We have come to answer a sinister question: Is the ersatz princess, otherwise known as Zsa Zsa Gabor, being held prisoner by the ersatz prince in her gilded aerie, a decaying Bel Air mansion that once hosted Hollywood’s most dazzling luminaries but now brings to mind an ominous scene out of Sunset Boulevard?

In the ensuing weeks, other pressing questions will arise. Was the prince stripped naked, robbed, and tied up by a gun-toting gang of hot lesbians? Were aliens from outer space involved? And whose daddy is he, exactly?

But initially, at least, the issues seem simpler, or at least as simple as anything involving Zsa Zsa and her consort could ever be—which is to say, not very.

It has been several months since the gossip columnist Cindy Adams—a longtime friend and biographer of Zsa Zsa’s late mother, Jolie Gabor—suggested in print that Prince Frédéric von Anhalt had locked up his wife, preventing her from seeing or even talking to old friends. This charge greatly upset von Anhalt, the aging German stud who counts himself as Zsa Zsa’s 10th husband, although she claims to have married a mere eight. In high dudgeon, he determined to prove that he takes fine care of his elderly wife, who suffered a devastating car accident in 2002 and a massive stroke in 2005.

And so he decided that Zsa Zsa—who has repeatedly turned down buckets of money from tabloids desperate for an interview, according to the prince—would consent to be interviewed and photographed for the first time in many years.

The only problem was persuading Herself to go along with the plan. How difficult could this be, after all? Zsa Zsa is partially disabled and totally dependent on her strapping, virile husband, who looks as if he could effortlessly crumple men half his age into little pretzels. But getting Zsa Zsa to cooperate turned out to be as simple as figuring out how old she is. The prince confides that Zsa Zsa was quite put out by his unexpected claim to be the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s billion-dollar baby. The resulting media furor did not improve Zsa Zsa’s mood, already soured by the indignities of decrepitude. “She doesn’t want to talk, because she thinks people make her old,” the prince warns me before I meet her. “She hates to talk about the age. She doesn’t believe she’s 90 years old. She says she’s 82.”

When Zsa Zsa married Frédéric, she listed the year of her birth as 1930, although this would have made her seven years old when she married her first husband. Most sources list her birth year as 1917, but Zsa Zsa has long maintained that she and her sisters, Eva and Magda, pretended to be older than they really were when they first arrived in America.

“I don’t think she’s 90, but I don’t even want to know,” says the prince, who gives his own age as 58. But 21 years ago, when he married Zsa Zsa, he was widely reported to be 43, and many sources now put him in his early 70s.

Zsa Zsa Gabor and her ninth (or so) husband, Prince Frédéric von Anhalt, at home in Bel Air. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

The Gabors always adjusted the facts to suit the needs of the moment, according to Cindy Adams. “They would lie about everything,” Adams says. “When I wrote my book about Jolie, Eva was getting married to her 44th husband, and the wedding gown was very décolleté. Between the fleshly hills of Gabor was a cross larger than St. Peter’s Basilica. The Gabors were Jewish, so I said to Jolie, ‘What’s with the goddamn cross?’ Jolie said, ‘Eva’s new about-to-be-husband hates the Jews, so in this book you make us Catholic.’ They have always lived with no reality; there was never any truth to anything.”