At Home With the ‘Legendary’ Zsa Zsa

They came, they saw, they gawked. Some guests who attended Zsa Zsa Gabor’s recent party at her Bel-Air home celebrating the publication of her autobiography “One Lifetime Is Not Enough” were more interested in exploring her mansion than her memoirs. As one guest put it, the downstairs is K mart Versailles and the upstairs is paneled like the basement in “Wayne’s World.”

The gym features what must be the oldest exercise bike on Earth. “It looks like it was assembled by Torquemada,” noted an observer, an apparent fan of the Spanish Inquisition.

Those interested in Gabor’s book weren’t disappointed, either. Of awakening in the El Segundo jail she writes, “In my dazed state I remember that jewelry is not allowed in jail. Bitterly, I tell myself that my jailers, my fellow prisoners, and the press--usually so favorable to me but now circling the prison like vultures--must have laughed heartily at the sight of the legendary Zsa Zsa Gabor bereft of all her diamonds.”

Gabor’s husband, Prince Frederick von Anhalt, has his problems, too. Now that the Berlin wall is down, he wants his ancestral lands in what was East Germany back, pronto. They include 50,000 acres and six castles. “It is very hard to deal with Communists,” he said. “The least they should do is let us live in it.”

Not-So-Limited Edition

The king of aphorisms is back. Robert Grayson, who self-published two limited-edition books of aphorisms (“From Left to Right,” which sold for $5,000 per copy and “I’m Fabulous, You’re OK,” priced at a mere $250) has just written “See Dick, Run.” While the 33-year-old New York-based Grayson has lowered the price of his latest effort to a mere $19.95, he’s pushed the edge of the envelope in another way: The book is shaped like a part of the male anatomy.

Sample aphorisms from the new book: “Lust is modern man’s noblest emotion,” “Love may find you, but you can lose it in a crowd,” and “If you look for love in all the wrong places, you will lie about where you finally found it.”

Says Grayson, who is scouring New York for a place that will shrink-wrap the sure-to-be-controversial work, “If the issue of the whole book is my sex life, then I think my dates should be tax-deductible.”

Essentials

What you need to maneuver the L.A. scene: Now that we’re fully entrenched in the recession, one-upmanship has turned into one-downmanship as everyone tries to out-downscale one another. Flash is simply no longer in, even if you can afford it. Now it’s chic to brag about how poor you are. Executives are considering trading in their Porsches for Rabbits, big jewels are staying in the vault and one art dealer was heard saying, “I have all the time in the world and no money.”