Page 126 – LIFE

LIFE in the Middle East: Power and Petroleum in the Gulf in 1945

August 11, 2021February 15, 2013 by

Oil. A simple word that for much of the 20th century, and well into the 21st, has meant unimaginable wealth for a very few; plentiful and (for a time, at least) cheap energy for consumers and industries around the globe; deadly conflicts and tensions, as international powers jockeyed to ensure access to wells, fields and pipelines; and, of course, myriad and well-founded worries about the poisoning of land, sea and sky and still, the world craves more, always more, of the precious stuff

In an online article titled “There Will Be Oil and That’s the Problem,” a companion piece to his recent TIME cover story, writer Bryan Walsh argues that oil supplies aren’t going to vanish any time soon, but that fact shouldn’t leave us any less concerned about our dependence on petroleum:

“[Discoveries of new oil reserves] are occurring around the world,” Walsh points out, “from the deepwater finds off Brazil to the North Dakota tight oil that has led to a resurgence of American crude production. There are oil sands in Canada and new resources in the melting waters of the Arctic. There will be oil and that may be the problem. That’s because the new supplies are for the most part more expensive than traditional oil from places like the Middle East sometimes significantly so. They are often dirtier, with a greater risk of more devastating spills and accidents.”

Walsh goes on to discuss far more complex and enduring issues around the production and consumption of oil, but a central, unsettling question looms: in a world with an unslakable thirst for petroleum, will human beings pay a higher and higher price in blood, in treasure, in environmental degradation rather than rethink their addiction to oil?

With that question hanging in the air, LIFE.com looks back at one of the earliest and most comprehensive features any publication anywhere ever published on the fraught and lucrative Mideast petroleum industry: a massive photo essay in the June 11, 1945, issue of LIFE magazine titled, simply, “Middle East Oil,” that provided (in LIFE’s words) “the first complete look at this fabulous and troublesome part of the world.”

Photographer Dmitri Kessel spent eight weeks traveling and photographing in Iran, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. (“It was so hot,” LIFE informed its readers of the photographer’s time in the desert, “that for periods Kessel could not handle his camera without scorching his hands.”) The result is a remarkable chronicle of a world both familiar and impossibly remote, where preteen dynastic kings, transplanted Texas wildcatters and armies of anonymous workers play out their lives amid the forces shaping the region’s landscape and transforming ancient cultures: the towering oil wells and refineries so colossal they sometimes seem ready to dwarf the desert itself.

NOTE: A sharp reminder that the original “Middle East Oil” feature from 1945 was published in an era vastly different than our own can be found in the dated language and, even more so, in the blatant, invidious bias occasionally on display in the article. For example, one photo caption reads, in part: “Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. employs 40,000 Iranians, many trained in its own Institute of Petroleum Technology. It has built its own city beside the old town. Iranian workers are usually honest and as industrious as heat permits.”

It goes without saying that LIFE would not have made a similar assertion about, say, American workers at a refinery in Texas or Louisiana.

Middle East OIl, Iran 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

IRAN

Middle East Oil, Iran 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Iranian Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlev, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Middle East Oil, Iran 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

IRAQ

Kirkuk, Iraq, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kirkuk oil field, Iraq, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Middle East Oil, Iraq 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kirkuk, Iraq, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kirkuk oil fields, Iraq, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Camels graze near an oil refinery, Iraq, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

King Faisal, Iraq 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

BAHRAIN

Bahrain oil refinery, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Oil industry laborers, Bahrain, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Middle East Oil, Bahrain 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Bahrain oil refinery, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Bahrain 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

SAUDI ARABIA

Middle East Oil, Saudi Arabia 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Saudi Arabia 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Saudi Arabia oil refinery 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Saudi Arabia, 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Saudi Arabia 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Middle East Oil, Saudi Arabia 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Middle East Oil. Saudi Arabia 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Middle East Oil, Saudi Arabia 1945

Dmitri Kessel Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Heartache of Wartime Farewells, 1943

January 18, 2020February 13, 2013 by

The photos here, made by LIFE’s Alfred Eisenstaedt in April 1943 at the height of the Second World War, capture farewell kisses that are particularly fraught. These young men, bidding their sweethearts farewell, faced the possibility that they might never return from the war.

In its February 14, 1944 issue (Valentine’s Day), in which many of these pictures appeared, here’s how LIFE magazine described the scenes:

They stand in front of the gates leading to the trains, deep in each other’s arms, not caring who sees or what they think.

Each goodbye is a drama complete in itself, which Eisenstaedt’s pictures movingly tell. Sometimes the girl stands with arms around the boys’ waist, hands tightly clasped behind. Another fits her head into the curve of his cheek while tears fall onto his coat. Now and then the boy will take her face between his hands and speak reassuringly. Or if the wait is long they may just stand quietly, not saying anything. The common denominator of all these goodbyes is sadness and tenderness, and complete oblivion for the moment to anything but their own individual heartaches.

Farewell kiss, Penn Station, 1943.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Farewell to departing troops at New York’s Penn Station, April 1943.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

‘I Was in LIFE’: Kim Novak Remembers

January 18, 2020February 12, 2013 by

In the early 1950s, right around the time she stole scenes as a pretty young thing driving Jack Lemmon nuts in the oddly titled 1954 comedy, Phffft!, Kim Novak caught the eye of LIFE magazine’s photographers, who were charmed by her talent, her haunting beauty and her determination to be not merely a star, but a genuine actress. Their fascination with the young Novak proved prescient: In the coming years, she would become one of the most accomplished and versatile movie stars of the decade, with credits including The Man With the Golden Arm, Pal Joey and, most notably, Hitchcock’s wholly unsettling masterpiece, Vertigo (1958).

In 1956, as her career was truly taking off, Leonard McCombe photographed Novak for a major cover story. Just 23 years old at the time, the actress was starring in the movie Picnic but was still uncertain of Hollywood and her place in it. Six decades after the peak of her career, LIFE.com reached out to the gracious Ms. Novak (born Marilyn Pauline Novak on Feb. 13, 1933, in Chicago) to find out what it was like to appear so prominently in LIFE at such a young age.

“I hoped to show the world my soul,” Novak told LIFE.com, flashing back to that confusing time. “I believed that fame had found me for a reason that I didn’t quite understand yet, and that LIFE magazine would help to give me a voice. Bottom line, I wanted the world to see that I was not just another Hollywood pretty face or sex symbol but the real McCoy!”

As lovely as McCombe’s March 1956 cover shoot turned out to be, and as flattering and insightful as the story was, Novak admitted feeling disappointed with its direction.

“Looking back,” she said, “I wish I had the opportunity to respond to more real situations. I’ve always been proud to be a reactor rather than an actor. For the cover shot I was handed a matching lavender umbrella, sweater and gloves then told to look into the camera and smile. I wanted a reason to smile, and was not yet a good enough actress to invent one.”

The McCombe photos inside the issue, however, were more accurate representations of what it was really like to be Kim Novak in 1956. For instance, of the photo in this gallery that shows her in a dressing room, breaking down in tears after being asked to model a dress and then merely cue a performance by a costar, Novak says: “I was distraught and even wrote a poem through my tears because I felt taken advantage of in my first major television appearance. I would have preferred it if LIFE used one of those more honest photos for the cover.”

McCombe followed Novak to appearances, fittings and even home to Chicago, but none of the pictures he made in all those weeks with her is more memorable and evocative of that time than the famous, first photograph in this gallery. On a New York-bound train, the stunning young star removes her jacket as several male passengers unabashedly gape. McCombe, Novak said, “captured a special moment in time. I’m pleased to have been the spark that started a fire in the train’s dining car that night.”

During that trip home, Kim known as “Mickey” to her family found that having McCombe capture not only her professional life but also her personal one was almost surreal. “The two worlds were so different,” she recalled, “and I didn’t know how to fit in either one.”

The third image in this gallery, meanwhile, subtly captures the actress’ ambivalence. “In a Beverly Hills restaurant,” read the caption to the photo, “Kim Novak sits with a faraway look as agents Al and Wilt Melnick hotly discuss her blossoming movie career.”

Novak admitted that her expression was not so much a dreamy “faraway look” as one of concern for her future. “I worried, because I was being treated like a commodity, and I didn’t know what to do about it,” she says. “I only knew I didn’t like it.”

While she might not have liked the sometimes brutally commercial aspect of moviemaking, stardom certainly had its perks for instance, as in the seventh photo, where she tried on $12,500 mink rented by studio designer Jean Louis.

“Yes, I loved glamour,” Novak told LIFE.com. “When I put on the gowns of Rita Hayworth, Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford, I felt transformed into someone else. It seemed like I could feel their energy running through my body.”

Of her favorite leading man, Jimmy Stewart, who starred with her in both Bell, Book and Candle and Vertigo, Novak remembered that “he could make me feel like I’d just slipped into my favorite warm fuzzy slippers by taking my hand when a gossip reporter walked on the set. He could make the whole world go away when things got to be too much for me to handle.”

Though she enjoyed much success in Tinseltown, Novak would eventually retire from acting and find fulfillment elsewhere. Married to veterinarian Robert Malloy for more than 40 years (Novak is a lifelong animal lover) and living in Oregon, where she enjoys painting. She has had some tough times—a serious, bone-breaking horse-riding accident in 2006; evidently successful treatment for cancer in 2010; depression and treatment for what she herself called, in a 2012 conversation with TCM’s Robert Osborne, bipolar disorder—but she has come through.

“After Harry Cohn died—he was the head of Columbia Pictures, where I was under contract—the choice of good scripts seemed to die with him,” Novak recalled, explaining her decision to leave the movies behind. “I grew tired of waiting for that good role to find me. I left Hollywood and the life of a movie star to make a path for my artistic desires without the handicap of false expectations. Today, when I’m not riding my horse in the mountains of Oregon, I’m painting the life around me, the life that I love. I am content.”

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Kim Novak captured the attention of the men in the dining car on a train bound for New York.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Kim Novak, 1956

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

In a Beverly Hills Restaurant Kim Novak sat with a faraway look as agents Al and Wilt Melnick hotly discussed her blossoming movie career.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Kim listened to crystal gazer Zaza in Armando’s in New York.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Novak fled in bitter frustration to her dressing room over her assigned role on The Ed Sullivan Show, where she angrily flung a vase of flowers to the floor and sobbed in abandon to a rose she destroyed: “I’m tearing this flower apart like I’m destroying my life.” As she often did, she later turned the episode into a little poem.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Composed and given lines she wanted, Novak smoothed her dress as she prepared to go on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Novak stopped in a for a family dinner in Chicago while on her way east. Seated (from left around table) beneath portraits of Kim were her mother, brother-in-law Bill Malmborg, childhood friend Barbara Mellon, her father, older sister Arlene and her Aunt Mildred.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Novak tried on $12,500 mink rented by studio designer Jean Louis.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

A rare laugh from somber Kim Novak greeted a joke by Otto Preminger, who visited Kim while she was in New York. She had great fondness and respect for Preminger, who directed her in The Man With the Golden Arm and put her genuinely at ease.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

A long, glum goodbye to Mack Krim preceded the trip east. A theater owner, Krim was her constant escort in Hollywood. At the time of the story Kim put off the question of whether or not she is in love with him, saying she wanted to fulfill herself as an actress before getting married.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Life Magazine cover, March 5, 1956

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE magazine, March 5, 1956.

Westminster Dog Show Champs and Contenders From the 1950s and 1960s

August 11, 2021February 11, 2013 by

The bond between dogs and humans has taken many forms: hunting companions, workmates, helpers and saviors. Then there are show dogs, the kind that take center stage every year at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. These dogs are primped, pampered and trained with the same dedication and diligence that world-class coaches bring to the prepping of elite athletes.

When the Westminster show descends on New York’s Madison Square Garden, it seems that everybody—even cat people!—are, for a few days at least, dog devotees. Enjoy this selection of four-legged friends from the 1950s and ’60s by the great Nina Leen.

Courtenay Fleetfoot of Pennyworth (a.k.a. “Ricky”), a Whippet, was chosen Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, New York City, 1964.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Skye Terrier, Jacinthe de Ricelaine, 1964.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Vincenzo Calveresi with his four Maltese, 1955.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Maltese, 1955.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ignoring a kick, a team of Maltese dogs stood motionless as owner Vincenzo Calversi tested their obedience, 1955.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Billy, a Miniature Poodle, 1964.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Dilettante, a Chow, 1964.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Doberman in training ran behind an automobile near Roslyn, N.Y. with handler Peter Knoop.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Painted Lady, a Boxer, 1964

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mighty Man, a Brussels Griffon, 1964.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Westminster Dog Show, 1955.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Wire Fox Terrier, Travella Superman of Harham, 1955.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This Whippet, Courtenay Fleetfoot of Pennyworth, won Best in Show in 1964.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Courtenay Fleetfoot of Pennyworth won Best in Show, 1964.

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rare Photos From the Set of ‘Porgy and Bess’

February 1, 2022February 7, 2013 by

Not too many musical classics have experienced the sort of polar-opposite reactions from audiences and critics that Porgy and Bess has elicited ever since it debuted on Broadway in 1935. The opera, which features some of the most recognizable songs in all of American music, has been praised as a bold attempt to exalt African-American vernacular in the operatic canon, and pilloried as a patronizing, if not outright racist, caricature of black life in the South in the early 20th century. Even some of the black performers who have most ably filled principal roles in the opera through the years have voiced their reservations about the work.

The great St. Louis-born mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry, for example, said of her own experience playing and singing the part of Bess: “I thought it beneath me. I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there.”

Bumbry’s attitude is, arguably, the same that most people have chosen to take to the work. The opera might be filled with racial stereotypes; the songs might glorify the basest (quasi-mythical) aspects of Black culture; the characters might be emblematic of African American “types” anchored not so much in history as in the dominant culture’s notion of that history all that might be true, but the opera also, all these decades later, somehow endures. It has seen several revivals on Broadway (most recently in 2011) and musicians and singers as diverse as Miles Davis, Jascha Heifetz and Christina Aguilera have performed or recorded their own variations on the opera’s famous tunes.

Here, LIFE.com presents photos made on the set of the earliest film version of the opera Otto Preminger’s 1959 Porgy and Bess, starring Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr. as the drug-dealing pimp, Sportin’ Life, and Pearl Bailey. LIFE magazine evidently loved it (see below), but the years have not been kind to the production, and one would be hard-pressed to find a critic today who doesn’t find the film an unsettling combination of strident and cartoonish.

It’s also worth noting of this production that Davis and Bailey recorded their singing parts; Poitier’s and Dandrdige’s songs were dubbed by two classical singers: Robert McFerrin (Bobby McFerrin’s dad) and Adele Addison.

This, meanwhile, is how LIFE introduced the movie to its readers in the June 15, 1959, issue of the magazine, in a multi-page spread featuring Gjon Mili’s vibrant color photos. (Only one of Mili’s pictures from that assignment is in this gallery; none of the other photos here ran in LIFE.)

The folk opera, Porgy and Bess, is a story of life, death and faithlessness in a Negro tenement called Catfish Row. It has come a long way since composer George Gershwin and author DuBose Heyward launched it hopefully on Broadway in 1935 and sadly closed it after 124 money-losing performances. Gershwin and Heyward were dead when success finally came through some fine U.S. revivals and a triumphant State Department-sponsored tour of Europe. Today Porgy and Bess is a national treasure and a beloved classic and comes finally to the movie screen.

Samuel Goldwyn had his troubles casting the film, but he wound up with some of the finest Negro actors and singers in the land — Sidney Poitier as Porgy, Dorothy Dandridge as Bess, Pearl Bailey as Maria, Sammy Davis Jr. as Sportin’ Life. The glory of the opera, its unforgettable songs, comes resplendently from the stereophonic soundtrack. All the favorites are there Summertime, I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’, It Ain’t necessarily So, Bess, Yo Is My Woman Now. The plot, taken from the play by Heyward and his wife Dorothy, is unchanged in the movie as are the brilliant lyrics, written by Heyward and Gershwin’s brother Ira.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dorothy Dandridge (Bess) and Brock Peters (Crown) on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sammy Davis Jr. in character as Sportin’ Life on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dorothy Dandridge and Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Pearl Bailey (Maria) in a scene from Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Porgy and Bess, 1959: At annual church picnic, the people of Catfish Row hear Sportin’ Life (Sammy Davis Jr.) sing his song of skeptical wickedness.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Scene from the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock.

Porgy and Bess

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dorothy Dandridge and Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Brock Peters (Crown) on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Porgy and Bess

Gjon Mili Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Brock Peters and Sidney Poitier act out violent scene from Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier on the set of Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Porgy and Bess, 1959.

Gjon Mili Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE With Zsa Zsa Gabor: Rare Photos, 1951

August 12, 2021February 5, 2013 by

Anyone who has lived to be almost 100 likely has a few outlandish tales to tell. At least, one hopes they have tales to tell; it’s simply too awful to think of someone living through ten decades without one adventure, one great passion, one scandal worthy of relating over and over again. What’s the point of living a long life, after all, if one can’t look back with some complacency and pleasure at the glorious, memorable mistakes one made along the way?

With that in mind, we turn our attention to the one and only Zsa Zsa Gabor. Born Sári Gábor on Feb. 6, 1917, in Budapest, the middle sister of a middle-class Hungarian family between younger sister Eva (1919 – 1995) and older sister Magda (1915 – 1997) Zsa Zsa lived in the public eye for more than six decades, before her death at 99 in 2016.

Beautiful, glamorous and disarmingly funny; married nine times, divorced seven (one marriage was annulled); friend and lover to the famous; accused traffic cop-slapper (remember that weirdness back in 1989?); Bernie Madoff victim to the tune of something like $10 million; best-selling author; actress with scores of movies and TV appearances to her name one could argue that Zsa Zsa was, in fact, the very last of those outrageous, celebrated Hollywood figures (like her late friend, Liz Taylor) who routinely and unrepentantly provided scandal sheets and gossip columnists with fodder in the middle part of the last century.

Quotations attributed to her through the years, meanwhile, suggest a lively intelligence and a savvy, off-hand and charming worldliness behind her seemingly soft facade:

“A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.”

“Macho does not prove mucho.”

“I have never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back.”

“Husbands are like fires. They go out if unattended.”

“To a smart girl men are no problem. They’re the answer.”

Time, alas, was not kind to Gabor. Late in her life, she suffered strokes, was confined to a wheelchair and had her right leg amputated above the knee to combat an aggressive infection. Her obituary was written and prepped and then shelved several times in the past few years by media outlets, as she fought on against mounting odds, diminished but far from forgotten.

Here, LIFE.com recalls the younger Zsa Zsa with a series of photos by Ed Clark many of which never ran in LIFE from 1951, when she was barely known outside of California, but was quickly becoming as famous as her sister, Eva (who, incidentally, only married five times).

In its October 15, 1951, issue LIFE magazine introduced the 34-year-old Zsa Zsa to its millions of readers thus:

To television fans in most of the country, the only Gabor is blonde Eva, whose Hungarian beauty is a frequent, familiar and satisfying sight on their screens. But lately another Gabor, Eva’s sister Zsa Zsa, has begun to establish herself on the West Coast as a TV performer and wit of sorts. The show on which she appears is called Bachelor’s Haven and specializes in romantic counsel to men, a field in which Zsa Zsa feels herself highly qualified, from personal experience.

Her experience began about 15 years ago when, as a teenager in her native Budapest, she proposed to a Turkish diplomat over his teacups and became Mrs. Burhan Belge. But, says Zsa Zsa, “I was still a little girl playing with dolls,” and so in 1941 they were divorced. Zsa Zsa, whose given name is Sari, made her way to the U.S. and married hotel-man Conrad Hilton. After five hectic years of marriage, which were enlivened by a jewel robbery and Zsa Zsa’s tales of being mysteriously drugged and held captive in a Hollywood hotel, she and Mr. Hilton were divorced. In 1949 she married actor George Sanders. When he left for a movie role in England three months ago Zsa Zsa took a television job to fill her idle time. She now has signed a movie contract herself and is rated as the biggest new hit on West Coast TV, a rating she has earned by her beauty, ripe Continental accent and the Hungarian savoir-faire with which she tosses off her advice to the lovelorn.

“Men have always liked me and I have always liked men,” says Gabor, “but I like a mannish man, a man who knows how to talk to and treat a woman not just a man with muscles.” On Bachelor’s Haven, where she is a permanent panel member, Zsa Zsa is often peremptory. When she senses that a man does not meet her rigid standards, she dismisses the offender with a curt: “Him I would shoot.”