'Finding Zsa Zsa' review: There's more to Gabor than you think

When it comes to Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor, it's hard to keep them straight. Which one slapped the cop? Who said, "New York is where I'd rather stay"? Why, after so many years, should we even try to distinguish them?

On the basis of Sam Staggs's freewheeling "Finding Zsa Zsa," should we be making larger distinctions? Eva found her fame through an exercise in cornpone surrealism called "Green Acres," through which she floated, in Staggs' unimprovable phrase, "like Titania among the rustics."

The book's main focus is on Zsa Zsa, who was 18 when she inveigled a Turkish diplomat to the altar. She joined him on a lecture tour of London, and Staggs' greatest biographical coup may be the unearthed photo of kittenish Zsa Zsa drawing the eye of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw.

But Zsa Zsa had ideas beyond being a muse. After shedding Husband No. 1, she traveled with her 21 suitcases from Istanbul to Baghdad to Karachi, Pakistan, across the Pacific and through the Panama Canal. Within 10 months of landing in New York, she had bagged her second husband, pious hotelier Conrad Hilton. "Whatever else could be said about Zsa Zsa," wrote Husband No. 3, actor George Sanders, "she has a lot of guts."

On screen, she was a glowing presence in John Huston's "Moulin Rouge" (1952). The headlines surrounding her relationship with playboy Porfirio Rubirosa made Zsa Zsa fatally unserious about acting, and the rest of her career was a decline into self-parody. Her final years found her a mere invalid, tethered to and exploited by Husband No. 9, a bogus German prince whose lust for publicity may have exceeded hers.

Staggs is an invaluable film chronicler whose work has always toggled between the engrossing and the overwrought. He bridles at those who would link the names Gabor and Kardashian, but didn't the Gabor sisters stay famous because, in Staggs' words, "they never stopped working at it"?

And when did a Paris or a Kim make you laugh the way Zsa Zsa does when she says, "I believe in large families. Every girl should have at least three husbands." The Gabors saw their joke before anybody else did, and they laughed like the survivors they were.