungary.
    Zsa Zsa, beautiful and spoiled as a child, would be reared as if to the manor born, inheriting from her mother an overblown sense of entitlement that she would exhibit for the rest of her life. She had a Swiss private-school education, was given lessons in horseback riding, outfitted like a princess, tutored like a courtesan-in-waiting, offered singing, ballet, and piano lessons, and even spent an hour each day with a master of the epée. Jolie also saw to it that Zsa Zsa, as well as her sisters, Eva and Magda, was schooled in English, German, and French. “Zsa Zsa can talk about nothing in four different languages,” Jolie would later say in an interview. Zsa Zsa landed her first role at the age of nineteen. She was discovered by the Austrian opera star Richard Tauber, who hired her to appear onstage with him in the Viennese production of Der singende Traum ( The Singing Dream ).
    Because she had decided too late in life that she wanted to be an actress, Jolie Gabor would happily live vicariously through her ambitious daughters, especially Zsa Zsa. In 1936, she launched a campaign to obtain the title of Miss Hungary for Zsa Zsa. It didn’t matter to Jolie that she viewed Zsa Zsa as having no discernible talent or that her daughter didn’t even own an evening dress. She forged ahead anyway, using Eva’s peroxide to temporarily turn her brown-haired daughter into a platinum blonde, raiding Magda’s closet for a floor-length gown, then muscling Zsa Zsa into the wings of the stage and literally pushing her out into the lineup of finalists. Against all odds and with Jolie’s practiced chutzpah, Zsa Zsa was crowned Miss Hungary of 1936, but had to surrender the crown since she was not yet sixteen. Now, in 1941, Zsa Zsa was in the process of obtaining a divorce from Burhan Belge, press director for the Foreign Ministry of Turkey in Ankara, leaving herself free to embark on a husband hunt that began with a trip to Hollywood to visit her sister.
    Conrad Hilton had been sitting down while talking to Texan hotelier Joseph Drown, who in five years would open the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. When Conrad drew himself up to his full height, Zsa Zsa could not help but be impressed. In her 1960 memoir, her memory of the moment was vivid: “He stood there for a moment: A tall, erect, sun-tanned man with gray hair showing white at the temples in sharp contrast to his dark skin… looking like a wild Indian, with upturned greenish eyes, high cheekbones—a beautiful, distinguished figure who might have been