House of Hilton

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by Jerry Oppenheimer


  Back at the hotel, the girls went up to the room that had been comped by Kathleen’s acquaintance. Behaving like first-class guests who had won a weekend for two, they ordered wagons of tasty treats from room service.

  “The next morning,” says Demaitre, “the hotel caught us. They didn’t know we were there, and they called our parents.”

  The Dugans were “remarkable” in their reaction, she says. Kathleen wasn’t punished and was allowed to continue her madcap ways.

  KATHLEEN DUGAN’S HIGH SCHOOL career skidded to a screeching stop near the end of her junior year when she was a not-so-sweet sixteen. She was furious that her parents had left her at home and gone off to Nebraska to visit a relative. Preferring to be on a school week jaunt rather than attending classes, she decided to show her parents just how angry she was.

  “She called me and she said, ‘You gotta come over. You can’t believe what I’m doing!’” says Hallaren, whose jaw dropped when she arrived minutes later and entered the Dugan house. “Kathy had painted practically the whole house gold gilt—the toilet seat, the switch plates, the frames around the paintings, some of the walls, and she even painted her own portrait with gold gilt. I saw her doing it, and I said, ‘Your parents are going to kill you.’ And she said, ‘If they’re mad, they deserve it.’”

  When they arrived home, Dodo Dugan hid any dismay she might have had about her daughter’s demon decorating. “She said, ‘Kathleen, this is very pretty, this is very artistic, this is beautiful. You did a great job,’” recalls Hallaren.

  Kathleen then quit school. “She simply just stopped going,” says Hallaren. “The parents didn’t make her go back. Kathleen was a very powerful girl.”

  Instead of working toward a diploma, Kathleen just hung out, cruising town in her convertible, having fun. Curiously, she continued going to Manhasset High School social functions as if she were still enrolled. Some classmates who weren’t in her tight inner circle didn’t realize she had quit and thought she was still a student.

  Meanwhile, her girlfriends, who stayed close with her through the years, graduated in June 1957 and went off to colleges that fall before securing glamorous jobs. Hallaren became a top model’s agent, working for the likes of Eileen Ford, then went into acting, winning her first audition on Broadway as Clara in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Martha Hanahan also was in the fashion business for a time, as an art coordinator at Mademoiselle, and later raised horses. Christina Demaitre quit in the middle of her senior year at the University of Maryland to take a job as a reporter in the women’s section of the Washington Post and later became a lawyer.

  Kathleen still had her eye on show business, fantasizing about becoming an actress, or a singer like Joni James. She even considered testing her considerable talent as a vocalist against others on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, the American Idol of the time, but she couldn’t get past the fear factor of appearing on live television.

  Instead, she went to acting school. Despite her lack of a formal high school diploma or an equivalency, Kathleen auditioned and was accepted in the fall of 1957 into the two-year program at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. One of her classmates, Robert Redford, graduated in what would have been Kathleen’s class of ’59. She, however, spent only one or two semesters before dropping out, because she’d fallen in love with a guy other girls considered an Adonis.

  CHAPTER 7

  Kathleen had met Laurence K. Avanzino, two years older and a student and football player at C. W. Post, the recently opened campus of Long Island University, one glorious Sunday in October 1957, while he, his brother, Ken, and some friends were tossing the pigskin around on the front lawn of the Avanzinos’ home in Manhasset’s exclusive Plandome section. Always flirtatious, Kathy cruised by a few times with some girlfriends in her convertible before stopping and striking up a conversation with the blond-haired, handsome, well-built Avanzino, who, according to his sister, Adele, was “a cross between Steve McQueen with a little bit of Paul Newman’s eyes.” “Larry was gorgeous,” notes Jane Hallaren, “and a total maniac.”

  The Avanzinos weren’t strangers to Kathleen when she stopped by that fateful day. While she hadn’t met Larry before, she knew Ken, whom she had set up with Martha Hanahan during one of his class breaks from Colgate University; he gave her his school pin and they went steady for a time. Kathleen also introduced another friend, Linda Eden, a younger sorority sister in Alpha Theta Alpha, to one of Larry and Ken Avanzino’s close pals, John McKusker; the two later got married. Even back then big Kathy was a matchmaker extraordinaire. And McKusker and Eden would play a key role in the Dugan-Avanzino romance.

  Growing up together and attending high school in the Long Island town of Roslyn, the Avanzino boys and McKusker were known as “The Three Aces”—teenagers into fast cars, cute girls, and beer. Of the three, McKusker and Ken Avanzino would go on to become successful businessmen, while Larry would have a difficult and ultimately tragic life.

  Of the two brothers, Ken, younger by a year, would have been the real catch for an ambitious, aggressive girl like Kathleen. Modest, amiable, very bright, and highly educated, he graduated from Colgate, went on to Columbia University, and later became extremely well-off. But Kathy could not have predicted back then that she had chosen a loser, albeit a handsome one. When she became serious about Larry—“It was pretty much love at first sight,” observes Adele Avanzino—he was considered the family’s “golden boy,” according to Martha Hanahan. “The sun rose and set on him in the Avanzino house. He was very spoiled.”

  There were signs of trouble, however, such as his drinking, which started early and escalated through his life. Because he had “disciplinary problems” at Roslyn High School during his senior year, the future maternal grandfather of Paris Hilton was sent by his parents, Elizabeth, a housewife, and Laurence, a high-level executive at major corporations like Eberhard Faber and Olivetti, to live with an aunt in Boston where he was enrolled at Matignon, a strict and academically demanding independent Catholic high school. There, he became best friends with a classmate, Brian O’Riordan, who describes him affectionately as a “wild man” and a “con man.”

  “Larry was a big, handsome kid, and the nuns loved him,” O’Riordan says. “But what a con artist he was! He was about as religious as the rest of us, which is to say he wasn’t. But the nuns thought he was Saint Larry. He’d smile and lie to them—‘Yes, Sister…No, Sister’—and I used to think, ‘You phony!’ A nun would say to him, ‘Oh, you’re living with your aunt?’ And with a straight face he’d say, ‘Oh, yes, Sister, we had some family problems and I thought it was better to come here,’ and I’d think, ‘You liar.’ The aunt his parents sent him to was supposed to be tough, but he had her wrapped around his little finger within three hours of his arrival.

  “Larry one time went to confession and the priest was known to be nutty as a fruitcake, so Larry started telling these things he did—like rape and murder. The priest pulled him out of the goddamn confessional and was yelling at him and Larry looks at me and says, ‘I don’t think he gave me absolution.’”

  Though he was bright, he didn’t study and never cracked a book. As Ken Avanzino observes years later, “My brother could get A’s, or incompletes if he didn’t like a course. The teachers loved him, or hated him. That’s the way he was.”

  At Boston College, which he attended for about a year, Avanzino’s dangerous and reckless side surfaced. In one incident, he is said to have crashed a boat into a bridge abutment and suffered injuries. Behind the wheel of his Ford coupe he was a speeding time bomb.

  “The way he drove his car, it’s amazing I’m still alive,” O’Riordan says. “I bounced off the dashboard any number of times when he slammed on the brakes. There were a couple of guys from MIT who were giving Larry a hard time, and they stopped their car at a red light and Larry plowed his coupe into them and pushed them through the light. I said, ‘Larry, for Christ sake, you’re gonna get someone killed.’ But those g
uys didn’t do anything. They were afraid of him.”

  A snappy dresser who always carried a wad of spending cash, Avanzino was, and always would be, a ladies’ man. But the girls he pursued back then had to come from money. In college, he fell in love with a very religious, beautiful, bright blonde from a wealthy family—her father owned a big trucking company—whom he met while cruising the campus at Regis College, a prestigious Catholic girls’ school in the Boston suburbs.

  “Larry loved rich girls. That’s all he ever dated,” says O’Riordan. “He was so blunt with them—‘What does your father do? Does your dad make a lot of money?’ Only Larry could get away with something like that.”

  The new girl in his life in the fall of 1957 was Kathleen Dugan, and the two seemed to have much in common: their wildness, their skewed values, their nonconformity. They were, and would be, a highly combustible mix.

  Two tragedies of varying extremes brought Larry and Kathleen together in holy matrimony. The first was that he got her pregnant in the spring of 1958, some eight months after they had started going together.

  “It was Kathleen’s first time out [sexually], she was a total virgin, and she goes and gets knocked up in the backseat of her car,” says Jane Hallaren, in whom Kathleen had confided. “It was the first time sex came into their relationship. She was horrified—horrified! She said, ‘Janie, I’ll have to kill myself! What am I going to do?’ I said, ‘Well, do you love him?’ She was hysterical and said, ‘I don’t know…I don’t know.’ She knew something was not right with him, that there was something strange about the guy.”

  Or at least that’s the way she made it seem to her bosom buddy.

  Hallaren’s dark view of Larry was that he “wasn’t somebody you could even talk to, let alone think of starting a relationship with, especially when you were someone like Kathy who wanted to conquer the world.”

  But Kathy, others say, was madly in love with Larry, or thought she was, and one way to trap the elusive Adonis into marriage was to put aside her inhibitions and get pregnant. As Martha Hanahan suggests, “It might have been the first and only time Kathy and Larry had sex.”

  The second tragedy, which would be linked in a curious way to the first, happened on June 2, 1958. Larry’s brother, Ken, was coming home to Manhasset from Colgate for the summer when the car in which he was riding, driven by a classmate and close friend, crashed not far from the university in the upstate New York town of Hamilton. The friend was killed, and Avanzino suffered a broken back that would keep him in a local hospital for three months.

  Kathleen had gotten pregnant around the time of the accident. With Ken in the hospital, she and Larry decided to visit him, accompanied by their friends, John McKusker and Linda Eden, neither of whom had any inkling that she was probably with child and that the future father was about to make Kathleen an honest woman because of it.

  Kathleen’s Catholicism ruled out abortion. Moreover, abortion was considered dangerous back then. Horror stories abounded in the late ’50s about abortion mills run by sleazy men and women using coat hangers as their operating tools.

  While Larry could just as well have walked away from his pregnant girlfriend, Kathleen was adamant and demanded marriage. “She was madly in love with Larry,” Martha Hanahan points out. “But I never got the feeling Larry was committed to marriage as she was.”

  Years later Ken Avanzino saw it another way. “Kathleen must have been a lot more intelligent than I gave her credit for in her younger years because she was a master at getting what she wanted—and she wanted to marry my brother.”

  As they were nearing the hospital near Cobleskill, New York, where Ken Avanzino lay bedridden, Larry Avanzino spotted a church and asked McKusker to stop. It was then that he and Kathleen announced that they were getting married. A minister who had been with the Congregational Church of Manhasset performed the brief ceremony, suggesting that the shotgun marriage had been prearranged without McKusker’s and Eden’s knowledge.

  The next to know about the hasty nuptials was Ken. “They showed up at the hospital and they say, ‘Guess what, we just got married,’” he recalls. “I was surprised, naturally, but Kathy and Larry were the type of people who would surprise you with whatever they did. My reaction? ‘Let’s have a beer!’”

  Back in Manhasset both sets of parents went ballistic. The Avanzinos wanted Larry to stay in school and get a degree. “They didn’t like Kathy,” asserts Hallaren. “They were very much against Larry marrying her. They were unhappy and they kept her at arm’s length.”

  The Dugans and the Avanzinos agreed that the newlyweds were far too young, irresponsible, and immature to be man and wife. With their parents’ reactions so negative, Kathleen, twenty, and Larry, twenty-two, withheld the really big shocker—the impending arrival of the stork—for as long as they could before her bump showed.

  “Kathy’s mother was very religious and she wanted a big Catholic church wedding,” says Adele Avanzino. “I don’t know if Dodo knew her daughter was pregnant, but she knew her daughter eloped and she wasn’t happy about that.”

  Plans were immediately put in motion for a second ceremony before a Catholic priest at St. Mary’s, the Dugans’ church, where Kathleen had once gone to school. The church nuptial was held on August 16, 1958. It was a big affair with dozens of family members and friends in attendance, followed by a reception under a tent in the Dugans’ backyard. “Her parents, as I would have expected, put a good face on it,” recalls Martha Hanahan, a member of the wedding party. “It was summer and the satin gowns we wore were lovely,” says Jane Hallaren. “We all knew Kathy was pregnant. It just was unspoken.”

  Kathleen and the father-to-be moved into the Avanzino home temporarily, lying low to avoid the gossip until the baby arrived. Later, Dodo Dugan told a confidante, “I tried to talk her out of it, but Kathleen made up her mind she had to have Larry. Everything she saw that she wanted she had to have.”

  On March 13, 1959, almost seven months after the church wedding, Kathleen Dugan Avanzino, a month away from turning twenty-one, gave birth to a healthy and beautiful baby girl whom they named Kathleen Elizabeth Avanzino, Paris Hilton’s future mother.

  From day one, the Avanzino union was destined to fail.

  “They had a volatile relationship,” says Ken Avanzino. “They were both pretty high-strung, and one minute they’d be raising their voices at each other and the next minute they’d be embracing.”

  Raising their voices, however, wasn’t the worst of it. Kathleen and Larry had knock-down, drag-out fights. One memorable bout occurred in the kitchen of the Avanzino home when, in the midst of a heated argument, with little Kathy screaming in the background, Kathleen hurled a bottle filled with milk at Larry, just missing his head. Incensed, Larry charged at Kathleen and punched her in the nose. “There was blood and milk all over the kitchen,” recalls John McKusker. “They had some brawls, but that one was a classic. Larry was a very volatile, emotionally unstable guy.”

  While the Avanzinos and the Dugans helped the struggling young married couple financially, Larry also had to get a job to help support his bride and little Kathy. With just his street smarts, good looks, and brawn to go on, the only position Avanzino could secure was as the manager of an Esso gas station in the town of Wantagh, on Long Island. “Larry,” McKusker points out, “was never a great provider.”

  Kathleen, who once had big dreams of becoming a singing star, was miserable. But she still belted out her rendition of “Danny Boy” when she and her husband would go to McLaughlin’s, a piano bar on Northern Boulevard, in Roslyn, Long Island, to drink.

  Visiting her one afternoon in the sad little bungalow the Avanzinos were renting in Long Beach, Long Island, Hallaren found her in tears. “Little Kathy was in a high chair and big Kathy was feeding her, and I remember her being so depressed. She said, ‘This is not what I ever wanted for my life.’ Kathy was angry because she was home feeding a kid in a high chair with a maniac husband while her friends were all ha
ving great times—and she had every reason to feel that way. The whole situation took her spirit away.”

  Kathleen’s sister, Donna, witnessed the quick decline and fall of the marriage and says it broke Kathleen’s heart. Still, she wasn’t hanging on to Larry’s ankles begging him to stay. “I know she was very much in love with him, but he was going a different route than what Kathleen had planned for her life,” says her sister. “He had personality problems. He was a drinker.”

  CHAPTER 8

  A high school dropout, and with her dreams of becoming a singing star dashed by pregnancy and a shotgun marriage to a failure, Kathleen appeared to have no future. The only light in her life was her daughter. Everywhere Kathleen went people were enthralled by little Kathy.

  “She was an absolutely stunning child,” says her aunt, Donna. “She was so perfect with beautiful light blond hair and an absolutely gorgeous face like a China doll.”

  When little Kathy was in her terrible twos, big Kathy came to the conclusion that her baby had very marketable assets—her looks and cuteness—and that the darling child, if handled properly, could become a little walking, talking, moneymaking machine—a real life Chatty Cathy doll, only with a capital “K.” At the same time, Kathleen, then working as a cosmetics salesgirl in a Long Island drugstore, had hit on a career for herself that didn’t require a diploma—just lots of moxie: full-time stage mother and manager of little Kathy’s seemingly bright future.

  “Big Kathy was going to make sure little Kathy did what she didn’t do—and that is become a star,” observes Adele Avanzino, who would always have a close relationship with her ex-sister-in-law.

  The self-styled mother-manager began schlepping little Kathy on the train into Manhattan, taking her from agent to agent, advertising agency to advertising agency, all of which was the last straw for her husband. Larry Avanzino thought it was wrong to promote his daughter like that, plus he was envious of his wife’s drive and ambition.

 

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