Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976)

by Stadiem, William

  The marriage barely survived the arrival of the jet planes and was over by 1960, having produced one daughter, Anne-Jacqueline. Those jets made it easy for Claude to make his gâteau at the Tour and eat it in Beverly Hills, as well as to commute between Malibu and Warner’s Villa Aujourd’hui in Cap d’Antibes, which put high-roller Jack in easy betting distance from Onassis’s casino in Monte Carlo. Terrail was so grateful to be part of this new Jet Set that he made friends in Santa Monica with jetmeister Donald Douglas, whom he called “Monsieur DC-8,” and Howard Hughes, who was the only guest he’d allow in the Tour wearing jeans and sneakers.

  But his more usual crowd was the Darryl Zanuck A-list polo set, which included him in their notorious all-night high-stakes croquet matches in Palm Springs. The Terrails’s best friends were other bicontinental French-speaking couples, Kirk and Anne Douglas and Gregory and Veronique Peck. Barbara Warner had her father’s sense of humor. When Anne-Jacqueline was born at the American Hospital in Neuilly, Barbara announced to her husband that the precocious baby was already talking. What was her first word? an amazed Claude asked. “Maxim’s,” Barbara taunted him.

  Barbara did more than taunt when she began an affair with Raymond le Sénéchal, the pianist at the Elephant Blanc nightclub and longtime accompanist of playboy-crooner Sacha Distel, whose smash record “La Belle Vie” became an even bigger smash as Tony Bennett’s “The Good Life.” Distel was the lover of Brigitte Bardot at the time of his pianist’s transgressions with Madame Terrail, giving Igor Cassini endless grist for his gossip mill. One bit of grist that almost closed the mill was Claude Terrail’s assertion that Jack Warner and his Hollywood goon squad were preparing to kidnap his daughter, Anne-Jacqueline, who was living with him while her mother played.

  As was his ability, Jack Warner brought immense pressure on the Hearst papers to clear his name. Cassini jumped to it, warning Claude that there would be a bloody-duck boycott by Hollywood if he didn’t bite his tongue. “Certainly I retain, in spite of these painful experiences, all my affection for my American clientele,” Claude retreated in the Cholly column. Within a year, the divorce was finalized and everyone had kissed and made up, as Cassini reported in a column about a Manhattan cocktail party for polo pals Terrail and Rubirosa. Honoring the two studs was a Jet Set all-star lineup of Serge Semenenko, Oleg Cassini, Jack Lemmon, Pat DiCicco (ex-husband of Gloria Vanderbilt), NBC head Robert Sarnoff, Opel heir Gunter Sachs (future husband of Brigitte Bardot), and front and center, Jack Warner, as proof that duck conquers all.

  As Barbara’s jibe indicated, the rivalry between the two temples of the Tour and Maxim’s was intense. But Claude’s high-profile romances, his high-profile marriage, and his high-profile friends made him a major star, the first restaurateur to achieve this level of celebrity, and his ability to put a face, his well-known face, on the Tour gave him a big publicity edge over Maxim’s. The Vaudables, the family who owned Maxim’s, simply could not match the glamour of the Terrails. Even in the New York cradle of publicity, Henri Soulé, owner of its chief celebrity temple, Le Pavillon, was a dumpy, untelegenic autocrat. He may have instilled fear, but he lacked charisma.

  What Soulé and the Vaudables did offer, power-snobbery, was precisely what the sixties critics of French inhospitality were complaining about. Terrail may have been the snobbiest of the lot, but one never felt it. When asked what was the best table in the house, Terrail would reply, “Wherever you sit, mademoiselle,” followed by a deft kiss of the hand. Retro-aristo places like Maxim’s drove the sixties radical-communard-Frommer types crazy, but miraculously, the Tour was able to escape their wrath. It had become as essential to Paris as Notre Dame, something that had to be experienced once in a lifetime. Terrail was simply someone whom no one could ever dislike. He might have been the stuff of parody, but his charm and style made him critic-proof. The Tour’s china may have been Limoges, but its owner was pure Teflon.

  IF CLAUDE TERRAIL’S IMAGE WAS THE PARISIAN PRINCE OF SOPHISTICATION, CONRAD Hilton’s was the Beverly Hillbilly. However, that wasn’t a bad thing in Eisenhower America, where up-from-nothing success was the hallmark of Yankee ingenuity. Hilton’s remarkable achievement in becoming the king of the hotel world was the apotheosis of the American Dream. Until John and Jackie Kennedy squeaked into the White House, sophistication of a Terrailian order was looked upon with great suspicion by most Americans, to whom all things foreign were presumed subversive, if not Communist.

  Besides, Conrad Hilton wasn’t the hayseed he appeared to be. That was part of his own subversiveness. He was as educated as he was motivated. He had been an officer in World War I in Europe. He had seen the world, dined and danced at Maxim’s. He was an intimate of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, heads of state around the world who wanted his hotels, as well as the wizards of Wall Street, the City, the Bourse, who financed his hospitality juggernaut. In Los Angeles, he was close to fellow westerner Gary Cooper, but also to German temptress Marlene Dietrich.

  He has been portrayed as a rich hick from the sticks for having married Zsa Zsa Gabor. But Gabor was no cheap floozy. She was one of the goddesses of her generation. Before time turned her into a caricature, almost any man would have fallen prey to her. The most urbane actor in Hollywood, George Sanders, certainly did; he married her after Hilton. The world’s greatest playboy, Porfirio Rubirosa, certainly did; the only thing that kept him from a trip to the altar was the siren call of Barbara Hutton’s billions. Then Hilton’s son Nick topped Daddy by wedding the ultimate Hollywood trophy, Elizabeth Taylor. At a time when men were judged by the distaff company they kept, the Hiltons could hold their own with anyone in the Jet Set. Perhaps what made Conrad Hilton seem like a rube, a country bumpkin, an innocent abroad and at home, was his deep Catholicism. Going to church, as he devoutly did, didn’t get you in to Cholly Knickerbocker. Hilton often quoted the Bible, but he also cited Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson: “There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”

  One of the greatest businessmen of all time, Conrad Hilton had a life that was better than a Horatio Alger story, a primer on how to succeed in business by trying and trying and trying. He was born in 1887 in what was then the arid mountainous wild of the New Mexico Territory, one of eight children of a plucky immigrant family. His father, Augustus Halvorson Hilton, had journeyed from Norway and settled in a territorial hamlet called San Antonio, midway between Albuquerque and El Paso in the valley of the Rio Grande. Conrad Hilton may have inherited his unerring instinct for prime locations from his father, a powerful six-footer with a handlebar mustache who became the big man of his small town. That hamlet grew rich as a depot for the nearby coal mines and cattle and sheep ranches. As the owner of San Antonio’s one general store, he was Mr. Big. He was known to the Spanish-speaking locals as El Coronel, or the Colonel. Conrad’s mother called him Gus.

  ON THEIR TOES. Hotel magnate Conrad Hilton with his new daughter-in-law Elizabeth Taylor, 1951. (photo credit 7.1)

  Mary Laufersweiler, of German stock, had smitten her future spouse as the May Queen in Fort Dodge, Iowa, where Gus Hilton first alighted on coming to America. To her prosperous merchant father, however, Gus Hilton showed too little promise, and Fort Dodge offered too little opportunity for him to prove himself. So south by southwest he went, surviving an Apache ambush that killed four fellow travelers, until he decided to stake his claim in the middle of nowhere and carve out a career as what was called a trafficker and trader, of beaver pelts. He saw plenty of opportunity for success if he could manage to avoid being scalped. Eventually, he did well enough to reseek Mary’s hand, and this time her father gave in. Gus returned to Fort Dodge and, after a honeymoon in New Orleans, brought his bride to the Wild West.

  The worst part of pioneer life for the new Mrs. Hilton was not the Apaches but the absence of a Catholic church. In Iowa, she had never missed a daily mass. To fill that void, a circuit-riding Belgian missionary would visit San Antonio
. When the padre couldn’t get to the Hiltons, the Hiltons went to the padre, wherever he was in the mountains or desert, in a buckboard wagon. The cultured Mary Hilton taught Conrad and his siblings to play the piano and to speak French to the prelate and Spanish to almost everyone else. Every summer, she would pack the kids onto the Santa Fe railway and take the long journey back to Fort Dodge. Conrad loved the Pullman sleepers, whose modernity and cleanliness would become the hallmarks of his hotels. The Pullmans’ electric lights, running water, and elaborate bathrooms were a magic ride into the future.

  By 1904, Gus Hilton had become a rich man, selling his investment in local coal mines for over $100,000. To celebrate what today would be multimillionaire status, he took the family by Pullman to the St. Louis Exposition. They stayed in a fancy hotel, Conrad’s first such experience, called the Inside Inn, owned by the Hilton of his times, E. M. Statler, whose Statler chain Conrad Hilton would acquire in 1954. After the World’s Fair trip, the newly rich Hiltons left the desert for the ocean, moving to the breezy luxury of Long Beach, California. Conrad’s sisters were sent back east to a Catholic finishing school; he was being prepared to attend Dartmouth, where he would major in economics and acquire eastern polish. Unfortunately, a stock market crash in 1907 made the Hiltons poor once again and sent them packing back to New Mexico, shattering Conrad Hilton’s boyhood dreams of Ivy.

  Searching for a way to recoup his fortune, Gus had the brainstorm of turning his rambling adobe home in San Antonio—which, luckily, he had not sold—into what would become the first Hilton hotel. The location was perfect, across from the new train depot. Mary was a great cook. He’d put her in the kitchen. And Conrad and his brother, Carl, would be the bellhops. Gus hung out the shingle. The room rate was two dollars a day, full board. Conrad hated his new job, meeting every train, schlepping heavy trunks, running all over town to do errands for guests, always hustling. Then one man gave him a five-dollar tip that changed his mind and his life. Before, the biggest tip he’d ever gotten was a nickel. Five dollars was winning the lottery.

  Lottery or not, Mary Hilton insisted that Conrad get an education, and not just in life. She enrolled him in the fledgling New Mexico School of Mines in nearby Socorro, where he could board with a Norwegian cousin, Olaf Bursum, and come home every weekend to bellhop. Conrad credits all the math courses he took at the little three-building campus with making him an accounting wizard, a bottom-line skill he considered the cornerstone of his hotel triumphs.

  The campus life at Sorocco was a far cry from that of Hanover, New Hampshire, but it did exist. Conrad learned to play tennis, to drink (with all the get-rich-quick types, there were lots of bars), and to dance, at a circuit of balls held in the various area haciendas of rich ranchers. He enjoyed the Texas (or New Mexican) two-step, but his favorite for formal occasions was the Varsoviana, a waltz-mazurka fusion Polish import that Conrad always used as the first dance to commemorate the opening of any new Hilton around the world.

  By 1911, Conrad had graduated and New Mexico was about to become the forty-seventh state. Cousin Olaf, who had become the sheriff in Socorro and a rising Republican power broker, arranged to get Conrad elected to the first state legislature. Moving to the capital, Santa Fe, Conrad Hilton overnight became a player and, at twenty-four, one of the new state’s most eligible bachelors. He became the toast of the cosmopolitan Palace Hotel, where he learned all the “eastern” dances the Ivy League boys were doing in New York at the Plaza. The dances all had animal names, the fox-trot, the bunny hop, the camel walk, the chicken scratch. He also picked up the neo–Jazz Age slang: Beat it. Sure. Nutty. Classy. Get your goat.

  Conrad had calling cards printed, an advertisement for himself to the ladies of the desert. There was nothing shy about this young man on the make: “Conrad Nicholson Hilton. Heart Broker. Beware of Fakes, as I Am the Original ‘Honey Boy.’ Love, Kisses and Up-to-Date Hugs a Specialty.” It may have lacked the suave subtlety of a Claude Terrail, but it played in Santa Fe. At the inaugural ball for the state’s first governor, held at the Palace, Conrad danced his way into the heart of New Mexico’s dream girl, the classiest belle of the entire Southwest. She was Jouett Adair Fall, the daughter of Judge Albert Bacon Fall, whose campaign to be New Mexico’s first senator Conrad helped spearhead.

  That campaign, which Fall handily won, marked Conrad Hilton’s loss of innocence. There, and in the legislature, he saw firsthand how corrupt politics were. No one was more corrupt than Conrad’s almost-father-in-law. Senator Fall would slime his way ever upward into Warren Harding’s cabinet as the secretary of the interior who presided over the Teapot Dome oil lease bribery scandal, for which he would go on to prison and infamy. After his one disillusioning term in the legislature, Conrad left Santa Fe and came home to San Antonio and father Gus with a plan to start a chain, not of hotels but of banks. Just as he sold his father on the idea, however, World War I broke out. Though at thirty, Conrad was almost over the hill for fighting, he boarded the train to San Francisco and enrolled at officer candidate school at the Presidio. His co-bellhop brother, Carl, had just finished Annapolis. Patriotism ran in the family.

  The lieutenant-in-training was awed by San Francisco. It was his first visit to a real metropolis. He had his eyes on the women and his mind on the banks, but his imagination was stirred by the grand hotels, the Palace on Market Street and the Fairmont on Nob Hill, the Bay City having completed its earthquake retrofit under Julia Morgan, the architect who would design Hearst Castle. Everywhere Conrad Hilton went during the war, he noticed the hotels. In Boston, he was taken to the new Copley Plaza and a Harvard-Yale ball that put the dances in Santa Fe to shame. In New York, from where he shipped out to Europe, he was intimidated by the scale of the city but mesmerized by the Plaza. And in Paris, he focused not on the smallish Ritz (under a hundred rooms) but on the Continental (nearly four hundred rooms) two blocks away, the largest hotel in the city, which Juan Trippe later would acquire and convert into his Paris InterContinental, to compete with Hilton. To Conrad Hilton, size always mattered.

  Hilton wasn’t about to go back to the ranch after he’d seen Paris, and Gus didn’t expect him to. In fact, he wanted his son to go even farther, to Capetown, since Gus’s new scheme was to get into the South African mohair business. Alas, Gus Hilton was killed in an accident in his new Model T, which skidded on ice into a ditch on New Year’s Eve, 1918. Conrad Hilton had no choice but to muster out and come home to New Mexico.

  Conrad returned to what seemed a wasteland. All of Gus Hilton’s big plans had died with him. The hotel had closed. There was nobody left to run the general store. Conrad’s mother was never one to hold him by the apron strings. Her advice to him, which he never stopped telling people, was “If you want to launch big ships, you have to go where the water is deep.” Conrad soon learned that the deep water in those parts was deep in the ground, deep in the heart of Texas. In the early twenties Texas was on the verge of an oil boom that would have a huge and permanent effect on the state’s development and on its larger-than-life character. Conrad was planning not to drill but to start his chain of banks in the Lone Star State, providing all the prospectors with a place to store their new wealth.

  Regarding the $40,000 inheritance from his father as a grubstake, Conrad set off first for Wichita Falls, Texas, to buy his first bank. But no one there, or anywhere else in oil country, was willing to sell him one. He couldn’t even find a hotel room to sleep in. The boom was that great. He was mightily impressed by the oilmen, every one a likely millionaire in big boots and fancy clothes, and by the retinue of gamblers, hookers, promoters, and sideshow of ambition that followed in their wake. It was in Cisco, Texas, striking out in trying to find a bank or a bed to sleep in, where Conrad Hilton had his moment of conversion, à la St. Paul en route to Damascus. Forget the bank, he decided. He’d use his legacy to buy a hotel.

  The only beds in booming Cisco were at a flophouse called the Mobley, which rented them by the hour, with a maximum stay of eight
; the rooms were turned over three times a day. Conrad Hilton didn’t care who was sleeping in those beds, prospectors or prostitutes. He just liked the volume, and he used his School of Mines training to calculate the prospective profits. In a few days, he closed a deal to buy the Mobley for $40,000. He got the hotel but not a bed. The no-vacancy sign remained on. Conrad Hilton ended up sleeping in a hard chair in the office of what would become the foundation of the Roman Empire of innkeeping. He sent the following telegram to his beloved mother, his rock and redeemer: “Frontier found. Water deep down here. Launched first ship in Cisco.” The Western Union man read the dispatch literally. A ship in landlocked Cisco? He thought Hilton was insane.

  So did a lot of other people for a long time. Hilton set out to renovate the Mobley in a way that would presage the way he would run his Hiltons to come. First of all, realizing that his “profit was in beds,” he closed the sprawling ground-floor dining room and converted the space into more bedrooms. He also added a newsstand, a tobacco shop, and a gift store. He gave pep talks to the surly staff and pumped them up, comparing them to the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) he had just proudly served in Europe. He also promised them raises and long-term jobs, as long as “Cisco spelled Mobley” to travelers.