The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty

by Taraborrelli, J. Randy

  Meanwhile, in the summer of 1944, while Zsa Zsa was in Washington and Conrad in Texas on business—his sons Nicky and Barron were at military school—a devastating fire broke out at the Hilton mansion. Unfortunately, it was Zsa Zsa’s wing that suffered the most damage—all of her precious photo albums, letters from her parents, and other prized possessions were lost to the blaze. Even more upsetting, the family’s German police dog, Ranger, with whom Zsa Zsa had become particularly close, perished in the fire. “We will rebuild, of course,” Conrad told reporters. “But much of what has been lost, my wife will never be able to replace.” Understandably, Zsa Zsa took the tragedy to heart, finding symbolism in that it had been primarily her wing that had been destroyed, and not the rest of the house. In her mind, the fire seemed like nothing if not a metaphor for her marriage, as if her life with Conrad was going up in flames.

  When it seemed matters couldn’t get much worse for her, Zsa Zsa’s luck finally took a turn for the better when she and Eva were introduced to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Hull promised that he would do what he could to help get Zsa Zsa’s family out of Hungary. He then urged her and Eva to go to New York to rest, telling them they had done all they could in Washington. In truth, he was alarmed by Zsa Zsa’s appearance; she looked unwell and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Zsa Zsa called Conrad to tell him that she was going to be in New York, and asked that he meet her there so that they could discuss their marriage. He agreed.

  He Never Should Have Done It

  Unfortunately for Conrad Hilton, as soon as he arrived in New York, he came down with the flu. Because he was so sick, he was forced to stay in a suite at the Plaza with Zsa Zsa, something he hadn’t planned on doing. It was this twist of fate that would precipitate a final showdown between the unhappy couple.

  While he was sick in bed, Conrad was forced to sit and watch as Zsa Zsa spent most of her day dressing and undressing for the day’s big events—namely breakfast, then lunch, then tea, followed by what Conrad would derisively call “the main event,” dinner. He couldn’t believe how much time she spent putting on makeup, styling her hair, and trying on one glamorous outfit after another, then switching back and forth between all sorts of expensive jewelry, for the look most appropriate for each meal. “It took me by surprise to once again discover that beauty can be a full-time affair,” he later recalled. He said that all of her many beautifying processes rather reminded him “of the rite of an ancient Aztec temple.” With nothing else to do with his time, watching Zsa Zsa indulge herself became almost an obsession. It was like witnessing a bad train accident; he couldn’t quite take his eyes off it.

  Perhaps Zsa Zsa’s self-indulgent behavior stung Conrad all the more because he had just recently established the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, through which his charitable and philanthropic endeavors would now be channeled. A great deal of time and discussion was going into making decisions as to which charities would benefit from Hilton’s largesse—and meanwhile, here was his wife, totally involved in herself and in her self-indulgent lifestyle. His hardworking mother, Mary, also came to mind, and how completely different she was from Zsa Zsa in values and priorities. Comparing the two women just made Zsa Zsa seem all the more superficial and silly. It appeared to him that his wife knew the cost of everything but the value of nothing. Eva had lately been suggesting that Zsa Zsa might try a career in show business, and Conrad had to agree with her. At least then maybe she could earn her own money and he might have some respect for her. As it stood now, he pretty much had no respect for her at all. She knew it, too.

  Because there was a party on their schedule that was to be thrown in honor of the governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey, the Hiltons had a choice to make: either stay at the hotel and try to tolerate each other, or go to the party and surround themselves with plenty of distraction. Even though he was sick, Conrad felt the party would be their best option. Of course, Zsa Zsa was game. She could always put aside any stress for a good party; plus, as she recalled it, she viewed the event as an opportunity to once again show Conrad that she could be an asset to him. She was a gorgeous woman at his side, a beautiful wife who was the envy of all of his colleagues; surely that had to count for something. And if there was one thing she knew how to do, it was to be social.

  Conrad washed his face, donned a white shirt and jacket, black bow tie and pants, and was ready in about fifteen minutes. He then spent the next two hours waiting for Zsa Zsa to make her entrance.

  Zsa Zsa finally emerged from the bedroom, a stunning vision in passionate red. She wore her slinky, formfitting crimson beaded gown—slit way up one side to show ample leg—as if she was born to wear it, as if there was no reason for it ever to have been made if not to adorn her curvaceous body. She also wore a small diamond tiara in her hair, which was no longer red but dyed blonde now. A pair of silvery starburst rhinestone earrings and matching brooch given to her by Conrad as a gift completed the perfect picture of 1940s glamour. Her hard work done, Zsa Zsa proudly stood before her husband for final inspection. “So, what do you sink?” she asked, spinning around a couple of times for him.

  Conrad sized her up from head to toe. “I’m just wondering how much this has cost me,” he said.

  Zsa Zsa was speechless. She had spent hours getting ready for him, and that was his response? It made her angry, and he knew it. “Oh, you look beautiful, my dear,” Conrad said, brushing her concerns aside. “But you always look beautiful. Can we please just go now?”

  The evening went downhill from there.

  The party at the Waldorf-Astoria was packed with New York socialites and a sprinkling of celebrities such as the actress Loretta Young and Zsa Zsa’s sister Eva. However, it was Zsa Zsa Gabor Hilton who stood out from the rest in a gown that could not be overlooked. Conrad kept to himself, clearly not well, speaking to a few people. Because he had unknotted his tie, he seemed uncharacteristically disheveled, even in his natty white jacket. For her part, Zsa Zsa played the role of wealthy socialite wife to the hilt. It’s what she did best, after all, her entire identity wrapped up in the being of Mrs. Conrad Hilton. “Pink champagne,” she was heard saying, “we need much more pink champagne! Everyone drink up!”

  “It’s a great party, isn’t it?” Eva asked her sister at one point. “Just think of all of the money in this room.”

  Actually, the thought had already crossed Zsa Zsa’s mind. Looking around at all the well-heeled people in her midst, she wondered aloud if one could ever truly be rich enough. “And then I think to myself, no, you can never be rich enough, ever,” she said, laughing. “Sanks God there’s enough money to go around for everyone in America! Sanks God!”

  Though Zsa Zsa did everything she could think of to cover for the fact that her husband was not at his best, Conrad didn’t seem to appreciate it. Mostly he acted as if she was on his nerves. “What’s the best scotch you have?” he asked a waiter, seeming distracted.

  As soon as they got back to their suite, the Hiltons, predictably enough, had a terrible row. “I tried,” Zsa Zsa told Conrad, according to what she would recall. She told him that she had done her part; she had been a good wife and partner at his side. Everyone loved her, she said. Everyone, that is, but Conrad. “You were the only one at that party who was not in love with me,” she charged. He apologized, saying he wasn’t feeling well. He left the room, changed out of his suit, and, according to her memory, returned wearing a short white terrycloth robe. He then sat down before her and began to smoke a cigar. “Let’s just drop this thing until tomorrow morning,” he suggested in a pleading tone.

  Still dressed in her slinky red gown, Zsa Zsa paced back and forth before him, clearly not ready to let it go. “And then you send someone else—a priest!—to tell me that you want to divorce me?” she asked, now seeming to want to explore other areas of contention. “You send a priest?”

  Conrad was speechless. In a boardroom, he certainly knew how to be confrontational when just such a moment presented itself. But in a marriag
e? No. Mostly, he didn’t have the kind of passion for Zsa Zsa that it would have taken to work himself into the sort of furious lather that could even come close to matching her own. Not only that, but by his own admission, this was not a good day for him. Therefore, he just sat on the couch puffing on his Cuban and taking everything she had to dish out, all the while looking chagrined about it.

  And so what if I want to look pretty?” she continued to rage as she stalked about the room. “So what? What have you ever done to make me feel wanted?”

  He still couldn’t find the words to respond. To her, it must have seemed as if there was nothing she could do to enrage him. What could she do to bring forth some passion from this man? It must have seemed useless to her.

  “How could you do this to me?” Zsa Zsa continued, now facing him, her eyes blazing and her Hungarian temper on full, explosive display. “If you didn’t want to marry me,” she concluded bitterly, “you shouldn’t have done it, Connie. You just should not have done it!”

  He certainly couldn’t argue with her there. Now, perhaps, more than ever, he likely realized that he never, ever should have done it.

  What Would It Take?

  After the big fight with Zsa Zsa in New York, Conrad immediately checked in to another suite of the Plaza. A few days later, he left the city and flew back to Los Angeles. By telephone, he then told Zsa Zsa that he was done with the marriage. There were a number of reasons for his decision. First of all, the religious conundrum having to do with his divorce from Mary had never really been reconciled in his mind. Also, that he now viewed Zsa Zsa as being shallow and self-involved did nothing to enhance her image in his eyes. Of course, his preoccupation with his work also figured into the equation. Hilton would later admit in his memoir that he preferred negotiating with businessmen for new hotels to negotiating with Zsa Zsa for ways to continue their marriage. Therefore, if she didn’t file for divorce, he would do it. After all she had been through with him, she said, the last thing she wanted was for him to file against her. “I’ll do it,” she said, “and happily.” After she did so, a property settlement and separation agreement was entered into on November 3, 1944, that saw to it that Zsa Zsa would receive $2,083.33 a month.

  After Zsa Zsa returned to Los Angeles, Conrad tried to go his separate way from her. She made it difficult, though. He put her up in a suite at the Town House, but she was on the telephone with him constantly, arguing with him about one thing or another about the way things had gone between them. He kept giving her money in an attempt to assuage his own guilt, but it was never enough. She wanted more and she felt she deserved it, even though they had a separation agreement in place. There were some months when he would give her as much as $5,000 in the hope that she would just stop pestering him, but it never worked. As if out to prove the old adage that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, she continued her verbal assaults on a nearly daily basis, seemingly determined to make him as miserable as she felt he had made her.

  One day, Conrad received a telephone call from a close friend who told him that he had seen Zsa Zsa with another man at the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank. Together, they looked cozy in the commissary, holding hands—or so Conrad was told—and even sharing a kiss or two. Was Zsa Zsa having an affair?

  Since she was officially separated from Conrad, it would seem that she had a right to do whatever she pleased; at least that’s how most people might have viewed it. Not Conrad, though. He had his attorney hire a private detective and put him on her trail, following her for about a week. Sure enough, according to the attorney’s recollection of events, the report came back that Zsa Zsa was involved with a successful movie studio executive. The private detective told the lawyer he believed he even caught Zsa Zsa with the executive in the man’s cream-colored Mercedes-Benz convertible late one night, parked in an empty lot behind the studio. He produced a series of black-and-white photographs that, though shadowy, seemed to suggest that something was going on in that vehicle between Zsa Zsa and the studio exec. He also said that afterward, the two seemed to be arguing. The man suddenly bolted from the car and stormed down a nearby street into the darkness. Meanwhile, Zsa Zsa put her head on the steering wheel and appeared to sob uncontrollably.

  “Get out of here right now,” the attorney hollered at the detective. The notion that Zsa Zsa had been intimate with someone in an automobile genuinely upset Hilton’s lawyer. “What the hell kind of a person are you, saying this about Mr. Hilton’s wife? Even if it’s true, you don’t say that about a man’s wife! What’s wrong with you?”

  “But that’s what you paid me for,” the detective said. He was dismayed, and, it could be argued, with good reason. What kind of news did the attorney expect from him, if not of the good and grimy variety? He had trailed Zsa Zsa every day for a week, he said, and he had much more to report. “That lady ain’t no lady,” he concluded. “Put it that way.”

  “Just get out of here,” said the attorney as he slammed the door behind the private eye.

  The lawyer decided not to give Conrad the lurid details or the photographs, just the information that his wife was likely involved with someone, and that maybe it wasn’t going so well. When told this, Conrad decided to confront Zsa Zsa. He immediately raced to her suite at the Town House, and in front of a number of people, including a woman who was Zsa Zsa’s personal secretary at the time, Lena Burrell, he laid it on the line with her. “Are you having an affair with some studio guy?” he demanded to know. “Tell me the truth this instant.”

  “Oh my God!” Zsa Zsa exclaimed, sizing him up. “You’re an absolute wreck,” she said. She suggested that he pour himself a brandy to calm his nerves. But he didn’t need a drink, he told her. What he needed was an answer to his question: “Are you or are you not having an affair?”

  “Of course not,” Zsa Zsa said.

  “She seemed unfazed by the question,” recalled Lena Burrell of her employer. “I recall that she was formally dressed in a white strapless evening gown, prepared for a night on the town at Ciro’s. She went into her purse, pulled from it her lipstick and compact, and began to apply the cosmetic, all the while looking into the mirror with what I think could only be described as the greatest of affection. This drove Conrad crazy. She once told me that nothing bothered him more.”

  “Must you do that now?” Conrad asked.

  “What’s it to you?” she remarked, still looking into the mirror rather than at him.

  “One more time,” he said. Then, punctuating each word with a period, he asked, “Are. You. Having. An. Affair?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “So what?” she asked, still acting disengaged. “Who cares? Our marriage is over, anyway.”

  “That still doesn’t give you the right to lie to me,” Conrad said, “and to make a fool of me.” He looked more hurt and wounded than he did angry, which seemed to throw Zsa Zsa. Again, what would it take to upset this man? It was as if there was nothing she could do to make him explode. Why was he always in such perfect control, and what did it say about her as a woman that she was unable to make him furious with jealousy? It was maddening.

  According to Lena Burrell, Zsa Zsa put her compact and lipstick back into her purse, took out a pair of embroidered and jeweled white opera gloves, and then walked over to Conrad. She stood as close to him as possible, raised her head to look up at him, and, in an even, dispassionate tone, reminded him, “I am a very beautiful woman, in case you haven’t noticed.” Many men were after her, she claimed, and yes, she had slept with quite a few of them. He might not have any desire for her, she said angrily, but others certainly did. “In fact, since we broke up, I have had more men than you will ever know,” she declared, spitting the words out at him. “Now, if you don’t mind,” she said in finishing, “that will be all. Husband.” She smacked him hard on the chest with her gloves, and then turned her back on him.

  “Mr. Hilton looked completely crushed,” recalled Lena Burrell. “Who knew
if what Zsa Zsa said to him was true or not? What was clear to me, though, was that she fully intended to hurt him with her words. He said, ‘I will ignore what you have just said because I know you didn’t mean it.’ And she said, ‘Oh, really, now?’ ”

  Shaking his head, Conrad bolted from the room, slamming the door behind him so hard it rattled the walls. Zsa Zsa smiled to herself. “There,” she said, seeming satisfied. “That should do it.” After slipping her fingers into the gloves, she rolled them up her arms to her elbows and then turned to Lena Burrell with her wrists held outward so that the assistant could fasten the buttons. “Do you think it will be chilly this evening?” she asked. “Because if so, perhaps I should wear my platinum mink.”

  “Oh yes, do wear the mink,” Lena said. “You look marvelous in it, Miss Gabor.”

  “I know I do,” Zsa Zsa said petulantly. “That was not my question. You do have my medication now, don’t you?” Zsa Zsa then asked, using her euphemism for the prescribed amphetamines she had begun taking of late.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lena said. She reached into her purse and pulled out a large plastic bottle of capsules. When Zsa Zsa extended her hand, the secretary dropped two of the capsules from the bottle onto her palm. Zsa Zsa popped both into her mouth and swallowed. “Well, just look at that!” she exclaimed proudly after they went down. “Without even a drop of champagne. How about that, dah-ling !”

  Zsa Zsa Is Institutionalized

  In the spring of 1945, Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor finally received word from their mother, Jolie. She, her husband, and Magda had somehow made it to Lisbon and, thanks to Cordell Hull, would soon be on their way to the United States. Their arrival was still a few months away due to a paperwork delay, but at least they were en route to Manhattan. “I think you should go to New York and wait for them there,” Conrad told Zsa Zsa. Even though he was angry at her, he was still trying to be supportive. “I will put you up at the Plaza for as long as it takes,” he told her.