House of Hilton

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  Richards couldn’t take it anymore and told his wife he wanted to return to her daughter’s home in Las Vegas where he could have some peace and quiet as death neared, but Kim and Kyle demanded that he stay in California.

  “This way,” maintains Sylvia Richards, “if they wanted to see him they didn’t have to travel very far. They were that selfish. One day we were in the room with Kenneth and he was telling Kim we were going to go home, and she flew at me, came at me with hands and fists, and physically attacked me. She was screaming that I was trying to take her father away. She called the security patrol and tried to get me removed from her house. She told me that Rick and Kathy were going to do things to me. I said, ‘Let ’em come on!’ It was a terrible mess. Ken wanted to go home and I was going to take him one way or another.”

  Kim finally consented and arranged for a plane to fly the Richardses to Las Vegas. The next morning, Ken Richards suffered a heart attack and was rehospitalized for a week. Shortly after he arrived back home, extremely weak, Kim showed up.

  “It was midnight and she was drunk on her rear end and blubbering,” maintains Sylvia Richards. “She had two strangers bring her to our house in a pickup truck, and she didn’t know who those guys were. I refused to let her come in and wake up her father. Later, she told me she had gone to the Las Vegas Hilton and gambled all night.”

  The next day Ken Richards, in critical condition, was taken to the Nathan Adelson Hospice in Las Vegas. That night his wife slept in a chair next to his bed, knowing he was dying. In the morning, when she went to get breakfast, a nurse found her. “He’s fighting to stay alive because he doesn’t want to leave you,” she told her. “You’ve got to tell him he can go.”

  She did, and a short time later Kenneth Richards died. The date was April 28, 1998. His daughters, Kim and Kyle, didn’t show up until after he was gone.

  Meanwhile, someone at the hospice had notified the Hiltons in New York. While the widow was still in the room with her husband’s body—he would be cremated—Rick and Kathy telephoned. “Rick is on the phone and Kathy is in hysterics in the background,” says Sylvia Richards, who has never forgotten the moment. “Rick says, ‘Kathy needs to talk to her dad.’ I said, ‘Rick, he’s gone.’ But he insisted. ‘She’s got to talk to him.’ Kathy got on the phone. ‘Oh, Dad, I love you so much and I miss you. You’ve done so much for me….’ I didn’t say anything. I just let her ramble. And I was thinking maybe somebody else was there besides Rick. I thought Kathy was putting on an act because she never gave a damn. She never showed him any love. If she loved him, she would have been there. None of them lifted a finger to help.”

  Sylvia Richards’s daughter, Cyndi, who lived through that horrific period leading up to Richards’s death, still sheds tears remembering those events.

  “Why didn’t Kathy Hilton help him out, because he might have lived longer if she had helped?” she asks, her voice choked with sorrow and anger. “Where the hell was Kathy Hilton when her father died? Getting them to help him was like pulling teeth. By the time they paid back Kathy and Rick for that loan, my mom and dad had no money. The Hiltons are a cruel family.”

  CHAPTER 15

  As a cancer-riddled Ken Richards was dying in 1998, big Kathy discovered a lump in one of her breasts. It was malignant and would later spread to a lung and then to her brain. Her daughters, who lived on her every word, who were so dependent on her, were devastated.

  The Dugan family suddenly seemed cursed by cancer. Both of big Kathy’s brothers would be stricken not long after her diagnosis. One would die of cancer of the liver, the other would require treatment for bladder cancer, according to their sister, Donna. Because of the genetics, fear of breast cancer would hang over Kathy Hilton, her daughters, Paris and Nicky, and Hilton’s half-sisters, Kim and Kyle.

  Big Kathy’s initial reaction to the diagnosis was “Oh, no, not me,” according to Adele Avanzino. “But then in her next breath it was, ‘You know what? I’m going to fight this thing until the end,’ which she did. She was unbelievable through the whole thing.”

  Among the first of her friends she called to break the terrible news was her childhood pal Jane Hallaren. “She said, ‘I have cancer and I think this is it.’ I burst into tears and she burst into tears. She said, ‘I thought I would have so much longer,’ and I said, ‘I thought you would live forever, too, honey.’”

  She also telephoned the man who got away—her first teenage love, Bob Conkey. Big Kathy wept and said, “We never did get together after all these years.” She talked about “all those missed moments in life.”

  Despite her suffering, she also took the opportunity to bad-mouth her caretaker husband, Bob Fenton. “She told me that he basically bullshitted her when they met, telling her that he had a lot of money, and she said he didn’t have any money, and that basically he was living off of her,” says Conkey. “It’s funny because she thought she was going to live off of him. It was one of those classic—you mean you don’t have any money, either?”

  Bob Fenton, who once again would have to care for a wife with cancer, accompanied her, along with Adele Avanzino and a couple of Kathy Hilton’s friends, to the doctor’s office in Palm Desert. Big Kathy was adamantly against having a mastectomy, so her course of treatment would involve having surgery to remove the tumor, and then chemotherapy and radiation. “Nothing is going to put me down,” she confidently told her husband and companions after the visit. “I’m going to fight this as hard as I can. I have too many things to live for.” Always concerned about how she looked, she seemed more worried about losing her hair as a result of the chemo than about losing her life.

  Ken Richards’s widow, Sylvia, who had forged a modicum of a friendship with big Kathy years earlier when they shared his daughters, Kim and Kyle, also had had breast cancer and had decided to have a double mastectomy in order to survive. “I told Kathy, ‘You better have them removed,’ but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said she had this wonderful doctor who patted her on the butt and pinched her on the boobs and said the way he was treating her was the way to do it. She didn’t want to lose her breasts.”

  However, Kathleen may have had second thoughts mastectomy-wise after she started her treatments. She had another friend who had had the surgery and was then living a normal life. Kathleen’s sister, Madonna, remembers her complaining, “She’s now on a cruise having a good time, and here I am getting chemo and radiation, and dying.’ She had a rough ticket with the cancer.”

  Despite how shabbily big Kathy had treated him, Bob Fenton became her devoted, around-the-clock nurse. Even those in Kathleen’s camp who disliked him and believed all the nasty things she had to say about him attest to how concerned and compassionate he was during her illness.

  According to Adele Avanzino, Kathleen “felt terrible” that Fenton would have to go through the same trauma he did with his first wife. “I remember her saying, ‘Bob, you don’t have to go through this with me.’ She suffered in his grief, too. He went from one grief to another.”

  The situation, however, infuriated Fenton’s daughters, who saw a completely different picture. “I really felt sorry for my dad because I think he was used,” declares Barbara Frank. “Here was this man who was totally vulnerable, who really wasn’t thinking clearly, and had just gone through the most horrific, unimaginable loss of my mother to cancer, and then here he had to do it again.”

  By late 2001, big Kathy’s cancer had spread to her brain, and she had to undergo surgery in Los Angeles. It was at that point that she knew she didn’t have much time left.

  On one occasion, Judy Goldstone called the house hoping to speak with her father, but Kathleen answered. “She started screaming at me,” recalls Goldstone. “She told me how much she hated me and what a horrible person I was, and that her cancer had now spread to her brain and that she was going to die, and that I was nothing but ‘a cunt.’ Then she hung up.”

  Some six months before she died, Kathleen prepared her will. A relative of Fenton’
s who was staying at the house at the time had warned him, “You better get in there and listen to everything that is going on, Bob, because she’s going to screw you.” Fenton’s response was “No, she isn’t. She loves me.”

  During Christmas 2001, Adele Avanzino and her brother, Ken, visited Kathleen. “When we got to her house in the afternoon, she opened the door and she was using a walker and she didn’t have her wig on. We asked if we could take her to dinner and she said that would be great, that she hadn’t been out at all. When we got back to the house, she had her wig on and she was all dolled up and ready for some fun. That was Kathy.”

  On March 2, 2002, some six weeks before her sixty-fourth birthday, Kathleen Dugan Avanzino Richards Catain Fenton, Paris Hilton’s maternal grandmother, died.

  She succumbed peacefully in her daughter Kim’s home where she had been moved a week or so earlier. Her obituary in the Palm Springs Desert Sun newspaper, which was prepared by her daughters, described her glowingly as “a homemaker for twenty-five years.”

  Kathy Hilton, the first of big Kathy’s brood, and son-in-law Rick flew in. Accompanying them was Paris, who arrived with her latest arm candy, hunky model Jason Shaw (with whom she would later appear in a steamy video, reportedly answering the door naked.)

  Because a number of friends and family couldn’t get in at the same time there were several services for big Kathy, who was cremated. Two small services were held in Kim’s home. Fenton is said to have missed the second one because the widower was out playing golf. A larger, private service was held at the Palm Springs Mortuary in nearby Cathedral City, and Kathy Hilton arranged for another in Los Angeles.

  In the wake of her death, now two-time widower Bob Fenton quickly came to the stark realization that he should have heeded his relative’s warning about monitoring his late wife’s will. Aside from the urn containing her ashes, which he kept by the side of his bed, he wound up with nada. The way his daughters saw it, their father had been taken to the cleaners. “Financially, my dad was screwed over big-time,” claims Barbara Frank. “He sold his home, gave her the money, moved in with her, and ended up with nothing.”

  Big Kathy’s house, in which Fenton had invested a quarter-million dollars of his own money to fix up, was left to Kathy Hilton, Kim Richards, and Kyle Umansky.

  Even from the great beyond, Paris Hilton’s devilish maternal grandmother would make life a living hell for her fourth and final husband. According to a stipulation she is said to have made, Bob Fenton was permitted to stay in the house for a year after her death. However, he could not have any female company, or he would be evicted. To make certain that he was abiding by that condition, Kim Richards had been instructed to check to make sure there were no ladies on the premises.

  Actually, big Kathy, in one of her last acts in this life, might have been doing a good deed for Fenton by barring women from the house.

  Once he got back on his feet he again fell into his serial Casanova persona, met a sexy middle-age babe who his daughter said lived in a trailer park, and married her. The union didn’t last very long.

  Almost three years to the day that big Kathy passed on, Fenton, who had been battling pancreatic cancer, died. His cremation took place at the Discount Cremation and Burial Services of the Desert in Palm Springs.

  Some years after big Kathy’s death, her childhood pal, Jane Hallaren, observes: “All Kathleen ever wanted out of life was to see her daughters become stars and marry rich men. Her favorite granddaughter surpassed them all. Whether Kathleen’s in heaven or hell, I’ll bet she’s thinking of Paris and saying, ‘You go, girl!’”

  CHAPTER 16

  A couple of years before his death at ninety-one in 1979, Paris Hilton’s great-grandfather, Conrad Hilton, went to the hospital for his annual checkup. He always was as particular about his health as he was about the cleanliness and service in his worldwide chain of hotels. He thought of his thousands of annual guests as his extended family, though actual Hilton family members attest he was perhaps more concerned about his customers than his own brood.

  Rarely ill a day in his life, the broad-shouldered, six-foot-two extrovert who often sported a Stetson and cowboy boots would rather walk than ride, and his long legs gave him an Olympian stride.

  In fact, it was by fast-stepping up and down Fifth Avenue for days, discreetly scoping out the comings and goings of the then down-on-her-heels Plaza Hotel, that he assured himself she was well worth buying and giving a makeover. He always referred to his hotels in the female form as if they were his mistresses, and he described his love affair with hotels as “a series of romances in which girls played little part.”

  Affectionately called Connie since childhood, Hilton had enormous charisma and tremendous energy. As the many women in his party-loving, party-giving life noted—such as (almost) Miss Hungary of 1936, Zsa Zsa Gabor, his second wife—Connie was as amply endowed physically as he was financially and had amazing stamina and staying power.

  Besides walking, Connie Hilton also got his exercise by dancing the Varsoviana, a waltz done up Texas style, which he learned secretly and on the cheap at an Arthur Murray studio near his Beverly Hills headquarters. He instructed his administrative assistant, close confidante, and rumored onetime sweetheart, Olive Wakeman, to interrupt even his most important business meetings to remind him if he was running late for dance class by whispering, “You have an appointment with Mr. Murray.”

  So Connie, who in his late eighties had married for a third time, was naturally mighty concerned when the doctors conducting his physical concluded that it might be wise to remove his prostate, the loss of which could severely impact his highly vaunted and much praised boudoir calisthenics, or so he feared.

  “The old man stuck his head up and says, ‘Well, now, doc, how’s that gonna affect my sex life? You ain’t taking that out, if I can’t get this up.’ He’s almost ninety, for Christ’s sake, and he’s worried about his sex life,” recalls Maxwell House coffee heir Bob Neal, still shaking his head in awe years later at Connie’s geriatric virility. “He sure liked to chase the girls pretty good.”

  In his eighties Connie still enjoyed flirting with young women, such as pretty and perky Gini Tangalakis, who worked as one of the Hilton Corp.’s lower-echelon secretaries. When she was at home sick with a cold, the most powerful hotelman in the world telephoned this twenty-one-year-old engaged-to-be-married office worker. “‘Oh, I understand that you’re not well. Is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all?’ I told him I just had the flu and that I appreciated his concern. ‘Well, Gini, do you have a nurse? If there’s anything I can do, feel free to call me.’” The next day he called her again. “‘When you get back to the office, why don’t you come up. I’d like to see you.’” When Gini got a small paper cut and was asking one of the other ladies in the office for a Band-Aid, Connie suddenly was hovering over her with concern—and romance—in his eyes. “He took my hand in his—‘Are you okay? Can I help? Here, let me see your little finger.’” She feared he was going to kiss it.

  Connie had come on to another office girl who had occasionally visited him at his Bel-Air estate on weekends, where they would have lunch at poolside and he would watch her swim. “She would just spend the day enjoying his compound more than actually, I think, being with him,” says Tangalakis years later. “She took it for what it was—just an old man who wanted a little female companionship. That was kind of how he flirted. He’d say, ‘Why don’t you come to my house for brunch and a swim?’”

  As Bob Neal notes with delight, “The old man was a real cocksman.”

  CONRAD NICHOLSON HILTON came from the most humble of beginnings. He was born on Christmas Day 1887, in a primitive adobe dwelling in San Antonio, Socorro County, in what would become Texas but was then the rugged and barren New Mexico territory.

  He was the first of four brothers (one of whom died at the age of two) and he had four sisters, brought into the world by slight, prematurely gray Mary Laufersweiler Hilton, a dominee
ring, staunchly religious Roman Catholic of German heritage. Like clockwork, at sunup and sundown every day she dropped to her knees with her children gathered around her to pray, and on Sundays she traveled for miles through the wilderness to attend mass.

  Connie was named for his maternal grandfather, Conrad Laufersweiler, and his middle name, Nicholson, was in honor of the longtime family doctor who delivered him. Connie was the fair-haired one whom his mother most loved and coddled. He would later describe her as “the loveliest lady I have ever known and the most gallant.” She would have an enormous psychological impact on his bizarre relationships with women later in life, and two of the three women he chose to marry, the first and third of his wives, were named Mary, like his mother. In his eyes, “Mary was a lady.”

  While Connie inherited his strong religious beliefs from his mother, it was from his brawny, robust Norwegian father, Augustus Holver Hilton, a man who cared little about religion or prayer, that he got his mind for business. He had his father’s big hands, big feet, big voice, and big ambition. Connie would even sport a mustache like him, too.

  The Hilton-Laufersweiler union took place on Lincoln’s birthday in 1885. Called Gus, or “the Colonel,” the Hilton patriarch had built “a tidy little empire,” A. H. Hilton, in San Antonio, that included a general store. Along with selling and trading, he was a loan shark of sorts—called “grubstakers” in those days—who supplied provisions and money to prospectors in return for a share of their profits.

  San Antonio was a trading center, and A. H. Hilton sold and bartered everything from groceries to coffins, and when things were slow, the strapping Norwegian went into the wilderness buying and trading beaver pelts and furs and dealing tobacco and groceries to trappers. He liked to boast about his adventures and once even sold an article about them to the newspaper in Albuquerque, often reading it aloud to whoever would listen.