House of Hilton

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  While Kim was having fun spending lots of money, her husband, Gregg, was under his father’s thumb. If Marvin Davis made a deal, Gregg just had to watch. When Gregg talked about moving out of town with Kim and their children, Marvin would have none of it. “I want all your credit cards right here on my desk,” he told his son. “If you’re going to leave, we’re not going to support you.” Apparently the plastic meant more than the independence: Kim and Gregg stayed.

  At the same time, Barbara Davis “was like big Kathy, but with money,” in that she dominated Kim, according to Sylvia Richards. “She would call Kim and say, ‘We want you at our house. Now!’ And Kim would say, ‘But my mom and dad are here.’ And Barbara would yell, ‘I don’t care! You get up here in a half hour!’ Barbara Davis was doing this to them constantly. Whatever Marvin and Barbara wanted, Kim and Gregg had to jump.”

  Big Kathy had come to despise the Davises because they had snubbed her like the Hiltons had, and she resented how they treated her daughter. “Kathy kept saying, ‘Oh, someday we’re going to write a book about them. They’re horrible,’” says Mickey Catain.

  Meanwhile, the marriage of Kim and Gregg Davis began to rapidly deteriorate. “Marvin and Barbara Davis broke that marriage up,” Sylvia Richards asserts.

  John Jackson, who became the new man in Kim’s life after she and Gregg Davis separated, maintains the two split up “because Barbara and Marvin said, ‘Enough’s enough!’” They gave their son an ultimatum: either leave Kim or face being cut off from the family fortune. He chose the former.

  Meanwhile, big Kathy, whom Jackson describes as “money-driven, amoral, and would in a moment backstab you,” tried desperately to keep her daughter’s marriage from falling apart. “I heard plenty of stories about big Kathy chastising Kim,” he states. Kay Rozario maintains that big Kathy’s hidden agenda was to keep her daughter’s marriage together because of the Davises’ money.

  According to Jackson, “Kim finally pissed it all away and Gregg went in a different direction—and then it was all about money. For big Kathy it was all about how much money Kim could get from Gregg, which cars she could get, getting the house, all that crazy stuff.”

  An acrimonious divorce and child custody battle ensued. Kim is said to have gotten a settlement and child support from the Davises, ranging between $20,000 a month that continues until the year 2009 and $23,000 a month for life, or until she remarries, and shared custody of the daughter and son she had with Davis. The divorce and custody battle also was said to have caused a major rift in the friendship between the Hiltons and the Davises.

  “When Kim and Gregg split up, Kathy Hilton took sides with her sister,” maintains Jackson. “Then Nancy Davis [who went to the University of Denver with Rick Hilton] and Kathy were at each other’s throats. I could not believe the amount of shit that was going on.”

  AFTER THE DAVISES DIVORCED, big and little Kathy set up Kim with other big shots with big money. Big Kathy, for example, arranged for Kim to go out with an Arab prince; big Kathy also borrowed his Mercedes and totaled it, apparently while under the influence.

  Kathy Hilton, meanwhile, sought out wealthy men who ran in her Manhattan social circles. One was a Revlon cosmetics honcho. Another was Donald Trump, who once viciously declared that Kathy’s father-in-law, Barron Hilton, was “a member of the lucky sperm club”—a snarky dig that Conrad, not Barron, started the Hilton fortune. (But in March 2006, when Trump’s model wife, Melania, gave birth to a boy, The Donald named him William Barron in honor of the Hilton bossman.) Rick and Kathy socialized with Trump, and Kathy figured he and Kim might be a match made in heaven.

  “Kathy couldn’t run around anymore because she was married, so she lived vicariously through Kim, just like big Kathy lived vicariously through little Kathy,” observes Sylvia Richards. “Kim told me that Kathy kept setting her up with Trump, and Trump would call—I was there when he telephoned—and wanted her to come to New York. He would give her the money and she would go. But I don’t think Kim was really too keen on him.”

  A USED HARLEY-DAVIDSON motorcycle and an execution-style murder were the curious catalysts that brought Kim together with the next new love of her life, John Jackson, an aircraft parts supplier, who fathered her fourth child.

  Immediately after her separation from Davis, Kim dated a bad egg, a twenty-nine-year-old securities broker and high roller with a house in Malibu. John Collett was a central figure in one of the country’s largest scams, involving eight thousand elderly investors and nearly $150 million in losses. He was under investigation on suspicion of illegally selling partnerships in oil and gas leases.

  A former stereo salesman, Collett was talking to Kim on a phone outside of Brent’s Deli, in the San Fernando Valley community of Northridge, during lunchtime on October 28, 1991, when, as Jackson put it, “someone walked up to him and popped a cap in his head.”

  Moments later Kim called the deli asking, “Have you seen my boyfriend, John Collett? He’s a nice-looking guy.”

  Collett had been shot twice in the head at point-blank range by a hit man who had been paid $30,000 to bump him off.

  “The killing devastated her, but I don’t know for how long,” says Kay Rozario. According to Sylvia Richards, Kim was “supposedly in love” with Collett, and “I know she was very shook up about that episode. But Kim was so dramatic all the time. And, of course, the killing was very dramatic, so she hung on to the story forever.”

  Jackson learned the sordid story from the dead man’s mother, Jan, when he responded to a classified advertisement offering to sell her late son’s Harley. When Jackson bought the motorcycle, she suggested he call Kim “because it was her favorite bike. I thought it was kind of morbid, but one night on a fluke I dialed her number, we met and then from about that day on we started dating.”

  Kim was still living in the Davises’ Little Holmby house when she hooked up with Jackson in the spring of 1992.

  “We were living in the fast lane,” Jackson says. “We were jet-setters and bounced all over—Paris, St. Tropez, Orlando. And we were taking the kids with us most places. Kim was always very kid-oriented.”

  While the two never married, they had a child, Kimberly, Kim’s fourth, and her third daughter.

  Eventually, Kim moved out of the Davis house and into a home she had purchased in Calabasas, a rustic community that is home to a number of TV and movie celebrities in northern Los Angeles County. By that point the honeymoon period had ended, and Jackson states his relationship with Paris Hilton’s aunt became “the worst nightmare of my friggin’ life.”

  Jackson blames many of Kim’s issues on big Kathy. “She was 100 percent the problem,” he observes. “Kim’s a spittin’ image of her mother in every way. The amorality, and the drinking, the revolving door of men who she [big Kathy] had in her life when Kim was with me, and just the conniving craziness about her, and the way she [Kim] spent money like water. Kathy was that typically frustrated mother of a child star who lived through her children.” And Jackson believes “without a doubt” that Kathy Hilton was the same kind of mother with Paris.

  Jackson got an up close and personal look at the Hiltons—Kathy and Rick, and Paris—during the five years he spent living with Kim, and he came away with a bad taste. He got to know Paris, who frequently spent a week or two hanging out with Kim at the Richards-Jackson house, and he and Kim attended parties thrown by the Hiltons. He says that one of the things that struck him about little Kathy, big Kathy, and Kim and Kyle was how bitchy they could be.

  “They always speak so derogatorily about people behind their backs,” he says. “It’s unbelievable, because they get joy out of making fun of people. They’ll be out shopping and they’ll be making fun of some other woman’s shoes or outfit.”

  He says he also heard occasional racial and anti-Semitic slurs. “There were always those kinds of jokes,” he claims. (Paris would be accused publicly of making such remarks by Marvin Davis’s grandson, Brandon Davis, a member of Paris’s
privileged posse.)

  While Jackson attended a number of parties with Kim at Rick and Kathy’s, one of Kathy’s more intriguing ongoing theme bashes occurred during the sensational 1995 murder trial of O. J. Simpson. Only someone with the prestigious Hilton name like Kathy could have the key players in the O.J. drama over for private dinners to dish about the case. “It was wild,” observes Jackson.

  Kathy had been a friend of O.J.’s wife, Nicole, and was part of the circle that included many of her friends. “Big Kathy told me that Nicole once told little Kathy that O.J. was violent and that she feared he might kill her someday,” recalls Jane Hallaren.

  When O.J. went on trial, Kathy invited virtually all the key figures, as Jackson remembers, from prosecutor Marcia Clark to Simpson houseboy Brian “Kato” Kaelin. “Every time Kim and I went, there was a new person on the O.J. end—[Simpson ‘Dream Team’ attorney Robert] Shapiro, [Simpson pal and defense attorney Robert] Kardashian.” Another trial player who became a friend of Kathy Hilton’s was Faye Resnick, victim Nicole Brown Simpson’s so-called best friend—a onetime cocaine user who parlayed her role in the case into a nude layout in Playboy and a book deal.

  “It was just so Kathy could get the scoop on what was going on behind the scenes—and also so she could feel important,” Jackson declares. “It was quite a show.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Paris Hilton’s maternal grandmother’s third husband was far different from her second. While Ken Richards was a mild-mannered, beaten-down-by-big-Kathy businessman, Jack Catain was a hot-tempered mobster who had the connections to put out contracts.

  Short—five foot eight, round—190 to 200 pounds, and hunched over, he was not the healthiest of gangland types. “We called him the six-million-dollar man,” referring to all the money he spent on his numerous surgeries, says his daughter, Mickey.

  In a 1969 U.S. Senate investigation into organized crime headed by then–Arkansas senator John L. McClellan, Catain, son of a Chicago produce market worker, was identified as a member of the Mafia. In a subsequent probe involving a major extortion case, Catain was linked to Philadelphia Mafia godfather Angelo Bruno, who was murdered the same year big Kathy and Catain said “I do.”

  To this man, Kathy Hilton’s mother was married—twice, according to his son.

  It took years for the government to nail Catain. They finally won a conviction in 1987, after he was divorced from big Kathy, for his part in a $3.3 million counterfeiting operation, though he claimed the government used liars to convict him. According to the prosecutors, Catain conspired to sell part of a multimillion-dollar cache of counterfeit $100 bills.

  Catain had been linked to a number of major cases, including a wide-ranging, national headline–making Internal Revenue Service probe into alleged ticket-scalping at the 1980 Super Bowl in Pasadena. There was testimony in that case that Catain “was aware” that a key witness “was to be killed” because he “was to testify against Catain” in his counterfeiting case.

  Catain also figured in the case of charismatic financial “wonder boy” and convicted “con man” Barry Minkow, who ran a $100 million Los Angeles–based carpet-cleaning and building-restoration business called ZZZZ Best. It was all one huge Ponzi scheme in which early investors were paid off with money thrown at the twenty-one-year-old Minkow by later investors hoping to make a fast buck. At one point, Minkow reportedly borrowed $400,000 from Catain at interest rates between 2 and 5 percent a week. Catain would later sue Minkow for failing to split with him certain of ZZZZ Best’s profits.

  Among those who lost money to Minkow was big Kathy’s and Kim Richards’s close friend Kay Rozario, whose daughter, Leanne, dated Minkow briefly and says he was smitten with Kathy Hilton’s sister Kim. “She was beautiful and she was such a talent,” he says. “Back in the day I was trying to hit on her when I was this jerk who was a lying, cheating thief. I pursued her in the sense that she was good-looking and I was a sleazeball.”

  He recalls one evening when he pulled up in front of famed chef Wolfgang Puck’s tony West Hollywood restaurant, Spago. Sitting beside him in his Datsun 280ZX was the lovely Leanne Rozario. Stopped just in front waiting for the parking valet was the couple with whom they were having dinner—Rick Hilton and his sister-in-law, Kim Richards. “Leanne looks at me and says, ‘See, they drive a Ferarri.’ So the next day I went out and bought a Ferarri.”

  But he claims he never even got to first base with Paris Hilton’s aunt.

  Big Kathy and Jack Catain were introduced by a mutual friend, Los Angeles produce king Chet Frangipane, who says he picked up Paris’s grandmother on the Hollywood freeway one afternoon when she flashed by him in her black Corvette convertible. “Kathy was not a bad-looking lady and I pulled her over in my Mercedes, gave her my business card, got her number, gave her two pounds of fresh mushrooms, and made a date,” says Frangipane years later.

  The two went out for about a month, but then he lost interest. “It’s like a piece of food,” he explains gruffly. “You want it, but the more you look at it you say, what the fuck do I need this for?” It was then that he introduced big Kathy to Catain, whom Frangipane had met at a golf tournament in Palm Springs that was sponsored by an organization called the Italian-Western Golf Association. “It was like an Apalachian meeting. There were more FBI than golfers,” he jokes, referring to the infamous meeting of all the top crime bosses back in the ’50s in upstate New York. He says that Kathy and Catain “hit it off” immediately and about a year later got married.

  With all of Jack Catain’s wise-guy attributes, big Kathy could still “break my balls,” as he used to intone, and make his life miserable. But she was intensely attracted to him.

  “My dad was a tough guy, and Kathy just loved that image of a guy being tough and kind of treating her rough. She liked that mafioso thing,” observes Mickey Catain. “There was just a lot of energy between them.”

  Kathy raved about Catain to friends like Jane Hallaren, who was among the first outside of her immediate family who learned they had gotten hitched. “She called and said, ‘Janie, you are not going to believe this but I got married, and you can’t tell anybody that he’s mafioso, and he’s fantastic.’ She was nuts about him—and liked the danger. She talked about him all the time, how she was really taken with this guy, that he had given her a lot of jewelry. Kathy’s one of those people who was just absolutely addicted to chaos and drama.”

  Moreover, Kathleen saw dollar signs when she looked at Catain, even knowing that most, if not all, of his wealth—the roll of dough in his pocket, his cars (a Rolls-Royce Corniche and a special edition Cadillac convertible), all the jewelry he gave her, his 8,000-square-foot house high on a hill in Sherman Oaks—had come from the proceeds of criminal activities.

  “Kathy was a gold digger, no doubt about it,” concludes Mickey Catain. “And so were her daughters. She trained them that way.”

  Her brother, Michael Catain, who, like his sister, had become close to big Kathy and got to like her despite her avarice, nevertheless agrees that her agenda always was their father’s money. “The funny part was she made no bones about it,” he offers. “It wasn’t as though she hid the fact. She would laugh, and she would kid, and she would literally say, ‘I’m here just for the money,’ but in a joking way. In the end, though, she wasn’t joking.”

  One of Catain’s big calling cards was the flashy ring he gave Kathleen—a huge fifteen-carat rock, most likely “straight off the truck.” Behind Kathleen’s back he snickered about the stone because it was yellow, and far from a pure specimen.

  (Years later her granddaughter Paris beat big Kathy by nine carats when she reportedly received a $4.3 million, twenty-four-carat diamond engagement ring from the young Greek shipping heir Paris Latsis. However, the authenticity of the ring, whether it was actually given to her, and what happened to it, was in dispute.)

  The ring Catain slipped on big Kathy’s finger had had a number of wearers. According to Catain’s son, his dad gave the same rin
g to many women in his life and always made certain he got it back when they were through. One woman to whom he was married for a short time, Joan Parnello, widow of Frank Sinatra’s orchestra conductor, Joe Parnello, returned the ring to Michael Catain in a park “stuffed in a stuffed animal’s ass,” he recalls, chuckling at the memory. Big Kathy, however, is the only woman in Catain’s life who refused to give back the rock when their marriage was over. “Kathy ended up with it,” says Catain’s son.

  He says his father married Parnello after his first marriage and divorce from big Kathy and then remarried big Kathy before they divorced a second time. “Kathy probably had something to do with his marriage to Parnello breaking up.” Chet Frangipane says Catain decided to divorce Kathy the first time because “they were always fighting. She’d get drunk and he’d tell her to get the fuck out. Why’d he remarry her? What the fuck does a guy do for a good blow job? So Jack went back and forth with her.”

  Of all of her many bizarre relationships with men, big Kathy’s involvement with Catain was surely the oddest. After all, what couple would enjoy spending a weekend at a Hilton Hotel in the San Fernando Valley getting injections of lamb’s urine, or some other odd potion, from a La-La Land New Ager in hopes the shots would make them healthier, prolong their lives, and rejuvenate them? His daughter, Mickey, recalls, “We did have some guy come to our house and we got these strange injections. I took them also. I remember turning red and becoming very hot after receiving them. They were expensive. We would have numerous people at the house in line for those shots.”

  Big Kathy may have got the idea for the shots from Hilton family chatter. The patriarch, Conrad, was known to have made trips to Switzerland to get injected with urine from a sheep that he was told would help him stay healthy and keep up his stamina sexually.