Zsa Zsa Gabor is 94 years old and in failing health. We’ve heard dire reports about her for months and I don’t want to sound heartless about it but I honestly didn’t expect her to live this long. Not a lot of people make it to their mid 90s and she just needed to have a leg amputated above the knee in January.

Zsa Zsa has collected plenty of husbands in her time (I just checked and she’s on her ninth! I would have guessed five or six tops) but she only has one child, Francesca Hilton, 64, from her marriage to Conrad Hilton from 1942 – 1946. Zsa Zsa’s current husband, the hilariously named Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, 67, wants to make Zsa Zsa a mom again and says he wants to carry on the Gabor name. He just announced plans to have a baby via a surrogate. It wouldn’t be Zsa Zsa’s biological child of course, but he wants her to sort-of be the mother if this scheme is successful.

Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband wants his 94-year-old wife to become a mother again using an egg donor, artificial insemination and a surrogate mother, Prince Frederic von Anhalt told CNN Thursday.

“I’ve gone through the initial steps of donor matching and blood work and next week the donation process will begin,” von Anhalt said.

Gabor’s only child, Francesca Hilton, described herself as shocked when told of the plan Thursday.

“That’s just weird,” Hilton said.

Von Anhalt, 67, said he is working with Dr. Mark Surry of the Southern California Reproductive Center in Beverly Hills. CNN calls to the center have not been returned.

Gabor has suffered major health problems in the last year, including hip replacement surgery and a leg amputation. She has been unable to walk since a 2002 car accident.

“I’m a retired guy,” von Anhalt said. “I can take care of it.”

Gabor talked about adding a new baby to the family when they got married 25 years ago, and she brought the topic up again in recent months, he said.

One reason is their desire to have someone carry on the famous Gabor name. None of her two sisters left an heir and her only child does not use the Gabor name, von Anhalt said.

Francesca Hilton, 64, is Gabor’s only child, the product of her second marriage to hotel magnate Conrad Hilton.

She told CNN that her full name is Constance Francesca Gabor Hilton.

The process, which includes finding an egg donor and a surrogate mother to give birth to the baby, will cost about $100,000, von Anhalt estimated.

The prince, who acquired his royal title when he was adopted as an adult by a German woman, is Gabor’s ninth husband.
He has complained in recent months about financial burdens caused by his wife’s hospitalizations. While he put their Bel Air, California mansion up for sale earlier this year, he said he is not actively marketing it.

“In life you need something to live for,” he said. “If my wife passes away before me, I have nothing to live for.”

[From CNN]

I don’t know what this guy is playing at but this is ridiculous. “I need something to live for” – so you get a baby at 67? This is the guy who “adopted” about four grown men in recent years in exchange for millions of dollars for the right to use the Prinz von Anhalt name, which was bestowed on Frédéric when he himself was adopted as an adult at 37 by German nobility. (Or former nobility, it hasn’t counted for much there in some time.) So why does he want a baby now? Does he want to ensure that whatever is left of Zsa Zsa’s fortune goes to that child rather than her daughter that is right around his age? Does he really want some kind of purpose and future companion in life? Either way, it’s really sketchy. He’s been married to Zsa Zsa for 24 years though and that counts for something.

Header photo is from 2/6/11. First photo below of Zsa Zsa in a wheelchair is from 1/26/10. There are also older photos of these two from 1994 (red dress) and 1998 (blue dress). Credit: WENN and Fame