The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty

by Taraborrelli, J. Randy

  Since childhood, the Gabors had been schooled on various kinds of seduction, and Zsa Zsa used her charm to weave a bit of a spell on Mary Hilton. A great storyteller even in her youth, Zsa Zsa told Mary many tales about her own mother, Jolie, and how much she missed her. She also talked about her family’s many struggles in Budapest. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi storm troopers had begun their onslaught for world domination in the mid-1930s, and it was feared by the Jewish Gabors that they would be among those targeted for concentration camps. Thus far, the war had not affected Hungary, and the Gabors were still doing quite well in their many enterprises, including jewelry and dress shops. They had a good life in Budapest, but it was limited, and as Zsa Zsa explained, that’s why Jolie encouraged her and Eva to go to America. She missed her family desperately, Zsa Zsa said, and wrote letters to them on a daily basis. It was clear that she loved them very much.

  Zsa Zsa also explained that her sister Magda was presently working in the anti-Nazi underground in disguise as a Red Cross worker, helping Polish prisoners of war make their way to Egypt to join General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army. She was deathly afraid that Magda would be discovered and killed, and she said the thought of it haunted her every waking hour. Such emotional stories, and Zsa Zsa’s heartfelt telling of them, tugged at Mary Hilton’s heartstrings. Soon she would be referring to Zsa Zsa affectionately as “that dear girl.”

  “In turn, Mary shared with Zsa Zsa stories of the Hilton family’s early struggling days and their own humble beginnings, their first businesses, the gambles they had taken and the way those risks ultimately paid off for them,” recalled one Hilton family member.

  On the whole, Mary Hilton approved of Zsa Zsa Gabor. However, she warned Conrad that if he intended to take Zsa Zsa as his wife, he should reconsider. “And you know why,” Mary Hilton told her son. “You will never be able to marry this girl,” she told him. “So get that thought right out of your head, Connie. Get it right out of your head!”

  Catholic Stumbling Block

  The church will not let me marry Zsa Zsa,” Conrad Hilton was saying, “and I’m not sure what to do about it.” The hotel mogul had called an urgent meeting in the study of his Bel-Air mansion to discuss what was turning out to be a major stumbling block in his relationship with Zsa Zsa Gabor. Nicky, nineteen, was present for this confab, as were several business associates and a priest, Father Lorenzo Malone, who was also a trusted friend of Conrad’s and a fellow golf enthusiast. According to the later recollection of one of those present at the meeting, Conrad seemed nervous and uneasy, and with good reason.

  There were a couple of major concerns on the table. First of all, Zsa Zsa Gabor was not Catholic, or at least that’s how it appeared to most people at the time. “I accept the teachings of the Catholic Church,” she said, “and then I ignore them and do what I want.” Hopefully, she was joking. Actually, she said that her mother was Jewish but that her father had converted to Catholicism. However, she couldn’t prove it, and frankly, no one knew whether to believe her or not; the declaration seemed to come out of the blue one day during a discussion with Conrad about her religious background. It was at about this time that Conrad came to the realization that he couldn’t necessarily rely on Zsa Zsa to be truthful. His gut now told him she was fibbing about a vitally important issue, her religion. In time, he would find that honesty meant little to her; a good story meant everything.

  Actually, the question of Gabor’s faith was not an insurmountable problem. Even though the Catholic Church at the time did not encourage so-called mixed marriages, such unions were still possible if performed by a priest not in the church but in the rectory, and also if the non-Catholic party agreed to raise all children as Catholics. A much bigger problem for Conrad in marrying Zsa Zsa was that the Catholic Church did not recognize the divorce from his first wife, Mary Barron. Therefore, as far as the church was concerned, he was still married to Mary. Any subsequent marriage would not be acknowledged by the church.

  For Conrad, this stringent Catholic doctrine presented a major moral and spiritual dilemma. If he wanted to take Zsa Zsa as a wife, he would have to be married in a civil ceremony that would not be sanctioned by the church. He would then have to live with the consequences, which would include his not being able to partake in the Catholic Church’s sacraments such as Holy Communion and Reconciliation (better known as Confession). Hilton was devout in his faith; would he be able to live with the idea of being so ostracized by the church? No. It was inconceivable. Therefore, to try to come to terms with the problem at hand, Conrad had called this meeting at his home.

  “So, what do you gentlemen think of this?” he asked

  “I think you have no choice in the matter,” Father Malone offered. “You can’t go against the church, Connie.”

  “I admit that I’m just not used to being told no,” Conrad admitted. “But that’s not it entirely. This is just an exploratory meeting anyway,” he added, framing it almost as he would a business deal.

  “Well, I suppose a canonical dispensation might be possible,” offered Father Malone.

  Conrad raised his eyebrows. “Is such a thing even possible?” he asked. No one in the meeting knew for certain, but they quickly decided it was as good an idea as anyone could come up with under the circumstances.

  “I don’t know,” the priest concluded. “It seems far-fetched, but maybe worth a try.”

  “Would you try?” Conrad asked the priest. “All I ask is that you at least see what can be done.”

  Father Malone said he would try.

  Conrad Breaks the News to Zsa Zsa

  The granting of a canonical dispensation simply so that a person who would otherwise not be entitled to do so could marry in the Catholic Church was almost never granted in those days. After Vatican II convened in the 1960s, such dispensations became more commonplace. But in the 1940s, it was practically unheard of. However, when Conrad met with certain officials of the church in Los Angeles, he was led to believe that his charitable contributions to the church might be so appreciated that there would possibly be a way to work around the red tape involved in a dispensation. Certainly, he had given huge sums of money to the church, and in 1940 he had donated more than $50,000 to Catholic charities—a staggering amount for the time. Therefore, Hilton left his meeting with the church officials hopeful that something could be worked out that would allow him to marry in the Catholic Church. He was elated. He knew there had to be some way around this matter. There was always a way, always an alternative—at least that had been his experience in life.

  But then a week later Conrad received a telephone call from a friend of his, Father Kelly, telling him that there was not enough time to file the necessary paperwork if he wanted to marry in April, as he had said he did. Moreover, upon closer investigation, even if he delayed the wedding, it was unlikely that a dispensation would be possible.

  The next morning, Conrad and Zsa Zsa took a walk through one of the lush gardens of his estate, just one of many that were filled with an abundance of vivid flowers planted in herbaceous borders. It was a sunny day with a bright blue sky that was lightly scattered with white clouds. “My dear, there’s something I must tell you,” he began.

  “What is so wrong?” Zsa Zsa asked. Catching the tension in his voice, she knew it was bad news.

  “It saddens me to say it,” Conrad told her in a faltering tone, “but this is as far as we will be able to go in our relationship.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t marry you,” Conrad explained. “It simply isn’t possible.” As she listened, Conrad detailed for her the laws of the Catholic Church relating to mixed marriages and, more specifically, explained that as long as his first wife, Mary, was alive, he was still married to her in the eyes of the church; their divorce was not sanctioned.

  “But is there nothing that can be done?” Zsa Zsa asked. As she spoke, according to her memory, she bent over to admire a batch of colorful flowers rather than allow Conrad to
see the tears of disappointment that had sprung to her eyes.

  “No,” he said firmly. “I’m sorry, Georgia. We can’t get married.”

  The silence between them deepened. “Then I must go,” she finally decided, never once looking at him directly.

  “Please, let me show you the way,” he offered.

  “That won’t be necessary,” she responded. “I know the way.” With that, she rushed off.

  Once Zsa Zsa left his home, Conrad made up his mind that he would never see her again. Now, with her out of his life for good, he was engulfed by conflicting emotions. He couldn’t help but be glad the matter had finally been settled, and in some ways he felt about it as he might have a hotel deal that couldn’t be consummated. He was ready to move on to the next big deal. He had actually caught her in a number of small lies since her sudden revelation that her father had converted to Catholicism. For instance, he had become fairly certain that she’d lied about her age, saying she was eighteen when she was twenty-four. Later, she would say she was just sixteen when she met Conrad. It’s safe to say that he would never know her true age. Still, women were known to lie about their ages all the time, he reasoned, and perhaps this was not a big deal. But Conrad had a strong moral compass. He liked to say that he never lied. Of course, that likely was not the case, but he did at least strive for honesty.

  Was he in love with her? It had been so many years, to hear him tell it, that Conrad wasn’t even sure he remembered what love felt like. However, he was fifty-five, and with this latest loss in his life, he began to sense his mortality like never before. For him, the big question was: Did he really want to be alone for the rest of his life? And if not, what were the chances he would ever find someone like Zsa Zsa Gabor again?

  PART TWO

  Mary

  The First Mrs. Hilton

  It had been almost twenty years since Conrad Hilton felt about a woman the way he felt for Zsa Zsa Gabor. That he had an eye for the ladies as a young man, there is ample evidence. He had enthusiastically embraced the Santa Fe social whirl of balls, cotillions, and debutante parties when he was a young legislator, and was a much sought-after dancing partner for some of the city’s most beautiful young women.

  When Conrad was posted in Paris during the First World War, a safe distance from the front lines as a first lieutenant in the Army Supply Corps, he was a popular, striking figure in his bespoke uniform, with lovely young ladies in tow along the Champs-Elysées’ bistros and boîtes, a boulevardier in the tradition of the great Maurice Chevalier. A devout Catholic, however, Hilton seemed to wear his religion on his sleeve, leading many to wonder if that was not the reason he’d managed to avoid a trip to the altar. It was almost as if he had decided that the ladies he sought were more suited to the ballroom than the bedroom. To many of his friends and associates, it seemed that he used the church as a shield against romantic commitment.

  Fittingly, it was at church in Dallas that he first spied the woman who would soon end his days as a bachelor. Seated down front in the crowded sanctuary, she was conspicuous by the dark crimson hat she was wearing. Following the service, he lost her in the crush of people despite attempts to follow the red chapeau down the street, hoping the woman wearing it would lead him to her home. As he wrote in his autobiography, “There was something about the way she wore the hat, the way she carried her head that was attractive.”

  Having lost sight of the distinctive hat and its owner, Hilton wrote, “For a month of Sundays I amazed that congregation with my piety. I attended every mass from six ’til noon. But I didn’t see her again.” Then, while wrestling with the growing problems of trying to raise funds to build the Dallas Hilton, he was taking a stroll one day to clear his head when he encountered her, wearing a different hat and accompanied by an acquaintance of his, Mrs. Beauregard Evans, who made the introductions. “This is Mary Adelaide Barron,” she said, “a relative of ours from Owensboro, Kentucky.”

  At the time, Mary Adelaide Barron—born in Kentucky on April 27, 1906—was a stern, serious-looking woman with strong bone structure and a robust frame. Her long, chestnut-colored hair was usually parted in the middle and pulled primly into a bun, just like the style worn by Conrad’s mother—a woman whose name she also shared. She bore a distinct resemblance to Mary Hilton. At just eighteen, about half Conrad’s age, she wasn’t exactly eye-catching, but the camera didn’t capture her full personality and charm. In reality Mary was a handsome young woman with expressive blue eyes, a small nose, thin lips, and a bright smile. Hilton recalled, “For a while everything took a back seat to the girl with the laughing eyes and soft Kentucky voice.” Still, hers was a different background than Hilton’s.

  Mary was educated at Owensboro High School, though some family members have said that she didn’t graduate. Her family (six brothers and two parents) was poor and moved about a great deal from one ramshackle farmhouse to another. Her father, Thomas Barron, raised tobacco and pigs for a meager living. Seeming undaunted by her lot in life, however, Mary Barron had an ebullient personality, often using salty language as she enjoyed her life to the fullest with many good friends.

  “Conrad saw Mary as the kind of fun girl who could add levity to his dry lifestyle, which was all about high finance and complex business dealings,” said Stanley Tucker, whose mother was a good friend of Mary’s, having grown up with her in Owensboro. Tucker would become a close friend of Conrad’s as well.

  Before Mary left Dallas, she promised that when the hotel was complete she would return and marry Conrad. (As a sentimental gesture, she also gave him her red hat.) Once she was back, Hilton began to see his financial problems, which had once seemed insurmountable, begin to resolve themselves one by one. Breathing more easily now, he took off for Atlanta, where Mary Barron was visiting. After ten days, their pact to marry was sealed, and he returned to Dallas for the August 4, 1925, grand opening of the first hotel he had ever built from scratch, the Dallas Hilton. The hotel was a smash hit from day one. Forty-five days later, on October 19, Conrad Nicholson Hilton, thirty-eight, and Mary Adelaide Barron, nineteen, were married simply at a six o’clock mass at Holy Trinity Church in Dallas.

  After the ceremony and bridal breakfast, Conrad took his new wife on a sightseeing tour of America, from Texas to Colorado, then on to California, where he introduced Mary to San Francisco, “whose elegant beauty had captured my imagination as a young army officer.” Then they were off to Canada and down to Illinois, next stop Chicago, “for I wanted Mary to see another kind of American city, a swarming, hustling, commercial city that could also stir the imagination.” At the LaSalle Hotel in Chicago, the Hiltons found a long line of frustrated tourists and businessmen attempting to check in to the popular and clearly overbooked establishment. Conrad, hoping to impress his new bride, whipped out a business card from his wallet and handed it to a bellboy. Before he knew it, he and his wife found themselves in a luxury room on a top floor with a stunning panoramic view of the city. Being Conrad N. Hilton, president of Hilton Hotels, had its advantages.

  Upon returning to Texas, the newlyweds moved into one of Dallas’s finest residences, the ultra-chic, eleven-story Beaux-Arts apartment-hotel the Stoneleigh Court. Some nine months later, they would become a family with the birth on July 6, 1926, of a son, Conrad Nicholson “Nicky” Hilton Jr. “If I listened to my wife, little Nick was something special,” he would recall. “Actually I kind of thought so myself. He was not unduly red, had big eyes, curly hair and was quite a howler.”

  “Connie was so proud to have a boy,” recalled Jarrod Barron, a cousin of Mary’s who also became a close friend of Conrad’s. “He wanted a son so badly. Nicky was his pride and joy from the beginning. Seeing him with that baby was something I will never forget. Mary used to say, ‘God help me if I would have had a girl. I don’t know how Connie would have reacted!’ ”

  With the prospect of further increasing the family and a need for more room, the Hiltons bought a lovely four-bedroom home in the exclusive Da
llas suburban residential community of Highland Park. Fifteen months after the birth of Nicky, they welcomed, on October 27, 1927, another son, William Barron Hilton, increasing the family to four. “Double trouble was what Connie called them,” said Jarred Barron. “When Barron was born, he was over the moon with happiness. It was a good time, for sure.”

  Business Affairs

  Fatherhood in no way impeded Conrad Hilton’s ambitious quest to become America’s foremost innkeeper. Before the end of the 1920s, he was well ahead of his goal of acquiring at least one hotel a year. “Besides Dallas, Abilene, and Waco,” he recalled, “I had added Marlin (eight stories, one hundred rooms, costing $400,000), Plainview (eight stories, one hundred rooms, costing $400,000), San Angelo (fourteen stories, 40 rooms, costing $900,000), and Lubbock (twelve stories, two hundred rooms, costing $800,000).” Meanwhile, a family tragedy struck when Conrad’s younger brother “Boy” (Gus Jr.) was struck down with tuberculous meningitis. His death rocked the family, and Conrad, of course, took it badly, saying he had lost his best friend. He did his best to support his siblings—and especially his grieving mother—through the loss and distracted himself with his work. Through it all, Mary proved herself a devoted mother, capably caring for their sons and pursuing her wifely duties, pressing Conrad’s suits and baking his favorite dishes, such as tuna casserole. However, by the fall of 1929, storm clouds began to gather. It would seem that the stock market crash and the Great Depression signaled the end not only of Hilton’s fortunes, as earlier noted, but also his marriage.

  These were tough times, to be sure, and Conrad would be forced to take desperate measures in order to keep the wolves from the door. To that end, he began spending a great deal of time away from home, often in late-night meetings with board members, reviewing financial records and trying to come up with imaginative ways to remain solvent. At one point, matters became so dire that he considered borrowing against his life insurance policy. “Of course, you must do it,” Mary advised him. “This bad spell will not last forever,” she said, echoing his own philosophy. “And when it’s over, you will come out on the other side bigger and better than ever.” It was good to know, he thought, that he and his wife were in such accord, that she still had so much faith in him. Therefore, he borrowed against the policy and used the money to stay afloat, going from hotel to hotel and doing what he could in terms of cutting corners, leaving Mary at home with the children. It says a lot, though, that as happy as Mary was that he took her advice, she was unhappy when he didn’t show up one night soon after to be a fourth for bridge. Little things meant a lot to her, and his absence was just further evidence to her that he had other things on his mind.