Kathleen indicated to her friend Jane Hallaren that she was investing the money in jewels. “She wouldn’t know her way around the stock market if her life depended on it,” she asserts. “But she invested in gems. She had a tremendous amount of gems.”
Others, like Kay Rozario, were aware that Kathy was dipping into the girls’ money pot, but she points out that Kathy probably deserved what she took. “She was Kim’s mother and she taught her everything she knew and that’s who gave Kim her career, and Kathy worked very hard at it. Who’s to say whose money was whose?”
In the Richardses’ home there were recriminations, loud arguments, threats of divorce. Big Kathy had started bad-mouthing Richards to her friends like Jane Hallaren. “Kathy said she hated him, that he was no good, that he couldn’t do anything right, that he was worthless. Kathy had beaten Ken down to nothing. She said, ‘I’m getting rid of him,’ and then ‘I got rid of him,’ in that order. She gave me the impression the girls did not keep up a relationship with their dad.”
By 1970, after six turbulent years, Kathleen claimed she had had enough of Richards and gave him the boot. Along with the money issue, they also were battling over their children’s future in TV and the movies.
An ugly nine-year battle ensued. Ken Richards wound up sleeping alone in the maid’s quarters. “Kathleen wouldn’t give Ken a divorce because he wanted at least 50 percent custody of his daughters, Kim and Kyle, and Kathy wanted full control,” says Sylvia Richards. “At the time Kim was making a lot of money, and Kyle was starting to make money, and this is why Kathy wanted complete custody.”
Ken Richards eventually moved out of the Bel-Air hell house and into an apartment in nearby Encino where, on July 4, 1978, he met Sylvia Benedict, a divorcée, who lived in the same complex with her daughter, Cyndi, and her little boy, Bobby. Richards, who by then had gone into the real estate business in the Valley, pursued Sylvia, and they began living together while his divorce and custody fight continued unabated. Kathleen alone went through a half dozen lawyers.
Kim and Kyle loved their father despite their mother’s efforts to alienate them, and they became close to Sylvia when they visited Richards on weekends. “After Ken and I had gone together for a while, the girls begged their father to marry me—they didn’t want him to lose me,” says Sylvia Richards.
Then Richards faced the toughest battle of all. He had a family history of high blood pressure and heart disease, and in early 1979 he was admitted to Ventura Hospital in critical condition, facing open-heart surgery. His life was on the line.
In order to protect his assets from Kathleen should he not survive the operation, he had given Sylvia power of attorney. “Just before Ken went into the operating room,” recounts Sylvia Richards many years later, “our lawyer called Kathleen’s lawyer and told him that if she didn’t sign the divorce papers before Ken had the surgery, and if Ken didn’t survive, that he would sue her on my behalf and take everything for myself and the children. I don’t think Kathleen, who was in the hospital room, thought Ken was going to live, so when the call came in from her lawyer she literally tore out of the hospital room and finally signed the divorce papers after nine years.”
Their divorce was final on May 17, 1979.
A day after Richards’s successful heart surgery, as Sylvia was sitting vigil in the intensive care unit, praying for his full recovery, little Kathy, who by then was engaged to Rick Hilton, telephoned her. Sylvia, who had come to view little Kathy as a clone of her mother—“in every way”—thought she was calling to wish well the man who had raised her. Instead, she teased and taunted Sylvia. “She told me that her mother had been going to the hospital when I wasn’t there, and that Ken had told her how much he loved her—that he loved her more than me, that he would never stop loving her. She said other things that were very hurtful—and untrue. Little Kathy and big Kathy loved hurting people.”
Sylvia Richards has never forgotten another traumatic incident that occurred in New York on the occasion of Paris’s christening at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. While Kathy and Rick had not invited Sylvia and Ken Richards to the sacred event—Kathy all but ignored the man who had raised her from the age of three—Barron and Marilyn Hilton had generously flown them to New York in their private plane and put them up for a week at the Waldorf. A celebratory dinner after the christening was held with family and friends at a fancy restaurant when Kathy Hilton once again began attacking Sylvia.
“All of a sudden she said in front of everyone, ‘I’d sure like to see you and Mom and Ken go to bed together. I know who would win that game.’ I was so embarrassed I could have died,” states Sylvia. “She was just trying to hurt me by insinuating that her mother was better in bed than I was. Ken was mortified. Kathy’s a very mean person. They are very bizarre people.”
It was shortly after his divorce from big Kathy was final that Richards was hit with another big Kathy shocker. From his attorney he learned that she had illegally sold a piece of valuable land he owned where he planned to build a home. She had forged his signature on the required property sales documents and pocketed the money. “He could have sued her,” says Sylvia Richards, “but he held off because of the girls and was worried about hurting them. Of course, afterwards, Ken said if he had to do it over again he’d have thrown big Kathy’s little tush in jail.”
As part of the divorce settlement, Kathleen received the Bel-Air house—Richards decided to let her have it because he didn’t want to uproot Kim and Kyle. Some years later, however, when big Kathy sold the house, she was supposed to give part of the proceeds to her daughters. According to Sylvia Richards, “They never saw a dime, and Ken kicked himself for letting her have it.”
Ken and Sylvia were married in a small ceremony at a Methodist church in the Los Angeles suburb of Ventura in November 1979. Ken wanted his daughters there, but big Kathy barred them from attending, which devastated Kim and Kyle and deeply hurt their father.
Just days later little Kathy and Rick Hilton had their big wedding in Beverly Hills. Richards demanded an apology from little Kathy for the hurtful things she had said to Sylvia at the hospital after his surgery. She laughed in his face and refused. “She wouldn’t apologize, and we didn’t go to her wedding,” says Sylvia Richards.
CHAPTER 10
When Kim Richards was nineteen, she began a relationship with gawky, curly-haired George M. Brinson—called Monty—scion of a wealthy supermarket chain family from the South. He wasn’t a Latsis, or a Niarchos, but the young man’s family did have big money.
Brinson had left the family homestead in High Point, North Carolina, to make his mark as a producer in Hollywood. With a Ferrari and a penchant for action and high-stakes gambling, he was instantly welcomed into a glitzy, fast Hollywood crowd. It was through a friend of Rick and Kathy Hilton’s that Kim was introduced to Brinson, and after a blind date dinner at the trendy Palms restaurant in Beverly Hills “we were basically together every day,” he says.
It was not an easy courtship. While she was living with Brinson, Kim started seeing other men, he asserts, rich boys from even wealthier families. One was John Davis, son of billionaire oil and entertainment mogul Marvin Davis.
“Kim would say she had to go babysit Paris and Nicky and, really, she was being fixed up with John, and I found out about it,” claims Brinson. “She was being influenced to do it. She was being pressured because of the billions of Davis dollars.” The pressure, he’s certain, was coming from one influential source—big Kathy—“who was looking for the best for her daughter, and those guys had megamoney.”
At the time, though, Kim would marry Brinson. Like big Kathy with Larry Avanzino, Kim’s was a shotgun wedding because she had become pregnant. “We found out and we did the right thing,” states Brinson years later. “It was Kim’s choice to have the baby. They [Rick and Kathy, and big Kathy] didn’t believe in abortion because they were Catholic. It wasn’t even an option.”
With marriage arrangements being rushed, Brinson gav
e Kim an engagement ring, but big Kathy didn’t feel it was suitably large. “She told Kim to give it back to him,” recalls Mickey Catain. “Kathy told me, ‘I’m not letting her take that ring.’ She made him give her a bigger one.”
The Brinson-Richards nuptials took place in July 1985 at the same house of worship where Kathy and Rick took their vows—the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. One of Kim’s wedding gifts was a watch and a pair of earrings worth about fifty thousand dollars. It was from one of her other very rich former suitors.
Photos of the Brinson-Richards reception appeared in a celebrity monthly called Teen Favorite Superstars with a story that was headlined “Here Comes the Bride (At an All-Star Wedding)!” It declared that Kim “…now has a new role—as the real-life blushing bride.”
The article disclosed that one of her bridesmaids was her sister, Paris Hilton’s other aunt, Kyle Richards, already at sixteen a veteran of six years of Hollywood work; she’d been one of the recurring cast of Little House on the Prairie and had appeared in a slew of cheesy movies and TV series, but nevertheless was a high earner for big Kathy, who now had two star contenders and one Hilton wife in her brood.
Kyle’s date at Kim’s wedding was teen actor Tommy Howell, a member of the Malibu rat pack of Rob and Chad Lowe and the Emilio Estevez–Charlie Sheen brothers. Teen Favorite Superstars asked the burning question, “Hmmm…is there another wedding in the future for the Richards family?”
The other bridesmaid was Moon Unit Zappa, who had introduced the whole “Valley Girl” concept with her 1982 song. A year later Valley Girl, the movie, was a box office smash, and “Valley Girl Speak” had spread across the country. The film’s tagline was: “She’s Cool! She’s Hot! She’s from the Valley!” It satirized the whole vapid “gag me with a spoon…fer sure” Valley Girl zeitgeist of which Kim and Kyle Richards were a part and little Kathy was an alumnus.
The Brinsons bought a spectacular two-story apartment in one of the ritzy condominium towers on Wilshire Boulevard. Kathy and Rick were so impressed with the place that they bought one as an investment, one floor below Kim and Monty’s place.
Some seven months after their nuptials, Kim gave birth on February 21, 1986, to a beautiful baby girl whom the Brinsons named Brooke Ashley.
A month later, they started a production company, Brinson/Richards Entertainment, with big Kathy, who envisioned herself a movie mogul, playing an active role. The company, however, produced just one film—the forgettable and pedestrian Escape, released in 1990—with Brinson as the cowriter, Kyle as a cast member, and Kim as the heroine, Brooke Howser, who comes to a small town where everyone and everything is “strange.” The film was made on a million-dollar budget, the money a gift from Brinson’s parents.
Like their film, the Richards-Brinson union tanked.
At a Christmas party at Marvin Davis’s, a curious incident foreshadowed the eventual end. “I actually lost my wedding ring because it was too big. It just fell off my finger,” recalls Brinson, laughing at the memory. “So it’s me, Britt Ekland, and her boyfriend, Slim Jim Phantom, from the Stray Cats, crawling around on the floor looking for the ring. We never found it.”
Not long after that party Kim went out for an evening to a private club in Beverly Hills with some girlfriends. Around 2 A.M. Brinson drove up in his Ferrari and discovered his wife leaving the club, walking hand in hand with Marvin Davis’s other son, Gregg. “It was the final straw,” Brinson declares.
The two got divorced but shared custody of Brooke, and the exes remained friends. Years later, Brooke and her cousin, Paris, became close pals, traveled together, and Brooke even roomed with Paris and Nicky in the sisters’ West Hollywood home.
Brinson, who became a professional poker player, maintained a close friendship with Kathy and Rick and continued to think of himself as “the brother-in-law.”
His ties to the Hiltons were so tight, in fact, that Brinson, with Rick and Kathy’s enthusiastic support, put together the 2005 first annual Nicky Hilton’s New Year’s Eve Poker Tournament, in the new poker room at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. “Rick and Kathy don’t play,” notes Brinson, “but Paris is learning and Nicky’s pretty good.”
BIG KATHY REJOICED when Kim Richards Brinson’s next future husband came into her life—this one via an introduction by her half-sister Kathy Hilton, who was prompted from behind the scenes by their mother. All big Kathy had to hear were the three words “Marvin Davis’s son” to realize that, like Kathy with Rick Hilton, Kim with a Davis son was hitting the marital jackpot. Or so it appeared at the time. “Big Kathy was thrilled!” declares Kay Rozario. “And why not? She saw Kimmy marrying a son of one of the richest men in America.”
Aaron “King of Prime Time” Spelling loosely based his ’80s network melodrama Dynasty on the family into which Kim would marry. The saga of the fictional Carringtons, a wealthy Denver family in the oil business, was Spelling’s view of his friends the Marvin Davises, a superwealthy Denver family in the oil business. (The Davises eventually relocated to Beverly Hills, where Davis turned his entrepreneurial skills to lucrative real estate investments, and even more bankable entertainment.)
The Davises, naturally, lived like royalty, with servants, expensive cars, private jets, yachts, and mansions, such as the Knoll, a 45,000-square-foot Holmby Hills palace. They were running neck and neck with the Hiltons in terms of big, big money when Kim Richards came into their lives. However, Kathy Hilton had her own thought on which was the superior tribe, one that she openly communicated to Sylvia Richards. Rolling her eyes about the Davises’ ostentatious lifestyle, she once declared, “I’m married to the Hiltons and they’re old money. I’m old money. The Davises are nothing but new money.”
The Davises, meanwhile, thought the Hilton bunch were trailer park trash.
Rick Hilton had gotten to know the family when he was enrolled at the University of Denver with Nancy Davis, Gregg’s sister. Their parents had rubbed shoulders in Los Angeles’s tight-knit, upper-stratosphere party and high-society circuit. Socially ambitious Kathy Hilton had become part of that orbit when she propelled herself into high-profile charity and committee work and elite, celebrity-driven fund-raisers as a reinvented young LA society matron. Kathy became involved in Barbara Davis’s glitzy fund-raisers, including one for multiple sclerosis; a spectacular event was held on the grounds of Kathy’s father-in-law Barron Hilton’s fabulous estate. (Barron’s wife, Marilyn, had been stricken with MS.)
So it was to no one’s surprise that enterprising Kathy—looking out for her newly divorced half-sister, Kim, a single mother with a jones for the high life—would through all her society connections and friendships introduce Kim to the immensely wealthy, most eligible bachelor Gregg Davis.
For big Kathy, the Davises were even bigger fish to fry for Kim than the Hiltons were for little Kathy—mainly because the Davises represented to her the embodiment of Hollywood glitz and glamour; they were flashier and more flamboyant and more fun than that stuffier, low-key hotel family who had refused to accept her into their elite fold. But she ran into the same kind of wall with the Davises. Big Kathy would later confide to Mickey Catain that she believed the Davises suspected “her daughters were gold diggers, so they didn’t like her because they knew the influence she had over the girls.”
The wedding of Kim Richards to Gregg Davis was “elaborate and humongous,” according to Sylvia Richards, who attended with her husband, the father of the bride. The ceremony was held at the Davises’ opulent estate. The Olympic-size pool had been covered and an enormous canopy placed over it, and that’s where the bride and groom exchanged their vows. Afterward, there was a sit-down dinner for some two hundred guests.
The newlyweds’ home, a gift from his parents, was in affluent, tree-lined “Little Holmby,” so named because of its nearness to the massive estates like the Playboy Mansion and the Knoll in ultraexclusive Holmby Hills. “Gregg was born with a gold spoon in his mouth,” says Kay Rozario, “and now Kim had a l
ot of money, and those two spent like there was no tomorrow; whoa, did they spend, with no concept of the real world and how people live.”
In the garage, they had a couple of Ferraris and Mercedes-Benzes, and a few other cars, which were detailed weekly by the staff. They had dune buggies and Ski-Doos—expensive snowmobiles—and had had trailers custom-built to carry their fancy toys when they went on trips. It wasn’t considered unheard of for Kim to go shopping and spend $10,000 in an afternoon as she prowled from one exclusive boutique to another on Rodeo Drive. “I’d shop with Kim and we’d go into a store and she’d see things she wanted and say, ‘I want every color in this, I want every color in that,’ and she just bought, bought, and bought some more,” says Sylvia Richards, who, with Kim’s father, were frequent guests of the young Davises, who had set up a special suite for them in their home. “She was like little Kathy—she loved to spend.”
It didn’t matter how much money they spent, because Marvin Davis kept doling out more. Every time he made a deal, such as when he sold his exclusive California golf resort, Pebble Beach, he lined up Gregg and his siblings and each one of them got a slice of the proceeds.
“When Marvin made that deal,” says Monty Brinson, who had kept up a friendship with the Davises and Kim, “Gregg gave her a check for a million dollars and told Kim to go out and buy whatever she wanted.”
When Brinson bet and lost $50,000 on a Los Angeles Lakers game, he only had $10,000 in his pocket to pay off his bookie. Gregg, at Kim’s request, loaned him the rest.
Kim had two children with Gregg, a daughter, Whitney, and a son, Chad. Now the mother of three, she had decided to retire permanently from acting, though she would work on and off over the years. “I thought I’d have my baby [with Brinson] and go right back to work, but when I held her, I’m like, I’m not putting her down, she’s mine—and then I had another one, and I had another one, and I had another one,” she once said, verbalizing big Kathy’s incantation to her daughters to have lots of kids.
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