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Hollywood Crime Scene · Rachel Fisher and Desi Jedeikin

Episode 389 - Zsa Zsa Gabor Part 3

April 2, 2026·1 hr·4 clips
Zsa Zsa slapped a Beverly Hills cop after he told her to fuck off — then said it meant go in London.
The file is thick. Rachel opens the final installment with Sam Stagg's Finding Zsa Zsa as the main source, plus a 2007 Vanity Fair piece and newspaper articles from the time. George Sanders is gone, and Zsa Zsa has separated from Josh Cosden, the fifth husband whose oil-money image gets a hard squint. Then Broadway wanders in. Her 1970 run in 40 Carrots gets treated like a real prestige play, partly because Julie Harris had created the role and won a Tony for it. Joan Fontaine had played it too, so Zsa Zsa stepping into the part feels gutsy, odd, and completely like her. The messiest stretch belongs to Von Onholt. He wants to meet a movie star, ideally Zsa Zsa, and offers a celebrity photographer $10,000 to arrange the photo. Nobody in the room mistakes that for subtlety. Rachel and Desi read the whole move as less romance than a rich man's checklist, while Zsa Zsa responds like someone who has already seen several versions of this movie. Somehow, it lasts three years. He goes back to Germany because Hollywood may be too much, then comes back, and the engagement follows. August 1986 makes it official. Zsa Zsa is around 70, he is in his 50s, and the mood is not exactly misty-eyed. Jolie is not buying it. She suspects Von Ahnhal is a con man and refuses to attend, which hits harder because she had tolerated plenty before. The New York Post detail is the kicker: Jolie had been ready to give a diamond ring, then was not speaking to her daughter the next week. Rachel and Desi end with affection for Zsa Zsa as a kind of celebrity that does not really exist now: ridiculous, glamorous, absurd, instantly known, and almost impossible to recreate.

As heard by us

A brisk, funny finale about Zsa Zsa Gabor's late-life glamour, messy marriage politics, and tabloid legend.

Hollywood Crime Scene closes its Zsa Zsa Gabor series with a sharp look at the later, stranger stretch of her public life: a Broadway run in 40 Carrots, the aftermath of another split, and the three-year courtship that led to her 1986 marriage to von Anhalt.

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Why you'd press play

He paid $10,000 for an introduction to Zsa Zsa Gabor, and three years later she married him.

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