The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty (31 page)

“I’m not sure that anyone does this kind of thing today,” said veteran actress Ruta Lee, who attended many such Hilton functions around the world. “There was always a celebration somewhere, and if you were on the list, you were always on the go, taking off on a chartered jet for some exotic location or another.

“The kind of organization it took to pull off just one of these events was staggering, and Conrad would do two, three, sometimes four a year,” Ruta Lee added. “The buzz in Hollywood was always, ‘Are you going on the next Hilton junket?’ And if you weren’t, you did everything you could think of to get on that darn list. Luckily, I was on the list. But to tell you the truth, pretty much every celebrity in town was on it! You would look around and think to yourself, my God, who
isn’t
here?”

Though these Hilton junkets usually went off without a hitch, the occasional unexpected event would occur. For instance, the opening of the Hilton Hotel in Rome was interrupted in June of 1963 by the death of Pope John XXIII. That junket would have to be called off and rescheduled at a tremendous cost. A ballet company from the British Isles hired by Conrad to perform was canceled just in the nick of time before boarding its flight to Rome. As a result of the cancelation, a chef was stuck with twelve hundred desserts—peaches stuffed with ice cream, wrapped in batter, and baked lightly with crushed almonds. “We threw away a shitload of peaches that night,” Nicky said with a laugh when recounting the story.

In 1956, an earthquake occurred in the midst of the Mexico City junket, which so frightened members of the press that many of them asked to be whisked out of the country as soon as possible. One reporter was so shaken up, she had to have psychiatric treatment. She sent Conrad the bill. And he paid it!

The Hilton junket in Hong Kong happened to fall in the middle of the so-called Three Years of Great Chinese Famine (1958–61), a time of widespread food shortages, drought, and terrible weather conditions. Many members of the media and other socialites who had been invited decided to pass on it. Those who did show up were met with a daily ration of two gallons of washing water, one quart of drinking water, and two pints of toothbrushing and/or shaving water. “It wasn’t the best week of my life, put it that way,” is how entertainer Debbie Reynolds recalled it.

The Berlin Hilton opened the same week in November 1958 that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev decreed that the United States had six months to vacate West Berlin. Despite the ensuing unrest, Conrad decided to go ahead with the junket.

As it happened, Khrushchev would turn out to be the least of Hilton’s problems. A dancing bear had been hired to perform in the hotel’s main ballroom to kick off the festivities. Unfortunately, in the middle of his performance the animal caught a whiff of fresh pheasant being cooked in the kitchen for dinner. Without warning, the bear broke away from his trainer and galloped out of the ballroom and down the hall, following the scent and frightening everyone in his wake. The food and beverage manager, hearing the sounds of people screaming, “Get out of the way!” bolted from the kitchen to see what was going on, and in doing so ran right smack into the arms of the bear, which had just rounded a corner. At that moment, the trainer managed to secure the animal, who seemed as stunned as the poor hotel employee. When the whole thing was over, the food and beverage manager couldn’t contain his anxiety; he burst into tears and fainted dead away. He then had to be carried away by three members of the Hilton security team, past a crowd of stunned hotel guests, into the elevator and up to his room. “Never a dull moment at a Hilton junket,” is how Hedda Hopper put it in her report of the chaotic mishap.

At the Nile Hilton opening in Cairo in March 1959, a blustery sandstorm interrupted the proceedings, blowing away the large Bedouin tent that had been erected in the middle of the desert for a press corps dinner. In the process, more pounds of roast lamb than Conrad cared to remember were dusted with hot sand fresh from the Sahara. “Don’t remind me!” he once said with a laugh when asked about that particular junket.

Of that Cairo junket, singer/actress Anne Jeffreys recalled, “The propeller plane—there were no jets, of course—was overloaded with stars, and as stars will do, we had overpacked for the occasion. Therefore, Conrad was forced to hire another plane to follow us, which was filled only with our luggage.

“When we arrived, we were bowled over by the beauty of Cairo, until we realized that none of the electrical outlets worked for American equipment. I had just washed my hair to prepare for the opening night ball and had gone to dry it, when I found that the dryer didn’t work! So I called my best friend, Ann Miller, in the suite next to mine and told her about it, and she said, ‘Oh my God! The same thing just happened to me. What shall we do?’ Because it was such a hot day in Cairo, we decided to use the weather to our advantage. Both of us went out onto our balconies, and there we were—a blonde and a brunette with about three yards of hair between us—swinging our wet locks over the Nile River, trying to get them to dry. Ann asked, ‘We’ll never forget this moment, will we?’ And we never did!”

“I have so many memories of the Middle East junket,” added actress Jane Russell. “For instance, I still can’t believe that I had the chance to climb a pyramid, on my hands and knees! Me and Anne Jeffreys and Hugh O’Brien. We got about halfway up, which I think was equivalent to about forty stories. Your jaw would drop, it was that amazing, and all thanks to Conrad’s largesse. I remember that we went straight from Egypt to Athens for the opening of the Hilton there. Who would spend this kind of money today? I actually can’t imagine a businessman doing today what Conrad Hilton did back then.”

As well as personal fun shared by celebrities, there were important socioeconomic strides made during Hilton junkets. For instance, in 1958, Conrad Hilton opened the Havana Hilton and made national headlines when, during his keynote speech at a luncheon with Cuban officials and businessmen—which, incidentally, he delivered in purest Castilian, having mastered the Spanish language—he dealt another blow to Communism. He noted that “ordinarily labor works for capital; the usual thing is for employees to work for employers. But in the building and operation of our new Havana Hilton we have reversed the picture; the employers are working for their employees.”

Conrad was referring to the fact that Hilton Hotels did not own the Havana Hilton, but had leased it from the Cuban Catering Workers’ Union. It was an unusual Cuban-American business relationship where the workers had a stake in the property and were encouraged to become owners of shares in the business, a real stake in the enterprise. They would be partners rather than just workers. Conrad described it as “a new weapon with which to fight Communism, a new team made up of owner, manager and labor with which to confront the class conscious Mr. Karl Marx.” He noted that Marx never owned, managed, or worked an enterprise in his entire life, “but from his world of inexperience he has managed, for a whole century, to convince hundreds of millions of people to be at each other’s throats.” He said he was happy to say that “the project we are dedicating today gives the lie to Marx, Communism and all they stand for.”

“Hilton openly attacked Communism for the first time in a foreign country when he spoke in Havana,” wrote Vincent Flaherty, who had attended the luncheon, for the
Los Angeles Examiner
. “Hilton is out of Cuba now, but that beautiful 30-story hotel he dedicated remains as a mute but powerful reminder of all he had to say.”

Barron Climbs the Ladder of Success

E
ver since he was denied a job back in the 1940s by his father because his salary demand was too steep, Barron Hilton had been adamant about finding his own way, carving his own niche. However, his wife, Marilyn, had asked him to at least think about joining the family enterprise. “It’s your legacy,” she told him at one family dinner, according to a witness. “In the end, you know you and your brothers are going to have to take over the business when Dad [Conrad] dies, so I don’t know why you are being so hardheaded about it,” she said, always a practical woman. “You may not think there is a premium on money and power right now,” she said, “but I can assure you that others do, and they will be coming after the Hilton Corporation when Conrad dies; that is, unless his sons are in charge,” she said. “Hotels are this family’s life’s blood. You must know that by now.”

In the end, Marilyn Hilton prevailed. When Conrad offered it to him, Barron took the corporate job of vice president in charge of television. “We became one of the first chains in the country to offer TV sets in every room,” he would later recall. At this same time, Barron also took interest in an idea Conrad had of investing in what would eventually become a huge enterprise in this country—the credit card business.

Several credit card companies, including American Express and Diners Club, had begun to flourish in the late 1950s, though it wouldn’t be until the 1960s and ’70s before the general masses began to use them. In 1958, Conrad began to conceptualize the Carte Blanche credit card business. Barron was intrigued enough by the idea to accept his dad’s appointment as president of the company. This would be an opportunity to be a part of the Hilton empire while putting his own stamp on an important new endeavor—he could be his own man, even while working in his father’s domain. Of course, another key factor in his decision to join the ranks was that he wanted to make his father proud. “That was always a running theme with all the sons when it came to Conrad,” said one Hilton relative. “Making Connie proud. It killed them to think that Connie might not be proud of them. I actually think they would have turned on each other if it meant making Dad proud, that’s how important it was to them.”

“Money has gone out of style,” Barron said at the time. “Credit and convenience are the biggest consumer needs today.”

However, it was tough going for Barron in his new position. Likely because Carte Blanche was so ahead of its time, it would lose $2 million in the next six years, this even though it was considered to be a more prestigious card than American Express or Diners Club. It had a small base, because, as some argued, the qualifications for the card were so stringent. Soon the board would sack Barron as the company’s president, a big embarrassment to him. But then, as a board member, Barron was still in the position to make a successful sale of the company to Citibank for a profit of $16.5 million in 1965, and, as he would later put it, “all of a sudden I was a hero in the company again.” (Though Hilton would buy it back in 1979, the card would eventually be phased out in the 1980s.)

Whether working with Carte Blanche or involved in other Hilton business pursuits, from 1958 onward, Barron Hilton would always have an important role in the family business. Eventually, in 1966, he would succeed his father as president of the domestic Hilton Hotels Corporation.

“He was serious, not a funny or lighthearted person,” said one of Barron’s former employees. “When he walked into a room, it was the same feeling as when his father walked into a room. He commanded respect because of the way he handled himself. He was friendly, don’t misunderstand. But whereas you felt you could talk to Nicky, you didn’t feel that Barron was approachable. He was intimidating. When he was with his wife, it was even more off-putting because, together, they were like royalty. He was tall and good-looking and she was gorgeous and sophisticated, and they carried themselves with a kind of mystery. You felt the Hilton money and power when you were around them. They just looked and acted rich.”

Nicky’s Fast-Paced Life

F
or several years and until the present time, I have clung tenaciously to the hope that my son, Conrad Nicholson Hilton, Jr., would settle down and go to work with the serious purpose of making his own way through life, acquire a gainful occupation and become a useful citizen of this country,” Conrad Hilton wrote in his will of 1955. The will then stipulated that Nicky be given a $500,000 trust fund in the event of Conrad’s death—but with one proviso: “It is not my intention that the provisions made for him in my will be used in a wasteful or extravagant mode of living, but it is my purpose and my profound wish that my said son so conduct himself and order his life that he may, if he chooses, enjoy to the fullest extent the provisions I had made for him in my will. Therefore, I hereby commit to my trustees absolute discretion to and full power over the accumulation and application of all income and principal of the Trust Estate created in my will for Conrad Nicholson Hilton, Jr.” In other words, if Nicky did not live up to his father’s expectations, the trustees of his estate could choose to withhold his trust—or perhaps not even allow him to have it at all. Even in death, Conrad would have the final word over whether or not Nicky had lived up to his fullest potential.

In 1956, Nicky was named vice president in charge of the Inns Division of the Hilton Corporation, responsible for the management of three airport-adjacent Hilton-owned hotels, in San Francisco, New Orleans, and El Paso.

Always the visionary with an eye toward expanding his vast empire, Conrad had the foresight to realize that as more people began to travel by air, there would grow to be a huge need for quick, sometimes just overnight accommodations. He began to invest heavily in a chain of establishments near airports that many would have considered modestly priced motels rather than superior hotels. However, Conrad loathed the word “motel,” because it suggested low-quality accommodations—thus his usage of the word “inn.” Starting with the San Francisco Airport Hilton, the venture would be wildly successful. That these properties weren’t of the same ilk as the glorious Hilton hotels found around the world didn’t make them any less important to the Hilton Corporation’s bottom line.