“Jean Smith is the latest beauty to catch Nicky Hilton’s roving eye—and hold it a little longer than most girls…. Nicky Hilton took Jayne Mansfield to the Photog’s Ball and, Jayne says, ‘was a perfect gentleman’…. Conrad Hilton hosted a big party including his son, Nicky, and the Swedish beauty, Ingrid Goude…. Nicky Hilton spent an hour in the telephone booth at El Borracho the other night chatting with stripper Lee Sharon…. Today’s Nicky Hilton Item: Elaine Conte, whoever she is—and who cares…. Today’s Nicky Hilton item: Dorothy Johnson….
“Nicky Hilton’s been dating Marisa Allasio at the Plaza’s romantic Rendezvous Room…. Nicky Hilton’s pals say he vowed to follow Italo actress Marisa Allasio to Hellton…. The beauty with Nicky Hilton at Birdland the other night was cover girl Helene O’Connell…. Nicky Hilton took Carolyn Mitchell to Molly Bee’s opening at the Club Largo but they had a quarrel and Nicky stalked out….”
DURING THAT NONSTOP girl rush there were some special relationships that were mostly under the radar of the gossip columnists—relationships in which Nick didn’t always live up to his public reputation as a playboy extraordinaire, or even that of the “perfect gentleman.”
After Betsy von Furstenberg, Nick’s next serious romance was with knockout Joan Lucille Olander, who hailed from a small town in South Dakota. Once she got to Hollywood and began winning beauty contests (as a fifteen-year-old), she found herself in that elite circle of starlets who caught the roving eye of eccentric Howard Hughes, and she was soon winning parts in RKO films (along with working as a Las Vegas showgirl and gracing the cover of Esquire as an Alberto Vargas pinup). In New York, she was in the Broadway show Million Dollar Baby, and every night the world champion prizefighter Jack Dempsey came to see her. They began a relationship before she decided “he was too old or I was too young.”
Practically overnight, Joan Lucille Olander was transformed at Universal International into platinum blond bombshell Mamie Van Doren, a legend in her own time, and was in that class of sexpots that included Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe. Mamie was known for wearing what was called the “bullet bra,” a look that drove male fans of all ages wild with desire; her trademark line was “Mamie likes ’em young.”
To generate buzz for their new star, Universal’s publicity department chief, Al Horowitz, arranged for Nick—America’s most eligible bachelor of the decade—to take Mamie, wearing a white, strapless, slinky Ceil Chapman gown, to the 1953 Hollywood premiere of The Glenn Miller Story at the Pantages Theater. When they were given seats too close to the screen, Mamie was embarrassed and told him, “Maybe you said yes to the wrong starlet,” but Nick squeezed her hand and responded, “Hell, Mamie! You’re with a Hilton!”
Their date that night made the columns. The snarky syndicated gossipteuse Edith Gwynn told inquiring minds, “People are still sniggling over Mamie Van Doren’s theater-aisle march at the Glenn Miller Story prem. She was gowned and made up to look exactly like Marilyn Monroe was for M.M.’s How to Marry a Millionaire opening! Mamie didn’t quite make it. Imitators seldom do! Anyway, she was dragging her white fox along the floor—with Nicky Hilton trailing behind.”
A photo of the two, smiling and looking glamorous—Nick in tux and bow tie—ran in the scandal rag Confidential and got bigger placement on the page than one of Academy Award winner Humphrey Bogart and beautiful actress Cyd Charisse “in a huddle at Mocambo.”
“It was my first big outing as Mamie Van Doren,” she recalls years later. “Except for Rock Hudson, Nick was my second date. He was sexy-looking, handsome. He had it all—he had money, he had popularity, he was a celebrity, and all those things together turned me on.”
Nick was infatuated, and why not? Mamie was industrial-strength arm candy—platinum blond hair and a body to die for. Nick squired her to the best restaurants—Romanoff’s, Chasen’s—to A-list parties, to the racetracks where he won and lost bundles.
But just like Betsy von Furstenberg, Mamie nailed Nick’s modus operandi early on. “He was on his best behavior in the beginning and then he started getting really bad,” she maintains. “I took him to the Golden Globe Awards. I was the hostess that year and Nick sat at the bar and he got loaded while I was onstage.”
Once again Nick was playing second fiddle to a glamorous movie star who was getting all the attention; it was a rerun of his relationships with Taylor and von Furstenberg.
Despite her sexpot image—and Nick’s reputation as a horndog—Mamie was not about to jump in bed with him right away. “I didn’t sleep with him for quite a while,” she asserts. “We dated for a couple of months before I went to bed with him. He got very upset over that. It was pre-Pill America, and I didn’t want to get pregnant.” But when their relationship finally turned intimate Mamie was surprised to discover that the real-life Nick Hilton in the sack didn’t live up to his publicity as a stud. “All he wanted to do,” states a very candid Mamie years later, “was drink and then maybe fuck. But he really wanted to drink before he wanted to go to bed. Unlike what the newspapers had to say about him, he wasn’t a real sensuous Romeo, or a Casanova, but Nicky was really well-hung. He had a large cock, but was curiously unskilled at using it. He was not that great of a lovemaker. He wasn’t kinky at all, but quite conservative. Lovemaking was straight on, the old-fashioned way, and that was it—there wasn’t much foreplay. When we were in bed, all he wanted to do was watch Dragnet or some other stupid show on television. I can’t say Nick was bad in bed, but when a man’s drinking a lot, he can’t always perform. We fucked often—as often as Nicky’s drinking would allow. He drank—that was the most he did.”
Nick wasted no time asking Mamie to marry him, but she had qualms, which she kept to herself. For one, she didn’t like his drinking, and, second, her career was starting to boom and she didn’t feel marriage would be conducive to her goal of becoming a major star. The Hilton wealth, though, was an attraction. Mamie quipped to Hedda Hopper, “Nicky’s selling a new kind of fountain pen—one that writes with oil.”
Nick sensed Mamie’s hesitation about marriage and took her to a party where his actor pal John Carroll lobbied for him. The bash was at his brother Barron’s, where Mamie and Marilyn Hilton did an ass-wiggling hula-hula dance together. Afterward, Carroll sidled up to Mamie and told her, “Nicky wants to marry you. Baby, you can have it all. Play your cards right. Marry him. He wants you.”
Nick soon took Mamie to Casa Encantada for dinner, hoping for his father’s approval. The dinner was a “bizarre” affair, says Mamie. Connie sat at the head of an immense table, which was set with solid gold plates and silverware and with almost as many servants to wait on the three of them as there was help in a Hilton hotel dining room. While Connie eyed Mamie—and she certainly was an eyeful—he never spoke a word to her but directed all of his conversation to his son. “Conrad talked to Nicky, Nicky talked to Conrad, and Nicky talked to me. When I spoke to Conrad, he answered through Nicky. It was though we were speaking different languages and Nicky was our interpreter,” says Mamie. “Conrad wanted to meet me to make sure Nicky wasn’t getting into another bad scene. He was an imposing man, and he made Nicky look small and weak. Nicky and his father were completely different types. Nick adored him, but he knew he couldn’t come up to what his father was. Nicky didn’t give a rat’s ass about hotels.
“Conrad had a pool house on the estate and he wanted Nicky to live there, and Nicky wanted to get his own place because he wanted me to move in with him,” continues Mamie. “I knew there was going to be a problem. Conrad said to Nicky, ‘I want you to move in here. I want you to stay here, and I’ll do it any way you want to do it.’ Conrad was begging Nicky to stay. Conrad really had him under his thumb. He dominated him like crazy.”
At dinner Conrad smoked big Cuban cigars, blowing smoke everywhere and belching loudly. Beyond that, a noise that sounded like the staccato of a machine gun erupted on and off during the course of the meal.
“I heard rumblings under Conrad’s elegant chair and I said,
‘What the hell is that?’ Between the smell of his cigars and his deep, rumbling farts at the table I felt sick. He was a real cowboy.”
Nick never moved into the pool house but stayed in the apartment above Bob Neal’s at 882 North Doheny.
“Nick wanted me to see it to make sure I liked the décor before I moved in,” recalls Mamie. “He had hired a decorator and I went to visit the place and it was the worst I’d ever seen—so many colors, so wild. He’d put a lot of money into it, but it was awful. No taste.”
Mamie never moved in, and they never lived together. “I’m the one who broke it off,” she says. “We had a big scene where it was really a blowout—such a bad argument, and that was the end. He was about to give me a diamond engagement ring. He wanted to get married in Vegas. But I had a contract with Universal and I was just starting. I had a third movie coming up, and I thought, all I need to do is get married and then have problems with him getting drunk all the time. I never even thought of the Hilton money, or a big settlement if we split up. I was young. I was just so glad to get my studio contract and make two hundred and fifty dollars a week.
“And I don’t think the old man approved of me. For one thing, I wasn’t a Catholic.”
According to Mamie, she and Nick double-dated one night with Bob Neal and a girlfriend of Mamie’s, and at the end of the evening they all returned to Neal’s apartment. She says Nick and Neal were inebriated.
Mamie didn’t like Neal, who she felt “was very instrumental in leading Nick to a lot of things because Nicky was sort of weak in some ways. He had a lot to do with the way Nicky was. He had a lot to do with Nicky’s behavior. Bob Neal was older, more secure and wiser, and he was jealous because Nick was better looking. I never liked Nicky running around with him, and the minute Nicky and I broke it off, guess who called me? Bob Neal.”
Says Neal years later, “Mamie had the greatest fucking figure. We’d pull up to her house and I’d look over and she’d be naked in her car. She told me she didn’t drink and she didn’t smoke, because she didn’t want a damn thing to interfere with her sexual pleasures and feelings.”
Mamie soon met and married the popular bandleader Ray Anthony—the first of her four husbands—and they had a baby, a son. When she was performing her singing act in the showroom where Liberace was featured at Las Vegas’s Riviera Hotel and Casino, Nick, whom she hadn’t heard from since their split, suddenly made an encore appearance.
“I was now married, and a mother, and I’m on my way to my dressing room and he’s standing outside the door,” she recalls vividly. “He said, ‘Hi, I’m going to catch your show tonight,’ and he asked me if we could get together. I got all nervous. He made it clear he was still interested in me. He never gave up.”
The last time she saw Connie was in Manila in 1968 when she was returning from Vietnam, where she had entertained the troops. Connie had just opened the Manila Hilton. “I went down to the dining room, and there he was with about six beautiful, young Filipino girls. I was sitting at a table where I could watch him. He knew it was me but he never came over to say hello. And I thought, well, fuck you!”
But the Hiltons remained in her life. Hugh Hefner had invited Mamie to his bacchanalian Halloween party at the Playboy Mansion in 2005, and she ran into Connie’s great-granddaughter face to-face for the first time.
“I’m pretty wild on the dance floor and here comes Paris Hilton as an angel wearing wings and trying to dance. I wanted to tell her I slept with her great-uncle, but I thought, oh, shit, she probably couldn’t have cared less and didn’t even know who he was.
“She’s got the Hilton name, but she’s not put together well. She’s butt ugly and she’s got stumps for legs. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. She’s famous for being famous and it’s just like Marilyn Monroe. What really made Marilyn pop out was when her nude calendar came out in the fifties. Back then something like that was unheard of.
“And today what made Paris famous is that X-rated video. But there’s a lot of difference between a photograph and a pornographic video. We’ve come a long way. A pinup picture isn’t going to do it these days. You have to be giving blow jobs on camera.”
FOR A TIME Nick dated B-movie actress and stunt golfer Jeanne Carmen, another blond bombshell in the mode of Mamie. Carmen was a close friend of Marilyn Monroe’s, and after Marilyn’s death in August 1962, Carmen was one of the confidantes who claimed to have been a witness to Monroe’s affair with Bobby Kennedy. Connie introduced Nick to Carmen, and soon the gossip columnists were reporting a hot romance.
But years later Carmen acknowledges that they actually were walkers for each other. “When Nick didn’t have a date and he wanted to go somewhere and not be alone he called me, and if I didn’t have a date and needed someone, I’d call him.”
She believes he was simply a publicity hound who savored being seen with beautiful women. “We’d be out at a club and sometimes photographers would be lurking and when Nick saw the camera he’d reach over and kiss me,” she recalls. “I was never a publicity hound, but he would do that, he’d call attention to us. And I’d say, ‘Nicky, please.’ And as soon as the photographer would go away that would be the end of that. He probably wanted everybody to think he was laying every girl in town—and he might not have been laying anybody.
“I honestly don’t remember him making a sexual play for me, which is really strange. Maybe it was the booze. I never heard anything about him being gay, but who knows.”
CHAPTER 25
Through most of the 1980s, British actress Joan Collins’s claim to fame was her starring role in what was then the world’s most popular soap opera, Dynasty, in which she played Alexis Carrington Colby—one of the great bitchy, sexy, and conniving TV divas of all time. But back in the mid-1950s, after she arrived at 20th Century-Fox to pursue stardom after La Dolce Vita across the pond, she was hot prey for playboys like Nick Hilton.
By the time Joan hooked up with Nick, she was considered “one of the most dated girls in town.” She’d been linked to actors Robert Wagner, Michael Rennie, conductor Buddy Bregman, and both of Charlie Chaplin’s sons. At one high point, she’d set an unofficial Hollywood record by dating fourteen different bachelors in as many days and had just ended a brief live-in relationship with Arthur Loew Jr., grandson of MGM’s founder, with Loew telling her, “You are a fucking bore,” and Collins telling him, “And you are a boring fuck.”
Nick was captivated by Joan’s sultry looks and sexy, clipped accent. Early on he showered her with attention—a 24/7 chauffeur-driven car was a nice touch. And the twosome spent time in swinging Acapulco.
Collins’s relationship with Nick was part of what had the potential of being a volatile triangle that involved another starlet, Natalie Wood. The celebrity exposé magazine Uncensored put the Collins-Wood competition for the heart and mind of the hotel scion on its cover: “Natalie Wood & Joan Collins: The Untold Story Of That Feud Over Nicky Hilton.”
When asked by a gossip columnist about sharing Nick, twenty-three-year-old Joan said, “Oh, it doesn’t bother me. Besides, Natalie is much younger than I am—she’s only nineteen.” In fact, Joan wasn’t interested in a serious romance and neither was Nick.
Natalie, however, would see things a bit differently, and so would Nick.
Joan liked men with machismo, men who could dominate her but not push her around, so Nick was a mixed bag in her book from the start. She viewed him as “dissolute and rakish”—quite aware that he fancied himself a girl-chaser and “Hollywood’s swingingest bachelor.” Years later she observed, “He appeared as if he had seen and done everything. He had been everywhere, could get practically any girl he wanted, and was completely jaded.”
But there were more serious issues that eventually turned her against him. For one, she claimed in her memoir Past Imperfect that he was “racially bigoted,” noting that his ideas went with his “southern drawl,” which was actually Texan but sounded Alabaman to her British ears. And while she vie
wed him as a “devout Catholic” who kept a rosary and a crucifix next to his bed, she was shocked to discover that his night table also featured “an amazing array of pill bottles in all shapes and sizes, girlie magazines, pornographic books, bottles of Coca-Cola, and a gun.”
All of the Hiltons of Nick’s generation were brought up with guns for hunting, but Nick, drunk or stoned, was dangerous with a weapon in his hand. Joan said Nick loaded the gun he had next to him in bed with blanks and frighteningly fired at the ceiling in the middle of the night “to the horror of his neighbors on Doheny Drive, who would call the police in a frenzy of fear.”
Before long Joan Collins had had it with Nick Hilton and moved on, but Natalie Wood hung in.
NATALIE WAS EXCITED by the prospect of having an affair with a man who had slept with Elizabeth Taylor, one of her idols. As Dorothy Kilgallen reported, “Pals of reckless young Natalie Wood say her torch for Nicky Hilton is bright enough to light up all the territory west of the Mississippi.”
“Nick never discussed that he even knew a girl,” states Bob Neal. “He was very discreet and the girls knew this, and they liked it because they didn’t like guys with big mouths, so it took me about twenty years to find out who was the love of Nick’s life.
“It ended up it was Natalie Wood. Their relationship was based on something very simple—very fucking simple, and there’s one in every house. It’s called a bed.”
Nick and Natalie had met just before the opening of the new Hilton Hotel in Mexico City; she was one of a number of starlets and other celebrities who, in typical Connie Hilton fashion, had been invited to add glitz to the ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Each was wined and dined, given first-class accommodations, and anything else they desired. Nick, for instance, got Natalie.
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