New Constellations: Movie Stars of the 1960s

Chapter 11. Eva and Zsa Zsa Gabor: Hungary Meets Hillbilly U.S.A.

224 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 11 Eva and Zsa Zsa Gabor Hungary Meets Hillbilly U.S.A. DIANE PECKNOLD When Eva Gabor died at seventy-four, the New York Times eulogized her as being “best known for her role as an out-of-place city socialite stuck on a farm on television’s ‘Green Acres’ in the 1960s,” but opined that she “probably achieved as much celebrity from being one of the three Gabor sisters as she did from her acting.” This kind of assessment had dogged Eva throughout her career. As early as 1954, she described the dif- ficulty she had overcoming her celebrity. “I’ve got to beat my glamour down. I’ve got to make the audience forget it, make them accept me as an actress,” she averred in her autobiography (Gabor 213). Eva Gabor. Courtesy Photofest. Eva and Zsa Zsa Gabor stand in this volume as envoys of an emergent mode of stardom in which celebrity precedes film work, and then infiltrates and underscores (or undermines) screen stardom. Theirs is a pop-culture stardom no longer under the centralized control of Hollywood studios that came to the fore and troubled the lines between stardom and celebrity in the 1960s. Indeed, Zsa Zsa has been cited as “one of the first and easily among the most outstanding exemplars of . . . modern celebrity. [Hers] was a fame that required having to do no work to get it, save gaining media exposure” (Gabler, Life 163). Their unabashed cultivation of their own public personae was greeted with a form of indignant ridicule that revealed its threatening potential. “They all seem to have arrived [in America] carrying nothing but a slightly used mink coat, a bushel of orchids and a press agent,” jibed one journalist (Tim Taylor, “I’m Bored with Gabors,” Cue, 13 June 1953, 10–11). Another caustically suggested that “the Gabors measure success by the physical weight of newspaper notices the clipping bureaus turn over to them.” But the real disdain was prompted by the fact that they had shrewdly created this publicity themselves. “The Gabors do not have a publicity agent. In the past, occasionally, they engaged the services of a professional, but long ago they came to the conclusion that all public relations counsels are mere amateurs in comparison to their own skills,” Esquire reported in a mocking profile of the clan (John Mariot Graham, “Glamour Goulash,” September 1953, 98). Eva Gabor is, moreover, harbinger of a new mode of televisual stardom, combining film work and TV work; but with TV stardom always intertwined with film stardom and extra-textual celebrity. Though Gabors were fixtures of media culture throughout the 1950s, it was not until “Green Acres” (1965–1971) that Eva finally became a legitimate screen star, an accomplishment that, ironically, reflected her ability to embody the tension between celebrity and stardom in the post-studio era, and to mediate the larger anxieties about social and cultural authority such tension revealed. At the same time that the Gabors participate in a repositioning of star discourse, their stardom is particularly relevant to the 1960s in another way, as their stardom is caught up in 1960s’ discourses on race and class. Not only celebrity outcasts in the supposedly legitimate ranks of Hollywood stardom, they were also racially suspect ethnic whites in civil rights America . The Gabors could thus be imagined as the cultural detritus of, simultaneously , the breakdown of traditional class-cultural hierarchy and unexamined white privilege. In “Green Acres,” Eva mobilized her status as an ersatz star to satirize increasingly unstable cultural mythologies—particularly cinematic ones—that had diffused and sustained class distinction and racial hegemony in the immediate postwar era. EVA AND ZSA ZSA GABOR 225 ✩★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩ Eva in the Barnyard: Casting Celebrity “The first question popping into mind while watching Eva Gabor film a scene for a new TV series called ‘Green Acres,’” television columnist Hal Humphrey wrote in 1965, “is, ‘What’s a chic Hungarian like her doing in a barnyard?’” (“Hungary Meets Hillbilly, U.S.A.,” Los Angeles Times, 9 August 1965, 5: 20). His question both encapsulated the camp juxtaposition at the heart of the show’s comedy and summarized the key features of class and ethnicity on which it relied. Following attorney Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert) and his socialite wife Lisa (Eva Gabor) as they move from their Park Avenue apartment to a crumbling farmhouse in Hooterville to pursue Oliver’s...