House of Hilton

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  One of their stops on the honeymoon was Chicago, where the newlyweds checked into the bustling LaSalle Hotel, which was fully booked. To impress his young bride, Connie whipped out his new business card—Conrad N. Hilton, President, Hilton Hotels—and the couple were quickly ushered to a room. Connie came away telling Mary, “Someday I’m going to come back and find a vacant lot. I’d like to build me a hotel here.” It was that kind of talk that would make him so successful, and would eventually wreak havoc on their marriage.

  Ten months after their nuptials their first son, Conrad Nicholson “Nick” Hilton Jr., future darling of the gossip columns, was born on July 6, 1926. Nick, who looked like his mother, had “big eyes, curly hair, and was quite a howler,” said the proud father, who felt having a son as his firstborn was “the main event.”

  At the time, the Hiltons were living in Dallas’s chicest residence, the eleven-story beaux arts–style Stoneleigh Court, an elegant apartment-hotel, which was the first luxury building of its kind in Dallas and the tallest hotel west of the Mississippi at the time. The Hiltons’ suite boasted a telephone, a wireless connection to the hotel’s own high-powered radio station, and circulating ice water in the kitchenette’s mechanical refrigerator, and each bedroom had a Murphy “California” wall-bed. The Stoneleigh was heralded as “the ideal home where all housekeeping problems have been solved for you.”

  And what’s more, hotelier Connie got a steep trade discount on the rent. He liked to make money, not spend it, and through the years he’d earn a reputation as a tightwad.

  With the new baby in tow, Connie bought an elegant four-bedroom home at 4800 St. John’s Drive, one of the most prestigious streets in fashionable Highland Park, an exclusive residential little city designed by a Beverly Hills landscape architect.

  With wife and baby settled in, he returned to what he most loved—building the Hilton Hotel chain. His immediate plans were for more Texas Hiltons—Abilene, Waco, Marlin, Lubbock, El Paso, and way stops in between. He planned to open, as he vowed to Mary, “a hotel a year.”

  However, he did take time from his to-do list to make another baby, William Barron Hilton, who came into the world on October 23, 1927, fifteen months after Nick. Barron was born just two months before his father’s fortieth birthday on Christmas Day 1927. By then, Connie had more than the holiday to celebrate. He now had hotels in Dallas, Abilene, Waco, Plainview, San Angelo, and Lubbock—and was close to renting two thousand rooms a night, all with the help of friendly bankers and venture capitalists. Outside of Texas, he planned for Hiltons in Oklahoma City; Wichita, Kansas; and Mobile, Alabama.

  His biggest venture to date, however, was the Hilton in El Paso, to be built at a cost of $1,750,000 under the umbrella of his newly organized Hilton Hotels, Inc., a consolidation of all his properties in one fat, moneymaking group.

  Connie, however, didn’t see the approaching storm. Less than three weeks after he announced the El Paso venture, investors and speculators were jumping out of windows as they watched their stocks fall like dead ducks shot out of the sky.

  “Wall Street Lays an Egg,” the entertainment trade paper Variety famously declared, marking the devastating stock market crash of October 1929. The nation, the rest of the world, and Connie Hilton were about to sink into the Great Depression.

  CHAPTER 18

  Despite the horrific economic climate, Connie managed to open his nineteen-story, three-hundred-room El Paso Hilton on November 5, 1930, a year after the Wall Street crash. Thousands had turned out, not for rooms, but rather to gawk at his new palace with its luxuriant penthouses. The way Connie saw it, the crowds were there seeking “reassurance” that the times weren’t as bad as they seemed, and that the new Hilton edifice represented hope in the face of hardship.

  Along with the financial doom and gloom—and Connie knew he was in for some rough times business-wise—he also now faced the prospect of a failed marriage.

  Mary Hilton was at the opening in El Paso, but after all the congratulatory speeches were concluded, her husband looked over and she was nowhere to be seen. One of Connie’s sisters, who also noted her hasty departure, asked whether he thought his hotel obsession bored her. He couldn’t conceive of such a notion. Even more troublesome was his sister’s perception that Mary Hilton viewed Connie’s love affair with hotels as a “rival.” His sister warned, “Mary’s young and used to a lot of attention.”

  Connie argued that he paid his pretty wife lots of notice, that he lavished her with gifts, that he gave her two sons. But he realized he was rationalizing what was a deteriorating domestic situation, a situation that would only grow worse as he worked day and night to keep his hotels afloat in those bad economic times, while Mary was up to who knows what in his absence.

  “And so it went,” he stated in Be My Guest. “With me dashing all over Texas—and Mary alone at home…what happened to Mary and me didn’t come all at once. But, as I floundered…fighting desperately…little by little the laughter went out of Mary’s eyes.”

  Oddly, in the midst of their deteriorating marriage, twenty-six-year-old Mary became pregnant in early October 1932, and on July 1, 1933, gave birth to a third son, who was named Eric Michael Hilton.

  The only mention of Eric’s birth in Be My Guest is a reference to two brief notations Connie had made at the time in his diary, which was otherwise filled with his main interest—the Depression-era business affairs of his hotels. One was “Mary is expecting a baby.” The other was “July 1, Eric Michael Hilton born at St. Paul’s at ten A.M.”

  Later, there were other references in his diary regarding his marriage: “trouble at home…another quarrel, worse than before…Mary tense and tearful…”

  Like his mother and his mother-in-law, Connie was a staunch Catholic who believed in all of the church’s teachings, including the ban on divorce. With the Depression wreaking havoc on his business and the country at large, he noted in Be My Guest that he had become even more pious. “In over forty years I had never, without good reason, missed a Sunday Mass,” he declared. “Now I started every single day on my knees in church.”

  One would have expected, then, that a divorce would be entirely out of the question for the devout hotelman. It was, as he himself stated, “a bitter pill to swallow.” Nevertheless, he claimed, “all semblance of harmony had gone from our relationship. The breach was too wide to heal.”

  The way he described the marital situation, it was his wife and the mother of his children who wanted the divorce. As Connie put it, “I couldn’t blame Mary. What kind of life had she led over the past three years? I couldn’t honestly blame myself. What else could I have done but what I did?”

  He said he intensely “resisted” a divorce because it meant “long, lonely years” ahead for him, and just thinking about his sons coming from a “broken home” made him feel “leaden.” In the end, though, he rationalized the marriage’s demise as a “casualty” of the Depression.

  This is what actually happened.

  Not long after Eric Hilton was born, Connie and Mary separated, and she moved with the baby to El Paso. Moreover, it was Connie, not Mary, who filed for divorce—strange, since she appeared to be the injured party in the marriage, according to the scenario laid out in Be My Guest.

  On June 11, 1934, the divorce decree was issued, ending the Hilton union of nine years—eleven months after Eric’s birth. Nick was about to turn eight, and Barron seven years old. While Connie showed up in court with his attorney, the court record shows that Mary Barron Hilton had oddly waived her right to appear.

  Regarding the issue of child custody, Judge Royall B. Watkins ruled in favor of Connie. Such decisions are rare, with the mother usually being granted custody, unless there are circumstances regarding her moral character. But the court found that Connie was “able and capable of caring for and educating the minor children…and that he is a proper person to have the care, maintenance, and control of said children.” Mary gained only visitation rights “at all reasonable
times and places that may be agreeable” to Connie.

  Judge Watkins also approved a property settlement between Connie and Mary that was far more punitive than generous. Though she was given all the household goods, furniture, and effects, all other property, including their home, was granted to Connie. In addition, the millionaire hotelman had only to give his wife a sum total of thirty-six hundred dollars, paid in installments of three hundred dollars a month, with the first such payment due on July 15, 1934.

  The question remains: why was the wife of America’s up-and-coming hotel czar treated so harshly? What never was revealed in Be My Guest, and has been a long-held Hilton family secret—one of many—was that Mary, who felt abandoned by Connie, had had a torrid affair with a charismatic, renowned Texas football coach by the name of Mack Saxon. As Mary’s cousin Jarred Barron states, “Connie was working so hard he wasn’t giving Mary her proper attention and it ended up she strayed away.”

  One of the El Paso College of Mines’ legendary players, Ken Heineman, who played under Coach Saxon, clearly remembers Mary “being around as Mack’s girlfriend” while she was still married to Connie.

  “She would come to El Paso and Connie wouldn’t be with her and everybody knew that they were having an affair,” says Heineman. “Mary was very good-looking—a real cutie—and Mack was a good-looking guy, and he was very attractive to women, and he had a reputation as a drinker and a rounder. We knew that he caroused. That’s the way he came to the attention of Hilton’s wife. Mack was a handsome celebrity in town, and she just got tired of Conrad.”

  The son of a Methodist minister, Saxon had lettered at the University of Texas in 1925 and was captain of the Longhorn squad and All-Conference quarterback in 1926. He was considered the team’s greatest ground-gaining star at the time.

  “Mack was a real intelligent, bright, energetic man, but he drank too much,” says his nephew Milton Saxon. “He started drinking when he became a coach, and as head coach he was part of El Paso society, and that’s how his meeting Conrad Hilton’s wife all came about.”

  Although Connie had been given custody of little Eric, he would have no role in bringing up the boy. Instead, Eric was raised by Saxon and Mary, who were married in the Fort Worth, Texas, courthouse on Saturday evening, June 1, 1935—right after she had collected the last of Connie’s monthly divorce installments. Their marriage made the “Dallas Social Affairs” column of the Dallas Morning News, mainly because of Saxon’s celebrity.

  Connie also would have only a minor role in raising his other two sons, Nick and Barron. Curiously, even though he and Mary had a horrific marriage and hellish divorce, it was Mary’s mother, Mayme Barron, who left her home in Owensboro to move to Dallas and help care for the boys. As Mary’s cousin Jarred Barron observes, “Mary’s mother was a jewel and she went down and raised those two boys. She was just that kind of person.”

  Connie needed her help because his sons were a handful. In Be My Guest, he described young Nick as “mercurial, outgoing, spontaneous,” while Barron was a problem eater and was “careful, quiet, single-minded…Nick got into more mischief, but Barron was harder to handle.” Connie’s mother, Mary Hilton, had rightly perceived, “Nick has charm. Barron has determination.”

  For example, when Barron was a young teenager away at school, he penned a letter to his father negotiating for a higher allowance. While it was poorly spelled, he detailed, accountant-like, each one of his expenses, such as “Tellephone…50c per week.” He determined he was losing seven cents out of each two dollars of allowance and demanded five dollars a week, leaving him two dollars and fifty cents for “weekend pleasures.” He ended the letter by writing, “Sorry this is all business,” and signed it, “Your loving son, Barron Hilton.” During World War II, Barron would raise chickens in the backyard of his father’s Bel-Air mansion, Beverly Hillbillies style, and sell them to the home kitchen, unloading the rest to his father’s hotel in Los Angeles.

  But the boys rarely saw their father, who was often away on business—his hotels took precedence—and, having watched their parents’ marriage fall apart, the Hilton lads were out of control. At one point, the boys infuriated neighbors by painting the front steps of their elegant home a bright orange. In Be My Guest, Connie contended that Barron had suffered a severe eye injury when he fell out of a tree house. But years later, Nick told friends that he had actually thrown a toy train engine at Barron during one of their many fights, a sibling rivalry that would only get worse through the years.

  A DARK CLOUD appeared to hang over the union of Mack and Mary Barron Hilton Saxon. Along with the loss of twins at birth (she’d been pregnant when they were married), she was almost responsible for the deaths of herself, Nick, who had just turned fourteen, and Barron, two months away from his thirteenth birthday.

  Around 2:45 on the morning of August 13, 1940, a bellboy at the El Paso Hilton was returning to the hotel after delivering mail to the post office when he saw smoke pouring from the ninth floor. Apparently inebriated, Mary had fallen asleep while smoking a cigarette. Her bed was in flames, and smoke had filled the room when firemen reached her ninth-floor suite.

  Saxon had been awakened by heavy smoke and rushed across the hall, where the coach found Mary standing bewildered and choking. Saxon ushered her and Barron to safety at the end of the hall and then raced back to the smoke-filled suite where he found Nick at the living room window and brought him out without injury.

  The front page of the El Paso Herald Post that day had the blaring headline:

  MINES COACH RESCUES FAMILY FROM FIRE

  Mrs. Mack Saxon And Two Sons Taken From Smoke Filled Suite At Hilton Hotel

  Saxon’s life started falling apart in the early 1940s when he was fired from his coaching job after the team had a string of losses. Privately, his drinking was blamed for his demise, and the word was out that he had been fired. Years later, his nephew, Milton Saxon, says he was told by a football coach that Mack could have coached more important teams “if he hadn’t been such a heavy drinker.”

  After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Saxon joined the navy and headed the athletic training program at the Banana River, Florida, Naval Air Station, with the rank of lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve. After the war, he was named civilian assistant to the head of the navy’s aviation physical training program headquartered at the Pentagon.

  The Saxons and their son, Eric, lived in circumstances far different from those of his Hilton siblings.

  The Saxon family set up housekeeping in a rented two-bedroom, two-story red brick row house in Fairlington Village, modest housing in northern Virginia built for some three thousand defense workers during the war and located near Saxon’s Pentagon job.

  While Nick and Barron were sent by their father to private Catholic and military schools—they both spent some time at the same military school where Connie had gone—Eric was enrolled in the Arlington County, Virginia, public schools, attending Dolley Madison Jr. High School and Washington-Lee High School. Unlike Connie, Mack and Mary Saxon couldn’t afford fancy schools for Eric.

  Eric’s friends from his school days in Virginia remember never being invited into the Saxon home or ever meeting the Saxons, possibly due to their drinking. However, they have fond memories of Eric as a scrappy, fun-loving regular guy who liked girls and basketball, not necessarily in that order.

  Though the kids in his circle heard talk that he was the son of the famous hotelman, “I don’t think he was close to him in those days at all,” says a pal, Larry Linderer. “Eric’s mother looked after him. We were pretty poor in those days, and our housing in Fairlington was very transient—people coming into the government, leaving the government. I wouldn’t call them projects, but…it was nothing like you would think of for the son of Conrad Hilton.”

  Eric and Linderer were part of a street gang. “We were from North Fairlington and ran around the neighborhood and terrorized the guys from South Fairlington,” recalls Linderer. “When we caught ’em
, we’d give ’em pink bellies. We weren’t vicious, just kind of, ‘You guys stay on your side of the highway, and we’ll stay on our side.’”

  Eric was a bit of a junior Casanova and would later earn a reputation as a full-fledged womanizer. “Every Valentine’s Day he used to leave a box of candy on my doorstep and run away,” says one of his early pursuits, Carol Furman Kane, who went to junior recreation club dances with him and has never forgotten his “very, very bright blue eyes, black hair, great big grin, and lots of freckles. He’d always leave the candy when Lent had begun, and I’d given up candy, but my mother just absolutely adored him, so she got to eat all the candy.”

  By the time Eric was in his young teens, Connie, who had recovered from the Depression without too much damage and was on a hotel-buying spree, had purchased his fourteenth: the one-thousand-room Mayflower, rich with political legend, in the nation’s capital, located just across the Potomac River from Arlington. Eric gleefully announced one day that he had been given permission by Connie to throw a party in one of the Mayflower’s posh suites. “Eric was given the suite for a weekend,” recalls Carol Furman Kane, “and he invited a group of boys and girls to dinner at his private suite, and, of course, all the mothers of the girls said, ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ But I understand the boys all had a great time.”

  On Sunday morning, May 8, 1949, Mary Saxon awakened to find the love of her life lying lifeless beside her. At the age of forty-seven, after years of hard drinking, Mack Saxon had died in his sleep. The cause of death was listed as a heart attack, though friends of Eric heard he had taken his own life. Saxon was buried with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

  At forty-three, with a teenage son to raise, Mary Barron Hilton Saxon, a serious alcoholic, was suddenly a widow. She soon moved back to El Paso where her drinking and carousing often left young Eric to fend for himself, sometimes “begging neighbors for food” because his mother had forgotten to shop for groceries. As a close Hilton relative observes, “Eric had a tough life growing up.”