House of Hilton

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  CHAPTER 19

  Through the Depression and his divorce, Connie Hilton remained an optimist. While other hotelmen were watching their properties sink like the Titanic, he planned for the future. Traveling across Texas doing everything he could to salvage his business, he read a magazine article about a grand new hotel that had recently opened in New York City. It was called the Waldorf-Astoria. He cut out the article, folded it neatly, and placed it in his wallet. One day, he envisioned, it would be his.

  As the Depression wore on, Connie was able to buy back hotels he had lost in El Paso and Abilene, and soon he was buying new ones again, such as the Paso del Norte in El Paso, which he quickly flipped for a profit. The next was the Gregg Hotel in Longview, which became the Longview Hilton. The owner, a doctor, made Connie an offer he couldn’t refuse—he could buy the place on time, could borrow against it, and the doctor would, if needed, even lend him money to expand it. Connie saw the Longview as a gift from heaven, and he went in a new direction; he started scooping up Depression-era white elephants at fire-sale prices.

  Back in business, the hotel shopaholic began a nonstop spending spree. Forming a buying group, he snapped up some beauties. One was the elegant 22-story, 450-room Sir Francis Drake, in the heart of San Francisco, which even came with a new, thriving nightclub. The hotel alone had cost more than $4 million to build; Connie picked it up for chump change—$275,000 in cash. Comparing it again to a woman, he stated, “While I had loved my dowagers, gotten tremendous satisfaction from building my own dream girls, this was like marrying into the social register. This lady had a family tree.”

  Hilton also bought a place he could call home and hang his Stetson, a house befitting a bachelor and business visionary of growing stature and fame. It was in Los Angeles, midway between his Lone Star State dowagers and his City on the Bay queen. The new Hilton hacienda was a one-story Spanish stucco-and-red-tile affair adjoining the fancy Bel-Air Country Club golf course where the stars played; next to buying hotels, dancing, and praying, golf was Connie’s thing. With the house he hired help, including his first chauffeur.

  Next to the Waldorf, Connie dreamed of owning what was then the world’s largest hotel, the Stevens, in Chicago. The three-thousand-room colossus could hold the equivalent of the entire population of a small Texas city and even had its own hospital, with five private rooms, two wards, and an operating room. Using some shrewd and complex maneuvers and good old-fashioned bargaining, it became Connie’s, for $7,500,000.

  Soon he’d break into the platinum club as the owner of two fine New York hotels, the famed Plaza, which he’d redo, and the Roosevelt. In Los Angeles, he’d buy the Town House, which he turned into one of the City of Angels’ swankiest and most profitable getaways, with fancy bars and elaborate floor shows. Connie established his first West Coast headquarters there, and under the glass on his desk in his plain, modest office he put that clipping about the Waldorf that had been burning a hole in his wallet. He knew he’d get her someday.

  NOW IN HIS MIDFIFTIES, the only thing seemingly missing in Connie Hilton’s gilt-edge world, other than getting his hands on the Waldorf, was another sexy spitfire to have and to hold at the end of a hectic day. She came in the voluptuous form of a Hungarian émigré by the name of Zsa Zsa Gabor, a shrewd little gal—once again, half his age like his first wife—who wanted nothing more than a sugar daddy.

  Long before there was an entity known as Paris Hilton, there was Zsa Zsa, a glamorous and outrageous creature of convoluted background who had told so many stories about herself through the years that one just had to take them for what they were worth. Zsa Zsa was Zsa Zsa’s favorite subject.

  Before she arrived in America in 1941 (she came to be with her sister Eva, who was under contract to Paramount), Zsa Zsa had won and lost the title of Miss Hungary—won because she was hot, lost because the judges discovered she wasn’t quite sixteen, a requirement for entrance. Instead she was given the title “Maid of Honor.” Her mother, Jolie, had pushed her into the pageant and was furious when the title was taken away, while Zsa Zsa’s father, Vilmos, twenty years Jolie’s senior, compared what Mama Gabor was doing to “white slavery.”

  Like big Kathy Dugan Avanzino Richards Catain Fenton, Jolie Gabor was a stage mother from hell. A fashionista extraordinaire, Jolie was among the first Hungarian women to get her hair bobbed in the Roaring Twenties and among the first women to drive a car—a Mercedes, of course.

  If Paris Hilton’s maternal grandmother, big Kathy, had a clone on this planet Earth, it was Jolie Gabor. Like big Kathy, she gave up her own show business ambitions to make her daughters stars, and she also had three of them. Jolie taught Eva, Magda, and Zsa Zsa how to get attention and win men. As Zsa Zsa later remarked, “She was determined that we would make our mark. We would be no ordinary girls. We must be taught every accomplishment befitting young ladies…. She regimentedour day to [the point of] exhaustion.” And that included ballet, piano, tennis, riding, fencing, swimming—virtually the same lessons big Kathy made her daughter Kathy Hilton take when she was developing her to become a star and marry rich.

  By the age of eleven, Zsa Zsa already had curves and knew how to use them. She would earn quite a reputation at a young age and, like Paris Hilton, would become famous for being famous. Like Paris, Zsa Zsa “loved reading about myself”—she got her first boldface notice in Louella Parsons’s column. The famed gossip declared Zsa Zsa “even prettier than Eva told us!”

  Back in Budapest, young men were leaning out of windows yelling, “Zsa Zsa! Look at me! Please, Zsa Zsa!” She was already known for her wildness, and when the boys shouted she “imagined all sorts of delicious adventures happening to me, although I was not quite sure what they would be.” At night under the covers, she read sexually explicit books where she became “the heroine—wicked, helpless, outrageously kissing my master’s hands—books I dared let no one see,” Zsa Zsa once wrote. She would fall asleep thinking, “Oh, to be wicked and glamorous, beyond good or evil, a great woman with countless distinguished lovers.”

  Her romance with Connie began one fabulous evening in December 1941, just three months after Zsa Zsa arrived in America. (She’d already been married to and was getting divorced from another much older man, a Turkish government official.) The setting was Ciro’s on the Sunset Strip, a precursor to the kind of nightclubs in which Paris would play many decades later—a hangout for the louche Hollywood crowd, the beautiful celebrities, the wise guys, the chorus girls, and the wannabes, from Frankie and Marilyn to Bogie and Bacall. Ciro’s was a glitzy joint with famous dance bands, lots of booze and brawls, and leggy cigarette girls in short skirts and high heels.

  Zsa Zsa and Eva were partying that night at Ciro’s with two of Hollywood’s most handsome and prominent lawyers, Zsa Zsa with Gregson Bautzer, and Eva with his law partner, Bentley Ryan, a Hilton lawyer. The champagne hadn’t yet gone to her head when she spotted the “tall, erect, sun-tanned man with gray hair showing white at the temples.”

  Connie, who had arrived with a Hollywood starlet, sat at their table. He sported a hand-painted necktie advertising three of his hotels, and cowboy boots. And he was immediately intrigued by Zsa Zsa, whom he called “Georgia,” because he had trouble pronouncing “Zsa Zsa.” He saw her as a “Hungarian siren…witty, vivacious, and just off the boat.” She saw him as “a real American, rough, rugged, dominating.” Connie asked Zsa Zsa to dance, and sparks flew. “He held me so close that I could hardly breathe,” she recalled. “I looked up into his eyes and knew that I was going to marry this man.”

  She later claimed in her memoir, One Lifetime Is Not Enough, that Connie offered her a whopping twenty thousand dollars that night to accompany him to Florida. Zsa Zsa, known to exaggerate, said she was “insulted” by the windfall and “refused” the big guy’s generosity. But she told him that night, “I theenk I am going to marry you.” Connie figured she was putting him on, especially since he was a confirmed bachelor and “marriage from a religious standpoi
nt,” according to Be My Guest, was “a forbidden fruit” because of his divorce.

  Nevertheless, Connie began his courtship, taking Zsa Zsa and Eva to El Paso, where he “blushed like a little boy” when he introduced her to his very Catholic eighty-one-year-old mother. Mary Hilton, still dismayed over the fact that he had thumbed his nose at the Church by getting a divorce, gave her favorite son a disapproving look. What struck Zsa Zsa the most about the octogenarian matriarch was that she slept with a small pearl-handled revolver under her pillow, just as her grandson Barron would years later.

  Though they met at Ciro’s, Connie asked Zsa Zsa to be his wife at another Hollywood hot spot, the Mocambo. Shrewdly, Zsa Zsa chose the smaller of the two engagement rings he had offered her in order to dispel chatter among Connie’s friends that she was marrying him for his money. She also suspected Connie was testing her with the two rings.

  Four months after they met, on April 10, 1942, Sari “Zsa Zsa” Gabor became the second Mrs. Conrad Hilton, in a civil ceremony not recognized by the Catholic Church at the Santa Fe Hotel.

  Zsa Zsa got her first hint of what life would be like with the hotel impresario on their wedding night. Connie was “strong, virile, possessive.” After making love, she whispered into his ear, “Oh, my darling, I love you.” His response? “By golly! I’m thinking of that Blackstone deal!”

  That would be one of the last times they slept together in the same bed, let alone the same room. There were four bedrooms in the Bellagio Road house—one was for Connie, and one for Zsa Zsa because he was “a man who could never share a room with a woman,” she stated much later. There was a guest bedroom, and in another wing Nick and Barron shared a room.

  Nick, the handsome roué of the two, was particularly attracted to his glamour girl stepmother. Once, when he saw Zsa Zsa give Connie a little peck on the cheek, he asked his father “what does a man have to do” to get Mama to kiss him. According to Zsa Zsa, Connie “whacked him so hard I thought Nick might suffer a concussion.” Later in the marriage it would be more than a kiss that Nick—and Zsa Zsa—would desire together.

  On their first morning as man and wife, Zsa Zsa naturally wanted to have breakfast with her husband. She found him in his room seated at a table wearing a regal red velvet robe, and instantly she knew she’d made a mistake. “I thought, this is a high priest sitting opposite me eating soft-boiled eggs. I could have been his handmaiden…not his wife.”

  It’s not that Connie wasn’t a man who couldn’t appreciate Zsa Zsa and sex, especially if a bit of kinkiness was thrown into the mix. One day they received a party invitation, but even though Zsa Zsa didn’t recognize the hostess’s name, Connie thought it might be fun to attend. The Hiltons were greeted by a beautiful, nude blonde floating in her enormous indoor swimming pool, around which were gathered other frolicking couples also wearing nothing.

  “Sex and steaminess were in the air,” Zsa Zsa wrote, “and I was overtaken by a kind of languor and after dinner became light-headed.” Meanwhile, Connie had hightailed it. Zsa Zsa found him behind a red-velvet-curtained door. On the bed was a beautiful girl with Connie standing above her zipping up his fly. The pious innkeeper had taken his bride to what she later called “a whorehouse.”

  Conrad’s main complaint about his bride was that she was a spendthrift. He felt women were childlike when it came to handling money. As a consequence, he put her on a strict household budget, banned her from using his credit, and declared she had to buy everything for the household and herself on two hundred and fifty dollars a month, which Zsa Zsa usually ignored, infuriating the multimillionare hotelier; they fought constantly about her spending. When she went over budget, he deducted the amount from the next month’s check.

  Zsa Zsa began to see her husband as a dictator, literally, figuratively, and quite shockingly. “Money,” she later asserted in her book, “was Conrad’s God, and white supremacy, not only Catholicism, appeared to be his religion.” She suggested that Connie, who had German blood on his mother’s side, might also have had “Nazi tendencies.” One of his trusted employees, she claimed, was a former “Gauleiter”—a low-level Nazi Party politician. She also noted that Connie “laughed uproariously” when she accidentally introduced him to visitors as “my husband, Conrad Hitler.” (Years later, Connie’s great-granddaughter Paris reportedly had a propensity for making racial, ethnic, and religious slurs. In one instance she was accused of branding a Los Angeles event promoter “a lazy Mexican,” and she was said to be fond of using the “N” word, all of which she has denied.)

  Despite Zsa Zsa’s claims about Connie’s fascistic leanings, she also acknowledged that he helped Jolie Gabor when she fled Hitler’s Europe during the war by putting her up in the Plaza when she arrived in America, and by buying from her the silver she had smuggled out of Hungary. The money helped her to open a little Manhattan shop that she eventually turned into a costume jewelry empire, in the process becoming a millionaire.

  Meanwhile, there was little if any marital bliss in the Hilton household. Connie had started locking his bedroom door to keep Zsa Zsa out, and she had started thinking about sleeping with other men. She’d spend most nights cuddling with “Harvey Hilton,” her French poodle, who used to nip Connie on the ankles when he made the rare appearance in her boudoir. On one occasion she wandered into Connie’s room, unlocked by chance, wearing a sheer black nightgown with hopes of seducing him. She sashayed in at a most inopportune moment—he was on his knees praying. Glancing up at his tarted-up mate, he bellowed, “Dammit, go to your room and wait for me.”

  Zsa Zsa felt frightened and alone, became severely depressed, began acting strangely, developed paranoid feelings about her jewelry, began popping pills, had a couple of emotional outbursts, and wound up in a straitjacket in a psychiatric hospital for almost two months, where she was being given insulin shock treatments, according to her own memoir and a biography. Connie, who she said had committed her, never came to visit. Confidential, the scandal magazine, blared: “Hubby Conrad Hilton thought Zsa Zsa Gabor had lost her buttons…. It took a stretch in a swank sanitarium for the Hungarian playgirl to prove she wasn’t nutty as a fruitcake…or was she?”

  Zsa Zsa “desperately needed someone’s arms around me.” Enter handsome, young Nick Hilton. With her marriage on the rocks, Zsa Zsa had rented a house in Bay Shore, Long Island, and Nick came to visit. Before long they were sleeping together, Zsa Zsa later claimed in her book. As she put it, “I had always loved Nicky Hilton, my stepson; now I began to love Nicky, the man. He was sexy and exciting, but not quite as dazzling as Conrad was…. When Nicky and I made love…I was convincedmy marriage was totally finished and that we’d [Connie] never sleep together again.”

  However, Zsa Zsa and Connie had one more go at it after they were split. She claimed he raped her in his suite at the Plaza Hotel and that the spawn of that assault was a daughter, Constance Francesca, the only child of all three Gabor sisters’ many marriages and unions. Francesca grew up a Hilton and contends she’s a Hilton, though Connie claimed to the journalist Lloyd Shearer of Parade magazine that she wasn’t his daughter.

  On November 13, 1944, just thirty-one months after they tied the knot, Connie got a formal separation from Zsa Zsa. Not long after, on the same day as their third wedding anniversary, Zsa Zsa announced that she planned to sue him for a whopping $10 million, claiming, “I don’t want that money for myself. I wouldn’t take it. I would give it for relief of European refugees—particularly Jewish refugees who have suffered so much.” Three months later Connie took up the gauntlet and sued Zsa Zsa in Los Angeles Superior Court, charging “cruelty,” but he made no specific allegations.

  The last thing in the world Connie wanted or needed was the kind of tabloid press his separation and divorce was generating, which he had escaped with his first divorce. Now, though, Connie and Zsa Zsa’s split was the big gossip story of the day—not quite on a par with Paris Hilton’s cataclysmic temporary loss of her Chihuahua, Tinkerbell, in August
2004, but still headline-making. “Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea,” as Walter Winchell introduced his gossip on the radio, were talking about how Zsa Zsa was taking the big hotel guy for millions.

  Zsa Zsa told the divorce court that Connie chose his butler over her during the marriage, which certainly pricked up ears in Superior Judge Warren Steel’s courtroom on September 17, 1946—testimony that appeared in the court record, but not in Zsa Zsa’s two autobiographies, or even in Connie’s Be My Guest.

  “He hired the butler five weeks before we married,” Zsa Zsa stated. “The butler was very fresh. He wouldn’t take my orders. I complained to my husband and asked that the man be dismissed, but he said, ‘If you don’t like it, you can go.’” In the summer of 1944, Connie’s swank Bel-Air home was destroyed by fire. She testified, “When the house was rebuilt, he returned with the butler. I did not go back.” Zsa Zsa’s sister Eva testified that shortly after the two were hitched, Connie told her he did not want to be married.

  In the end, Zsa Zsa got a property settlement that Connie had convinced her to sign in 1944. Once again, it was a pittance—not quite as bad as the one the first Mrs. Hilton had received, but still very little. The multimillionaire gave Zsa Zsa $35,000 in cash and $250,000 in alimony, to be paid at the rate of $2,083 monthly for ten years. But if she remarried—which she would do, tying the knot with the British actor George Sanders—the payments were to be reduced to $1,041 for three years. He also gave her some stock in the Hollywood Roosevelt and Plaza hotels. (He gave lots of girls Hilton stock as gifts over the years.)

  Jolie Gabor, in her autobiography, written with the help of New York gossip columnist Cindy Adams, said that Zsa Zsa had hired a lawyer recommended by the actress Claudette Colbert. “He was so nice he was stupid. A jerk. She [Zsa Zsa] made a stupid divorce. Not even a permanent suite for life at the Plaza. Not even 10 percent discount on any suite anywhere in the world. Wherever Zsa Zsa goes, in a Hilton Hotel she must pay herself. Ridiculous.”