From the late 1970s through the mid 1980s, the City Line Dinner Theater was a place where you could pig-out at the buffet, and then see a washed-up star going through the motions, in what was once a broadway hit (maybe a decade or two ago) – all for under $20.
In his June 2, 1983 review of the Dinner Theater’s production of “Forty Carats,” Stewart Ettinger wrote of the show’s star, in the Courrier Post, “at 64, she is just not believable as a 40-year-old divorcee being chased by a young man of 22.”
Ettinger added that “Zsa Zsa was a success in the same play on Broadway in the early 1970s … she is stiff. Her lines are often flat and she plays to the audience instead of her very able co-stars.”
But getting panned in the Courrier Post, turned out to be least of Zsa Zsa’s problems during what was supposed to be a one-month run for her, at the City Line Dinner Theater. On the same day when Ettinger was trashing the fabulous Zsa Zsa’s portrayal of Ann Stanley, in the Courrier Post – more than 150 other newspapers from coast to coast were running an AP story detailing how a group of handicapped people, some in tears, abruptly left a dinner theater after entertainer [note they did not refer to her as an actress] Zsa Zsa Gabor refused to keep performing unless they moved from tables near the stage, according to their escort.
Zsa Zsa Fired
That same day, Gabor was fired from the cast of Forty Carats, and the performance scheduled for that night was canceled. The Philadelphia Daily News wrote –
“This is the most unbelievable frameup in my life,” the actress said in an interview in her dressing room after learning that her contract with the show had been terminated. “I am not going to apologize for something I did not do. They have to pay me $50,000,” she said. “I just have the very good luck of not having to play any longer in this terrible theater.”
What Actually Happened
The next day (June 3, 1983), the Inquirer reported that –
A group of 16 head-trauma patients and nine staff members from the Woods Schools, in Langhorne, Bucks County, were in attendance near the stage. At intermission, theater officials told them that Miss Gabor felt “distracted” by the presence of six of them in wheelchairs near the stage, and that they would have to move before the show could continue.
After the discussion went on for several minutes, with theater employees shuttling between the group and Miss Gabor’s dressing room, the group decided to leave rather than undergo further embarrassment.
Of course, that was not the end of it.
L’affaire Zsa Zsa continued to consume lots of ink, and not just in the Philadelphia papers. Between June 3 and June 17 of 1983, more than 750 stories ran in papers throughout the county, about her exploits at the Dinner Theater.
The Monsignor weighs in
On June 13, 1983, when almost everybody in town was thinking that whatever could be said about the Zsa Zsa story had been said already, Monsignor S.J. Adamo decided to share his thoughts about the controversy, in a long opinion piece that ran in the Daily News – He wrote that “any time I’ve seen Zsa Zsa perform on TV talk shows she always made me happy that I was a celibate.”
The monsignor then suggested that maybe everybody had been a little too rough on poor old Zsa Zsa
Epilogue
Within a year-and-a-half of the Zsa Zsa fiasco, Tabas Enterprises, owners of the City Line Dinner Theater, were no longer putting on theatrical productions at that location. But that did not stop the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission from ruling that they had unlawfully discriminated against the group from the Woods Schools, two years earlier.
Harold Barbour was the President of the Woods Schools at the time of the incident. When Barbour died in 1991, the Inquirer wrote – Two days later, she called the school about midnight “and told us she was coming. She wanted to know how many chocolates to bring,” Mr. Barbour was quoted as saying. But the peace offering never happened. She did not show.
Zsa Zsa Gabor died on December 18, 2016, at the age of 99. The next day, both the Inquirer and the Daily News ran an AP obituary that made no mention of the City Line Dinner Theater Incident.