The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty

by Taraborrelli, J. Randy

  Nicky wilted with regret. He bowed his head and lowered his voice. “I’m sorry, Maria,” he said hoarsely. “Rough night, you know?”

  Rough night indeed. Nicky had spent it arguing with another woman, this one a maid working at the Bel-Air Hotel, her name being Virginia Larson. A tall brunette from New York, she was young and shapely—Nicky said she had “a great rack”—with a dazzling smile and a flirtatious way about her. Every time Nicky would see her in the hallway, he would exchange long, smoldering looks with her. However, as an employee of the hotel, she was strictly off-limits, or at least that would have been the case under normal circumstances. However, Nicky was hurt, lonely, and feeling sorry for himself. He was still distraught and angry about the end of his marriage. He was also upset at himself for not handling all of it better. He had let his family down, but he had also let himself down. Now he felt he deserved a good time, and he decided that Virginia was just the woman to give it to him.

  As he later explained to his friends, he went looking for Virginia and found her cleaning one of the rooms on her assigned floor. They’d never even had a conversation, that’s how little they knew each other. He just walked into the room, closed the door behind him, and pinned her up against the wall. “No, not here,” she protested. Too late. He was already having his way with her. “I didn’t even give her a chance to take off her cute little maid’s uniform,” he said later, “which made it somehow even better.” He later said that she was a willing partner. He knew as much, he claimed, because after they finished, she kissed him fully on the lips and said she would like to see him again, but “maybe next time you can at least take a girl out to dinner first.”

  However, the next day, Virginia complained to a few of the other maids that Nicky had forced himself on her. She said that she was thinking about lodging a complaint with his father. When Nicky heard this troubling bit of gossip, he decided to confront her. The two then had a big quarrel about what had occurred between them—his view of it and hers, which now were vastly different—and when she threatened to tell Conrad about their illicit rendezvous, he smacked her hard across the face and called her a liar. He instantly regretted it, he said, but—again—it was too late. The damage was done. Now there was no way she could continue working at the Bel-Air Hotel. It was too much of a risk. Therefore, he took her down to his office, wrote out a big fat check, threw it at her, and sent her on her way, telling her to find employment elsewhere. She seemed so happy with the amount he’d given her and so amenable to leaving her job that as soon as she sashayed out the door he wondered if he hadn’t been set up. Now, the next morning, he was just tired, hungover, and sorry he’d ever succumbed to the likes of Virginia Larson.

  Maria de Amaté realized that for Nicky Hilton, every day seemed more hopeless than the one before. Sometimes he managed to go to work at the hotel, but there were many days he would rise, have his breakfast, and then simply go back to bed. As often happens, one day of discontentment led to another and another, until finally he was deep in a rut, drinking too much alcohol, popping too many pills. “Don’t tell my pop I’m here,” he would instruct Maria before closing his bedroom door. “If he asks where I am, just tell him I’m at work.” He would not emerge again until the next morning, pale and miserable, and then would repeat the same routine.

  Later that afternoon, Conrad and Barron were having a meeting in the study and came out looking for Nicky. “Have you seen my son?” Conrad asked Maria. He had called the Bel-Air Hotel and was told that Nicky hadn’t come in that day. Now Maria found herself in a predicament. Nicky had specifically instructed her not to tell his father when he was in his bedroom during the day. Yet she worked for Conrad, not Nicky. While she had some sympathy for the young man, there was no question that her allegiance was to Conrad. “He’s in his room, sir,” she said quietly. Conrad looked miffed. “But he should be at work,” he said with a tinge of frustration. He and Barron left the kitchen, headed for Nicky’s bedroom suite on the second floor. A few moments later, Maria heard loud banging on the suite’s door, then angry, muffled voices. Ten minutes later, Conrad and Barron came back down to the kitchen.

  “He’s getting worse,” Barron said.

  Barron saw the sadness in his father’s face and waited for a response. “I know,” Conrad said at last. “But he’s a strong kid. He’ll get over it. It’s the divorce. He just needs more time.”

  “Okay, Dad,” Barron said, looking a little hopeless. “Maybe you’re right.”

  When Conrad left the room, Barron sat down at the table, poured himself a cup of coffee, and lit a cigarette. Now it was his hands that were trembling. The pressure of not knowing for certain how to handle his older brother’s desperate situation was getting to him. He looked at Maria de Amaté sadly. There was nothing either of them could think of to say. “That will be all,” Barron finally said, dismissing the maid.

  A Baroness Named Betsy

  Let’s make a promise,” Nicky Hilton was saying. “Let’s promise to never have another drink again.” He gazed lovingly into the green eyes of the beautiful blonde seated next to him at the bar of the Bel-Air Hotel. “Baby, if we can feel like this without drinking, then why bother having even another drop?” he said, holding her hand. “This is already as good as it gets,” he concluded. “We don’t need liquor!”

  “Oh, I agree, Nicky,” cooed the blonde. She had earlier confessed to him that she too had a serious drinking problem. “Never another drink for either one of us, then,” she whispered to him. “Seal it with a kiss?”

  He leaned over and kissed her fully on the lips. “Consider it sealed,” he said.

  It was the summer of 1951 and Nicky Hilton had finally begun to feel a bit better. He was now finding comfort in the arms of another young lady with an exotic past and show business aspirations. One day, while surveying the pool area at the Bel-Air Hotel, his eyes had fallen upon a shapely blonde lounging poolside. Her shocking pink bikini—unusual in America in those days—had distinguished her among the other beauties sunning themselves that early afternoon. Nicky made a beeline for her and began to pour on the charm.

  “You know, sweetheart, I run this place,” he said, standing above her. “So if there’s anything you need,” he added, “anything at all. Just ask for me. I’m Nicky Hilton.”

  “The Nicky Hilton?” she asked, sitting up in her lounge chair. She lowered her cat-eye sunglasses and took him in.

  “The one and only,” he answered with a lopsided grin.

  “Spare a smoke?”

  He pulled a pack from his vest pocket, lit one, and handed it to her. She inhaled fully and then, exhaling deeply, languidly lay back down on her recliner. “So, what’s a handsome, rich boy like you doing working in the middle of the day?” she asked, gazing up at him dreamily.

  “Making it possible for beautiful girls like you to show off here at the pool,” he said, seeming transfixed by her body.

  “Do you make a habit of undressing girls at the pool with your eyes, Mr. Hilton?” she asked.

  “Mr. Hilton is my father,” he said with a sly smile.

  “Well, does your daddy know that you undress girls at the pool with your eyes?” she asked with an arched eyebrow.

  “Actually, my daddy encourages it,” he shot back with a wink.

  “My kind of daddy,” she said.

  One thing led to another until, finally, he asked her out. She was eighteen-year-old Betsy von Furstenberg and she accepted. It was Betsy, then, to whom Nicky would vow to never have another drink. “It was the kind of thing you promised when you were in the first blush of romance, when you’re head over heels and you think life couldn’t get any better. Unfortunately,” she hastens to add, “the promise we made to each other lasted only about a week. Then, unfortunately, we both picked up where we left off.”

  Born Elizabeth Caroline Maria Agatha Felicitas Therese, Freiin von Fürstenberg-Hedringen in Arnsberg, Germany, she was a baroness by birth, her father was a count from Germany, her mot
her from Union Springs, Alabama. Her parents met while her mother was vacationing on a yacht in the south of France.

  After moving to America, Betsy attended the Hewitt School in New York. A model who had often graced the covers of French fashion magazines as well as three issues of Look magazine (photographed by Stanley Kubrick), her goal was to become a successful actress. After changing her name to Betsy von Furstenberg, she had made her stage debut in New York at the Morosco Theatre in the play Second Threshold. The show ran from January to April. After it closed, Betsy moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film with MGM, which immediately positioned her for stardom with a cover story in Life. Then she met Nicky Hilton. Like Elizabeth, Betsy was an actress who at times appeared sexy and alluring yet on other occasions was able to project a winsome, innocent quality that hid a much tougher core. “I could drink any fellow right under the table,” she said with a laugh. “We all drank back then. Nicky and I were probably not the best influences on each other because we were both heavy drinkers from the start. Plus we were both taking Seconal, which was the recreational drug of choice in Hollywood at that time. I mean, everyone was on it. Marilyn [Monroe] was living on it! I soon learned that Nicky and I had that drug in common. Mixing it with alcohol was deadly, but we did that too. Before long, we were enabling each other like nobody’s business.”

  Though they didn’t know anything about her alcohol or drug issues, Conrad and Barron were still ambivalent about Nick’s relationship with Betsy. Of course, she hadn’t reached anywhere near the kind of fame and notoriety Elizabeth had attained, but this was Hollywood and anything could happen overnight. Betsy seemed to be on her way, and thus both Hilton men saw trouble on the horizon for Nicky.

  “Oh no, not again, son,” Conrad said loudly. His voice could be heard as he approached from many feet away, according to Bob Neal, who was lying by the pool with Nicky at the Hilton mansion that afternoon. He and Nicky were baking in the sun in their swimsuits, alongside a pair of girls in matching white bikinis, when Conrad’s voice boomed toward them. Both young men looked up, and to their amusement they saw that Conrad was wearing a brown suit, matching cowboy hat, and heavy western boots. (He also wore his star sapphire ring on his right hand, a favorite of his.) “A little hot out here for a get-up like that, isn’t it?” Nicky asked lazily as he lay back down and offered his face to the sun. Conrad ignored his observation. “Barron told me about this girl you’re seeing,” he said, stepping toward Nicky so that his shadow was cast over his son’s face. “I understand she’s in show business.” Nicky said nothing. “Please don’t get in too deep, that’s all I’m saying,” Conrad added.

  Nicky didn’t look up at his father. He tipped the fedora he was wearing down below his eyes. “I like her,” he said simply. “And I haven’t been happy since Elizabeth. Betsy makes me laugh. She’s fun. And she’s got a classy chassis, too, Pop. So just leave it alone, all right?”

  “I’m just saying, maybe take it slow, okay, kid?” Conrad asked. “There’s no hurry, right?”

  Nicky’s answer was silence. He wouldn’t allow himself to be drawn into a discussion about Betsy; he kept his hat covering his eyes. Finally, he said, “I get it, Pop, okay? We got other dames here today, don’t we? Obviously I’m not in that deep, right?”

  “All right. I’m just a little worried about you, that’s all,” Conrad said before taking his leave.

  After he was gone, Nicky tipped his fedora up above his eyes, looked at Bob Neal, and said, “Sometimes it would be nice if he would just see the best in me, instead of the worst. I mean… would that be so bad?”

  Bob Neal thought it over. “Actually, you might want to do the same for him, Nick. Would that be so bad?”

  Nicky grinned at his friend. “Asshole,” he said with a swift, playful punch to Bob Neal’s arm.

  The Shadow of Her Smile

  Oh, baby, I’m so sorry about what happened last night,” Nicky was saying to Betsy. The two were on the telephone. Betsy was so hungover she was finding it hard to focus on the conversation. It had been a rough night of partying on the Sunset Strip.

  “What do you mean?” she wanted to know

  “Have you looked in the mirror?” he asked, his voice well modulated and controlled. If ever a relationship could be viewed as toxic—a term certainly not used to describe such pairings in the 1950s but one that today certainly does apply—the one between Nicky Hilton and Betsy von Furstenberg qualified. Both were drinking too much, both were addicted to Seconal, and, by her own admission, both were physically abusive of one another. On this morning, she got out of bed, walked over to the vanity, and gazed at her reflection in the mirror. Much to her surprise, she had a black eye. She didn’t even remember how it happened. “Well, one thing led to another,” Nicky explained when she came back to the phone, “and the next thing I knew, you slugged me and, well, I slugged you back,” he said. “I got a shiner, too. Can you believe it?”

  “Oh well,” she said with a sigh. “Give me a call later and we’ll have a nice quiet dinner and talk it over, okay?”

  “Okay, baby,” he said. “Sorry. Bye.”

  “It actually was no big deal,” Betsy would recall many years later, “which shows you how bad things had become. It had just been another night in our life together, one of us as bad as the other, both dragging each other down. I enabled him, he enabled me. I look back on it now all these years later and wonder how we ever got through it. But in our defense, drinking was much more accepted back then. Nobody saw anything wrong with it. It was actually considered to be glamorous and a big part of living the good life, to have cocktails all the time.”

  In September 1951, Nicky and Betsy announced their engagement, saying that that they planned to wed aboard a yacht in the Caribbean in January. Though Betsy told gossip columnist Louella Parsons, “I’m too thrilled to talk,” it’s not likely she ever really felt she and Nicky were destined for marriage. “I’m not sure he even asked me to marry him,” she recalled many years later. “It was more like, we were drinking one night and leaving a club and the media was all over us asking about our future, and one of us flippantly said, ‘Oh, we’re engaged.’ The next thing we knew it was in all of the papers, ‘Elizabeth Taylor’s Ex-Husband Is Marrying a Baroness.’ ”

  If Only

  After her divorce from Conrad Hilton, Zsa Zsa Gabor married actor George Sanders. She was not happy, though, and felt that he was unkind. When he received his Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in All About Eve, he didn’t even thank her or so much as mention her name in his acceptance speech. That night, after the show was over and everyone had vacated the venue, Zsa Zsa sat alone in the dark, cavernous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Feeling sad and worthless, she listened to the sounds emanating from backstage—actors and actresses, producers and directors and others connected to the film industry celebrating their victories and commiserating over their losses, but reveling in their camaraderie just the same. “I could hear their laughter and their merriment,” she would recall. And she thought to herself, “If I only had a career. If only I had… power.”

  It was a compelling thought, the idea of her attaining power during this time. In the 1950s, women generally didn’t think in terms of finding their own power. Men were thought of as being powerful, women feminine. Of course, in show business, there were any number of women who could be aptly be described as being overtly powerful—great actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, even, to a certain extent, Marilyn Monroe. It’s likely that when Zsa Zsa spoke of wanting power she was thinking in terms of having some influence in the entertainment world—like her husband, George Sanders—and perhaps even parlaying that power into a lucrative career so that she didn’t have to be so dependent on any man for her survival. This isn’t to say that she would ever be the kind of woman who would be independent of a man; that wasn’t who she was either. “What I wanted was to look into the mirror and see someone I could be proud of,” she once explained. “I knew no one
would take me there, I would have to do it on my own.”

  Lately, Zsa Zsa had been talking about trying for a serious career in show business; she just wasn’t sure how to go about it. Sanders was less than encouraging, believing her to have no discernible talent. He agreed that she was quite witty, but he didn’t see how she would be able to utilize that character trait in show business. She was uncommonly beautiful, he had to concede as much, but so were many other women in Hollywood. Beauty would not necessarily distinguish her, or so he thought. It was ironic, then, that while George Sanders was out of town for three months making the movie Ivanhoe in England, his brother, Tom Conway, called upon Zsa Zsa to assist him in what can only be called a “show biz emergency.”

  Tom Conway was on his way to the taping of a local Los Angeles–area television program he was appearing on called Bachelor’s Haven, a panel show where celebrities answered questions sent in to the TV station from the lovelorn. There was an opening on the panel of three; would Zsa Zsa like to appear on it?

  This was actually the perfect star vehicle for Zsa Zsa Gabor. It required what she knew she could do best—be gorgeous with her stylish wardrobe, be funny with her continental accent, and be quick with her Hungarian wit. “I can do this,” she decided. “I want to do it.” But still, she didn’t know if she could pull it off; she was terribly fearful, especially since she had never been before a television camera.

  Zsa Zsa’s mother, Jolie, who happened to be visiting, did everything she could think of to encourage her daughter. Still, Zsa Zsa was unsure. Therefore, Jolie picked up the telephone to recruit the one person she felt could convince Zsa Zsa to take the chance of a lifetime, someone who had spent most of his days taking big chances—Conrad. Even though the two had suffered a contentious relationship of late, Jolie knew that deep down they still had a deep, soulful connection. Still, when she told Zsa Zsa that Conrad was on the telephone, Zsa Zsa balked at speaking to him. She thought he had called to pick a fight with her. “Oh my God! I can’t speak to him now,” she said. “He’ll just upset me.” However, her mother insisted. “He is family,” she said. “Now, you speak to him!”