The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty (24 page)

I
mmediately after the wedding, the new Mr. and Mrs. Conrad Nicholas Hilton drove up to Carmel, California, in Nicky’s red Mercedes-Benz convertible. There, the couple would spend the next three nights at the Carmel Country Club. They seemed happy, but Nick was seen drinking a great amount of alcohol, which made some observers wonder about his true feelings. He was worried. He confided in one friend that though he was relieved the wedding was over, he was now beginning to wonder just what he had gotten himself into, because the country club was overrun with photographers and press people all vying for shots of the newlyweds. Meanwhile, to fill the weeks before their honeymoon—heaven forbid the Hiltons should have some free time!—MGM arranged a busy itinerary, which included many photo sessions and press conferences. Nick spent most of that time dodging these press events in any way he could. At one point he skipped out on a media dinner and holed himself up at his dad’s home. “Screw this,” he told Conrad and Barron as soon as he walked through the door. He was agitated. “She loves this stuff,” he told Conrad of his new wife. “You oughta see the way she eats it up. They’re all over her, taking pictures, kissing her ass. But me, they just ignore. What’s the point?” he asked, pouring himself a shot of his preferred libation.

“First of all, the drinking has got to stop,” Barron told his brother. It was clear that Nicky was already drunk. “It’s ten in the morning and you’re already loaded,” Barron said.

Nicky told his family members that he had expected a certain amount of media intrusion, but that this was far more than any man could take. “You have to live through it to understand what it’s like,” he said.

It would have been easy for Conrad to give Nicky the “I told you so” routine, but he genuinely felt badly for his young son. “You have to take it in and then ignore it, Nick,” he said. “What have I always told you: Be big,” he added. “You have to be bigger than they are. Now, go back and join your wife. You can do this, son. I know you can.”

In two weeks’ time, Nicky and Elizabeth boarded the
Queen Mary
for their “perfect” honeymoon cruise. Nicky by now knew pretty much what to expect and tried to steel himself for a trip that would doubtless be filled with curiosity seekers, fans, photographers, and journalists. Nothing, though, could have prepared him for the circuslike atmosphere that awaited him. It actually started with boarding. Nicky had a couple of suitcases with him. However, Elizabeth’s load was another matter altogether; she brought new meaning to the concept of overpacking. “She was traveling with seventeen trunks,” said Nora Johnson, the daughter of director Nunnally Johnson, who was on the ship, traveling first class. “She also had a maid and an entourage of, I would say, a dozen people.”

Instead of getting an opportunity to bask in the first blush of young married life and explore their sex life, like most honeymooning couples, Elizabeth and Nicky had no privacy at all. Everywhere they went on the enormous ship, they were followed by either photographers—who had been allowed access to the cruise—or other vacationers who couldn’t take their eyes off them. Although the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were also on board (occupying the bridal suite), it was the new Mr. and Mrs. Hilton whom everyone wanted to see. Everywhere they appeared, throngs gathered to get a good long look at them, but especially at Elizabeth. Even the crew of the ship surrounded the movie star, pleading for an autograph “and practically knocking over Nicky in the process,” recalled Melissa Wesson, who was also on the cruise on her honeymoon.

The cruise chaos was maddening to Nicky. Elizabeth was his new bride, yet she seemed to belong to everyone but him. To Nicky, it felt as if people were listening at the door of their stateroom, or trying to look through cracks to get a glimpse of them—and he was probably right. “I didn’t marry a girl,” he declared angrily. “I married an institution.”

Out of frustration, Nicky began to distance himself from Elizabeth and the chaos that surrounded her. He turned cold toward her, staying out all night drinking and gambling in the casino, leaving his new wife alone waiting for his return. In time there would even be stories of Nicky having pushed and shoved and been otherwise physically abusive toward Elizabeth on the deck of the ship. Somewhere along the line, he had developed a terrible temper. He certainly proved on this cruise that he could be explosive. “I thought he was a nice, pure All American boy,” Elizabeth told the writer Paul Theroux in 1999. “Two weeks later, wham! Bam! All the physical abuse started.”

“He wasn’t that way as a kid,” said Bob Neal of Nicky. “It was gradual. After he got out of the service, we noticed that little things started pissing him off. I think he was just unhappy, or restless… or… well, we couldn’t understand it. Back then, you didn’t analyze people as much as you do today. Back then, you just took it in, thought that it was strange, and moved on. You didn’t sit around trying to figure people out. But now, looking back on it, I think he was incredibly disappointed himself. I think he wanted a lot for himself, he believed in himself so much, and every time he took a misstep, it made him hate himself a little more—and thus the temper. That’s my theory, anyway.

“He also began drinking too much, and I also think this bad habit started in the service. There were signs that Nicky was getting worse, especially during the honeymoon with Elizabeth.”

“He loathed being known as Elizabeth Taylor’s husband,” Marilyn Hilton would recall of Nicky many years later. “He did not like being called Mr. Taylor. He was the I’m-the-boss-and-you-do-as-I-say type. He had a terrible temper and could be a real bastard,” she continued of her brother-in-law. “But he also could be sweet and gentle and really wonderful.”

“She left Nick three or four times on their honeymoon while in Europe,” Marilyn Hilton would say of Elizabeth.

Others saw another side to the story.

“Imagine being stuck on a cruise ship for three months with a woman who’s really, really pissed off at you,” said one of Nick’s close friends. “She started hitting him out of frustration when he didn’t do what she wanted him to do, and that wasn’t the best way to deal with Nicky, believe me. He’d hit you back, for sure.”

Bob Neal added, “By the time they got to New York, Nick was sick of all of it and, I dare say, sick of Elizabeth too. ‘She’s so goddamned demanding,’ he told me when he got back to Los Angeles. ‘You can’t please her. I don’t think anyone in the world is as spoiled as she is. You would not believe how bitchy she is too.’ So it’s safe to say they were not getting along at all. Or, as he told me, ‘It was three months of hell.’ ”

After the honeymoon was over, Elizabeth Taylor stayed in New York for a couple of weeks, likely trying to come to terms with the ordeal she’d just been through on the high seas. Meanwhile, Nicky Hilton returned to Los Angeles. “Nick was resentful, hot-tempered, and handled himself accordingly,” recalled Conrad. “Sometimes his temper flared and he stalked out. By the time they came home on the
Queen Elizabeth
,” Conrad added sarcastically, “the papers were printing tall tales of a separation.”

Those tales weren’t quite as tall as Conrad suggested.

Elizabeth Suffers a Miscarriage

T
he moment he got back to Los Angeles, Nicky made a beeline to Conrad’s house. When he opened the door to his father’s study, he found him in there with a battery of attorneys, in the middle of a meeting. Conrad remembered Nicky looking “absurdly young.”

“I’m sorry, Pop. I’ll come back,” Nicky said, apologizing. “Business first.”

“No,” Conrad said. “
Family
first.” He then asked the lawyers to please leave him and his son alone. What followed was a difficult conversation. Nicky said he hadn’t wanted to disappoint his father; he truly hoped he could make a go of it with Elizabeth, the way Barron had with Marilyn. Now that it was becoming painfully clear to him that such would not be the case, he was feeling sad and incredibly defeated. He was also bitterly disappointed in himself. “I’m really sorry, Pop,” Nicky told Conrad. “I’ve made a real mess of things. As usual.” He also told his father that much of what had been reported about his behavior on the ship was exaggerated. “It’s not true, and those writers
know
it,” he said, slamming his fist on his pop’s desk. “It doesn’t matter though; they’ll print whatever they want to print.”

Conrad understood. He’d been through the same sort of thing with Zsa Zsa. “You know what’s true and what isn’t,” he told Nicky, according to his later memory of the conversation. “You just have to hang on to the truth. And what have I always told you, Nicky: Be big. You have to be big.”

Nicky nodded his head. Later, Conrad would say, “I did my best,” but there was simply no way to cheer his son up that day. Compared to the happy union his brother Barron had been enjoying for years with Marilyn, Nicky’s relationship with Elizabeth was a real disaster. He felt like a failure. In a sense, though, that was something else he had in common with his father. Certainly Conrad felt like a failure as well in that he had had
two
bad marriages. He wasn’t nearly as judgmental of Nicky as Nicky believed. He understood Nicky—maybe even better than he understood Barron.

Deeply conflicted, Nicky didn’t seem to have much capacity for diplomacy, especially where Elizabeth was concerned. Instead of trying to reason with her, he would just scream at her, which didn’t make the situation any better and actually just made it worse. “She would then jump on him like an angry cat,” said Bob Neal, “punching and scratching, really enraged. Then Nicky did what Nicky would do. He’d say, ‘Get the hell away from me, you crazy broad, you,’ and he’d smack her just once and she’d go flying. She would cry, ‘
How could you?
’ He would then feel terrible about himself,
so
disappointed in himself. Then, a couple days later, it would happen again. It was an awful cycle.”

In the fall of 1999—almost fifty years after she and Nicky Hilton were divorced and thirty years after Nicky was dead and gone—Elizabeth Taylor would tell writer Paul Theroux in an interview for
Talk
magazine that she finally walked out on the marriage after Nicky caused her to have a miscarriage. She explained, “He was drunk. I thought, ‘This is not why I was put on earth. God did not put me here to have a baby kicked out of my stomach.’ I had terrible pains. I saw the baby in the toilet. I didn’t know that I was pregnant, so it wasn’t a malicious or on-purpose kind of act. It just happened.” Elizabeth became so upset in the telling of the story, wrote the writer, that she was forced to leave the room to compose herself. When she returned, she apologized, explaining, “I have never spoken about this before.”

As it happened, after Elizabeth and Nicky returned from their honeymoon, Elizabeth began filming the sequel to
Father of the Bride
, called
Father’s Little Dividend
, in which her character introduced in the first movie becomes pregnant. Her stand-in for the move, Marjorie Dillon, recalls of Elizabeth’s miscarriage at the time, “It was an early pregnancy—she wasn’t far along. One day, she fainted on the set and had to be rushed home. Nicky’s uncle was an obstetrician and he came to the house, but Liz had already miscarried. She was in bed and wanted Nicky to stay with her, but he had already made plans to go deep-sea fishing. He gave her a kiss and said, ‘I’ll be back in a couple of days. Marge will spend the night with you.’ I did, of course, and that’s when she cried and cried.”

Divorce—Hollywood Style

I
want you to end this marriage,” Conrad Hilton told Nicky one day at the end of November 1950, according to what Nicky later said. “Sometimes,” Conrad told his son, “a woman can bring out the worst in a man. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.” He did. After all, how many times had Zsa Zsa Gabor driven him to the brink of fury? Though he was always able to control himself—he didn’t have the temperament for violence in any way, shape, or form, and he also rarely lost his temper—he was surprised just the same at how angry she could make him. In many ways, he didn’t like the man he had become as Zsa Zsa’s husband, and from what he could tell, Nicky was going through the same thing as Elizabeth’s spouse. “End it, son,” he told him. “Get the hell out now, while you still can.”

“I don’t have to,” Nicky told him. “I got a call from some hot-shot lawyer yesterday. She’s divorcing me!”

Conrad shook his head sadly. “Well, here we go again,” he said. “Another divorce the church isn’t going to recognize, only now it’s going to be your cross to bear.”

“I know, Pop,” Nicky said. “The only difference is that I will never go through this again. I’ll never marry again. I can promise you that.”

On December 1, 1950, MGM announced that Elizabeth and Nicky were separating. A statement from Elizabeth said that “there is no possibility of a reconciliation.” Three weeks later, Elizabeth filed divorce papers, charging that throughout their brief marriage Nicky had treated her “in a cruel and inhumane manner.” She also cited “great and grievous mental cruelty and mental pain, suffering and anguish.” She did not stipulate any charge of physical abuse. For his part, Nick’s lawyer filed an answer denying all charges of cruelty.

On Friday, March 9, 1951, barely three months after it was announced that they were divorcing, Nicky Hilton and Elizabeth Taylor were back in touch. He picked up the telephone that morning to find Elizabeth calling him. She was now romantically involved with director Stanley Donen, she said, but she missed him very much. Nicky couldn’t believe his ears. That she missed him was perhaps not surprising, but that she was already in another relationship did give him pause. Their divorce wasn’t even final yet! He was reminded of the fact that he had met her on the day she ended her engagement to William Pawley. Or as Conrad had said of Elizabeth, “Fast worker, that one.”