1 (or Maybe 3) of a Kind: Exit Zsa Zsa

The digital age has only enhanced celebrity worship. Call it the age of instant celebrity, when anybody who can pull out their false teeth, spin on their heads and make a chopped salad gets 1.5 million hits on YouTube and goes instantly viral.

We are living in the age of the Kardashians, J.Lo and J.Law and Paris Hilton. We are no longer living in the age of Zsa Zsa Gabor, and more’s the pity.

Gabor, who died of a heart attack Dec. 18 at age 99, was a pioneer of celebrityhood. She was famous before it was cool just to be famous (and infamous, to boot). Look at her obituaries and you find all kinds of job titles and descriptions.

She was a movie actress sometimes, a stage actress every now and then, a television performer quite a bit, a wife very often, an author, a walking scandal, an attention-getter, an accumulator — of stories, husbands, lovers, roles, stuff from husbands. She was a memorable beauty, a Hungarian and, more often than you realize until you listen, a wit, dahlink.

She was an original, one of a kind. Actually, she was three of a kind — one of three sisters born in Budapest, where the Danube flows down from Vienna on its way to the sea. It was all part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, ruled by a regal family named the Habsburgs, who were swept away like so many imperials after World War I. Though times had changed, Zsa Zsa and her sisters Magda and Eva were raised to be beautiful socialites who would, if possible, marry kings.

They were all blondish beauties, and if none of them ever managed to marry a king, it was not for lack of trying — at least on the part of Zsa Zsa, who married nine different men (not counting an annulment after a ceremony which took place on a cruise ship). All three became actresses with varying degrees of success. Eva had a part in “Gigi” and became a star on the television sitcom “Green Acres.”

But, although Zsa Zsa did appear often in films, onstage and on television (both as an actress and a talk-show guest), her real creativity and inventiveness was her own life. She liked the high life, but sometimes she went low. Asked how many husbands she’d had, she replied, “You mean other than my own?”

She was frank that way. She was not a gifted actress or performer, but somehow she seemed to work on the periphery of stories and projects and people, few of which remain in fashion but many of which remain memorable.

Probably her most memorable screen role was as Jane Avril, a performer and a model for Toulouse-Lautrec, in John Huston’s richly colorized and inventive biopic “Moulin Rouge,” starring Jose Ferrer as Lautrec. But she kept popping up. She had a part in 1952’s “Lovely to Look At,” an entirely characteristic example of the classic MGM Technicolor musicals of the time, with Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, Ann Miller and Marge and Gower Champion: Gotta sing, gotta dance and, in Gabor’s case, gotta vamp.

She also had a part as a carny performer in the wistful romance “Lili”, starring Mel Ferrer and the charming Leslie Caron, which would one day become the Broadway musical “Carnival.” She was in “The Death of Scoundrel” starring George Sanders, a bemused, haughty-voiced actor who married Zsa Zsa for five years, then married her sister Magda. (In the end, ill and declining, he killed himself and left a note that said, “I am bored,” among other things.)

There was also something inexplicable called “Country Music Holiday,” a small part in the Orson Welles classic “Touch of Evil” with Marlene Dietrich, no less than the lead in “Queen of Outer Space” and, much later, “Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie.”

If all this has a faint touch of the ridiculous, she didn’t seem to mind too much. She married Conrad Hilton (Paris’s great-grandfather) and, eventually, and last, the still surviving Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, who had bought his title. Her daughter, Francesca, by Hilton, died in 2015.

She was a hit on talk shows, but time got the better of her, with more and more medical problems — hip replacement, surgeries and so on — until time simply stopped.

And yet … three of a kind or one of a kind, there was nobody like her. We are ever so slightly diminished.