Jolie Gabor; Matriarch of Flamboyant Family

Jolie Gabor, the elegant Hungarian matriarch of the much-married Gabor family, has died. She was 97.

Gabor, the mother of actresses Eva and Zsa Zsa and socialite Magda Gabor, died Tuesday at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage.

“Mama” Gabor, as she was called, once denied to a Times interviewer that she ever taught her daughters to become gold diggers. Instead, she said, she urged them to earn their own living and to marry not for millions but for happiness. With three marriages for Jolie, the four Gabors have married a total of 18 times.

“Because when you can support yourself,” she said, “you can choose your husbands. You have not to be the slave of a rich man.”

After coming to America in 1950, Gabor designed jewelry and owned jewelry boutiques in New York and Palm Springs.

Like her three daughters, Gabor charmed the Hollywood social set with her beauty, fractured English--including calling everyone “darlingk”--and her strong ego.

“I was always dying when I was young to be an actress but then I became 40. I thought it was too late,” she said in the 1975 interview. “Now I am happy, not only because I have had wonderful riches enough for happiness but because I am a celebrity. I give lectures. And when I am on a podium and I have a microphone and the limelight, then I feel like the big actress. So it worked out.”

Like her two actress daughters, Gabor also wrote a tell-all book of her memoirs, which was published in 1975 and titled “Jolie Gabor.”

Unlike Zsa Zsa, who had a single photograph of her mother in her book, and Eva, who left her out of her book entirely, Mama Gabor had 17 photos of Magda, 18 photos of Eva, 21 photos of Zsa Zsa and only 39 photos of herself in her book.

She is survived by daughters Zsa Zsa of Bel-Air and Magda of Palm Springs, and granddaughter, Francesca, of Hollywood Hills. Eva Gabor died in 1995 at age 74.

Services are planned for Friday at Desert Memorial Park in Palm Springs.