The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty

by Taraborrelli, J. Randy

  Upon returning to the States, the newlyweds purchased a modest three-bedroom, two-bathroom home in Beverly Hills on Alpine Drive. Soon after, nineteen-year-old Trish Hilton learned that she was pregnant. The couple was ecstatic, as were Conrad, Barron, and Eric, who seemed to sense that the impending birth would mark a defining moment in Nicky’s life. It certainly did seem as if he had turned his life around. He wasn’t drinking or taking pills, he was responsible at his job, and he seemed to be happy in his life. Conrad saw to it that Trish had one of the best obstetricians in Los Angeles, the same one who had delivered Lucille Ball’s children. “My pregnancy was so wonderful,” she recalled. “I remember it as being a happy time.”

  One morning, at a Hilton Corporation board meeting, Nicky stood up to make an announcement. He’d never looked better, wearing a navy blue cashmere jacket and black pants with a crisp white shirt and navy tie. “It’s official, gentlemen,” he announced to the executives seated on both sides of long conference table. “We have a new acquisition,” he continued, now gazing at his father at the head of the table. “He’s a bouncing baby boy. And his name is Conrad Nicholson Hilton the third.” As everyone at the table applauded the good news, Nicky rose and walked over to his father, who also stood up. He had finally done something Barron had somehow neglected to do—name a son after Conrad. Of course, maybe it would have been inappropriate for Barron to have done so with one of his many children, since it was Nicky who had been named after his father. As it was, Nicky would be the one to bring forth Conrad Nicholson Hilton the third. He and Conrad embraced, holding each other for just a moment before Conrad broke loose. “Okay, enough,” he said. “We’ve got work to do,” he concluded with a grin. “Looks to me like the next generation of Hiltons is growing by leaps and bounds. Let’s give them something to remember us by, shall we?”

  A year later, Trish and Nicky welcomed another son, Michael, named after Nicky’s friend Miguel Alemán Valdés, who had been the president of Mexico from 1946 to 1952 and was now president of the national tourist commission.

  Nicky and Trish’s friend Carole Wells Doheny—married to Laurence Doheny of the wealthy Doheny family of Los Angeles—recalled the couple’s first years of marriage as being blissfully happy. “Nicky seemed to fall more in love with Trish with the passing of time,” she said. “He became more emotional, more sentimental, especially after the second baby came. I can also tell you that he never cheated on Trish. He and I were close and I would know—and he never did. He was utterly devoted to her.”

  Carole Wells Doheny recalled one evening in particular during a skiing vacation in Aspen, Colorado, that she and her husband took with Nicky and Trish. She says it was a night when she realized just how much Nicky had changed. She and Nicky were relaxing on a couch in the den of the chalet the couples had rented for the week, having drinks and passing the hours. Trish was lying on the carpet in front of them, chatting happily away and playing with the two boys. Wearing tight black jeans, a red silk blouse, and a wide silver belt that perfectly accentuated her hourglass figure, Trish had never looked more striking. As she spoke, Nicky just looked warmly at her. Then, when Trish became preoccupied with one of the babies, Nicky turned to Carole and said, “Isn’t Trish beautiful?” Carole had to agree. Then Nicky added, “I think she’s the most beautiful woman I have ever known.” Considering the number of stunning women Nicky had known in his lifetime, Carole felt that his observation of Trish was quite the compliment. “What a wonderful thing to say,” she told him. Nicky grinned at Carole and, still gazing lovingly at his wife, concluded, “I’m a lucky man, Carole. And I’ve never known it more than I know it right now in this very second.”

  Zsa Zsa Teaches Trish About the Hiltons

  Dah-ling, Zsa Zsa is here now. So, don’t you worry about a thing!”

  It was Tuesday, December 16, 1958, and Zsa Zsa Gabor had just come to the rescue of an anxious Trish Hilton. Trish was frantic with worry as she attempted to plan her first important dinner party as a Hilton wife, which was scheduled for the evening of the eighteenth. Even though she had certainly entertained in the past, this night was to be special because all of the Hiltons would be together for the first time in the new Beverly Hills home she shared with Nicky. Nicky had told her not to give it a second thought. Just whip up something simple, he told her. “No big deal.”

  With just two days to prepare, Trish didn’t know how she would be able to make the kind of good impression she so desperately wished to make on her affluent new family members. “I don’t think I can do it,” she told Nicky, close to tears. “I need a least a week!” Nicky laughed. “I’ll tell you what; call Zsa Zsa for help,” he suggested. “If anyone can put on a good party, it’s her.” Trish was reluctant. She barely knew Zsa Zsa Gabor, having only met her a couple of times. She couldn’t imagine why the Hungarian star would want to help her. But Nicky told her that if she called Zsa Zsa and just said the word “party,” she would “come a-runnin’. Not only that, she’ll want to help,” he said with a grin, “because we’re family. She was my stepmother, after all. I mean, in some crazy way.” The idea of Zsa Zsa Gabor as anyone’s stepmother made Trish smile and relax a little; she suddenly felt better.

  About an hour later, Trish called the telephone number Nicky had given her, and within thirty minutes Zsa Zsa Gabor was seated with her at her dining room table. Over streusel cake and coffee, the two women got to know each other a little better before finally getting down to business. Of course, they talked about Conrad. Zsa Zsa told Trish about their early courtship days and how thrilling that time was in her life and how sorry she was that the marriage had to end. She said she was sure things would work out better for Trish and Nicky, but offered a little advice. “Husbands are like fires,” she said, “they go out when left unattended.” Finally it was time to get down to business. Zsa Zsa whipped out a small spiral notebook from her purse. “Okay, now what exactly is it you want to do, dear?” she asked.

  “Well, Nicky said to just keep it casual,” Trish explained. “So, you know… simple, I guess.”

  Zsa Zsa laughed heartily. “Oh, my dear, there is nothing casual or simple about the Hiltons!” she exclaimed. She added that even if it was to be an intimate gathering, Trish should still make it memorable. After all, she would have “only one chance to make a good impression on this kind of family.” Then, taking quick stock of things, Zsa Zsa decided that if she really wanted to impress, Trish needed a majordomo, a chef, and a maid. However, the problem was that Trish and Nicky had no such staff in their employ—in fact, they had no help at all! Therefore, Zsa Zsa offered to send members of her own household workforce who held those positions.

  “So, what would you like to serve?” Zsa Zsa then asked.

  “Um… spaghetti?” Trish asked.

  Zsa Zsa doubled over with laughter. “Spaghetti!” she exclaimed. “Oh, no, no, no! You do not serve spaghetti to the Hiltons!” Steaks should be on the menu, Zsa Zsa decided, because the Hiltons liked “hearty American foods. Potatoes! Corn! Vegetables! All of the typical American foods. Just no hot dogs,” she said with a laugh. As she spoke, she continued to add to her list: French bread, red wine, “a nice salad,” and cheesecake with strawberries for desert. “Oh, and champagne,” she added. “Pink champagne.” Finally she looked up from her notepad and announced, “You and I will do this together, my dear. It’ll be fun! I’ve been a part of this family for a long time, and I know just what we all like.”

  “Well, then you must come to the party,” Trish offered. “Say you’ll come. Please.”

  “Oh no, absolutely not,” Zsa Zsa said. She explained that if she were present alongside members of her own domestic staff, the family might conclude that it was her party, not Trish’s. And this was to be Trish’s big night. “Just act as if you did it all yourself,” Zsa Zsa suggested. “Let it be our little secret.” Also, she hastened to add that when she and Conrad were in the same room together, it could sometimes be explosive, “and you aren’t ready
to experience that just yet, especially not at your first party,” she concluded with a cackle. Besides, she said, she was already scheduled to appear that night at the red carpet premiere for the new Frank Sinatra film, Some Came Running, directed by Vincente Minnelli. If she didn’t show up, she concluded, it would be to the disappointment of many people. “Plus,” she added gaily, “I’m wearing my new chinchilla!”

  For the next day or so, Trish Hilton and Zsa Zsa Gabor planned Trish’s dinner party down to the very last crouton, and they became good friends in the process. It was to be a friendship that would last for more than thirty years.

  “Now I must see the dress you will wear,” Zsa Zsa told Trish on the morning of the party. Trish went upstairs to change and reappeared in a floral-printed bouffant dress with a tightly cinched waist. “Oh, you look so luffly,” Zsa Zsa enthused as the new Hilton wife descend the stairs. She complimented Trish’s good taste, and even seemed somewhat surprised by it. She then walked over to Trish and with her fingertip traced the area just below Trish’s neck and above her cleavage. “Do you see this part right here?” she asked. “This is the sexiest part of a woman,” she told her new charge. “It’s not the breasts, though I do love the breasts,” she continued. “It’s the fleshy area right above the breasts and below the neck that is sexiest. Such a beautiful spot on a woman.”

  Zsa Zsa gathered her things to leave. After telling Trish to have a “mah-vellous time,” she promised to have flowers delivered that afternoon—specifically red roses, which she said were Marilyn Hilton’s favorites. She hugged Trish and was then quickly out the door, on her busy way to prepare for the movie premiere, but not before one last parting thought. “Do not let Conrad intimidate you,” she said. “He’s just a man like any other, do not forget that.”

  That evening, Trish hosted her first dinner party as a Hilton. “Of course, as expected, Conrad was present, as was Nicky’s mother, Mary,” Trish recalled. “Barron and Marilyn were also there, as was Eric and his wife, Pat. There were a few other business associates present as well. In all, there were ten guests, including me and Nicky. It turned out to be a perfectly lovely evening; Zsa Zsa’s staff handled every moment beautifully.”

  “Say, don’t I know these people from somewhere?” Conrad asked Marilyn at one point as he studied the maid’s face carefully. Of course, Marilyn knew exactly who the household staff belonged to, having been to Zsa Zsa’s on many occasions. However, she would never give away Trish’s secret. She and Trish shared a conspiratorial look. “No, Connie,” Marilyn said. “I believe these people were just hired by Nicky and Trish.” Conrad smiled. “Funny how all maids look alike, isn’t it?” he asked with a chuckle.

  The next day, Zsa Zsa Gabor came to Nicky and Trish’s for a late breakfast, which Trish prepared as a small way of thanking her for her assistance. Nicky joined the two women for the meal—eggs Benedict, hash browns, cottage cheese, coffee, and an assortment of fruits. “It was obvious that Nicky and Zsa Zsa had a special relationship,” Trish recalled. “Zsa Zsa had known him since he was a kid, so really she was like a mother to him in some ways, though she liked to think of herself as an older sister. They had a lot in common, I found, especially in terms of how they believed they were viewed by Conrad.”

  “You know, your father has no respect for me whatsoever,” Zsa Zsa told Nicky at one point. She was not her effervescent self; she looked tired and a little hungover, likely from the previous night’s festivities.

  “Oh, no, Zsa Zsa, that’s not true,” Nicky said.

  “Oh, please,” Zsa Zsa said. “He thinks I’m a joke.” Zsa Zsa then said that Conrad had no idea what she had done with her career, how hard she had worked to make something of herself. In his mind, she said, it was all just “silly nonsense.” She said that she faced the exact same dilemma with her third husband, George Sanders, who had told her she was much too stupid to ever have a career, and when she finally did have one, he would never so much as even acknowledge it. As for Conrad, she recalled once saying to him, “You know, Connie, I was nominated for an Emmy award.” Now she asked Nicky, “Do you know what he said back to me?”

  “What?”

  “He said, ‘Well, you didn’t win it, now, did you?’ ” She shook her head incredulously. Then she asked Nicky a difficult question. “Tell me the truth,” she said, leaning in to him and looking quite serious. “Do you feel that he respects you?”

  The question seemed to make Nicky self-conscious. “I think so,” he answered, hedging. He also added that everyone in the family had worked hard to earn Conrad’s respect.

  “But why?” Zsa Zsa asked, exasperated. “Why is it that everyone in this family wants Conrad Hilton’s respect?” She said she thought it was strange, the way they were all vying for his approval. “As I told Trish yesterday, he’s just a man like any other,” she noted. She added that he was not a god, contrary to what many people in the family seemed to believe.

  Nicky mulled it over. “I guess we just want him to acknowledge that we learned a little something from his example,” he said thoughtfully. “Because it’s true, isn’t it?” He added that, in his view anyway, everything the Hiltons would ever achieve was intrinsically connected to who Conrad was and would always be in their lives. “Even you, Zsa Zsa,” Nicky said with a patient smile. “Don’t you think Pop influenced you to create this big, sensational life for yourself?”

  Zsa Zsa nodded. “I suppose that’s true,” she said, somewhat reluctantly. She added that she used to think to herself, “ ‘Oh my God, if I could just have the kind of life Conrad Hilton has.’ He would always say, ‘Be big, think big, do big.’ I guess I must have listened, because look at me now,” she exclaimed with a wide gesture of her arms and hands. “Who is bigger than Zsa Zsa?” she observed grandly.

  “No one,” Nicky said with a grin. “No one I know, anyway.”

  “Exactly,” Zsa Zsa said. “If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect, now wouldn’t I?” she asked. At that Nicky doubled over laughing. Watching the two of them, Trish couldn’t help but join in the laughter.

  “I remember thinking, ‘What a family I have married into,’ ” Trish Hilton would recall. “Yes, there was something sad and poignant about the way they were all hopelessly vying for Conrad’s attention and approval. But at the same time, there was something inspiring about their unity in it. They had this bond, this kind of ‘for better or worse’ family bond that made me just want to be a part of it. It wasn’t exclusive. Once you were in the Hilton family, It was inclusive, at least that’s how I saw it. It was ‘all for one, one for all.’ Even when they were against each other, you still felt they were somehow for each other.”

  “Oh, he will make you crazy,” Zsa Zsa told Trish in speaking of Conrad Hilton. “Trust me, dear. One day you will come to me and you will say, ‘Zsa Zsa, he has really done it. He has finally made me crazy.’ ”

  “Probably sooner than you think, too, Trish,” Nicky added with a wink.

  Success

  In December 1962, Conrad Hilton turned seventy-five, a milestone birthday in anyone’s life, and for some a time to adapt to a slower pace of living and spend more time exploring leisure activities. Not so for Conrad Hilton, though. He was still full of vigor, ambition, and curiosity—still involved in the day-to-day decision making of his company, attending all of its board meetings, and constantly looking to the future in terms of potential acquisitions. Of course, he suffered from certain conditions that are usually unavoidable manifestations of aging. He had arthritis in his knees and bursitis in his left shoulder. His mind wasn’t as sharp as it had once been; he sometimes forgot the names of people. His eyesight had begun to fail him; he now allowed Olive Wakeman to read to him the daily profit-and-loss reports from his hotels. But he was still thin, mostly agile, and usually able to cut a rug with the best of them, which he never failed to demonstrate at Hilton press junkets around the world.

  Conrad did have pangs of sadness regarding his fading youth, however.
The main reason for his wistfulness was the lack of romantic love in his life. He had been married twice and had a myriad of beautiful female friends, but his true love, the person he could view as a soul mate with whom he could share himself on every level, had never materialized. But on the whole, he’d long ago made peace with his life. He was proud of himself and what he had achieved in his seventy-five years. After all, the Hilton name was now as emblematic of American culture as Pepsi-Cola and American Express.

  Conrad owed a great deal of his success to the country’s postwar economic boom. The amazing progress that had been made in jet air travel in the 1950s made the world a smaller and more accessible place, and there was nothing like feeling right at home at a Hilton hotel no matter where one traveled. Globally, it’s almost impossible to calculate how much money Hilton hotels have generated. For instance, the Castellana Hilton in Madrid brought more than a million dollars in tourist revenue in its first year of operation in 1953. The Istanbul Hilton increased tourism in Turkey by 60 percent in its first year of operation in 1955.

  By the end of 1962, hotel occupancy in America was down 30 percent from the immediate postwar high of 90 percent, but Hilton was still at the top of his game, even with room rates and salaries increasing across the board. That isn’t to say that he didn’t have competition, though. The Sheraton hotel chain had the Hilton chain beat by nine hotels—a total of sixty-nine properties in the world. But it had fewer rooms (29,000) and a much smaller overseas presence (just fourteen abroad, eleven of which were in Canada). “It’s an American operation, for the most part,” Nicky Hilton would say of the competition. “Which is fine and good. And which is not what we are.” Pan American Airways also had a chain of hotels called Intercontinental Hotels, with nineteen properties around the world. But again, theirs was such a small presence compared to that of the Hiltons, and no competitor company was expanding anywhere as rapidly as the Hilton chain.