The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty

by Taraborrelli, J. Randy

  Frances took Zsa Zsa by the hand to an area farther away from onlookers. Once there and out of earshot of witnesses, the two women engaged in what appeared to be an animated conversation. Judging by the way Zsa Zsa’s arms were flailing about, it was clear that she was arguing with Frances. Meanwhile, Frances seemed relatively calm in the face of Zsa Zsa’s temper. Finally, loudly enough for everyone to hear, Zsa Zsa screamed out, “Enough! I have had enough of your insulting behavior!” She then turned and bolted away from Frances and back to her car, which was still parked at the valet station. Meanwhile, Frances—still accompanied by the security guard, who was now holding her arm and steadying her—calmly began to make the long walk back up the driveway toward the main house and finally to its large, eight-foot-high oak front doors.

  “Who does she think she is?” Zsa Zsa said as the valet opened the door to her Bentley. “She is a very thin and very withered creature, that’s who she is,” the buxom Zsa Zsa fumed. “What could he possibly see in her? She looks like, like…” Zsa Zsa hesitated, fumbling for the perfect words. Then she called out for all to hear, “… spoiled fruit!” For a moment, while Zsa Zsa simmered in her anger, it looked as though she didn’t want to get into her vehicle; it appeared as if she were considering following Frances up to the house. Thinking better of it, she announced her intentions. “I will return with my daughter,” she told the valet, who had nothing to do with barring her entrance. “I will come back with Francesca,” she declared, “and you will let me in!” She then got into her vehicle and screeched away.

  Clearing the Air

  Zsa Zsa did not return to the party with Francesca, as promised. Conrad had no idea of the scene that had been caused by her, either. The next day, when Frances finally told him about it, he was upset but not surprised. In fact, he couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps he was at least partly responsible.

  Back in 1919, when Conrad bought his first hotel, the ramshackle Mobley, he had authored a code of living for his employees, one tenant of which was, “Assume your full share of responsibility in the world.” But had he done that when it came to his problems with his second wife? He was elderly now, maybe approaching the end of his life. No longer young and naïve, he had vast experience—he’d been married, divorced, raised children—and he felt he should now know better how to deal with this truly maddening person in his family.

  What was at the root of all of this familial turmoil? Conrad was certain that it was simply that Zsa Zsa wanted money from him. But what he didn’t seem to understand was that, as much as she would not have rejected anything he might have offered her, it was her daughter’s inheritance about which Zsa Zsa was most concerned.

  Conrad thought that he should finally have a heart-to-heart talk with Zsa Zsa. Therefore, the day after the party, he telephoned her and suggested that she come by his office so that they could clear the air. The next morning Zsa Zsa appeared, bright and early. She sat across from him at his desk, next to Conrad’s attorney, Myron Harpole. After she settled in, she asked why Harpole was still present. “I’ve decided that he shall be my witness,” Conrad said sternly. Zsa Zsa rolled her eyes. “And they say I’m dramatic,” she remarked.

  Details of the subsequent meeting would be recalled years later not only by Zsa Zsa Gabor—in a sworn deposition—but also by Myron Harpole.

  “I want you to understand that the Hilton Company is a large corporation run by a board of directors and by stockholders,” Conrad told Zsa Zsa. Hilton said that it wasn’t just him sitting behind a big desk with an adding machine, counting the millions being made by his hotels around the world. “So, just barging in and screaming, ‘I want money,’ isn’t going to get you money,” he told her.

  “But I have never done that,” Zsa Zsa protested. “Never have I barged in here and screamed that I want money from you.” But as his ex-wife and the mother of his daughter, she hastened to add, some might feel that she did deserve some measure of generosity. At the very least, she concluded, Francesca deserved it. “I just want what’s best for our daughter,” she said, “and maybe for me, too. Do you remember how much you gave me in our divorce?” Zsa Zsa asked. “Well, I do,” she answered for Conrad. “Only $35,000. You said sign here, I signed. And that was that. Now I just want what’s coming to me.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that, my dear,” he said, showing a bit of an edge. “You will get exactly what is coming to you.”

  After a little more discussion about the past, Conrad shifted the conversation to the present. There were serious problems all over the world, he told Zsa Zsa, and the corporation had found many good ways to help assist the poor and disenfranchised. Perhaps she might consider contributing something for the betterment of others, Conrad suggested, and possibly use the Hilton name as a vehicle in that regard. The last time he had mentioned such a thing to Zsa Zsa was almost thirty-five years earlier in 1944 when they were married. At that time, he had suggested that she volunteer at a homeless shelter. Because she wasn’t interested, the subject was dropped. Why, knowing her as well as he did, Conrad would pick this time to once again try to convince her to be philanthropic was a bit of a mystery. Perhaps he just thought it was worth a try, that he had nothing to lose and that maybe Zsa Zsa would have everything to gain in terms of satisfaction and fulfillment. “I am just telling you this,” he told her, “because I care… Georgia.”

  It was the first time Conrad had called Zsa Zsa “Georgia” in probably thirty years. According to Myron Harpole, she appeared to be moved by his use of the sobriquet. “I forgot that this was your name for me,” she said, suddenly looking very sad. “It was so long ago, Connie. My God. What happened to us?”

  “We still have time,” he said, smiling at her. “We can try. Maybe start a charity yourself. Maybe that could be the first step…”

  Zsa Zsa didn’t answer. She just stared at him, lost in thought, as if caught between the past as it had once been with him and the present with all its confusion, anger, and unhappiness.

  “Okay. So, what about that charity idea?” Conrad asked, trying to get things back on track. The two were truly at cross-purposes. She wanted money from him. But he wanted her to give of herself. It must have made no sense to her, especially since becoming involved with any Hilton-related charity would likely not provide her any income.

  “Obviously, the meeting was not going well,” recalled Myron Harpole. “ ‘Okay, my dear, I guess you have made your point,’ Connie said, now seeming too tired to continue the discussion. As he rose, he said that the meeting was over. ‘I suppose it is,’ Zsa Zsa agreed, also rising. ‘Fine,’ she announced, ‘then we shall discuss this another time.’ She said that she was on her way to Beverly Hills to have a sable coat fitted, so she would take her leave. Besides, she said, she wasn’t quite sure she felt welcomed, anyway. ‘You know, Connie, you could at least apologize for some of the things that happened between us,’ she then said. ‘Not everything was my fault.’ Connie and I looked at one another, and he raised his eyebrows as if to say to me, ‘Good point, eh?’ He sighed. ‘I am sorry, Zsa Zsa,’ he said. ‘For any time I ever hurt you,’ he added, ‘please know that I am truly sorry.’ I felt that he really meant it, too. Somehow, it felt… big.”

  After a moment, a surprised Zsa Zsa asked, “Really? Do you really mean that, Connie?”

  “I do,” Conrad said. He looked at her wearily as if he was ready for her to go. “I guess no man is rich enough to buy back his past,” he concluded, quoting Oscar Wilde.

  “Fine, then,” she said.

  “So… will that be all?” he asked, trying to end things.

  The two were about to part ways. But not yet. If they were going to “clear the air,” as Conrad had earlier put it, Zsa Zsa still had a bit of unfinished business. According to what Myron Harpole would recall, she walked over to Conrad, tilted her head up, and put her mouth very close to his ear. “In all of these years, you have never respected what I managed to do with my life,” she said. She wasn’t heated or
even upset, she was just quite firm, as if wanting to clearly convey something she’d had on her mind for years. “I want you to know that I am a self-made woman,” she continued. “No man ever did one goddamn thing for me. I have had to fight to survive every single goddamn day of my goddamn life. So, please… stop… judging me!” And with that, she gathered her things. “That will be all,” she said as she turned and walked away from him.

  Barron, Eric, and Francesca

  Of course, the hotel business matters,” Barron Hilton was saying as he spoke to a reporter for the Associated Press during an interview at his massive estate in Holmby Hills. “But family comes first.”

  It could certainly be argued that Barron’s father, Conrad, didn’t always place family first, even though the notion of family was extremely important to him. He did his best with his sons—Nicky, Barron, and Eric—but even they would have had to agree that he didn’t spend as much time with them as they would have liked. He was a busy man building a vast empire; his time was limited. With that empire already built, though, Barron didn’t want to go down the same road with his own family. He learned from many of Conrad’s missteps and did things his own way. He managed to sustain a happy marriage, for instance, to a wonderful woman who was ever loyal to him. “She is everything to me,” he said of Marilyn in 1977, to whom he had been married for thirty years.

  Though Barron and Marilyn had led a life of privilege and power for many years, somehow they never allowed it to affect their family in a negative way. Their children were anything but spoiled. That was one of the lessons Barron learned from Conrad and one that he applied to his own family life. Just as Barron had to earn his own way and was never handed anything on a silver platter by his father, his children were taught that they shouldn’t depend on their potential inheritance to get by, either. Rather, they should chart their own course and start doing so as soon as possible.

  By 1977, Barron and Marilyn’s brood was growing up: Barron Jr. was twenty-nine; Hawley was twenty-eight; Steven was twenty-seven; David was twenty-five; Sharon was twenty-four; Richard was twenty-two; Daniel was fifteen; and Ronald was fourteen. “They each have their own personality, their own character,” Marilyn said of her children. “But in each of them, I see their father. They’re ambitious, like Barron. They’re curious, like Barron. Of course, all of that is like Connie, too. So in our case, the apple doesn’t fall far from the Hilton tree at all.”

  Certainly, where Barron was concerned, Conrad’s influence was obvious. “Barron took a fine company in Hilton and developed it into one of the truly great hotel companies in the world,” observed Bill Marriott, chairman and CEO of the competition, Marriott International. “The thing about Barron is that he was already a great businessman before he got into the hotel business.” Like Conrad, Barron operated from his gut. He tried not to allow emotions get in the way of business decisions, but it wasn’t always easy. Again, like his father, he trusted people and believed in them. However, by the 1970s, the hotel business was different from what it had been during Conrad’s heyday. “There were a lot of sharks out there,” said one of Barron’s friends. “He had to grow to be a little tougher than Connie because the times were different. But Barron was up for it. By 1977, he was someone who commanded a great deal of respect amongst his colleagues.”

  In the 1970s, when the National Gambling Commission held hearings on proposals to legalize gambling outside of Nevada, one of the first witnesses it called was Barron Hilton. Consequently, in 1971, the Hilton Hotels Corporation became the first company registered with the New York Stock Exchange to operate gambling facilities. Since taking over the reins of the Hilton Corporation, Barron—who was forty-nine in 1977—had become one of the most respected and most powerful hoteliers in the business. In 1966, the year he became its president, the company’s profits were about $6.6 million. By 1977, they were up to nearly $10 million. By this time, the Hiltons owned or leased 148 hotels, including Las Vegas’s Flamingo Hilton. Barron was earning about $150,000 a year, but as always, his major income came from stock dividends, not his salary. In his spare time, he enjoyed flying his own glider while at his 460,000-acre High Sierras ranch. He would soar at altitudes up to 18,000 feet, much to Marilyn’s consternation, who couldn’t help but worry about her husband when he indulged in this hobby. “But soaring,” Barron would say, “is a feeling you just can’t beat.”

  His was a good life. Barron Hilton was smart, savvy, and in many ways his father’s son. “He tried to be friendly to the staff, but I think he had a difficult time relating to us,” said Virginia “Gini” Tangalakis, who worked as a legal secretary for the Hilton Corporation in the 1970s. “You’d get into the elevator with Conrad Hilton or Eric Hilton and they would ask about your family, about your life, about your day. But you’d be in the same elevator with Barron and he’d stiffly observe, ‘Well, they say the stock market is up today. How do you like them apples?’ And you really wouldn’t know how to respond. He was more formal, reserved. I also recall that he had an enormous and lovely oil painting of Marilyn Hilton hanging on the wall behind his desk, which made me think, ‘My goodness, how much he must love his wife!’ ”

  Barron’s brother Eric had also proven himself a force to be reckoned with as he continued his work for the company. He didn’t demand the same kind of formality as his father and brother. “In the office, it was always ‘Mr. Hilton’ when referring to Conrad and Barron,” recalled Gini Tangalakis, “but when Eric came in, all of the secretaries and other staff members were on a first-name basis with him. It was always, ‘Hi, Eric! How are you?’ Or, ‘Eric’s on line one.’ Never ‘Mr. Hilton.’ He was always in a good mood, always cordial, a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy.”

  Eric and Pat remained happy in their marriage as they raised their four children in Texas.

  Of course, the Hilton men shared a great deal of regret when it came to Nicky, but they had all moved forward with their lives as best they could, getting along with one another and fully enjoying the spoils of great success. Only one family member was usually missing and considered by some to be a complete enigma: Francesca.

  As always, Conrad’s daughter, Francesca, remained a background figure in the family. By the time she was thirty in 1977, she had completed her transition into what could be considered the anti-Gabor. She wasn’t flamboyant or ostentatious like her mother and other female relatives, though she did share their sharp wit. “I didn’t want to be all glamorous, and I didn’t want to be another Gabor,” she told Geraldo Rivera in 1995. “I didn’t want to look like… you know… I wanted to be me. And they always wanted me to dress a certain way. But I rebelled. That’s their thing, not mine.” She also didn’t seem to have the same interests in business of her father, nor of her brothers.

  At one point, Francesca Hilton was finally given a summer job behind the registration desk at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. “[The customers] would always ask your name so they could scream at you if it didn’t work out,” she recalls. “When I gave them my name they’d say [sarcastically], ‘Surrrre.’ I’d go, ‘Listen, do you want me to take this reservation… or what?’ ” As it would happen, that particular job was about as close to working for the Hilton organization as Francesca would ever get, and it didn’t work out. It’s not known whether she was fired or quit, only that the job didn’t last long. Of course, Barron, Nicky, and Eric had all started their careers at menial jobs within the Hilton organization. But they were given opportunities to prove themselves and work their way up, and their careers eventually flourished. They each had the support of their powerful father, as well as the encouragement of each other. Even Eric—who could be considered third in terms of his status among the sons—had eventually gained the backing of his father and his brothers, which helped to motivate him toward great success in his life. Francesca never benefited from such support. She had her mother, but Zsa Zsa was a mercurial figure who could never really be counted on for anything. She tried to be present when she was supp
osed to be, but for the most part she lived her life on her own terms and was never eager to set aside her own agenda for someone else’s. By the time Francesca turned thirty she had long ago learned that she could not depend on anyone. In this family dynasty, she was most definitely on her own, like it or not.

  Francesca’s Idea

  Although Conrad Hilton had customarily rejected her requests for financial help over the years, Francesca Hilton continued to turn to him from time to time. Sometime in January 1978, she decided to ask him if she could possibly borrow a thousand dollars. Francesca summoned up her courage and explained that she was interested in beginning a career as a photographer, she felt she was good at taking pictures, and she needed her father’s assistance in purchasing equipment for her new endeavor.

  Francesca spoke with such enthusiasm, Conrad was pleased that she finally seemed to have found a career about which she could be passionate. Therefore he made a rare exception and actually agreed to lend her the money. Not surprisingly, he was extremely specific about the timeline in which she would have to pay back the loan. She would have just six months to return him the money. He was so emphatic about the terms, he went so far as to outline the loan agreement on paper.

  Six months passed. Though she tried her best, Francesca had only paid back half of the loan to Conrad. When she appealed to her mother for the other half, she was flatly turned down. The loan was Francesca’s responsibility, Zsa Zsa said, and she was not going to bail her out. Francesca then suggested that if her mother would just lend—not give—her $500, she would immediately hand it over to Conrad. She would much rather owe the money to her mother than to her father, and she would then pay Zsa Zsa back within the next six months. Again, the answer was no. If Francesca couldn’t pay Conrad back, Zsa Zsa reasoned, what guarantee did she have that she would pay her back?