Today’s DOTD - Drink Of The Day - is an Illusion cocktail, inspired by Hollywood actress, Hungarian-American icon, & socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor getting arrested this day in 1989 for slapping a police officer.
Zsa Zsa Gabor was a bit of an illusory figure herself, the kind of unusual person who it might be hard to believe even existed. Gabor was an actress and a socialite, known for both her extravagance and her history of serial marriages, being married nine times in her life. She had two sisters, who also escaped to the U.S., one of whom - Eva Gabor - also became a famous Hollywood actress. If Zsa Zsa Gabor were alive and came to prominence today, she absolutely would have been a reality TV star.
Gabor was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1917, to an ethnically Jewish family, who’d converted to Catholicism. Her mother was a jewelry shop owner & her father a Royal Hungarian Army officer. After being sent to Swiss boarding school, in January 1933, she won second runner up in the Miss Hungary pageant, which jump-started her career as an actress. As Hitler’s war expanded across Europe, Gabor left Hungary for the United States, though she once claimed she’d danced with Hitler twice.
Throughout her life, Zsa Zsa Gabor was known for both her unusual stories and her bizarre yet memorable comments. She was the originator of such infamous lines as “I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back” and “I am a marvelous housekeeper - every time I leave a man, I keep his house.” Unsurprisingly, it was her outrageousness that led to her arrest for slapping a cop.
The story behind the slap goes like this.
Gabor was driving her $215,000 Rolls-Royce through Beverly Hills on this day in 1989 when Beverly Hills Police motorcycle cop Paul Kramer stopped her for driving her car with expired registration tags. When Officer Kramer went back to his motorcycle to check for other violations, Gabor drove off. Kramer, of course, chased her down & stopped her again - and that’s when the act media called “the slap heard round the world” happened. To say the incident was unnecessarily contentious would be an understatement, with Officer Kramer swearing at the actress, and Gabor slapping the officer, and with Gabor ending up in handcuffs and heading to trial.
The trial, which began three months after the incident, was filled with drama and ridiculousness, and even included a re-enactment with Gabor & Kramer. Much of the trial was televised, and dissected through the media, a precursor to the O.J. Simpson trial in an era long before social media.
In the end, the jury found Zsa Zsa Gabor guilty of driving without a license and possessing an open container of alcohol—a flask of Jack Daniel’s—when Officer Kramer stopped her.
Today’s DOTD is a bit of an homage to Ms. Gabor, being a bit unusual and also a drink that - as the kids say these days - really slaps.
Ingredients
Here’s what you’re going to need for this drink:
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