The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty (61 page)

The question remained: Was Conrad Hilton in New York in April 1946, or was he there in July? If in April, it would not be have been possible for him to have fathered Francesca, since she was born the following March. But if in July, then, yes, it would have been possible.

It wasn’t until weeks after both Gabor’s and Kramer’s depositions that Conrad Hilton’s attorneys were finally able to locate his travel itineraries for 1946. Had they found them earlier, it might have saved a lot of trouble, though still not answering all questions conclusively. The startling discovery was made that Conrad had been in New York in both April
and
July. Now it appeared that both Zsa Zsa Gabor and Willard Kramer had been telling the truth. The only question was whether or not Zsa Zsa was telling the
whole
truth: Had she and Conrad really been intimate in July 1946?

A Surprise Visitor

I
t was a sunny afternoon the last week of July 1979 when Frances Hilton was rudely awakened from a sound nap by a loud rapping on her front door. It had been six months since the death of her husband. She was now living in a fairly nice—but by no means extravagant—three-bedroom apartment on Comstock Avenue in Beverly Hills. The home was tastefully furnished, a few antiques here and there, but mostly plain retail furniture. Frances was quite comfortable there, having turned one of the bedrooms into a study, the other into a master for her own use, and the third for guests. About a month after she moved in, Steven Hilton, Barron’s son, visited her and noticed that the apartment needed some repairs. “This has got to be done now,” he said, and he took care of it immediately. A few weeks later, Barron came to visit with a gift—a mink coat. She had never had one, and Barron just thought she deserved one, so he bought it for her. His father would have been happy about it. Barron always realized how much Frances meant to his father. He even wrote a letter to Bill Kelly to tell him that he believed Frances to be “my father’s one true love.” Therefore, the Hiltons would always treat Frances as a treasured member of the family. She would never really want for anything, but as was her custom, she would never really ask for anything either.

“Who is it?” Frances said as she stood behind her front door.

“Why, it’s me,
dah-ling
,” came the voice from the other side. “It’s Zsa Zsa!”

Could it be? Was it possible? And if so…
why
?

Frances cracked the door open with more than a little trepidation and… there she stood: Zsa Zsa Gabor—bouffant platinum blonde hair, shimmering blouse, slim-fitting slacks, spiked heels… the whole Gabor-esque picture. As Frances would later recall it, she couldn’t quite believe her eyes. In that moment, it was as if her two worlds had suddenly collided—the extravagant life she had once led as Conrad Hilton’s wife and the simpler one she now led as his widow. Instinctively, she reached out and embraced Zsa Zsa. “My goodness,” Frances exclaimed. “This is such a surprise.”

“For me, too,” Zsa Zsa said, laughing.

As it would happen, in the days following Zsa Zsa Gabor’s deposition in Francesca’s case, she couldn’t get Conrad Hilton off her mind. After all, at one time he had meant the world to her; they had so much history. When she heard that he had died, she went to pieces. People in her life were surprised at just how devastated she was by the news. Now it appeared Zsa Zsa had some unfinished business with his widow. After Frances welcomed her into her living room. Zsa Zsa took a place on the sofa; Frances sat next to her. She offered her a cup of tea, but Zsa Zsa declined.

Phyllis Bradley recounts what Frances Hilton later told her about this surprise visit from Zsa Zsa. “Mrs. Hilton told me that Miss Gabor started by asking if she had given her deposition yet,” Bradley recalled. “At first, Mrs. Hilton didn’t know what she was talking about. Then it hit her—Francesca’s lawsuit. Frances was scheduled to be deposed in just a week’s time. Miss Gabor warned her that the attorneys would probably ask her to recall every little detail about this visit, so they should probably be careful about what they discussed. She said that she had become smart about such things of late and joked that she could be a lawyer herself, with all that she had been through with what she called ‘these goddamn
depquisitions
.’ ” (As it would happen, Zsa Zsa would be proved right; the attorneys
would
ask Frances about this surprise visit and Frances would be asked to provide a clear and concise account of it in order to determine if Zsa Zsa had left any threadbare clues as to Francesca’s paternity—which apparently she had not.)

After she settled into her chair, Zsa Zsa took in her modest surroundings. “So, they wouldn’t let you stay at the mansion, would they?” she asked.

“Well, no,” Frances answered. She explained that the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation actually owned Casa Encantada. Attorney Donald H. Hubbs had told her that the foundation would list the house completely furnished—the way Conrad had bought it—for around $15 million (the equivalent of about $50 million today). “It was definitely time for me to leave,” Frances said. She added that she was sure Conrad wouldn’t have wanted her rattling around in that enormous mansion all by herself with just servants for company.

“You couldn’t take any of the furnishings, either?” Zsa Zsa asked.

Again according to her deposition, Frances told Zsa Zsa that if she wanted to keep any furnishings from Casa Encantada, she would’ve had to purchase them from the foundation. Zsa Zsa found this arrangement puzzling. She wondered why the widow should not be allowed to keep her deceased husband’s furniture. “Maybe in the real world,” Frances observed wryly, “but not in this one.” She added that even Barron and Eric had to purchase any pieces that had sentimental value to them. After some more small talk, Frances finally asked, “So, why are you here, Zsa Zsa?”

“I don’t know, to tell you the truth,” Zsa Zsa answered. She looked a little lost, as Frances would describe her. “But you were always so kind to me,” she said. “I guess I want you to know that I’m very sorry I was so mean to you, dear. It has really bothered me.”

Frances was surprised. She certainly never expected an apology from Zsa Zsa Gabor! She told Zsa Zsa that she probably had a great deal on her mind at the time, and that this was likely the reason she had often been so abrasive. Zsa Zsa agreed, but said she now realized she could have just been nicer to Frances. She specifically referred to the scene she had caused in front of Conrad’s hospital room when he was dying. “Do you know that I was actually quite proud of you that day?” Zsa Zsa asked Frances. She said she admired how Frances had stood her ground. Of course, she was angry at the time, she admitted. “But I also thought, ‘My God, this woman is completely underrated, isn’t she?’ ” she observed. “ ‘She’s tough, like me. She’s strong, like me.’ I thought, ‘It’s no wonder Connie married her.’ ”

Frances conceded that, in retrospect, she felt terrible about the way she had handled things at the hospital. She now believed she should have just let Zsa Zsa in to see Conrad, “but it was such an emotional time,” she explained. “I think I just got caught up in it.” She added that “in some ways I ended up being someone I really didn’t want to be.”

“You did what you believed was the right thing to do for the family,” Zsa Zsa concluded. “I understand. I fight for family, too. I always have.”

Zsa Zsa then spoke about her tortured relationship with Conrad. “To be loved is a strength,” she observed, “but to love,
that
is a weakness.” Conrad had represented an important reminder of her first days in America, she said. He was like a father to her, which, she observed, perhaps explained why she had so desperately sought his approval for so many years. “I have not been able to stop crying about his death,” she confessed, sadly. “I’ve just been so upset.”

Zsa Zsa then spoke of the meeting she and Conrad had about a year before he died when he apologized to her for ever having hurt her. “It just meant the world to me,” she said. “My God, I never thought he would do that! Never!” She also said she’d had a telephone call with Conrad about a month before he died, during which she told him that she didn’t know how she would ever survive his death. True to his nature, he told her that she would just go on, that she would pull herself “up from her bootstraps” and continue with the business of living. She should not give him a second thought, he said, because that’s just how he would want it. Characteristic of their relationship, the two then got into a bit of a tiff because Zsa Zsa felt Conrad was trying to control the way she should grieve his death, telling her just how to be sad.

“So does this mean you are no longer angry at him?” Frances asked.

Zsa Zsa couldn’t answer the question; she was ambivalent. She allowed, however, that she would always have strong feelings for Conrad Hilton because, as she put it, “completely letting those feelings go would be like cutting out the roots beneath me.”

“Okay, I go now,” Zsa Zsa then suddenly announced. “I’ve taken too much of your time.” According to Frances’s memory, Zsa Zsa stretched out her arms to her as the two women stood in the doorway. The unlikely friends then shared an embrace. “You know, I don’t ordinarily like women,” Zsa Zsa told Frances with a smile. “But you, I like. I know why he loved you,” she concluded as she broke away from the hug. And with that, Zsa Zsa Gabor turned and walked away.

Frances closed the door behind her.

*  *  *

Mary Frances Kelly Hilton, Conrad’s third wife, would survive her only husband, Conrad, by twenty-eight years. She would die of lymphoma on May 30, 2006, in Santa Monica, California, at the age of ninety-one.

“Frannie” would be survived by her brother, William P. Kelly—Bill—as well as his wife, Stella, and many nieces, nephews, and close friends, including her best friend, Helen Lamm, and her former personal secretary, Phyllis Davis Bradley.

“Frances became quite ill in the last years of her life,” recalled her sister-in-law, Stella. “When she was ill, we wanted her to move to Illinois to live with us, but she was independent. She loved her little apartment and wanted to stay in California. However, the money Conrad had willed to her was running out fast. My husband, Bill, wrote to Barron to say we were having problems supporting Frannie. Barron didn’t hesitate for a second making sure Frannie was taken care of for life.”

“The Hiltons all loved Frannie very much and treated her like a member of the family until the day she died. She was one of the loveliest human beings I had ever known,” concluded Stella Kelly. “Not a day goes by that we don’t miss her.”

A memorial mass for Mary Frances Hilton was set at St. Paul’s the Apostle Church in Westwood, the same church at which she and Connie attended mass every morning. Frances had originally intended to be buried next to Conrad in Dallas. However, her family convinced her to be buried in the family plot in Lake Forest, Illinois, so that they could visit the grave.

Judge’s Decision

T
he case of
Francesca Hilton v. The Estate of Conrad N. Hilton
would not end up before a jury. Instead, Los Angeles Superior Court judge Jack W. Swink granted the defendants what is called a “summary judgment,” a decision based on legal issues without a trial. “In other words,” explained Myron Harpole, “we, as Hilton’s lawyers, presented our evidence to the judge to prove that there was no need for the matter to go to trial, that the end result was obviously going to be a determination in our favor. Meanwhile, Francesca’s side appealed to him that the case had not been proven by us at all, and that it should go before a jury [for a trial that was slated to take place on May 16, 1980]. After both arguments were presented, we moved for summary judgment. The judge ruled in our favor.”

Neither Francesca Hilton nor Zsa Zsa Gabor was in court for the two-hour argument by both sides, on March 28, 1980.

In his decision, Judge Swink ruled that Conrad Hilton knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote his will of 1973, given that it so closely mirrored the many wills he had written prior to that time; he had never given a great deal of money to
any
family member. In Francesca’s case, Hilton had actually increased the amount of her inheritance from virtually nothing (in wills from 1947 to 1955) to $50,000 (in wills from 1955 through 1960) to, eventually, $100,000 (in wills from 1960 through 1973). In all of those wills, he also gave the great bulk of his estate to charity.

It had been Francesca’s attorneys who had turned the case into one about her paternity. As far as the Hilton estate was concerned, Conrad had publicly acknowledged her as his daughter to the world, and privately acknowledged her as his daughter in his will, and that should have been the end of it. However, Francesca’s attorneys sought to prove that even though Conrad had done so, he harbored a secret, unreasonable doubt as to whether or not he was her father. As to this nagging question, the judge ruled that Conrad had not suffered from any “insane delusion.” Rather, his doubts about her paternity were based “on logical suspicions,” which he had entertained for many years as a result of the shadowy circumstances of Francesca’s birth. In the end, the conflicting testimonies of Zsa Zsa Gabor and Willard Kramer only went toward convincing the judge that Conrad had good reason to wonder. “It would still come down to not whether he was the father or wasn’t the father,” the judge wrote in his ruling, “but what his
belief
was. Was his doubt a figment of his imagination? And the Court would answer no to that. Was it a belief that came out of thin air? And the Court would answer no to that, as well.”