“She loved the idea of being married, of family. That’s why she had her daughters’ friends like me around her,” Catain continues. “Big Kathy was just like a mother to everybody and she just loved all these girls to death and they just flocked to her. They hung out and talked and had sleepovers and got dressed to go out together. Kathy just kind of provided a shelter. It was fun and you’d get so wrapped up in it you didn’t think of it as being really weird.”
Kay Rozario, a close friend of big Kathy’s, points out that she was “very kind to a lot of young girls” and that she had “a lot of goodness in her.” Among the girls who were in Kathleen’s circle “were two who lost their mother,” recalls Rozario, “and Kathleen practically adopted them and helped to raise them. The house was always full of young girls, and all those girls loved her. There was a great deal of kindness and love there that those girls weren’t getting in their own homes, or from their own parents, so they were drawn to big Kathy.”
When little Kathy wasn’t out partying, she and her friends lolled by the pool or hung out in her enormous bedroom. Her clothing was piled everywhere—she had a huge wardrobe—and the decorating was very feminine—cute upholstered chairs and a king-size bed.
What little Kathy desperately wanted, though, was a car of her own. Big Kathy’s brother, Chuck Dugan, had a used car lot in Encino, and he found an old Fiat and had it fixed up and painted black for his niece. For a girl who in the not too distant future would be chauffeured in Rolls-Royce elegance as a Hilton, Kathy was overjoyed with the little sports car. “But the first or second day she took it out, the thing blew up,” remembers Mickey Catain. “Kathy just left it sitting there and walked away. I’m thinking, ‘You just can’t abandon a car like that.’ But she says, ‘Let someone else take care of it. I don’t want it anymore.’ That was always her attitude, and she never went back for it. She had no concern for anybody else. It was just what her needs were.”
CHAPTER 4
With no acting career, and no millionaire on the horizon, little Kathy received an offer she felt she couldn’t refuse. Because she was a habitué at the Mansion, she was asked to pose in Playboy for $25,000, an awfully tempting proposition for a cutie-pie with no discernable future.
“Kathy was a pretty girl with a nice figure who hung around with that fast Beverly Hills–Hollywood crowd, and I guess it was Hugh [Hefner] or one of his people who made the offer—and Kathy wanted to do it,” says Kay Rozario, with whom Kathy had discussed the proposition. “Plus she wanted to buy a new car and that offer of twenty-five grand looked good, and in those days that was like making a hundred grand.”
The wife of Bob Rozario, the legendary musical director for Bobby Darin, Tony Orlando, and Donny and Marie Osmond, Kay Rozario was a longtime friend of Kathy’s mother, and was like a surrogate mother to Kathy’s half-sister Kim. Rozario’s daughter, Leanne, was Kim’s closest friend; they had met at Cal Prep. At the time Kim and Leanne were there, one of their classmates was said to have been Michael Jackson’s brother, Randy, and every so often his brother “The Gloved One” would come by the Rozarios’ home to take the girls roller skating.
Kay Rozario says she was shocked—shocked—when Kathy, then about eighteen, told her of her plan to presumably take it all off for Playboy. “She said, ‘They want me to do it and I can use the money and I can get a new car.’
“I begged her, ‘Please do not do this.’ I said, ‘You are trying to catch a rich husband. What’s going to happen if you find Mr. Right and he takes you home to Mother and somebody in the family says, ‘You know what? Kathy was Miss October.’ I said, ‘Would you want that? They’ll turn on you. You think they’ll want a daughter who was a centerfold?’ Kathy knew I was right, and she promised me she wouldn’t do it. I talked her out of it.”
Big Kathy, however, didn’t think anything was wrong with the Playboy offer. “She said not a word. She may well have wanted Kathy to do it,” notes Rozario. “That would not have been beyond the realm of her thinking, which would have been any way to the road to fame.”
After Kathy reluctantly passed on the Playboy offer, she made another last-ditch effort for fame and riches: she cut a demo record with dreams of becoming a singing star.
Kay Rozario, who had been around major recording artists for decades because of her husband’s position, felt big Kathy had a good voice, but little Kathy “had a magnificent voice—like Streisand.”
Little Kathy took after her mother in the singing department as she did in many other ways. In fact, if it hadn’t been for little Kathy’s unplanned arrival in the world, big Kathy might have pursued a singing career of her own. As a teenager, with a few underage drinks in her, she had earned a reputation as a barroom chanteuse in the style of her ’50s Your Hit Parade singing idol, Joni James, who had such hits as “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “You’re Foolin’ Someone,” and “Mama, Don’t Cry at My Wedding.”
“I always felt because little Kathy’s sisters Kim and Kyle were famous, and she never got famous, that she felt empty,” observes Mickey Catain. “And I always felt she had this, like, thing—not ‘I’m going to show you I can make it,’ but, ‘I’m going to make something of myself.’ I remember thinking when I heard her sing on that demo, ‘Oh—My—God, she’s going to just soar. She’s finally going to make something of herself. She’s going to make her star that way.’ It wasn’t rock ’n’ roll. It wasn’t tacky. It was, like, mature music, like what Shirley Bassey would sing.
“Big Kathy had a great singing voice, they both had, and that’s why when I heard Paris was going to put out an album it didn’t surprise me because if she has half the voice her grandma and mom had, she’ll be amazing.”
When Kathy was entertaining the idea of becoming a professional singer, she and big Kathy had asked the Rozarios for help. “At the time my husband was very hot in television, we knew a lot of people, worked with a lot of stars, and she wanted Bobby [Rozario] to write some arrangements for her,” she says. “But my husband and I talked about it and we said, ‘Look, this girl wants to get married into a jet-set wealthy lifestyle,’ and that was her mother’s aim for her, too, so we ended up not doing anything. We didn’t think she was that serious about singing, but more serious about marrying someone rich.”
The Rozarios were right on the money.
Kathy never pursued a recording contract because suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, she finally snagged that guy from money her mother had taught her to nab.
RICHARD HOWARD “RICK” HILTON was a cute guy with “a mop of blond, Shirley Temple curls and a laid-back West Coast manner”—the sixth of Barron and Marilyn Hilton’s eight children, and a grandson of the patriarch Conrad Hilton in the genealogical tree of the enormously wealthy and powerful hotel chain dynasty.
For Kathy—and especially her mother—snaring Rick Hilton was like winning the Powerball jackpot. He was to little Kathy in 1978 what young, partying Greek shipping heirs Paris Latsis and Stavros Niarchos III would be to her daughter Paris decades later.
“Little Kathy was dating this one and that one and she was just trying to pick one that would marry her,” states Sylvia Richards. “Mama [big Kathy] was pushing real hard—real, real hard—for Kathy to marry Ricky.”
Mickey Catain agrees. “Oh, yeah,” she says, “Ricky was Kathy’s big coup.”
Little Kathy had known Hilton since their high school years, and both ran in that same show business crowd that included Desi Arnaz Jr. and Dean-Paul Martin.
Hilton had essentially grown up on spectacular and exclusive Sorrento Beach, in Santa Monica, where his parents had an enormous home overlooking the Pacific, a house that Barron Hilton had purchased from the silent film star Norma Shearer. Among the Hiltons’ famous and infamous neighbors on the beach were Peter Lawford, the druggy, womanizing “Rat Pack” actor, and his internationally known, politically powerful wife, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, one of President Kennedy’s sisters.
Rick’s childhood pal was the Lawfords’ firstb
orn, Christopher Kennedy Lawford, who remembered the young Hilton as having “hair so blond it was white.” He recalled in his memoir that the Kennedy girls “loved” Ricky, but he was “too shy to talk to them.” Wrote Lawford, “Ricky and I went everywhere on the beach together. One day we snuck into his parents’ bedroom so Ricky and his brother, Davy, could show me the gun their father kept under his pillow. It was a small .22-caliber revolver.”
Awed as any boy would be by a real, live gun, young Kennedy asked his chum why his father slept with a loaded firearm. Rick thought the reason was obvious. “In case a robber comes in the middle of the night,” he said. “But what if it goes off by accident while he’s sleeping?” the Lawford boy wondered. “Doesn’t it hurt the side of your dad’s head when he puts his head on the pillow?” Rick’s response was, “It’s a thick pillow.”
There had been a long connection between the Lawfords, the Kennedys, and the Hiltons, even though the Hiltons were staunch Republicans. For one, playboy Nick Hilton’s best friend, Maxwell House coffee heir and Texas oilman Bob Neal, had served as best man when the Lawfords were married and had also arranged for their honeymoon yacht and cruise.
It was when the Hilton heir was nearing graduation in the class of December 1978 at the University of Denver that he and Kathy Richards started getting hot and heavy, friends say.
In the mid to late ’70s, when Rick was matriculating, the university had a reputation as an expensive party school with a major social scene for “stuck-up,” out-of-state trust fund babies and Eurotrash—many of them “very urbane Saudi Arabians whose parents bought them cars and clothes and gave them huge allowances for months ahead of time,” says a very social member of Rick Hilton’s class. “All they did was live in fancy apartments off-campus, drink Chivas, do quaaludes and cocaine, and party. One guy lived in a two-story penthouse filled with sixteen-foot-high plastic palm trees to give the Denver winter a Palm Beach feel. Another, a Brit, had her daddy fly in his private jet so she could take her classmates on day trips to Vail or LA.”
At the time, though, the school was billed as “The Harvard of the West” and was one of the ten most expensive institutions of higher learning in America. The sons and daughters of chieftains of corporate America, like Rick Hilton, were well represented: a Royal Crown Cola heiress; the son of the president of AT&T; scions of Coors and Anheuser Busch; and, among many others, one of oil mogul Marvin Davis’s daughters, Nancy Sue. Some years later her brother, Gregg, would marry little Kathy’s half-sister Kim—Kathy is said to have introduced them. (A Davis grandson, Beverly Hills party dude Brandon Davis, would become a member of Paris Hilton’s privileged posse and would accuse her in a supermarket tabloid of making racist and anti-Semitic remarks. But that was far down the road.)
There was a standing joke at DU when Rick was a student there that the only day a professor could give an examination was on Wednesday, because everybody would be off skiing the rest of the week. The perception among certain members of his class was that if parents had the money and could pay the tuition and expenses, a student could stay there forever. “We always laughed and said DU wasn’t about academic credentials, it was about paying the tuition,” a member of Rick’s class notes.
During his college years, Rick may have had dreams of running the Paris Hilton after graduation—he took a French class and cut meat as a hotel and restaurant management school student. And he put to work the skills he was learning by throwing and catering the biggest and poshest parties DU had ever seen, charging each of the revelers a stiff $20 entrance fee. Clearly, the Hilton scion had inherited certain of his father’s and grandfather’s entrepreneurial skills and talent for making a buck. The bashes were held, naturally, in a ballroom at the family’s Denver Hilton.
“Rick threw amazing—amazing—parties, really well done with great bands and great food—not potato chips like your typical college parties, and there were hundreds of people there,” recalls Melanie Gelb, a classmate of Hilton’s and a student in his sophomore sociology class. “It was the party to be invited to. Everybody knew he was a Hilton and a lot of women were attracted to him. He was cute then, with really longish, curly hair, and an easy, comfortable way about him—mild-mannered, not flashy.”
Gelb’s invitation to Rick’s parties, though, may have been a quid pro quo in exchange for Gelb’s hard work in class. “I got to know him because he used to borrow my class notes when he wasn’t there,” she recalls. “He sat on the far right and I sat on the far left, but the class was small and if you looked around, you knew who was taking notes. He borrowed mine a lot. I don’t think he was embarrassed about it. Then, one day, he said to me, ‘I’m having a party. Do you want to come?’ And that’s how I got to go to those great parties he threw.”
Gelb remembers that Hilton was dating “a girl with blond hair who would hang on to him like a Christmas ornament, like she was protecting her turf. He didn’t seem quite in love as she was. She just seemed more like she was pursuing him.” At the time she thought the girl was from another school because she didn’t recognize her from the campus. Looking back years later, she was convinced the young woman was Kathy Hilton.
Because of his famous family name, Hilton was well known at DU, and that’s why a crazy plot to kidnap him was hatched by some staffers of The Clarion, the campus newspaper. Rob Levin, the paper’s managing editor at the time, thought, “What a story!” He even could envision the headline: “Hilton Heir Snatched.” His partner in the faux crime, he says, was Tom Auer, who later went on to found the Bloomsbury Review.
“We decided to kidnap Ricky from the student union as a prank because it was a slow news week, and we were not going to make news kidnapping somebody named Jones,” says Levin who, looking back on the bizarre affair years later, thinks he must have gone off his bean. “We arranged to have somebody’s Jeep as the getaway car, and the idea was that we would go into the student union and grab Ricky, stuff him in the Jeep, and then call campus security and report that he was kidnapped. We tried to drag him out of the union and into the Jeep, but he pitched up such a fit that we just let him go. I’m not sure Ricky was in a position to even know what was going on, what with various beverages he was drinking.”
Years later Levin, who became a feature writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had been assigned to write a freelance piece for a business magazine about the new Hilton hotel that was opening at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta. “I was invited to interview Ricky’s father, Barron, and when I got in there he was smoking a cigar and we chat and then I tell him, ‘By the way, I kidnapped your son in college. I don’t know if he ever told you that.’ I told him the story and he thought it was the biggest hoot in the world, and I got out of there without him calling security on me, so I guess it was okay.”
Aside from the parties he catered and the girls he dated, Hilton didn’t leave much of a mark at DU, other than excelling at volleyball. He was a nonparticipant in extracurricular activities and a no-show at alumni functions. His only mention is in the commencement program as having graduated. “Rick Hilton appears to have floated under the radar,” a school official says. However, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation showered his alma mater in November 2005 with $3 million to create the Barron Hilton Chair of Lodging Management, as part of the university’s Hotel, Restaurant, and Tourism School.
Not long after they started dating, little Kathy began bringing Rick Hilton home, viewing him as serious husband potential, and when she told big Kathy that he looked promising, she threw a house party that was like a victory celebration. One afternoon, Sylvia Richards had dropped by the house where she was met with a joyous scene—big and little Kathy and the mobster Jack Catain gloating over the possibility of marrying into the Hilton family. “We were talking and big Kathy said to little Kathy, ‘Well, if you get pregnant with Rick before you get married, Jack and I will take the baby.’”
Everyone in their circle thought Kathy and Rick were a perfect match.
“Ric
ky was adorable, very well mannered, very pleasant, very quiet,” says Kay Rozario. “He was always hanging around and they were in love and we were all thrilled for her. I said, ‘Great, Kathy, now aren’t you thrilled you got what you wanted?’ I said, ‘Aren’t you glad you never posed for Playboy? Now you can buy any car you want.’”
At one point the two lovebirds snuck off to spend quality time together at a Hilton getaway residence. “Little Kathy would report to big Kathy from there every day,” recalls Mickey Catain. “It sounded like Kathy and Rick played house, you know, just kind of got into it and they fell in love. It was all just so quick and then they came back from this trip and I remember they were sitting at my parents’ kitchen table and they said they were getting married and we were like, Wow! Big Kathy was beside herself with joy. She had trained her daughter well.”
BEFORE AN ENGAGEMENT could be announced, big Kathy had to take care of a major piece of monkey business, and that was to distance herself from Mickey’s father, Jack. She rightly feared that her involvement with a gangland figure might be somewhat off-putting to the very image-conscious and extremely low-key Barron Hiltons and throw a wrench into little Kathy’s long-dreamed-of nuptials to a Mr. Moneybags.
Around the time Kathy hooked up with Rick, forty-six-year-old Catain was the subject of a wide-ranging probe by federal organized crime prosecutors who had linked him to Mafia families in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Detroit. Authorities viewed him as a clever criminal who hid his illegal activities behind legitimate businesses that included cosmetics, construction, and exotic-car sales.
The feds had started looking into his involvement in such nefarious doings as money-laundering, Super Bowl ticket scalping, counterfeiting, and extortion, and it would take the white hats almost a decade to secure a conviction under which he faced fifteen years in the slammer and $225,000 in fines. Big Kathy used to boast to friends like Jane Hallaren that “if you ever need someone taken care of,” her husband had the muscle to handle it.
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