The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty

by Taraborrelli, J. Randy

  In the end, Zsa Zsa picked the ring with the smaller diamond. “It nearly killed me,” she would confess many years later, “because God knows I wanted the bigger ring.” Conrad was pleased. “I knew you would pick that one,” he told her.

  “Does this mean you changed your mind about marriage?” Zsa Zsa asked hopefully.

  He smiled at her. “Yes. We will marry in two weeks, my dear,” he said.

  It wasn’t a proposal as much as it was a declaration. However, Zsa Zsa was thrilled with it just the same, and eagerly agreed to it. She said in a telegram to her mother that she was going to marry “a hotel manager. I will make a good life for myself now,” she declared. Eva still wasn’t convinced. When Zsa Zsa broke the news to her, she tried to be happy for her, but she wasn’t able to do so. “I know what you want, dear sister,” she said, according to her later memory, “and you will not find it with this man. Why? Because this is a cheap man,” she said. “Just because he has money this does not make him want to spend it on a woman. I am telling you, Conrad Hilton is not the man for you.”

  Zsa Zsa was willing to take a chance that her sister was wrong. Shortly thereafter, on April 10, 1942, she and Conrad were married at the Santa Fe Hotel in New Mexico. Despite any reservations she had about the union, Eva stood up for her sister at the ceremony. Lawyers Gregson Bautzer and G. Bentley Ryan, friends of Conrad’s who were there when the couple first met, were both present.

  Zsa Zsa was twenty-five; Conrad was fifty-five. They had known each other for less than four months.

  For Love or Money

  On the same day he and Zsa Zsa were wed, Conrad Hilton finally closed the deal to buy the Town House in Los Angeles. “I made a package deal,” he said, maybe only half joking about his double acquisitions. “I landed Zsa Zsa and the new hotel all on the same day!”

  Also around this time, in 1942, the lease on the Dallas Hilton had expired and Conrad decided not to renew it. It was difficult for him to let the Dallas property go, however, because he had so many good memories attached to the city. After all, it was the first hotel built from scratch to bear his name. But it wasn’t turning the kind of profit he wanted and there was little room for sentiment in business, at least as far as he was concerned.

  There was good news in Chicago, though. The day after the wedding ceremony, Conrad took Zsa Zsa to the Windy City, where he was about to close a deal to purchase the opulent Blackstone Hotel, which stood across Michigan Avenue from the Stevens Hotel. After the two admired the Blackstone, Conrad took Zsa Zsa across the street to the Stevens.

  A towering Beaux-Arts brick structure overlooking Lake Michigan, the Stevens had been opened in 1927 at a cost of $30 million (more than it had cost to build Yankee Stadium) by James W. Stevens. It was then operated by Stevens, his son Ernest, and other members of the Stevens family. At three thousand guest rooms and an equal number of baths, it was the largest hotel in the world, complete with its own hospital and operating room, movie theater, ice cream parlor, restaurants, pharmacy, beauty parlors, dry cleaners, bowling alley, miniature golf course (on the roof), and banquet facilities that could accommodate eight thousand guests at a time. As a result of the Depression, the hotel went bankrupt and the property ended up going into the receivership of the government. Conrad wanted nothing more than to own the hotel himself, but that wasn’t possible at the time, not with the government’s intention to sell the hotel to the United States Army Air Corps for $6 million later in 1942. The building would be converted into living quarters and instructional rooms for military training during World War II, with more than 10,000 cadets in residence.

  The hotel—the actual premises—now belonged to the Army, but the Stevens Corporation itself, its assets and its liabilities, was still up for grabs. It would be a solid investment for anyone smart enough to take it on, because when the war was over, the government was sure to let go of the hotel. Whoever owned the corporation would likely be first in line to buy the hotel itself. Of course, Hilton, with his gut intuition telling him that the war would soon end, wanted nothing more than the corporation behind the Stevens.

  The trustees of the corporation asked for blind, or sealed, bids, meaning that any interested party would have to make his offer without any knowledge of the others being made. Conrad came in at $165,000. However, his intuition told him that was a lowball bid; he couldn’t seem to shake that feeling. After thinking about it, praying over it, and listening to his gut, he submitted a new bid of $180,000. As fate would have it, he would end up being the highest bidder. Therefore, the corporation was his. However, any profit Conrad might make on a reinvigorated Stevens Hotel was still just a pipe dream. For now, he just owned a corporation that was in a lot of trouble—taxes were owed, bills left unpaid. He would do what he could do to keep it afloat until the Army was finished with the hotel, and then he knew it would be his.

  As Conrad and Zsa Zsa stood on Michigan Avenue looking up at the enormous Stevens Hotel, a cold wind came in from the lake, causing Conrad’s eyes to water. He looked at his new wife and, according to her memory, said, “I’m going to own that soon. Georgia, you watch. Before I’m finished, it’s going to be mine.”

  That night, Conrad and Zsa Zsa had a wonderfully romantic evening of dining and dancing in Chicago. Later, they made love for the first time. Zsa Zsa would recall Hilton as being “strong, virile and possessive.” Finally, she was his. After all the angst, the heartache, and deliberation, they had each other. It should have been a triumphant moment. For her it was; she was elated. She later wrote to her mother and told her that she was sure to be taken care of now. She had married a wealthy man, she said, and there was no way she would ever go without, “not as long as I am Mrs. Conrad Hilton.” She wrote that she loved him very much and was happy to have found someone who could love her in return, “and also provide for me in the way that you have always wanted for me.” So she had gotten what she wanted and was satisfied. To a certain extent, of course, Conrad was happy too, but to say that he was overjoyed would have been an overstatement. He was distracted, not present during this night in Chicago.

  As they lay in bed, Zsa Zsa whispered that she hoped they would be together for the rest of their lives, or at least that is her memory. “That blonde secretary of yours,” she said as she caressed his arm. “I don’t like her, Connie. I think she’s jealous of me. Would you fire her for me? I’m sure we could find you a better secretary.”

  He was preoccupied and not really listening. “Yes, dear,” he said. “Of course.”

  Zsa Zsa recalled, “In the silence, in the darkness, I whispered softly, ‘Conrad, what are you thinking?’ And I waited dreamily to hear him murmur, ‘Oh, my darling, I love you. I love you.’ ”

  But instead, Conrad was quiet, just staring up at the ceiling, lost in thought with a small smile on his face. Zsa Zsa couldn’t quite read his facial expression; it baffled her.

  “What are you thinking, dah-ling ?,” she asked.

  Conrad turned to his new bride and, at last breaking his silence, confessed, “By golly, Georgia! I’m thinking about that Stevens deal.”

  The Roosevelt

  In the spring of 1943, Zsa Zsa Gabor woke up one morning to find that Conrad Hilton was nowhere to be found. Though she searched from room to room, he was clearly gone. “Where is Mr. Hilton?” Zsa Zsa finally asked Wilson, Conrad’s majordomo. “Oh, he went to New York, ma’am,” Wilson answered. “But he didn’t even tell me he was leaving,” Zsa Zsa said, seeming crushed. The majordomo just shrugged. Zsa Zsa would later say that this was the first of many such occurrences—Conrad leaving town without so much as a goodbye. “Nothing hurt me more,” she would later admit. “I began to see clearly that he truly didn’t care about me as much as he did about his business.”

  Not that it was a good excuse to treat his wife so dismissively, but Hilton did have some rather important business in Manhattan.

  Back in the mid-1920s, Conrad had launched an ambitious campaign to acquire, build, and/or upgr
ade hotels in Texas, his adopted state. This included properties in Dallas, Waco, Abilene, Lubbock, San Angelo, Plainview, Marlin, and El Paso. At that time, the country’s economy was booming, which he viewed as favorable for further expansion beyond the Lone Star State. By organizing Hilton Hotels, Inc. in 1932, he consolidated his properties into one group. As his acquisitions increased in number, he kept itching to move into the big time, with an eye toward the urban Northeast, specifically New York City. Now he had his eye on the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan.

  By the time Conrad Hilton set his sights on the Roosevelt—named for President Teddy Roosevelt—it had been in business for nineteen years and had become a destination point for out-of-towners and notable figures from the worlds of society, politics, and show business. Located at 45 East 45th Street, it covered a city block along busy Madison Avenue. In speaking of the Roosevelt, Hilton referred to it as “this great hotel adjacent to Grand Central Station, half luxury, half commercial—a socialite, so to speak, with a working husband.” In his mind there was nothing more beautiful than a towering hotel with a roster of satisfied guests.

  Unfortunately, the hotel business in New York City was not booming in 1943, a consequence of the war and the Great Depression. But that situation was temporary. In the meantime, if there was any way to put together the capital to purchase hotel properties, Conrad’s gut told him to follow through and buy. One by one, with each acquisition, it became easier to put together the equity necessary for the next one.

  When Hilton acquired the 1,012-room Roosevelt Hotel in the spring of 1943 and announced the purchase to a close friend and business associate, his friend, J. B. Herndon, was only able to muster one word: “Why?”

  “Because it’s a fine hotel. And because I’ve got to practice,” responded Hilton.

  “What for?” Herndon wanted to know.

  “For the Waldorf,” said Hilton. “I’m not quite ready for that one yet.”

  Long before the term “multitasking” became part of our lexicon, it epitomized Hilton’s octopus-like juggling act, keeping several projects going at the same time. While immersed in the demanding responsibility of putting together the financing he needed to complete the Roosevelt transaction, he was also frantically continuing to buy stock in the Waldorf-Astoria, of which Wall Street took note when word got out about the killing he would make on that stock. He’d bought the stock at 4½ and sold it at 85. It was more like a massacre than a killing.

  If Mr. Herndon had his doubts about the wisdom of Conrad Hilton’s ownership of the Roosevelt, they were nothing compared to the shock sustained by the faithful habitués of the hotel. About this, Hilton once recalled, “It was scarcely flattering to have everyone assume that I would ride my horse into the lobby or install spittoons in the famous Roosevelt Grill, yet on every hand, I received communications in various forms begging me to deal gently with my newest lady.”

  While naysayers chuckled about “that jasper from Texas,” as it turned out, Conrad Hilton would have the last laugh. Under his guidance, the Roosevelt would be credited with an impressive list of firsts, changing forever the way hotels of the future would be operated: the first with baths in every room, the first to be air-conditioned, the first to incorporate storefronts instead of lounges (put in place to circumvent the law of Prohibition), and the first to install television sets in every room. He even chose the hotel’s Presidential Suite as his home base when in New York City, a sign of the high regard he had for the Roosevelt.

  When the deal was finally signed, Conrad called Los Angeles to talk to Zsa Zsa. It had been a week since they last spoke, not even a phone call since the day she woke up and found him gone. When she was cold and distant on the telephone, he didn’t understand her attitude. In his mind, he hadn’t done anything wrong. “You must realize that I have business to take care of and that I will sometimes have to leave to take care of it,” he told her. All she was asking, she said, was for him to at least inform her in advance when he was leaving town. Was that too much to ask? It was difficult for Conrad to understand Zsa Zsa’s concern. When he was married to Mary, he said, he would leave at a moment’s notice and she didn’t seem to mind. “But I am not Mary,” Zsa Zsa reminded him. “Don’t treat me as you would her.”

  Marriage: His

  The first order of business for Conrad Hilton after Zsa Zsa Gabor moved into his huge Spanish-style estate on Bellagio Road in Beverly Hills was to establish certain ground rules for their new life together.

  First on the agenda was Conrad’s declaration that he and Zsa Zsa would sleep in separate bedrooms. Of the four large bedroom suites in the home, Conrad and Zsa Zsa would have one each. Nicky and Barron shared another, and the fourth was for guests.

  Some people in his life found it perplexing that Conrad had spent so much time lamenting that Zsa Zsa couldn’t be his wife, yet the first thing he did when he finally married her was to install her in a bedroom down the hall. Zsa Zsa was deeply disappointed by this arrangement; she wanted to sleep in the same bed with her husband. To her, it seemed only logical. Though he knew she felt the sting of rejection, Conrad wouldn’t budge on the matter, explaining that he valued his privacy. He had been alone for so many years, he enjoyed his own routine and didn’t want it interrupted. Besides, he was admittedly bothered by nearly everything done by women in the name of beauty. He didn’t want his wife moisturizing her skin, doing her nails, or applying makeup in his presence. He found such rituals tedious and self-involved, and believed that a husband’s bearing witness to such personal maintenance only served to detract from his wife’s sex appeal. In the end, Zsa Zsa had no choice but to acquiesce to his wishes. “Conrad wasn’t the type to share a room with a woman,” she would later observe.

  As a small consolation, Conrad gave Zsa Zsa license to redecorate her own enormous bedroom suite with its stunning view of the golf course in any way she saw fit. In that regard she went wild with expensive fabrics and pieces of furniture she later said were inspired by Gone with the Wind. Once she finished with her own suite, she eagerly began working on other rooms in the house. The only room she didn’t have plans to totally redecorate was Conrad’s, and that was because she was banned from entering it. It was inevitable, then, that the money she was spending on new furnishings would lead to a serious conversation about the household budget.

  Conrad fully understood that Zsa Zsa enjoyed spending money, and he certainly had a lot of it to spend. The question for him wasn’t whether or not he could afford to subsidize her extravagant taste, it was whether or not it made sense to him. He quickly realized that Zsa Zsa didn’t understand the value of money, or at least his interpretation of the value of money. He had worked hard for his wealth and continued to work for it. What did she do to earn a living? Nothing, really. Sometimes Zsa Zsa spoke of wanting to be an actress, but she didn’t seem to have much drive or ambition in that direction.

  “Being Mrs. Conrad Hilton, this is my career and sanks God for it,” she told her friend Andrew Solt. “I meant it, too,” she would later recall. “I was satisfied to be the wife of an important man who was growing more important every day, to help him in his career, to run his home graciously, and to take my place in the society in which he lived.”

  To be fair, Conrad didn’t expect her to do much else. He was perfectly satisfied if she just wanted to be a socialite, especially since she clearly wasn’t going to be taking a motherly role with Nicky and Barron. However, he was only going to finance so much of her time in high society, and after he took a look at the books and realized how much she was spending, he pulled the plug on her redecorating efforts.

  “But, Connie! I’m not done yet,” she complained. “Oh, yes, my dear, you are,” he told her.

  The question of finances would always be at issue in Conrad’s relationships with others, especially with family members. To him, it was a simple, black-and-white matter. He had earned his money fair and square, and he wasn’t giving it away to anyone, even to family members. Some would sa
y that he was incredibly cheap. In his own mind, however, that wasn’t the case. Privately (never publicly, for he was too modest to do so), as proof of his generous nature he would offer up the names of the many charities to which he regularly donated. Would a cheap man be so philanthropic? He had few limits when it came to giving money to charities, especially to Catholic aid organizations. However, when it came to family members, as well as friends, he believed that they—all of them—should demonstrate a work ethic similar to his own, earn their own way, and not expect to benefit from his own station in life. Moreover, he felt it wasn’t even fair to them to give them money. His financing of their lives would, he felt, be detrimental to them in the long run, eroding any motivation they might have to achieve wealth on their own, and also diminish their appreciation for the value of the dollar.