Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, a former Las Vegas headliner, dies at age 99

Zsa Zsa Gabor, the actress and socialite whose many marriages and show business career crossed through Las Vegas, died Sunday at her home in Los Angeles, her husband said. She was 99.

Gabor had been hospitalized repeatedly since July 2010, when she broke her hip after falling at home. She needed a wheelchair after being partly paralyzed in a 2002 car accident and suffering a stroke in 2005. Most of her right leg was amputated in January 2011 because of gangrene; the left leg was also threatened.

The Associated Press described Gabor, Paris Hilton’s great-aunt, as the “original hall-of-mirrors celebrity” — famous for being famous for being famous. Starting in the 1940s, Gabor rose from beauty queen (she was Miss Hungary in 1936) to millionaire’s wife to television personality to film actress to public character. She was married nine times.

In April 1942, she married hotel scion Conrad Hilton, who would eventually own the Flamingo and the International, later known as the Las Vegas Hilton, in Las Vegas. She also spent parts of several years as a Las Vegas headliner, bringing a star’s appeal even as some observers struggled to describe it.

Zsa Zsa Gabor’s lounge act with her sisters Eva and Magda debuted in Las Vegas in December 1953 at the Last Frontier. A Las Vegas Review-Journal clip from Dec. 24, 1953, described anticipation of the performances.

“Just how (the sisters) plan to entertain Ramona room customers is a topic of deep mystery even to the hotel’s publicist,” the article said. “It had been generally assumed … they would set their sights on Marlene Dietrich’s recently established Strip cleavage record.”

The article noted that Zsa Zsa was returning to the Strip after performing there in summer 1951, apparently dumbfounding an official from the place she’d performed.

“She didn’t sing, she didn’t dance — in fact, no one knew just what she was doing,” the unnamed official told the RJ.

Las Vegas lounge act promoter Bill Miller once told the RJ that he considered an act he booked with Zsa Zsa Gabor his one big career failure.

“People came to see her, but she didn’t really have an act,” he said.

Even if observers questioned her talent, Gabor had a flair for the dramatic. An RJ clip from Dec. 30, 1953, recounts how she appeared at a press conference at the Last Frontier sporting a black eye patch, claiming she’d been punched in the face by suitor Porfirio Rubirosa.

The article said Gabor told reporters Rubirosa had sought Gabor’s hand in marriage but she’d rebuffed him. Gabor said the refusal prompted the punch.

“The poor boy just couldn’t believe I would turn him down,” Gabor told reporters.

Rubirosa later married Woolworth’s heiress Barbara Hutton.

In Las Vegas, Zsa Zsa Gabor headlined in 1969 and 1970 at the Flamingo, and was the headliner at Vegas World’s Galaxy Showroom from Dec. 28, 1990, to Jan. 2, 1991, performing on New Year’s Eve for hotel owner Bob Stupak.

“Don’t expect me to sing, don’t expect me to do anything and then you’ll be happy,” she said during a news conference announcing the engagement.

Gabor was also a regular “roaster” at “The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast” series, which broadcast from the Ziegfield Room of the old MGM Grand (now Bally’s) in the 1970s through the early 1980s.

In October 2008, longtime Las Vegas performer Debbie Reynolds told former Review-Journal columnist Doug Elfman that Gabor outshone Paris Hilton, her famous great-niece.

“Zsa Zsa was a great beauty and a great wit, however, and she had a great voice to imitate,” Reynolds told Elfman. “So (Paris) is not, to me, as international a character as her great-aunt.”

Gabor’s marriage to Hilton, who was three decades older, lasted until September 1946 and produced her only child, Francesca Hilton. The Los Angeles Times reported that Gabor said she planned to ask for $10 million when she sued Hilton for divorce and that she’d give the money to European war refugees.

Drawing from her myriad couplings, Gabor wrote two books on romantic relationships, “Zsa Zsa’s Complete Guide to Men” (1969), “How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, How to Get Rid of a Man” (1970).

Gabor made headlines in June 1989 for smacking a police officer who’d pulled over her Rolls-Royce for a traffic breach in Beverly Hills, California. She was convicted of misdemeanor battery on a police officer, driving without a driver’s license and having an open container of alcohol in the car.

She served three days in jail, performed community service at a woman’s shelter and paid $13,000 in fines and restitution.

Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist John Katsilometes and The Associated Press contributed to this report. Contact Matthew Crowley at mcrowley@reviewjournal.com. Follow @copyjockey on Twitter.