The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty

by Taraborrelli, J. Randy

  The Palmer House was another of the grandest Chicago hotels, twenty-five stories, designed by the architectural firm of Holabird and Roche in 1925. Centrally located in Chicago’s Loop, like the Stevens, it too was known for its dignified, austere décor. When Conrad walked into the lobby and took a look around, he made a statement not many people could make then, or even now. He said, “You know, I actually think I’d like to own this place.” He didn’t even know if it was for sale, but he knew he wanted it! For advice, he called upon his friend Henry Crown, a successful businessman who’d made a fortune with his Material Service Corp., which sold gravel, lime, and coal to builders in Chicago. In his meeting with Crown, Hilton said that he’d been negotiating to purchase the Stevens Hotel but was having no luck with the owner. He said that he’d come to the conclusion that the sale simply wasn’t going to happen, and so he now had his sights set on the Palmer House.

  “Well, is the Palmer House even for sale?” Crown wondered.

  “I don’t know,” replied Hilton.

  “Well, find out, my good man,” said Crown. “And if so, why not buy both the Palmer and the Stevens?”

  At that bold suggestion, Conrad had to smile. Henry Crown was a man much like himself, someone who saw no reason his wildest ambitions could not be attained. He had already made a fortune in the construction business and held interests in banks, electronics, and the oil business as well as in railroad and shipbuilding enterprises. He also owned real estate in Illinois, California, and New York. In just a few years, he would go on to own the Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest skyscraper (which he would buy for $51.5 million in 1951). In his mind, there was no reason Hilton couldn’t buy two hotels in the Chicago area; that is, if he could afford it—and of course Conrad could afford it (and if he couldn’t he would find a way to do so).

  It was Henry Crown who then introduced Conrad to Henry L. Hollis, the trustee for the Palmer estate. Hollis wouldn’t say if the Palmer House was for sale or not, only that “we are not taking offers, nor are we refusing them.” That was good enough for Conrad and for his associate Billy Friedman, an attorney who had helped him with the deal for the Sir Francis Drake Hotel and who would now be representing him on the purchase of either the Stevens or the Palmer House—or maybe both. After conferring with Friedman and several other business associates—including Willard Keith, who was president of Marsh & McLennan, Cosgrove & Co., an insurance firm in Los Angeles, and whom Hilton had summoned to Chicago to assist him with the dealings there—Hilton made an offer to Hollis of $18.5 million for the Palmer House, contingent upon his taking a look at the hotel’s financial and tax records and the rest of the corporation’s books. However, when it came to Hollis’s attention that Hilton had also been trying to buy the Stevens, he balked, saying that the Palmer House trustees would not allow its hotel books to be viewed by anyone who could one day turn out to be competition for them. Hilton impressed upon Hollis that he had had no success in purchasing the Stevens and that as far as he was concerned it just wasn’t going to happen. Hollis then said he would present Hilton’s offer to the trustees of the Palmer House and see what happened, but he couldn’t promise anything.

  “That’s fine,” said Willard Keith, when Conrad told him about Hollis’s position, “but please, Connie, let’s not wait here in Chicago for an answer. It’s too cold here, sir. Let’s go back to California where we can thaw out.”

  Conrad shook his head no. “I said I was not leaving here without a hotel,” he said, “and I’m not. If it’s not going to be the Stevens, it’s going to be the Palmer House. But I will have a hotel before I leave this damn frozen tundra.”

  “Fine,” Keith said. “Whatever it takes to get out of here…”

  “Say, I have an idea,” Conrad said. “Why don’t you set up a little meeting with your friend Mr. Healy and find out what the hell is going on with him and with his Stevens Hotel.”

  “Why?”

  “Just curious,” Conrad said. “Might heat things up a little in this town,” he said with a smile. “You never know.”

  As directed, Willard Keith arranged to see Steve Healy. Over drinks, Keith said that Healy had blown it with Hilton where the Stevens was concerned, that Conrad had gotten tired of his waffling and had abandoned the idea of ever purchasing the hotel. His mind was now set on the Palmer House, Keith said, “and there was probably no changing it.” If it was a ploy, it worked. Now Healy wanted to unload the Stevens more than ever. The next day he called Conrad with a new proposal. Going back full circle to the original idea, he now wanted to make a profit of just half a million on the Stevens. That was fine with Conrad, of course, but how was he to know that Healy wouldn’t disappear again and then change his mind and up the price in the next twenty-four hours? Healy said he was prepared to sign a contract immediately guaranteeing the deal. The rest of the negotiation was quick and easy; before Conrad Hilton knew it, his dream of owning the Stevens had come true.

  What happened next is quite remarkable.

  After closing the deal on the Stevens, Conrad took a meeting with Henry Hollis, the gentleman with whom he had been negotiating the possible sale of the Palmer House. Reluctantly he explained what had happened—that the sale of the Stevens Hotel had unexpectedly been consummated. He said that he hoped Hollis wouldn’t be upset and think Hilton had been lying earlier when he said that the sale was not going to happen—thus his interest in the Palmer House. At first Hollis was skeptical. “The whole thing sounds suspect to me,” he said.

  “It’s a matter of my integrity,” Hilton told him. “It’s important what you think of me, and I don’t want you to think I was lying.”

  Henry Hollis said he might actually still be interested in selling the Palmer House, but considering all that had happened, he now felt he deserved a better price for it. Conrad agreed—to the tune of almost $19.4 million, up from his previous bid of $18.5 million. Hollis accepted. The two men shook hands. “And that was all there was to it,” Hilton later recalled. “No pens, pencils, papers, lawyers, witnesses.”

  Obtaining financing for the purchase of two hotels in the same city was no easy feat for Conrad. When he approached one of his chief backers, Samuel Doak Sr., president of the El Paso National Bank, with the plan, Doak wasn’t at all enthusiastic about it. He felt that Conrad was stretching himself too thin by buying what Doak viewed as competing hotels in the same city.

  Conrad had a few good arguments in his favor, perhaps the most persuasive being that he wouldn’t tell Doak how close in proximity he should situate his bank branches if Doak agreed not to tell Hilton how close in proximity he should own his hotels. He also gave him enough information about the value of the land on which both hotels sat, as well as the money they generated annually, for Doak to reconsider. Besides, said Hilton, he really didn’t need his backing. He had all the money he needed in his personal portfolio—not really, but it was a good bluff—but if Doak wanted in on the deal, fine. Of course, now Doak wanted in, and said he would help finance the purchase of both hotels. (It’s worth noting here that Samuel Doak Sr. would in just a year’s time be made a member of the board of the Hilton Hotels Corporation.)

  At the last minute in trying to close the deals for the two hotels, Conrad Hilton found himself short a million dollars. He went to his friend Henry Crown for the balance. “We’re friends,” said Crown. “I admire the way you do business. You have nerve, but you’re fair.” He said he would happily help Conrad secure the money he needed, and he did just that, from First National Bank. A million dollars in 1945 would be worth roughly $11 million today—a lot of cash to raise with just a single telephone call to a good friend, underscoring once again that Hilton was a man who could put together a great deal of money at least partly based on his character and personality. Soon the Palmer House and the Stevens were both his.

  Zsa Zsa’s Daughter

  On the evening of March 10, 1947—six months after her final divorce decree from Conrad Hilton was handed down�
��Sari Zsa Zsa Gabor gave birth at Doctor’s Hospital in New York City to a daughter, Constance (named after Conrad) Francesca (after her great-grandmother) Hilton. “I will never forget how I felt the first time they brought Francie to me,” she would recall. “When they put her in my arms, I was flooded with such warmth as I had never known. I still remember how powerfully my heart beat as I took her in my arms. I loved that helpless little thing as I had loved nothing in the world. I thought, this baby is a present from God, to calm me, to make up for what I have gone through in these last years.”

  That Zsa Zsa did not divulge the fact of her pregnancy at the divorce hearing back in September raised more than a few eyebrows. She would later claim that she knew she was expecting, but decided not to mention it because “the judge didn’t ask me.” Of the fact that she listed her age as twenty-one on the birth certificate, what can one say? She was Zsa Zsa Gabor, after all. (And she was also thirty.) She also listed her occupation as “house wife,” which is perhaps as much of a surprise as the entry of her age.

  When Francesca—she would always be known by her middle name—was born, Conrad Hilton did not openly question her paternity. Not exactly, anyway. Instead, James E. Bates, Conrad’s attorney, called Zsa Zsa to ask for an important meeting with her. The two of them met in his office the next day, according to his and her later testimony about it. “She plopped her well-stacked 125 pounds down into a chair in front of me,” he recalled, “and we got right down to business.”

  “Mr. Hilton and I are a bit curious to know why you have not demanded child support for Francesca,” he observed.

  Zsa Zsa studied the attorney carefully. “Because I don’t need it,” she said, choosing her words carefully. She added that she was “an independent, European woman,” and was confident that she could raise their daughter on her own. “I don’t want his money,” she concluded.

  “You don’t want his money?” Bates asked incredulously. That certainly didn’t sound like the Zsa Zsa known by James Bates. “Something is fishy here,” he decided to himself, at least according to his later recollection. “You know, you can, if you wish to, that is, file a lawsuit against Mr. Hilton and demand child support from him,” he told her, “and we may not even fight such an action.” He said that they might be inclined to just settle the case, meaning Zsa Zsa would then end up with money for her daughter.

  Now it was Zsa Zsa who felt that something was “fishy.” Why would Conrad be trying to give her money? That certainly didn’t sound like the Conrad Hilton she knew. “As long as you tell Mr. Hilton that this is not my idea,” she said, staring at the attorney sternly. “Because I don’t ever want to hear that Zsa Zsa Gabor went after Conrad Hilton for child support. That’s not what’s happening here,” she said. “Meanwhile, I need to think about all of this.”

  “Take all the time you want,” James Bates said nonchalantly.

  “I most certainly will.”

  That night, Zsa Zsa went home and racked her brain for an answer to the nagging question as to why in the world Conrad Hilton would be trying to give her money for child support. It made no sense to her. What was this really about?

  Zsa Zsa was a smart woman. It wouldn’t have taken her long to figure out that if she were to sue for child support, she might then be forced to prove in a court of law that Francesca was truly Conrad’s biological daughter. In other words, she may have believed that he had devised a “backdoor plan” to get to what he believed might be the truth of Francesca’s paternity. He knew Zsa Zsa was having sex with “many men”—at least by her own admission—and she figured that he probably felt he had good reason to believe that Francesca was not his child. Now she was angry.

  “I finally understand what it is that you and Mr. Hilton are trying to do,” she told James Bates the next day when she went back to his office.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “We are only trying to be of assistance to you, Zsa Zsa. Mr. Hilton still considers you family. Despite any recent ugliness…”

  That Conrad Hilton still considered Zsa Zsa Gabor to be a member of the family would, with the passing of time, prove to be perhaps the greatest complication in both their lives, fertile ground for decades of paradoxes and contradictions in their relationship. Close to her parents and sisters, she was, like most Hungarians of her war-torn generation, an extremely family-oriented person.

  If Conrad had cut Zsa Zsa off at this time, it might have saved them both many years of turmoil. He didn’t, though. Coming from a large, close family, he too felt the urgency of familial bonds, and that Zsa Zsa insisted that Francesca was his child drew him in and made him feel connected to both of them—this despite any suspicions he may have had about Francesca’s paternity. He would not remarry for decades, so in a sense, Zsa Zsa and Francesca would be the most recent addition to “family” he would have in his life. While it was true that Zsa Zsa would remarry many times over, her only child would be the one she had with Conrad. So, yes, these two disparate characters would be linked forever—for better or worse.

  “Well, you can tell Mr. Hilton that I don’t need his assistance,” Zsa Zsa said, trying to keep her temper in check. “I will take care of our daughter on my own. He may think I just got off the boat, but I’ve been around long enough to figure him out. From now on if he wants to talk to me, he can call me himself. If we are, as he says, family, then no more meetings with you, Mr. Bates. Now, good day.” She then stormed out of the attorney’s office.

  The big question, of course, was whether or not Conrad Hilton had sexual relations with Zsa Zsa Gabor during the time that they were separated, and in this case it would have to have been sometime in the summer of 1946. She claimed that they saw each other just one time between April and August of that summer, and that is when they were intimate. He said he did see her once, but that they most certainly did not have sex. They weren’t even having sex when they lived together, he argued. Why would he fly all the way to New York to be intimate with her? Meanwhile, Zsa Zsa listed Conrad as the child’s father on the baby’s birth certificate, with his occupation “hotel owner.” He didn’t contest it. Complicating things further, he also did not feel much of an obligation to acknowledge the baby either. The fact of her birth—indeed, Francesca’s name—is nowhere to be found in his autobiography, Be My Guest, which would be published in 1957 when the girl was about ten.

  In his own reserved way, Conrad Hilton loved Francesca and wanted to protect her from scrutiny. After all, she was just an innocent child born to a warring couple. He sensed that her life would not be an easy one. Also, there’s little doubt that he was also concerned about his family’s name, as well as the reputation of his company. “Of course, he didn’t want a public scandal,” said his attorney Myron Harpole. “These were different times, different mores. These were the 1940s. He would have done anything at all to protect his family’s good name. If you lived in the times, you would understand.”

  Simply put, Conrad encouraged Zsa Zsa and Francesca to feel that they were “family,” mostly because he didn’t want to force Francesca to live in a state of emotional exile. But privately, he would only take that kind of thinking so far. Without their knowledge, he did what he felt he had to do—he amended his last will and testament. A 1947 codicil to his will states, “It is my express purpose to leave nothing to the child born on or about March 10, 1947, to my former wife, Sari Gabor Hilton.” Only he and his attorney knew of this new provision, however—and it would be more than thirty years before Zsa Zsa and Francesca would be made aware of it.

  PART FOUR

  Sons of the Father

  Transition

  Obviously, the marriage to and subsequent divorce from Zsa Zsa Gabor had taken an enormous emotional toll on Conrad Hilton. It had been draining. Making matters so much worse, the union had shut him out from the sanctuary of his religion, which had left a huge hole in his psyche. By the time he was divorced, he felt exhausted. A free man once again, he now hoped to put all the psychological turmoil behin
d him. Also, with this newfound freedom he could at last receive the sacraments of his faith once more, and that was no small comfort. Still, he was sad that it hadn’t worked out. “I’m not even sure where it all went wrong,” he would say. “I just never dreamed it would all end so badly. It had such a promising start. My God, I was crazy about her!”

  After it was over with Zsa Zsa, Conrad Hilton did what most people expected he would do; he threw himself into his work. Now the owner of three of the best hotels in Chicago—the Palmer House, the Stevens (renamed the Conrad Hilton), and the Blackstone—and with two huge successes in New York City, the Roosevelt and the Plaza, Conrad Hilton turned his eyes 250 miles to the south, to Washington, D.C., where he set his sights on the Mayflower.

  The Mayflower had quite a distinguished history. Construction on the hotel began back in 1922 by land developer Allen E. Walker, following the Beaux-Arts design of Robert F. Beresford of Warren and Wetmore Architects at a cost of $12.9 million. When it opened in 1925, it was nicknamed the “Grande Dame of Washington,” and was said to contain more gold trim than any other building except the Library of Congress, evidence of which can be found in the ornate gilt columns standing guard in the hotel lobby. Located near the Dupont Circle neighborhood at 1127 Connecticut Avenue NW, it was deemed by Harry S. Truman to be Washington’s “second best address.”

  Shortly after opening, the Mayflower hosted the presidential inaugural ball for Calvin Coolidge, a tradition that would continue for decades to come. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a guest at the hotel when he worked on his historical “nothing to fear but fear itself” inaugural address. Truman, who succeeded FDR, resided there for the first ninety days of his presidency, following the death of Roosevelt, before moving to Blair House during the dismantling and rebuilding of the White House in 1948. Truman also announced his intention to run for the presidency from the Mayflower.