The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty

by Taraborrelli, J. Randy

  “I’m sorry to tell you that your mother-in-law has suffered a massive heart attack,” the doctor said with a flat demeanor.

  “Well, will she be okay?” Trish asked.

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “We don’t expect her to make it through the night.”

  “Just like that?” Trish asked in disbelief. For a moment, she was unsteady on her feet. “But it can’t be!” she exclaimed. “She was fine just yesterday! We went shopping. She was just fine!”

  After a few more moments with the doctor, Trish Hilton did what she knew she needed to do; she began to make the telephone calls she most dreaded. First, of course, she called Nicky, tracking him down at the Bel-Air Country Club. She tried to keep it simple, telling him that his mother had been admitted to the hospital and that he should get there as soon as possible. Then she called Barron, who was at home with Marilyn, and told him the same thing. Finally, she called Eric, who was in Houston where he and Pat lived. Because he was so far away, Trish felt compelled to give Eric all of the bad news at once, that his mother had suffered a heart attack and would likely not survive. He broke down and asked to be kept apprised of the situation.

  “Did you call Pop?” Nicky asked as he burst into the waiting room about thirty minutes later. No, Trish hadn’t called Conrad. She explained that she thought the call should come from Nicky. He agreed. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry all of this had to fall on your shoulders,” Nicky told his wife as he embraced her. While in his arms, Trish braced herself to tell Nicky the full truth. “Nicky, your mother’s not going to make it,” she blurted out, pulling away from her husband and looking at him directly. He just stared back at her, his eyes wide with shock and disbelief. “The doctor said she’s… dying,” Trish continued, examining his face closely for a reaction. “Oh no,” was all Nicky could say as his eyes instantly filled with tears. “Not Mom,” he said. “She’s too young, Trish! She’s only fifty-nine!” Suddenly, Nicky looked like a little boy to Trish, lost and afraid. She took him into her arms and held him close. “Now, you must go and call Conrad,” she whispered in his ear. “You have to call your father, Nicky. Now, go.” After she released her hold on him, he walked slowly to a pay phone in the corner, his head hanging low.

  While Nicky was on the telephone with Conrad, Barron and Marilyn arrived at the hospital. Both seemed frantic. “What’s happened?” Marilyn asked Trish. “What’s going on?” As Trish explained the situation, Marilyn stood staring at her with her mouth open. Meanwhile, Barron, standing behind his wife, slowly crumpled into a chair. He buried his face in his hands.

  Nicky hung up the pay phone and walked toward his family members with an oppressed and bleary expression. “Guess what? Pop’s not coming,” he said, looking bewildered.

  “Really?” Marilyn asked. She and Barron shared a secret look. “But… are you sure, Nicky?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” Nicky said. “He asked me to keep him posted,” he added. An uncomfortable silence followed. “Well, then, that’s what we’ll do,” Barron finally concluded, trying to stay positive. “We’ll keep him posted, just like he said.”

  As the family waited for word, the decision was made by the hospital staff not to move Mary Saxon to a hospital room. The doctors were certain that death was imminent; they felt it better to just leave her in the emergency ward. Nicky, Trish, Barron, and Marilyn stayed nearby, taking shifts for the next few hours, visiting Mary in the small cubicle where she lay on a tiny bed in a drugged sleep. Occasionally she would stir, but never did she speak. Finally, when all four Hiltons were together in the nearby waiting room, a grim-faced doctor emerged to give them the bad news that Mary Saxon had died. “No!” Nicky exclaimed. “No! It can’t be!” he said. He choked on his words and broke down. Barron just shook his head sadly as Marilyn hugged him.

  Trying to stay strong, Trish walked over to Nicky, put both of her hands on his shoulders, and looked him squarely in the eyes. “You should go and say goodbye to your mom,” she told her husband. “You have to say goodbye.”

  “No, I can’t do it,” he said, crying. “Don’t make me do it, Trish. Please. I can’t do it.”

  Barron walked over to his older brother and put his arm around him. “We can do this, Nick,” he said. “It’s okay. We can do this.” Pat and Marilyn watched sadly as the two brothers steeled themselves to bid farewell to their mother. “Come on, Nick,” Barron continued, his tone even. “Mom needs us,” he said. “It’s going to be okay, brother.”

  As the Hilton sons slowly walked toward the small curtained cubicle, their heads hung low, Barron repeated, “It’s going to be okay, brother. It’s going to be okay.”

  PART NINE

  In His Father’s House

  Nicky Causing Problems

  The death of his mother saw Nicky Hilton plummet to the deepest, darkest pits of despair. Mary had been a great ally, a true confidante, and now she was gone. In response to the loss, his demons took over; Nicky turned to liquor and pills to alleviate the pain, especially Seconal. At the time, Seconal was widely prescribed to high-profile people with particularly stressful careers. Because Nicky had been taking the drug for so long, Trish didn’t see it as a problem. She felt he was in good hands because his doctor, Lee Siegel, was a good friend, as was Siegel’s wife of forty-seven years, Noreen Nash Siegel.

  “Nicky suffered terribly from insomnia,” Noreen Nash Siegel recalled, “and my husband was treating it as best he could. Though the Seconal would relax him, I think maybe it was prescribed too much back then. It’s important to note, though, that Nicky wasn’t just scoring drugs on the street to get high. He was under a doctor’s care. My husband was doing the best he could for Nicky. Many times, he gave him pills that were half sugar and half sleeping ingredient. He sent him to a hypnotist at one point to deal with the sleep issue. He loved him and he was in many ways a father figure to him. He wanted to help him. But it was a tough battle.”

  A memorable turning point had occurred a couple of years into Nicky and Trish’s marriage during a vacation in Acapulco. Nicky combined Seconal with alcohol to the point where he became so sick, a frightened Trish flushed all of the pills down the toilet. It was the worst thing she could have done, as she later learned. “It forced him into a withdrawal he couldn’t handle and the next three days were sheer hell,” she recalled. “He was having convulsions and I thought he was going to die. Finally, a Mexican doctor prescribed some more Seconal, which we gave Nicky in low doses until he finally came around.”

  “Though he was still functional,” recalled Stewart Armstrong, who had been Nicky’s assistant when Nicky was heading up the Inns Division of the Hilton Hotels Corporation, and who had maintained a close friendship with him, “there was a definite shift in his efficiency after Mary died. I remember Trish saying to me, ‘It’s a bad time, but I know Nicky will pull it together. I’m just afraid that Connie won’t see it that way.’ She was right: Connie did not see it that way. Adding to the pressure was that Nicky and Trish had just purchased an opulent stone colonial estate in Holmby Hills for $450,000 [the equivalent of more than $3 million today]. So the financial pressure was on as well.”

  Along with his new position at the company came a whole new set of responsibilities for Nicky Hilton at a time when he was ill-prepared to handle them. There were many days—more days than anyone could count—when he simply didn’t show up for work. “I’m taking the day off,” he would say. “I’m allowed to. My pop owns the company.” Barron would have to cover for him. “Barron, above all else, didn’t want Conrad to know when Nicky didn’t make it to the office,” said Bob Neal.

  “I remember one time when Nicky was nowhere to be found and Barron was at the office doing Nicky’s work when Conrad showed up unexpectedly,” recalled Bob Neal. “Barron said, ‘I gotta go,’ and he took off and exited through a back entrance so as not to run into his father. I thought he was trying to avoid Conrad. Later, from wherever he went, Barron called Conrad at the office and tol
d him that Nicky was with him, covering once again for his brother. He had left the office just to be able to create an alibi for Nicky.”

  Try as he might, though, Barron would not be able to keep Nicky’s absences from Conrad for long. “Once, Nicky was gone for an entire week,” recalled Bob Neal. “We had no idea where he was. We feared the worst—that he was dead in some alley somewhere. Barron and Marilyn were frantic with worry. We had no choice but to tell Conrad. But we said that he had decided to take a vacation, not that he had just disappeared. As it would happen, that wasn’t such a great idea. ‘How dare he take an unscheduled vacation?’ Conrad asked. The old man was almost as upset about our excuse as he might have been had we just told him the truth: that Nicky had vanished.”

  Finally, after more than a week, Nicky showed up at the office as if nothing was unusual. When Conrad came through and saw Nicky, he immediately lit into him, asking him how he could fly off on a vacation without telling anyone in advance. “What vacation?” Nicky asked. “I was just busy. I wasn’t on any vacation. What are you talking about?” That was all Conrad needed to hear. “Do you know how much business you missed?” he asked. “This isn’t playtime,” he scolded Nicky. “Important international business is being conducted here on a daily basis, and you are responsible for it.” Though Nicky felt badly about the time he had taken off and promised to make it up to his father, Conrad was far from satisfied.

  “It was unprofessional behavior, and Conrad couldn’t accept that,” said Noreen Nash. “There was so much money on the line! Millions. Hundreds of millions. I mean, this was the absolute upper echelon of big business and power. There was no time for fooling around.”

  “Maybe we’ve just given him more than he can handle,” Barron suggested during one conversation with Conrad about Nicky in the presence of several staff members. Nicky had shown up for work every day for three weeks, but then he was gone for four straight days.

  “The problem is that he’s not consistent,” Conrad said. “I don’t know what to do…” He seemed completely bewildered.

  The TWA Merger

  I’m happy to say that Hilton International has had its best year ever,” Nicky Hilton announced at a Hilton Hotels Corporation board of directors meeting. It was the first week of December 1966. Nicky sat at the head of one end of the conference table, Barron at the other—the long, imposing polished mahogany surface separating them—with a dozen company executives sitting six on each side. Conrad was to the right of Barron. Nicky, as head of the international division, was in the process of giving his annual summation to the firm’s highest-level employees.

  In the last five years, Nicky explained, revenue from the international division had exceeded $143 million. But in 1966 alone, the year Nicky had taken charge of the operation, the division had generated a stunning $122 million. A total of 4.8 million guests had stayed at the thirty-five overseas Hilton hotels in the past year. There were eleven more hotels under construction and twenty-five others in various stages of planning. “Why, that’s absolutely incredible,” Henry Crown, one of the board’s directors, enthused. Nicky’s smile exuded confidence and accomplishment. “Nineteen sixty-seven could be our biggest year yet,” he concluded. He then outlined some of his marketing plans for the coming year and other efforts to make certain that when tourists made their vacation plans, they included a Hilton hotel on their itinerary. After Nicky was finished, Barron gave his brother a big thumbs-up. Conrad, on the other hand, seemed inscrutable. He sat quietly, deep in thought, his face immobile, his only contribution to the meeting being an occasional slight nod.

  While it was certainly true that the division was prospering under Nicky’s leadership, Conrad felt that he knew a larger truth: Much of the momentum had to do with Hilton’s good name and with the kind of upward trajectory that couldn’t be thwarted even by the head of a division who was often absent from work. Imagine how much could be achieved if Nicky was actually present all of the time? At least that’s the question Conrad couldn’t help but pose to some of his associates. Barron wasn’t sure what to think, and neither was Eric. They loved their brother and wanted to give him as much latitude as possible. However, Conrad seemed to have reached the end of his rope where his namesake was concerned.

  Nicky seemed blissfully unaware of the effect his work ethic was having on his father. The night of the board meeting during which he spoke of the company’s 1966 record, he had dinner with Trish and their friend Carole Wells Doheny at Chasen’s in West Hollywood. He was in great spirits. He said he had a lot of big plans, new ideas for international expansion. “I think the next year will be a big one for us,” he added.

  “You two love the idea of being Hilton’s international representatives, don’t you?” Carole said to the Hiltons. She couldn’t help but notice the glow on both their faces.

  “I never thought I would,” Trish said. “But, yes, it has been amazing.” Trish added that she enjoyed the traveling, the opening of hotels abroad, the excitement of meeting new people. Somehow, she concluded, it suited her and Nicky. “I don’t know why…”

  “I know why,” Nicky chimed in. “It’s because we’re such a great team,” he concluded, looking at his wife with great admiration.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Trish said bashfully. “You’re the star of this family,” she told her handsome husband. “You always have been.”

  “It’s so true, Nicky,” Carole agreed. “Why, you’re like a… a… a Kennedy!” she exclaimed. “You have so much charisma, so much magnetism.”

  Nicky blushed. “It’s not me,” he observed modestly. “It’s just luck. We’re in the right place at the right time.”

  The end of the 1960s was a booming time in history as far as the American travel industry was concerned. Airplane travel was at an all-time high, especially now with the addition of jumbo jets to every airline’s fleet. The far reaches of the world were now easily accessible by anyone with the money for a plane ticket and a hotel room.

  Taking advantage of the increase in air traffic, Pan American World Airways had broken new ground in the travel business by establishing a subsidiary called the InterContinental Hotels chain. The plan was for the airline to direct its passengers to hotels it had either leased or purchased around the world—thirty-six in all—providing not only a convenience but a price break on the purchase of travel tickets. The InterContinental chain was a real thorn in Conrad’s side, because it specialized in the same areas of expertise as Hilton, sometimes purchasing but mostly leasing hotels abroad, assisting local developers in the design, construction, and renovation of these hotels, and then managing them. So far, by 1967, InterContinental had not made any headway in domestic hotels, so at least Conrad still had that leverage over them. Still, he had to admit that the competition’s merging of air travel with hotel accommodations was a good idea. Always a visionary and industry leader, he couldn’t help but feel great annoyance that it hadn’t been his idea.

  Conrad was somewhat appeased when, toward the end of 1966, representatives from TWA—Pan American Airways’ chief competitor—contacted him to explore the possibility of going into business with him. TWA had taken a good look at the growing Hilton International enterprise and viewed it as a possible asset. In obtaining it, the airline wouldn’t have to create its own subsidiary to compete with Pan American and InterContinental; it could just align itself with the Hilton brand and compete that way. It was an interesting proposition, and with almost $200 million on the table, Conrad, his instinct for business growth still intact, was intrigued.

  “Tired of Being Misunderstood”

  By the end of the 1960s, Conrad Hilton’s multifaceted feelings about his oldest son had become even more conflicted. Maybe it was understandable. After all, Conrad had been putting up with Nicky’s erratic behavior for most of his namesake’s adult life. Now in his old age, he was just plain sick of it.

  Bob Neal recalled a troubling November evening in the winter of 1966 when he witnessed firsthand the great
tension between Conrad and Nicky. The two men were in the living room of Nicky’s enormous mansion watching a Walter Cronkite broadcast about the Kennedy assassination three years before. J. Edgar Hoover had just announced that all evidence pointed to Lee Harvey Oswald as having acted alone. “That’s bullshit,” Nicky said. “There were at least two shooters, maybe three. It’s some kind of cover-up.” As the two friends watched the program and discussed conspiracy theories, a crystal carafe of scotch sat in the middle of the coffee table before them, their two empty glasses on each side of it. When Trish walked into the room to announce that Conrad had come by unexpectedly, Nicky rolled his eyes and, turning to Bob, sarcastically muttered under his breath, “All hail.” On cue, Conrad walked into the room, straight as a board, still agile and determined in his gait. Taking one look at the display of carafe and glasses on the coffee table, he stopped and looked at Nicky. “Not overdoing it, right?” he asked. “Tomorrow’s a work day.”

  “Pop, I’ve had exactly one drink,” Nicky said wearily.

  “You sure about that, kid?” Conrad asked, now standing in front of his son, arms folded, blocking the view of the television set.

  “Sit down, Dad,” Nicky said, trying to lighten the mood. “Take a load off, why don’t you?”

  Conrad didn’t want to sit. Instead, as he towered over his son, he began to ask him questions about a business deal concerning the Hilton hotel in Paris. However, Nicky wasn’t in the frame of mind for business, nor was he prepared for a meeting. In a measured tone, he told Conrad that all of the paperwork relating to the Paris hotel was back at the office. He said he didn’t have it memorized. “You’ll have to wait until tomorrow when we’re at work,” he told his father, all of this according to Bob Neal’s vivid recollection of events.