The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty (74 page)

Acknowledgments and Source Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE AUTHOR’S SUPPORT TEAM

The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty
was a collaborative effort on many levels, from inception to publication. Here, I would like to acknowledge those who assisted me in this endeavor.

It’s been my great honor for the last sixteen years to call Grand Central Publishing my home, and I am deeply indebted to my publisher, Jamie Raab, for creating such a nurturing environment. I would like to also thank Jamie’s dependable assistant, Deb Withey.

I was so excited to work for the first time with the capable Gretchen Young as my editor on this book. I would like to thank her for the many hours she invested in this project. Working with her has been a real honor. As always, I would like to thank managing editor Bob Castillo for his invaluable contributions. Special thanks to Anne Twomey for her excellent cover design. I would also like to thank Claire Brown in art, Sara Weiss in editorial, and Tom Whatley and Giraud Lorber in production. A special thanks to my copy editor, Roland Ottewell.

I would like to thank Louise Sommers from Miller Korzenik Sommers LLP for her very thorough legal review of this work.

Also, I would like to acknowledge my domestic agent, Mitch Douglas, for sixteen years of excellent representation, and my foreign agent, Dorie Simmonds of the Dorie Simmonds Agency in London, who has been with me for almost twenty years.

I am fortunate to have been associated with the same private investigator and chief researcher for more than twenty years, Cathy Griffin. For
The Hiltons
, I think Cathy outdid herself by locating and then conducting scores of interviews with people who have never before thought of telling their stories.

My personal copy editor, James Pinkston, spent many hours with
The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty
, perhaps more than with any other book I have written because some of the subject matter was so complex and unique, much having to do with the hotel business. As always, his work was top-notch and I am indebted to him.

I am also deeply indebted to Charles Casillo for his editorial work on this book. He understood these characters so well from the beginning and helped me shape their portrayals. This would be a different book if not for his work on it.

Special thanks go to Maryanne Reed for helping me organize all of the tape-recorded interviews and transcripts that were pivotal to the research behind this book. It was not an easy task, but she did an incredible job and I am indebted to her for it. Thank you also to Jane Maxwell, a terrific pop culture historian who allowed me access to all of her files of magazine and newspaper articles relating to the Hilton family, and also access to scores of videos, particularly television broadcasts of Zsa Zsa Gabor over the years. I would also like to thank Cloe Basiline, Suzalie Rose, Mary Whitaker, and Patrick McKenzie in London, who assisted with European research. Also, Marybeth Evans in London did a wonderful job at the Manchester Central Library where she reviewed stacks and stacks of documents about the Hilton hotels worldwide. Thanks also to Suzalie Rose and Carl Mathers, who handled research for me in libraries in Paris relating to this subject matter. Kudos to Dale Manesis for all of his help with the vast collection of Hilton family memorabilia that I would never otherwise have had access to.

My thanks also to all of those who gave of their time so that I could have a better understanding of the Hiltons for this book. So many people were helpful, but there are a few I would like to single out:

Patricia (Trish) McClintock Hilton, Nicky Hilton’s widow, was so helpful and spent many hours sharing her most private memories, and I am indebted to her. I endeavored to tell her true love story with Nicky in a way that would do it honor, and I hope she approves. I wanted to do the same for Patricia (Pat) Skipworth Hilton as well, with the story of her marriage to Eric Hilton. She too went out of her way to make certain that we had a full and balanced understanding of her ex-husband, a generous man about whom few words have been written in the past. I hope she too approves.

The family of Conrad Hilton’s third wife, Frances Kelly Hilton, was also extremely helpful, in particular Bill and Stella Kelly, Fran Peterson, and also Frances’s best friend, Helen Lamm. They spent many hours remembering the wonderful Frances Kelly Hilton, and I hope they are pleased with her portrait as presented on these pages.

I also want to thank Francesca Hilton’s publicist, Ed Lozzi, who I put in a difficult position. Not only is he a friend of mine, but he also represents a client who had mixed feelings about this book. (For a fuller explanation of that, see the notes that follow for “Zsa Zsa’s Daughter” on
here
.) Still, Ed understood that the important thing was for my readers to have empathy for some of the challenges Francesca has faced in her lifetime. He found ways for me to have a better understanding of his client so that I could present a fair portrait of her. I thank him for that.

Carole Wells Doheny and Noreen Nash Siegel both gave of their time freely and generously, and their vivid memories of the Hiltons are on these pages as well. Also, Stewart Armstrong and Robert Wentworth were both good friends of Nicky Hilton’s and spent countless hours sharing their memories of him with me, for which I am deeply grateful.

Rhona Graff, vice president/assistant to the president of the Trump Organization, did everything she could do to make sure we were able to interview Donald Trump for this book, and I am so appreciative to her, and of course to Mr. Trump as well. “It’s really a great idea for a book,” Mr. Trump enthused as I was working on this project.

I am indebted to Backstreet Investigations’ Daniel J. Portley-Hanks. “Danno” helped us find court records long hidden away in the basement of the superior courthouse in Los Angeles, and as you will see from the following notes, they were absolutely essential to my research. I thank him as well.

I would also like to acknowledge Mark E. Young, Ph.D., the director of hospitality industry archives at the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel Restaurant and Management for his invaluable assistance, and also his time.

Thanks also to Katherine Miller, executive assistant to Steven M. Hilton, president and CEO of the Hilton Foundation, for her time and consideration.

Thanks also to Bob Neal, now deceased, but whose memories of his good friend Nicky Hilton live on in this book.

Just two months after he was interviewed for this book, attorney Myron Eugene Harpole passed away in Pasadena, California, at the age of eighty-five. He gave so many hours of his time to this project and was so helpful to me; I will always remember him with great fondness. He told me he had never before been interviewed, and that he wanted his memories to live on in this book. Therefore, I’m so happy that a major part of his legal career—his thirty-plus years with Conrad Hilton and Zsa Zsa Gabor—will now be memorialized in this work.

Also, I would like to acknowledge Phyllis Bradley, who also passed away within a year after being interviewed for this book, at the age of ninety-four. Ms. Bradley was a lively and fun woman who shared many reminiscences of her time with Frances Hilton, Conrad Hilton, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. She once gifted me with a marvelous keepsake: an antique glass bottle of perfume that Zsa Zsa had given to her almost forty years earlier. I’ll treasure it always, as I will my time with Ms. Bradley.

A NOTE ABOUT THE GABOR SISTERS, ZSA ZSA AND EVA

It was the morning of February 2, 1986, when I first met Zsa Zsa Gabor. My agent at that time, Bart Andrews, was scheduled to interview her for a possible collaboration on a memoir. He asked me if I also wanted to ask questions of her, and of course I couldn’t resist such an offer.

With her teased blonde—almost platinum—hair, Zsa Zsa was in full makeup and wearing a hot pink silk pantsuit when we arrived at her Bel-Air home. She had jewels dripping from both wrists and around her neck—and it was only ten o’clock in the morning! She certainly looked every bit the star. “Ask me anything,
dah-lings
,” she told us. “My life is your life.”

That morning, Mr. Andrews and I discussed a wide variety of subjects with Zsa Zsa, ranging from her early days in Hungary, her many marriages—including the one to Conrad Hilton—to her career as an actress and the consummate talk show guest. Much of what she had to say that day is included in this book. When it came to Hilton, she still seemed to have affection for him. “He was a great man in many ways,” she said, “but I was young and stupid and I didn’t know it at the time. What really makes me mad,” she allowed, “is that my entire life people think I am rich because of him. They think I got all of my money because I was his wife. If you knew him, you would know how ridiculous that is.”

During the two hours we spent with Zsa Zsa, we found her to be charismatic, funny, and even self-deprecating. We couldn’t help but notice, however, that the versions of some stories she told were not in accord with the accounts in her previous books,
My Story
and
How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, How to Get Rid of a Man
. “I leave it to you to decide what is true and what is not true,” she snapped at us when we pressed her about conflicting details. “It is not my job to tell you what is the truth. You figure it out for yourselves.” (Incidentally, the book we were discussing with Zsa Zsa never materialized; she changed her mind about it. Then, in 1991, she wrote the memoir
One Lifetime Is Never Enough
, using another writer.)

My time with Zsa Zsa Gabor that winter morning gave me great insight into her personality and character. I learned firsthand that she was the chief architect of her career and—as I wrote on these pages—a woman who should be admired for what she did with her life even if some of her choices were questionable. I liked her very much. For the most part, in this book I used versions of stories she relayed to me and Bart that morning, some of which I was able to corroborate with others who knew her well.

In years to come, I would see Zsa Zsa from time to time in Hollywood—once backstage in the green room at
The Pat Sajak Show
in September 1989, for instance, where we had a lively conversation about her desire to market a campy workout video (which she would do a few years later, called
It’s Simple, Darling!
). She was always bubbly, charming, and ready to tell a good story.

Years later, a strange thing happened to me relating to Zsa Zsa’s sister Eva Gabor. On August 20, 1991, I received a message on my voice mail from Eva—calling the wrong number! She was telephoning to tell me that her sister Magda had said that I would be delivering flowers to her, and she wanted to know what had happened to the delivery. It was just a random wrong-number voice mail. Since she left her number, I returned the call. How could I resist? When she picked up, I gave her my first name, but before I had a chance to tell her that she had reached me by mistake, she interrupted me and said, “Oh, Randy, the flowers just arrived. They’re lovely,
dah-ling
. Thank you very much,” and she hung up. I then sat staring at the telephone for a few moments marveling at such a strange chain of events. Two days later, I called her back to ask if she would consent to an interview for a magazine I was working for at the time. I mentioned that I knew her sister. “I don’t do interviews,” she said. “However, since you know my sister, why don’t you interview her?” When I said that I already had, she laughed and exclaimed, “There’s not one writer in this goddamn town who my sister has not told her entire life story to!”

I certainly never imagined that I would ever write a book in which Zsa Zsa Gabor would figure so prominently. Now that I have, I would like to thank Zsa Zsa for every moment I ever spent in her company, and for so many years of entertainment.

I must also acknowledge my late agent, Bart Andrews. His extensive notes and interviews with Zsa Zsa, Eva, and Magda Gabor for that planned memoir were utilized in this book. He was a terrific writer, my first agent, and the man who got me started in this business. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

A NOTE ABOUT PUBLICATIONS PRIVATELY PUBLISHED BY THE HILTONS

For much of
The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty
, I referred to three publications that were privately published by the Hilton family. These publications comprise so much information, it would be impossible to detail all of the material in them in the space allotted here. However, I felt it would be of interest to you, the reader, if I explained the purpose of each volume, and also how I came upon it.

When my researcher, Cathy Griffin, requested interviews with Barron and Eric Hilton, and Barron’s son Steven M. Hilton (president and chief operating officer of the Hilton Foundation), she received a letter from Steven M. Hilton (dated February 16, 2012) explaining that, in his view, Conrad Hilton’s 1957 autobiography,
Be My Guest
, was sufficient to understanding the Hilton story. However, he did send her a copy of
Conrad N. Hilton Foundation: The Hilton Legacy Serving Humanity Worldwide
to forward to me for my research purposes, as well as press releases explaining Barron Hilton’s philanthropic legacy and also the most recent Conrad N. Hilton Foundation annual report.