House of Hilton

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  After Nick was discharged from the hospital, Mitchell took it upon himself to make contact with Barron, who invited the nurse to meet with him at Hilton headquarters. “I said, ‘Barron, you should get together with Nick and fix up all these differences you two are having because Nick’s not going to live too long.’ And he told me he wouldn’t do it. He said, ‘No, I can’t be around Nick because every time I see him he wants to fight with me.’ I told him, ‘There’s no way I would want to die and not be close to my brothers. For the life of me, I can’t see why you would let your brother die. He’s a Hilton and you should make up with him.’”

  When Mitchell got back to the house he found Nick on the sofa crying. “He was really sobbing. Barron had called him and Nick got upset after they talked.”

  For a time back at home Nick seemed stable. But then he went off the deep end again, and Trish, who had finally had it with him, ordered him out of the house. Nick moved to a split-level, hillside rental on Gloaming Way off of Coldwater Canyon. Trish sent a longtime trusted maid, Mary, to look after Nick and keep Trish informed of his condition. Meanwhile, she moved with her stepfather and mother temporarily into the home of Natalie Wood, who was away making a film. When Dean Martin heard that she had left Nick, he called and pleaded with her: “He can get better, but he needs you with him. Don’t do this to him,” she remembers him saying. But Trish had been advised by doctors that the only way to motivate Nick into getting help was by playing hardball. At one point Nick showed up to confront her into taking him back.

  “He waved this piece of paper at me, which was his will leaving me one dollar, and he said, ‘If you don’t go back with me I’m going to put this into effect.’ And I told him to shove it. I told him to put it in effect, that the money wasn’t why I had married him, and I really meant that.”

  Nick’s behavior grew worse, and the nurses were called back for around-the-clock duty. While giving Nick a bath, Elliott Mitchell felt the right side of Nick’s stomach area at the liver and noticed it was hard. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s got cirrhosis of the liver.’

  “One time I came to work and he was waving a gun—and in his state of mind he was pretty dangerous,” says Mitchell. “I went in the kitchen and said, ‘Mary, Nick’s in there with a gun. I don’t want to go in there with him like that.’ And she went in to his bedroom and said, ‘Mr. Hilton, give me the gun.’ And Nick said, ‘No, I’m not going to give it up.’ I couldn’t believe it, but she threw him on the floor and took the gun from him. He told her, ‘It ain’t loaded anyway.’”

  One afternoon Nick returned to the Gloaming Way house with two expensive new cars—a Cadillac Eldorado and a Buick Riviera. “He came in the house,” Mitchell recalls, “and he says, ‘Mary, I bought two new cars, which one do you want?’ And Mary said, ‘Nick, you ought to ask Mrs. Hilton about this.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m asking you.’ Mary went out and looked at the cars and chose the Buick.”

  Meanwhile, Nick was having secret conversations with his longtime friend, actor John Carroll, and revealed that he was planning to sue his father and brother.

  At the same time, Carroll was talking to members of the Hilton circle, such as Dr. Buckley and Eric Hilton, among others. In one such conversation Carroll asserted that Connie and Barron were “scared to death” of Nick. “The father won’t send him away,” Carroll observed, “because the father’s scared he’s going to come out and kill him, and so is Barron.”

  Upset at how Nick was acting, Carroll, in an apparent tough-love heart to heart, asked Nick what he stood for, what his principles were, and how he thought he got to be who he was.

  When Nick responded glibly, Carroll lashed into him: “Everything you’ve got your father gave you and everything you are your father gave you, from your name all the way down to the four hundred thousand dollars you just stashed away and the money that you’re getting ready to sue him for. You are nothing except what your father made you. And what did you do with what he made you? He handed you three hundred million dollars on a silver platter and you threw it back in his face.” (Trish Hilton says the $400,000 mentioned by Carroll had been placed in a hotel safe by Nick, but the money disappeared and she believes it was stolen.)

  Carroll told Nick that if he went ahead with his planned lawsuit, it would end their friendship. There was talk that if Nick sued, Connie would fight back. As a member of Carroll’s little circle pointed out, “[Connie] didn’t get to where he was playing hearts and gin rummy and shooting pool and playing golf like Nick.”

  In an effort to help Nick, Carroll invited his friend and prominent Los Angeles criminal and divorce attorney Arthur Crowley to consult with Nick. “John was very concerned and felt that Nick needed some kind of help from somebody he could trust,” says Crowley.

  Crowley had known Nick around town for years, usually seeing him at the Luau getting drunk back in the 1950s. The attorney thought of him as a “good-looking guy” who got the girls. But by the time Crowley went to meet with him at Carroll’s request sometime in late 1968, the Nick he remembered was in a terrible state. “I was shocked at how he looked,” says Crowley. “Nick was in bad shape. He didn’t look like he was going to live very long the day I saw him. He had burns all over his hands from falling asleep while he was smoking, that sort of thing. He was in the bedroom passed out and it was an hour or so before Nicky really woke up and came out to talk to me.

  “Nick needed help badly, but he didn’t get adequate treatment,” states Crowley. “It was my recommendation when I saw him that he be institutionalized to dry out. But he wouldn’t go. The day I saw him I don’t think he could put two and two together.”

  Crowley adds sadly, “Unfortunately, he left a lot of unpleasant memories for a lot of people.”

  CHAPTER 29

  At 9:30 on the morning of Wednesday, February 5, 1969, the telephone rang in Natalie Wood’s home. Trish, who was still living there, answered the phone and froze in horror. Nick’s accountant, Richard Cohen, informed her “fairly brutally” that Nick was dead.

  The onetime playboy of the Western world was just forty-two years old. “I never forgave both of them for that—Nick for dying, and Dick for calling me like that.”

  Despite her threatened divorce, Trish had visited Nick the night before, still pleading with him to seek help. There was nothing that indicated an impending death—nothing had changed emotionally or physically; he didn’t seem any better or any worse.

  In a state of shock, Trish got into her car to pick up her now fatherless sons, nine-year-old Conrad and seven-year-old Michael, at their Catholic school in Beverly Hills.

  Meanwhile, Nick’s closest and dearest chum, Bob Neal, was testing his new Maserati on the winding roads outside of Rome with his fiancée, Dolores Faith. Barron left a message for him at the Hilton Hotel, requesting Neal to return posthaste to be a pallbearer at his brother’s funeral. Barron had already arranged to hold a TWA flight to Los Angeles for the couple.

  Elliott Mitchell, the nurse, had just gotten home after a routine twelve-hour shift with Nick—everything had seemed as normal as normal could be with a patient like him—when he received a call from his relief nurse that “something was wrong.” He got in his car and headed back and on the way spotted a policeman whom he convinced to escort him because of the emergency situation.

  “When I got there Nick was on the floor in his bedroom and he was already dead.”

  Nick’s death certificate was signed by one Dr. Webster Marxer, who listed the cause of death as “cardiac arrest” due to, or as a consequence of, “probably coronary artery disease” and stated he had been Nick’s physician from September 1964 until the time of his death. He said he had last seen Nick two days before he died.

  Trish Hilton, however, contends that everything on the death certificate was a pack of lies, part of a cover-up by Connie to hide the truth from the public about Nick’s condition, that his consumption of pills and alcohol was what killed him. She said it all stemmed from the loss of
his job when the international division was sold behind his back.

  “Dr. Marxer was not Nick’s physician,” she maintains. “He was Connie’s doctor. I met Dr. Marxer once at a party, but he was never in our home. He never treated Nick.” (At the time of Nick’s death, Marxer was a “physician to the stars” and was medical adviser to MGM. Marxer died in 1985.)

  Trish also emphatically maintains that if Nick had been hospitalized for a heart condition, as Marxer claimed, she would have known about it from talking to Nick on the phone or visiting him almost daily after they split, or from the maid, Mary, who was regularly reporting back to her about Nick’s condition. Moreover, she says, “I’d never even heard that Nick had a heart problem, ever, in his entire life. As his wife, I certainly would have known.

  “It never got in the paper that Nick overdosed. His death was induced in the last three or four months of his life by drugs and drinking. I don’t think he did it on purpose. I don’t think he sat down at eight o’clock that morning and took twenty Seconals and alcohol, but who knows?”

  As far as she can recall, there was never an autopsy. Newspapers across the country reported Nick’s death, most stating that he died of a heart attack. However, there were reports that he had shot himself. United Press International, whose story appeared in hundreds of newspapers, also said Nick had been “ill about a month.” It also quoted an unnamed Hilton family spokesman as saying that Nick had recently returned from the hospital because of “a heart condition” and that it had worsened in recent days. The New York Daily News, which displayed parts of the UPI story across the top of page three, ran almost a full page of photos, showing Nick with Elizabeth Taylor, along with headshots of three of the “many beauties” he courted—Betsy von Furstenberg, Mamie Van Doren, and Terry Moore, along with “Nicky’s estranged wife,” Trish.

  Trish took over the funeral arrangements because, as she says, “none of the Hilton family came to my rescue. None. I will never know why Connie didn’t, except after spending ten years with him I realized he couldn’t deal with family issues. And so I was terribly angry at everyone—at Connie, at Barron, and I refused to talk to them, and they treated me like I had divorced Nick, like I was the divorced wife.”

  The night before the funeral, Trish, accompanied by Carole Doheny and Dolores Faith, went to church. “I spent an hour with Nick privately at eleven o’clock,” Trish remembers.

  A requiem mass was held the next day, a Saturday, when Nick usually was at home watching cartoons on TV. An estimated thousand people came to his funeral, a depressing scene with autograph hounds looking for celebrities. Elizabeth Taylor, whose looming presence was a part of Nick’s short and troubled adult life, was not among the mourners. However, just prior to his death, she had finally agreed to give Nick the annulment that he had been seeking for years, one that the Catholic Church secretly granted, influenced by Marilyn Hilton, Barron’s wife. “A contribution was also given to the church,” says Trish.

  Because of the rumors that her husband had committed suicide by gun, Trish wanted to show the world otherwise and arranged for an open casket, which required a special dispensation from the church that was arranged for by a friend.

  Connie Hilton came to the funeral of his firstborn son, but an angry Trish made her eighty-two-year-old father-in-law sit in the second row, right behind her. After the service, Connie wandered around looking for a ride to the cemetery. He approached a Los Angeles policeman and said, “Is there a car for me?” When the cop asked him if there should be, Connie responded, “I think so. I’m the father of the deceased.”

  Nick was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in the same family plot near his beloved mother, Connie’s first wife. Afterward Connie threw a huge wake at Casa Encantada. “Not one member of the family came to my house, except for close friends,” Trish recalls sadly. “People thought I had divorced Nick, or was divorcing him, so they blacklisted me. They had no idea what was going on in our household. So I sat with my twenty friends and had a glass of wine and a cigarette.”

  Pat Skipworth Hilton, Eric Hilton’s wife before their divorce and his remarriage, had dinner with Barron shortly after Nick had passed away. “I was being very frank with Barron, and I said, ‘You know what was wrong with Nick?’ He said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘You saw to it that he never had a chance to become president of the international division.’ He said, ‘I had nothing to do with that.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s what helped kill Nick, and he thought you did have something to do with it.’ I remember the day Nick died, Barron called me to tell me he’d passed away, and Barron said, ‘But he forgave me.’ I’ll never forget that because Barron never called me, and he called me to tell me that.”

  In his last will and testament, dated December 18, 1968, less than two months before his death, Nick, furious that Trish had separated from him and was threatening to divorce him, declared, “I have intentionally and with full knowledge omitted to provide for Patricia M. Hilton,” stating that she had “filed for the dissolution” of their marriage.

  Trish was shocked by the will. Years later she says, “Everything I did [the threatened divorce, the sale of their home] was really to get him to go and get help, and it turned around and bit me.”

  For no discernible reason, Elizabeth Taylor also got a mention. Nick noted in the first paragraph of his will that they had been formerly married and divorced, and no issues remained from their seven-month union. He left trusts for his two sons for their schooling, with monies to be divided when they reached the ages of twenty-five, thirty, and thirty-five. Eric Hilton was bequeathed fifty thousand dollars, and Nick appointed him guardian of his minor sons’ estate.

  Several years after Nick was dead and buried, Connie quietly acknowledged to Trish that the sale of the international division, which led to Nick’s decline and fall, “was one of the worst business deals” he had ever made.

  Ironically, in early 2006, Hilton Hotel Corporation’s stock spiked upward when it made a deal for more than $6 billion to essentially reacquire its international hotels from a British group.

  ALMOST FOUR YEARS to the day of Nick’s death, his friend, thirty-year-old Larry Doheny, committed suicide on Valentine’s Day, 1973. After suffering three heart attacks in one year, he had just come home from the hospital in an agitated state with prescriptions for Valium and sleeping pills. Carole Doheny, Trish’s best friend, was visiting with Marilyn Hilton, Barron’s wife, and called her home to see how her husband was feeling, but there was no answer. When she arrived home he was dead. “Larry just took all the sleeping pills, everything,” she says years later.

  About a week after her husband’s funeral, Carole was sitting with her young son, Sean, in front of the fire in the library of her Brentwood home on a dark and rainy afternoon when she received an unexpected caller—Conrad Hilton.

  “It was out of the blue,” Doheny recalls. “I always saw Connie in a group of people, or at a party, so it was strange having him in the house like that. He came in and he just stood there and stared at me and at my little boy and then my one-year-old toddled in and Connie didn’t say anything. I asked him to please sit down. I offered him a drink and he said no, and he just sat there. It was all very strange.

  “Then, after a while, he started to talk, and he spoke in a very low voice. He told me how sorry he was that Larry died, how horrible it was that he had left me with two small children. He said how hard it was for a father to lose a child.

  “And the more he talked I realized that he wasn’t talking about Larry after all. He was talking about Nick. He said Nick was the brightest of his children, and that he had been too hard on him. He actually said that Zsa Zsa told him many times that he was in competition with his own son, and he said, ‘I shouldn’t have always tried to compete with Nick.’ And that to me was one of the most telling things he could have ever said. It said it all because Nick was always trying to please him.

  “And then Connie put his hands up to his face and started crying. He stopped
for a moment, and he looked at my little boys, and he said he was sorry he never spent enough time with Nick, and then he started crying again, and my little boy went over to him and held his leg. He spent several hours there. We just sat there quietly. And then he left.

  “A few weeks later Trish called me and said, ‘Connie really likes you,’ and we joked about whether I should marry him, and then I could be her mother-in-law. It was the first time both of us had laughed in a long time.”

  THE MOST SUCCESSFUL, flamboyant, and scandalous hotelman in history had outlived his firstborn son by a decade.

  Barron had been running the company, but Connie still demanded respect from his son and received it. Tim Applegate, who had worked closely with both father and son from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s, recalls that after Applegate had private meetings with the old man, a concerned Barron would pull him aside and ask, “What did Dad want this morning? What’s he saying?” More often than not, Applegate says, the senior Hilton “was worried that somebody was manipulating the market. He would say, ‘The wolves are after us!’

  “He got to be a handful in his last years. He would show up at stockholders’ meetings and tell people that he was really in charge, not Barron, so Barron had to be careful and make sure his father didn’t jump up and start talking. He’d say, ‘It’s okay, Dad, everything’s in control here.’ A lot of people just kind of ignored Conrad at that point, but Barron showed respect, which wasn’t reciprocated. Conrad acted like you would expect the chairman of a corporation to act toward the president, and the fact that he happened to be the father of the president didn’t seem to matter.”

  A pioneering visionary and entrepreneur in business and an icon in public, an icy and eccentric man in private—but a true red, white, and blue American original—Connie Hilton died at 10 P.M. on Wednesday, January 3, 1979, three days after being admitted to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica with pneumonia. Long before he died, the name Hilton had become synonymous with the word hotel. Travelers the world over had begun saying “Take me to the Hilton.” At the time of his death, the Hilton banner flew over almost two hundred hotels and inns in the United States, and there were more than seventy in foreign lands.