LESS THAN A YEAR after Nick took over the international division, Trish was finally able to wean him off of Lee Siegel’s downers and replace Siegel with a new doctor. But she soon came to realize that the situation had gone from “bad to worse” because, she asserts, Nick was now getting “mayonnaise jars filled with Seconal” from him.
Nick, like other people who were insomniacs, had started taking the pills to sleep. But he had become so addicted over the years that they had the reverse effect on him. “Instead of going to sleep, he became absolutely crazed,” Trish says, the memory still painful. “He’d stay up for forty-eight hours at a time, just absolutely loop-legged, and finally he’d crash. But during those four or five days I’d have to have nurses with him. I didn’t want him out of the house.”
Beyond that, the sudden death of Nick’s mother, Mary Barron Hilton Saxon, whom he worshipped, left him devastated.
Of Mary’s three sons, Nick, Barron, and Eric, it was Nick who was most like her, and it was Nick who helped her financially after Connie gave her virtually nothing in their divorce. (Mack Saxon left her with little but a navy pension.) Concerned about her financial welfare, Nick had established a small venture for his mother selling ballpoint pens to the Hilton Hotel chain for guest rooms, but when a cheaper vendor was found, Connie dropped her company, and Mary lost the account.
“But she was never in want of anything,” says Mary’s friend, the producer Hank Moonjean. “She got in to all the Hilton hotels for free. Nick took care of her because Nick was her favorite.”
For years, the first wife of one of the wealthiest and most influential businessmen in the world had been living quietly and alone in a simple second-floor walkup apartment in a nondescript stucco building wedged between high-rises in West Los Angeles. She kept to herself and had few friends. Her only real pleasures in life were playing cards, shooting dice, and betting on the ponies; she read the Daily Racing Form like the Bible and had her own personal bookie.
Despite their marriage scandal and divorce decades earlier, Mary and Connie kept a semblance of a friendship through the years. As Trish points out, “Connie just sort of forgot about everything that had happened between them, and he just wandered around and made business deals. He just didn’t hold grudges. In business he would, but in his personal life he was like la-la-la. In many ways he was a very naive man. Mary used to say to me, ‘I can’t believe a man who’s that smart gets lost coming home from the Dallas Country Club.’”
Trish was at home alone on Sunday morning, November 20, 1966, and Nick was at the golf course when his mother telephoned to say, “I’m in terrible pain.”
“I went over to her apartment,” recalls Trish, “and she was sitting on her little daybed in the second bedroom and she just looked very uncomfortable. I called for an ambulance and I went with her, and they took her to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. The doctor told me, ‘I don’t know how to tell you, but she may not make it.’ It was her heart. So I called Marilyn who then called Barron, and I found Nick at Bel-Air, and they all met at the hospital. She died about eight o’clock that night with all of us standing around outside her cubicle. Nick and Barron went in and I let them be alone with her.”
The true matriarch of the contemporary Hilton clan, a woman long lost to history, died just five months before her sixtieth birthday. A requiem mass was held three days after her death at St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church, and Mary was the first to be interred in a new Hilton family plot at Holy Cross Cemetery, in Culver City, where stars like Rita Hayworth, Loretta Young, and Bela Lugosi were buried.
CHAPTER 28
Behind Nick’s back, secret negotiations had started to sell off his baby, Hilton International. The eventual sale would destroy him.
It all began in 1966 when Trans World Airlines (TWA) jealously watched as its competitor, Pan American Airways, built a new and very profitable subsidiary, the Inter-Continental Hotels chain. By the late 1960s, the air-travel business was growing meteorically; the first jumbo jetliners that carried hundreds of passengers were being put into service, and the airlines realized they had to guarantee hotel space to all their new transoceanic customers. The Pan Am operation worked smoothly and flawlessly—passengers flying the friendly skies of Pan Am were directed to its thirty-six hotels on the ground around the world.
TWA had taken a hard look at the very successful Hilton International operation and saw nothing but dollar signs. The divisions’ revenue had increased almost 200 percent in five years; the overseas chain grossed $143 million and earned more than $5 million in the first nine months of 1965. And 1966 boomed with $122 million in revenue from some 4.8 million guests.
By mid-January 1967, TWA’s president and Connie—with Barron prodding him—had hammered out a preliminary merger agreement, a stock swap deal under which the household Hilton name would remain along with top management to operate its thirty-nine overseas hotels with more on the way (and two cruise ships that sailed the Nile River). But TWA would own the whole shebang—lock, stock, and bidet.
Nick and Trish were on a trip out of the country and returned to learn that the deal was in the works. No one in his own family had consulted with him.
“We came back to this dreadful news and it just broke his heart,” Trish says, remembering sadly what became almost two years of living hell for the both of them.
Nick immediately lobbied Hilton board members to vote against the sale. Among those on his side was Hilton’s second-biggest stockholder, Colonel Henry Crown, who had once been chairman and principal stockholder of the Empire State Building and was one of Connie’s longtime friends and advisers. Like Nick, Crown thought the international division was too valuable to divest, and he and Nick told Connie it was a terrible deal. “I was there for the two weeks that Henry Crown stayed in Los Angeles, and every night they would meet with different board members,” says Trish. “But when it came right down to it, the board voted with Conrad. I went to Connie and told him what a mistake he was making. He practically threw me out of the house.”
At first, Nick didn’t realize from whom he faced his biggest opposition, and when he learned his main adversary was his own brother Barron he felt as if he had been stabbed in the back. Their competitiveness and sibling rivalry had now reared itself in a major business deal, and Nick was the victim.
“Barron convinced Connie to make the deal, and Connie just listened to Barron,” asserts Trish. As she put it years later, “Barron sold out his brother. There’s no doubt about that. Nick absolutely was crushed. He couldn’t imagine that Barron would do such a thing. Barron wanted all the power, and there’s no doubt when they sold Hilton International, Nick was a goner.”
On May 9, 1967, TWA’s takeover of Hilton International went into effect with Connie continuing as president and a director, and with Barron overseeing the domestic end. Looking back to that time, Trish observes, “Nick really wanted to be successful in his father’s eyes, and he really tried, and he did a very good job for many months at a time—and even for a year at a time, but he had this thing hanging over him. Nick could have had it all, but Nick couldn’t live up to Connie’s expectations because he’d go on these [drinking and pill-popping] sprees. Barron was the entrepreneur, but Nick had the brains and he had the charisma, and I think that Connie would have loved to have both of his sons working for him. But Nick definitely needed to be under care of some sort.”
Devastated, Nick, who was named to the TWA board, a gesture he felt meaningless—and was meaningless—wrote a moving “Dear Dad” letter, probably the last communication between son and father. In the letter, Nick wrote that he felt “alone, disrespected, and unloved.” In a heartrending synopsis of his life, he said he was “grateful” to his father for all he had done for him “financially” over the years, but declared, “There is still something missing which is vitally important to me, your respect. I remember you once told me that without respect, there can be no love.”
He made mention of a shocking I
OU missive that Connie had sent him, a letter he described as “the itemized debt which was kept in infinite detail for the past eighteen years.” He noted that when he and Trish separated the last time, Connie would not even allow him to move into the Beverly Hilton. “Could it be I’m not wanted anywhere?” he asked.
Specifically regarding the sale of Hilton International, Nick wrote, “I ask myself, why did Dad inform the world that he had assigned me to a high and important position and then embarrass me by stripping me of my coveted job, by having my brother negotiate a sale without my knowledge, undermining me, and leaving me to fall flat on my face without explanation or warning?…What did I do wrong? What mistake had I made?…And if it was good business for the company to sell, why wasn’t I allowed to negotiate?”
He concluded the letter by expressing his “love” for his father, brother, wife, and children and declaring, “I want you to love me. For without you there is very little.”
As far as anyone knows, Connie never responded.
From that point on Nick descended into his own private hell—drinking more than ever, popping pills, acting violent at times.
In mid-August 1967, Walter Winchell reported, “Hollywood chums of Nick Hilton (son of the immensely popular Conrad Hilton) say Nicky is seriously ill.”
Friends realized that he was falling apart. Dean Martin, Nick’s golf and gin-rummy-playing pal, called Trish offering to help, but didn’t know what to do.
Eventually, that summer Trish talked Nick into taking a vacation, and they took the boys to Marbella, in Spain, for two weeks. It didn’t work. “He was just a nightmare, then he was great for a while, but when we came home he was a nightmare again,” she says. “I could not get him to stop drinking.”
In August 1967—almost nine years after their wedding day—twenty-six-year-old Trish filed for divorce for a second time in their marriage. This time she charged Nick with “repeated acts and threats of physical violence” and claimed he struck her in the face. She demanded $5,600 in monthly alimony and custody of the boys—Conrad, then seven, and Michael Otis, six.
But once again they came back together. A few days after the Hiltons’ ninth wedding anniversary, the New York–based syndicated society and gossip column “Suzy Says,” written by Trish’s mother’s friend, Aileen Mehle, reported, “Speaking of reconciliations, Trish and Nicky Hilton, who have stretched apart, have snapped back together again.”
Trish says she kept the divorce papers “in place” but “went back” to Nick “with his promise of good behavior.”
Despite the Hiltons’ rapprochement, Trish was growing more concerned by the day about Nick’s drinking and Seconal addiction and what it was doing to him. “He was not a happy man and he was just hanging on,” she says.
Around that time, Nick was staying at one of the Hilton homes in Palm Springs. At two or three in the morning, Nick’s sister-in-law, Pat Hilton, was awakened in Houston by a call from the emergency room of a Palm Springs hospital.
“They said, ‘Is this Patricia Hilton?’ I said, ‘Yes, it is.’ And the person said, ‘We have Nick Hilton here and he asked us to call you because we need permission to sew up his wrists because he tried to kill himself.’ I never was sure why Nick had them call me, but Nick and I got along great. I called my husband, Eric, who was in Dallas, and he immediately left and went to California to be with Nick. I never heard any more about what happened, and I never asked.”
BY THE NEW YEAR 1968, Nick was nearing bottom. He “never sobered up” and had become physically threatening to Trish and the boys.
There were frightening incidents with Nick and his guns, which he kept in the house. Noreen Siegel says her doctor husband once rushed to the Hiltons’ home after getting a telephone call that Nick had a gun and was shooting at the television. “My husband took the gun away from him,” she says, “and he came home with it, and he was very shaken by what happened. Lee was really very fond of Nick, so it was scary. But he talked Nick out of it, and he was able to put the gun down and give it to him. Nick called him the next day and wanted the gun back and Lee said, ‘No, you’re never getting that gun back, Nick.’ And my husband kept the gun and hid it in a closet, and I found it after my husband died.”
On another occasion, according to Carole Doheny, “Nick got crazy one night. He was actually doing target practice shooting decanters of liquor at the bar from outside on the lawn.”
Trish feared for her family’s safety and demanded that Nick get treatment or she would divorce him once and for all. She says, “He really went off the deep end.”
Trish says she received no assistance from members of the Hilton family who were aware of Nick’s physical and emotional state. Still upset years later, she says, “They did nothing. Barron never talked to me, never asked me if I needed help.” She called for a meeting at her house with Connie and several doctors who were aware of Nick’s situation—Judd Marmor; Rex Kennamer, a Beverly Hills physician to stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra; and Robert Buckley, a psychiatrist who had been involved in treating Nick and who became one of the directors of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation along with Barron Hilton.
“It was the first time I ever asked Connie to come to the house, and the last,” Trish says. “The doctors started by telling my father-in-law that his son would die if he didn’t go into treatment. And Connie looked at them, said nothing, and changed the subject. He didn’t want to hear about it. They told him that Nick had a fifty-fifty chance if he went into treatment, and he had absolutely no chance if he didn’t—that his situation was so serious.
“While they briefed him, Connie looked at me and suddenly said, ‘Trish, have you noticed anything different about me?’ I said no, but, of course I had. He had dyed his existing fringe of white hair a reddish brown and put a wig on top to cover the baldness. What was I going to say, ‘What happened to your hair?’ The doctors are sitting there and they can’t fathom what’s going on. So Connie said, ‘I had a shot at the Mayo Clinic and it grew my hair.’” (The hotel magnate was said to be so excited about his new look that he bizarrely commissioned his longtime society portrait painter, C. J. Fox, to paint his new head of hair on a number of existing portraits of him that hung in Hilton hotels.)
As for Nick’s situation, Connie had closed himself off. “That’s the only time I ever discussed Nick’s problems with anyone in the family,” states Trish. “I kept it all secret because Nick would have killed me if I told any of it to the family. They never tried to help before or after. I don’t know why. Connie ran from problems even though they involved his own flesh and blood. His thing was business and that’s all.”
The doctors advised Trish to go to court and have Nick committed if he continued to refuse treatment voluntarily. But Trish wouldn’t do it. She was fearful of the publicity and the impact it would have on her sons. Nick wouldn’t even consider Alcoholics Anonymous at that point. “There were so many doctors saying so many different things,” she says. “At the time I was twenty-eight years old. I had to make a huge decision about committing him and as it turned out I didn’t make the right decision.”
BECAUSE TRISH COULDN’T handle Nick anymore, she hired private male nurses to watch over him around the clock. She also gave Nick an ultimatum: unless he went into rehab, or was institutionalized, she declared she would divorce him.
To prove she was “deadly serious,” she put their house up for sale in early 1968 for $550,000, and a mention about the listing appeared in the Los Angeles Times in a story about the booming market in half-million-dollar homes. The article, which ran in March, said the house was for sale because Nick “was suddenly in the throes of a divorce.” (Within months, the Hiltons’ home was bought by the novelist Sidney Sheldon.)
The first time private duty nurse Elliott Mitchell, an African-American, arrived at the Hilton home, Nick was furious because Trish was hoping to have him admitted to the psychiatric ward at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He was refusing to leave the house, and
Mitchell couldn’t believe the scene he was witnessing.
“There was another nurse on duty, a little gay guy, and Nick realized he was gay and, man, that really upset him,” recalls Mitchell. “Nick had a belt and he was chasing the little guy around the room, and the little guy was jumping over a couch to get away from Nick, who was cussing and telling him he didn’t want to see him in the house anymore. He was calling him a ‘faggot.’”
Mitchell convinced the nurse to leave and attempted to calm Nick, who was out of control. “God damn it,” he told the nurse, “I’ll knock the shit out of you, too,” and came at him, fists flying. But Mitchell, a onetime boxer, ducked out of the way. Nick liked Mitchell’s moves, and the nurse was finally able to calm him down and convince him that hospitalization was best. Nick said he’d go peacefully only if the nurse stayed with him, which he promised to do.
At Cedars, though, there were more problems, at least at first. Nick was kept in a room in the psychiatric ward with two beds, one of them for Mitchell, who stayed with him around the clock. “We were in the room together and I told him something he was going to have to do and he said, ‘No goddamn nigger’s telling me what to do!’” Mitchell didn’t react, but said calmly, “‘If you want to call me nigger, call me Mr. Nigger, okay?’ And Nick just laughed so hard he cried, and after that the two of us got along.”
During his stay of a couple of weeks, Nick was counseled and given medication and came out much calmer. Mitchell said it was clear to him from long, soul-searching conversations with Nick that his depression, anger, and belligerence had to do with the Hilton family and, in particular, his brother.
“Nick was upset because his dad had put Barron Hilton in charge of the organization and Nick felt he should have been there, and this was driving him crazy,” states Mitchell. “His dad was always too busy all the time and never spent enough time with him. He felt they disrespected him in the family.”
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