It’s Simple, Dahling: Zsa Zsa’s in a Slap-Happy Pantomime

Nigel Miles-Thomas figures he got lucky.

The British director of “Cinderella,” which opens Tuesday on the UCLA campus, has snagged a genuine celebrity to appear as his Fairy Godmother--Zsa Zsa Gabor. A big name is the very thing this production needed, since “Cinderella” is a traditional English pantomime, and virtually nobody in the United States knows what this is. Gabor certainly didn’t. Like most people, she had visions of Marcel Marceau.

“That’s when you don’t talk, isn’t it?” she asked her agent, wondering what perverse soul would want her for a show in which she didn’t talk, since that is so obviously her forte.

Well, no, that’s not what a pantomime is. As Miles-Thomas explained, the panto, as it is usually called, is a traditional Christmas entertainment--part play, part variety show, part spectacle--that has been tearing British families away from their Yule logs for more than a century. It has singing and dancing and costumes lit up like Christmas trees and jugglers and cross-dressing, and this one will have Zsa Zsa, with a magic wand and dresses to die for.

Miles-Thomas’ co-producer, Michael Blaha, thought of casting Gabor after he saw her cameo in the new “Beverly Hillbillies” movie. Miles-Thomas makes it clear that he would have been glad to have her under any circumstances, but, best of all, she has turned out to be nothing like her reputation.

“She’s been an absolute joy for us,” Miles-Thomas said. The celebrated Hungarian has invited Miles-Thomas’ 2-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter out to her Simi Valley ranch and taken them riding. She brings cookies for the cast. She works hard at rehearsals and, like any good actor, contributes to the evolution of the production. “She’s a great suggestion-maker,” said Miles-Thomas, who listens when she tells him some bit of dialogue or business is just too British for Angelenos to comprehend.

As Miles-Thomas was singing her praises last week, Gabor arrived at a morning rehearsal, bearing a UCLA sweat shirt as a gift for her director. “Isn’t he gorgeous?” she said of Miles-Thomas, who once played Lord Byron and is as darkly handsome as the poet. Whatever else she may be, Gabor isn’t reticent. Sporting a diamond as big as a Balkan state, she was barely seated before she began a salty account of her previous day in court with actress Elke Sommer.

In recent years, Gabor has collected court dates the way black velvet collects lint. She wrested the tabloids away from the British royals in 1990 when she went to jail for three days for slapping a Beverly Hills police officer. And now she is in civil court after Sommer sued her for defamation, claiming, among other things, that Gabor said Sommer had no money.

Gabor recounted how the jury had howled with laughter the previous day when she testified about Sommer’s alleged contention that Gabor has a large rump. “If I have a big ass, I can’t help it,” Gabor said under oath. She added that she thought she had done very well with her posterior, thank you.

The case has already cost her $27,000 in lawyer’s fees, she lamented. “It’s not easy being Zsa Zsa Gabor.”

Unlike many of her Hollywood contemporaries, Gabor has a host of current projects. She did one of the voices in the recent animated version of Snow White called “Happily Ever After.” And she has an exercise video coming out. “It’s called, ‘It’s Simple, Dahling.’ ”

Gabor has always been a tomboy, she said. It runs in the family. “My mother is 92, and she still swims!” The only prop you need to do Gabor’s exercise routine, she said, leaping up to demonstrate, is a chair. “You have to move. If you don’t move, you get old.” Exercise is essential to staying youthful, but it is also a pain in the part of the body that preoccupies Elke Sommer, Gabor noted under her breath.

In Simi Valley, Gabor has stables for 58 horses and is proud of the fact that she rescued dozens of animals during the recent wildfires. “I saved 23 horses, a bird, a dog and a goat,” she said. “That’s why I work so hard. I have all these animals to support.”

“Cinderella” is great fun, Gabor said. She gets to sing Cole Porter’s “Friendship” and to dance (“Can you believe it?”). And there’s the delicious irony of acting as the magical adviser to a beautiful young woman who goes from rags to riches. “I will teach you how to catch a prince, how to keep a prince and how to get rid of a prince,” Gabor’s Fairy Godmother tells Cinderella.

Of course, Gabor herself had nothing after World War II, except her wits and extraordinary good looks. And she has been at the ball longer than most--and her present husband (her eighth) is indeed a prince, Frederick Von Anhalt.

Gabor doesn’t waste a minute. While waiting for rehearsal to begin, she updated her Christmas card list, culling the dead from the living in her address book. She put an X through Sammy Davis’ name and that of a favorite hairdresser, both gone.

Since panto can be raucous, a reporter can’t resist asking if she has written in any autobiographical business. “Have you slapped anyone?”

Gabor threw back her head and laughed.

“Not yet.”

* ‘CINDERELLA’ “Cinderella” begins Tuesday at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse and runs for six weeks. For ticket information, call (310) 825-2101.