Within hours of their arrival below the border, they were sleeping together. (Connie was not to be outdone. The world’s innkeeper divided his time between Barbara Rush, his first date on the trip; Ann Miller, his favorite dancing partner; and—on a quick hop over to Acapulco—Hillevi Rombin, the Swedish Miss Universe.)
At the big white-tie dinner, with all the dignitaries present, Connie noticed that two important chairs at the main table were unoccupied. “The people have come, the party is going, everything is functioning as it should, but Natalie and Nick are suddenly missing,” says Bob Neal, who shared a suite with Nick. “The old man comes over to me and he says, ‘Bob, I want you to go upstairs’—and he was talking between his teeth, he was very pissed—‘and get that guy and that girl outta bed and get ’em down here to this table. They are starting to serve dinner and they are embarrassing me. Goddamn it, get ’em outta that bed!’
“So I go upstairs and knock on the door and I said, ‘Nick, it’s serious. The old man’s ready to burn the fuckin’ place down if you don’t get downstairs with Natalie. Now!’ I bore down on him pretty good—and he knew when I was serious. So they got all their clothes on and they came down and had their consommé, or whatever, and they got up and they danced.
“The next thing I knew the old man came over to me and he says, ‘Now where the fuck are they?’ I look around and I said, ‘Well, sir, I’m not sure. I don’t know. I delivered them to your table as you requested, but now I have no idea.’ He said, ‘Goddamn! Nick can’t stay out of that fucking bed.’ And, for goddamn sake, they were back up in the suite in bed.”
Natalie was eighteen when she became involved with Nick, a dozen years her senior. Within a week of their get-together in Mexico City, the two were photographed dining at the Cocoanut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Nick gave Natalie a gold bracelet that she treasured, but no ring.
Meanwhile, Walter Winchell was reporting that Natalie had “transferred her affections again. From Nicky Hilton to Bob Wagner,” but noted in a subsequent column, “Coasters now believe Natalie Wood and Nicky Hilton will make it official,” and still later he wrote that when Natalie had trouble sleeping she “wakes Nicky Hilton by phone who chats with her until she dozes. That’s a gooooood bwoi. Whutz his number?”
By the time Nick and Natalie were going steady, she was starting to film Marjorie Morningstar, a plum role, and had already starred in Rebel Without a Cause and was cast for Splendor in the Grass. (She won Oscar nominations for all three films.) Natalie, née Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, whose parents were Russian Orthodox immigrants, was driven and ambitious—controlled and dominated by a stage mother on a par with big Kathy, Jolie Gabor, and Elizabeth Taylor’s mom. But unlike Kathy Hilton and Zsa Zsa, Natalie had real acting talent.
Unfortunately, she was also constantly stressed and riddled with anxiety and hypochondria. She was considered rather promiscuous, or at least that’s the impression she gave with so many men at her beck and call, much like Paris Hilton decades later. Besides Nick and Wagner, Natalie had been linked to Dennis Hopper, Robert Vaughn, Nick Adams, and the playboy Lance Reventlow. Curiously, Natalie also had a thing for gay and bisexual men, all of whom were closeted in those days. Among them were Sal Mineo, with whom she starred in Rebel Without a Cause and the handsome, sullen-appearing actor Scott Marlowe, whom she slept with on occasion; the gossip columnists hyped their relationship as Natalie’s “great love.”
Natalie’s pal Troy Donahue firmly believed she was madly in love with Nick. But she felt safer with Robert Wagner, whom she considered gentle and better looking, and who didn’t have alcohol and violence issues. Moreover, there was talk that during a visit to Casa Encantada Connie tried to coerce Natalie’s mother into permitting her to marry Nick by offering a financial incentive. Many years later, Natalie’s sister Olga maintains, “Nick’s father, Conrad Hilton, wanted them to have a relationship, and he tried to talk my mother into encouraging that by promising her stuff, but she didn’t go for it.”
On the other hand, Natalie’s British biographer, Gavin Lambert, asserts the mother “judged Natalie’s boyfriends on whether they were famous and whether they were rich. That’s what mattered to her.”
Nick, observes Lambert, “was a lord if not a prince of darkness, endowed with equal parts charm, sexual expertise, and cruelty. He probably slapped her around.” However, he found that Natalie was “excited” rather than put off by Nick’s playboy persona and intrigued by his bad-boy glamour. “Nicky was the dark excitement.”
Natalie’s younger sister, Lana, contended that their mother gave “full cooperation” regarding Natalie and sex, including her affair with Nick. While only a child at the time, Lana Wood remembered Nick and Natalie “stealing kisses in the pool.”
Nevertheless, Natalie chose to marry Wagner. But a decade later Nick and Natalie were still deeply attracted to each other. At a holiday party in London in December 1966, Nick, inebriated, came on to Natalie and she reciprocated—with Nick’s second wife, Trish Hilton, and Natalie’s second husband, Richard Gregson, at the same gathering, according to Lambert. (Trish Hilton denies it ever happened.)
Gregson said he “found Natalie and Nicky necking and dancing…. We had a huge row. Natalie became very wound up, full of guilt, and appalled at the way she’d behaved. Then she said she wanted to kill herself and grabbed a bottle of pills.”
Nick’s and Natalie’s lives would be forever entwined, and both would die tragically and young—Nick at the age of forty-two, Natalie at the age of forty-three.
CHAPTER 26
Despite Nick’s reputation as a rounder, much of it engorged by the columnists, he more often was interested in being seen with lovelies, such as Jeanne Carmen, rather than actually being with them, in the biblical sense. And to get turned on, he needed liquor or pills, and then was too stoned to perform, or he became physically abusive.
Many years later a number of women in Nick’s life wondered about his sexual preference. Was he gay? Was he bisexual? Even Bob Neal, his closest surviving friend who still boasted of Nick’s heterosexual exploits a half-century later, looked back and acknowledges he wasn’t certain if Nick really liked women. “I don’t know,” he says plaintively.
Nick’s Hollywood in the 1950s—not much different from Paris Hilton’s Hollywood in the twenty-first century—was a hothouse for sexual experimentation. Girl-girl, boy-boy, and all other combinations were in vogue, and the drugs and the booze added to the orgy. The studios covered up the sex scandals, and gossip columnists kept the secrets. Rock Hudson’s gay life, for instance, was an open secret in the industry, but didn’t become public until decades later when it was revealed he was dying of AIDS.
Nick Hilton had a secret life, too. He was part of a small, private social circle that included John Cohan, who claimed psychic powers and advised a number of Hollywood stars, such as Joan Crawford. Nick had an interest in the psychic world, astrology, and the like and developed a kinship with Cohan, who began doing readings for Nick about his future. On one occasion, Nick had planned to drive up the coast to San Francisco with a friend, but Cohan foresaw danger and advised him not to go. Nick took the advice, and the friend was involved in a serious auto accident. Whatever it was that Cohan felt, Nick was forever grateful.
As friends, they’d sometimes have lunch or dinner, so Cohan didn’t think it odd when Nick asked to meet in a suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel, in Hollywood. As it turned out, though, Nick and Cohan’s meeting would be far from routine.
“I go up and the door is open because he was expecting me and we were going to do [psychic] readings, and he said from the other room, ‘John, I’m in here. I’m just getting up.’ I walked in and my jaw dropped because who’s in bed with him but Troy Donahue. They were both nude. I sat on one of the chairs and then they both got up—stark naked.”
Donahue was one of the blond, blue-eyed, pretty-boy heartthrobs in 1950s films who, along with Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson, were
managed by the predatory homosexual agent Henry Willson—known as the man behind Hollywood “beefcake.” After Hudson appeared with Donahue in the film Tarnished Angels, Rock wanted to have sex with the six-foot-three hunk. “He saw me as a score,” Donahue later stated. When friends asked Hudson about Donahue, Rock responded, “Great cock-sucker, tiny dick.” Donahue, however, consistently denied that he was gay. He told People magazine in 1984, “Once in a while people get me confused with another blond, blue-eyed actor who was around at the same time, but it’s no big deal…I love women. Sometimes, I guess, too much.” (For nine months in 1964 he was married to the actress Suzanne Pleshette and had two other short-term marriages, fathering a daughter and son.)
Like Nick, Donahue was an alcoholic. In addition, he was addicted to painkillers, amphetamines, and cocaine, and at one point he reached such a low that he lived on a park bench before he became sober and pulled his life together.
Cohan claims Nick confided to him that his relationship with Donahue was “an on and off kind of thing. Nick liked to have experiences with women and men, but he told me he wanted to settle down only with a woman.”
SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD Tulsa, Oklahoma, oil heiress Patricia “Trish” McClintock was a five-foot-four, 103-pound brunette, an Elizabeth Taylor archetype in bobby sox. From a big-money Oklahoma banking and oil family, she had gone to a fancy Connecticut girls boarding school, traveled in Europe with her socialite mother, summered among the wealthy in La Jolla, and bet on the thoroughbreds at Del Mar. She grew up in an enormous home with maids and butlers and wings on the family homestead “where everyone spoke every once in a while.” Her parents were divorced and her mother had recently married multimillionaire producer W. Horace Schmidlapp, onetime husband of beautiful blond 20th Century–Fox actress Carole Landis, who had committed suicide by drinking and overdosing on a handful of Seconal, Nick’s favorite.
Trish was one pretty, prim, and sophisticated teenage package. As she says many years later, “I was privy to things a lot of girls aren’t.”
It was at the track one glorious Southern California Saturday afternoon in 1958 that Nick, then thirty-two, spotted teenage Trish, who was there with her grandfather, a member of the Federal Reserve Board; Nick was with another board member, a friend of Connie’s. “They introduced us,” she says. “That was how I met him.”
Nick wasted no time asking her out—to a Gay Nineties party in Los Angeles being thrown by his friend, the head of the Hyatt Hotel chain. And Nick made a rather odd request of Trish: he wanted her to wear one of Natalie Wood’s outfits—a costume from a film she had made. They were the same size and, well, he thought it would be kinky.
When Trish told her father, Frank Grant McClintock, that the infamous playboy was sending a plane for her, he practically locked her in her room; she had never dated a boy older than twenty. Moreover, she says, “I never thought there was anything between Nick and I. It was so ridiculous. I was so young, and he looked so much older to me. He looked like my father’s age. I had never, ever had anyone that old pay attention to me, so that sort of amazed me. I looked like a child.”
Trish saw Nick a few times, always at Del Mar, and she thought that was the end of their friendship. At summer’s end, having just turned eighteen in August, she flew east to begin her freshman year at Briarcliff College, outside New York City. She was there just ten days when Nick tracked her down and aggressively began pursuing her. Academics were out, and love was in.
“His sense of humor, the way he kidded me, how very, very protective of me he was—that’s what attracted me,” she says. “He was good-looking—tall and handsome, and very athletic. He’d never had children, and I definitely think he saw me as a woman he wanted children with.”
He asked her to marry him just before Halloween 1958, and their engagement made headlines across the nation. It was announced at a private party at the chic Colony restaurant in Manhattan in late October 1958. Just a few days after that momentous occasion, Trish saw Nick dead drunk for the first time in a scandalous incident that left her future brother-in-law Barron hospitalized. That same evening she also received a warning to “be careful of this guy” from Nick’s ex-girlfriend, Natalie Wood, who had become Trish’s friend.
On the evening of November 4, the newly engaged couple, along with Natalie, her beau, Robert Wagner, and one of her other former boyfriends, the actor Nick Adams, had gone out to dinner. Nick Hilton drank steadily, and by the time they got back to his suite at his father’s Plaza Hotel he couldn’t walk a straight line, but continued drinking. “It was the first time I had seen him drink—ever,” recounts Trish, almost a half-century later. “He got really, really drunk, and I think it had to do with the whole thing about getting married to me.”
At some point, Barron came into the suite, and he and Nick got into an argument. “I remember Nick was really drunk and saying something like, ‘I don’t believe that!’ And then he pushed Barron, and Barron stepped back on a piece of newspaper and slipped, went straight up in the air, and fell on the floor. It was an accident that you would never dream could happen.”
Barron was in severe pain. Whatever happened in that boozy instant, Nick’s push had resulted in Barron suffering a fracture of his right leg, and he had to be rushed to Manhattan’s Hospital for Joint Diseases. “Nick went to pieces and sobered up quickly over what happened,” says Trish.
While Nick accompanied his brother to the hospital, Trish stayed in the suite with Natalie and Wagner, spending the night with them. Natalie, who had had long experience with Nick, and Trish, who had very little but was about to marry him, stayed up and discussed her future as the wife of America’s most notorious playboy.
“We talked about Nick into the night,” recalls Trish. “Natalie said, ‘Have you ever seen him drunk before?’ I told her no, and she said, ‘If I were you, I’d go home and take a hard look about marrying him.’ She was very sweet and was warning me about what I was getting into. She said, ‘He’s one of the brightest men I know, he’s one of the most charming, but you’d better be careful.’ So that day I went home to Mother, and Mother said, ‘I don’t think you should marry him.’ And I said, ‘Nope, I’m going ahead.’”
And so, against her father’s and mother’s wishes, and with Natalie Wood’s warning ringing in her ears, Trish McClintock became the second Mrs. Nick Hilton the day before Thanksgiving, 1958, in a civil ceremony in the White and Gold Suite of the Hilton-owned Plaza Hotel. Nick’s brother Barron, walking with a limp, was best man. Their mother, the widowed gambler and reformed alcoholic Mrs. Mary Barron Hilton Saxon, was present, as well as her ex-husband, the groom’s father, Connie.
Forced by the Catholic Church to marry Zsa Zsa in a civil ceremony because of his divorce from Mary, the hotel czar was ashamed—and angry—that Nick had been put in the same situation because of his divorce from Elizabeth Taylor.
The New York Times reported that Trish wore a long-sleeved gown of reembroidered Alençon lace over white satin, made with a portrait neckline and an Empire sheath skirt terminating in a full court train, and carried a bouquet of white orchids. The “Gray Lady,” however, noted slyly, “Mr. Hilton’s marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, the actress, ended in divorce.”
Trish’s father felt his daughter’s betrothal to the notorious playboy was so scandalous and embarrassing to his moneyed and ultraconservative oil family that he banned her from being wed in her hometown of Tulsa. “He didn’t want me walking down the aisle with bridesmaids who were seventeen and eighteen years old, and Nick’s friends who were in their forties,” Trish says. Instead, Frank McClintock threw a country club party for seven hundred.
Trish’s mother couldn’t believe Nick would actually marry her teenage daughter; she predicted to Trish, “It’ll be a great first marriage.”
Trish acknowledges that she was “a virgin” when she was betrothed and believes that her lack of sexual experience was what appealed most to her groom. “Had I dated a lot and been to bed with other men,” she o
bserves, “Nick would never have married me.”
Despite his playboy reputation, she states, “Nick was never terribly, overly romantic. He didn’t go around kissing me. On top of everything else he was a prude, which is hard to believe about a man who supposedly slept with everyone. But when it got down to his wife and making babies he was definitely a prude.
“Looking back, Nick may not have really liked women,” she acknowledges. “My feeling is that the reason he behaved like that with other women is that, on the whole, he did not respect women, but I don’t think he disliked them.”
And she added emphatically, “Nick was not anywhere near being a homosexual, I can promise that.”
Moreover, she acknowledges sadly, “I do not think Nick loved me when he married me.”
Aware of Nick’s past transgressions with the ladies, Trish laid down two rules of behavior for her husband, who was fourteen years her senior. “I told him I’d leave him if he screwed around on me, or if he ever hit me.”
However, still “starry-eyed” by the quickie marriage, she had no intimation that Nick had had a serious prescription drug problem, which he hid from her (as he did with many of the women in his life) during the honeymoon period.
Beyond that, Trish found herself living in the shadow of one of the world’s great beauties. For years after they were married, Nick was dubbed “the first Mr. Elizabeth Taylor” by the press, which had him seeing red and made Trish feel insecure. Moreover, throughout their marriage, whenever Nick heard that Elizabeth was ill and in the hospital, which was often, he’d dispatch Trish to send her flowers in his name.
The thoughtlessness of people didn’t help, either. For example, one night Trish was at the ritzy El Morocco nightclub in New York. The ladies’ room attendant knew her and greeted her by name. “Suddenly,” Trish recalls, “the woman standing next to me at the mirror turned and said, ‘Are you married to Nicky Hilton?’ I just wasn’t used to things like that and I said, ‘Yes, I’m Mrs. Hilton,’ and she said, ‘Tell me, darling, what’s it like to go to bed with the man who’s gone to bed with Elizabeth Taylor?’ I didn’t know how to answer. What I finally said was, ‘It’s fine!’ and I went downstairs—we had Jack Kennedy’s table—and I broke into tears and no one knew what the hell I was crying about.
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