Jolie Gabor - Career

Career

In the 1930s, Jolie Gabor opened Crystello, a shop selling crystal and porcelain in Budapest, as well as Jolie's, a handmade-costume-jewelry shop at 4 Kigyo Utcza in Budapest; she also established another branch of her eponymous shop in Győr. Eventually there were five such shops in the Budapest area. The firm's jewels also incorporated semiprecious stones and were admired for their old-fashioned settings and workmanship. "Just like Bulgari is known in Rome, that's how well-known I was in Budapest", Jolie Gabor stated. "Jolie's did so well that at holiday time they were standing outside in line waiting until somebody goes out from the inside." The rise of Nazism in Germany forced her to curtail her retail business, Gabor recalled, "Everybody told, 'Jolie is crazy to go now to Berlin and Leipzig for jewelry.' I never went again."

She was forced to close the stores when Hungary was occupied by the Germans, at which time she and other family members fled to Portugal. They were assisted by Dr. Carlos Almeida Afonseca de Sampayo Garrido, Portuguese ambassador to Hungary — Gabor's daughter Magda reportedly was either his aide or his mistress — who provided safe passage to many Hungarian Jews in 1944. As an article in Vanity Fair stated in 2001, " was under auspices that the family, which was partly Jewish, had been spirited out of the country. (The girls' grandparents and other family members were killed by the Nazis.)" Her brother, Sebastian, also a jeweler, spent part of the war in labor camps, beginning in 1942, until he and their mother, Franceska, were killed in a bombing raid during World War II.

Gabor arrived in the United States on 30 December 1945. She opened a successful costume jewelry business (called Jolie Gabor) in New York City in 1946, with $7,200 borrowed from her daughters. It later moved to 699 Madison Avenue. Gabor also established a branch of the firm in Palm Springs, California. Among the company's designers were Elsa Beck, and Stephen Kelen d'Oxylion, as well as her own daughter, Magda. Beck's obituary was in The New York Times (15 February 2009). One of the saleswomen was Evangelia Callas, mother of future opera diva Maria Callas. In 1953 the store introduced ornamental metal fingernails studded with rhinestones. In 1975, Gabor signed with the Keene Lecture Bureau as an inspirational speaker on the subjects of beauty and personal empowerment.

The jewelry stores were sold by Gabor in the late 1980s to Madeleine Herling (née Magdalena Steingisser), a Hungarian-born businesswoman and philanthropist. Born in 1919 in Budapest and later a resident of São Paulo, Brazil, Herling was a daughter of Sigismund Steingisser and his wife, Frederica (née Pollachek).