How Zsa Zsa seduced the world with sex, one-liners and VERY tall tales to become the world's first celebrity to be famous just for being famous 

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The location for what would become the battle of the screen blondes was Walton Film Studios in Surrey on a summer evening in 1957.

Britain’s own redoubtable Anna Neagle left the film set, tapped on the dressing-room door of her co-star, the distinguished Shakespearean actor Anthony Quayle, and pushed it open.

The sight that confronted her was not one she expected. Quayle, in flagrante, lay naked on the floor. The film’s third star, the blonde Hungarian sex symbol Zsa Zsa Gabor, also naked, sat astride him, her voluptuous breasts bouncing like balloons.

Bewitching: The blonde Hungarian sex symbol Zsa Zsa Gabor in the fifties 

Innocence: Zsa Zsa with her two sisters Eva and Magda before she became an object of desire for men all over the world

Neagle, a friend of Quayle’s wife and famous for her screen portrayal of Queen Victoria, was not amused. Her face taut with fury, she slammed the door shut with a crash that reverberated throughout the studio.

Gabor, unknowingly, had made a powerful enemy. More than 30 years later, she told me: ‘That beautiful man, Tony Quayle, was the real love of my life. I would have married him in a moment if I had been allowed.’

But Gabor was never to marry him, or to succeed in annexing him from his wife and children. Neagle, with formidable strength of character, made quite sure of that.

In Gabor’s long and tempestuous sexual odyssey, comprising nine marriages, seven divorces, one annulment and literally hundreds of lovers — they included U.S. president Richard Nixon, Frank Sinatra, Richard Burton and the screen’s original James Bond, Sean Connery — Quayle was the man who got away.

In her unbelievably narcissistic autobiography, One Lifetime Is Not Enough, the outrageous Zsa Zsa insists that she had ‘never given a fig for titles, status or snobbery’.

Really? When she died this week at the age of 99, she was calling herself Princess Frédéric von Anhalt, Duchess of Saxony, a style and rank to which she had no valid claim whatever, any more then her ninth husband, Hans Lichtenberg, the soi-disant ‘Prince’, a former masseur and the son of a humble Berlin policeman.

1. Her first marriage was to the Turkish propaganda minister Burhan Asaf Belge in 1937. It was never consummated

2. Moving to America, she wed Conrad Hilton in 1942 and had an affair with his teenage son Nicky

3. In 1949, she married British actor George Sanders, a cad and an emotional sadist

But then mere facts were never allowed to interfere with the fabled self-invented legend that was Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Her sixth husband, Jack Ryan, once observed that she ‘dwells in a perpetual fairyland that never was’; and that was true from the very moment of her birth in Budapest on February 6, 1916, when her nouveau riche middle-class parents named her Sári — Hebrew for Princess.

As far as Zsa Zsa was concerned, a princess is what she always remained, and what she was determined to leave this world calling herself.

Her own mythology depicts her Jewish mother, Jolie, as the heiress to a jewellery fortune, and her family as the aristocratic scions of pre-war Hungarian society. The truth, like everything else about Zsa Zsa, was considerably less romantic. A large proportion of her mother’s income came from running one of Budapest’s most thriving brothels.

Gabor’s third husband, the actor George Sanders, once described her as ‘the last of the great courtesans’.

As a sexual adventuress, which she remained all her life, Zsa Zsa started young. Her horrified mother discovered her, at the age of 12, with her face black and smeared with coal dust. Pressed for an explanation, she admitted that she had been kissing the coalman, who was 14 years her senior.

4. Herbet Hutner, a private investment banker and philanthropist, was next in 1962. They divorced after four years

5. Then came flamboyant Texas oil baron Joshua S. Cosden Jr in 1966. They divorced in 1967

6. In 1975, she married Jack Ryan — designer of Barbie dolls and nine years her junior

‘That girl will come to a bad end,’ predicted her mother, before packing her off to an expensive Swiss boarding school in Lausanne.

Her elder and younger sisters, Magda and Eva, were also to become actresses, socialites and international sex symbols. With their diamonds, their lavish clothes, their well-heeled and famous lovers, their heavily accented English, their flamboyant habit of calling everyone ‘Dahlink’, and their unquenchable hunger for publicity, the Gabors became the prototypes of the modern celebrity.

Their talent for anything beyond displaying themselves was minimal, and none of them was ever in the remotest danger of winning an Oscar for their acting. They were, as society arbiter Elsa Maxwell memorably pronounced in 1952, ‘famous for being famous’.

In 1936, Zsa Zsa’s mother entered her for the Miss Hungary contest, which she claimed she won, ‘only to be disqualified because I was too young’. She was 20 at the time.

Things looked up when she made her stage debut in Vienna. ‘The Viennese Press raved about my beauty,’ she announced. ‘Men threw themselves at my feet, and I revelled in my power.’

A year later she married Burhan Belge, the dark and handsome Turkish propaganda minister. She was 21 (not 15, as she claimed). He was some 15 years her senior.

As Belge was always addressed as His Excellency, she insisted that she should be addressed as Her Excellency. The marriage remained unconsummated, partly through her habit of taking her Scottie dog, Mishka, to bed with her. Belge, a Muslim, would not agree to sleep in the same bed as an animal.

When her virginity was finally surrendered, she claimed it was not to her husband but to his political master, Kemal Ataturk, the all-powerful ruler of Turkey.

‘He dazzled me with his sexual prowess and seduced me with his perversion,’ she wrote. No documentation survives to support this claim. Like almost everything in her life, it’s a case of believe it if you will.

In 1941, with the world at war and the Germans invading Europe, she left Belge and, using her diplomatic passport to dodge the Nazis, embarked on the Orient Express, with 21 pieces of luggage, for the United States, where she joined her sister Eva in Los Angeles.

7. Next was Michael O’Hara in 1976. He was her lawyer in the divorce from Jack Ryan

8. Her shortest marriage was to Felipe de Alba on a boat in 1983. It was annulled the next day

Over dinner in Ciro’s restaurant, she met the billionaire American hotelier Conrad Hilton, and, after divorcing Belge, married him. She was 25, he 55.

She deplored his taste, completely redecorating his Bel Air mansion, sending him to an upmarket tailor, and convincing him to buy her favourite New York hotel, the Plaza.

But Hilton was not faithful to her, and when he took her to a brothel on Long Island and had sex there while she waited for him, the gloss fell from their opulent marriage.Perhaps in retaliation, Zsa Zsa began to sleep with her teenage stepson, Nicky Hilton, and continued to do so throughout her marriage to his father, and even after Nicky’s own marriage to Elizabeth Taylor.

Her union with Hilton Sr was heading for divorce, when, according to her, he performed the remarkable feat of raping her while his leg was in a plaster-cast. Her daughter, Francesca Hilton — the only child to be born from any of the 20 marriages clocked up by the three Gabor sisters — was the result.

Husband number three was the suave and sardonic British actor, George Sanders, who represented everything Zsa Zsa considered to be ‘class’. When she first approached him at a party and confessed, ‘Mr Sanders, I’m madly in love with you’, he smiled down at her condescendingly and murmured: ‘How well I understand, my dear.’

Sanders, a cad and an emotional sadist, not unlike the characters he often played on screen, was also a voyeur, and urged his beautiful wife to make love to a handsome young Italian priest while he watched from behind a curtain.

When Sanders won an Oscar for his performance in All About Eve, Gabor accompanied him to the awards ceremony. But when he had collected his Oscar, he did not come back to rejoin his wife. He left her sitting alone in the auditorium until the cleaners arrived.

But the publicity pendulum gradually swung away from Sanders and towards Gabor. Her beguiling way with a one-liner had made her a highly-paid television personality.

Asked how many husbands she had had, she drawled: ‘You mean, apart from my own?’ On the subject of male sexuality, she observed crushingly: ‘Macho does not prove mucho.’

And there was the most-repeated witticism of all: ‘I am a vondairful housekeeper, dahlink. Every time I get divorced, I keep the house.’

Signed by MGM for her first movie role in Lovely To Look At, she was paid a staggering $10,000. Sanders was outraged. For his own Hollywood debut, he had received $250.

9. Finally, in 1986 she wed a policeman’s son and former masseur who called himself Prince Frederic von Anhalt, Duke of Saxony

Aged: Zsa Zsa, old and frail, poses with her ninth husband who is pushing her in a wheelchair

Her impact on-screen led to a major role in Moulin Rouge. Her singing voice was dubbed — atrociously — and the director, John Huston, told his cameraman: ‘Move in close. I mean close. If they can see how beautiful she is, they won’t notice that she can’t act.’ But the film was a hit — and so was she. Other major movies followed.

To the professional rivalry between herself and Sanders was now added a bitter personal jealousy.

Gabor had a scandalous and hugely publicised affair with the Dominican playboy and polo player, Porfirio Rubirosa. A legendary sexual athlete, Rubi was also violent, and knocked Gabor around, causing her to appear on stage in her Las Vegas cabaret act wearing a black eye-patch.

She and Sanders were divorced in 1954, but were to remain close friends until his suicide in 1972.

In 1957, Gabor arrived in London to film The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk, with Anna Neagle and Anthony Quayle. Neagle, outwardly affable to Gabor, watched with concern while she openly flirted with Quayle, to the point where he became infatuated and talked of running away with her.

Quayle had been married for ten years to Neagle’s friend, the actress Dorothy Hyson. They had three children, the youngest, Christopher, then a baby only a few months old.

After discovering the lovers in flagrante, Neagle rounded on Quayle. ‘What on earth are you thinking of, Tony?’ she said. ‘To give up everything you have for this? Just how long do you think it could possibly last with a woman like that?’

On Gabor’s last day of shooting at Walton Studios, Neagle strode into the Hungarian’s dressing-room and closed the door behind her.

No one knows exactly what passed between them, but from the moment Neagle left the room, Gabor backed off. She flew home to Hollywood. Quayle returned to his wife. In 1989, when he was dying from liver cancer, Quayle filmed a brief tribute for Gabor’s This Is Your Life. By the time the programme was screened, he was dead.

‘I sent roses to his funeral saying that I would never forget him,’ she wrote. ‘And I won’t, because I can still see his big, round, lovable, boyish face smiling at me.’

Gabor’s next four short-lived marriages — to businessman Herbert Hutner, oil baron Joshua Cosden Jr, electronics expert Jack Ryan and lawyer Michael O’Hara — all ended in divorce.

Her eighth marriage, at sea in 1983, to Felipe de Alba, whom she chose to believe was the Duke of Alba, a Spanish nobleman — though in reality he was a Mexican ex-actor and suburban estate agent with no title — was annulled within 24 hours.

In 1986 came her ninth and last marriage, the most bizarre of all. Hans Robert Lichtenberg, a former masseur and the son of a policeman, was adopted in 1980, at the age of 37, by the last Kaiser’s 82-year-old widowed daughter-in-law, Princess Marie-Auguste of Anhalt, who was close to bankruptcy at the time.

The adoption, a business transaction, was brokered by Hans Hermann Weyer, a former Munich window dresser who was jailed several times for selling bogus titles.

Lichtenberg thereafter called himself His Highness Prince Frédéric von Anhalt, Duke of Saxony, and on Zsa Zsa’s marriage to him in 1986 — which even her mother and her sister Eva boycotted — Gabor called herself Her Highness Princess Frédéric von Anhalt, Duchess of Saxony.

Adopted children have no rights of succession to hereditary titles, but ‘Their Highnesses’ were photographed in ersatz ‘royal’ regalia, he in a pantomime uniform bedecked with braid and tin medals, she in a tiara and regal sash.

Since their marriage, the ‘Prince’ has reputedly made millions by adopting four men to the Anhalt title, one a brothel owner, the second the owner of Los Angeles striptease clubs, the third the owner of health clubs, and the fourth a surgeon. All four now call themselves Prince von Anhalt.

To the end of her extraordinary life, Zsa Zsa Gabor was the subject of yet more headline publicity. In 1990, she spent three nights in the El Segundo City Jail in Los Angeles, for slapping a policeman who had the temerity to stop her for a traffic violation.

Her health declined after a car crash in 2002, and an accident in 2010 when she fell out of bed while trying to answer the telephone. Five years ago, she had her right leg amputated above the knee because of a serious infection, after which she remained confined to bed at her LA mansion. Her declining health meant she was unaware of her daughter Francesca Hilton’s death from a stroke in 2015.

During her last illness, rumours were rife that she and the ‘Prince’ were facing financial ruin, with the loss of her $14 million Bel Air mansion, their luxury cars and fabulous art collection, after losing $10 million of their savings to the U.S.investment fraudster Bernie Madoff.

The world, which she kept entertained and fascinated through the decades, will be a duller and less colourful place now that the last and liveliest of the glittering Gabors has made her final exit.