In Palm Springs, she bought a modest house at 195 Club Drive overlooking the Indian Ridge Country Club. Her new abode was in the section known as Palm Desert. Bob Hope, who held his celebrity Bob Hope Chrysler Classic there, once quipped, “There’s so much loot in Palm Desert they could give Texas food stamps.”
CHAPTER 13
They called Robert C. Fenton Jr. the “Silver Fox.” For a man nearing seventy, the six-footer who once played college basketball was in great shape. He had a full head of gray hair and was known as a dapper dresser. As one of his two daughters, Barbara Frank, says, “Dad was a big person, with a big personality, and had lots of charisma. At his age women were just coming at him. It was amazing!”
One of the women who would land him—and make his life and the lives of his daughters a living hell—was big Kathy.
At the time she snagged Fenton one boozy night at a Palm Desert drink and dance joint out on Highway 111, the former aerospace marketing executive was “spinning out of control.” Earlier that year his former dental hygienist and homemaker wife of thirty-five years, the mother of his two married daughters, and the grandmother of three girls, had died of uterine cancer. Her death had come not long after they had moved from the Los Angeles suburb of Northridge to a “spectacular” home in Palm Desert.
“It was like everything was awesome in their lives,” says Barbara Frank, a nurse. “My parents had a really amazing relationship. A typical Saturday night for them was barbecuing steak, and I’d walk in to look at them dancing and listening to Frank Sinatra, having a cocktail. My mom was the quintessential housewife—the cook, the cleaner, the entertainer. My dad didn’t even know how to make a sandwich for himself. My mom’s death was brutal for him.”
While his daughters always knew that their very charismatic father was “a partyer” and “definitely loved it all—food, wine, music, and women,” they believed he never strayed during his marriage. However, there was another side to Bob Fenton that knocked them for a loop. As a widower he had become a serial Casanova.
Out of the blue, some six months after his wife was buried, Fenton met and married a flashy singer who worked at a popular Palm Springs lounge called Melvyn’s. “She didn’t wear any underwear so when she sat on the bar and crossed her legs she would give everybody a free show,” according to Fenton’s other daughter, Judy Goldstone. “They called her ‘The Black Widow.’”
The marriage between the Silver Fox and the Black Widow lasted several months and was dissolved in 1998. “Dad realized, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’” asserts Frank. Her sister adds, “She got the wedding ring. That’s it.”
Fenton’s daughters were so shocked by their father’s behavior that they convinced him to go into grief counseling at the Betty Ford Center in nearby Rancho Mirage. He went a couple of times. Two to three months later he met Paris Hilton’s grandmother, and the two moved in together.
“I was freaked out!” declares Goldstone. “I shared a housekeeper with my dad and she started telling me that he had photographs of the Hiltons in his house—Kathy and Rick Hilton and Kathy Richards—the whole deal.”
In that same time frame, Goldstone was shopping in the local Target store one afternoon when a pretty woman approached her and asked her whether she was Bob Fenton’s daughter. Goldstone thought she recognized the good-looking blonde as a girl who had gone to high school with her sister. “I said, ‘Oh, you’re Barbara’s high school friend, right?’ And she said, ‘No, I’m Kim Richards,’ and I said, ‘Who are you?’ because I didn’t know who Kim Richards was. And she just glared at me and said, ‘Your dad is living with my mother.’ And I went, ‘Ugh!’ and just turned and walked away from her, and that was the end of that conversation.”
Fenton had asked Kathleen to marry him on several occasions, but she played hard to get. She changed her mind, however, when he presented her with an enormous emerald ring surrounded by diamonds one glittery evening at Morton’s, a fancy steakhouse in Palm Desert.
Fenton had waited until his beloved had gone to the ladies’ room and then called over the waiter and plopped the rock into a fresh martini. Kathleen discovered it when she took a gulp. “Oh, yeah, she was thrilled,” says Adele Avanzino, who had accompanied them to dinner. “It was a big, big ring, and it was all very exciting.”
Certain friends of big Kathy’s were against the marriage. They felt that Fenton was a gigolo who was out to get her money. Moreover, they suspected he wanted to marry her because of her access to the Hilton wealth through her daughter. Never once did they look at the other side of the picture—that she thought Fenton was loaded and wanted to unburden him of some of his green.
Six days before Christmas 1999, Fenton and big Kathy, with her daughter Kyle as a witness, stood before the Reverend Daniel Rondeau in St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Palm Desert, and were married. On the marriage certificate, the bride listed her occupation as “Artist/ painter” and her usual kind of business as “Theater.”
Fenton’s daughters were angry—and catty—about the latest development involving their father. Furious at his actions, they refused to meet his new bride. Ever. But they soon learned what kind of woman she was, or at least heard the gossip.
“I was showing a girlfriend of mine some pictures of my mother and father and telling her how I couldn’t understand what my father was going through, and I said he’s married this woman Kathy Richards and this girl’s eyes popped out of her head and she said, ‘Kathy Richards?! You’ve got to be kidding!!!’ and I said, ‘No, why?’ And she said, ‘She is a pig.’ That’s what she called her, and she said she goes to the ‘nasty’ Nest—that’s what we call it in Palm Desert, the ‘nasty’ Nest—a club for people who are really old and go there to drink and sing and dance.
“My friend was there giving a bachelor party for her father, and Kathy was there and she had on this top that was really low cut and her boobs were hanging out and she was French kissing all these men. I said, ‘You have got to be kidding. Oh my God.’”
After hearing her friend’s story, Goldstone immediately telephoned her father.
“I said, ‘Dad, this girl told me about her being at the bar with her boobs hanging out and French kissing these men,’ and he said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’ I said, ‘Dad, what are you doing? Why are you with her?’ And he said, ‘I love her, Judith. She’s my wife now. You are just going to have to accept this.’”
At that point, big Kathy declared war on her husband’s daughters. The first volley came in a phone call to Barbara Frank from her father. At the time Frank was going through a costly divorce and custody battle, but she had been getting financial support from her father, who was helping to pay her attorney bills. That all changed after he married big Kathy.
“Kathy might as well have called me because it came from her telling my dad what to do,” states Frauk. “He said, and I’ll never forget his words, ‘Under no circumstances am I going to continue helping you in any way financially.’ I said, ‘Dad, I’ll pay you back. I’ll refinance my house. I really need help.’ And he said, ‘Barbara, I’m with Kathy now. She won’t allow me to help you anymore.’ I thought, this isn’t my dad. Who is this man?”
Beyond cutting off financial assistance to his daughter, Fenton went along with another, even more disturbing maneuver instigated by his bride. Big Kathy convinced him to sell his house, the one he had purchased with his wife before she died, and put all of the proceeds, about $250,000, into renovating her house.
Still, big Kathy tried to ingratiate herself with Fenton’s daughters, if only to please him. Or so it appeared. At one point, she telephoned Judy Goldstone and said she had her mother’s ring and jewelry box and that she wanted Goldstone’s little daughter, Emily, to have it in memory of her grandmother. Shortly afterward, Fenton arrived at his daughter’s home without his bride and left the ring in the mailbox, since his daughters weren’t speaking to him. “I had my mother’s engagement ring and I was really happy about it,” Goldstone recalls
thinking at the time.
Several years later, after Kathleen was out of the picture, Fenton was sitting at his daughter’s dinner table when he said, “Judith, I want Emily to have Mother’s diamond ring.” When Goldstone replied that he must have forgotten because he’d already given her the ring, his response left her shaken. “He said, ‘No, not that diamond,’ and I asked, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Well, Kathy made up that story about the ring to make you come around to like her. The ring you got was never Mother’s ring.’
“Kathy had made up a whole scenario,” continues Goldstone, still incredulous years later. “She actually kept my mother’s real ring. My father was so crazy in the head and just trying to get along that he never balked at anything Kathy did. He told me he didn’t come to the door the day he dropped off the [phony] ring because he was embarrassed.
“That night my father gave me a ring and said, ‘This is your mother’s real diamond, and I want Emily to have it,’ and I said ‘Fine,’ and just let it go. Kathy didn’t like me because she couldn’t control me, because I refused to ever meet her. I never actually came face-to-face with her in my whole life.”
Fenton’s daughters believe that the single biggest reason for Kathy’s spell over their father, and his obliviousness to what she was doing to him, had to do with the Hilton family. They are certain he was “blinded” by the Hilton fame and wealth. “She played that up,” says Goldstone. “He would always tell me, she’s part of the Hiltons, her daughter is Kathy Hilton, her son-in-law is Rick Hilton, his father was Conrad Hilton’s son. He was completely impressed. He told me, ‘I enjoyed going to the Waldorf with them in New York, I enjoyed spending time with Rick—Rick and Kathy were very nice to me. I enjoyed babysitting the boys for them.’ He was impressed with Kim being a child star and Kyle being in the movies, and he really wanted me to meet Rick Hilton and make dinner for him when he came to the desert.”
On his birthday, and on Father’s Day, Fenton always got a nice card from Kathy and Rick. In the envelope was a check, usually for five hundred dollars.
Others, such as Adele Avanzino, saw how “enamored” Fenton was of the Hiltons and how he adored being in their exclusive orbit. “He loved the connection,” she says, “until Kathy would say, ‘I’m Kathy Richards and I’m Kathy Hilton’s mom.’ Then Bob would say, ‘No, you’re not Kathy Richards, you’re Kathy Fenton.’ He liked the Hilton connection up to a point, but he wanted her to always remember that her last name was Fenton, not Richards or Hilton. He reminded her of that all the time, but she mostly used the name Richards, except if they went someplace like the Waldorf in New York—and then she threw the Hilton name around.”
Meanwhile, Kathy began treating Fenton like dirt. She refused to have sex with him and made him sleep in a guest bedroom. When he bought her a gift—an inexpensive Movado watch at the local Costco discount store—she laughed in his face and threw it at him. “What am I going to do with this piece of crap?” she bellowed. “Take it back and buy me a barbecue.”
To friends, she boasted, “I don’t do shit for Bob. I won’t travel with him. I won’t cook for him. I won’t do anything for him.”
CHAPTER 14
Around the time that she met husband number four, the Silver Fox, big Kathy learned that husband number one, the Italian Stallion, was dying.
Larry Avanzino, Paris Hilton’s maternal grandfather, was in a near vegetative state in a long-term-care nursing facility, mostly for the poor and destitute, in Providence, Rhode Island. He had suffered serious brain injuries when he was viciously assaulted and smashed in the head with a baseball bat and knocked down a flight of stairs. The slugger was believed by family members to be someone close to him, someone to whom he might have been abusive. But nothing ever was proven.
Avanzino had lived a narcissistic and hard life after he and Kathy had gotten divorced, one far removed from that of the Hiltons’ glamorous world. Mostly, he worked as a housepainter, drank, pursued women, and made more babies.
When he was in poor financial straits, which was most of the time, he received help from his loving and loyal successful brother, Ken. “Ken owned the building that Larry was living in,” says John McKusker, who had witnessed Larry’s elopement with Kathleen and was a guest at Paris Hilton’s christening. “Ken was always bailing Larry out of shit. Larry was an alcoholic, a drug addict, whatever.”
After his marriage to big Kathy failed, Avanzino had two more wives with whom he fathered three daughters and two sons, who are distant half-sisters and half-brothers of Kathy Hilton’s. One of Avanzino’s sons, Laurence Jr., was in the Providence, Rhode Island, news in December 1995 when he was a witness for the prosecution in the case of his best friend, who was accused of beating and stabbing to death a girlfriend in an argument over her earnings as a stripper.
Avanzino rarely if ever had contact with his daughter Kathy Hilton as she grew up, or with any of her children, Paris included. As his second wife, Diane Campisi, whom he married in 1964, points out, “Larry didn’t bring Kathy up, so nothing in her life had anything to do with him, other than the fact that Kathy Hilton has his genes.”
When Campisi first met Avanzino at a cousin’s wedding he appeared to have potential, and “anybody would have fallen in love with him,” says Campisi’s mother, Josephine. “Larry had a Mercedes, a two-seater, with a canvas top, and at that time he was in sales, starting a new job with a company in New York. When Diane was dating him, all the waitresses paid so much attention to him. But his life went downhill. It was very sad.”
After the beating, Avanzino was comatose for about two years. His brother, Ken, had advised friends like John McKusker not to visit because of the terrible shape he was in. But when big Kathy learned of his plight she told a friend she had gone to see him and that her onetime Adonis “was toothless. That was all she had to say.”
On February 20, 1997, Paris Hilton’s maternal grandfather died in his hospital bed at the age of sixty-one. His obituary described him as a “self-employed painter.” There was a funeral mass for him in the Most Blessed Sacrament Church in Wakefield, Massachusetts, and he was buried in Oak Grove Cemetery, Medford, Massachusetts.
In the very public world of Kathy Hilton and her most famous daughter, Paris, there has never been a mention of Avanzino. It is as if he had never existed.
SOME TWO MONTHS after Larry Avanzino died, Ken Richards, big Kathy’s second husband, was stricken with cancer of the kidneys that had metastasized to his lungs and his bones. The doctors gave him a year to live.
Richards, who had raised the now-prominent Kathy Hilton from the time she was three years old and was the father of the moneyed and successful Kim and Kyle Richards, was just scraping by, living on his social security and the small salary Sylvia, his wife of almost twenty years, was drawing from her job as personnel manager of a discount store in Boise, Idaho, where the couple lived in a small condominium.
Richards, who was eighty years old and could no longer work, had been virtually abandoned by the Hiltons and by his daughters. With mounting medical bills, Richards, against the advice of his wife, who was “too proud,” contacted Kathy and Rick Hilton in New York, explained their dire straits, and asked to borrow some money.
At first the Hiltons made excuses. “Rick told Ken, ‘I have kids to put through school. I have party dresses to buy for Paris and Nicky, blah, blah, blah,’” recalls Sylvia Richards, still incredulous and emotional some years later at the Hilton heir’s response. “It was very humiliating because Ken had to beg. He literally had to beg.”
Finally, the Hiltons, living in a Manhattan penthouse with a spectacular home in the tony Hamptons, agreed to loan Richards ten thousand dollars. But there was a proviso.
“He made us pay back the loan,” states Sylvia Richards. “And they never once came to see Ken. Never once called and said how are you doing? Are you starving to death? Are you getting your medicine? This is the man who raised Kathy Hilton, but she was in the upper crust now and she didn’t
need Kenneth.”
Choked with emotion, she adds, “Kathy Hilton’s just like her mother. She had a very good mentor, and she learned well. Kathleen, the mother, had no soul, and the daughter doesn’t either.”
With her husband becoming increasingly ill—the cancer had spread to his hips—Sylvia Richards sold their condominium and paid off Hilton, and the Richardses moved in with Sylvia’s daughter, Cyndi, from her first marriage, and her husband, who lived in Las Vegas.
“We sold everything, and by the time I paid off Rick I had, I think, one hundred and forty-nine dollars left,” says Richards. “We had maxed out our credit cards to pay for Ken’s medications.”
She says she didn’t ask for any more help from Kathy and Rick.
Things only got worse for the Richardses. At her wit’s end, Sylvia Richards telephoned her husband’s youngest daughter, Kyle, who lived in Beverly Hills, to see if they could stay with her while her father was being treated at the VA hospital in Los Angeles. Kyle and her second husband, Maurico Umansky, a broker at Rick Hilton’s high-end real estate agency, Hilton & Hyland, readily agreed.
But when Richards got to the hospital, accompanied by his wife and daughter, he was shocked to learn that the VA had made no room arrangements for him. “Ken was in a wheelchair in terrible pain,” says Sylvia Richards. “Kyle called her mother-in-law who is a psychiatrist, and she said to bring Ken to Cedars Sinai and she’d make sure he was admitted.” He was there for three weeks, and the cancer had spread throughout his bones, requiring daily radiation treatments.
By then Sylvia Richards had accepted an invitation—one she would come to regret—to stay at Kim Richards’s home in suburban Calabasas. “Being at Kim’s was just beyond belief,” she asserts. “Her father is dying and he’s hurting and she would get drunk and jump on the bed, bring the kids in, and could care less. Because she was a little girl TV and movie star, she’d been doted on all her life and was very selfish. She thought whatever Kim wanted, that’s what should happen.”
House of Hilton Page 14