Jolie Gabor - Family

Family

Born Jancsi Tilleman in Budapest, she was the third child and third daughter of a Jewish couple, Hungarian-born Josef Tilleman and his Austrian-born wife, Franceska (née Reinherz), prosperous jewelers who owned a jewelry shop called The Diamond House. After the death of Josef Tilleman, Franceska married Dr. Miksa Kende, a physician.

Gabor's friend, Cindy Adams, who helped with Jolie's memoirs, once recalled one of Eva Gabor's weddings, at which the bride wore a cross, "They would lie about everything ... 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."

Jolie's birthname is usually used for males in Hungary: "My parents were so eager to have a son they named me Jancsi, which translated comes out Little John or Johnny", Gabor said later in life. She had two elder sisters, Janette and Dora; a younger sister, Rozsika (aka Rosalie), and a younger brother, Sebastian. The fate of her three sisters during the Holocaust remains unclear. Jolie was an aunt to Annette Tilleman, wife of Hungarian-American congressman and Holocaust survivor Tom Lantos. Annette was the daughter of Sebastian Tilleman, Jolie's only brother — who was killed in a bombing raid during World War II, along with their mother.

The year of Gabor's birth is murky. She claimed to have been born in 1900 and once jokingly said she had lied so much about her age she didn't remember her actual birth date. Her obituary in The New York Times gave a birth year of 1900. On a passenger manifest dated 30 December 1945, however, Gabor gives her age as 45 years and two months, which would mean, if true, she was born in 1899. Published accounts of her third marriage, in 1957, have Gabor stating her age as 54, which would mean a virtually impossible birth year of 1903. Author Dominick Dunne stated, in 1995, perhaps in jest, that Jolie Gabor was believed to be 109, which would mean a birth year of approximately 1886. The 1987 edition of Biographical Dictionary, however, states that Gabor's birthday was 29 September 1896, as does the 1959 International Celebrity Register.

Her mother's family, the Reinherzes, had established jewelry shops in Vienna, and an uncle of Franceska Tilleman helped his niece and her husband to open The Diamond House, located at 54 Rakoczy Ut, in downtown Budapest, which specialized, despite the shop's name, in artificial pearls.