The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty

by Taraborrelli, J. Randy

  “I do,” he answered. “And my God, that Connie is such a fool sometimes,” he added, shaking his head.

  “Why do you say that?” Zsa Zsa asked.

  “Well, you know, sometimes he says that Francesca is his daughter, and sometimes he says she is not,” Gregson answered. The remark was casual and off the cuff, as if he was just thinking aloud.

  Zsa Zsa faced Gregson directly. “What do you mean by that?” she asked, suddenly stiffening. “When has Connie ever said that Francesca is not his daughter?”

  “Oh… I mean…” Suddenly, Gregson was at a loss for words; he began to sputter. Ordinarily a very smart, discreet lawyer, he had spoken out of turn. Now he was definitely on the spot, and likely annoyed with himself about it, too. “What I mean is that… sometimes he feels like a father and… sometimes… he doesn’t. That’s all.”

  “But that’s not what you said,” Zsa Zsa countered, her expression now stern. “What you said is that he sometimes thinks Francesca is not his daughter. That’s what you said.”

  “Well, has he ever said anything like that to you?” Gregson asked Zsa Zsa.

  “No,” Zsa Zsa answered quickly. “Not once has he ever said anything like that to me. And just look at them,” she continued. “He is so nice to her and she loves him so much.” She added that Conrad was always present for all of the girl’s parties, and as far as Zsa Zsa could tell, he truly cared for Francesca. “Why, we’re family,” she concluded, according to her distinct memory of the events.

  “Look, let’s just have a fun day and not worry about it,” Gregson said, trying his best to end the conversation. “I was talking through my hat, anyway. Let’s forget it.” He then leaned in to her and added, “Take a look around, Zsa Zsa. This is the high life, baby. You got it made, sweetheart. Enjoy it! Who the hell cares what Conrad Hilton thinks about anything?” And with that, Gregson Bautzer left the room as quickly as his legs could take him.

  Now alone, Zsa Zsa Gabor turned her full attention to Conrad and Francesca, still playing in the backyard and acting for all intents and purposes like father and daughter. Only she would know exactly what was going on in her head in that moment, but to hear her tell it many years later, as she sat smoking her cigarette and staring at her ex-husband and her daughter, Zsa Zsa was more than a little concerned.

  Natalie Wood’s Advice

  Are you sure about this? Because this is a big decision. You need to think about it carefully.”

  It was late in the evening of November 4, 1958. Natalie Wood—the famous actress who once dated and was still friendly with Nicky Hilton—was trying to reason with a dark-haired eighteen-year-old girl named Trish, offering her advice about her love life. As it had happened, Natalie’s fling with Nicky had overlapped with her love affair with Robert Wagner, a handsome actor known for his pretty-boy looks and exaggeratedly groomed pompadour. Natalie and Robert had married the year before, shortly after her affair with Nicky ended. Now Natalie felt she could offer some insight into what Trish could expect in a relationship with the Hilton heir.

  The two were sitting on a not very comfortable Victorian-era black-and-gold settee in an ornately appointed suite at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria in which Natalie was staying with her new husband. Nicky and Trish McClintock had also checked into the hotel for a weekend of fun and socializing in New York City. They’d been dating for a couple of months, and despite the age difference—Nicky was thirty-two—Trish had fallen head over heels in love with him. Just days earlier she had agreed to marry him. It had all happened so fast, no one in either of their lives seemed able to understand the relationship. Trish’s father was particularly upset about it. After all, at thirty-eight, Frank Grant McClintock was only six years older than Nicky. It didn’t matter to Trish, though. She knew what she wanted—what she felt she needed—and it was Nicky Hilton.

  The two young ladies were settling into their chat after what had been an eventful night. Earlier, Nicky, Barron, R.J.—as Robert Wagner was known—and the actor Nick Adams (who would later star in a TV series called The Rebel) joined them for dinner at an upscale restaurant. Although they all had a few drinks and were no doubt feeling a bit high, no one seemed to be inebriated by any means. By the time they returned to the Waldorf, however, Nicky and Barron had a serious case of the giggles, as if the alcohol had finally kicked in and was making them giddy. Eventually Nicky and Barron began to engage in some juvenile horseplay. Suddenly, Barron slipped on a newspaper and fell backward. It was such a freak accident, it took everyone by surprise. One moment, Barron and Nicky were laughing and mock fighting, and the next, after a loud thud, Barron was flat on his back. It looked serious; everyone was concerned. Nicky immediately sobered up and sprang into action. He helped Barron into the elevator, secured a cab, and got his brother to a nearby hospital as quickly as possible, leaving his fiancée, Trish, behind in the suite with Natalie, R.J., and Nick Adams.

  When Nicky and Barron returned to the suite, the group learned that their concerns had some merit. Barron had broken his leg. Relieved that it wasn’t anything more serious, Nick Adams wearily said good night. Then Barron went to his room, and Nicky and R.J. went off to enjoy the view from one of the terraces, leaving Natalie and Trish to their cups of coffee and girl talk.

  The evening’s events had brought Natalie’s concerns about Trish’s romance with Nicky into sharp focus. At just twenty, Natalie Wood wasn’t much older than Trish, but because she’d been involved in the cutthroat world of show business since the age of five, she was much more experienced. And because of her previous relationship with Nicky, she was aware of the dark side behind his charismatic, playful demeanor. “So, how are things going between you and Nicky?” Natalie wanted to know.

  “It’s wonderful,” Trish said, according to her memory of the conversation. “He’s just great.”

  “You know, he really is,” Natalie agreed, looking a bit troubled. “He’s a wonderful man. But he does have a problem, you know? Are you sure you’re ready to handle this kind of thing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You haven’t seen him drink?” Natalie asked.

  Actually, as it happened, this night marked the first time Trish had ever seen Nicky have an alcoholic beverage. She wasn’t that concerned about it.

  “Sweetheart, it’s a problem,” Natalie added. She then said that she and Nicky had once dated, so she knew him quite well and felt that his drinking was not a small matter. She said it was “a lot for any woman to handle.” Being candid, she had to admit that she didn’t know if Trish was ready to cope with such trouble.

  Trish didn’t know what to think. Her silence was a disheartened one. Natalie was an actress, she reasoned, and perhaps she was just displaying her flair for the dramatic. “Okay, well, if he has a problem, I will deal with it,” Trish said finally.

  “What’s the attraction?” Natalie asked.

  “I have never met anyone who has such strong faith that people will ultimately do the right thing,” Trish answered. She added that she first fell in love with Nicky’s idealism, and then with him as a man. “I love him,” she said, “and that’s all that matters.”

  Natalie smiled. “Oh my,” she said, shaking her head at Trish’s naïveté. “Love isn’t enough.” She reached out and took both of Trish’s hands in her own and told her that she used to believe the same thing, “that when you love a boy, that’s enough,” she said, a bit wistfully. But she added that she’d since learned the hard way that this was not always the case. “Love is not enough,” she concluded. “You need much more.”

  Trish held her ground. “Well, I’m not leaving him,” she said. “I see all he can be, and I want to help him get there,” she added.

  Natalie shrugged as if to suggest that she had tried her best and was now ready to let it go. She then suggested that Trish at least take her time and not rush into marriage. Trish said she would do just that. “Fine,” Natalie concluded as she set her eyes on the fancy cake platter set before them
. “Now, let’s have some of that nice coffee cake, shall we?”

  In her heart of hearts, Natalie Wood must have known that her advice to Trish would go unheeded. Just as she had to learn her own hard lessons, so would Patricia “Trish” McClintock. For Trish, sitting in a glamorous suite at the Waldorf-Astoria while listening to advice about her love life from one of the world’s most famous actresses—a woman who three years earlier had been nominated for an Oscar for her work in Rebel Without a Cause—was just the first of many years’ worth of head-spinning moments she would experience as the fiancée, and later wife, of Nicky Hilton. Trish would spend the next eleven years doing everything she could think of to prove Natalie wrong… to prove that love really was enough.

  Trish

  Patricia “Trish” McClintock was seventeen when she met Nicky Hilton one Saturday in the summer of 1958 at the Del Mar racetrack in Del Mar, California. From a well-to-do family whose wealth had been made in the banking and oil businesses, Trish was accustomed to trafficking in the circles of high society. Her parents were both college-educated; her mother had dated Joseph Kennedy, the oldest Kennedy brother, who was killed in the war, and her grandmother was assistant treasurer of the United States. Born elite, Trish was raised with maids and servants at her feet in an enormous Oklahoma mansion. Her education was an expensive and private one at the Ethel Walker School in Connecticut, from which she received glowing grades. Her vacations were spent traveling through Europe with her recently divorced mother, who was now remarried to Broadway actor and producer (of South Pacific) William Horace Schmidlapp, who had been married to film star Carole Landis for three years until her suicide (a Seconal overdose) in 1948. Sometimes, Trish would find herself in California, where she and her grandparents would loll away the hours on Wednesdays and Saturdays at the racetrack in box number 203 (which happened to be directly below one shared by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his protégé, Bureau Associate Director Clyde Tolson).

  Trish was the kind of woman men looked at twice. About five foot four, with bright brown eyes and shoulder-length brunette hair, she was shapely and carried herself with great élan. She was stylish, not just with her clothing but in the way she comported herself. She had what the French call “je ne sais quoi,” that ineffable quality that made people take note of her. This isn’t to say that she was a Hollywood-style glamour girl, though. She wasn’t. Rather, she had a homespun quality about her. She was approachable, not aloof, a girl-next-door type.

  One Saturday, Trish’s grandfather—who was a member of the Federal Reserve Board and, as president of First National Bank in El Paso, was also Conrad Hilton’s banker—spotted another board member at the races in the company of Nicky Hilton. Introductions were made all around, which was how Trish McClintock ended up meeting the tall and darkly handsome—and older—Nicky Hilton. “Here’s some money,” Nicky told the young ingénue as he handed her a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill. “Now, go bet on whatever horse you like.” Was he trying to impress her? If so, it hadn’t worked. “I’m not taking your money,” she said, more intrigued than insulted. “You can give me two dollars to bet if you like, but not a hundred.” Then, catching herself, she quickly said, “Wait! I don’t need your money! I have my own!” He laughed and said he liked her spunk, her lack of pretense. She had to admit to herself that she found him interesting. “But he was too old for me,” she would recall many years later. “He was thirty-one when I met him. I thought that was old. At seventeen, I had never dated anyone over the age of twenty. I’d certainly never gone out with anyone in his thirties.” The two spent the afternoon gambling together, however, and getting to know each other. The following Wednesday they saw each other again, and then again on the next Saturday. “But there was no interest from me at all,” she recalled. “Not in the least. We would talk and he would flirt and I was not interested.

  “At the end of the day on Saturday, he said, ‘I have a party I’m going to on Saturday night and I’d love for you to be my date’,” Trish recalled. “ ‘It’s Natalie Wood’s party,’ he said. So that piqued my interest. And then he told me it was a Gay Nineties theme. I told him I would have nothing to wear to such a party, and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it. You and Natalie are the same size. I’ll tell Natalie to get one of her costumes from Warner Bros. for you.’ I thought all of this was exciting and said yes, I would go.”

  Trish’s excitement would be short-lived, however. When Trish told her father. Frank Grant McClintock, of Nick’s invitation, he objected. “He said, ‘Forget it. You are not going out with a man who is old enough to be your father.’ And that was that. I was seventeen. What was I going to do? My father had such a fit, I had to call Nicky and tell him the date was off. He was disappointed. But not so disappointed that he didn’t continue to pursue me.”

  For the next few months, Trish and Nicky would continue seeing each other at the racetrack, but never dated. He would turn thirty-two in July; she would turn eighteen in August. Finally, on September 14, 1958, Trish returned to New York, where she was scheduled to begin her freshman year at Briarcliffe College. She would stay with her mother and stepfather while in the city. The next day, Nicky telephoned her. He missed her, he said, and wanted to continue their relationship, even if by long distance. Before long, he was courting her in New York.

  “One thing led to another,” she recalled, “and before I knew it, I had gone from being not that interested to being completely in love. It was sudden and surprising. When I realized how I felt, it was like being on board a fast-moving train, everything moving quickly. I was young and excited and it felt romantic and new. Finally, just before Halloween 1958, Nicky asked me to marry him.”

  “The Woman to Give My Children Life”

  Nicky Hilton had never before met anyone like Trish McClintock. First of all, she didn’t drink. She most certainly didn’t do drugs, and she didn’t swear. She was also a virgin. “She’s practically a nun,” was how Eric Hilton put it at the time.

  After the succession of glamorous, sophisticated women in his life, Nicky’s friends and family were baffled by his choice of Trish McClintock as a partner. He was used to being in the company of much more experienced women. Though Trish was quite pretty, she wasn’t what one might think of as a bombshell. She didn’t emanate the confidence or sexuality of his previous romantic conquests, a wide range of self-possessed beauties from Elizabeth Taylor to Mamie Van Doren to Betsy von Furstenberg to Natalie Wood and Joan Collins. Trish was unaffected, a genuine innocent. “She’s a breath of fresh air,” Nicky told Bob Neal about Trish McClintock. The two were throwing back Pabst beers in a bar in West Hollywood in October 1958, just before Nicky would ask for Trish’s hand in marriage.

  “She’s not your type, though,” Bob observed. “She doesn’t have that edge your girls usually have.”

  Nicky smiled. “Yeah, well, if you look at my track record with girls, it’s not so great, is it? I think it’s time for a change.”

  “But is there passion between you two?” Bob asked, pushing a little more. “I just don’t see it, Nick.”

  Nicky took a drag from his cigarette as he considered his friend’s statement. “Passion is overrated,” he countered. “I had passion with Elizabeth and look what that got me. Now I want something more. She’s the one,” he concluded. “I think she’s the woman to give my children life.” Because it was such a poetic way to put it—“give my children life”—Bob Neal would always recall the moment with vivid clarity. “He really meant it,” Bob would say many years later. “I think it came from a deep place in him.”

  It was as if, at the age of thirty-two, Conrad “Nicky” Hilton was finally growing up and looking for something more significant in a partner than just the temporary thrill of sexual fireworks. He had recently begun talking about having children and said he was searching for a woman who would not only be a romantic partner for him, but a suitable mother for his children. “Can you see Elizabeth Taylor as a mother?” he asked Bob Neal. “No way. [Ac
tually, Elizabeth had three children by this time, and from all reports, she was a pretty good mother.] But can you see Trish as a mother? Absolutely. When am I ever going to find another girl like her?” he asked.

  Also distinguishing Trish McClintock was that she didn’t know much about Nicky’s past and therefore held no judgment about him. “At first, I didn’t really know anything about him at all,” she now allows. “I never knew, for instance, a thing about his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor. I didn’t even know that he had been married to her until I read about it in stories that ran in the press after Nicky and I announced our engagement. That was—honest to God—the first time I had ever heard a thing about his involvement with Elizabeth.* And even after that, Nicky and I never discussed her. He never discussed any of his ex-girlfriends with me. And I was just as happy that he didn’t. I didn’t want to know the details, and he never told me any of them.

  “But after our engagement, I started hearing rumors about this one and that one, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t know whether to believe the stories or not. I would have been horrified, at the time, to learn that these rumors were true.”

  If Nicky Hilton ever had the benefit of starting over with a clean slate, it was with this woman. It wasn’t that Trish had decided to trust him; she was so inexperienced it never occurred to her not to trust him. Considering how high-profile his past exploits had been, Nicky probably was correct in thinking that he would likely never find anyone else so blind to his past.

  “She didn’t judge him,” said Bob Neal. “She made him feel like a winner at a time when he was tired of feeling like a loser. I understood it. It was like everything that had happened in the past was finally in the past, and he now had a chance to write a new future. Also, he finally had alignment in terms of how his family felt about his romantic life, because all of the Hiltons fully supported Trish. They felt that she was just what the doctor ordered, that she could keep Nick on the straight and narrow because that was the way she lived her own life. Conrad decided to accept the fact that Trish was Episcopalian and not Catholic. I think at this point he felt she had so many redeeming qualities, he could live with her faith.”