House of Hilton

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  “Cal Prep was a joke,” says a former student who went there and was a close friend of Kathy’s. “It was just a place for rich kids and celebrities to go. Their parents paid the money and the kids went and hung out.”

  One mother, a close friend of big Kathy’s, sent her daughter there because she suffered from dyslexia and possibly attention deficit disorder. “It was a good little school for more individualized attention, which is what my daughter needed,” she says. “I got a letter from a teacher saying my daughter was never going to graduate with her class, but two days later she’s up there on the stage—graduating. We paid the tuition and they just pushed her through.”

  If little Kathy wasn’t academically inclined—and why should she be, her mother, big Kathy, was a high school dropout at sixteen, and Kathy Hilton’s biological father, Larry Avanzino, turned out to be an alcoholic housepainter—one could blame her lack of interest on the school’s odd methods of teaching. For instance, there was little or no homework, the philosophy being that “a student does not need to repeat for five hours after school what he should have learned in school.” When one of the students was asked to name the days of the week, he replied, “Five school days and two days off.” Learning history wasn’t considered necessary, and tests were thought of as a big hoax. “The right answer isn’t as important as the thinking process behind the answer.” With no homework, no tests, little or no history, and classes in fencing and, oddly, Mandarin Chinese, Kathy thought Cal Prep was the coolest.

  Having been indoctrinated with her mother’s rules of mating behavior—Marry Rich!—teenage Kathy sought out suitors who were wealthy and well connected to show business. But one of the ones she picked early on didn’t meet the profile developed by her mother.

  Like big Kathy, little Kathy’s first serious boyfriend was another bad boy, according to his public high school buddy and Kathy’s close friend at the time, Pierce Jensen. He compared Kathy’s steady to the pot-smoking, long-haired Jeff Spicoli, Sean Penn’s character in the 1982 film about southern California teen life, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

  Kathy and her guy had four common interests—steamy make-out sessions, partying, hanging out…and steamy make-out sessions.

  “Kathy was dumb as a nail,” asserts Jensen, who at the time was a college-bound senior with Kathy’s boyfriend in the class of 1974 at William Howard Taft High School in affluent Woodland Hills. Taft was a real-life Ridgemont High and, like Cal Prep, was attended by a number of child stars and the children of stars—among them Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia Brady on The Brady Bunch.

  “Kathy’s whole thing was going out and having fun,” recalls Jensen. “And if we weren’t going out to the restaurants in West LA, or cruising the Sunset Strip we would pretty much just hang out at her home.”

  Kathy lived in a pretty house that big Kathy’s second husband, Ken Richards, had had built on Aqua Verde Drive on the edge of Bel-Air.

  “At Kathy’s we played paddle tennis or listened to music,” says Jensen. “She never talked about anything except, you know, nonsense—going with this guy, going with that guy…‘he’s cute, she’s cute’…‘oh, I really like that song.’ There wasn’t a book in the house, no newspapers except for the trades and the tabloids. We never went to the beach, never went hiking, never did things that I would do with other girls that I would date. Just like her daughter Paris, Kathy was only interested in being seen.

  “Her boyfriend was a partyer like we all were,” says Jensen, chuckling years later. “We dropped acid, smoked pot, drank. He had a rattletrap car, and I know Kathy was embarrassed to ride in his clunker. I remember her mother saying, ‘My God, my daughter—you’re not riding in that car!’”

  Unlike little Kathy’s boyfriend, Pierce Jensen was much more acceptable to big Kathy, especially because his mother, Pat Priest, was a major mid-1960s TV star who played the role of Marilyn in The Munsters and had starred in one of Elvis’s films, Easy Come, Easy Go. “Big Kathy gushed all over my mother when they met,” recalls Jensen.

  Jensen remembers Kathy’s mother as being very overbearing and saw her as the epitome of the stage mom. “But by the time I knew Kathy the drive wasn’t so much to get Kathy into acting—it was to get her a rich husband. Before we would go out her mom would say, ‘Oh, you’ll never get a rich man with that skirt on. Put this on,’” Jensen recalls vividly. “Big Kathy had an agenda. When we would go out and Kathy would see men in expensive cars, or men who looked wealthy, she’d make comments like, ‘Oh, I’m going to bag me one of them one day…I don’t have time for acting now, I’m busy looking for a rich guy.’”

  Kathy’s only known girlfriend at the time was homely and overweight, thus no threat or competition when she accompanied Kathy on her frequent outings looking for cute, rich guys. Also, she had a car and was Kathy’s chauffeur.

  Kathy’s vanity didn’t end there. In her room the failed starlet, who was jealous of Kim’s and Kyle’s success, kept stacks of eight-by-ten black-and-white publicity glossies from the days when she thought her career would blossom—sort of a contemporary teen version of Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond reliving the glory days. She autographed the photos for friends or anyone who might have recognized her from her TV or modeling gigs.

  Among the photos was one of her posing in a bikini—G-rated. Another was a shot of the wholesome blond teenager wearing a broad Pepsodent smile, her hands wrapped around a tree branch, the kind of photo Seventeen would run, sparking envy in girl readers with acne and baby fat. Kathy had given both to Jensen, inscribing one of them on the back with the words “Pierce, I love U! Kathy.” Another note, on the back of the same photo, was inscribed, “Dear Pierce. You have been such a great friend and escort”—she underlined the word escort twice. “Maybe one day we will get 2-gether. Love ya, Kathy.”

  There was one other photo of Kathy that Jensen kept through the years, one he held dear to his heart—a Polaroid that he shot of her at a party.

  “Everybody was fucked up,” he remembers about that night. “We were all drinking, carrying on, smoking dope—although I never saw Kathy ever get high. I always got the impression that she was afraid to because she would lose control and be herself.”

  The photo looks like one you would see on an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, except Kathy eagerly volunteered to be the model. She never was, nor would she ever be, a victim.

  Kathy is seen lying on a bare mattress with flower designs on it, her head propped on a pillow, her eyes wide open like a frightened deer staring into headlights. Her midriff is bare because she has the tails of her blouse tied, the sleeves rolled up, and her legs in jeans are spread wide and bent at the knees.

  “She was just being her outrageous, flirtatious, outgoing, exuding-sexual-charm self,” explains Jensen. “That night, at that party, she just plopped down on that mattress like, ‘Come on, baby, do me…. Look at me, boys.’ She was just being Kathy. But if I were to say, ‘Come on, Kathy, take your top off,’ she would say no. She would only go so far.”

  Back then Jensen and others in their crowd had a nickname for Kathy, who dressed “extremely provocatively and was the most flirtatious girl” they’d ever met. “We called her ‘PT,’” reveals Jensen. “Everybody called her a prick tease. I’ve never met anybody like her since.” (By coincidence her mother, big Kathy, had an X-rated nickname during her own wild teen years. She had been given the moniker “Pussy” Dugan.)

  “Kathy flirted with every guy who crossed her path,” maintains Jensen. “Even though she was involved with my friend, she flirted with me. She flirted with our friends. That’s why it didn’t surprise me the way Paris turned out, because her mother was the same way—although back then I don’t think Kathy was sleeping with people. But you’d think she’d slept with every guy in the city by the way she acted.

  “Me and my buddies always wondered whether she and her boyfriend were having sex—because the way she acted you would say, yes, ten times a day. They were just all
over each other like cheap suits, making suggestive comments to each other, and rubbing and groping. I can imagine her mother telling Kathy all about sex—but also telling her you can please a guy in other ways, and string him along and you’ll have him hooked.

  “Her mother told her all her life that she was great and wonderful, so she had a huge ego, and you know that when you have a huge ego you don’t act like yourself. You think you’re better than everyone else and you act that way. She was always on, never a genuine person.

  “I thought when she eventually hooked up with Rick Hilton that she must have pulled off the perfect acting job, that she nailed him with her fake personality, her false way of being. I thought, ‘Well, she did it.’ The prophecy is fulfilled.”

  CHAPTER 3

  In September 1974—well before Rick Hilton came on the scene—little Kathy focused her attentions on another young man who, for a number of reasons, caused consternation for her mother.

  Jane Hallaren, who had been a confidante of big Kathy’s since childhood, clearly heard the tension in her voice when she telephoned her in New York to discuss little Kathy’s latest romantic travail. Jane and big Kathy’s close bond had been formed when Hallaren, a street kid from Brooklyn, “beat the shit” out of big Kathy in the schoolyard of their Catholic parochial school after Hallaren had a Heathers-type confrontation with a clique of girls whom Kathy controlled. A onetime model’s rep instrumental in Martha Stewart’s brief commercial and print modeling career, Hallaren had later gone into acting—stage and film—receiving critical acclaim as a predatory lesbian college professor in director John Sayles’s 1994 art film Lianna.

  Over time, big Kathy had kept Hallaren in the loop on the goings-on in her life—“a book in itself,” she states—and on little Kathy’s various teen romances, all of which Hallaren thought “quite banal and superficial.” But the long-distance phone call on the night in question is one she has never forgotten.

  “Kathleen said, ‘Janie, Kathy’s having an affair. It’s with one of the Jackson Five. I don’t know what to do.’

  “Kathleen said she was allowing the relationship to proceed, rationalizing that the relationship was a step up for Kathy because it was a connection to a well-heeled show business family and celebrity. At the same time big Kathy didn’t like black people, and here was Kathy involved with a black kid. It’s the only conversation I ever remember having with her about any man in her children’s, or her own, life, that she had trepidation about.

  “I was sitting in bed listening to this, thinking, ‘Oh—My—God.’ I thought, ‘This is so absurd, so insane’ that I said to her, ‘I can’t believe you’re sanctioning this.’”

  After that call Hallaren heard nothing more about the claimed romance until long after Kathy had become Mrs. Rick Hilton.

  “It was when people started asking, is Michael Jackson straight or gay? When he was getting weird, and I said to Kathy, ‘He’s straight, right, being he had that affair with Kathy,’ and she said, ‘No, no, no, no—it wasn’t Michael. It was one of his brothers.’”

  Hallaren assumes big Kathy was telling her the truth about her daughter’s relationship, but she also emphasizes that big Kathy was histrionic, an über drama queen who often exaggerated a situation to make it sound more intriguing and make her life appear more exciting.

  Another bizarre situation arose when big Kathy’s second husband, Ken Richards, learned that big Kathy had actually asked a young man to give little Kathy “sex lessons,” according to Sylvia Benedict Richards, who married Ken Richards after his acrimonious divorce from big Kathy. “Big Kathy told Ken that she wanted Kathy to know all about sex, and how to perform sex, literally, the best way possible,” asserts Sylvia Richards. “So she asked a young man to teach her in his van. Ken had a fit when he found out about it and confronted Kathleen. She told him to mind his own business, to keep his nose out of it, that Kathy was her daughter.” (Years later, Paris received sex instruction from her mother, who warned her that performing fellatio would put “holes” in her face. “I totally believed her. She’s, like, ‘It’s from sucking,’ I’m, like, ‘Ewwww!’”)

  Having watched big Kathy in action for more than two decades, Sylvia Richards observes, “She believed that rules didn’t pertain to her. And this is the way she brought up the girls. There were no rules for them, either. And that’s the way Kathy brought up Paris.”

  AFTER LITTLE KATHY finished high school there was a series of well-heeled, handsome, show-biz types whom she pursued. And she was known as a partyer—one of the pretty girls-on-the-make who frequented the bashes at the Playboy Mansion. As Sylvia Richards states, “Little Kathy partied all night, and slept all day.”

  For a time Kathy had “a big crush” on and “chased and dated” Dean Martin’s son, Dean-Paul, discloses Jeanne Martin, Dino’s widow, herself the 1948 Orange Bowl Queen. At the time, the handsome actor, who was a half dozen years older than Kathy, was ending a bad first marriage. “Kathy definitely wanted celebrity and wanted to marry somebody preferably in show business,” recalls Martin. “She loved the limelight, that I know.”

  Kathy also chased and saw Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s son, Desi Jr. “She used to drop his name all the time,” says Mickey Catain. “He came up to her mom’s house a couple of times. She talked about him a lot.” But that ended quickly because, as a well-placed observer notes, “Lucy would have none of it. She didn’t think very highly of Kathy.”

  Dean-Paul Martin, who died in a plane crash in 1987, and Desi Arnaz Jr., who later married a dancer, fit perfectly the profile of the kind of man with whom big Kathy would have liked little Kathy to walk down the aisle—they came from money and had major show business connections.

  “Kathy was desperate to chase them—not for her own sake but rather because her mother wanted her to. That’s the pathetic part,” observes Jane Hallaren.

  After each and every date little Kathy, on instructions from big Kathy, would call her mother and give her an intimate description of what went on. “I was there at the house visiting when she called,” says Sylvia Richards. “Mama wanted to know a blow-by-blow description of what went on. And little Kathy gave her a blow-by-blow description. Big Kathy didn’t care what little Kathy did as long as she married somebody rich. She was that way with all of the girls. Kathy was out for the buck—as much as she could get.”

  When none of those relationships worked out, little Kathy trolled the trendy clubs and restaurants of Beverly Hills and the Valley. Riding shotgun on those manhunts was Mickey Catain, whose mobster father was married to big Kathy at the time.

  “I was hanging out with her because our parents put us together,” she says. “I was just divorced and I wasn’t in that world of Kathy’s with all the celebrities and with going out every night to the clubs. That girl loved to party. Kathy was very sophisticated when it came to that scene. She’d meet some guy and he’d call her for a date. A lot of them were foreigners, guys with money—Iranians, Persians, Asians. So she’d go on the date, but she’d invite like five other girls to go along with her and then we’d get there and the guy would go, ‘Who are they?’ I’d be so embarrassed. I’m like, ‘Oh, Kathy, I can’t stay,’ and she’s like, ‘Oh, no, no, no. Stay, stay. It’ll be fine.’ And she’d make the guy take us to the most expensive restaurant and pick up the tab for all of us.”

  On one unforgettable occasion, big Kathy took the girls to meet the entire Dallas Cowboys team, apparently in hopes of securing dates for them. “She knew somebody with the Dallas organization and we showed up at their training session,” says Catain. “First we watched them play and then we’re limoed off to have dinner with them, the whole team. It was just to meet the guys and have fun and flirt. It was like one of the best nights I ever had.”

  Because big Kathy surrounded herself with gorgeous young women, wild stories and unfounded rumors circulated about her activities. Sylvester Stallone’s mother, Jackie Stallone, a self-styled psychic, says she heard from her friend Eva Ga
bor that big Kathy “ran an escort service. Eva told me many times that the mother introduced girls to eligible men.” David Patrick Columbia, who documents the Manhattan and Hamptons society scene on a popular website called New York Social Diary, lived in LA for years, helped Debbie Reynolds write a memoir, and followed the movements of the contemporary Hiltons, says he had received reports from sources on the West Coast that one of the girls was connected to convicted “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss, who in 2005 was planning to open “Heidi’s Stud Farm,” a luxury brothel for women to have sex with male prostitutes. On the other hand, Fleiss claims she never heard of any of them.

  At one point, big Kathy bought a used navy blue Cadillac limousine so she and her companions, among them Mickey Catain’s mother, Marlene, could ride in style and meet affluent men. The car had a vanity plate with a portion of her name on it. At the time both women were divorced from Jack Catain, and the two had become friends.

  “We went out together and I thought through her I could meet other people because I was married for so long,” Marlene Catain states. “I would drive around with her in her limo while she was smoking grass, and she would have Arab guys in the car. We’d drive into Beverly Hills and everybody would look at us. She took me to the Playboy Club, which was very exclusive at the time. I had the impression she had connections there, or knew Hefner. I met some interesting people there through her. I thought it was fun. I felt like a voyeur.”

  Her daughter, Mickey, didn’t think that Paris’s grandmother took money in a play-for-pay sense from any of the men she encountered during her adventures. “She would pick them up and have them take her to dinner, or she would set them up with other women. She would hit on them, get them to take her out, take her on a trip—whatever she could get. And I think she always had in her mind the idea, is he marriage potential?