The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty (21 page)

After their initial meeting at the Mocambo, Nicky and Elizabeth had lunch at a Mexican restaurant on Melrose Avenue. He was so taken with her, he had flowers sent to her that same day. Their romance unfolded quickly from there. Before anyone knew what was happening, she was all he could think about, all he could talk about. He began to gift her with expensive jewelry, which even at her young age was one way to Elizabeth’s heart. Those closest to the family felt that Nicky perhaps wanted to emulate his brother, Barron, and settle down, and maybe in the process win just a little more favor with his father.

“Pop, think we can have a little talk?” Nicky asked Conrad one evening after dinner. Conrad excused himself and his son from the table, and the two then went into the study.

“I want to marry Elizabeth,” Nicky told Conrad once they were alone in Conrad’s inner sanctum. “I love her and I want her to be my wife. I think we can be happy together.”

According to what Nicky would later recount to his trusted friend Bob Neal,
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Conrad wasn’t sure what to make of Nicky’s decision. “Why, Nick?” Conrad asked him. “You’re both so young. This is so fast. You just met her!”

“But Barron was younger than me when he got married and you didn’t question that,” Nicky protested. That was undeniably true. But Conrad had felt that Barron was mature and prudent enough to handle marriage and children. He wasn’t so sure about Nicky. He had the same opinion of Nicky that he’d always had—he admired his zeal for living and his appetite for fun, while at the same time questioning his ability to be responsible and to commit to one thing for long. He appealed earnestly to him to reconsider, to give it more time. But Nicky wouldn’t hear of it. His mind was made up.

“Nick, you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into with this girl. I’ve been down this road, and I know how tough it is.” He spoke of the difficulty of living a life in a “fishbowl” with Zsa Zsa and the unrelenting media curiosity that accompanied their marriage. And she was famous for her personality alone. Elizabeth Taylor was a movie star, America’s sweetheart, with the powerful machinery of MGM’s publicity department behind her, turning out updated scoops on her life as they unfolded. The couple’s every move would be documented in newspapers and fan magazines. They wouldn’t have a moment of privacy. “Life with Elizabeth will be beyond anything you have ever experienced,” Conrad said.

Conrad’s fiery plea fell on deaf ears. Nicky was going to marry Elizabeth and he was sure they would make it work. He believed in her, and he believed in himself. Conrad felt he was being, as usual, idealistic and naïve. Nicky didn’t care. “But I still need your approval,” he told his father. “Please don’t make me get married without your approval, Pop.”

Conrad sighed. He knew he would have to acquiesce. Of course, he would have preferred to have more control over him, but he knew that Nicky would ultimately do what he pleased—and perhaps it would work out for the best. After all, Nicky had surprised everyone by stepping up to the plate and making a successful career managing the Bel-Air Hotel. “Of course you have my approval,” Conrad said finally. “But,” he couldn’t help adding, “I think you’re making a big mistake.”

Nicky grinned broadly. “Then it will be
my
mistake,” he said. The two men stood up and firmly shook hands, but only Nicky was smiling.

The Man Who Bought the Waldorf

N
icky Hilton’s intention to marry Elizabeth Taylor would not be a priority in Conrad Hilton’s life, not yet anyway. Something else big was on the horizon, the realization of what could only be described as a personal dream of his. Nicky wasn’t the only one clipping pictures from magazines and using them for inspiration. Since 1932, Conrad Hilton had kept a small, dog-eared picture of a hotel under glass on his desk in his office at the Los Angeles Town House. He had seen it in a publication while crossing the country in a train, and couldn’t resist it. Across its front he wrote, “The greatest of them all.” It was a photograph of the splendid Waldorf-Astoria, truly considered at the time to be the world’s premier hotel, a New York City landmark and one that Hilton had long wanted to own. He could barely afford to put a roof over his family’s head—which was how they all ended up living at the El Paso Hilton—yet here he was fantasizing about owning the Waldorf-Astoria.

Of all the women in his harem, the Waldorf was the one Conrad knew he would cherish the most, and as far as he was concerned, all of the many loves of his life had been but mere forerunners to this one, the grandest dame of them all. Even with the string of successes Hilton achieved in the 1940s, he kept wondering if they constituted enough “practice,” as he had once put it, for him to have a run at the real prize—the Waldorf-Astoria. Proudly it sat in all of its imposing art deco splendor at 301 Park Avenue, occupying the entire block between East 49th and 50th Streets. It was a forty-seven-story architectural marvel that had inspired countless glossy magazine features and photo spreads and hundreds of newspaper articles, with its celebrated history of luring thousands through its doors.

But that was in its heyday. Now the wisdom of owning the Waldorf-Astoria was questioned by many of Conrad’s advisers on his board of directors. Nothing new there—they seemed almost never to agree with him. The hotel was in financial trouble; even though it was still considered the biggest and the best, it had fallen on hard times during the Depression and hadn’t fully recovered. However, as with most of his acquisitions, Conrad had a strong intuition that the Waldorf could and would recover, and that when it did it would be more profitable than ever. What the hotel had going for it—besides its exquisite craftsmanship that would have been cost-prohibitive to replicate in 1949—was its prestigious name value. The Waldorf was world-renowned and had a stellar reputation. Many notables happily called it their home away from home. Winston Churchill, Pope Pius XII, and the crowned heads of many nations were impressed with not only the stunning architecture but also the impeccable service of the Waldorf-Astoria.

If one were going to visit New York at the time, the Waldorf-Astoria was still the most coveted destination. (At its original location, where the Empire State Building now stands, it was also the first hotel in the country to feature room service.) However, the prices were so exorbitant that most people simply couldn’t afford it. “It was the host to kings,” Conrad Hilton would write. “It made history. It made news. It made everything but money.” Conrad believed all that could change, though, and of course he felt he was the man to do the job.

For Conrad, owning this hotel was essential. “He believed that if he could claim ownership of the Waldorf, it would be the one thing upon which he could always hang his hat,” said Olive Wakeman a few years later, in 1963. “Call it ego, call it what you like, but Mr. Hilton felt the hotel already belonged to him, and all he had to do was cut through the red tape and deal with the other formalities that prevented it from truly being his. I don’t think there was ever a doubt in his mind that, somehow, he would own the Waldorf-Astoria. That’s the kind of man he was.”

There were two companies governing the Waldorf at the time, with which Conrad would have to deal in order to acquire it: the Hotel Waldorf-Astoria Corporation, which owned the hotel and its name, and the New York State Realty and Terminal Company, which had been organized by two railroads, the New York Central and the New Haven, and which owned the land on which the hotel was leased. Since the New York State Realty and Terminal Company had put forth $10 million to build the hotel, it had final say over who owned it. So as well as purchase control of the corporation, Conrad would have to appeal to the Realty and Terminal Company.

The first hurdle to leap would have to do with the Hotel Waldorf-Astoria Corporation. Since it retained control of the building and the land, it was therefore in a position to deny any prospective purchaser the right to acquire the prized real estate. With a level of arrogance that some observers at the time felt set a new standard, the corporation members dug in their heels, claiming they were opposed to any prospective owner who had several irons in the fire, like Conrad. A new owner should be a man with nothing on his mind but the Waldorf. In other words, they were afraid that Hilton’s commitment and attention to the hotel were lacking.

There were few businessmen as diplomatic as Conrad Hilton. He knew how to schmooze not only the stockholders leery of allowing him ownership of the hotel due to their sense that the hotel would be less special if it were “just another Hilton enterprise,” but also his own board of directors, who viewed the Waldorf-Astoria as a white elephant that would do nothing but deplete the company’s finances. No matter how many hotels Hilton owned and how successful he was with them, there was always resistance to his making big acquisitions. It speaks to the economic times, of course, but also to the ego of those who had designated themselves guardians of these hotels’ legacies. There had been those who felt that Hilton’s ownership of the Plaza would somehow ruin that grand dame’s reputation, and he seemed to be facing the same sentiment where the Waldorf was concerned.

With the door slammed in his face by the Waldorf-Astoria Corporation, Hilton had to at least try to appeal to the New York State Realty and Terminal Company. He decided to first approach R. E. Dougherty, vice president in charge of real estate for the New York Central, figuring it would be better to plead his case to one man and arrive at something—even defeat—than continue to deal with what Conrad felt was an amorphous, soulless Waldorf Corporation. Accompanied by his trusted adviser Joseph P. Binns, Hilton began a long, wearisome campaign to convince Dougherty that he had no intention of converting the stately Waldorf into a run-of-the-mill way station, that he would keep alive the storied tradition that had made it one of the wonders of the hotel world. After all, hadn’t he already proved what he could do with his acquisition of the Plaza and the Roosevelt, rescuing both from uncertain futures and returning them to their former glory? Dougherty conceded that Hilton had done a miraculous job in both instances.

Months passed in 1949 with no progress in the purchase of the hotel. In the summer, Conrad went to Europe to investigate opportunities there for hotels he might acquire as part of his new venture, Hilton Hotels International. Upon his return, he learned that another mogul was interested in the Waldorf-Astoria, or as he put it, “The Queen had, in my absence, acquired a second suitor, a wealthy fellow who had no other lady in mind.” Now Hilton was afraid that he might never acquire the hotel unless he acted quickly. His corporation’s board of directors was, as usual, not encouraging about the purchase and tried to block it in every way they could think of. Never one to be easily discouraged, Conrad decided to use his own money rather than the corporation’s to finance part of the purchase, and to form a “buying group” of investors for the rest. In other words, he was acting independently of his own corporation—unusual, to say the least, but not surprising if one knew Conrad Hilton. He would find a way, especially when there seemed to be no way.

Within days, Conrad walked into the office of one of the chief stockholders in the Waldorf Corporation and presented a personal check to purchase 249,024 shares of stock at $12 a share. This purchase, if accepted, would give him a majority control of the corporation. The offer was accepted within forty-eight hours. Now it would be up to Conrad to cough up $3 million, the asking price for the hotel itself. Meanwhile, he kept whittling away at any resistance from the Waldorf-Astoria Corporation and the New York State Realty and Terminal Company, constantly meeting with its members, constantly reassuring them of his intentions and basically winning them all over.

With the wheels in motion for the purchase, and it being clear that Hilton was going to proceed with or without his own Hilton Hotels Corporation, HHC finally decided to participate in the buying group. Slowly but surely, with his corporation’s investment as well as those of a number of backers, from banking institutions to insurance companies, Hilton began to amass the $3 million he needed to make the purchase. He was still $500,000 short when he sat down with his friend the entrepreneur Henry Crown. “What do you say you and I just go in with halves of the five hundred grand and get this hotel?” Crown didn’t even hesitate, coming up with the $250,000 for his old friend. In the end, Conrad would pay $3 million for about 69 percent of the Waldorf-Astoria Corporation, and also assume a debt of almost $4.5 million. Thanks to his scrutiny of the bottom line, he would soon increase his holdings in the hotel from 69 percent to 100 percent.

On October 12, 1949, the deal was concluded; Conrad Hilton now owned the Waldorf-Astoria. For the rest of his life, he would be known as “the Man Who Bought the Waldorf.” There was even a biography published about him in 1950 using that title by Thomas Ewing Dabney. Conrad would say that for the rest of his life, everything he did would be measured as having happened either “before the Waldorf” or “after the Waldorf.”

Conrad’s impact on the grandest of all hotels would be felt almost immediately. For instance, he would install vitrines—glass-paneled cabinets—in the lobby to showcase and sell objets d’art, thereby putting about $18,000 in the hotel’s coffers every year. After a thorough investigation, he would disprove rumors that pilfering by employees was costing as much as $100,000 a year. He would also set up the operational side of the Waldorf on a basis whereby even partial occupancy would still yield a profit. His experience operating other hotels would tell him that if properly managed and cost-planned, the Waldorf could make a profit on 75 percent occupancy. In fact, he believed it could even be profitable on a 50 percent occupancy.