Resolution
It would not be until the spring of 1986, after a three-week trial before Los Angeles Superior Court judge Robert Weil, that a final—and surprising—order would be issued in the matter of Conrad Hilton’s will. Judge Weil ruled in favor of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. His harsh ruling read, “The entire residue of the estate is distributable to the Foundation, and no part of said residue is subject to the option contained in Paragraph Eight (a) of decedent’s will in favor of William Barron Hilton.”
In his decision, Judge Weil found that when the option permitting Barron to purchase excess stock was included in Conrad’s will, no one, including James E. Bates or Donald Hubbs, “perceived or realized that by creating this option it was possible that Barron Hilton could receive 100 percent of the shares of the estate.” The judge observed that Conrad Hilton was a “very wise man” and that “if he had intended to give Barron Hilton all his stock, he would have done so.”
Myron Harpole recalled, “I had succeeded 100 percent in protecting what I believed to be the interests of Conrad Hilton and of the foundation bearing his name—at least for the moment.”
The foundation, now victorious, was anxious to move forward and let bygones be bygones. Barron wasn’t quite so eager. He decided to take his case to the U.S. district court in the spring of 1986, and it was there that he would finally prevail. “The presiding judge, Thomas J. Whelan, was very much on the side of Barron and his lawyers,” recalled Myron Harpole. “He decided to nullify the decision of the superior court. So Barron managed to get the whole thing reversed; excellent lawyering, one could say, on the parts of his attorneys.”
At the core of the court ruling in Barron’s favor was the foundation’s conversion to a public support organization, which the judge ultimately decided was invalid. His decision concluded that the foundation could not take those kinds of dramatic actions after Conrad’s death to change its status, thereby invalidating Barron’s Option.
“We think this is a shocking opinion,” said foundation lawyer Thomas J. Brorby at the time, “and is clearly contrary to Conrad Hilton’s will.”
Barron countered by saying, “I regard this as a significant victory.”
With that nullification in hand, Barron Hilton then formally appealed the original ruling. At long last, he would win his case in the court of appeals in California in March 1988.
Finally, in November 1988, this battle—almost ten years long—would conclude with a settlement that would see the foundation give Barron Hilton the bulk of the disputed shares of stock, about two-thirds of them. “By this time, the total wealth on the table was about $2 billion,” recalled Myron Harpole. “In the end, Barron ended up with four million shares, worth about three-quarters of a billion dollars. The foundation received 3.5 million shares [placed in the Conrad N. Hilton Fund], and the remaining shares [about five million] were placed in the W. Barron Hilton Charitable Remainder Unitrust. According to the arrangement, Barron then received 60 percent of the W. Barron Hilton Charitable Remainder Unitrust’s share dividends and the foundation received 40 percent until 2009, after which those trust assets reverted to the foundation.”
In the end, Barron didn’t have to pay for his newly acquired three-quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of stock—not what it was worth when Conrad Hilton died and not what it was worth in 1988. In order to do so, he would have had to recruit a large group of fellow investors who would have been entitled to as much as perhaps two-thirds of the stock. “He would have had to have come up with a fortune to afford that much stock, and then the taxes on what he had to raise would have killed him,” recalled Myron Harpole. “This is why they established the W. Barron Hilton Charitable Remainder Unitrust, a legal tactic that allowed Barron to win the stock and not have to pay for it. Some felt this maneuver was actually a clever way of rewriting Conrad Hilton’s will,” concluded Harpole. “Barron disagreed, of course.”
Myron Harpole is still not, all these years later, convinced. He still feels that Conrad did not wish for Barron to achieve great wealth by virtue of his option. “Conrad had favored Barron in other business deals, so Barron was worth about $26 million at the time of the dispute,” he reiterates. “It wasn’t as if he was being left penniless by his father. But as a result of the dispute over the will—and also because of some additional technicalities and stock appreciation—Barron walked away with about a half billion dollars. However, I understood Barron’s reason for contesting the will,” he concluded. “There was just too much money at stake. He couldn’t very well walk away from that kind of money. He was a Hilton, after all. Conrad’s son. The best and brightest of the bunch. So he did what Hiltons do, he fought hard and he won fair and square. You have to hand it to him, because there’s a big difference between the $750,000 he had when he started the battle and the half a billion he ended up with when he finished it.”
Barron still felt that, through it all, he was merely carrying out his father’s wishes, even if some of them had been badly misconstrued by portions of his will that were ambiguously written. “My father’s two objectives, retaining control of the stock in family hands and benefiting charity through the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, can now both be achieved,” Barron Hilton said at the time of the settlement. “I am confident that my father would be pleased with this accord.”
PART FIFTEEN
Fini
Zsa Zsa’s Lapse in Judgment
After the death of Conrad Hilton and the unsuccessful contesting of his will by his daughter, Francesca, the histrionic nature of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s life continued seemingly unabated. In August 1986, after her divorce from Felipe de Alba, she married Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt.
Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt—born Hans Robert Lichtenberg in Wallhausen, Germany—says he was adopted as a grown man in 1980 by Princess Marie-Auguste of Anhalt, daughter-in-law of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He is twenty-seven years Zsa Zsa’s junior. To hear him tell it, he came to America with the express purpose of meeting Zsa Zsa, which he did after he paid a photographer $10,000 to introduce him to her and snap their picture together. One thing led to another, and—as often happened in Zsa Zsa’s unpredictable life—they ended up man and wife.
Though she always managed to put on her resolute Zsa Zsa face for the public, by the end of the 1980s certain cracks had begun to appear in that façade. In 1989, for instance, she was convicted of slapping a police officer in Beverly Hills. She was forced to pay $13,000 in fines and also spend seventy-two hours in jail. It would seem that the constant stress of just being Zsa Zsa was taking its toll, as evidenced by the copy of an advertisement for a skin cream she was promoting at the time, “Zsa Zsa’s Beautifying Night Creme.” It read, in part, “The anxiety, the mobs of reporters, the strangers always calling—it’s awful! Yet, you could never tell on my face. I always look mah-vellous and beautiful. But, dahling, you know how Zsa Zsa is suffering.”
Maybe part of her agitation had to do with her ambivalent feelings about Conrad Hilton, which continued into the new decade. She was eventually able to accept—as she would later say—that he had omitted her from his will. However, Francesca’s inheritance was still difficult for her to reconcile. When Zsa Zsa thought about the long, tangled journey she, Conrad, and Francesca had shared for so many years, it made her angry. Indeed, with the passing of time, it would seem that she became more—not less—bitter.
In 1990, Zsa Zsa Gabor was seventy-three and apparently determined to even the score on all counts—thus her memoir of that year, One Lifetime Is Not Enough.
Comparing to her smartly written autobiography of 1960, Zsa Zsa Gabor: My Story, the reader is overwhelmed by the gossipy nature of One Lifetime Is Not Enough, as well as its many inconsistencies. For instance, in the 1960 book she wrote, “One evening I greeted Conrad with a warm kiss. Nicky said with a grin, ‘Dad, what must a fellow do to get a kiss like that from Zsa Zsa?’ Conrad and I both laughed it off.” The 1990 book reads, “On one occasion, Conrad presented me with a box of c
hocolates, I kissed him. And Nicky—not able to control his jealousy—said, ‘What does a man have to do, Dad, to get a kiss like that from Zsa Zsa?’ Conrad whacked him so hard that I was afraid Nicky might suffer a concussion!”
One of the conquests Zsa Zsa conjured up in her book was with Nicky Hilton. She claimed that after her divorce from Conrad, she engaged in a three-year love affair with Nicky that continued into his marriage with Elizabeth Taylor. “Nicky Hilton was the first of a series of men I would have in common with Elizabeth Taylor,” she wrote.
Nicky’s wife, Trish Hilton, doesn’t believe that is true. “Do you think my husband would have had a three-year affair with his former stepmother and forget to mention it to me? Of course not. I loved Zsa Zsa. We were good friends; I saw her all the time, as did Nicky. It would have come up between us, this so-called affair. She would never have told me such a thing to my face, though, because she would have known that I would have seen through it.”
It got worse in One Lifetime Is Not Enough when Zsa Zsa set her sights on the one man who had vexed her for decades, Conrad Hilton. He had always had the last word, at least as far as she was concerned. Even from the grave, he had managed to have the last word about Francesca. Not anymore. Zsa Zsa now claimed in her book that Francesca was actually not conceived during a spontaneous Manhattan tryst in July in 1946, but rather as a result of Conrad having raped her.
“One day he sent a limousine for me, with instructions that I visit him in the Plaza,” Zsa Zsa wrote. “I obeyed, simply because by now obeying Conrad Hilton had become a habit for me. When I arrived at his suite, I discovered that Conrad was in bed, his leg in a cast after an accident. First, we had coffee. Then (incredible as it sounds, but quite believable if you had known Conrad, his forceful nature and his intense virility), he raped me. Nine months later, our daughter Francesca Hilton was born.”
Zsa Zsa’s new version of events surrounding Francesca’s conception was a lurid twist to an old tale. She certainly never mentioned rape the three times she was under oath about Francesca’s conception.
Zsa Zsa’s story could only jeopardize Francesca Hilton’s already tentative place in the Hilton family. Perhaps the best course of action—that is, if Francesca wanted to be looked kindly upon by the family—would have been to immediately disavow it. How could she, though? It came from her mother, after all. They still loved each other very much, even if they did have a lifetime of differences between them. Once again, Constance Francesca Hilton found herself in an all too familiar place: caught in the middle of an ugly war between her irate mother and the distant man she had always called “Daddy.” Therefore, where this allegation was concerned, she turned to humor. “Don’t ask me,” she joked. “I wasn’t there.”
It’s difficult to imagine why a woman of distinction like Zsa Zsa Gabor would have wanted such a tasteless book to be representative of her life and times. No matter her flamboyant or controversial nature, she had never been lacking in class and refinement, which makes the fact that she authored this book all the more perplexing. “Yes, I think she was angry,” says Trish Hilton in trying to understand Zsa Zsa’s motivation, “but I also don’t think she took the book that seriously. I think, for her, it was just a collection of sensational stories for entertainment and attention. I could just hear her saying, ‘Oh, dah-ling, please! Why, no one actually believes this stuff. This is just for fun!’ ” concludes Trish Hilton. “Giving her the benefit of doubt, I long ago chalked this book up to a terrible lapse in judgment.”
* * *
As of this writing, Zsa Zsa Gabor is ninety-seven years of age. She and Frédéric, who is seventy, have been married for twenty-eight years. Von Anhalt continues to court media attention. For instance, on February 6, 2012, he hosted a ninety-fifth birthday party for Zsa Zsa at the couple’s Bel-Air home, even though Zsa Zsa was bedridden and seemingly incapacitated. He allowed a few celebrities—such as Larry King and his wife, Shawn Southwick—to go into her room and pose with her for photographs of questionable taste. Judging from them, Zsa Zsa did not seem to know what was going on around her.
Zsa Zsa Gabor is now a complete invalid, bedridden in the Bel-Air home in which she has lived for nearly forty years. She suffers from dementia, has had one leg amputated and half her body paralyzed as a result of a stroke. “She doesn’t even know she gets food through the tube,” von Anhalt told the New York Post in September 2012. “It will only upset her,” he says. “She was so glamorous always, and she is so vain.” It’s a heartbreaking ending for a strong and powerful woman who once proclaimed, “I do not want to get old. Please, God, take me before that happens. There’s nothing beautiful about aging. It’s a cruel thing to happen to a woman such as myself.”
Francesca: “The Original Hilton Heiress”
Today, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s only daughter, the formidable Constance Francesca Hilton, is divorced and has no children. At sixty-seven, she lives in Los Angeles. Occasionally she performs as a comedienne at the Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip, where she demonstrates a sharp wit and humorous point of view about her life and times. “I am the original Hilton heiress,” she has said during one of her monologues. “I’m older, wiser, smarter—and I’m damn wider! My mom is Zsa Zsa Gabor,” she continued. “My father was Conrad Hilton. Some of you have our towels. Keep ’em! Keep anything you steal!” And later: “My niece is Paris Hilton. She called me the other day and said, ‘Francesca, can you pick me up? I’m just too drunk to drive.’ I said, ‘Girl, I’d pick you up, but I’m too drunk to drive myself.’ ”
Though Francesca likes to joke that she and Zsa Zsa “are best of friends now that we’re the same age,” there has been no shortage of heartache for mother and daughter since Zsa Zsa’s marriage to Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt. For the last twenty years, there have been many lawsuits and a myriad of other legal actions between von Anhalt and Hilton, most of them in recent times having to do with the care of Zsa Zsa.
For years, von Anhalt had allegedly prevented Francesca from seeing her mother and, according to her, would not share medical, psychological, or financial information with her. In a 2011 statement, Francesca said, “By isolating me from my mother, not only does her current husband deprive her of my love and companionship, but he goes against estate planning documents that appear to reflect her wishes that he not be in sole control of her affairs.” In 2012, Francesca won, by court order, the right to regular, private visitations—one hour, once a week, alone, without von Anhalt present but with the presence of a caretaker, lawyer, or officer. She is now also entitled to a full accounting of how her mother’s money is being spent by von Anhalt. As of this writing, von Anhalt remains his wife’s temporary conservator.
Because of her mother’s illnesses, these have been anything but easy times for Francesca Hilton, a woman who, it would seem, has always had it rough. “Zsa Zsa’s ongoing health problems have been so hard on her,” says one of Francesca’s closest friends. “Sometimes she wants her mom. Things happen in the course of her life and, you know, she just needs her mom. It’s that simple. But she doesn’t have her. Not really. So it’s very painful.”
“She squeezes my hand,” Francesca has said of Zsa Zsa. “She knows me. She mouths a few words. She once called me ‘the Brat,’ so that’s how I announce myself. I say, ‘Mother, the Brat’s here.’ ”
As for her present relationship with the Hiltons, Francesca remains on friendly terms with some members of the family; she and Barron speak occasionally and she has also assisted the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation with certain charity events. “I think she has spent a large part of her life trying to find her path,” says the foundation’s head, her nephew Steven Hilton.
“People who know her well realize that Francesca has not only survived a very challenging life, she has thrived despite it,” concludes her publicist and good friend Ed Lozzi, “and so they wish her well. I think people have always rooted for Francesca Hilton. They still do.”
Paris
If Conrad Hilton’s h
istorical hotel chain does not immediately come to mind when the Hilton name is mentioned these days, it’s likely because of the impact on our culture that’s been made by the most well-known, controversial, and successful of the current Hilton generation: Conrad’s great-granddaughter Paris.
Paris Whitney Hilton was born in New York City on February 17, 1981. Her sister Nicky was born two years later. Two brothers were added to the family, Barron II in 1989 and Conrad III in 1994.*
Richard Howard Hilton, better known as Rick, is Paris’s father. The sixth child of Barron and Marilyn, he was born in 1955. Hilton would go on to make a fortune as the chairman and cofounder of Hilton & Hyland, a high-end real estate brokerage firm headquartered in Beverly Hills. He has a degree in hotel and restaurant management. “You could say that he is a chip off the ol’ block that is Barron,” says a good friend of Rick’s.
In November 1979, the end of the year of Conrad’s death, Rick married Kathleen Elizabeth Avanzino, today better known as the socialite (and also actress) Kathy Hilton. (Kathy’s half sisters Kim and Kyle enjoyed success in TV and movies in the 1970s and 1980s, and more recently in the reality show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.)
Kathy was a young mother—twenty-two when Paris was born, and at times her inexperience showed. For instance, Pat Hilton—Eric’s wife—recalls that she was in Los Angeles (from Houston, where she and Eric lived) visiting her sister-in-law Marilyn when she first met Paris, who was about nine months old. “Kathy brought her over to Marilyn’s and was excited to introduce me to the baby,” she recalled. “She called her ‘Star,’ as I remember it—a nickname for her. She handed the infant to me and said, ‘Here, Pat, why not hold Star for a little while?’ I was thrilled to do so, she was such a happy, beautiful baby. But then Kathy just disappeared. The next thing I knew, Marilyn and I had Paris for the entire day.”
The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty Page 49