The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty

by Taraborrelli, J. Randy

  Wyatt Montgomery recalls Eric Hilton as being “a hell of a nice guy, good-looking, with a winning personality and a big smile for everyone. As adults, he and Nicky had grown very close. The two would take off in Nicky’s flashy red convertible with the white leather interior, go to the Santa Monica beach, maybe have dinner in Beverly Hills. I always felt the closeness they shared was because both viewed the other as underdogs in the family. Barron wasn’t an underdog, that’s for sure. Barron was always top dog.

  “But in the end, the three of us, we’re not so different,” Nicky told Eric one day at the office, according to Wyatt Montgomery.

  “I don’t know. I think we’re different,” Eric observed.

  “Not really,” Nicky continued. “After all, the three of us are just trying to do the same thing, aren’t we? We’re all just trying make our father proud.”

  Eric had to agree.

  Like Nicky, Eric was certainly never at a loss for female companionship either. One of Eric’s many girlfriends was the popular actress Margaret O’Brien, who won a Juvenile Academy Award as the outstanding child actor of 1944 for her unforgettable performance as Tootie in 1944’s Meet Me in St. Louis. She recalled, “I was seventeen and Eric twenty-one when he and I dated.

  “I met him while doing an appearance at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, which of course his father owned. He was my first offscreen kiss, with Jeffrey Hunter being my first onscreen. Then I went on with my film career and we drifted apart. But I have the sweetest memories of Eric Hilton.”

  Perhaps another reason any possible romance cooled between Eric and Margaret O’Brien was because he had become so smitten with the lovely Patricia Skipworth, daughter of El Paso insurance man E. T. Skipworth.

  Pat Skipworth was about five foot six, slender with a willowy figure, her chestnut brown hair worn full and loose around her pretty face. She had a finely drawn, aristocratic nose, deep brown eyes, and a wide mouth that, when turned up in a smile, filled her face with a certain radiance. She looked smart in anything she put on, so much so that some thought she could have been a high-fashion model. She knew just how to wear clothes and had a great sense of personal style, one that evolved even more after she met Eric.

  Eric and Pat first met while attending El Paso High School in Texas. “I’ll never forget it,” she recalled with a laugh. “I was sitting in the passenger’s seat of a green 1945 Buick with my girlfriend in the driver’s seat when Eric and two other boys piled into the backseat. Eric said, ‘Hey there! How are you girls doing?’ But I was much too shy to turn around. So all he saw was the back of my head. After we dropped them off wherever they were going, my girlfriend said to me, ‘Oh my God, that boy Eric Hilton is so adorable! How could you not turn around and say hello to him? Did you see how blue his eyes are? He’s a real dreamboat!’ ”

  A week later, Patricia finally got a formal introduction to Eric at school. However, she didn’t make much of an impression on him. The next day she saw him again, and he didn’t remember ever having met her. Every time the two would run into each other and be introduced, Eric would act as if it were the first time. “He would extend his hand and say, ‘Hello, I’m Eric Hilton,’ ” Pat recalled with a chuckle, “and I would think, ‘Dear Lord! I am not registering with this boy at all, am I?’ It drove me crazy throughout my sophomore and junior years.”

  When Pat moved to what she refers to as “the other side of the mountain” and began attending Austin High School, she stopped seeing Eric around town. But then, after graduation in 1951, the two ran into each other again at the El Paso Country Club, where Eric volunteered to call out bingo games. “I was with my mother when someone reintroduced me to Eric and—again—he acted as if it was the first time. I turned to my mom and said, ‘You see? This is the boy I told you about. The one who never remembers me!’ ”

  Despite his apparent lack of interest, Pat saw something in Eric that intrigued her, a kindness and warmth in his eyes that inexplicably made her feel tender toward him. With her curiosity and attraction peaking, she began to arrange “impromptu” meetings with him, making sure she would be in places she knew he frequented in hopes of possibly striking up the conversation with him that would finally break through his inscrutable indifference and make him remember her. That it wasn’t working was maddening. “My mother would always know when I’d been in the same room with Eric,” Pat recalled, “because I would come home and slam the front door real hard in complete frustration, shaking the whole house. My mother would say, ‘Oh my God! Pat must have met Eric Hilton. Again!’ ”

  Finally, Pat and Eric both found themselves attending Texas Western College, the college in which Eric would enroll for two years and which is today known as the University of Texas at El Paso. “One day, a friend of Eric’s sat down at a table in the Student Union Building where I was eating lunch,” Pat recalled, “and he said, ‘My friend Eric Hilton can’t seem to get a date. Do you know anyone?’ And I thought, ‘Um… hello?’ I didn’t believe for a second that he couldn’t get a date! Perhaps he really had noticed me! Sure enough, the next day he called and asked me out. And that was it; we began to date.”

  Interestingly, after his initial indifference, Eric fell hard for Pat. Within just two weeks, he wanted to marry her. While there was no doubt that she was infatuated with him, Pat couldn’t help but feel uncertain about his suddenly ardent feelings. “I didn’t know what to say,” she recalled. “It was all so sudden. I hadn’t even thought about getting married. But I later learned that Eric was a determined man, which I guessed was a Hilton trait. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. So we continued dating and he continued trying to talk me into it and, well, I guess you could say I was drawn in by him.

  “As well as his good looks, it was his personality,” Pat recalled of her initial attraction to Eric Hilton. “He was just so funny. To this day, he has a wonderful sense of humor. So I think that’s what did it for me. It wasn’t his father’s wealth, or anything like that. God’s honest truth, I never gave that a second thought.” Finally, as she recalled, it was her mother who made the decision. “You are marrying Eric Hilton, and that’s the end of it,” she told her daughter. “You know you love him. You’ve been in love with him since way back when, when you were slamming doors for him!”

  The wedding took place on August 14, 1954, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. Along with Pat’s parents, Conrad Hilton was also present, as well as Mary Saxon, and Barron with Marilyn, and Nicky. “It was a lovely ceremony,” Pat recalled. “Conrad and Mary seemed proud of Eric, and everyone got along well. I was excited to join a family that had done so much good for the country. Eric and I began our lives together, and he continued with his career. We used to joke that he started at the top of the hotel business—that is, on the roof of the El Paso Hilton, sweeping up after the pigeons! Then he started working as an engineer in the basement. He had just been accepted into the Cornell Hotel School when he was drafted. The next thing I knew he was off to Japan… and I was off with him.”

  Conrad made a rare exception to his steadfast rule about lending money to family members, fronting Eric the money that paid for Pat to go to Japan and live with him while he was in training to be a radar specialist. “Conrad was considerate enough to make sure we weren’t separated so early in our marriage,” Pat recalled. “He loaned Eric the money to rent us a nice apartment there, and a year later I found out I was pregnant. Our firstborn, Eric Jr., was born in Tokyo. [The couple would have three more children: Beverly, Linda, and Brad.] After Eric was discharged, we moved back to Dallas and continued our lives together.

  “It was hard in the beginning,” Pat recalled of her nearly thirty-year marriage to Eric Hilton; they would divorce in 1983. “We rented and moved around a lot. We were poor. Conrad believed that people should work for a living. If he was giving out handouts—and I’m not saying he was, but if he was, it wasn’t to Eric,” she said, laughing. “We paid him back the loan he gave us for my move to Japan.


  “Eric had to work hard for his money, all sorts of jobs at Conrad’s hotels, from doorman to cook to elevator operator. It didn’t matter, he wanted to do it—desk clerk, steward—he did everything he could, as long as it was at a Hilton hotel. We had a tiny little house and Conrad could come down from Los Angeles and visit from time to time. I can’t say that he and Eric had a close relationship. Not that it was strained; it was more like they didn’t really know each other well. It felt formal, though cordial. [Conrad] was always nice to me. I figured that his relationship with Eric was set in stone before I came into the picture, and so I stayed out of it.

  “As for the brothers, I thought of Eric as the gentler of the three,” she continued. “When I first met Nicky and Barron, I was a little struck by how different they were from Eric. Whereas they were aggressive, commanding personalities, Eric was much more laid-back and mellow. He said it was because his brothers had his father as a role model while growing up. ‘I had my mom and my stepdad,’ he told me. ‘We lived a normal life in the suburbs. My brothers had all the trappings of wealth, I didn’t.’ He had no bitterness about any of it. ‘I wouldn’t trade my life for my brothers,’ he always said. But Eric was pretty much always the eternal optimist. ‘I get that from my father,’ he would tell me.”

  A Troubling Conversation About Francesca

  It was March 10, 1958, Francesca Hilton’s eleventh birthday. She was a happy little girl with wavy shoulder-length brown hair. She loved her mother, and as little girls often do, thought of her as the center of her whole world. Zsa Zsa did her best, but being maternal did not come easy for her. It wasn’t as if she made herself available, even for a morning ritual such as coming down from her room for breakfast with her child. “Come down for breakfast!?” Francesca once exclaimed. “She had breakfast in bed. And I was usually in school by then, anyway.” Parenting was a constant struggle for Zsa Zsa. Self-involved, she had trouble making time for her daughter. She was conscious of it, too. It wasn’t as if she was oblivious to her shortcomings as a mother. However, she felt that her burgeoning career was so demanding, there was no way to find a happy balance between it and her responsibilities as a mother. Many of her films were made in Europe, so she and Francesca spent a great deal of time there, and she reasoned that Francesca was getting a well-rounded worldview as a result. Plus, at this time she was involved in a messy on-again, off-again relationship with the notorious playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, which totally consumed her. She would try—and in her mind, that was the best she could do.

  When it was time to celebrate her daughter’s birthday, suffice it to say, no one threw a party quite like Zsa Zsa. Every year, Zsa Zsa would come up with a different theme for Francesca. She took great pleasure in hosting anything but the ordinary party for her daughter—admittedly as much to celebrate herself as a mother as to celebrate Francesca’s birthday—so one year it would be a western theme, another year a Spanish theme, a circus theme, a masquerade theme, and so forth. Because these theme parties usually ended with at least fifty screaming, crying children tearing her Bel-Air house apart—as often happens when that many kids are together for hours at a time—it was Zsa Zsa’s idea that for Francesca’s eleventh, the party’s theme would be “formal.” “All children want to be grown-ups,” she said. “This time, for one night, they can be grown up.” Therefore, all of the girls would be asked to wear ball gowns and long white gloves—which they would not be allowed to take off for the entire night—and the boys would wear tuxedos; their little bow ties were to remain intact as well. Zsa Zsa reasoned that if the children were dressed like adults, maybe they would actually act like adults and the party wouldn’t end up a big, chaotic mess.

  With the passing of about a week’s time, though, Zsa Zsa couldn’t help herself; her imagination began to run wild with ideas for the party:

  “What if we had a twelve-piece orchestra so that the children could dance?”

  Done.

  “And what if Eddie Fisher performed?”

  Done.

  “And what if Pat Boone sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to Francie, because he’s her most favorite star of all?”

  Done.

  Celebrities loved Zsa Zsa Gabor. She was fun, well connected, and could get pretty much anyone to do anything for her. The media loved her too. Once word got out about the kind of sensational party she was to host for Francesca’s birthday, Life magazine decided it was an important enough cultural event to warrant a photographer and a reporter for a three-page spread, which would appear in its March 31 issue.

  Unsurprisingly, the party was a smashing, over-the-top, bombastic success. “Why, this is just so… unusual,” Marilyn Hilton told Zsa Zsa, as butlers served ginger ale and grenadine cocktails from silver trays. “What a novel idea! How ever did you come up with it?”

  Zsa Zsa smiled. “Well, if you’re going to throw a party, you have to make it worthwhile,” she said. “Otherwise, you can’t expect Life magazine to show up, now can you?” How could anyone disagree?

  Life’s story later noted that the “18 guests, dressed like well-bred miniatures of their movie-colony elders, showed up on a rainy evening at Miss Gabor’s Bel-Air home. When the evening threatened to segregate into sexes, Francesca, a chip off the old block, murmured to the girls, ‘Let’s go in and meet the boys.’ ”

  Later, Zsa Zsa was photographed while doting on Francesca—who was wearing a white-and-pink short-sleeved bouffant ball gown—and helping her open dozens of elaborately wrapped presents presented by the offspring of celebrities like Van Johnson, Dick Powell, and Deborah Kerr, all of whom came with their famous parents. As songs like “Picnic” and “Sugartime” by the McGuire Sisters played on the sound system, Zsa Zsa was interviewed not only by the reporter from Life but also one from the Associated Press. “My sweet daughter, she is the apple of my light,” Zsa Zsa said, of Francesca, commingling the metaphors “apple of my eye” and “light of my life.” She continued to rave, “As you can see, we are one big, happy family. Connie is right over there,” she said. She then pointed to a tall man in a cowboy hat looking around with a bewildered expression, as if he had never seen any children’s party quite like this one. “My divorce from Connie has not affected his relationship with our daughter at all, not one bit,” she said. “And there’s Nicky, Barron and Marilyn, too,” she told the reporter.

  After dinner was served—fried chicken and mashed potatoes—all of the children and adults assembled on the wooden floor Zsa Zsa had laid down on top of the brick-paved library for a stage. It was where the orchestra had already assembled. Zsa Zsa walked onto the stage wearing a strapless bouffant floral-printed evening gown, cut about as low as possible. She then told a few jokes that seemed a little inappropriate considering the party’s age group, but the famous parents certainly enjoyed them. “I’m a great housekeeper, as you can see,” she said, motioning around to her surroundings. “I get divorced. I keep the house!” And this one: “I believe in large families. Every woman should have at least three husbands!” Asked about the diamond brooch she was wearing, she said it was a gift. “I don’t take gifts from perfect strangers,” she allowed, “but, then… nobody’s perfect.” She knew how to get a laugh.

  Finally, turning serious, Zsa Zsa announced, “It is my great pleasure to introduce a good friend of mine. I’m sure you watch his television program every week, don’t you? Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Eddie Fisher!” Eddie then came out to great applause to perform a few of his big hits, such as “Heart” and “I Need You Now.” Afterward, the cake, as big and as ornate as any royal wedding cake, was brought out as the guests all sang “Happy Birthday” to Francesca. Then, right on cue, the telephone rang. Surprise! It was Pat Boone, calling from New York. As it happened, he wasn’t able to rearrange his schedule in order to appear in person, so it was decided that he would sing “Happy Birthday” to Francesca long-distance. “Why, this is the best birthday ever!” Francesca enthused after hanging up with her “most favorite star of all.”

 
At around ten o’clock, the guests began to filter out. Francesca and Conrad then stepped outside to enjoy some private time together. They began to play in the expansive yard as Zsa Zsa stood in the kitchen watching through an open window with attorney Gregson Bautzer, a very good friend of hers who was at the party along with his wife, actress Dana Wynter. (Bautzer had been Eva Gabor’s date the night she and Zsa Zsa met Conrad for the first time, many years earlier. He had also attended Zsa Zsa’s wedding to Conrad.) With one hand, Conrad tossed a red ball in Francesca’s direction, while with the other he nursed a Dewar’s neat. Though the little girl would sometimes catch it, she usually missed the ball. She would good-naturedly run to retrieve it and then pop it into the air to return it to her dad. It was relaxed and very natural.

  “Will you just look at those two,” Zsa Zsa said to Gregson with a satisfied smile. “They get along so well, don’t they?” she added, lighting a cigarette. “Family is so important, don’t you agree, Greg?” Then, speaking loudly to her daughter through the open window, she cautioned, “Now, Francie, don’t you dare get those gloves dirty! They’re pure silk! I just bought them at Magnin’s!”

  “Yes, they’re really great together,” agreed Gregson as he watched father and daughter at play.

  “I know this birthday party is a little much,” Zsa Zsa admitted. “But all I want is for Francie is to have a beautiful life. I think every young girl deserves that much,” she added with a reflective smile, “and a father is so important to a child. Don’t you agree, Greg?”