The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty (55 page)

“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

O
f 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 supposed 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

A
lthough 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?

In June 1978, the editors of
People
magazine heard that Francesca was attempting to launch a career as a photographer. This news seemed to present an opportunity for the magazine to finally obtain photographs of Conrad and his new wife, Frances—none had been published up until that time. The magazine’s editors told Francesca that if she could take those pictures, they would be interested in purchasing them. It was an exciting proposition. Not only could it launch Francesca’s career with a reputable publication, but she would be paid more than $500 and would have money left over after paying back her father. Francesca made the trek up to Casa Encantada to present the idea to Conrad.

The two sat in Conrad’s study as she made the pitch. “This would be a great way for me to break into the business, Dad,” she enthused, according to her later testimony. She explained that she cared about him much more than any other photographer who would just come in and take pictures for the money. She promised that they would be wonderful photographs, and assured him that he would have full approval not only over each shot but also over any story in which they would appear. She added that she would earn more than enough money to pay back what she owed him. Conrad didn’t have to mull it over long. “Absolutely not,” he decided. Francesca was bewildered: “
But why?
” Conrad explained that he didn’t feel it was fair for
him
to have to work in order for
her
to earn money. Keeping his temper in check, as usual, he said he could think of nothing worse than spending the entire day posing for pictures. In his mind that was definitely work.

For a moment, Francesca was at a loss. Finally, in her own defense, she reiterated her intention: She was only taking the job in order to pay him back what he had lent her. But as he rose from his chair, he told her to just forget about it. She didn’t have to pay him back at all, he declared.

“But I’m not trying to get out of paying you back, Dad,” she said. “I’m just…”

“I understand, and that will be all, Francesca,” Conrad announced formally, as if ending a Hilton board meeting. “Good day, my dear,” he added, as he patted her on the shoulder and then took his leave.

The Great Adventure of His Life

I
n the fall of 1978, Conrad and Frances Hilton began planning their second wedding anniversary party, which would take place at their home in December, shortly after Conrad’s ninety-first birthday. He was in fine spirits and in relatively good health, given his age. He still went into the office six days a week, if only to make a pest of himself to Barron. “He’d rather I only come in a couple times a week,” Conrad told one secretary of his son, “but why make it easy on the boy?” he asked with a wink. “He was actually quite active in the year 1978,” Barron Hilton would recall. “I discussed with him our business on a day-to-day basis. He was particularly interested in what our earnings reports were indicating. He constantly was on the phone with the stockbrokers determining the value of Hilton stock.”