The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty (19 page)

As for Nicky, he just continued to maintain his below-par grades, sliding by without his father’s attention or worry. “How come my pop gets all bent out of shape when Barron flunks something, but when I do, it’s okay?” Nicky asked Everett Long, one of his best friends at the time. “It’s like my pop doesn’t give a shit if I graduate or not.” Everett Long laughed. “Consider yourself lucky,” he told Nicky. “You don’t need the old man riding you anyway.” Years later, Long would recall, “I remember Nick saying to me, ‘I could murder someone and end up in jail and my dad would probably say, “Oh, gosh darn that Nicky!” But if Barron ended up in jail, my dad would die of a broken heart.’ ”

Predictably, Nicky soon became intensely competitive where Barron was concerned. If Barron had a girl, Nicky wanted a girl. If Barron got a new car, Nicky wanted a new car. It would be the pattern throughout their teenage years. Nicky just felt that Conrad preferred Barron, and so he would always work to try to reverse that situation, or at least be Barron’s equal in all things. “Nicky could do anything he set his mind to, he just needed people to believe in him,” said Robert Wentworth, who was also a friend of both Hilton sons. “He needed that kind of encouragement. I’m not sure he ever got it at home.”

The boys may have been competitive, but they were also quite unusual youngsters in the sense that they both loved to express themselves, giving speeches when they were teenagers to nobody, really, other than each other and their father. Conrad would call these little speeches “stirring orations on important subjects.” He wrote, “I could recognize my father’s persuasiveness in this new generation. When Nick tried to convince me, his lone listener, ‘Resolved: We Need Better Hospitals’ or ‘Resolved: We Have Too Many Schools,’ I had visions of Gus and his cowbell storming about New Mexico for better roads.”

After school, both Hilton sons ended up in the service. Barron had volunteered for the Navy as soon as he was old enough at seventeen, and soon found himself assigned to Pearl Harbor. Nicky served as a radar man aboard the battleship
North Carolina
. In one letter to Conrad, Nicky wrote that he realized that his personal wealth—or, more specifically, the wealth of his father—didn’t matter one iota in the service. “You have to learn to take it and like it over here,” he wrote. “It doesn’t matter in the service how much money your dad has because you’re in exactly the same boat with everyone else. If I was ever a smart aleck, or Barron either, and I guess we were, this is a fine place to get it kicked out of you.”

In August 1945, when the war was finally over, Conrad was happy and relieved to have Nicky and Barron safely back home. However, neither son showed any interest in the hotel business. Likely because both had grown up in the huge shadow of their father’s enormous success, now neither wanted to compete with him. True, when Barron was seventeen he worked as a doorman at the El Paso Hilton. He also worked in the garage at the Town House. But that was about as close to the hotel business as he wanted to get. He and Nicky—and even Eric—made it clear that they were not going to be following in their father’s footsteps. Conrad was disappointed, but he tried his best to reconcile it, realizing, as he put it, “You have to let sons find their best path in life.”

There was no denying that both Nicky and Barron were brimming with youthful potential and masculine allure. The Hilton brothers had grown into strikingly handsome men who oozed wealth and charisma. Nicky in particular had movie-star looks. His brown eyes were warm and inviting, as was his dazzling, porcelain-white smile. He added to his glamour boy appeal with impeccable grooming. His thick dark hair was always perfectly coiffed, groomed to perfection with expensive hair cream, comb-grooved, but with a careful, casual tousle—much like the teen idols of the day. He had yet to develop the full ladies’ man image he would soon acquire, instead coming across as a younger, more innocent and boyish version of Burt Lancaster or Robert Mitchum. For his part, Barron was tall and slender with a regal bearing, dark curly hair, and an attractive intensity. He also dressed in impeccably tailored suits and exuded sophistication and charm.

Immediately after the service, Barron was able to enroll in the University of Southern California Aeronautical School—which did not require a high school diploma at the time—where he would go on to earn a twin-engine rating. However, he would drop out after just a year. “I didn’t seem to get along with school,” he would remember in 1981, “but I did well in arithmetic. It’s somewhat embarrassing that I didn’t really complete an education,” he said. “I regret that to a degree.”

Though he had dropped out of high school and then college, by the time he turned twenty-one, Barron Hilton’s youthful days of irresponsibility and unreliability were relegated to his past. It was as if some mechanism in him switched on when he came of age, and suddenly he was his father’s son: motivated, interested, invested, ready to make a fortune, and determined that he didn’t have to have a full education in order to make it happen. Conrad agreed that Barron had what it took to advance in whatever profession he chose, and he was willing to give him a chance to figure out what that would be. It would probably be in the field of aeronautics, which was fine with Conrad. He knew that Barron would find his own way.

Unfortunately, Conrad didn’t have the same confidence in Nicky. After the service, Nicky’s ambition seemed to involve little more than enjoying his freedom and having a good time. Conrad also felt that Nicky was too idealistic. “Nicky was the kind of guy who just believed that everything was going to be okay,” said Everett Long. “He wanted the best for everybody, even if he was in competition with Barron. He considered it a friendly competition. I’m not sure Barron felt exactly that way. I think Barron was a little tougher than that. Anyway, Conrad felt that Nicky was drifting. Eventually, he felt he had to step in and help steer Nicky in some sort of direction. He sent Nick down to Texas to work in the boiler room—the heating facilities—of his El Paso hotel for a short time. Then he coaxed him into studying hotel management in Switzerland at Ecole Hôtelière in Lausanne. Nicky didn’t want to go, though, and fought it tooth and nail. His reasoning was that Conrad hadn’t forced anything on Barron, why was he forcing this on him? Of course, the reason was because Barron seemed to have some sort of direction, whereas Nicky didn’t.”

After about six months of schooling, Nicky returned to Los Angeles, still no closer to having any sort of direction or goal. Conrad then offered him a job as a manager of the Bel-Air Hotel, in which Conrad had a major interest. Again, this was not Nicky’s dream and he resented another attempt to push him into the hotel business. However, he figured that since Barron wanted nothing to do with it, it would give him a leg up in his competition with his younger brother for Conrad’s approval. So Nicky took the job at the Bel-Air Hotel with reluctance, but soon realized he was actually good at it. He had a way with people, he had a great deal of charisma and personality, and he was funny and bright. “People gravitated to him and he was efficient in his job of managing that hotel,” said Everett Long. “He had a lot of responsibilities and, for a minute there, I think he even had Conrad’s approval.”

An Offer He Could Refuse

O
n June 20, 1947, at just twenty, Barron Hilton married Marilyn June Hawley at St. Vincent de Paul Church in Chicago. “Her family had a home up in Lake Arrowhead,” recalled Conrad’s attorney Myron Harpole, “and that’s where Barron and Marilyn first got acquainted. She was a wonderful girl. You couldn’t help but fall for her.”

At the time of her marriage, Marilyn—born in Los Angeles on February 11, 1928—was a pretty and stylish woman who wore fashionable yet simple clothes with classic lines. Her hair was dark blonde, her makeup usually consisting of little more than the red lipstick of the day. She certainly didn’t have the flashy glamour of a celebrity, but her smile radiated great warmth. It was easy to see why Barron, who had grown up to be so serious and determined, would be attracted to such a striking, unassuming woman. Because of her great charm, friends like the actress Carole Wells remember her to this day as “beautiful.”

The couple would have their first of eight children in 1948, William Barron Hilton Jr. Then, in 1949, along came Hawley Anne Hilton. By the time he was twenty-two, Barron was settled into a happy home life.

Just before he had his first son, Barron announced that he had been giving his future a great deal of thought and had come to the conclusion that he, like his older brother Nicky, who was working at the Bel-Air Hotel, wanted to work in the hotel business, and specifically for the Hilton organization. By this time, the Hilton Corporation had gone public, with its stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange; Conrad was the corporation’s largest stockholder with more than $2 million in holdings.
^*

Conrad Hilton owned twelve major hotels by the time Barron decided he wanted to be involved in the family’s enterprise, nine of which were folded into the corporation and worth over $51 million. (The other three remained independent of it for technical reasons having to do with their financing.) It gave Conrad great satisfaction to know that the corporation’s elected officers were all men who had started their climb up the ladder of success at around the same time he had, and who owed a lot of their success to his ingenuity, creativity, and business savvy. There was Red Ellison, for instance, who had once been a bellboy at the hotel in Abilene. He was the kid who had given Conrad $500, his life savings, when Conrad needed it most to keep the company going during the Depression. Now he was vice president in charge of the Western Division. There was also Bob Williford, former key clerk at the hotel in Dallas. Now he was executive vice president of the corporation and vice president in charge of the Central Division. There were many others as well, who had long been allies of Conrad Hilton’s and were now rewarded with prime positions in the corporation. His assistant Olive Wakeman found herself promoted to executive secretary, which opened a position for personal secretary to Conrad Hilton, eventually given to Ruth Hinneman.

For Nicky, the news that Barron wanted to join the ranks in the hotel business wasn’t the best. Now thriving at his position at the Bel-Air Hotel, for the first time Nicky had his father’s respect on a professional level, and the old rivalry reared its head again. Nicky had even accompanied his father on an important business trip abroad intended to open communication channels between European and American hotels, which had led to the establishment of Hilton Hotels International in May 1946. As Conrad had explained it, the goal of this new company was to “expand internationally and thereby encourage both industry growth and tourism,” with his corporate slogan being “World Peace through International Trade and Travel.” Hilton believed his hotels could not only contribute to the economies of European countries but also provide a permanent reminder of the part America had played in the Allied victory with the establishment of the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine. Along with the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), these two initiatives’ stated aims were to help rebuild cities and economies after the devastation of World War II. Conrad also saw his efforts as a way to combat Communism, a growing menace to world peace and as insidious as the Nazi assault on Europe only a few years earlier. That he involved Nicky in these important matters meant the world to Nicky, and demonstrated that Conrad was beginning to take his eldest son seriously.

“Now, the hotel business was Nicky’s thing,” recalled Everett Long. “
He
was the son in the family business, not Barron. He wanted to know, ‘Why is Barron all of a sudden interested? He wasn’t before, why now?’ ”

This intense competition between the brothers was not the result of any genuine hostility between them. They had a deep and abiding love for one another. However, they displayed a fierce sibling rivalry that would last for their entire lives.

One day, out of the blue, Barron walked into Conrad’s office to ask him for a job with the Hilton Corporation. Of course, Conrad was open to the idea. “I can start you out in a position at $150 a week,” he said, according to his memory.

“You’re joking, right?” Barron said.

“No,” Conrad responded. “I think that’s fair. I started at five dollars a month, but I think we can do a little better for you,” he concluded with a wink. “Besides, that’s what we started Nicky at, and that’s where we’ll start you at, whichever hotel we place you in.”

Barron looked at his father as if he were daft. “But Nicky is on his own. I have a family,” he said. “I have a child, my wife is pregnant with another. So we’re talking about supporting three people. Plus, I have to have a cook. Oh, and I have to have a nurse, too. So that’s
five
people I have to support, Dad!”

Conrad shook his head in astonishment, no doubt marveling at the temerity of the young man before him who felt entitled to not only his own cook but a live-in nurse as well. However, that’s how he had raised his sons—with a staff of people on hand to do their every bidding. Therefore it was no surprise that they’d gotten used to living that way. Still, it was always a struggle for Conrad to reconcile the way he had been raised—with little—with the way he had raised his sons, and what they expected from life as a result of such a privileged upbringing. “I don’t know what to tell you, Barron,” he said. “We start people at $150 a week in our organization, and that’s not going to change for you.”

“Well, I can’t work for any man for $150 a week,” Barron said, getting up from his chair. “I need a thousand dollars a month, Dad. That’s $250 a week.”