House of Hilton

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  The hotel and the Towers, home over the decades to visiting presidents, potentates, and pretenders, have the tightest security. The insiders claim that if there had been a stalker, they never were made aware of him, and they would have been had he been a threat.

  As one executive who, along with his father, had a long and storied history with the Hilton Hotel organization in New York, notes, “There are absolutely no secrets if you live in a hotel, especially if it’s a Hilton Hotel and you’re a Hilton. Employees are looking at the sheets and the underwear that go to the laundry every day. They have a proclivity to gossip. They relish in trying to find out what are someone’s peccadilloes. It’s like living in a fishbowl—your comings and goings are clocked. And if they’ve got a bone to pick with someone—and Paris’s parents, especially Kathy Hilton, infuriated a lot of Waldorf people with their imperious manner—they’ll make sure to bring them down.”

  According to the hotelmen, Paris had hightailed it out of the Waldorf for a fling with a cute trucker with a big rig whom she met while he was unloading goodies on the hotel’s loading dock. Paris apparently wanted a taste of the simple life in the cozy cab of an eighteen-wheeler.

  “I don’t remember anything about a stalker ever surfacing in the hotel at the time,” states Neal Schwartz, whose family ran the valet concession for decades at the Waldorf on a handshake between Schwartz’s Hungarian-born grandfather, Harry, and Conrad Hilton himself. (The two men had bonded after Hilton scandalously married the Hungarian spitfire Zsa Zsa Gabor back in the 1940s. “Zsa Zsa would go off into rants and rages in Hungarian which no one but my grandfather could understand, so Conrad would say, ‘Harry, find out what the hell she wants and just quiet her down.’ Mr. Hilton liked and trusted my grandfather and that’s how my family got the hotel valet business.”)

  Schwartz scoffs at Kathy Hilton’s story about the stalker. “It sounds like something the Hilton spin machine would put out,” he maintains. “Certainly there was no increase in security, and I’m sure Paris’s grandfather [Barron Hilton, who ran the show at the time] would have made sure they would have done that. But there was no change in security at the hotel or the Towers. When Paris took off she had a bit of a wild-child reputation already.”

  Schwartz, whose family’s company had offices at the New York Hilton and the Waldorf at the time of Paris’s departure, was hearing about all the excitement from Waldorf managers who were sworn from talking publicly about the hotels’ innermost secrets if they wanted to receive their pensions.

  “There was a big to-do at the Waldorf—you know, how are we going to explain to Barron that we lost his grandkid?” says Schwartz, who was not a Hilton employee and therefore not subject to any Hilton gag order.

  At the same time, there were whispers within the tight-lipped, low-key Hilton family circle of provocative and distressing behavior involving Paris and a group of young men, actions that had gotten her into a jam at school. There was chatter of Paris’s sticky fingers, snatching everything from a relative’s lingerie—“stupid things like panties,” says a Hilton family insider—to an expensive car belonging to a girlfriend’s parents. “She took it and was driving all over New York City. Of course, they hushed it up.”

  Whatever the reason for Paris’s disappearance—deranged stalker, horny trucker, or some other shenanigans—one fact is crystal clear: Kathy Hilton shipped Paris off to stay with her own mother—Paris’s maternal grandmother, Kathleen Mary Dugan Avanzino Richards Catain Fenton, known as “big Kathy.” She lived in Palm Desert, part of Palm Springs, the sizzling California desert Babylon for the rich, famous, and infamous.

  Kathy Hilton, known as “little Kathy,” had high hopes that her mother—considered “a driven, ambitious stage mother from hell”—could straighten out the wild child.

  Paris’s grandmother adored her, called her my “Marilyn Monroe,” and pledged she’d one day be world-famous. When Paris was still an adolescent big Kathy had tried to get her into modeling. At one point big Kathy called her close friend Jane Hallaren, who had been in the runway business years earlier, to secure Paris a catwalk slot at Eileen Ford’s famed agency. “Paris was thirteen, fourteen years old and she was breathtaking, but she was kind of shy if you can believe it, and I didn’t think she had the personality for it,” says Hallaren.

  “Paris was Kathleen’s first grandchild, and they had a very special bond, and Kathleen thought she could take Paris under her wing, straighten her out, and make things happen for her,” says Adele Avanzino, big Kathy’s first husband’s sister.

  “Little Kathy sent Paris to live with her mom because Paris was totally out of control,” states Michele “Mickey” Catain, the daughter of Paris’s grandmother’s third husband, Jack Catain, himself a real-life Tony Soprano–style mobster.

  A young divorcée at the time, Mickey Catain had become like another daughter to big Kathy and had partied with little Kathy before she married into the Hilton family. A member of Kathy and Rick Hilton’s wedding, Catain had seen Paris when she was just a baby and later when she was in her terrible twos. “She was gorgeous,” she says. “Her face was incredible, like a porcelain doll.”

  But other than reading the burgeoning gossip about Paris’s feverish frolics, Catain hadn’t seen her face-to-face for some years until she was invited by big Kathy to visit her in the desert when the naughty teenager was under her jurisdiction. “I went and stayed for a weekend, and Paris was such a snot,” Catain recalls vividly. “Even back then she thought her shit didn’t stink. She was just a very spoiled girl.”

  However, Catain didn’t get the impression that the change of environment had improved Paris’s behavior. “I hardly ever saw her because she came into the house, changed her clothes, and disappeared again. She was always with a group of girls and they’d all go out together, which cracked me up because that’s exactly what her mother [Kathy Hilton] used to do when we partied together. It wasn’t New York nightlife, but it was Palm Springs. Paris must have had the town going crazy!”

  After Kathy and Rick Hilton placed Paris in the hands of her grandmother to be tamed, the concerned parents took off for a much-needed breather from the stresses and strains of parenthood by going on a cruise aboard another wealthy couple’s yacht. “They were gone for a long, long time,” says a family insider. “And Mama [big Kathy] took care of Paris. And was that ever a trip!”

  While staying with her grandmother, Paris was enrolled at the very fancy Palm Valley School in neighboring Rancho Mirage, where she had a reputation as a flirt who cared little about her studies, though she came prepared for algebra class in style, bearing a bejeweled calculator.

  There were other schools on Paris’s journey through secondary education. For a couple of months, she attended the Canterbury School in Connecticut, but was ejected when she left for a weekend without permission. For a time, she had matriculated at the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, California, where her friends and classmates included Kimberly Stewart, the wild daughter of rocker Rod Stewart, and Nicole Richie, the equally wild daughter of singer Lionel Richie. “I just remember at Buckley all the guys loved her because, you know, we had to wear uniforms, like we had these proper uniforms, and there’s a certain way you had to wear your skirt and everything, and I’d kind of lift mine up and she’d lift hers up a little further and our skirts would be a little shorter than everyone else’s and we always used to get in trouble for that,” recalled Stewart.

  Paris also attended Professional Children’s School in Manhattan, and spent some time at a school for troubled kids in Utah that featured behavior modification therapy. Because of her growing bad-girl reputation, Paris was said to have been refused admittance to a private Catholic school in New York. “Another family was considering enrolling their daughter but heard that Paris also was applying,” maintains a knowledgeable source. “The parents threatened to send their daughter elsewhere if Paris was admitted.”

  Paris claimed years later that she had been diagnosed as a child with
attention deficit disorder. As she got older, this led some to believe she was on drugs, which she denied using.

  While big Kathy had serious concerns about her granddaughter’s behavior, she was also extremely proud of Paris’s growing fame. In fact, it was in a Beverly Hills condo owned by big Kathy where Paris struck the sexy pose for the Vanity Fair article in which little Kathy told the stalker story. Big Kathy thought her grandbaby’s spread was fabulous.

  “Big Kathy bragged about her and was so excited she was in the magazine,” notes Catain. “She was looking at the layout and saying, ‘This is the vehicle to make Paris a star. She doesn’t realize how much this is going to do for her. Her fame’s just starting to take off.’ I remember her telling me, ‘This is the turning point for Paris’s career, but we’re not going to tell her.’ She goes, ‘We’re not going to let it go to her head.’ Like it wasn’t already there.”

  To her first husband’s brother, Ken Avanzino, big Kathy predicted a most spectacular and grandiose future for her granddaughter. “You watch,” she declared with the utmost confidence, “Paris is going to be bigger than Princess Di.”

  And to Linda McKusker, a friend from her high school days, big Kathy, referring to her granddaughter’s uninhibited ways, asserted, “Paris really isn’t like that”—that is, a poster child for exhibitionism—“she’s just your sweet, average girl next door.” Years later, Paris attributed her success to big Kathy.

  Meanwhile, big Kathy threw the blame for Paris’s bad-girl behavior on her very own daughter, Kathy Hilton.

  “Big Kathy used to tell me, ‘My daughter does not know how to be a mother. She’s a good businesswoman, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, but she’s not a good mother,’” maintains Catain. “She said Kathy never paid attention to those kids, Paris and Nicky, until they started to become famous. And that’s because she had her own agenda, and because she’s a very self-centered, selfish lady, just interested in how much higher she could climb. Big Kathy always said, ‘Kathy’s the worst mom.’”

  CHAPTER 2

  Before she bagged and tagged a scion of the Hilton Hotel family at the age of twenty, before she gave birth to the It Girl of the New Millennium, before she sold glitzy shmattes and art in her Sunset Boulevard boutique, before she hawked overpriced tchotchkes on her QVC home shopping network show called Many Splendid Things, and before she starred as the hostess of her own reality TV show, appropriately titled I Want to Be a Hilton, blond and perky little Kathy was as desperate for fame and fortune as would be her wild-child spawn.

  Pushed by big Kathy, and discovered before she was two years old by a famous children’s photographer who was knocked out by this perfect little creature’s blond, all-American look, little Kathy’s career was launched. But unlike her younger, very pretty and more talented half-sisters, Kim and Kyle Richards—who had had enormous success in TV sitcoms and movies in the ’70s and ’80s—Kathy never really made it and wasn’t bankable.

  During her fifteen minutes, however, she modeled in print ads and appeared in some three dozen TV commercials. By the age of thirteen she had made two appearances on her sister Kim’s popular program, Nanny and the Professor, and got mostly one-shot gigs on such network prime-time shows as Marcus Welby, M.D., Family Affair, Bewitched, The Rockford Files, and Happy Days. She appeared in a CBS movie called Johnny Comes Home and had a chance at a TV pilot, but it never got the green light. It was all downhill, career-wise, from there.

  Based on her fancy-schmancy attitude teaching manners, style, and refinement to her supposed rube contestants as mistress of ceremonies on the ill-conceived 2005 NBC reality flop I Want to Be a Hilton—a program that had genuine Hiltons seeing red, and which Kathy herself famously declared “fucking sucks”—one would have expected the fabulous Mrs. Hilton to have been groomed at a proper finishing school, to have had matriculated at one of the elite Seven Sisters colleges, and to have done the grand tour of Europe in style, entering polite society as a refined debutante. After all, she had married into one of the planet’s wealthiest and most powerful families.

  But, as it turns out, Kathy Hilton was not to the manor born.

  THE FUTURE KATHY HILTON was groomed for the stardom that eluded her by the overbearing, determined, and very outlandish big Kathy, who lived vicariously through her daughters’ ups and downs. A materialistic diva, big Kathy was obsessed with accumulating money, diamonds, fancy cars, expensive homes—and husbands to pay for it all.

  She was a mistress of manipulation who dominated and controlled little Kathy’s and her sisters’ every professional and personal decision, from the outfits they wore, to the jobs they took, to the men they dated and married. By the time the future Kathy Hilton was thirteen, her mother had made her take singing lessons, dancing lessons, guitar lessons, horseback riding lessons, swimming lessons, and ice skating lessons—all salable talents on the résumés she sent to casting directors and producers, hoping to make her daughter a star.

  “She talked to her daughters every day, probably three, four times a day,” recounts a friend. “She loved sitting for an entire day on the phone with her dogs around her dictating to her daughters. Even after little Kathy became a Hilton and was living like royalty in New York she’d be calling her mom every day, and big Kathy would give her orders.”

  Big Kathy’s constant mantra to little Kathy, her firstborn, and to her other daughters—and later to her granddaughters, Paris and Nicky—was: Marry rich men and have lots of babies. And she made certain they did just that. (Besides the Hilton whom Kathy lassoed, Kim Richards tied the knot for a time with one of the sons of billionaire oilman and Hollywood mogul Marvin Davis and had two children with him. Kyle for a time was wed to the scion of a wealthy foreigner and had a daughter with him. Later, she married a well-to-do agent in Rick Hilton’s hugely successful Beverly Hills real estate firm.)

  “My daughters are married to men who have a total net worth of $13 billion,” big Kathy once bragged to her friend Linda McKusker, as if she were hawking an IPO. “Big Kathy,” McKusker felt, “had visions of grandeur. She really did drive her kids hard.”

  Friends jokingly compared big Kathy’s mind control over little Kathy and her sisters to that of twisted ’70s cult leader Jim Jones—sans the killer Kool-Aid. But more on the mark, they likened her to that famous-for-being-famous Hungarian hot mama Jolie Gabor, the Queen Mother who dictated that her glamorous offspring—Zsa Zsa, Eva, and Magda—marry rich and famous and live the high life draped in furs, diamonds, and rubies. (The drag queen RuPaul once described the Gabor girls as “guts, glamour, and goulash.”) Zsa Zsa took her mother’s advice to heart when she roped in and married the big kahuna himself, Conrad Hilton, the second of her many husbands.

  BIG KATHY’S MAIDEN NAME was Dugan, and she never quite had much luck marrying really rich. Avanzino, Richards, Catain, and Fenton are the surnames of the serial bride’s four husbands.

  The first of her mostly horrific unions—essentially a shotgun wedding—was to a bad boy named Larry Avanzino, an Italian-American, who had gotten the pretty Irish-American Dugan girl pregnant in the backseat of her 1957 black Chevrolet convertible. The unplanned bundle of joy conceived in that cramped vinyl and chrome General Motors love nest would grow up to be none other than Kathy Hilton, Paris Hilton’s mother.

  The identity of Kathy Hilton’s biological father and how her birth came about has been a long-held family secret. Says an Avanzino relative, “It’s really made me angry that with all of Paris’s fame the real identity of her [maternal] grandfather has been covered up. You only hear the name Hilton, never the name Avanzino. I guess it just doesn’t have the same ring.”

  Big Kathy’s third husband was Jack Catain, an organized crime figure, whom she is said to have married and divorced twice—turned on by the big diamond he gave her and by his tough-guy persona. When little Kathy was about to marry into the Hilton family, big Kathy split from the mafioso to avoid a scandal.

  In her pantheon of husbands, number two, Ke
n Richards, and number four, Bob Fenton, were submissives to big Kathy’s dominatrix. Richards, whom big Kathy had stolen from his wife and three children, raised little Kathy. Until she became a Hilton, she always publicly used the Richards name, never Avanzino. Richards also was the father of Kim and Kyle, whose careers he helped finance. Once Kim was bringing in a hefty revenue stream from her screen work, big Kathy gave Richards the heave-ho. As for Fenton, she boasted that she denied him sex throughout their marriage.

  Big Kathy could be cruel—physically and emotionally—as a mother and a wife, the no-sex rule being just a minor bit of torture in the scheme of things. She had a frightening propensity for violent behavior such as physically abusing people. One eyewitness to, and target of, Paris Hilton’s maternal grandmother’s anger—a stepdaughter—says she was left “emotionally scarred” from their hellish relationship.

  It was at the knee of this oddball of a matriarch that Kathy Hilton learned the good, the bad, and the ugly and later passed on her mother’s philosophy and values to her own daughters, Paris and Nicky.

  BY HER MIDTEENS, little Kathy’s show business career was in the proverbial toilet. She lacked that elusive magical elixir for a successful run, and her mother’s dream of making her into a star had all but faded. The kind of media that would rocket Paris Hilton to international celebrity status—the World Wide Web—sadly didn’t exist back in the 1970s. Moreover, she was thought to be slothful by her stepfather, Ken Richards, who often complained, “Kathy’s so lazy she won’t get up—all she wants to do is party at night.”

  Studies were never Kathy’s cup of tea, either. When she did attend classes, when she wasn’t auditioning or working, it was at a small, curious private educational institution in the Los Angeles suburb of Encino—Valley Girl country. California Preparatory School, Cal Prep as it was known, attracted a mélange of child performers and wannabes, ranging from some of the Michael Jackson clan to Partridge Family star Danny Bonaduce, who assaulted a transvestite prostitute years later, giving him the proper credentials for his own reality show in 2005, when Kathy Hilton’s was airing.