House of Hilton

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  Mickey Catain clearly remembers big Kathy telling her, “‘I can’t have them [the Hiltons] finding out what your dad does.’ She would laugh and think it was real cute, but she knew the rest of the world wouldn’t approve. Kathleen was afraid that my dad, because of all his troubles, was going to give little Kathy a bad name. She was worried about that, about tarnishing little Kathy’s image. She said, ‘I’ve got to be careful with Kathy because of who she is marrying.’”

  To avoid a scandal, big Kathy distanced herself from Catain, at least until things cooled off and little Kathy was safely married and in the Hilton fold.

  According to Mickey Catain’s brother, Michael Catain, their father and Paris Hilton’s grandmother were married and divorced twice, though only one marriage certificate for the two could be found in California state vital records, leaving open the possibility that they were hitched the first time in another state.

  What is on the record is that Catain and big Kathy tied one of the knots on July 4, 1980, taking the vows before a Unity minister in the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys. The witnesses were Michael Catain and Kathy’s half-sister, the actress Kim Richards. “It was a very small wedding,” recalls Catain. “Just a one-day thing at a little church—not even a church.”

  In her sworn marriage certificate, big Kathy listed her occupation as “Theatrical Manager.” Big Kathy’s marriage to Catain happened eight months after little Kathy married Rick Hilton—a wide enough window of time to separate the new Mrs. Hilton from a mob moll mama and her Mafioso guy, had anyone bothered to check.

  “Dad liked big Kathy because she was the female version of himself—aggressive, a go-getter, a hustler, and he loved that,” says Michael Catain. “I remember Kathleen telling me that she actually convinced Ricky that Kathy Jr. was a virgin. I just remember Kathleen laughing about that. She was really a female con artist.”

  One of the people who had been let in on Kathy and Rick’s forthcoming nuptials happened to be a paid source of Barbara Sternig, the National Enquirer’s veteran celebrity reporter in Hollywood. The source, Sternig says, was surprisingly another Hilton: Constance Francesca Hilton, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s daughter with Conrad Hilton (who later reportedly denied paternity). “Francesca was the source for a number of Enquirer stories,” states Sternig. “When I first joined the paper in 1975, she was tipping us. I used to talk to Francesca about stories all the time, and when I had something on Zsa Zsa I’d always call her, and she would tell me what I needed.”

  Sternig knew a bit about how the Hiltons operated. When she was a high school student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, in Lake Forest, Illinois, Conrad Hilton had donated money to the school to build the Hilton Gymnasium. But the word among the nuns and students was that he had a hidden agenda. “There was a lot of buzz-buzz going around,” remembers Sternig, “that he gave this money to prove he was a good Catholic even though he dumped one or two wives and was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor.”

  A smooth operator who once risked her life to infiltrate Frank Sinatra’s inner circle in order to write an exposé about “Old Blue Eyes’” secret world in Las Vegas, Sternig knew a good story when she saw one. When she got the Hilton marriage tip, she remembers thinking, “There were good angles—Kathy’s the sister who didn’t make it in show business, but she sure made it in the marriage game. And Rick was known as a catch, but Kathy wasn’t an heiress.”

  Because of the supermarket tabloid’s notorious reputation, it was often difficult, if not impossible back then, to get people to cooperate on the record. Not so with the future Mrs. Hilton, who leaped at the opportunity to let “enquiring minds” in on her impending nuptials.

  Knowing his ever-so-discreet parents would vehemently disapprove of him discussing his private life with a rag that had a reputation for touting space aliens and Elvis’s ghost, the then very reserved Rick Hilton declined to participate, recalls Sternig, reluctantly letting his publicity-hungry future bride do the dishing. Moreover, Kathy agreed to meet Sternig for lunch at a restaurant especially chosen by the very savvy and ironic tabloid reporter for the interview: a place called Romeo & Juliet.

  It was the first time Sternig had ever met Kathy, who also readily agreed to pose for photos. “Kathy talked all about the Hiltons and how daunting it was for her to be marrying into that dynasty, and I thought, ‘She’s a cute little nothing—nothing special, coming from a plain family. She was kind of a flibberty-jibberty little blonde—indistinguishable from many, many other little blondes in Hollywood, and that’s what sort of struck me as incongruous, and made it interesting to me to see what was in her head, to see why he’d marry her over some other little blonde.

  “My take on Rick was that he was enamored of show business and that’s why he liked her—that she was an arm-piece who would happily hang out with him and do all the rich guy things that he wanted to do. I thought they were not the brightest lightbulbs in the chandelier, so it was a match made in heaven. I never heard anything about Kathy again until Paris became famous.”

  Kathy officially married into the Hilton family on November 24, 1979, in the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills—“Our Lady of the Cadillacs,” as it was known, because of its wealthy parishioners. It was the same Roman Catholic house of worship where Paris’s great-uncle Nick—Kathy’s new father-in-law’s brother—had tied the knot some three decades earlier with Elizabeth Taylor in what the world press called “the marriage of the century.” (Seven months of living hell later, their union was dubbed “the divorce of the century.”)

  Kathy and Rick’s marriage took place some eleven months after Rick’s grandfather, Conrad Hilton, died at the ripe old age of ninety-one. (Hilton family members say it’s doubtful that the former Kathy Avanzino Richards ever met the patriarch.)

  On November 27, 1979, the society page of the Los Angeles Times had a one-column headline reading:

  HILTON-RICHARDS RITE IS SOLEMNIZED

  The four-paragraph announcement included a photo of “Miss Kathleen Richards, daughter of Mrs. Kathleen Richards of Bel-Air” wearing a virginal white gown and beaming into the camera of Times photographer George Rose. Standing on her right, Rick Hilton had a pasted-on smile and was wearing a formal striped groom’s outfit. The notice stated that the bride was a graduate of California Preparatory School in Encino and that her “attendants” included her sisters, “actresses Kim Richards (Hello, Larry) and Kyle Richards (Little House on the Prairie).” In a city like LA it is important to list screen credits in marriage announcements and obituaries. The bridegroom, the announcement continued, was a graduate of the University of Denver, and at the time was working as an associate with the Eastdil Realty Corp. in New York City. The bridegroom’s father, it said, “is president and chairman of the board of the Hilton Hotel Corp.”

  Little Kathy’s—and certainly big Kathy’s—dreams finally were realized. Later, Kathy told her sister Kim, “If I hadn’t married Rick, Mom would have taken me down the aisle with a gun in my back.”

  Not long after the wedding, Jane Hallaren recalled an evening when big Kathy was driving her home after a visit when suddenly she changed direction and headed for little Kathy and Rick’s place. Hallaren had never before been there, wasn’t that close to little Kathy, and was a bit embarrassed about barging in on them late at night.

  “Kathleen takes me on a tour, shows me all their fancy furniture, and they had some beautiful pieces—a bit too much chintz, but their home was quite lovely. Then, she starts taking me up to their bedroom and I said, ‘Kathleen, I don’t want to go up to their bedroom,’ and she says, ‘Oh, you have to. They want to see you. They love you,’ and I said, ‘They don’t really know me.’ We walk in and Ricky’s on the bed watching TV, and Kathy’s walking around doing something, and she said, ‘Hi, Jane,’ and that was it. Kathy’s sole reason for taking me there was to show me how well off little Kathy was living now that she was a Hilton.”

  Marilyn Hilton, a blond, blue-eyed looker herself when she married Rick’s fathe
r, Barron, didn’t think much of Kathy from the start. At the wedding reception she confided to her sister-in-law, Pat Hilton, Eric Hilton’s wife, “She chased Rick until she finally got him.” Pat Hilton, who knew Kathy slightly at the time, says, “She did not leave a very good impression with me, even before the wedding. I could look at her and see she was determined to be a Mrs. Hilton and wanted everybody in the world to know about it.”

  Another family insider asserts that Marilyn “had suspicions [little] Kathy was a gold digger. Marilyn thought Kathy was too pushy and brassy, and Barron couldn’t stand being around that mother of hers. He didn’t think she was stable. He used to call her ‘The Madam’—as in bawdy house madam.”

  Barron Hilton banned big Kathy from visiting his home when he was there, according to Jane Hallaren. “She was only allowed there when he was not in residence. [Big] Kathy was always dying to get accepted by Barron, and there was never going to be any shot at that.”

  Kay Rozario, who knew about Barron Hilton’s view of big Kathy—the Rozarios’ daughter, Leanne, dated one of Barron’s other sons, Ron—says that over the years Kathleen had become a heavy drinker, which Barron Hilton could not abide, probably because his own mother, Conrad Hilton’s first wife, Mary Barron Hilton, had become an alcoholic.

  “Barron couldn’t stand big Kathy’s drinking,” Rozario asserts. “She got drunk and noisy and sloppy. You could call her a drunk. You could call her a lot of noise. You could call her all kinds of things—but not a madam,” she says in her defense.

  According to a longtime Hilton business associate, Rick secured his first after-college job, at Eastdil, through the auspices of his father, who was friends with Ben Lambert, who ran the real estate company and was on the Hilton Corporation board of directors. It is said that Rick spent part of his very first real estate commission on a new Rolls-Royce that Kathy wanted.

  At the time of their marriage, the newlyweds lived in Rick’s expensive rental in the nineteen-story white brick apartment tower at 420 East Seventy-second Street, in Manhattan’s Lenox Hill neighborhood.

  Some fifteen months after the wedding, on February 17, 1981, Kathy gave birth to the first of four children. They named her Paris Whitney. She was christened at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. Paris’s first home was in a sumptuous penthouse at 220 East Sixty-seventh Street.

  Friends and family members say she had all of the facial characteristics, especially the mouth and eyes, of her biological maternal grandfather, Larry Avanzino. “If you put a wig on Larry, you’d have Paris,” notes Jane Hallaren. “The only thing that Paris has that isn’t Larry is her nose. That’s Kathleen’s nose.”

  FROM DAY ONE, Kathy—and her mother—had big dreams for Rick. Kathy saw him becoming the next Mr. Hilton, succeeding his father and grandfather as the Hilton organization’s boss of bosses.

  “Kathy’s what we used to call the ‘balabusta’ of the family,” says Mickey Catain, referring to the Yiddish term describing a pushy wife. “From the start she’s the one that ruled the roost. Rick kind of just stayed in the background, never said much. Big Kathy would tell me that Rick wasn’t focused on anything and that Kathy helped him focus. He could have cared less about high society and the social life, because he grew up with it his whole life. But [little] Kathy didn’t and desperately wanted it. Rick’s kind of come into his own and he’s done real well for himself [in real estate]. But back then she pushed him into everything.”

  Like big Kathy with her husbands, little Kathy always would be the dominant partner in her “very long and successful marriage” to Rick Hilton, who amiably and affectionately refers to his loving spouse as “Mommy.”

  “Little Kathy’s big dream was that she would be the next the Mrs. Hilton,” states Sylvia Richards. “She wanted Rick to be the top dog and she would replace her mother-in-law, Marilyn Hilton, as the number one Mrs. Hilton.”

  Kathy and her mother, however, weren’t aware that Barron didn’t favor his children in that way. At his 500,000-acre Flying M Ranch, in Nevada, Barron kept a joke plaque by the fireplace that read: “Money isn’t everything, but it does tend to keep the children in touch.”

  It was well known within the upper echelon of the Hilton Hotel organization that little Kathy wanted to become “the reigning princess,” says Tim Applegate, who served under Barron and Conrad Hilton as executive vice president and chief counsel through the 1970s and early 1980s.

  On one occasion Applegate flew on the company plane from Los Angeles to New York with the two Kathys and other family members shortly after the engagement to Rick, and he recalls how they aggressively tried to impress him because they knew he had Barron’s ear.

  “I ended up in a limousine with the mother and Kathy on our way to the Waldorf, and the mother, in particular, was putting on airs about how wonderful her daughter was, how important she was, how big and successful she was, how Kathy was going to see that Rick became a big success. She was a real social climber. It was all supershallow, and I remember thinking, ‘Kathy seems kind of like an airhead, and my God, I hope I don’t have to do this again.’”

  Applegate, who attended Rick and Kathy’s wedding, recalls how “upset” Rick had made his father when the Hilton organization bought a new headquarters building in Los Angeles and his son wanted to benefit with a real estate sales commission for doing nothing. “Apparently Rick tried to get himself listed as one of the brokers on the deal—after the fact,” asserts Applegate. “Barron was never very tolerant of such things. It was kind of like, ‘Get out of here. We don’t do things like that.’ Barron thought it was improper. He always thought his kids were best off making their own way in the world.

  “Conrad had given money to each grandchild (Rick among them) when they were born, so they all had enough money to get started in life. And Barron always believed, ‘I’m not doing these kids any favors by throwing money at them.’

  “When Rick was going to the hotel school at the University of Denver, he bought a BMW 2002, not an expensive car. Barron called me up to his office and we had a conversation on the phone with Rick and we worked out a loan. After the call Barron repeated, as he did many times to me, ‘I could give him the car, but I think it would be a disservice to him.’”

  FOR KATHY, life as a Hilton wife was not an immediate bowl of cherries. She was instantly disliked by a number of Hiltons, especially the Hilton women, and the wives of top Hilton executives, who felt she was too pushy. Bibi Hilton, Eric’s second wife, remembers Kathy declaring, “Once Marilyn [her mother-in-law] is dead, I’m going to be the queen, and I’ll remember who in the family has been mean to me on the way up.” (Years later, when early publicity about this book began appearing in the world press, the New York Post quoted Kathy Hilton as saying, “If anyone participates in the book they will be banned from the family.” The Post said she had “even threatened people, telling them, ‘I can make your life very difficult [if you help Oppenheimer]. I am a very powerful woman.’”)

  Kathy was shocked and angry when she realized that her father-in-law, Barron, didn’t give her husband special treatment. For instance, Rick Hilton had the idea in the 1980s of going into the hotel business for himself by developing a chic boutique hotel in trendy downtown Manhattan. But the deal with his backers was said to have been predicated on having the Hilton name somewhere on the marquee, even if the hotel was called “The Rick Hilton,” because the Hilton name generated big business.

  Rick approached his father about the deal, bearing a special gift—a bunch of his favorite cigars, Cuban Monte Cristos. Barron took the cigars, but Rick didn’t get what he had come for.

  “Barron made it clear that there was no way in hell that he was going to give Rick permission to use the Hilton name,” maintains Neal Schwartz, whose family ran the Hilton valet service in New York and had a close working relationship with Barron. “Rick did want to be the next Mr. Hilton, and I’m sure Kathy was stoking the flames. But I think Rick finally came to realize that it was never go
ing to be.”

  When Rick and Kathy and their brood moved into their huge suite on the thirtieth floor of the Waldorf Towers, they threw the Hilton name around in order to get an extremely favorable rate far below market value, hotel insiders maintain. They were paying about $30,000 a year for the apartment that would normally rent for seven figures annually. “As far as I know, Barron was under the impression that they were paying market value. He was furious because he didn’t want any of his kids getting a break, and living off his name,” contends Schwartz. “But Rick got the deal because the manager was led to believe Rick would be the next Mr. Hilton, and would want to be on his good side.”

  Kathy networked with the wives of Hilton executives, letting it be known that she expected Rick to one day replace his father. “She was very superficial—just interested in getting known as a Hilton, to be a somebody—and was delighted that she married someone who had a foot in the door with money,” says the widow of a top Hilton executive. “She was not to the manor born by any means. I’d see her at parties and she’d tell me about her shopping experiences in New York. This was just after they moved into the Waldorf. She said she had started shopping at a store called Mar-Shalls. She said, ‘Well, I go to Mar-Shalls. It’s wonderful.’ And then it struck me. She wasn’t talking about a fancy shop on Madison Avenue, but rather Marshalls, the discount store. Kathy just gave it a fancy name. I don’t think Kathy would be caught dead today walking into Marshalls. That would be so below her. She kept telling me how she was Rick’s wife, which, believe me, meant nothing. She got high and mighty and thought she was somebody because she has the Hilton name.”

  There were times when Barron was in New York on business and staying at the Waldorf, but in order to get in to see his father, even though they were in the same building, Rick had to actually make an appointment through his dad’s secretary. Recalls a Waldorf insider, “Rick would call up to see what kind of mood his father was in before he’d try to get in to see him. His visits were always short.”