The problem with his formula was that relatively few travelers were coming to Cisco. Conrad began looking for better locations with more traffic. Learning of two such Texas properties with wasted space, he bought these seedy hotels for a song. He cleaned them up and made them profitable. Then he sold all three of his properties, plowing his capital into the from-scratch fifteen-story beaux arts high-rise private-bathed Dallas Hilton, known as the “million-dollar hotel” because of its cost, much of which came from a local financier named Harry Siegel. It was the first time Conrad Hilton had done business with a Jew, and it was the beginning of many equally beautiful cross-religious friendships. The ecumenical nature of his financing led to a lifetime of deep-pockets charitable support of the just-founded National Council of Christians and Jews.
In 1925, the same year the Dallas Hilton opened, Conrad Hilton closed the book on his bachelor life and married Mary Barron, by whom he was smitten during one mass at his Catholic church. Mary, from Owensboro, Kentucky, was visiting Dallas cousins. As soon as the Hilton became profitable, Conrad beat a path to Kentucky and popped the question. They split their honeymoon between country and city, Lake Louise in Canada and Chicago. You could take Conrad out of his Hilton, but you couldn’t take the Hilton out of Conrad. When he saw the Chicago construction site for the Stevens, slated to become the largest hotel in the world, the honeymoon was over and the calculations began. Like every other hotel he saw and coveted, the Stevens one day would be his.
Having survived the Depression by the skin of his teeth (his marriage did not; after having three sons, Nick, Barron, and Eric, the Hiltons divorced in 1934), Conrad took his first holiday since his honeymoon. It was 1938, and he decided to visit his cousin Joe Hilton, a doctor in Los Angeles who had a beach house in Playa del Rey, south of Santa Monica. The first thing Dr. Joe did when he saw Conrad was to put him in a hospital for a week for exhaustion. Once he was released, Conrad was overwhelmed by the beauty, the climate, and the healing properties of Southern California.
But the workaholic obsessive in him was even more taken with the Town House Hotel on lower Wilshire Boulevard, down the road from Bullocks Wilshire, the incomparable art deco temple of commerce that was the department store of the stars. Aside from the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Town House was the place to stay in L.A., and the only place to stay if proximity to the Hollywood studios was the object, which it usually was. Back then, the Beverly Hills was a resort getaway, far from the action. The Beverly Wilshire was an apartment house and not even in the running. The Town House meant business. As did Conrad Hilton, who made one of his famous snap decisions that he would move to the sunny, beachy California of his briefly rich childhood. Besides, as one of America’s highest-profile eligible bachelors, Conrad could see that Hollywood, the fertile crescent of available pulchritude, was everything to a dancing fool like himself that Texas was not.
The Town House wasn’t for sale. Wanting to buy something to be his beachhead, Hilton found an opportunity up in San Francisco in the Sir Francis Drake on Union Square, one of the many grand hotels around the country that still had not recovered from the 1929 Crash and its endless aftermath. As such, it was a great deal: built at a cost of $5 million, bought by Hilton for $275,000 cash. Opened in 1928 at the height of the boom, the Drake flaunted the miracle of ice water on tap, radios in every room, an indoor mini-golf course, and special windows that supposedly admitted “healthful” ultraviolet rays, a real selling point in that gray and foggy city.
Hilton celebrated his big-time acquisition by buying a hilltop Spanish-style estate adjacent to the Bel Air Country Club. It was the platonic ideal of the mission architecture he grew up with in New Mexico. Here he could pursue his new passion for golf, and his old passion for women. He didn’t have to hand out cards now. Distaff Los Angeles knew precisely who he was and greeted him with open limbs. Among the women he went out with were sugar heiress Kay Spreckels, who would marry Clark Gable, and Texas-born Ann Miller, she of the million-dollar legs, with whom he loved to dance and reminisce about his adventures in the Southwest. Miller’s father was the lawyer for outlaws like Clyde Barrow and Baby Face Nelson who robbed the western banks that Hilton had dreamed of starting. He was always nostalgic for his cowboy roots.
Conrad Hilton wasn’t the only hotel kingpin in Los Angeles. Far grander was Arnold Kirkeby, whose empire of trophies made Hilton look like a cheap motor-court operator, and whose Bel Air mansion, which would become the setting for the television smash The Beverly Hillbillies, made Hilton’s new Bel Air hacienda look like a hillbilly shack. The awesome Kirkeby collection included New York’s Sherry-Netherland, Gotham, Hampshire House, and Warwick; Chicago’s Drake and Blackstone; Havana’s Nacional: and in Los Angeles, the Beverly Wilshire Apartments, and the one that Hilton wanted, the Town House. He never would have had a chance were it not for Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese invasion had freaked out the entire West Coast, including Arnold Kirkeby. California went on high alert, assuming it would be next. There were constant air raid drills, night blackouts, and armored convoys up and down Wilshire Boulevard. The beaches were empty. The Town House was empty. Los Angeles had turned into a ghost town, a hotelier’s nightmare. Arnold Kirkeby wanted out. Hilton wanted in. The soldier in him wasn’t afraid of another Japanese invasion, because he believed that America would win. He offered Kirkeby $800,000 for the Town House, valued as at least a $3 million property. It was a classic Hilton steal. Hilton improved it with what he called “a few dainties,” tennis courts, sand from Santa Monica to beachify the pool, his beloved running ice water. Then he made a deal with the government to billet its top brass at his new property, and presto, without a single tourist, the Town House was full, and Hilton was hailed as a genius. He was embraced as an equal by Kirkeby, who would die during the jet age’s hotel boom in 1962, in one of the cluster of 707 crashes.
The ego rush of landing the Town House propelled Conrad Hilton straight into the arms of an even bigger trophy, Sari “Zsa Zsa” Gabor. Gabor, an international-beauty-pageant winner, had two equally gorgeous sisters and a hat-designing mother who had big designs for her glamorous daughters. Wags called the family “the Gold Diggers of 1942.” Dig they must, and dig they did. Gabor had just arrived in Hollywood from Europe and a divorce from a prominent Turkish diplomat she had met in Switzerland, where she attended a top boarding school. At twenty-four, she already had been crowned Miss Hungary and was a rising opera star.
Hollywood was at Gabor’s feet, and as the new kid in town, she was invited everywhere, as was the new kid Hilton. He met her at a party and immediately brought her out to El Paso, home of the El Paso Hilton—and his mother. Despite her Jewish roots, despite her failed marriage, Zsa Zsa was given the thumbs-up by Mama Hilton. Miss Hungary sang, and danced, and thought. Despite Mary Hilton’s devout Catholicism, she was willing to overlook Zsa Zsa’s no-no divorce. After all, Conrad, too, had his own no-no divorce. Love, and the trademark Hilton optimism, would conquer all. They married in 1942.
For once in Conrad Hilton’s life, his boundless faith in himself failed him. His fatal mistake was in trying to manage his wife the same way he managed his hotels. Gabor might have been a Hilton now by law, but in no way else. Zsa Zsa was as wasteful as Conrad was frugal, and Beverly Hills was a dangerous place for someone with no economic boundaries. To Zsa Zsa, there was no such thing as a budget. But what troubled Conrad more than his wife’s extravagances was his gnawing guilt that, having been denied communion because of their divorces, they were both, in the eyes of the Church, living in sin. Zsa Zsa dutifully attended mass with Conrad every Sunday at Beverly Hills’s Good Shepherd Catholic Church, but when all the other celebrities, such as Frank Sinatra, rose and went up to the altar to receive Holy Communion, the Hiltons had to stay kneeling in their pew. Depriving a Hilton of his sacraments was akin to depriving a Hilton guest of his ice water. After having a daughter, Francesca, Conrad and Zsa Zsa would end their infatuation in divorce court in 1946.
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p; There was also a complicating jealousy factor with Conrad’s firstborn, Nick (Conrad Nicholson Hilton, Jr.), who was a heavily hormonal seventeen when his father married Zsa Zsa. The six-foot-tall, rangy, handsome heir to the Hilton fortune had his father’s looks but not his drive. The apple of Conrad’s eye, Nick was spoiled, totally lacking the hunger that had driven his father to his pinnacle. Conrad wanted Nick to succeed him and had sent him to the École Hôtelière de Lausanne, the Swiss West Point of hospitality. Expelled after six months, Nick was delighted to return to Los Angeles, where he drank, gambled, and did drugs, including heroin, and notoriously began a long affair with his stepmother after his father divorced her.
HUNGARIAN RHAPSODY. Zsa Zsa Gabor, ex-wife of Conrad Hilton, free-spending and high-flying at Heathrow Airport, London, 1968. (photo credit 7.2)
The Oedipus business had started when a teenage Nick, ogling Zsa Zsa in a semipublic display of affection with Conrad, asked what he had to do to get a kiss like that. Conrad, western-barroom-style, knocked his impudent son across the room. Nick was also playing with the fastest crowd in Hollywood. His best friend was the outwardly dashing but terribly troubled Peter Lawford, who would arrange the introduction to Elizabeth Taylor after Nick spotted her at the Mocambo nightclub.
Realizing it was better to sublimate his passions by pursuing hotels rather than women, Conrad Hilton, chastened by the Zsa Zsa debacle, went on an amazing run of “dowager” conquests. These weren’t rich widows but great old properties that had seen better days. Hilton could get them for a relative song. First came the Big Bertha that was the giant Stevens in Chicago, followed by its far fancier neighbor, the legendary Palmer House. In Washington, D.C., he bagged the Mayflower, known as “Washington’s Second Best Address” because Truman stayed there while the White House was being renovated. In New York, Hilton acquired the Roosevelt, the Plaza, and his proudest big buy, the Waldorf Astoria.
At which point Washington came calling, asking Conrad to become the Marshall Plan’s hospitality point man, bringing his Hilton hotels to Europeans as a form of foreign aid that would end up giving back more to America in profits than America gave to Europe in help. In 1949, Hilton obliged Washington by going on a grand tour of Europe’s grand hotels, his first visit since World War I. He was shocked by how tarnished the grandeur had become.
England was particularly poignant. The great houses like Claridge’s and the Savoy were victims not of German bombs but of English neglect. There had been no new linen for years. The windows were caked with the grime of war. The plumbing was primitive and barely worked. Price controls stifled the profit motive. The only good thing Hilton found was the courtly service.
France was slightly better. The main problem he noted was the scarcity of soap, a deficiency that he had noted after World War I. Plus ça change … The local and venal black market provided better food and bedclothes than the nonmarket of England. But Paris hadn’t seen a new hotel go up in over thirty years. To Hilton, tradition was just a way to put a positive spin on everything having been lost. Germany had nothing left, and Italy not much more. All Hilton saw was endless opportunity for an American innovator.
It was unclear which got more front-page publicity, Conrad’s 1949 acquisition of the world’s most beautiful hotel, the Waldorf, or Nicky’s 1950 acquisition, by marriage, of the world’s most beautiful woman, Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor, only seventeen to Nick’s twenty-three, was having her own troubles, chafing at the constraints of her starry indentured servitude to MGM. She had two possible modes of escape: going to college or getting married. She hated to study, so that left Nick, who seemed like just the ticket out of her bind. The moment they met, the gossips went wild, nastily intimating that this was as much about money as it was about love. Louella Parsons quoted the ostensibly virgin teen goddess vowing, “Nothing comes off until the ring goes on.” The diamonds quickly arrived, and 1950’s wedding of the year was scheduled by MGM to coincide with the release of Father of the Bride, just as it would coordinate To Catch a Thief with the royal nuptials in Monaco in 1956.
With the frenzy of a Chinese Theatre premiere, 3,000 fans mobbed the street outside the Good Shepherd Church to get a glimpse of some of the 600 celebrities inside, a Who’s Who of showbiz that included Astaire and Rogers, the Gene Kellys, the Bing Crosbys, the William Powells, the Dick Powells, and, to protect his investment, Louis B. Mayer, actually crying for joy in a front pew. Zsa Zsa Gabor was conspicuous in her absence. The newlyweds drove up the coast in Nick’s Mercedes convertible to begin their honeymoon at the Carmel Country Club, where humorist Art Buchwald happened to be vacationing. On what was supposed to be his big night with the queen of the world, Nick was found by Buchwald alone and drunk in the bar, which he seemed to inhabit for the lovebirds’ three-day stay.
The pair then took a train to Chicago to stay at Hilton’s Palmer House, then to New York and Hilton’s Waldorf, before catching the Queen Mary to Europe. Conrad’s wedding gift to Elizabeth was a big block of Hilton shares. It didn’t seem romantic, but to Conrad Hilton, the gift was his supreme expression of love. On the Queen, Nick gambled away $100,000 in the ship’s casino while Elizabeth found solace playing canasta with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the second most famous couple aboard that crossing. With Nick’s mounting inebriation and wagering losses, things that began ugly eventually turned violent, as the newlyweds turned the Queen into a floating boxing ring.
The fights continued at André Terrail’s George V, which, because of its long Hollywood connections and its rare-in-Europe air-conditioning, was the young Hiltons’ Paris headquarters. There PR dynamo Elsa Maxwell took them in tow, giving a major bash for them at Maxim’s, graced by Orson Welles, Maurice Chevalier, and every crowned or turbaned head in the city. Nick Hilton was unimpressed. He chewed gum the entire evening. Next stop was a private villa on the Via Appia Antica in Rome, where Elizabeth escaped Nick by hiding out with director Mervyn LeRoy, who was at Cinecittà studios directing the sword-and-sandals megamovie Quo Vadis. To help restore Elizabeth’s sanity, LeRoy put her in the film as an uncredited extra, playing a Christian martyr at the Colosseum. Elizabeth embraced it as typecasting. Nick was typically furious. When Elizabeth vanished from the villa, he trashed the entire place. The bill was sent to Daddy.
Then came the Riviera and the bridal suite of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, where La Taylor seemingly drew more press than the entire recent Cannes Film Festival. Nick escaped to the casino but was angrier at Elizabeth for her diamond purchases at Van Cleef on the Croisette than at his even more extravagant wagering losses. He saw their future as a replay of his father’s marriage to Zsa Zsa, minus the sex, plus even more shopping sprees, if possible. To try to make up for his wife’s bruises, Nick bought her a poodle called Banco.
After three months of European sparring, the Hiltons moved to a large and lavish bungalow at the Bel Air Hotel, which was opened in 1946 by one of Conrad’s former Texas partners, Joseph Drown. Alas, all the room service on earth couldn’t save the union. The pair separated in December 1950. The dream marriage had lasted all of six months, making the Conrad/Zsa Zsa match seem like high fidelity. Elizabeth fled to New York, this time to escape the shame of it all, seeking the solace of buddy Montgomery Clift. She checked in to the Hilton-owned Plaza, assuming she would be comped. She assumed too much. On checkout she received a bill for $2,500, informed that she was no longer part of the Hilton family. She called Clift over to help her smash everything in the suite. Together they stuffed a linen store’s worth of towels into her luggage. The Hilton Corporation sent her an even bigger bill for the damage and the theft. In the bitter end, when the divorce was granted in early 1951 on grounds of mental cruelty, Elizabeth asked for nothing except to keep her jewelry and her Hilton stock. Her taste in men was debatable, but she knew a great investment when she saw it.
Hilton father and son rebounded from their marital woes in similar fashion. They both went out with actresses, though not double-dating. Conrad squired around Jeanne
Crain, Hope Hampton, and the French bombshell Denise Darcel, revisiting his weakness for foreign-accented sultriness. Nick went the bombshell route as well, courting the likes of Mamie Van Doren and Joan Collins. Nick also went mano a mano with Howard Hughes for the favors of Terry Moore.
Conrad was still convinced that Nick could play out this wild-oats phase and be made into a hotelman. He took the boy on a second honeymoon to Europe, visiting potential sites for his Marshall Plan–inspired chain of luxury fortresses of American capitalism against the omnipresent Communist threat. Unfortunately, Nick was much more interested in partying than in innkeeping. Conrad had to plot his European invasion all by himself. The Marshall Plan expired in 1952, without providing the bonanza of easy financing that Hilton had expected. Instead, he had to go from country to country looking for money. Nonetheless, the Hilton name was magic, synonymous with success, American-style, and Conrad found himself in the enviable position of having to turn away foreign investors.
Hilton’s first project on the continent was in Madrid, where the developers of what would be the city’s first high-rise modern hotel had run out of money. Taking over and renaming the edifice the Castellana Hilton, after himself and the broad new boulevard it overlooked, Hilton chartered two TWA Constellations from his friend (and Nick’s amorous rival) Howard Hughes, full of show people for the 1953 grand opening.
The paint hadn’t dried, the elevators were broken, and the air-conditioning sputtered on and off, but publicity conquered all. The most famous of the stars was Gary Cooper, synergizing the Spanish premiere of High Noon with his buddy’s hotel premiere. So awed were Madrileños by the presence of Cooper that fan calls short-circuited the Hilton switchboard, knocking out phone service along with everything else. Mary Martin was there, serenading the opening-night crowd with “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” as the spotlight fell on Conrad, who had led off the festivities by sweeping Jinx Falkenburg onto the floor for his trademark Varsoviana. Swimming champion and cover girl Falkenburg was one of America’s media stars. Her top-rated radio interview show with her husband, Tex McCrary (Tex and Jinx), was broadcast every weekday morning from Peacock Alley at Hilton’s Waldorf Astoria. Tex and Jinx—who happened to have been born in Spain and was perfect for this launch—led the campaign to get Hilton golf mate General Eisenhower to run for president. Synergy was Conrad’s motto, even though he didn’t have a clue what the word meant. Hilton’s one overreach was to dress all the Castellana’s service staff in clichéd peasant costumes that looked as if they had come from the MGM wardrobe closet rather than the fields of Segovia. After a public outcry, Hilton redressed all the bellmen and waiters in tuxedos.
Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976) Page 18
