Devin Wilder of Moose Jaw, Sask., bought this 1985 Rolls-Royce Silver Spur not knowing its previous owner was famous socialite Eva Gabor.Amber Bracken/The Globe and Mail
Whooo boy, does she turn heads. Every time she’s out, people honk and ogle and whip around to take her all in. Can you blame them? You don’t see curves like that every day, and especially not on the streets of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, population 34,872 at last count.
Devin Wilder first laid eyes on her over FaceTime. He grew up working on cars on the family farm and had bought, restored and sold close to 60 vehicles by then. He’d been around the block enough to know when a car is special, and this 1985 Rolls-Royce was – well, he’d never seen anything like it.
“All the body lines, the gaps, everything is perfect because it’s never been taken apart,” he says. “From any angle, everything is perfect.”
Ms. Gabor was 66 years old when she bought the Rolls-Royce with its gleaming red interior, one of several such cars she’d bought over the years.Amber Bracken/The Globe and Mail
A vintage Rolls-Royce is not a car for the faint of heart, nor for the weak of wallet. The parts are almost non-existent, the mechanicals exacting and temperamental. Having previously restored two of them, Mr. Wilder knew what he was getting into. But he couldn’t resist.
“It was owned by a celebrity,” Mr. Wilder told his mother, when he got the new Rolls home to Saskatchewan. “I think it’s a D-list celebrity. Like, she wasn’t really famous.” He couldn’t fully remember the woman’s name. “Eva Gabbar?”
“You don’t think Eva Gabor was famous?” his mother exclaimed. “She was Marilyn Monroe before Marilyn Monroe was Marilyn Monroe! The Gabor sisters were the sex icons of their generation.”
From the time they began making headlines in the 1940s, Eva Gabor, her outrageous sister Zsa Zsa and the less famous Magda, were the very picture of Hollywood celebrity. Actresses and personalities whose extravagant collection of husbands – five for Eva, nine for Zsa Zsa, six for Magda – was surpassed only by their passion for luxury vehicles.
The record is silent on when exactly Eva Gabor started collecting Rolls-Royces, but in 1967, her vehicular purchases were headline news. Literally. A story ran in newspapers across the country, with the headline: “Eva Gabor Buys another Rolls-Royce.” The article noted she had accumulated three in just over four years.
Mr. Wilder gets a lot of attention when he drives the eye-catching car.Amber Bracken/The Globe and Mail
At the time, Eva Gabor was in her late 40s and the star of Green Acres, a sitcom about a New York socialite forced to relocate to the country. Ms. Gabor was the glittering centre of the show, upstaged only by its pig, Arnold Ziffel.
“I could start to hear the clock ticking,” Ms. Gabor told the reporter in 1967, about buying her fourth Rolls. “So each time I decide I need a new one.”
Was the ticking clock she heard counting down the run of her popular TV show? The dwindling years of a bankable actress in Hollywood? Or was she starting to feel the fleeting nature of life itself?
Whatever the case, she was 66 years old when she bought the 1985 black Silver Spur with a poppy red interior. A photo shows her standing beside it in a classic slim dress and a long strand of pearls, her blonde coif so iconic she marketed an eponymous wig in the style.
(For the record, it was Zsa Zsa, not Eva, who slapped a police officer after being pulled over in a Rolls-Royce in Beverly Hills a few years later, an encounter described then as “the slap heard around the world.”)
A photograph of Ms. Gabor with the car.Amber Bracken/The Globe and Mail
When she died in 1995, the car was sold by her estate and moved from Los Angeles to Florida. In 2011, a businessman brought it to Calgary. It sat there until 2022, when Mr. Wilder bought it and moved it to Saskatchewan. Recently, he put it up for sale again. He thought it should be seen and appreciated, and not just sit in his garage in Moose Jaw.
“I love the experience of cars,” he says. “I get asked that a lot, ‘How can you sell cars after you own them?’ I don’t have a possessive ownership over vehicles. I love to share them. I would love everyone to see this car if they could.”
Sometimes, when he’s driving Eva Gabor’s Rolls-Royce down the streets of Moose Jaw, he thinks about all the places the car has been and the people who have been chauffeured around in it. Where were they going? What would they have done? He found some old cigarette butts in the crevices of the car and he keeps them in a Ziploc bag as part of the car’s journey, a clue to people and places far away and long past.
Amber Bracken/The Globe and Mail