The May 1950 Beverly Hills nuptials of NICK HILTON and a teenage ELIZABETH TAYLOR was billed by the press as the wedding and love match of the century. Two hundred five days later they were divorced. As Taylor revealed years later, “Nick kind of got a kick out of beating the shit out of me.”
FROM THE PRIVATE COLLECTION OF TRISH HILTON
Eight years after NICK HILTON and Elizabeth Taylor split, he fell for another teenage beauty, Oklahoma oil heiress PATRICIA McCLINTOCK. Less than two years before Nick Hilton died, he and Trish and their two sons, Michael and Conrad III, vacationing at the Hilton in Rome, celebrated Trish’s twenty-seventh birthday, one of the happy times in their dysfunctional marriage. Their life was darkened by Nick’s drinking and addiction to sleeping pills. He was found dead on February 5, 1969, at the age of forty-two.
FROM THE PRIVATE COLLECTION OF SYLVIA RICHARDS
KATHLEEN DUGAN AVANZINO RICHARDS CATAIN FENTON, Paris Hilton’s maternal grandmother, surrounded by her famous brood: from left, child actresses KYLE and KIM RICHARDS; their father and her second husband, KEN RICHARDS; and the future KATHY HILTON, the spawn of big Kathy’s first marriage to a Long Island bad boy, Larry Avanzino. Big Kathy’s mantra to her daughters, and later to her granddaughters, Paris and Nicky, was to marry rich. Her own dream to become a singing star ended when she became pregnant and had a shotgun wedding.
FROM THE PRIVATE COLLECTION OF MICKEY CATAIN
Paris Hilton’s maternal grandmother, known as “ BIG KATHY,” celebrating with hubby number three, JACK CATAIN, who was identified by federal prosecutors as a member of the Mafia. He died after their divorce and shortly before he was to begin serving a prison term.
FROM THE PRIVATE COLLECTION OF KENNETH AVANZINO
At her wedding into the Hilton dynasty, the future mother of Paris has a rare get-together with her estranged father, LARRY AVANZINO. His shotgtun marriage to Paris’s maternal grandmother ended in divorce, and he had no role in raising his daughter.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CONSTANCE BANNISTER
Paris’s mother was cute as a button when she was discovered as a toddler by famed baby photographer Constance Bannister. These and many other photos led to the future KATHY HILTON’s career as a child model and actress, pushed by her “stage mother from hell,” big Kathy.
COURTESY OF LONG PHOTOGRAPHY, INC.
At a “Welcome Home Party” for the Reagans on January 4, 1989, held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Los Angeles, Paris Hilton’s parents RICK and KATHY, staunch Republicans like all Hiltons, pose with NANCY and RONNIE, who have just turned over the White House to George H. W. Bush.
FROM THE PRIVATE COLLECTION OF SYLVIA RICHARDS
Baby PARIS HILTON and her joyous parents. Her mother, KATHY, called her “Star” from day one.
FROM THE PRIVATE COLLECTION OF SYLVIA RICHARDS
With an angelic schoolgirl face that any mother would love, who would have guessed pre-adolescent PARIS HILTON would one day be the boldface name in gossip columns and websites for her exhibitionistic behavior.
© SCHWARZWILDER/dpa/CORBIS
KATHY HILTON and her first-born share much in common: the fashionable crucifixes around their necks and their ambition and drive for celebrity. Mother was also an actress and wannabe singer.
© JOHANSSON/LODGE/CORBIS
PARIS, the infamous “celebutante” who became a household name and money-making “brand” by displaying her X-rated wares, pictured here at the Playboy Mansion for Hugh Hefner’s Midsummer Night’s Dream Party.
PARIS HILTON’s fame—and infamy—skyrocketed after the homemade porn video in which she co-starred with a boyfriend hit the Internet. Overnight, four minutes of the grainy film were seen by millions, and soon all twenty-seven minutes were marketed, outselling the video of Gone With the Wind. Even the Hilton Hotel chain showed a spike in guests after the video was distributed.
CHAPTER 21
Nick and Elizabeth’s engagement was official as of February 20, 1950, even though she had been warned by a number of people, including Doris Lilly, a syndicated gossip columnist and author of How to Marry a Millionaire, that Nick was trouble and that she should walk away before it was too late. Lilly told her that Nick had beaten up a model friend of hers after a bout of heavy drinking, according to Taylor biographer C. David Heymann. Monty Clift also tried to steer her away from marrying the Hilton boy. When she called him and asked Monty whether he would hang out with her and Nick after they were man and wife, he answered, “I don’t think dear Nicky is my kind of guy.”
All wasn’t negative and ominous, however. Connie’s girl Friday, Olive Wakeman, sent Elizabeth a pile of cookbooks with the note, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” She also warned, “Don’t forget his ego,” advice that along with the cooking went in one pretty Elizabeth Taylor ear and out the other.
The setting was Church of the Good Shepherd, the Hilton family church, in Beverly Hills, on May 6, 1950, when Elizabeth and Nick tied the knot. It was Elizabeth’s first of eight marriages, and Nick’s first of two.
Every Hilton Hotel manager in the world had been invited, along with every big name in Hollywood. Special seating had been arranged by MGM for Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, Elizabeth’s parents in the about-to-be released Father of the Bride. The organ player was even on MGM’s payroll.
The ceremony started five minutes late after a few close calls—Elizabeth’s gown almost got ripped when it got stuck in the car door on her arrival, and the organ needed to be hastily repaired before the “Wedding March” could be played. As Nick and Elizabeth took their vows, Connie whispered to his ex-wife and the groom’s mother, “They have everything, haven’t they?” Her response was, “Maybe they have too much. I don’t think it’s going to be easy for them.” The ceremony took all of twenty minutes, and then Nick passionately kissed the bride.
When the newlyweds emerged from the church they faced a wall of paparazzi so thick that the twenty-five hundred frenzied fans, restrained by a phalanx of more than two dozen policemen, could hardly see the couple.
In the almost full-page photo that Life magazine—the celeb weekly of its day—used in its May 22 issue, eighteen-year-old Elizabeth was the epitome of Hollywood glamour, smiling dazzlingly. She wore the veil and white satin gown that MGM had had made especially for her. Embroidered with beads and seed pearls and cinched at the waist, the wedding dress emphasized her pinup girl bosom. Life called her “one of the loveliest ever seen on the screen—charming, sparkling and starry-eyed.” A caption below one of the photos, however, noted pointedly that the wedding “was stage-managed” by the studio.
In the Life photo, boyish, dimple-cheeked Nick had an expression of shock on his twenty-three-year-old face, his eyebrows lifted skyward as if he was surprised by the whole event.
At the Bel-Air Country Club, near Connie’s home, a wedding reception of Cecil B. DeMille proportions was thrown by the father-in-law of the bride and MGM: seven hundred guests were forced to walk a reception line, a trip that took as long as six hours. The guests washed down slices from a five-tier vanilla-frosted wedding cake with Dom Perignon—one hundred cases’ worth. One of the guests, the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, introduced Elizabeth to another reveler as “Mrs. Hilton,” and Elizabeth “beamed, ‘Isn’t that a wonderful name?’”
The honeymoon began with a drive up the treacherous Pacific Coast Highway in Nick’s Mercedes-Benz roadster, he with half a load on from all the champagne he’d consumed at the reception, to the Carmel Country Club where they had a cozy villa overlooking the ocean. Nick’s drinking continued on their wedding night. While the setting was romantic, no lovemaking occurred. Nick spent the first three nights at the bar, according to another hotel guest, the humorist Art Buchwald.
“It amazed me,” Heymann quoted Buchwald. “Any other man would have been in bed with his wife, particularly when the wife’s initials were ‘E.T.’ Hilton spent an entire night at the bar, drinking himself into an absolute stupor.”
According to a Hilton family insider years later, “Nick’s impotency was linked to his feelings of inadequacy next to a star like Elizabeth. He just couldn’t perform.”
About two weeks after the wedding, the newlyweds boarded the Queen Mary and embarked on the European leg of their extended honeymoon, paid for by Connie—and destined to be the trans-Atlantic Love Boat cruise from hell.
By the time they boarded, Nick was sick of the whole staged event, and especially of how he was being treated. Everywhere they went together, the press’s focus was on Elizabeth; Mr. Machismo was made to feel more like “Mr. Taylor” than Mr. Hilton, the husband. At one point he led photographers on a chase all over Los Angeles after he failed to show up at a studio-arranged press conference. As the gossip columnist Jimmy Fidler pointed out, “I’m afraid that Nicky, as the spouse of Hollywood’s most celebrated young star, [would] be wise to accept the situation and quit dodging.” Later, Connie said, “Nick was resentful, hot-tempered, and handled himself accordingly.”
Nick saw himself as Elizabeth’s baggage, literally and figuratively. That was underscored when it was loaded aboard the ocean liner; Elizabeth had fourteen suitcases and two steamer trunks filled with clothing, furs, jewelry, and cosmetics, and each bag had been carefully labeled for its contents by Sara Taylor, who had literally packed her daughter’s belongings. Nick, who brought four puny bags, sarcastically told a reporter as he was about to walk the gangplank that he was “traveling with a film star.” Their shipmates included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who promised to throw the newlyweds a party one night in Paris.
The entire crossing was one big brawl. Elizabeth was usually left on her own while Nick drank and gambled until long after midnight, losing as much as $100,000 in the ship’s casino. One night Nick angrily tossed a stack of chips at Elizabeth when she begged him to stop playing. When he demanded she accompany him to a ship’s movie, or to make a call to his father, she stormed off, which enraged him. On one very public occasion on deck he shoved her up against a bulkhead and warned her, “Don’t you ever do that to me—I’m talking to you!”
It only got worse. At night he returned drunk to their stateroom and physically attacked Elizabeth, punching her in the stomach, knocking her to her knees, leaving her gasping for breath.
For Elizabeth, the honeymoon sex, infrequent as it was, was what made the trip exciting, if not dangerous to her physical well-being. Not only was Nick far more sexually experienced than Elizabeth, but he was well endowed. On that trip Elizabeth discovered that size does matter. (One of Nick’s many companions in the post-Elizabeth era of the fifties, Terry Moore, later claimed, “He had absolutely the largest penis—wider than a beer can and much longer—I have ever seen. To make love to him was akin to fornicating with a horse.” Another, the British temptress Joan Collins, was more explicit, stating that her onetime lover was a “sexual athlete” and that along with his brother Barron and their father, the Hilton men “possessed a yard of cock.”)
Sex aside, Nick played the role of the ugly American to the hilt. At the Paris party thrown by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, he embarrassed himself at the dinner table when he spat a wad of chewing gum into a napkin, which he popped back in his mouth after the fancy dessert. Like a number of Hiltons past and present, Nick had had a scattered education, which probably accounted for his lack of social graces and sophistication. (Despite their money and power, the Hiltons were in many ways socially unsophisticated. When drinking and angry, Nick was prone to use racial and anti-Semitic slurs like “kike” and “nigger.” Although Connie was a popular party-giver—mainly for business reasons—he was known to fart and belch freely at the dinner table.)
In Cannes, in the south of France, Nick spent his evenings at the casino and was spotted late one night with one of the high-priced, beautiful prostitutes who picked up their clients near the casino. He took her back to the hotel knowing Elizabeth had already gone to bed.
When they traveled to London, Nick didn’t like the way the drinks were mixed at the posh Savoy Grill, so he demanded that a variety of bottles be delivered to his table, where he mixed them himself. Upstairs in the newlyweds’ suite, he had practically an entire liquor store at his disposal.
When the honeymooners got to Berlin, Elizabeth fled from Nick. She reportedly asked the director Mervyn LeRoy, who was shooting MGM’s Quo Vadis, to hide her on the set where she dressed in a toga and was part of a Colosseum scene. Another account stated that both she and Nick had appeared in the scene as a prank. At some point, Nick trashed a room in the villa they were renting, destroying costly antiques. Nick’s drinking and gambling continued unabated. He and Elizabeth argued incessantly over her spending and his inebriation and violent tantrums, and when the booze kicked in, he slapped her around. On their return to New York aboard the Queen Mary, she feared his wrath and bunked one night with a teenage girl from New York with whom she had become friends.
The Hiltons’ hellish honeymoon lasted three months, which is equal to almost half of their entire marriage.
The gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, writing in Modern Screen, charged that the pair were “behaving like spoiled children” who had “everything done for them all their lives…what [Nick] didn’t smooch from his father, he smiled out of his mother. They gave him everything…except…consideration for others, emotional happiness for himself.”
Nick returned immediately to California, telling his father that being with Elizabeth was like “life in a fishbowl,” and he berated the press for making up stories. Nick was quoted in Modern Screen, which also did a positive piece by writer Kirtley Baskette, as saying, “I knew when I married a movie star what I was in for, although I didn’t expect this much made of everything I do…. It’s not very pleasant to be made out a louse.” As Connie said later in Be My Guest, “He was angry, hurt, bewildered and defiant.” His father told him, “It’s the price you pay for marrying a famous woman.” And Connie was a veteran, having had Zsa Zsa as a mate.
Elizabeth Taylor Hilton stayed in New York for a few weeks with the family of the girl who had harbored her aboard ship.
Zsa Zsa Gabor later claimed that she and Nick had one last sexual fling during his marriage to Elizabeth and that he complained bitterly about her.
One of his complaints was about her dog. In Paris, Nick had bought Elizabeth a French poodle, because her dog Butch had died while they were away. Back home, Nick had wanted to move into the Bel-Air Hotel, but the suite he wanted wasn’t available, so he and Elizabeth had temporary use of his brother Barron’s home. But Elizabeth never bothered to housebreak the pooch, who continually did his business all over the floor, infuriating Nick. It was one of the few things he vehemently complained about to Betsy von Furstenberg when they started dating. “He’d go out in the morning and come back that night and there were messes all over the floor,” she says Nick told her. “He was disgusted by the fact that she never cleaned up after the dog. The same poop was still lying there. Why they didn’t have a servant cleaning up after the dog, God only knows.”
It might be because the servants had already taken enough “shit” from the imperious actress. During their stay at Barron’s, Elizabeth hired, fired, and was walked out on by six servants, according to Sheilah Graham, who observed, “Servants don’t usually leave considerate employers.”
By September, four months after the wedding, the gossip columnists who had been calling it a love affair were now predicting a divorce. Dorothy Kilgallen, who penned the nationally syndicated “Voice of Broadway” column, reported it was all but over. “Before the wedding,” she wrote, “he was said to have promised Elizabeth’s parents he would give up gambling and drinking, but he broke both promises early in the honeymoon.” Meanwhile, Elizabeth denied that her marriage was on the rocks and fibbed to Hedda Hopper, “I am especially happy now.” When Hopper asked Elizabeth about Nick’s “misbehaving” on their honeymoon, Elizabeth declared, “Doesn’t everyone?”
ON DECEMBER 1, 1950, Nic
k and Elizabeth formally separated. MGM, on Elizabeth’s behalf, issued a statement that said, “Nick and I…have come to a parting of the ways…there is no possibility of a reconciliation.”
On December 22, Elizabeth Taylor Hilton filed for divorce. In a page and a half complaint, she charged Nick with extreme mental cruelty, alleging that he had “wrongfully and without provocation” treated her “in a cruel and inhuman manner,” and “inflicted…great and grievous mental cruelty and…mental pain, suffering and anguish, thus destroying the legitimate objects of matrimony…making it impossible” for her “to continue to live with [Nick] as his wife.” She asked for the return of her maiden name, Taylor. But there was no mention of alimony; the fact is, they hadn’t lived together long enough to acquire much communal property.
Nick’s attorney filed an answer categorically denying Elizabeth’s charges of cruelty. Meantime, Nick took off on a hunting trip to Mexico. The “inside word,” according to one gossip columnist, was that Connie was “showing more grief over the bust-up than the principals themselves.”
Writer C. David Heymann observes, “She didn’t realize it at the time she married Nick Hilton that he was a dangerous soul, that he was physically abusive. He masked from her his drinking, his gambling, and all of his nasty habits. Obviously, he represented to her America’s foremost hotel chain and that was appealing to Elizabeth.”
SHE LOOKED DRAWN and nervous. She could barely speak in a voice above a whisper. At one point she dropped her face into her gloved hands, and when she looked up, tears were streaming down her cheeks. That was eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor’s demeanor on the witness stand on January 29, 1951, when she told her dramatic story of neglect and abuse at the hands of Nick Hilton.
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