I never knew what Zsa Zsa Gabor was famous for, and the reading I’ve done here hasn’t taught me. It seems no one much knows. Eva, of course, was on Green Acres and did some voicework for Disney, but Zsa Zsa and Magda seem to have been famous for being famous. They were glamorous and often-married, and Zsa Zsa was the last of them.

It’s not that I’m mourning her, really, but I’ve long found the whole Gabor thing fascinating. I remember Zsa Zsa’s trial for slapping an LA cop, where it turned out that her driver’s license had been altered—in pen—to change her age. She claimed that her license had been stolen by Mexicans and returned that way, which is surely the most ludicrous thing she could have come up with, and yet she swore it under oath. At the same time, Nick at Nite was running Green Acres reruns and told us, in their commercials, that the show starred Eva, not Zsa Zsa—will not hurt you!

Her earliest film credit is from 1952, and she’s credited as playing “Zsa Zsa.” She seems to have played herself, or a variant on herself, as often as any other character. She actually has more TV and movie acting credits than today’s Celebrating the Living honouree, Cher, but she plays either explicitly herself or a character named after her fourteen times, and probably characters based on her persona far more often than that—though I’m not inclined to watch through to find out how often. When she’s listed as things like “the movie star,” one can only assume she’s playing herself.

And yet, as she grew older, she seems to have come to something of a place of stability in her life. Her health was poor, but her last marriage was in 1986, and they seem to have been happy until the end. She’d suggested that they’d have a spectacular party for her hundredth birthday in February, then she’d return to Hungary, land of her birth, and live the rest of her life there. Which also means she was admitting her age.

You see, neither Wikipedia nor IMDb mention it, but for many years, the Gabor sisters fought like crazy to keep anyone from knowing how old they were. William Poundstone tried to figure it out for one of his Big Secrets books, and it was arguably easier to find out what the Colonel’s secret herbs and spices were. The sisters were so routine about shaving years off their ages that their birth order would sometimes seem wrong, and the only thing of reliable certainty was that their mother, Jolie, was definitely the oldest. (And, it turns out, a Holocaust survivor; eldest sister Magda’s no-one-seems-sure, Carlos de Almeida Fonseca Sampaio Garrido, the Portuguese ambassador to Hungary, smuggled her and a thousand other Jews out of Budapest. Her father and brother elected to stay, as apparently did her sisters, and Jolie was the only one to survive the war. I’m not sure how her husband, the sisters’ father, survived, though he did.) Even the New York Times is reporting that Zsa Zsa died at “probably 99.”