Fake Your Way to the Top

Zsa Zsa Gabor, the "Prince" Frederic Prinz von Anhalt and...the "Counsel" Weyer Graf von Yorck

"You can fake your way to the top.” I remember thinking, wow, when I first heard that Dreamgirls tune back in 1981 at the Imperial in New York. Eddie, you and Beyonce were great in the movie adaptation, but nobody could possibly best the originals; Cleavant Derricks and Jennifer Holliday. I can’t help but wonder if Frederic Prinz von Anhalt, one of the world’s greatest “mythomaniacs” of all time might too have been in the audience prior to his 1986 marriage to Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Fake his way, he has. Anhalt’s schitck is that he was adopted in 1980 by Princess Marie Auguste of Anhalt at which time he changed his name from Hans Robert Lichtenberg or Hans-Georg Lichtenberg, depending on who you believe. The adoption and name change did not confer any title or nobility, and the Ducal Family of Anhalt does not include Prinz von Anhalt as a member. Further, Germany’s monarchy was extinct by 1919. Frederic has said that he was a friend of Princess Marie Auguste's only child, Prince Karl of Prussia who died in a 1975 automobile accident, and that the grieving mother adopted him out of kindness and gave him the name Prince Frederic von Anhalt of Munich, the Duke of Saxony.

However, according to other sources, Princess Marie Auguste was bankrupt and the adoption was a business deal pioneered by Hans Hermann Weyer, a former window dresser who became an “honorary consul” of Bolivia, SA in Luxembourg. Weyer became better known in the 1960s as a “title broker,” for selling certificates of nobility, decorations, and degrees from invented colleges and universities. Jailed several times on fraud charges, he was described in 1982 by John Vinocur, then chief of The New York Times in Bonn as the greatest hotel “lobby rat," and, “a Munich rogue who sold phony titles to men who presumably wanted nothing better than being summoned to the phone." Weyer himself was “adopted” as an adult, in 1996, by a Countess of Yorck of Wartenberg, a 78-year-old German noblewoman, and now uses the name Consul Weyer Graf von Yorck. Do not miss the web site and “who’s who” of all the familiar faces by clicking here. http://www.consulweyer.de/

Anyhow, I guess in effort to keep himself current, Frederic decided to insert himself in the Anna Nicole Smith saga and called a news conference at Zsa Zsa’s Bel Air estate in Los Angeles and offered his account;

"She (Anna Nicole) had quite a few enemies and very, very few friends, almost no friends at all," the 62? year old lamented. “Smith's burning ambition,” he said, “was to be a real princess and wear a tiara. I told her the only thing I could do was to adopt you, but of course my wife was very much against it, I said I won't get a divorce just to make you a princess." A bird in the mansion, I guess.

Of course, had he adopted Anna Nicole and were it true that Frederick actually parented Danielynn, that would mean she is the Step Great Aunt of Paris Hilton. Imagine that.

“Round and around, and it’s always so real, yeah, when you’re comin’ down.”

“Everybody Is Up To Something.” sm