Notater |
- Conrad Hilton var en av de f?rste senatorene i New Mexico (ca 1912)
Hans f?rste hotell ble bygget i Eastland Co, Texas USA, og st?r fremdeles i 1998
Headline: Obituary of Jolie Gabor Glamorous matriarch who convinced her daughters of the
importance of celebrity and rich husbands
Publication Date: April 03, 1997
Source: The Daily Telegraph London
Page: 23
Subjects:
Region: United Kingdom
Obituary: JOLIE GABOR, the mother of Magda, Zsa Zsa, and Eva who has died aged 97, was
always determined that her daughters should achieve celebrity.
"You will be rich, famous and married to kings," she told them - and to that end insisted that they
should master every possible accomplishment. "I wanted them not just to skate," she said, "but to
skate like Sonja Henie; and I wanted them to play the piano so magnificently that a Rubinstein
would be green with envy."
No talent was too arcane to be overlooked. "When will you be able to do that?" she demanded
after taking her daughters to watch a fire-eater at a circus. This maternal solicitude bore fruit; if
none of the girls married kings, they all became showbusiness personalities, with the keenest
instinct for publicity.
No doubt there was an element of frustrated ambition in Jolie Gabor's hopes for her daughters.
Born Jolie Tillemans into a prosperous merchant family in Budapest, she wanted to be an actress,
only to have her dreams dashed when, at 17, she was married off to Vilmos Gabor, a former
cavalry officer who owned a jewellery business.
"In the back of my mind I had the idea to get a divorce six months later," she remembered. "But
like a fool I fell pregnant and had a daughter. Then I had another daughter and another. And all
the time I wanted sons." Six months stretched out to 22 years.
Jolie Gabor finally divorced her husband in 1939, and escaped to America with no possessions
beyond $100 in cash, a sable coat and a 30-carat diamond. Fortunately her daughter Zsa Zsa
had preceded her to New York and married the hotel tycoon Conrad Hilton within three weeks
of stepping off the boat. "Her heart is so big," Jolie observed, "I believe she would have married
Connie Hilton just for my sake.
Subsidised by Zsa Zsa, Jolie Gabor started a small jewellery shop on Madison Avenue. Soon it
was a big jewellery shop. "When you look as beautiful as my daughters, you don't struggle," Jolie
Gabor reflected. "The best combination in the world is brains and looks. And also to know how
to enjoy yourself."
She cast a benevolent eye over her daughters' copious matrimonial adventures, reserving a
special affection for the actor George Sanders, who married both Magda and Zsa Zsa. "You
know, Jolie," Sanders wrote to her, "I think marriage is for very simple people, not for great
artists like us."
Zsa Zsa, however, cast a colder eye on her third husband. "Ven I vas married to George
Sanders, ve vere both in love with him. I fell out of love vith him, but he didn't."
In 1957 Jolie Gabor married Count Edmond de Siegethy, who had escaped from Hungary in
1956. He arrived in New York with only $27 and proceeded to spend $20 on flowers for Jolie.
"Any man who could be so generous had to be special," she concluded, "so I married him."
The match, she noted proudly, took the matrimonial score of herself and her daughters to 13;
eventually the daughters would notch up 19 marriages on their own account.
It hardly boded well for Jolie's marriage to de Siegethy that, at a family reunion in Vienna in
1958, she told Vilmos Gabor that he had always been her real husband. Nevertheless her second
marriage endured. "You see, my darling," she explained to a journalist in 1973, "he insists every
day that I take 14 vitamin pills, and that I use only the best lotions on my face. The Hungarians
worship beauty."
Jolie Gabor expressed outrage at suggestions that her daughters married for money. Zsa Zsa, for
example, never took any alimony. And Eva (who died in 1995) concluded that men were a
necessary evil: "Sex," she said "is very good for pimples."
Jolie Gabor loved parties and was always ready to pawn a diamond to pay for champagne.
"Life's a gamble," she held, "you must know how to play it." She spoke of her daughters with
pride, yet she knew what was due to herself: "I too am a success."
Conrad Hilton
By Ryan Braithwaite
Conrad Hilton was born on December 25, 1887, in the small town of San Antonio, New Mexico. He grew up working in the
family hotel. After a few years in New Mexico, Hilton enlisted in the Army because America entered WW1. Nothing happened
to him in the war, so he came back to New Mexico. Hoping to start a bank, he went to Albuquerque with $5,000. Finding that
he couldn't start a bank, he decided to go to Texas and start one.
There wasn't a suitable one to buy or build in Texas, so he bought a hotel in Cisco, TX, instead. After that he bought seven
more hotels for a total of eight hotels and had the first Hilton Hotel built in Dallas. Then the depression hit, but he survived with
five hotels. He regained three more hotels and was able to buy the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco, the Stevens in
Chicago, and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in the following years. Hilton Hotels were very prosperous and very popular.
At the end of his life, Hilton turned over the management of Hilton Hotels, Inc. to others. He lived in luxury until the day of his
death on January 4, 1979.
Hilton Hotels and Resorts: http://www.hilton.com/
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