The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty

by Taraborrelli, J. Randy

  A year after moving to the West Coast, Conrad established his company’s first headquarters outside of Texas, with offices on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. By this time, most interested Americans were well aware of the Hilton name and what it represented in terms of quality hotel accommodations at reasonable prices. Without a doubt, Conrad Hilton had become a major player—arguably the major player—in the hotel business, respected not only for his instincts and business acumen but also for the fact that he had not only survived but had gone on to thrive during a time when most American businessmen had no choice but to throw in the towel.

  Georgia on His Mind

  He had never met anyone quite like her. But, then again, few people had.

  It was a California winter’s night early in the first week of December 1941 when Conrad Hilton and a date found themselves having a drink at the popular Ciro’s nightclub on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. If one wanted to be seen in Hollywood, Ciro’s was the place to go. All of the most famous of stars socialized with one another there—Joan Crawford, Cary Grant, and Barbara Stanwyck—with photographers stationed just outside the club’s doors in order to preserve their celebrity sightings for the next day’s newspapers. There was always a gaggle of fans patiently waiting out front with their autograph books open in the hopes of spotting their favorite movie star, and maybe even getting a signature. With this crush of people pushing and shoving for a better view as flashbulbs popped off all around them, it was always a mad scene at Ciro’s.

  As Conrad and his companion immersed themselves in the bustling nightspot, a stylish young woman and her handsome escort swept into the club, immediately drawing the attention of practically everyone in the small room. This was the era of the “grand entrance,” and the new arrival certainly understood how to make one. Wearing a dark blue satin dress with turquoise embroidery, she moved confidently with feline grace. Although she was only five foot three, her voluptuous carriage made her seem taller and her high waist made her legs appear to be long. Her lovely face was surrounded by soft red hair in a bouffant style. With milky skin, high cheekbones, a straight nose, hazel almond-shaped eyes, and sensuous lips, this attractive woman certainly seemed as if she belonged among the elite in Ciro’s, but in truth she’d yet to accomplish anything in Hollywood. Adding to her mystique, she was on the arm of dashing celebrity attorney Gregson (Greg) Bautzer, former fiancé of Lana Turner.

  As the attractive couple walked into the club, they were followed by an equally eye-catching pair—actress Eva Gabor from Hungary and her date, G. Bentley Ryan, a partner in Bautzer’s law firm. Eva had just begun her career as an actress, having recently made her debut in a small part in the Paramount film Forced Landing. Though she was quickly becoming well-known, it was not for her acting ability as much as for her beauty and charm. At twenty-one, she was an exotic young woman, blonde and shapely, with a thick Hungarian accent, a quick wit, a vivid intelligence, and a delicious sense of humor. Her march toward fame began at the knee of her ambitious, wellborn Jewish mother, Jolie (Jansci) Tilleman Gabor, a Budapest debutante and heiress to a jewelry fortune. Eva’s father was Colonel Vilmos Gabor, a self-absorbed, domineering product of the Hungarian military establishment, twenty-two years older than Jolie. By 1939, Eva, the first in the family to journey to the United States (with her then husband, Erik V. Drummer, from whom she was now separated), had obtained a Hollywood agent and a Paramount studio contract.

  The woman who caught Conrad Hilton’s attention was not Eva, though, it was her older sister, twenty-four-year-old Zsa Zsa,* the alluring redhead in the satiny blue dress. Zsa Zsa (born Sari) was the second of three daughters—the third being her older sister, Magda—born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, in 1917. She had been in America for just three months, having also migrated from Hungary.

  Zsa Zsa, beautiful and spoiled as a child, would be reared as if to the manor born, inheriting from her mother an overblown sense of entitlement that she would exhibit for the rest of her life. She had a Swiss private-school education, was given lessons in horseback riding, outfitted like a princess, tutored like a courtesan-in-waiting, offered singing, ballet, and piano lessons, and even spent an hour each day with a master of the epée. Jolie also saw to it that Zsa Zsa, as well as her sisters, Eva and Magda, was schooled in English, German, and French. “Zsa Zsa can talk about nothing in four different languages,” Jolie would later say in an interview. Zsa Zsa landed her first role at the age of nineteen. She was discovered by the Austrian opera star Richard Tauber, who hired her to appear onstage with him in the Viennese production of Der singende Traum (The Singing Dream).

  Because she had decided too late in life that she wanted to be an actress, Jolie Gabor would happily live vicariously through her ambitious daughters, especially Zsa Zsa. In 1936, she launched a campaign to obtain the title of Miss Hungary for Zsa Zsa. It didn’t matter to Jolie that she viewed Zsa Zsa as having no discernible talent or that her daughter didn’t even own an evening dress. She forged ahead anyway, using Eva’s peroxide to temporarily turn her brown-haired daughter into a platinum blonde, raiding Magda’s closet for a floor-length gown, then muscling Zsa Zsa into the wings of the stage and literally pushing her out into the lineup of finalists. Against all odds and with Jolie’s practiced chutzpah, Zsa Zsa was crowned Miss Hungary of 1936, but had to surrender the crown since she was not yet sixteen. Now, in 1941, Zsa Zsa was in the process of obtaining a divorce from Burhan Belge, press director for the Foreign Ministry of Turkey in Ankara, leaving herself free to embark on a husband hunt that began with a trip to Hollywood to visit her sister.

  Conrad Hilton had been sitting down while talking to Texan hotelier Joseph Drown, who in five years would open the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. When Conrad drew himself up to his full height, Zsa Zsa could not help but be impressed. In her 1960 memoir, her memory of the moment was vivid: “He stood there for a moment: A tall, erect, sun-tanned man with gray hair showing white at the temples in sharp contrast to his dark skin… looking like a wild Indian, with upturned greenish eyes, high cheekbones—a beautiful, distinguished figure who might have been a diplomat. I found myself thinking, this man I could marry.”

  Zsa Zsa would later add that Hilton had reminded her of the heroes of the Hollywood westerns she had fantasized about while growing up in Hungary, men like Tom Mix and Buck Jones, real American rough-hewn, take-charge types who could command her respect while also keeping her in line. She would write that she was crestfallen when Gregson Bautzer explained to her that Hilton was in the hotel business. That didn’t seem like an interesting line of work, she wrote, and she secretly wished he had been a diplomat or perhaps even someone in politics. He was certainly stately enough to look the part. Nevertheless, for her—at least as she would recall it—it was love at first sight.

  Not everyone would be taken in by Zsa Zsa’s florid descriptions of the intense feelings she felt for Conrad the moment she laid eyes on him. Legendary gossip columnist Sheila Graham, for instance, would write acerbically that it was indeed love at first sight between the mismatched pair—“Zsa Zsa’s first sight of Hilton’s wallet.” Graham may not have been far off the mark. In Jolie Gabor’s autobiography, she reveals that shortly before Zsa Zsa left for America, Jolie had actually advised her daughter to marry a man in the hotel business. Zsa Zsa was intrigued. “Why?” she asked. Jolie explained that a friend of hers had married a hotel director in Carmel, California, and that he had provided the best life in the world for her. “She tells me the food is good and the accommodations are good and there is so much courtesy and so many parties,” Jolie counseled her daughter. “She says it makes for a very good life. So, remember this.” That Zsa Zsa was introduced to a “hotel director” just weeks after arriving in Los Angeles must have seemed to her like nothing if not an extremely good omen.

  “Would you mind if I sat here?” Conrad asked Zsa Zsa before taking a seat right next to hers. Pleasantries were exchanged, and then, much to Zsa Zsa’s surprise since he had
arrived with a date, Conrad asked her if she would like to dance. She accepted the invitation without hesitation.

  The two walked out onto the dance floor, and while they swayed in each other’s arms, Zsa Zsa was dwarfed by Conrad, whose lean, muscular frame towered over her. She couldn’t help but notice something elegant about him. At fifty-four, he seemed much more energetic and vital than any of the younger men in the room.

  “They told me that a very pretty woman from Hungary would be here tonight,” he whispered to her, according to her memory, “and, by golly! They were sure right.” However, she didn’t seem like a “Zsa Zsa” to him. “I can’t pronounce Hungarian,” he joked. In his mind, her name sounded more like “Georgia,” and that would be—so he decided right then and there—the name he would call her from that evening forward. (Coincidentally, she had gone by the name of Georgia Gabor as a chorus girl at the Club Femina in Vienna when she was about sixteen.) She smiled coquettishly when he told her as much; she had been learning the role of a soubrette since she was a toddler.

  After their dance, the couple spoke about Zsa Zsa’s past, how she had just arrived from Hungary, and how much she already disliked Hollywood. The people were too phony, she said. She wasn’t fond of the usually sunny weather, and didn’t even like the look of the palm trees—too top-heavy, she had decided. He laughed at her humor, “like a young boy,” she would recall, “throwing his head back and roaring, uninhibited, enjoying himself completely.”

  There was another dance. Then another. After they finished their third and once again took their seats, the Budapest bombshell gave Conrad a teasing look and said, “I seenk I am going to marry you.” There was a certainty in her flirting, expertly balancing brazen suggestiveness with a shimmering veil of aloofness. Here was a woman who was dazzlingly different from those whom Conrad had hunted and then discarded so easily. Here was a woman who appeared to be a bit of a huntress herself. For a moment, he was taken aback. “You seenk you’re going to marry me?” he repeated with a chuckle, mimicking her accent. “All right, then,” he decided, “why don’t you just do that!”

  The night seemed to fly by. Somewhere along the way, his date—the lady Conrad had shown up with—seemed to vanish. He never even inquired as to her whereabouts, so captivated was he by the girl he had just met. As they chatted, he suggested that Zsa Zsa accompany him on a trip he was taking to Key West to visit his brother Carl, who was now stationed there as a Coast Guard officer. But first he planned to stop in El Paso to attend a surprise party for his mother. Zsa Zsa, playing hard to get, said she had plans, but that she might be able to join him at least for the Florida part of the trip. The two promised to stay in touch.

  That night, Zsa Zsa rushed back to Eva’s small Hollywood apartment and announced, “This is the man I marry.” Eva, who was brushing her teeth, stopped long enough to ask, “What man?” Zsa Zsa answered, “Conrad Hilton.” Eva asked, “But isn’t he too old?” Zsa Zsa smiled. “Oh no,” she said. “I find him so beautiful.” Eva had to laugh. “First a Turk,” she said, “and now a Texan.”

  Meanwhile, Conrad drove his sleek black Cadillac convertible, with its snappy red leather interior, along the winding Sunset Strip and back to his Bel-Air estate. Upon arriving at his destination, according to what he would later recall, he decided to enjoy a brandy alone on one of the many courtyards before finally retiring for the night. By this time a peaceful hush had settled over the property, with all of its many workers and functionaries now fast asleep. His children were also in bed for the night. The only sounds were the rustling of the cypress trees in the soft breeze. Sitting under a clear Southern California sky studded with stars that sparkled like diamonds, Conrad couldn’t help but smile. It had been a night he would never forget.

  Loneliness at the Top

  On December 7, 1941, three days after Mary Hilton’s surprise birthday party, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. With the country in turmoil, Conrad Hilton and his mother would spend the next few weeks in El Paso quietly waiting like the rest of the world to see what would happen next. He would later remember them spending much of his fifty-fifth birthday on December 25 in church, praying for peace.

  On the twenty-eighth, Conrad went to New York on a business trip at the behest of Arnold Kirkeby, a good friend who was the founder of the Kirkeby hotel chain. (Many years later, Kirkeby would become known as the owner of the Bel-Air mansion used for exterior shots for the television show The Beverly Hillbillies.) “I’ve got this bug in my ear about the Hotel Pierre,” he told Conrad. “What do you think about going into a little joint venture with me on it?”

  Ordinarily Conrad would not have been able to resist at least closely examining the possibility of acquiring another hotel, but at this particular time he thought it best to be prudent. With the country at war and the battleground now extending to America’s own shores, no one knew quite what to expect. At the least, he suspected that vacation travel would decline as the nation transitioned to a war economy. Conrad agreed to do an inspection of the Fifth Avenue hotel in order to gauge the possibility, but he really didn’t take it seriously. Making it big in New York was still a major goal of his, though. All of his success somehow seemed insignificant to him when he thought of the valuable real estate in New York and how much he wanted a piece of that action. However, the time was not yet right, and for Conrad Hilton good timing was everything in business.

  On New Year’s Eve, Hilton found himself alone in a smoky, bustling Manhattan bar. It was ironic, because back in Los Angeles he was always the perfect host of any party, and he had many at his home, often to celebrate the opening of one of his hotels or some other business-related achievement. At such functions, Conrad could talk to almost anybody about almost anything, from the economy to sports to entertainment; real estate was his forte, though, along with politics and religion. Though he counted as friends many distinguished and important heads of state and government, one of the great paradoxes of his personality was that he was fundamentally quite shy. “I think he had friends for different purposes,” said Donald Hubbs. “He’d have a friend to play golf with, a friend to ride horses with, a friend to do various things with, play cards, that sort of thing. But he didn’t have a lot of close friends. He was, to a large extent, a private man.” And now, on New Year’s Eve in New York, Conrad once again found himself dreadfully alone.

  As Conrad nursed his dry martini, the clock struck twelve and joyous couples all around him brought in 1942 with shouts of celebration, kisses, and embraces. Never had people been more completely and utterly annoying, he would later recall thinking to himself. “Hey! Happy new year, friend!” someone shouted at him over the din while slapping him on the shoulder. Conrad raised his glass. “Yeah, happy new year, friend,” he said bitterly.

  If anything, the celebration of New Year’s Eve 1941 proved to be yet another in a recent string of soul-crushing, depressing moments for Conrad Hilton, and because he was alone in a room full of happy strangers, this one somehow felt even more discouraging than the others. While he had obviously done a lot with his life, all around him it was glaringly obvious that others had somehow done what he hadn’t—they’d forged genuine relationships with spouses and partners with whom they were now happily sharing their lives. Maybe none of them had his money, but they seemed to have much more. When he put his life under heavy scrutiny, he didn’t like what he saw. If only he had been at home with his sons, perhaps he would have felt better about things.

  At about two in the morning, Conrad Hilton shuffled back to his hotel, his head hung low, feeling old, drunk, and unhappy. Sleep eluded him. A few hours later, once the East Coast sun had risen on the morning of January 1, 1942, Conrad picked up the telephone and called the woman he had begun to consider somewhat of a lifeline—Zsa Zsa Gabor in Los Angeles. She was elated to hear from him, even though the call had come at such a early hour. He instantly felt better, the heaviness of his hangover seeming to lift with just the sound of her voice.

  “When
are you coming back, Connie?” she asked, her English, if possible, somehow even more difficult to understand by long-distance telephone. “I miss you,” she said, or at least that’s what he thought she said. It sounded more like, “I meese you.” Then she added, “I can’t vait to see you.”

  “Well, Georgia, why don’t you come down to Florida?” he asked, alluding to the trip he had mentioned when he first met her. “I’m headed there to visit my brother.”

  “But I can’t afford to do that, Connie,” she said. “I don’t have the money.”

  “My dear, of course I will pay for it,” he told her. “A round-trip train ticket. Please join me.” (Airline travel was in its infancy at this time, seldom used even for cross-country trips.)

  There was a pause. “You know, I’m not yet divorced,” she told Conrad. He was surprised. This was the first he’d heard that she’d ever been married. “It’s not right, Connie,” she said. “I don’t want you to seenk I am that kind of girl.”

  He had to laugh. Whatever kind of girl she was, he decided, he would see her soon enough. “Fine,” he told her. “I understand, Georgia. We shall meet again very soon in this new year.”

  Upon hanging up, Conrad couldn’t help but wonder about her. There weren’t many women who would turn down such a generous offer. It did bode well for her, in his estimation. It would, at least thus far, appear that she wasn’t just looking for a nice trip to the East Coast on his dime. However, he had to admit that the fact that she was married did bother him. How had it happened that, at her age, she’d already been wed and was on her way to being divorced? He had quite a few questions about her, but he also couldn’t get her off his mind.

  Soon Conrad would find himself in Florida with his brother Carl. Then it would be back to Los Angeles for business as usual. Only now he was beginning to sense that things could very well change in his life. At the very least, wondering about this new woman, “Georgia,” and what she might one day represent made for more than a few moments of contentment as Conrad Hilton watched the scenery race by, his head resting against the window of a train’s passenger car.