The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty (11 page)

When Hilton acquired the 1,012-room Roosevelt Hotel in the spring of 1943 and announced the purchase to a close friend and business associate, his friend, J. B. Herndon, was only able to muster one word: “Why?”

“Because it’s a fine hotel. And because I’ve got to practice,” responded Hilton.

“What for?” Herndon wanted to know.

“For the Waldorf,” said Hilton. “I’m not quite ready for that one yet.”

Long before the term “multitasking” became part of our lexicon, it epitomized Hilton’s octopus-like juggling act, keeping several projects going at the same time. While immersed in the demanding responsibility of putting together the financing he needed to complete the Roosevelt transaction, he was also frantically continuing to buy stock in the Waldorf-Astoria, of which Wall Street took note when word got out about the killing he would make on that stock. He’d bought the stock at 4½ and sold it at 85. It was more like a massacre than a killing.

If Mr. Herndon had his doubts about the wisdom of Conrad Hilton’s ownership of the Roosevelt, they were nothing compared to the shock sustained by the faithful habitués of the hotel. About this, Hilton once recalled, “It was scarcely flattering to have everyone assume that I would ride my horse into the lobby or install spittoons in the famous Roosevelt Grill, yet on every hand, I received communications in various forms begging me to deal gently with my newest lady.”

While naysayers chuckled about “that jasper from Texas,” as it turned out, Conrad Hilton would have the last laugh. Under his guidance, the Roosevelt would be credited with an impressive list of firsts, changing forever the way hotels of the future would be operated: the first with baths in every room, the first to be air-conditioned, the first to incorporate storefronts instead of lounges (put in place to circumvent the law of Prohibition), and the first to install television sets in every room. He even chose the hotel’s Presidential Suite as his home base when in New York City, a sign of the high regard he had for the Roosevelt.

When the deal was finally signed, Conrad called Los Angeles to talk to Zsa Zsa. It had been a week since they last spoke, not even a phone call since the day she woke up and found him gone. When she was cold and distant on the telephone, he didn’t understand her attitude. In his mind, he hadn’t done anything wrong. “You must realize that I have business to take care of and that I will sometimes have to leave to take care of it,” he told her. All she was asking, she said, was for him to at least inform her in advance when he was leaving town. Was that too much to ask? It was difficult for Conrad to understand Zsa Zsa’s concern. When he was married to Mary, he said, he would leave at a moment’s notice and she didn’t seem to mind. “But I am not Mary,” Zsa Zsa reminded him. “Don’t treat me as you would her.”

Marriage: His

T
he first order of business for Conrad Hilton after Zsa Zsa Gabor moved into his huge Spanish-style estate on Bellagio Road in Beverly Hills was to establish certain ground rules for their new life together.

First on the agenda was Conrad’s declaration that he and Zsa Zsa would sleep in separate bedrooms. Of the four large bedroom suites in the home, Conrad and Zsa Zsa would have one each. Nicky and Barron shared another, and the fourth was for guests.

Some people in his life found it perplexing that Conrad had spent so much time lamenting that Zsa Zsa couldn’t be his wife, yet the first thing he did when he finally married her was to install her in a bedroom down the hall. Zsa Zsa was deeply disappointed by this arrangement; she wanted to sleep in the same bed with her husband. To her, it seemed only logical. Though he knew she felt the sting of rejection, Conrad wouldn’t budge on the matter, explaining that he valued his privacy. He had been alone for so many years, he enjoyed his own routine and didn’t want it interrupted. Besides, he was admittedly bothered by nearly everything done by women in the name of beauty. He didn’t want his wife moisturizing her skin, doing her nails, or applying makeup in his presence. He found such rituals tedious and self-involved, and believed that a husband’s bearing witness to such personal maintenance only served to detract from his wife’s sex appeal. In the end, Zsa Zsa had no choice but to acquiesce to his wishes. “Conrad wasn’t the type to share a room with a woman,” she would later observe.

As a small consolation, Conrad gave Zsa Zsa license to redecorate her own enormous bedroom suite with its stunning view of the golf course in any way she saw fit. In that regard she went wild with expensive fabrics and pieces of furniture she later said were inspired by
Gone with the Wind
. Once she finished with her own suite, she eagerly began working on other rooms in the house. The only room she didn’t have plans to totally redecorate was Conrad’s, and that was because she was banned from entering it. It was inevitable, then, that the money she was spending on new furnishings would lead to a serious conversation about the household budget.

Conrad fully understood that Zsa Zsa enjoyed spending money, and he certainly had a lot of it to spend. The question for him wasn’t whether or not he could afford to subsidize her extravagant taste, it was whether or not it made sense to him. He quickly realized that Zsa Zsa didn’t understand the value of money, or at least his interpretation of the value of money. He had worked hard for his wealth and continued to work for it. What did she do to earn a living? Nothing, really. Sometimes Zsa Zsa spoke of wanting to be an actress, but she didn’t seem to have much drive or ambition in that direction.

“Being Mrs. Conrad Hilton,
this
is my career and
sanks
God for it,” she told her friend Andrew Solt. “I meant it, too,” she would later recall. “I was satisfied to be the wife of an important man who was growing more important every day, to help him in his career, to run his home graciously, and to take my place in the society in which he lived.”

To be fair, Conrad didn’t expect her to do much else. He was perfectly satisfied if she just wanted to be a socialite, especially since she clearly wasn’t going to be taking a motherly role with Nicky and Barron. However, he was only going to finance so much of her time in high society, and after he took a look at the books and realized how much she was spending, he pulled the plug on her redecorating efforts.

“But, Connie! I’m not done yet,” she complained. “Oh, yes, my dear, you are,” he told her.

The question of finances would always be at issue in Conrad’s relationships with others, especially with family members. To him, it was a simple, black-and-white matter. He had earned his money fair and square, and he wasn’t giving it away to anyone, even to family members. Some would say that he was incredibly cheap. In his own mind, however, that wasn’t the case. Privately (never publicly, for he was too modest to do so), as proof of his generous nature he would offer up the names of the many charities to which he regularly donated. Would a cheap man be so philanthropic? He had few limits when it came to giving money to charities, especially to Catholic aid organizations. However, when it came to family members, as well as friends, he believed that they—all of them—should demonstrate a work ethic similar to his own, earn their own way, and not expect to benefit from his own station in life. Moreover, he felt it wasn’t even
fair
to them to give them money. His financing of their lives would, he felt, be detrimental to them in the long run, eroding any motivation they might have to achieve wealth on their own, and also diminish their appreciation for the value of the dollar.

Fueling his philosophy about money, no doubt, was that Conrad had survived the Great Depression; he knew what it was like to lose everything and work hard to get it all back. Many of his generation would throughout their lifetimes place a premium on the American dollar. Where Zsa Zsa Gabor was concerned, the discussion of domestic finances was one that would be resolved quickly, and not in her favor.

“There’s too much trouble caused by women being foolish with money,” Conrad told Zsa Zsa, according to his own memory (which, as well as a parsimonious view, suggests a rather chauvinistic one that perhaps was also not unusual for the times). “We’re not going to have that trouble,” he told her one night over dinner. She was seated at one end of the table, he at the other, with yards of space between them. A team of servants headed up by Wilson the butler dished out their food, expeditiously removing their empty plates as soon as they finished with each course.

“I don’t understand,” Zsa Zsa said. “What are you saying to me?”

“Georgia, I’m putting you on a budget,” he told her. “From now on, you will receive a check from me at the beginning of each month for $250. You can spend it on clothes, hair, makeup, luncheons, tips, whatever you like.”

She nodded.

“Meanwhile, you can charge any household items—furnishings, linens, food—to my store accounts.”

She nodded again.

“But if you go over the allotted amount in personal expenses,” he warned her, “that amount will then be deducted from the following month’s allowance. I’ll teach you sound business practices if it’s the last thing I do,” he said, his tone such as it might have been had he been lecturing a teenager. (To put this into a proper perspective, perhaps it should be noted that this amount would be equivalent to about $3,000 a month today, which seems not unreasonable for such extra expenses.)

“I am not a child, Conrad,” Zsa Zsa said, now annoyed. “I am not your
daughter
. I am your
wife
.”

Ironically, at this same time his teenage sons were often in negotiation with their father over just such matters. For instance, Barron had just given his father a handwritten letter detailing his own expenses and explaining why he needed more than a two-dollar-a-week allowance, or what he in his letter called “a raise in salary.” He was spending seventy-five cents a week on milk and pie at recess, he noted. He was also spending fifty cents a week on telephone calls, and already that week he was twenty cents in the hole (which, in an arrangement like the one Conrad had with Zsa Zsa, would have to be deducted from next week’s “salary”). He also explained that he was spending eighty-two cents a week on transportation. He detailed certain other expenses and came to the conclusion that he needed a three-dollar-a-week raise, to five dollars. His father, moved by his son’s logic, gave him a raise of four dollars a week instead, which tripled the boy’s allowance.

For Conrad, keeping his wife on a strict budget would not be as easy as keeping his teenage son on one. Or as he put it, “I tried to instill sound business principles into my beautiful Circe, but I might as well have practiced on a statue in the park.”

For instance, one day Conrad noticed a charge for six chiffon housecoats. He became upset and confronted Zsa Zsa about the purchase. “Yes, I bought the housecoats,” she admitted with wide-eyed innocence. “But they are for the
house
! And you said that
household
expenses could be charged to your account!” Even he had to laugh at that logic. When she tried to extend it to being able to buy presents on his account for “household friends”—namely, friends who visited the household—he wasn’t sure what to think. “Glamour, I found, is expensive,” he later recalled, “and Zsa Zsa was glamour raised to the last degree.”

Humorous moments aside, Conrad would not be very lenient when it came to Zsa Zsa’s budget. If she spent even five or ten dollars on something personal and charged it to his account, he would quickly deduct that amount from her next month’s budget. She complained that it was impossible for her to keep up with the spending habits of the wives of Conrad’s peers with whom she was social, and said that she found humiliating the fact that she was always pinching pennies while they seemed to have an unlimited supply of spending money. He told her she would just have to make the proper adjustments.

Another issue that was raised for Conrad was what he viewed as Zsa Zsa’s inherent self-involvement. He was a man who lived his life trying to find ways to be of service, and through many philanthropic efforts fueled by his businesses, he sought to contribute to society. Whether it be the simple goodwill measure of speaking about prayer to a large assemblage, as he often did, or whether it had to do with making sure people in foreign countries were able to support their families by virtue of their jobs with his hotels, he truly cared about his fellow man; it wasn’t an act. Therefore, it unnerved him that he was married to someone who, at least as he saw it, didn’t really care much about others. As far as he could see, she cared only about herself.

No matter how many times Conrad tried to talk to Zsa Zsa about doing something for others—he even asked her to go to a homeless shelter and see what it might be like to feed the poor—there was no changing her. She knew little about world events except as they might affect her family in Hungary. She didn’t have many real concerns other than disagreeing with the budget her husband had set forth for her. She liked to shop, and try as Conrad might to find something else that interested her, he couldn’t seem to do it. Plus, she could be quite temperamental.

“It was a little like holding on to a Roman candle,” Conrad would say of his marriage, “beautiful, exciting, but you were never quite sure when it would go off. And it is surprisingly hard to live the Fourth of July every day.” He had indulged in his infatuation for her and misread that fleeting emotion for a deep and abiding love—likely because of his lack of experience in such matters. Compounding things, she said she wouldn’t be intimate with him until they were married. If anything, that decision of hers kept him hooked. He must have known that it was a bit of a manipulation; he was a smart man, and she wasn’t exactly an innocent little flower. Still, he fell for it. Now he couldn’t believe the predicament in which he found himself. When he took stock of all he had given up to be with her—namely his religion—he couldn’t reconcile his own naïveté.