How to Write a Book

The blonde relaxes across the sofa. Pink dress, pink shoes, pink toenails and pink lipstick dominate a background of blue phlox and red roses. "John," she calls. "Bring in the babies."

From somewhere in the Bel Air mansion overlooking Hollywood, the butler appears with four squirming Yorkshire terriers and one beribboned miniature French poodle. Off in a corner, a burly, bald man toys with a tape recorder. "How do you parse champagne?" he asks suddenly. "How do you imprison it on a page?"

"Who, me?" asks the woman.

The verbal pingpong has started for the day. International Party Girl Zsa Zsa Gabor and Autobiographical Collaborator Gerold Frank have begun their daily attack on the intricate task of translating Zsa Zsa onto the pages of a book. Ex-Newsman Frank (New York Journal-American) comes to the task with impressive qualifications. A veteran ghostwriter for wartime marines and submariners (Out in the Boondocks, U.S.S. Seawolf), longtime freelancer and magazine editor (Coronet), he now makes literary collaboration with show-business characters his well-paying specialty. After nearly 5,000 hours of listening, he in effect wrote Lillian Roth's I'll Cry Tomorrow, Diana Barrymore's Too Much, Too Soon and Sheilah Graham's Beloved Infidel. All three were bestsellers and earned more than $250,000 for 51-year-old Co-Author Frank (married, two children). Whatever he gets from working up the proper empathy with Zsa Zsa, he will deserve every cent.

Who's Frustrated? Zsa Zsa has ideas about the book: "I know practically everyone in the whole world," she says in her rich Hungarian accent, which is as hard to render in print as Eliza Doolittle's cockney. "I want to make it clear that I'm not just the dumb blonde who wisecracks."

But Frank has ideas too: "I think this is a unique woman. What passes through her mind when she sees men? I must probe your frustrations."

Zsa Zsa: "I'm not frustrated."

The recorder is purring softly; the mike is cradled close to Zsa Zsa's bosom.

Frank: "What makes Zsa Zsa Gabor? I myself feel you are a woman in the unadulterated form who might have lived 100 years ago--pure and chaste."

Zsa Zsa (screaming): "Chaste! Everybody's going to think I'm insane."

Frank: "I mean that you are a pure example as something discovered in Greece 2,000 years ago. There's freedom, a freshness, a spontaneity. Is it just a complete and artful acceptance of your own femininity? Let's say you've just come into a room. Who do you see?"

Zsa Zsa: "I see only the women first."

Frank: "Do you think of the women in the room as your rivals?"

Zsa Zsa (haughtily): "I never in my life thought I lose a man if I give him love and affection. American law is against a woman. If I go in a room and see a very attractive man, I don't think about him as a man, but as a business partner. My class woman has no chance for love. She thinks, dammit, the man's marrying me for my money. It's only poor people who are really happy."

Which Century? Frank takes time out to explain to a visitor: "Sometimes it takes two hours of talking before we get five minutes we can use--and then maybe Zsa Zsa will say, 'We can't use this.' The whole thing takes as long as having a baby." Persistently, Frank gets back to work: "What do you like in men?"

Zsa Zsa: "Strength, intelligence and truth.*Playing games I have no time for."

Frank: "Do you do social work among the rich, as Oscar Levant says?"

Zsa Zsa: "This is utterly ridiculous. I don't know what social work is."

Frank: "Would you like to be Mme. de Stael?"

Zsa Zsa: "Of course. I'd like to be all the great women--De Stael, Pompadour, Du Barry and Josephine. Everyone says I belong in the wrong century. But I can't help that."

Frank (visibly tiring): "I'm still on the outskirts of that strange continent called Zsa Zsa. I don't know what rivers and tributaries there'll be ... Would you resent being called an amalgam of quicksilver, champagne and steel?"

Zsa Zsa: "Yes, I am steel--and platinum."

Frank: "And sharp Sheffield steel." Zsa Zsa: "We write a good book and we get rich! We write a -bad book and we get poorer and poorer."

Frank: "We want it to be a good book." Zsa Zsa (sadly): "That's impossible."

*Actress Gabor's specific choices in matrimony: No.1, Turkish Diplomat Burhan Beige; No. 2, Hotelman Conrad Hilton; No. 3, Actor George Sanders.

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