House of Hilton

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  One press account said she had ended her marriage “with a broken heart and incipient ulcers.” Of almost seven months of marriage, the Hiltons had had three months of honeymoon hell and two months of separation—leaving eight weeks of fighting over the poodle’s doo-doo on the floor.

  The courtroom of superior court judge Thurmond Clarke was standing room only—attorneys, the press, photographers, and spectators, all gathered for the best show in Tinseltown that day.

  “He was indifferent to me and used abusive language,” Elizabeth stated, her voice dropping so teeny-tiny that the shorthand reporter, C. W. Lyman, just two feet away, complained to the judge, who ordered her to “keep your voice up. Just pretend my reporter is a little hard of hearing.”

  Elizabeth’s attorney, William Berger, was permitted by the judge to pick up the narrative—an unusual move, just to speed things along—with Elizabeth consenting to his statements, among which were that “almost from the beginning of the marriage” Nick was indifferent to Elizabeth and picked arguments “for no apparent reason. In addition,” the lawyer continued, “Mr. Hilton spent night after night at the casino when they were in France…and remained away until five and six in the morning and forced her to take a cab back alone. This also was true after they returned to Los Angeles.”

  Looking prim in a navy-blue suit, white blouse, navy pumps, and a flowered straw hat, Elizabeth recalled one not very shocking incident that occurred just after the newlyweds arrived home from their honeymoon. “I had unpacked my clothes and my mother was there and [a friend] Mrs. [Marshall] Thompson. Mr. Hilton came in and said, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ I tried to keep him from saying more. It was embarrassing.” She acknowledged that that was a sample of Nick’s rudeness. Barbara Thompson, whose husband was an actor, took the stand and told the court that since the marriage Elizabeth no longer was her “gay and usual self” and that she had lost “a tremendous amount of weight” as a result of the stress of being married to Nick. The tabloid New York Daily Mirror headlined the trial: “Liz, Sobbing Of Nicky’s ‘Cruelty,’ Wins Divorce.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Nick Hilton was still in the process of tying up loose ends with Elizabeth Taylor in the summer of 1951 when he spotted eighteen-year-old Betsy von Furstenberg lolling in the Bel-Air Hotel swimming pool. The five-foot-four blonde eyed him, too, attracted by his “cute, sort of boyish, lost boy quality,” and before long they had become an item. “It was just chemistry, just one of those crazy things as the song goes,” she says many years later.

  Nick immediately telephoned her for a date, but she told him she required a chaperone. Instead, he planned a dinner party at his father’s spectacular home where Nick had been bunking since his divorce. It was a posh party with guests like the actor Joseph Cotten and the actress Patricia Medina at the table being served dinner on solid gold plates. Betsy was impressed.

  However, she would soon come to realize that the party was “a great smoke screen.” As she notes, “Nick made a tremendous effort for me not to see the rather sordid side of his life in the beginning.”

  Not long after they began what would be a tempestuous relationship and engagement of sorts, Nick took Betsy to his home state of Texas to meet his alcoholic mother, the widowed Hilton matriarch, Mary Barron Hilton Saxon, who was hospitalized. They also took in a football game and went bird-shooting, and Betsy was sworn in as an honorary citizen of the Lone Star State, a cute ceremony arranged for by the well-connected Hilton scion.

  “At first it was very romantic and we never left each other’s side,” she says. “He was terribly sweet with me. We would have dinner alone and I never saw that other side of things, and then slowly, little by little, I realized what his day was like, what his night was like. There was no pretense of him going to an office, or doing anything.”

  Unlike most of the girls Nick had been with, including Elizabeth Taylor, Betsy came from far different roots. Born in Westphalia, Germany, she was the daughter of a chic southern belle, Elizabeth Johnson, from Union Springs, Alabama, who, while on a yacht in the south of France, met and soon married handsome and wealthy Count Franz Egon von Furstenberg. Their fairy-tale union lasted just four years.

  Brought up as a Park Avenue princess, Betsy was partly educated at the prim and proper Miss Hewitt’s Finishing School. At the age of fourteen she was a cover girl in chic French fashion magazines and made her first film in Italy at seventeen. She was photographed for her first of three Look covers by Stanley Kubrick. MGM summoned her after she dazzled critics in her first Broadway play, launching her on to the cover of Life (circulation 5,200,000) as “Betsy von Furstenberg, Society Girl on Broadway.” Betsy’s friend S. J. Perelman used her as a character in one of his short stories, describing her as “Bitsy von Auchincloss, whose eyes and bathing suit were the same size and color.” (Before she met Nick, she dated Peter Howard, grandson of Charles Howard, owner of the famed racehorse Seabiscuit.)

  With all of Betsy’s sophistication and glamour, however, Nick Hilton’s world was still one giant eye-opener. She called it “primitive, very wild, and uncultivated. A friend was shocked that I was with Nick because she knew I was completely out of my depth.”

  This was underscored during that trip to Texas when Nick spent most of his time drinking and playing high-stakes poker with his cronies, relegating Betsy to another room where she discovered herself among a small coterie of rather glamorous, startlingly beautiful young women.

  “They had these women around who I thought were quite nice, and the men would sort of separate themselves from the women and they would be playing cards and I would be talking to these women,” she recalls. “I just assumed they were actresses. After their card game Nick came out and said, ‘Don’t you dare talk to those women!’ I said, ‘What am I supposed to do, sit in a corner and read magazines while you’re playing cards?’ And he said, “I told you—do not talk to those women.’ When I asked why, he said, ‘They’re prostitutes!’ Afterwards we all went out to dinner together.”

  Nick’s chums were all older—he mostly sought out father-figure types because his relationship with his own father was so difficult. There was the Maxwell House Coffee heir Bob Neal, who had a reputation for tossing diamond trinkets at Hollywood cuties he was pursuing (like Debbie Reynolds). There was Nick’s close confidante, the darkly handsome actor John Carroll, who played Zorro on the silver screen, and who had an affair with a young Marilyn Monroe while she was living with him and his wife, Lucy Ryman, Marilyn’s protégé at MGM. And there was a Texas legend, the flamboyant hotelman Glenn McCarthy—known as “Diamond Glenn” and the “King of the Wildcatters”—who was the inspiration for Jett Rink as played by James Dean in the film Giant, which also starred Nick’s ex-wife.

  Nick’s divorce from Elizabeth Taylor was still news—the papers had photos of them working out a settlement and having meetings in New York that sparked published reports of a reconciliation—when word broke about his engagement to Betsy, and this too received worldwide attention in mid-September 1951. Headlines screamed, “Ex-Countess Reveals Betrothal To Nicky Hilton, Hotel King Heir.”

  For the young actress now trying to make it in movies, the engagement to Elizabeth Taylor’s ex-husband was a publicity bonanza. Reporters had caught the two of them together and under a barrage of questions about whether theirs was true love, whether marriage was in the future, they spontaneously said they were engaged.

  “I’ve never been happier,” she told reporters. “Nicky’s a wonderful guy.”

  For Nick, who had had it with Elizabeth’s fame and publicity, it was simply more of the same. Sharp-eyed gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen noted that Nick’s fiancée wasn’t sporting an engagement ring and asked, “Why hasn’t the rich young man given her a diamond?” Years later Betsy explains that she and Nick “went to look for one, but we couldn’t decide. And then I said, ‘Let’s forget about the ring.’ I wasn’t the type to settle down that easily.”

  Bob Neal, who describes
him and Nick as “the Gold Dust Twins” because of how close they were, was extremely fond of Betsy. “She was the genuine article, very cute and had a lot of class, and Nick liked her.” But more than five decades later at the age of eighty-four, he notes, “When she arrived in Hollywood, Nick was the biggest catch on the market. If a girl went out with him it was instant publicity. Betsy knew that. Besides, Nick was very attractive and Betsy was cute as anything he ever showed up with.”

  Their announced engagement, on a par decades later with the blast of press about Paris Hilton and Paris Latsis’s so-called marriage plans, even pricked up Elizabeth’s ears. Betsy explains: “Just after all that news about the engagement hit, Nick and I went to the opening of a movie and we were sitting somewhere towards the front and Elizabeth was sitting somewhere towards the back. When the film was over Nick said, ‘Let’s wait. Let’s not go out. I don’t want to run into her.’ But she waited us out. The theater was empty and she waited for us to come up the aisle so she could look me over. I thought it was funny that she would wait just to see me. We said hello and that was it.”

  However, Elizabeth remained on Nick’s mind. When he and Betsy had quarrels, he called her “Elizabeth,” as in Taylor. “Somewhere inside of himself,” Betsy notes, “he was appalled that this new affair with me was turning out to be just like the old marriage in the fact that we couldn’t get along and that Elizabeth obviously also wanted him to live a different kind of life.”

  Betsy soon discovered that Nick was a hooked on downers, along with being an alcoholic. “He was taking all these pills that a doctor friend of his was supplying him with, so he had no motivation to do anything that would make him feel better about himself,” says Betsy, still horrified years later. “I think Nick was terribly, terribly disappointed in his own lack of motivation and that he just couldn’t get with it. The terrible thing was he had no enthusiasm for anything except that dreadful life he led, no real interest in anything, in what the rest of the world was like. He slept ’til God knows what time. He got up and he started drinking and playing cards. He didn’t go to work.

  “I couldn’t deal with it. In the daytime I was at the studio and when we went out at night we danced and we flirted and I didn’t deal with it. I was eighteen. There was nothing I could do.”

  Bob Neal says Nick was “doing the death wish, which is what I called it. The death wish is a combination of pills and booze. You can’t beat it. He kept that very, very secret. He was on pills big-time. Down in Palm Springs where the Hiltons had a place, I once watched Nick go from the bed to the bathroom and it took him three hours. He was paralyzed.”

  Neal, who was practically a part of the Hilton family, believed Nick’s descent into pill hell had a lot to do with how his father and brother Barron regarded him, and how he was never given a chance in the family business in those days. “Nick got squashed all the time and he blamed it on Barron, I’m afraid,” observes Neal. “But the old man was behind everything like that. It wasn’t Barron who instituted things. Everything had to have the clearance of the old man because he held the purse strings, and the old man was an asshole.”

  When Betsy found the long days at the studio exhausting, Nick put her together with his doctor friend. “He used to play cards with Nick and hang out with him and run errands for him,” she says. “He was like a father to Nick. He supplied Nick and his friends with what they needed. He might have also been a pimp. He was a very evil person.”

  When Betsy complained to the doctor that she was having trouble sleeping, he whipped out his pad and prescribed the little red pill Nick was hooked on until his death, the very addictive downer Seconal. “I guess I had taken Nick’s Seconal and found out how nicely it worked,” says Betsy. Mixed with the alcohol it made for a very potent cocktail.

  Seconal was the recreational drug in Hollywood back then—Judy Garland, for one, gobbled them like M&Ms and eventually fatally overdosed; Cary Grant and Carole Landis and Marilyn Monroe were among the untold number of star users.

  With the downers doing their job, Betsy needed something to get her up and going, because she had to be at the studio early in the morning even though she wasn’t making a film, so Nick’s friendly physician wrote prescriptions for Betsy’s “uppers,” which were the most addictive for her. “I had a very hard time getting off amphetamines,” she acknowledges.

  While the gambling, the drinking, the pill-popping, and the occasional violent outburst were a way of life for Nick, Betsy still found him “awfully cute, extremely endearing, gentle, and sweet—except on those occasions when he was terribly drunk.”

  At the same time, she was “dumbstruck” by his lack of interest in anything outside his own parochial circle. “I thought I could introduce him to things that are very enjoyable—traveling and seeing things, but he wasn’t interested in expanding at all. He was only interested in playing cards and drinking—drinking and playing cards. It was an unbelievably boring existence. It was really amazing that our relationship continued as long as it did, because we really had very little to talk about to each other after a while.”

  Betsy felt the same about some of the other Hiltons she met: “I was so amazed that they were so uneducated—all of them. I just remember bringing up something about the Second World War and they just didn’t have the slightest clue. I was talking about Pétain, or DeGaulle, or something like that, and they just knew nothing.”

  If there was any great suspicion that Betsy was after the Hilton money, it was mainly attributable to Connie’s paranoia. To see if the new girl in Nick’s life was up to something, he dispatched, of all people, his ex-wife, Zsa Zsa, under contract at MGM along with Betsy, to investigate. If anybody had the radar to spot a gold digger, it surely was the former Mrs. Hilton, with whom Connie had remained on speaking terms.

  “I’m certain she had been put up to having lunch with me to find out what my motives were, because the Hiltons didn’t know me well at all,” says Betsy. “And, of course, what Zsa Zsa said to me was, ‘Dahlink, you must get and keep the ring. That’s the important thing. Just get the ring.’ It was so funny. I thought she was joking at first, and then I looked at her face and I realized she was totally serious. I felt like I was talking to a creature from a different planet.”

  As Betsy saw it, Nick was clearly “intimidated” and fearful of his powerful father. When she moved into her apartment on Doheny Road, for instance, she noticed that Nick never parked his black Cadillac anywhere near her building. “He didn’t want his father to know that we spent all our time together.”

  Some six or eight months into their relationship, an event occurred that infuriated Betsy, who was just about fed up with Nick’s way of life. They had planned to fly to Mexico, and she had packed accordingly. But when the plane landed they were in snow-covered, frigid northern California. Instead of a sun-drenched, sensuous villa overlooking the Pacific, they moved into an isolated cabin in the snow.

  “The plans were suddenly changed because of weather, and Nick thought, ‘Oh, well, since we’re on the plane, let’s go someplace else,’ so we wound up in Tahoe, or Arrowhead, and of course, I didn’t have the right clothes and it was freezing cold. We were literally snowed in with absolutely no servants, nobody to wait on us, no restaurants to go to. I objected to being the one to make the bed, cook the food, to wait on him. And he was drunk and boring and played cards and I had nothing to do.”

  Betsy returned to Los Angeles and moved out of her apartment and in with a close friend, the actress Esperanza Bauer Diaz “Chata” Wayne, the Mexican actress and estranged second wife of the Duke himself, who was in Hawaii.

  While Betsy was at the Waynes’ mansion in the San Fernando Valley, preparing to return to New York to be in a play after having been let out of her MGM contract, she received an emergency telephone call from Nick’s doctor. “Nick’s in very bad trouble,” he told her. He had been in an accident while driving drunk, suffered a broken arm, the police were looking for him, and he needed a place to hi
de out.

  “He asked me if I could just keep him at Chata’s for a while,” she recalls. “I don’t even know how they knew I was there.” Nevertheless, Betsy and Chata agreed to harbor Nick. “He never told me any details about what happened in the accident and I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know. I was just being sisterly, motherly, because he didn’t want the police to find him, and he didn’t want his father to know about what had happened.”

  Lying low in the Wayne residence, Nick bonded with the lady of the house, and the two spent hours together playing cards, drinking, and who knows what else. “I went out,” says Betsy. “I wanted no part of it.” The Hilton heir and the Duke’s wife must have gotten real chummy, because Nick ended up being one of the central figures in the Waynes’ eventual divorce trial. Their “dirty wash,” as John Wayne called it, was being splashed across the front pages of America’s newspapers day after day.

  Wayne charged that his wife had “entertained” Nick during his absence. He said he learned that his wife had a man in the house during his absence, but he didn’t know it was Nick until the butler handed him his wife’s doodlings, which read, “Esperanza Hilton…Chata Hilton…Chata and Nick…”

  “When I saw this,” the big guy testified, “I vomited.”

  He told the court that, early in his relationship with his wife, she used to doodle with his name, so when he saw her doodling with Nick’s name, “I knew how she felt about him.”

  Mrs. Wayne accused her husband of having had “an all-night tryst,” as the press called it, with sultry actress Gail Russell, who had played Wayne’s love interest in a western called The Angel and the Badman.

  During the four-day trial, Chata Wayne also testified that her husband, revered at the box office as a brawny cowboy in westerns and a warrior in combat films, turned their home into an actual war zone—bombarding her with everything from the back of his beefy hand to upholstered pillows, and even throwing rubbing alcohol in her face during their six-year marriage. On one occasion he left her stranded at a party and took off with some chums to go “someplace where there were stripteasers, call girls, prostitutes or whatever you want to call them. He came home the next morning very drunk and with a big, black bite on his neck…a human being bite,” she testified. In response, the Duke charged that Nick was “the other man” in his marriage, and that his wife was in love with him—an accusation she denied.