House of Hilton

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  Hilton, though, was in far better shape than Jack Catain, who desperately needed rejuvenation. He had a long history of medical problems, including a bad heart that would eventually do him in, and he got about on artificial hips, often using a walker.

  Big Kathy tried her best to keep up his heart rate. For instance, she never permitted Catain to see her without her makeup on, even going to bed with her face fully made up. Once Catain started snoring, she’d tiptoe into the bathroom and take off the makeup. In the morning, she’d wake up before him and put her makeup back on.

  “She always cared about how she looked, always had to be dressed up for my dad,” says his daughter. “She used to yell at me, ‘Put lipstick on! Put makeup on! What’s the matter with you?’”

  Despite how hard big Kathy tried to make herself look beautiful, Catain still chased other women, or at least big Kathy suspected he did. She was so jealous that one night she climbed over the wall that surrounded his house to spy on him to see if she could catch him with another woman, but it was so dark that she fell on her backside and limped around for a few days. “It was funny, the stupid things she did,” says Kay Rozario, who heard about the incident from Kathleen.

  Around the time big Kathy became involved with Catain, nineteen-year-old little Kathy was starting to get serious with Rick Hilton; Kim Richards, about thirteen, was making appearances on TV shows like Hello, Larry, Kraft Salutes Disneyland’s 25th Anniversary, and a sitcom called Why Us?; and ten-year-old Kyle was in one of the first big scary teen flicks, Halloween, appeared in the Disney feature The Watcher in the Woods, starring Bette Davis, and was on TV’s popular Little House on the Prairie.

  By that point in their lives the girls were so shell-shocked by their mother’s freaky lifestyle that her involvement with a mobster was something they just shrugged off. “Little Kathy was not happy, and after she married Rick she was even more unhappy because now she thought she was upper crust, and just look who Mama was with,” notes Sylvia Richards. “Kim and Kyle were kind of numb with everything because they had gone through so much with their mother that her relationship with Catain just seemed to roll off. After a while it was just, ‘Oh, well, it’s somebody else.’”

  Because of little Kathy’s impending marriage into the Hilton family, and Kim’s and Kyle’s very public careers, big Kathy had kept her relationship with Catain low key even to the point of not actually sharing the same residence with Catain after they married. Incredibly, the odd couple lived in separate domiciles throughout their marriages—big Kathy in her Bel-Air manse and Catain in his immense home on Royal Oak Road in Sherman Oaks.

  Early in their relationship, when things were going well, they began house hunting, looking at multimillion-dollar properties together. But when it came to signing the papers, big Kathy balked.

  “My dad wanted the house to be in both their names and Kathy said, ‘Oh, no you don’t! You buy the house, but it’s all in my name!’” states Mickey Catain. “Kathy was very adamant about money. Kathy came to me and she said, ‘Look, I don’t want to split the ownership with your father because if your dad dies, I’m not going to split the house with you. I want the house in my name.’ She was real open about it.”

  Most of the time big Kathy brought her lap dogs, her luggage, and Kim, Kyle, and little Kathy before she married Rick Hilton, to stay for a weekend or longer with the Catains. “We used to all party together,” says Mickey. “Every night there was something going on. Kathy would bring her brother, Chuck, and his wife, Jane, and her mother, Dodo. She’d bring her friends. We had a wild time.”

  On other occasions they hit the bar, nightclub, and disco circuit—Jimmy’s, Pips, or The Daisy in Beverly Hills, which catered to the rich and famous, or a tony club Catain liked on Ventura Boulevard in Encino. Once Kathleen started drinking, though, she got wild and would begin flirting with other men, which infuriated Catain.

  “She used to love to make my dad jealous,” maintains Mickey. “She would flirt with any guy, even with just a friend of ours, someone she had no interest in whatsoever, just to get my dad jealous. Then they’d yell and scream at each other. It was never physical, he never hit her or beat her or anything, and because they had separate houses, he’d scream at her to go home.”

  Big Kathy got turned on by professional athletes, and one she knew from her teenage years was Jim Brown, who had played at Manhasset High School and with whom she sometimes hung out in Los Angeles where he lived after retiring from the Cleveland Browns as a Hall of Fame star running back.

  “She was friendly with him and she used to brag about it and she used to try to make my dad jealous because my father was kind of a little bigoted,” recounts Catain. “She’d see Jim Brown at this one club we’d go to, and she’d go sit on his lap and put her arms around him and flirt with him in front of my dad, and that used to drive my father insane. They’d have some big fight and then they’d go home and make love. That was kind of their pattern.”

  SOMETIME AFTER CATAIN and big Kathy were married, an explosion and fire destroyed his Sherman Oaks home. A number of years later Kathleen turned over to Mickey Catain a suitcase filled with irreplaceable Catain family photos and memorabilia. Mickey was thrilled because she assumed everything had been consumed in the flames.

  When Catain expressed surprise upon seeing the items, Kathy told her a deep, dark secret. “‘I collected all those pictures and your father and I got them out of the house the night before it blew up.’ She said that my father blew up the house for the insurance money because he was in trouble. I literally had no idea my father did this.”

  In the end, it was Catain, in ill health and using a walker, who wanted a divorce from Kathleen; when she balked, he threatened to sue her—or worse—to get back all of the expensive jewelry he had given her.

  “He gave her a lot of jewelry. I saw it. I mean lots of jewels, like some big ruby and emerald deal,” says Jane Hallaren. “She told me that if she gave him any trouble, or asked for any kind of alimony, or wanted the jewelry back, he would make her life miserable. I got the feeling he was threatening her life. She said, ‘Listen, this guy is Mafia, he’s involved, he’s a gangster. He’ll kill me.’ Whether that was drama or not I tended to believe that it was true. She said, ‘He’s crazy.’”

  According to Kay Rozario, Catain also “took Kathy for some dough. He wiped some money out of her. He told her to invest in God knows what. Part of it might have gone to ZZZZ Best. But I think Jack just took it and that was it. She dumped him, and she told me, ‘That no good bastard. He stole all my money.’ I don’t think he took everything, but he took a big chunk. He was a royal piece of work.”

  Big Kathy and Jack Catain were divorced in 1982, and a year later he remarried, this time to Phyllis Sherwood, a onetime showgirl who had been divorced from Bobby Sherwood, a popular big-band leader from the ’40s.

  Catain told Sherwood, who also got taken for a lot of money in the ZZZZ Best scam, that big Kathy had pushed him into marrying her. “It was one of those things where she said let’s get married real quick—bap, bap, bap, and he was, like, well, okay,” says Sherwood, who met Catain at a wedding and was married to him for five years until he died. “Jack made it sound like he wasn’t really serious about marrying her. When Kathy married Jack she was looking for exactly the same as what she wanted for her daughters—she wanted the money. That was the most important thing in her life. And I guess it worked out pretty good because Kathy Hilton did very well for herself by marrying Rick. I mean, she’s no brain trust. And big Kathy’s the grandmother of that charming child, Paris. Oh my God, the whole bunch of them are idiots!”

  Jack Catain died on February 21, 1987, in the cardiac intensive care unit at Encino Hospital. He was fifty-six years old. At the time he was free on bail, waiting to begin a fifteen-year federal prison sentence. No one remembers big Kathy being one of the mourners at his funeral service.

  CHAPTER 12

  Around the time Jack Catain died, big Kathy, low on dou
gh, sold the Bel-Air home that Ken Richards built for her and used the proceeds, along with money she is said to have borrowed from a wealthy Middle Easterner one of her daughters was dating, to buy a two-bedroom condominium apartment in the déclassé flats of Beverly Hills, a first-floor unit in a “modern, characterless” building, as Jane Hallaren described the place.

  Though only in her midforties, big Kathy was “at a stage in her life when she was cutting back and trying to make life a little simpler,” contends Adele Avanzino, sister of Paris’s maternal grandfather.

  For a woman who was downsizing, big Kathy made a curious decision—she wanted to again play mother to an infant. To Hallaren she revealed, “I’m going to get another baby.” Hallaren, who had heard a lot of wild stories from her childhood pal, was stunned. “I said, ‘What do you mean, another baby?’ And she said, ‘There’s this horrible woman who doesn’t want her baby, and I’m going to get it. I met this woman in a parking lot and I told her, ‘You better get me that baby.’

  “She was crazy about babies, but what she was telling me was all so grotesque and illegal,” continues Hallaren. “She was so casual about it and I asked her, ‘Kathy, how are you going to bring up a baby at your age with your lifestyle?’ And she said, ‘Well, if I can’t do it, the girls will take it. They want another baby, we all want another baby in the family.’ I thought to myself, how much control does she have over her daughters?

  “I didn’t talk to her for a few months and then I called and said, ‘So, did you get that baby?’ And she said, ‘No, no, no. I can’t go into it, but that horrible girl didn’t let me have the baby.’”

  But, in fact, there was a baby. The girlfriend of a Dugan family relative had gotten pregnant and wasn’t prepared to care for the baby, so big Kathy volunteered her services. “Kathy got the baby and kept it for a while,” says Adele Avanzino. “Kathy didn’t want the infant to go to a foster home, or an orphanage, or a Catholic charity. Eventually, another Dugan relative took the baby, which was fine with Kathy.”

  WITH HER DAUGHTERS essentially on their own, and needing a moneymaking venture, big Kathy went to real estate school with dreams of becoming “a realtor to the stars,” but she found getting a real estate license an effort and quickly lost interest.

  She took up art instead. During the day she set up her easel on her patio and turned out oils and watercolors of landscapes and animals, and had a built-in outlet for her work: Kathy Hilton’s boutique on Sunset Boulevard called Elizabeth’s Staircase. Big Kathy usually signed her paintings using an assumed name because she didn’t want her wealthy daughter’s customers to question why her mother needed to earn a living. Little Kathy also stocked children’s tables and chairs on which her mother had painted cute designs.

  By night, big Kathy shed her artiste’s smock and got dolled up to crawl Beverly Hills bars, clubs, and discos frequented by high rollers. She played the Hilton card to the max, using her connection to the famed hotel family to impress men. In her hunt for another husband with money, she made it appear she was a rich Hilton heiress looking for a long-term relationship.

  “She was always at one of the good restaurant bars, sitting out front, and she always seemed to be buzzed,” says the former actress Carole Wells Doheny, who was married to one of the scions of the oil-rich Beverly Hills Doheny family dynasty and had been a close friend of Paris Hilton’s playboy great-uncle, Nick, and other Hiltons. “You’d walk in and there she’d be just hanging on the bar and she’d be trying to pick up any guy who had any money and who would pay her tab.

  “I always felt sorry for her because she seemed to try too hard. She would glom on to you. You could never get past her at the bar. She would always tell you who she was, and who she was related to.”

  With a little scotch in her, Kathleen did what she did back in Manhasset when she was a teenager, which was to launch into song, belting out such standards as “Danny Boy,” “Summertime,” and “My Funny Valentine.” At places like the world famous Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, a bar crowd could find her singing with the piano player. “She liked the schmaltzy stuff, and she was very dramatic, so she could pull it off,” notes Avanzino.

  Hallaren says it was during that period that Kathleen had started pursuing wealthy members of the geriatric set—men in their seventies and eighties. And then there was her “Seabiscuit” period when she chased little fellows with big money—racehorse jockeys whom she met at bars and at the tracks.

  One of big Kathy’s social acquaintances at the time was the niece of a man once dubbed “the scourge of Hollywood,” a flamboyant character who in the ’50s conducted a reign of terror against some of Hollywood’s biggest stars and made a bundle in the process.

  Her acquaintance was Marjorie Meade Roth, niece and confidante of Robert Harrison, the founder and publisher of Confidential, the big daddy of the sleazy celebrity exposé magazines that had their garish golden age in the ’50s and ’60s. In Conrad and Nick Hilton’s heydays as Hollywood men about town, the father and son were often targets of blaring Confidential headlines, such as “The Strange Role of Zsa Zsa in Conrad Hilton’s Life.”

  By the time big Kathy met Roth, she was married to TV writer and producer Marty Roth, the brain behind such popular TV sitcoms as Three’s Company and I Dream of Jeannie. Some seventy episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard came from his typewriter, and he was the hit series’ executive story editor.

  The Roths had met big Kathy through their friend Gary Stein, a wealthy Beverly Hills bachelor who owned a metal-plating company in the San Fernando Valley.

  Stein was dating Kathleen who was, according to Roth, “his partner in drinking. She was a very heavy drinker, and Gary liked to drink so they had that in common. She was wild, and there was something about her that was not endearing. She was sort of like a con artist.

  “It was around the time her daughter Kim married Marvin Davis’s son, and I used to say to Kathy that she was better than Jolie Gabor because all her daughters married so unbelievably well. I said to her, ‘You know people talk about Jolie Gabor and what she did with the Gabor girls, but you beat her by a mile. You should write a book for women on how to get their daughters into wealthy marriages.’ I was teasing her, and she just ate it up.”

  Through big Kathy, the Roths also met and socialized with Kathy and Rick Hilton.

  “We really liked them,” Roth says. “They were young and fun. When I knew Kathy back then, she was an absolutely lovely girl and I found it hard to believe she was the daughter of that woman.

  “One night Marty and I had dinner with Rick and Kathy at the Bistro Garden in Beverly Hills and we were sitting at a table outside and there was this horrible crash. Ricky had just bought a brand-new Porsche and he said, ‘I’ll bet it’s my car.’ And we said, ‘Oh, no!’ And he said, ‘I’m going to go look,’ and he ran out and his Porsche was smashed. He came back and we laughed and we finished dinner and we had a fun time. He didn’t seem to mind.”

  Years later Roth, whose husband had died, looked back on their friendship with the Hiltons and wondered whether their interest in keeping up a social relationship was because Marty Roth was a big wheel in TV and might be helpful to Kathy’s sisters, or even her daughters. “It’s possible,” she says. “Marty absolutely was a connection to TV.”

  FOR YEARS BIG KATHY had been partying in Palm Springs. The California desert playground was an oasis of rich, divorced men ready for trapping by predatory females. It had been for generations a getaway for the rich and famous, and rich and infamous, who lived and died there—from the likes of Presley, Sinatra, Liberace, Monroe, and the Gabors to Alan Ladd, who overdosed in his hideaway on Camino Norte after a week of nonstop drinking and popping pills.

  Looking for a new life and a new man, big Kathy decided to take her show to Palm Springs, ridiculed in hipper quarters as “God’s Waiting Room” because of the old stars who hung out there.

  “She used to go there a lot,” says Halleren. “She scoped out the scene, li
ked what she saw, and that’s why she decided to move there. She’d been through everybody [in Beverly Hills], every bar, and her reputation was too crazy, and she knew she was old news.”

  Adele Avanzino essentially agrees. “Kathy just got tired of the whole LA scene,” she says, “and just thought life would be a little easier down there, a little simpler.”

  Big Kathy planned her move with military precision. Her strategy was to buy a house on a golf course, sit out on her patio armed with cocktails and dressed provocatively, and flirt with the duffers passing by, hoping to score a hole in one with a rich daddy.

  Just before she moved, and as part of her strategic planning, she made a change in her appearance. “Her idea was to first get a face-lift and then make the big move to Palm Springs and marry a billionaire,” recounts Hallaren, in whom big Kathy confided her plan of attack. Hallaren recommended a top plastic surgeon who had done reconstructive work on her own face after she was in a serious automobile accident, Dr. Steven “Doc Hollywood” Hoefflin, who was best known for his work on Michael Jackson’s face. His other celebrity patients included onetime Hilton wife Elizabeth Taylor, so big Kathy felt she was in good company. Moreover, Kathleen thought there was a chance of romance with him because she thought he was single—and definitely well-off.

  Big Kathy came out of surgery “looking exactly the same, only younger, so it was a great job,” Hallaren says. “I loved her nose. It’s the same nose that Paris has, and Kathy Hilton has it, too. It’s got a marvelous kind of different bump on it, which I think is wonderful. She had just gone to him for the face-lift, and Dr. Hoefflin talked her into the nose job.” She also hoped to lose weight; because of her drinking, she had blown up to about 170 pounds.