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Gabor's hubby claims paternity
10/02/2007 13:54 - (SA)
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| Prince Frederick von Anhalt at a news conference in Los Angeles, announcing that he and Anna Nicole Smith had a decade-long affair and may be her infant daughter's father. (Nick Ut, AP) |
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Los Angeles - The husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor says he had a decade-long affair with Anna Nicole Smith and may be her infant daughter's father.
The claim by Prince Frederic von Anhalt on Friday comes amid a paternity suit over Smith's five-month-old daughter, Dannielynn.
The birth certificate lists Dannielynn's father as attorney Howard K Stern, but former Smith boyfriend Larry Birkhead is waging a legal challenge, saying he is the father.
"If you go back from September, she wasn't with one of those guys, she was with me," Von Anhalt told The Associated Press in an interview on Friday.
He said he would file a lawsuit if Dannielynn was turned over to Stern or Birkhead.
Von Anhalt, 59, and Gabor, 90, have been married for more than 20 years.
Gabor, a onetime sex symbol and star of such 1950s films as Moulin Rouge and Queen of Outer Space, has been in declining health in recent years and she had a stroke in 2005.
She was partially paralysed in a car crash in 2002.
'Zsa Zsa knew'
Von Anhalt, who was Gabor's eighth husband, said he and Smith met in the 1990s when Smith was still married to elderly oil tycoon J Howard Marshall II.
He said Smith approached him and Gabor at the Plaza Hotel in New York.
"She was a very big fan of Zsa Zsa and wanted to be like Zsa Zsa," he said. "She wanted to be a princess."
He said the two started an affair soon after, meeting over the years in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.
For much of that time, he said, Smith urged him to make her a princess like his wife.
But short of divorcing the actress, he said the only solution would have been adopting Smith.
Von Anhalt said he did consider that and even filled out adoption papers, but Gabor refused to sign them.
He said he never admitted the affair to his wife, but that he was sure she knew.
"She was a very sexy woman," Von Anhalt said. "To have an affair with her is the top."
All claims are doubtful
Publicist Edward Lozzi, who said he had handled publicity for Gabor when she was convicted of slapping a Beverly Hills police officer in a 1989 traffic stop, said he doubted Von Anhalt's claim, and called him a "chronic fabricator".
"There are some people who are married to famous people and take advantage of it," said Lozzi, who said he had dated Smith three times and had spoken with her within the last year.
Both Von Anhalt and John Blanchette, Gabor's long-time publicist, said Lozzi was a hanger-on and never the family's official publicist.
"He's the one taking advantage of it," said Von Anhalt.
Ronald Jason Palmieri, an attorney who has represented Gabor and Von Anhalt for 15 years, was also sceptical about the paternity claim.
"I have to believe my client, but it's still surreal," he told the Los Angeles Times. "I would find it completely implausible that he is the father of that child."
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