“The things I had to live with when I married Nick were horrible,” she continues, the bad memories still lingering. “People would ask me unbelievable things about my being married to Nick, about being a member of the Hilton family. I even changed my credit card from ‘Mrs. Nick Hilton’ to ‘Trish Hilton.’ I always said, if I didn’t have seventeen years in Tulsa, I’d be completely nuts.”
But it was hard to hide from the world back then if you were a Hilton. Early on, at a ball at the Waldorf, a photographer prodded Nick and Connie to kiss Trish on each cheek, and the next morning her picture between them was on the front page of the New York Post. “It was because the Hiltons were so famous,” she observes. “We couldn’t make a move without the press writing about us.”
The first stop on their whirlwind honeymoon was West Berlin, where they attended the opening of the latest global Hilton, a seven-million-dollar, fourteen-story affair. The flight out of New York started on an ominous note and just may well have set the tone for the Hiltons’ tumultuous marriage. The chartered four-engine airliner, carrying some sixty celebrity passengers including Connie and the newlyweds, developed engine trouble over Nova Scotia and had to turn back. It was a scary and bumpy ride.
In Berlin, at the fancy black-tie dinner celebration that included such dignitaries as West Berlin’s mayor Willie Brandt, who was Trish’s dinner partner, and German statesman Conrad Adenauer, among many others, the bride shockingly witnessed for the first time her groom getting plastered, at least in public.
“Nick was way down at the end of the table with Bob Neal, and he was absolutely smashed. I got up and walked over and accidentally on purpose spilled his parfait on him, and I got one of the waiters and we carried him out to make it look like we wanted to clean him up.”
From Berlin they flew to the Middle East, followed of course by a pack of invited, freebie-loving gossip columnists who never reported Nick’s German drinking episode.
Once several months after their honeymoon, and twice within the first year of marriage, Nick left Trish for short periods to carouse. The first time was devastating for the child bride because he chose their first Valentine’s Day together to go to Miami Beach and hang out with Bob Neal. “It just killed me,” she remembers. But because of a sudden cold snap in Florida, he returned after several days, tail between his legs. She rationalized that he needed his freedom because he was “terrified” from the start of getting married. “He just suddenly woke up and he was married and he hadn’t been married since 1950.”
The second time he took off for the Playboy Mansion to party with his friend Hugh Hefner. “I thought, he’s off to his bachelor ways and I’m not going to put up with this. I’m not dumb and I’m not naive to think nothing happened there between him and one or more of those Bunnies. But I had to get over it very quickly.”
THE HILTONS BOUGHT a charming three-bedroom, two-bath “starter home,” as Trish calls it, in Beverly Hills, on Alpine Drive, where their neighbors were movie stars and titans of industry. As Trish observes, “The only thing Nick wanted to do was prove to his father that he could be a settled, married man.”
As he had with Elizabeth Taylor, Nick, egged on by Connie, ordered Trish to convert to Catholicism. “I went to Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills for about three sessions,” she says, “and I came home and told him I couldn’t be a Catholic, but that I would raise our children as Catholics up until seventh grade, and he agreed.”
A few months after they were wed, Trish became pregnant. Nick, as she recalls, was “speechless, overjoyed, and unnerved.” He found the best obstetrician money could buy; it was to be the same doctor who had handled the pregnancy of the Shah of Iran’s wife and delivered Lucille Ball’s babies. As far as Trish can remember, it was the only time Nick was willing to give up his play dates with his crooner pal Dean Martin—golf and gin rummy every day at the Bel-Air Country Club. “That’s when I knew he liked me,” she says.
At nineteen, Trish gave birth to a son, whom they named Conrad Nicholson Hilton III, in honor of his grandfather. Fourteen months later, Trish had a second son, Michael, who was named in honor of Nick’s friend Miguel Aleman, the president of Mexico. Nick would have liked four or five little Hiltons to compete with Barron.
While Nick and Trish had many acquaintances from their separate lives—her teenage schoolgirl and young Tulsa socialite pals, and his carousing buddies—between them they shared a very small circle of close and loyal friends who stood by them through their turbulent marriage. Besides Bob Neal and his B-movie beauty and future wife, Dolores Faith, their circle included Carole and Lawrence Doheny IV, he the scion of the fabulously wealthy Southern California oil- and property-rich Doheny family, and she the gorgeous actress Carole Wells, who starred in a number of TV series through the mid-1950s and 1960s; and Nick’s doctor, Lee Siegel, and his actress wife, Noreen Nash.
“Nick and Larry and Bob Neal were wicked, rich, bad boys,” observes Carole Doheny years later. “Nick and Larry really liked each other—Larry looked up to Nick, and Nick was kind to him, and they were the guys who played gin rummy together—Nick and Larry and Bob Neal and Dean Martin—they were all the same skin. The Katzenjammer guys.”
As a father, Nick was like his own dad; that is, he wasn’t much of one. But every year he took his boys on a two-week trip—hunting, perhaps, or to Europe, but as Trish points out, “Nick wasn’t a day-to-day husband-type daddy.”
But Carole Doheny, Trish’s closest friend, remembers being at the Hiltons’ one evening and thinking how happy Nick seemed having a family. “I saw him as a loving father. He adored Trish. He adored those two babies,” she says. “Trish was lying on the floor and she had one of the boys near her and she was wearing black jeans and a big silver belt and she had that gorgeous little body and those beautiful boobs, and we were sitting there quietly talking and having a drink, and Nick was just staring at her. Just entranced. And he suddenly said, ‘She’s the best-looking girl I’ve ever known.’ And because I knew his history with women, I said, ‘Wow! With all the girls you knew, that’s quite a compliment.’ And he said, ‘And she’s even better-looking naked.’”
CHAPTER 27
Having proved he had settled down by becoming a family man, or at least that’s how it appeared, Nick was finally brought into the Hilton business fold by the old man, and even Newsweek magazine took note of the move in March 1960, observing that the “onetime full-time man-about-town…has been looking more and more like his man-about-the-world father…plugging away” on a new chain of Hilton hotel-motels called Hilton Inns, “with Nick running the show as vice president in charge.”
The article, however, misjudged Nick’s standing with his father by stating that he had been “singled out as heir apparent,” noted that he had “mastered executive syntax,” and quoted him (or more likely a Hilton press release) as saying, “The division has unlimited expansion potential. Its future is parallel to transportation factors, new modes of living, and the healthy complexion of a growing America.”
According to Trish, Nick for the first time seemed to feel good about himself, because his father was giving him a modicum of respect and responsibility. “Nick was thrilled,” observes Trish. “He wanted his father’s attention. That’s all he ever wanted.”
The Hiltons’ home life, however, was something else altogether. Trish learned that Nick was hooked on Seconal—just as he had been in the early 1950s when he was involved with Betsy von Furstenberg. He had never kicked that addiction, though he was drinking a bit less.
“Seconal was the drug of choice of whatever anyone was doing back then,” says Trish, scornfully.
On one horrific occasion, about two or three years into their marriage, Nick and Trish were vacationing in Acapulco when she caught him stoned and flushed his beloved downers down the toilet. It almost killed him, literally.
“I had to learn quickly about addiction,” she says. “I called a Mexican doctor and he told me I almost killed Nick by throwing away his pi
lls. He was withdrawing and you can’t withdraw off those pills. He was three days in withdrawal. He carried on frighteningly, and then he had a convulsion. I thought he was going to die. The Mexican doctor gave me more Seconal to start Nick back on them in low doses. I didn’t know what to do, but throwing away the pills was a no-no.”
Trish claims that their close friend and Nick’s physician, Dr. Lee Siegel, was obligingly writing Seconal prescriptions for him. “Nick always had a friendly doctor in his back pocket,” she asserts. “The downers, that was Nick’s big love, and Lee was getting them for him. I thought what he was doing was awful, and that I had to get this man out of Nick’s life. He was in our lives for years.”
Noreen Nash Siegel, the doctor’s widow, denies that her husband was a “Dr. Feel Good,” though she acknowledges that he was like a “father figure” to Nick and that Nick confided in him. She was aware of Nick’s use of Seconal, because, she says, Nick was “an insomniac.”
“I know that my husband was very sympathetic to people who had insomnia. But he was also very cautious. It’s very easy to say ‘he supplied’ Seconal to Nick, but sleep deprivation is a horrible thing, and he was sympathetic to people who had it. Lee would try to limit the pills, but these addictive personalities—and that’s what Nick was—get hooked.”
There are others besides Trish who viewed Siegel as a “Dr. Feel Good” in Nick’s life. Pat Hilton, Eric’s first wife and Nick’s sister-in-law, was shocked when, on one of the overseas Hilton celebrity junkets, she says she saw the doctor “going up and down the aisle in the plane saying, ‘Here, take this. It will make you feel really good.’ He came up to me and said, ‘Here, this will keep you awake so you can really enjoy everything,’ and he said, ‘If you need a pill to go to sleep, I’ve got those, too.’ I said, ‘I don’t need anything to make me feel better than I do right now.’”
Siegel’s widow, Noreen, acknowledges that her husband adored the Hilton Hotel opening freebies. “He always gave up everything to go on those junkets. We had a good time.”
There are those who felt the doctor acted inappropriately. For example, not long after Eric Hilton married Patricia Skipworth in El Paso in August 1954—Nick was the best man—they were visiting Nick in Los Angeles and Siegel also was present. Says Pat, “He asked, ‘How many times have you done it since you got married?’ I was a new bride and blushing beet red, I’m sure. Then, he said, ‘What you need to do is put a penny in a jar every time you do it, and after the first year start taking them out and you will never get to the bottom of the jar.’”
She thought the doctor’s advice and philosophy on sex was “weird, in bad taste, and totally uncalled for. I told Eric it really bothered and embarrassed me, but he said, ‘Don’t worry about it. That’s just the way he is.’ But I thought he was a creep.”
The doctor’s widow acknowledges that Siegel “had plenty of advice about women and sex” to offer patients and friends. “He counseled a lot of people on those issues.”
The end of Connie and Siegel’s friendship came about in 1967, when the Los Angeles Times, reporting on the fifth marriage of seventy-five-year-old author Henry Miller in the living room of the Siegels’ elegant English Tudor home, stated erroneously that the doctor was the brother of the notorious mobster Bugsy Siegel.
When Siegel saw the mention in the story’s fourth paragraph he howled with laughter. Connie, however, fumed. He immediately called Siegel and demanded that he sue the paper for libel and defamation.
Noreen Siegel, who married the actor James Whitmore after the doctor’s death in May 1990 at the age of eighty-one, recalls Connie telling her husband, “You’ve got to sue the Times. I want it made clear that I don’t cavort with criminals! You’ve got to prove that’s not true!”
As Noreen notes, laughing about the incident years later, “Lee didn’t care what anybody said or thought about him. He told Connie, ‘So what, it doesn’t bother me. We just called the paper and they ran a little retraction.’”
She says Connie and Lee never spoke again.
BECAUSE OF NICK’S prescription drug abuse and alcoholism—“drinking was a thread through our entire marriage”—Trish left him several times, threatening divorce if he didn’t straighten out. He tried, but it never worked. “There were many months of normalcy, but it [his addictions] sat like a little black cloud over our lives. It was never going to be a marriage made in heaven. I was just too young to deal with all of it. My lack of knowledge [about addiction], my fear that I wasn’t doing right made me feel I was an enabler.”
Nick and Trish had their first formal separation—at least one that became public—five years into the marriage. Some six months later, in February 1964, she sued for divorce for the first, but not the last, time. She charged that Nick had caused her “extreme mental and physical suffering.” Trish sought custody of the boys, four-year-old Conrad and two-year-old Michael, and asked for community property and child support.
Years later Trish asserts that the split was over Nick’s drinking. “He went on one of his binges and I kicked him out, and that’s when he went into Hazelden [the alcohol and drug rehab center], and he came out looking like a god, and from that time on I had to always do something drastic to get him to do things, and the only drastic thing I knew to do was to leave him.”
A few months later, their roller-coaster ride of a marriage appeared back on track. As Dorothy Kilgallen reported, “The Nicky Hiltons’ reconciliation seems to have worked out nicely, and she’s wearing a huge new ring—an emerald surrounded by diamonds—to prove it.”
BY THE TIME Nick turned forty in 1966, Connie believed he had settled down enough to take on the biggest job he would ever hold in the worldwide hotel organization: chairman of the executive committee of the New York Stock Exchange–listed Hilton International Company. Nick would oversee Hilton’s whole overseas operation, although it was veteran Hilton executives who would actually run the show. It was more of a figurehead position, but to Nick it showed he’d gained more of his father’s respect.
The Hilton international empire was immense. Since the late 1950s, and by the time Nick took over, Connie had put together a mind-boggling thirty-nine hotels in twenty-five countries, employing forty thousand workers. Most of the hotels were leased from their owners—a far more lucrative deal for the Hiltons than actually owning them. One press wag declared that Connie had “an edifice complex.”
The “empire builder,” as the Los Angeles Times called Connie Hilton, had also become involved in domestic and international political affairs and was often invited to give patriotic speeches. Awards and honorary degrees were bestowed upon this living legend.
Celebrity friends celebrated his enormous international success. The actor Bob Cummings, one of the frequent Hilton junketeers, threw what Earl Wilson called “a smasher of a Beverly Hills party” for Connie, with guests wearing the native costumes of the countries where Hilton had its hotels. Nick showed up as a Turk, while Barron bedazzled as a French wine steward.
With Nick running the international division, thirty-eight-year-old Barron, by then the father of eight—one of them being Rick Hilton, Paris’s father—was named president of the Hilton Hotels Corporation, the domestic division, of which he’d been vice president since 1954.
By the time Nick and Barron moved up the ladder, Connie, though still chairman of the board, had stepped down as president and chief executive officer of Hilton Hotels Corporation to devote all of his energies to the international arm, which allowed him also to keep close tabs on Nick’s behavior.
With his new position, Nick, with Trish, sold their first home and bought a palatial stone colonial in ritzy Holmby Hills for $450,000 and change—a lot of money in those days. Like his father who picked up Casa Encantada for a song, Nick had negotiated down the price of his new house by more than $200,000 and brought it up to speed with another hundred thousand or so in renovations.
Trish, meanwhile, got into the swing of Beverly Hills society, becoming
one of the ladies, or, in her case, one of the very young ladies, who lunched at the chichi Bistro Garden. And she ran in a circle that included Dino’s wife, Jeannie Martin, Janet Leigh, and Sammy Davis’s bride, Altovise. Along with them she was part of the fund-raising, charity, and gala circuit, joining the organization SHARE.
While Nick lent his name to some charity events and organizations and contributed money, he rarely made an appearance at the functions and, after years of well-documented nightlife, had become something of a stay-at-home loner. “We didn’t have friends together per se,” says Trish. “Our life was really very, very separate in many ways because I had my own friends, he had his work and golf.” Besides golf and cards (and drinking and popping pills), Nick liked to read—his favorite book, read over and over almost obsessively, was Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. However, on Saturday mornings he could not be interrupted from his other favorite form of entertainment—watching children’s cartoons on TV—and on Sunday evenings he was riveted by Bonanza.
Because the Hiltons were staunch Republicans, Trish joined an organization of prominent women—among them Shirley Temple Black and Mamie Eisenhower—who were backing the 1968 presidential ticket of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Trish was among a large group of rich, coiffed California women pictured in a full-page political advertisement in the Los Angeles Times that declared in big, bold words: “Women For Nixon Look To You For A Better America.”
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