House of Hilton

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  Connie remembered Gus Hilton as a “Viking of a man with energy to burn,” who considered seven o’clock in the morning the middle of the day. A jovial backslapper, Gus loved nothing more than to bargain with his customers when they claimed his prices were too high; it was from his type-A father that Connie learned the “art of the deal.”

  The older Hilton instilled the values of working hard and making money in Connie, who earned five dollars a month during two summers laboring in the family store. Once, when he overslept, he heard the disappointment in his father’s booming voice. “Mary, I do not know what will become of Connie. I’m afraid he’ll never amount to anything. He’ll sleep his life away.”

  Like many in the Hilton dynasty—all the way up through and including Paris—Connie would have limited schooling, bouncing from one institution of learning to another, though he dreamed in his youth of going to Dartmouth, a fantasy dashed by hard times. As he later acknowledged, “My so-called formal education was pretty informal.”

  He received his basic reading, writing, and arithmetic in a one-room adobe grammar school. He attended some classes at the Goss Military Institute in Albuquerque but found the discipline too rigorous, and he was pleased when the school burned down, a fire he later claimed he “took no active hand in.” For a time he studied at the School of Mines at Socorro and at St. Michael’s College, run by strict Christian Brothers, in Santa Fe, mainly because his mother made him attend. For a time he was also a cadet at the New Mexico Military Institute.

  THROUGH THE 1890S and early 1900s A. H. Hilton went through boom times, so much so that the money rolling in permitted the family to move in 1905 to sunny Long Beach, California, and rent a beautiful home a block from the ocean, while Gus Hilton stayed in San Antonio running the business. The Hiltons’ high life, however, was short-lived. Everything went bust in 1907 when there was a run on a New York bank, touching off a currency panic that spread across the land. The Hiltons were left holding the bag, their warehouses filled with merchandise that no one had the money to buy.

  One of their salable assets, Connie quickly realized, was the rooms in their sprawling adobe home that had been added on over the years as each new Hilton arrived into the world. Connie, then twenty years old, and his father envisioned their hacienda as a stop on the road for traveling salesmen, miners, and railroad people who needed a comfortable bed and a warm meal.

  Thus, the first informal Hilton Hotel was born, with Connie running things as day manager, night manager, room service clerk, and concierge. When the midnight, morning, and noon trains arrived in town with weary, hungry travelers, Connie was at the station to hustle them to the Hilton. As he later stated, “I can’t honestly say I fell in love with the hotel business as it was practiced by the Hilton family in 1907 or began to dream of the Waldorf or the Plaza.” The business then was more “a case of urgent necessity.”

  But, like everything else Hilton through the years, it was a great success. The guests and the money rolled in. In less than a year the Hiltons had to hire outside help. Because the jerry-rigged hotel was a hit, Connie rated himself a “boy genius.”

  When Hilton was twenty-one, his father gave him control of the family store in San Antonio and a share of the profits in the family business, now called A. H. Hilton & Son.

  In 1912, when New Mexico became the forty-seventh state, Connie, at twenty-five, thought politics would look good on his résumé. He decided to run as a Republican candidate for the new state legislature. Like Paris Hilton’s maternal great-grandfather, her paternal great-grandfather also would become a politico.

  The elections were “ruthless” and “only the fit” were able to survive. There were allegations that one side voted a herd of sheep, while the other the entire populace of the local cemetery. The dead and the sheep had spoken, and Connie Hilton beat his Democratic opponent by 243 votes, becoming the youngest representative to New Mexico’s first state legislature.

  Connie utilized his two-year term by conducting a self-improvement program. Despite his supreme self-confidence, he dreaded speaking publicly, which he realized was a fatal flaw for a politician. When he was asked to make his first big political speech, he looked at the crowd and froze. His ultrareligious mother, however, heard one of his practice speeches, told him to forget about the teachings of Grenville Kleiser’s “Course in Public Speaking,” and intoned, “All those trimmings are sinful…. You’d do better to pray about it than practice this.”

  He followed Mary Hilton’s advice, prayed on the opening day of the legislature, and made an acceptable speech. His stage fright never returned.

  Connie’s womanizing days had started in earnest, too. He courted all sorts, including the vivacious debutante daughter of a judge and a hottie from Chicago who taught him ragtime “animal dances” like the grizzly-bear and the kangaroo-dip.

  Politics, meanwhile, frustrated him. Once he witnessed the corruption, the graft, the self-interest, and the red tape, he never sought reelection. Instead, he envisioned himself as a wealthy banker. With almost $3,000 of his own money, plus some $27,000 more he raised from investors, he actually was able to open the New Mexico State Bank of San Antonio in September 1913, when he was just twenty-six. But the shareholders—“the smart-money boys,” as he called them—soon took control and Connie was named the bank’s cashier, unpaid no less. He fought back and collected enough proxies by the time of the first stockholders’ meeting to win back control, but by then the bank had gone bust. But Connie, never one to give up, booted the old guard, became vice president, and in two years the bank grew with assets of $135,000. He considered himself a success.

  His banking career, however, ended when America entered the First World War.

  Connie enlisted in the army in 1917, went to officers’ candidate school, and served in France, where, though he never saw a day of combat, he did manage to enjoy the painted ladies and the cheap champagne. The only personal tragedy he suffered was the death of his father, who was killed in a car accident back home.

  At the time of the armistice with Germany, Connie was serving in the cushy Paris office of the army’s chief purchasing agent, with headquarters in the posh Hotel Élysée Palace, on the Champs Élysées. Connie himself was comfortably billeted in a nice little apartment on Rue de Bassano, with a cook to serve him, no less. “This,” he later acknowledged, “is going to war in style.”

  When he returned home in mid-February 1919, he had $5,000 and change in savings—and a big dream of becoming wealthy and powerful. The dream would be fulfilled in the dusty, raucous Texas town of Cisco.

  CHAPTER 17

  In 1893, a tornado swept through Cisco, some fifty miles east of Abilene. The twister cut a devastating swath, killing more than two dozen and flattening most of the businesses and homes.

  The next big wind to hit Cisco was Connie Hilton, his arrival coming just as the Roaring Twenties were about to begin. “I thought, dreamed, schemed of nothing but how to get a toehold in this amazing pageant that was Texas,” he stated years later. “It was waiting for me in Cisco.”

  Once known as Red Gap, Cisco had been renamed in the early 1880s in honor of a New York financier, John A. Cisco, who built the Houston and Texas Central Railway, which intersected with the Texas and Pacific line. The railroad turned the town into the heavily touted “Gate City of the West,” a bustling commercial center that attracted immigrant workers and entrepreneurs alike. Connie saw it as a “cow town gone crazy.” He also saw his destiny there.

  Initially, he thought of establishing another bank; there was one for sale, and three others in town. He was prepared to buy, but when the seller saw how anxious Connie was, he raised the price by five thousand dollars and told him “no haggling.” A born haggler, Connie passed.

  Then he took a look at the two-story, red brick Mobley Hotel down the dusty street. When he saw the jammed lobby and heard the desk clerk yell “Full up!” he sought out the owner, who considered the place nothing more than a fleabag, a “glorifie
d boarding house,” and was willing to unload “the whole shooting match” for $50,000 in cash. With his five thousand dollars in savings burning a hole, Connie anxiously telephoned friends and family for the remaining $45,000. Even his mother, looking for a tidy profit that she knew her little boy could make, chipped in five big ones.

  When the deal was consummated, he sent her a telegram: “Frontier found. Water deep down here. Launched first ship in Cisco.”

  “The Mobley,” Connie later told Time magazine, when he made the cover some years later, “wasn’t exactly a hotel—it was sort of a flophouse. We considered it a bad day when we didn’t have a three-time turnover on the beds. It was a bad night when I had a bed of my own.”

  The hotel generated three thousand dollars the first month. Practically overnight, he had renovated the Mobley’s lobby, shuttered the little greasy spoon attached to the hotel, and put in more beds; he had the front desk cut in half, installed a newsstand that sold tobacco, and trashed the potted palm in favor of a stand that sold novelties.

  With the Mobley, Connie set in stone some of the Hilton Hotel management philosophy that continued into the twenty-first century, which was to replace wasted space with moneymaking space. He also gave pep talks to his Mobley employees, giving them a sense of pride, with a promise of better wages.

  In return, he asked them for complete and utter loyalty to him and his guests. He demanded that his employees offer service with a smile and provide clean rooms, spotless halls, fresh soap and linen. Connie also was credited with a ten-point “Code for Success” that would appear in “This Week,” a Sunday magazine newspaper supplement, which boasted the “world’s largest circulation” of more than fourteen million readers:

  1. Find your own particular talent.

  2. Be big.

  3. Be honest.

  4. Live with enthusiasm.

  5. Don’t let your possessions possess you.

  6. Don’t worry about your problems.

  7. Look up to people when you can—down to no one.

  8. Don’t cling to the past.

  9. Assume your full share of responsibility in the world.

  10. Pray consistently and confidently.

  CONNIE’S NEXT HOTEL, The Melba, was in Fort Worth and was a grim and grimy sixty-eight-room place. However, he got another good deal, and within ninety days he had the place spick and span and minting money.

  Then came the Waldorf—not the biggie in New York that he one day would own, but the six-story frumpy-dumpy Waldorf in Dallas. Other small and medium hotels became part of the growing Hilton chain. He had savvy partners who helped him along the way with financing and business acumen, but they didn’t always see eye to eye.

  That was underscored tragically in the lobby of the Dallas Waldorf in April 1922, when one partner shot and killed another. When the shooter was released from prison, Connie feared he’d come gunning for him. There are two accounts of what happened next. In one, Connie convinced the prison chaplain to have the paroled gunman go to the West Coast and out of his range of fire; in the other Connie invited the man to his office and had his army automatic at the ready, but the man never showed, and the danger passed.

  As Connie sped toward making his first million, his siblings also were doing well. One brother had gone to the Naval Academy in Annapolis and became an officer; another was studying at Dartmouth; a sister had married wealthy and was a young matron residing in a Massachusetts mansion; another was an actress in the road company of The Gold-diggers; and the youngest was valedictorian of her high school class. A cousin had won election to the U.S. Senate. The Hiltons were quite a successful, driven clan.

  In the five years since he bought the Mobley, Connie had developed the expertise, put together the team, and had access to the kind of financing that allowed him to break ground on July 26, 1924, for the first full-fledged Hilton Hotel. It would be the Dallas Hilton, erected on land leased for ninety-nine years, rather than land he had to pay for out of pocket.

  Connie used the leased land as collateral for a half-million-dollar bank loan, put up $100,000 of his own money, and raised another $200,000 from chums. He even convinced the building contractor to toss $150,000 in the pot. And when he ran out of money, Connie urged George Loudermilk, the former undertaker from whom he had leased the land, to put the finishing touches on the hotel and even furnish it. Connie was a natural-born businessman, a shrewd operator and manipulator who didn’t need a Harvard MBA to succeed.

  With his growing riches, he joined a fancy golf club, started playing tennis, danced with beautiful young women, and even leased a theater, the Circle, in Dallas, where he started producing plays with a stranded stock company.

  Connie Hilton was going on forty and still a bachelor. But not for long.

  IN HIS 1957 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Be My Guest, Connie painted a saintly portrait of the young woman he married, who became the matriarch of the contemporary Hilton clan—Paris Hilton’s paternal great-grandmother. Her name was Mary Adelaide Barron, of Owensboro, Kentucky. Despite Connie’s glowing account of her in his book, she displayed, in fact, some of the same uninhibited traits as Paris’s maternal grandmother, big Kathy.

  Connie and his ghostwriter, Elaine St. Johns, described Mary Barron as a churchgoing gal—“pretty, vivacious, alert, with laughing eyes…and the soft Kentucky voice.” He claimed he first spotted her in a red hat several pews in front of him at one glorious morning mass when she was visiting a cousin, Beauregard Evans, in Dallas, but lost her in the crowd when he tried to follow her out, and then spent “a month of Sundays” at mass in hopes of running into her again. They eventually were introduced; he wined and dined her; and they fell in love. Once his Dallas Hilton was completed, she promised she’d come back to marry him. Before she bade him adieu, the love-struck bachelor asked her to leave her red hat with him. In her absence he contented himself “with flying the red hat from my bedpost.”

  What Be My Guest didn’t reveal was that Mary Barron Hilton, for whom Barron Hilton was named, was a happy-go-lucky, curvy and buxom brunette with Mary Astor looks who hailed from the Kentucky backwoods. A barely educated eighteen-year-old who liked her moonshine, loved to gamble, cursed like a sailor, and savored telling dirty jokes, she had a raucous whiskey laugh and came from what today might be described as trailer park trash. What’s more, Be My Guest quickly skipped over the fact that Connie was twice his teen bride’s age.

  But it’s no surprise that Mary Barron pledged before she returned to her old Kentucky home that she’d be back to be the innkeeper’s wife. After all, what pretty gal in her right mind who lived the real-life simple life in the country without indoor plumbing and six brothers wouldn’t hitch her star to a sugar daddy who owned the beginnings of an international hotel chain?

  On paper, though, Mary Adelaide Barron’s lineage looked just fine. Her father, Thomas Mason Barron II, was a descendant of George Mason, a patriot, statesman, and liberal delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention. He has been called the “father of the Bill of Rights,” which makes Paris Hilton a distant descendant by marriage of one of the drafters.

  But Tommy Barron, Mary’s father, was no patrician politician. He was blue collar and a good ol’ boy through and through—a tobacco-chewing, moonshine-swilling native of Owensboro who was known in those parts of Kentucky as a tobacco “pinhooker,” a speculator who bought poorly prepared tobacco at auction, took out the bad parts, and resold it. “He made a modest living at that,” according to Jarred Barron, Mary’s first cousin.

  “Mary’s family didn’t have much,” says Jarred, who at eighty-seven (in 2005) was one of the last remaining Barrons who had a clear recollection of his late cousin and her world when she became involved with Connie. “Back then her family moved to different places. For a while they lived with my grandfather, on the farm right close to where I’m sittin’ right now in Owensboro. They raised tobacco and corn pigs. Mary’s house didn’t have running water, and her father, who had seven kids to su
pport, drank a little too much.”

  If Mary Barron graduated in the 1924 class of Owensboro High School, as Jarred Barron recollects, school officials had no record of her attendance.

  “Mary was young, around sixteen or eighteen years old, awfully good-looking and had a terrific personality, and was visiting a relative who lived in Dallas and met Conrad Hilton down there,” recalls Barron, who was a dozen years younger than his pretty cousin. “The family wasn’t too happy about it because Mr. Hilton was so much older.”

  Mayme Mulligan Barron, Mary’s mother, was like Connie’s, a staunch Catholic who attended every mass at St. Stephen’s Catholic Church in Owensboro. That fact alone helped smooth things over with the deeply religious Mary Hilton, who had her doubts about whether this unsophisticated teenage looker was the one with whom her prized son should spend the rest of his life. “Mayme was a strong—strong—Catholic,” says Jarred Barron.

  The grand opening of the Dallas Hilton occurred on August 4, 1925. The place was an instant moneymaker and was Connie’s first “minimax,” as he later termed it—minimum cost, maximum hospitality.

  “I had climbed Mount Everest,” Connie boasted, and now he was raring to get hitched.

  Keeping her promise, Mary Barron returned to Dallas to marry Connie just one month after the opening. In a simple ceremony at six o’clock mass on September 7, 1925, Connie Hilton, thirty-eight, and Mary Barron, nineteen, were married by the Reverend Thomas Powers at Holy Trinity Church in Dallas. Mary’s hometown newspaper, the Owensboro Messenger, described the bride as “a popular member of the younger social circle of Owensboro. The groom is president of a chain of hotels and is a prominent businessman of Dallas.” The newspaper noted that the newlyweds “left for a two months’ tour of Canada and the Eastern states before returning to Dallas to reside.”