CHAPTER 1

Like many children of the rich and famous, Paris Hilton didn’t always get to spend quality time with her parents, especially her mother. A socially ambitious young woman, Kathleen Elizabeth Avanzino Richards Hilton, who had married into the celebrated Hilton Hotel family, was often out and about. With little time on her hands for mothering, she was cavalier about leaving her firstborn with the hired help or with relatives.

This was made abundantly clear to Patricia Skipworth Hilton, the first wife of Conrad Hilton’s third son, Eric. A Texas beauty who had married into the Hilton family in her late teens, Pat, a mother of four, had become quite close over the years to her sister-in-law and brother-in-law, Marilyn and Barron Hilton, parents of Kathy’s husband, Rick. The second of Conrad’s three sons, Barron had succeeded the Hilton patriarch as head of the international hotel empire. Pat adored Marilyn, a former cheerleader who herself was a gorgeous teenage bride when she became part of the Hilton family. (The Hilton men, from Conrad on down, were known for taking young’uns for their brides.)

Whenever Pat visited Los Angeles from her home in Houston, Marilyn insisted that she stay at their spectacular estate. It was during one of those occasions, when Pat was “in the throes” of one of her many divorce actions in what was a hellish marriage to Eric Hilton—hellish marriages not being an oddity in the Hilton dynasty—that she observed new mother Kathy Hilton in action.

“I was there talking with Marilyn when here comes Kathy with Paris, who was nine months old and a great big, fat, pretty baby,” Pat Hilton says in her Lone Star State drawl. “Kathy said, ‘Meet Star’—she called Paris ‘Star’ from day one. ‘Would you like to hold her for a minute?’ That was the last I saw Kathy that day. She took off until that evening. I wanted to kill her! She didn’t leave any instructions on what time Paris had to be fed. There weren’t any diapers. She just left me in the lurch.”

Furious, Pat vented to Marilyn, who listened sympathetically and knowingly, and rolled her eyes. “Marilyn said, laughing, ‘Well, I guess you’re it for the day. Kathy does this all the time. She just wants to go out. And she knew you’d take care of the kid.’”

When Kathy finally reappeared at day’s end, Pat confronted her. “How dare you do this to me?” According to Pat, “Kathy’s only reply was, ‘Oh, I had to be somewhere. I didn’t think you’d mind.’ I warned her, ‘Never, ever do this to me again!’ But it didn’t bother her at all. Kathy Hilton’s very selfish and very spoiled and very self-centered, and that absolutely carries through to Paris.”

When Rick and Kathy Hilton traveled and deigned to bring Paris along, they naturally stayed in Hilton hotels, where they demanded special services, including babysitting care for their daughter, despite the fact that Barron Hilton had a strict rule barring Hiltons from getting special treatment or favorable room rates.

“When they were in New York, and Paris was just an infant, Kathy and Rick would get one of the women from housekeeping at the New York Hilton to babysit for them,” states a Hilton Hotels insider. “They would leave Paris on Friday and not come back for her until late Sunday. It was a known fact that Kathy and Rick liked to party, and when Kathy was a young mother she had no qualms about flaunting the Hilton name and taking advantage of it. She’d let it be known that Rick was going to be ‘the next Mr. Hilton,’ so hotel executives were afraid to argue with her. None of Barron’s [eight] kids were getting a free ride. The only one who ever took advantage was Kathy.”

Kathy and Rick were prone to show up out of the blue without reservations at a Hilton hotel on a busy weekend and demand the best suite in the house, fine wine and food, and babysitting for Paris. One of their targets was the Hilton in Parsippany, New Jersey, which had a four-star restaurant and a hip discotheque. The hotel also housed a number of lavishly furnished suites leased by big corporations.

When Paris was just a toddler, Rick and Kathy appeared on a busy Friday with her in tow along with their two small dogs (which weren’t permitted in the hotel unless they were Seeing Eye dogs). Though the hotel was fully booked, they made it clear they were Hiltons and wanted VIP treatment—the best suite, complimentary food, and a babysitter because Paris’s parents wanted to spend the night boogying in the disco. The manager, who didn’t want to get in hot water with members of the ruling family, broke the ironclad no-special-treatment rule and put them in a suite, vacant for the weekend, that was leased by the pharmaceutical company Warner-Lambert.

“I thought, ‘What the hell, they’re going to leave on Sunday so it will work out,’” he says. “But no sooner do I get back to my office, I get a call from Rick Hilton who says, ‘It’s customary that we get a welcoming amenity.’ I told him, ‘Oh, absolutely.’ Then he says, ‘We like a nice California red wine and something white, and my wife likes seafood.’ And then he demanded a babysitter. I had to convince the hotel’s elderly German seamstress to do the sitting.”

The manager felt relieved when the Hiltons checked out Sunday night, because Warner-Lambert people were coming in the next morning. But then he got a call to return to the hotel posthaste because there was a major crisis.

“I go up to the suite the Hiltons were using, and there’s dog shit and dog piss all over the place—I mean everywhere. They didn’t walk their dogs for the entire weekend. It was a real nightmare. We ended up having housekeeping do a detailed, deep cleaning. After all that, I never heard a word from Rick or Kathy Hilton—never got a thank-you, nothing. But that’s where their mind-set is. They act like the imperial court.”

Kathy and Rick also threw their weight around at the Las Vegas Hilton, another place where they liked to party, and where Paris was spotted as a little girl wearing mascara and eyeliner painted on by her mother. (By then, Kathy was booking Paris into charity event fashion shows.) The Hiltons, including Paris and her sister, Nicky, quickly earned a reputation at the Sin City Hilton for “arrogance, threats, and intimidation,” according to a number of present and former employees, such as Margaret Mary (Peggy) Cusack Yakovlev, who also served as a personal assistant to Eric Hilton and his second wife, Bibi.

“Kathy and Rick and the girls looked down their noses at the help and were very judgmental,” states Yakovlev. “Paris and Nicky were running loose in the hotel, were always trouble, and the mother always seemed to be coaching them.” She notes that the Hilton sisters usually were accompanied by hired help who looked like they were treated despicably.

When Paris and Nicky informed hotel employees who they were, the workers ran the other way. The philosophy was—if you run into Rick and Kathy or their daughters, just keep your head down and your mouth shut. “Kathy was absolutely pushy, arrogant, condescending, and presumptuous, and Paris picked that up from her,” observes Yakovlev. “The spotlight always had to be on Kathy. It was always, ‘Do you know who we are?’ ‘Do you know who I am?’ Rick was usually like a bump on a log. He had a look on his face like he was taking a bowel movement.”

However, Yakovlev remembers an incident in which Paris’s father was shockingly outspoken. It happened some weeks after Kathy Hilton gave birth to one of their two sons, Conrad and Barron. Rick Hilton was smoking a celebratory cigar outside the main entrance of the Las Vegas Hilton’s crowded celebrity showroom. Yakovlev, who was standing nearby, overheard another Hilton employee congratulating the proud father on having such a large and handsome brood. “She asked him what he attributed it to,” says Yakovlev, “and he said, loud enough for anyone to hear, ‘I like to fuck!’ Guests were passing by and heard it and looked at him. I couldn’t believe it.” (Some detractors felt that Rick and Kathy did not measure up to the proud Hilton name. One, who personally knew the family, even put his feelings into print. Taki Theodoracopoulos, a controversial figure who wrote the “High Life” column for Britain’s respected Spectator magazine, declared in a column that Kathy and Rick “are straight out of The Beverly Hillbillies.” He claimed, “They eat hamburgers covered with ketchup washed down with Chateau Latour.” He called Rick “a hick…as thick as they come,” and proclaimed that neither Rick nor Kathy would ever “win the Parenting of the Year award.” Kathy and Rick also were among former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg’s 2005 diatribe 100 People Who are Screwing Up America, for “raising the most vapid…twerp…maybe in the world.”)

When Paris was about twelve and still on the innocent side, she had pet ferrets that she carried in her Prada purse. The cute little rodents accompanied her everywhere she went in the hotel, which caused headaches for the Hilton managers, who were afraid to challenge her for fear of her mother’s wrath.

On one occasion, Yakovlev recalls, Paris and her sister showed up at the glitzy hotel showroom where the big acts entertained audiences of thirteen hundred at each performance. “The girls brought the ferrets in with them and Rick and Kathy didn’t care. They could not see any further ahead than what their children wanted, while we were responsible for the safety of the guests. We did not want those little rodents escaping and rubbing up against customers’ ankles.”

One of the managers with gumption decided to confront the Hiltons. “You need to get your girls and your rodents out of here,” he told the Hiltons. “They’re not coming in. I am not allowing them.”

Kathy Hilton put her hands on her hips and got in his face and said, “Well, their grandfather [Barron] will certainly hear about this! Their grandfather is going to know from me how you are treating his granddaughters.” The manager’s businesslike but emphatic response was, “You go right ahead and tell him. This is a publicly traded company and I am doing my job. I have a multitude of guests to worry about. You have to take the rodents elsewhere.”

(There was considerable chatter that as Paris got older she made use of facilities at other hotels in Las Vegas where she demanded and received VIP treatment, just like her parents did. According to an insider, Paris and her pals “used the saunas in one hotel to go to the bathroom in because they were too lazy to get out of the sauna to use the actual bathroom facilities.” Paris’s purported urination problems became public in 2005 when a blogger, and then the New York Post, reported that “cleaning crews had to be brought in” at the opening of a Las Vegas club because Paris was “not able to wait in line for the bathroom.” In early 2006, a Hawaiian taxi driver claimed she was inebriated and had urinated in his cab. He threatened to use her DNA in a court suit.)

         

BEFORE RICK AND KATHY MOVED their brood to New York City in the ’90s, the Hiltons lived in exclusive Bel-Air, in Los Angeles, where Paris and Nicky attended a strict coeducational Roman Catholic school, St. Paul the Apostle, which went up to the eighth grade. The Hilton girls were required to wear uniforms and were given a Catholic education in addition to the reading, writing, and arithmetic. “It was more strict than a lot of schools,” says a parent of a student who went there. “The principal was against having boy-girl parties until the graduation party.”

Paris graduated from St. Paul’s in June 1995, the only school from which she is believed to have ever received a formal diploma. But because of her increasingly wild behavior she was not seen at the eighth-grade parent-sponsored graduation party. She then went to Marymount High School in Bel-Air, but she didn’t finish with her class.

Nicky, two years younger than Paris, was friends with another St. Paul’s student, Diana Tangalakis, the daughter of an attorney. By an odd coincidence Diana’s mother, Gini Tangalakis, had worked years earlier as a secretary in Conrad Hilton’s offices and had experienced some amusing episodes with the old flirt who came on to her when she was twenty-one and engaged to be married and he was in his eighties.

On a number of occasions Diana Tangalakis was invited by Nicky to sleep over at the Hiltons’, and that caused concern for her mother. “Back then Nicky was a very quiet girl, very polite and sweet, but it was hard for her to be accepted by the kids—kids that age can be tough,” says Gini Tangalakis. “Nicky wasn’t included in a lot because she was rich, because she had the Hilton name—you know, she was the first kid to bring a cell phone to school, so all of that made it difficult, and Paris already had a reputation at the school. She was off-the-wall even back then. I always thought that Nicky seemed to be a little more on the ball.

“When I would take my daughter up to Rick and Kathy’s house to spend the night with Nicky, I always had to wonder—who’s in charge here? Kathy and Rick were never around. There would be the housekeeper, who spoke very little English. That didn’t ride well with me. I’d tell my daughter, ‘If you feel uncomfortable, just call and we’ll come get you if something doesn’t seem right.’ I’d drive away thinking, is this stupid of me or what?”

As Tangalakis observes, “It didn’t appear to me that there was much parental involvement.”

When the Hiltons decided to move to New York, there was much talk among the parents of St. Paul’s alumni. “The scuttlebutt was that Kathy wanted to expose her girls to the social and nightlife world in Manhattan,” says Tangalakis. “She wanted her girls to be in the limelight, and she certainly accomplished that.”

         

BY THE TIME PARIS was in her midteens and becoming the reigning princess of the gossip firmament, she suddenly vanished from New York, where her family was ensconced in a thirtieth-floor penthouse at the exclusive Waldorf Towers. The Towers is the residential arm of the Waldorf-Astoria, one of the world’s grande dames of hotels. Conrad Hilton had bought the place with much hoopla in the late 1940s. Now, several generations later, Paris Hilton was making all the headlines.

Not since the 1950s, when Paris’s Hollywood playboy great-uncle, Nick Hilton—Conrad’s firstborn, Elizabeth Taylor’s first husband—was a constant boldface name in the columns for his narcissistic nights of broads, boozing, and brawling, had there been a Hilton so publicly outrageous and wicked.

At the time of her disappearance, Paris, who bounced from school to school because of her grades, her behavior, or both, was attending a hoity-toity private academy on Central Park West. While the Dwight School, founded in 1872, boasted that its mission was to “develop each student’s unique capabilities by integrating mind, body, and spirit,” rich-kid detractors from other fancy schools joked that Dwight was an acronym for “Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together.”

When the whispering became a roar and questions about Paris’s curious evaporation reached Kathy Hilton, she had a ready, albeit convoluted, explanation.

“Well, you know what? She never got friendly with anyone at Dwight. And Paris had a 3.8 average. She’s very, very smart…. We left the school because we had a stalker…. It was the most frightening thing I’ve ever gone through,” she explained in a piece in Vanity Fair that featured a full-page photo of Paris striking an arresting pose—legs teasingly spread, wearing a crotch-baring mini and a see-through mesh top for all the world’s stalkers to drool over.

“It was so scary,” continued her mother of the stalker situation. “…We pretended that we went here and there. We said, ‘Oh, she went off there,’ and the truth is, we spent some time in London, at the London Hilton. We brought the tutor with us.”

She maintained that Paris graduated from high school “with homeschooling.”

Curiously, however, Kathy Hilton’s recitation of the circumstances surrounding Paris’s disappearance differs substantially from the way Waldorf-Astoria management insiders remember it.

The hotel and the Towers, home over the decades to visiting presidents, potentates, and pretenders, have the tightest security. The insiders claim that if there had been a stalker, they never were made aware of him, and they would have been had he been a threat.

As one executive who, along with his father, had a long and storied history with the Hilton Hotel organization in New York, notes, “There are absolutely no secrets if you live in a hotel, especially if it’s a Hilton Hotel and you’re a Hilton. Employees are looking at the sheets and the underwear that go to the laundry every day. They have a proclivity to gossip. They relish in trying to find out what are someone’s peccadilloes. It’s like living in a fishbowl—your comings and goings are clocked. And if they’ve got a bone to pick with someone—and Paris’s parents, especially Kathy Hilton, infuriated a lot of Waldorf people with their imperious manner—they’ll make sure to bring them down.”

According to the hotelmen, Paris had hightailed it out of the Waldorf for a fling with a cute trucker with a big rig whom she met while he was unloading goodies on the hotel’s loading dock. Paris apparently wanted a taste of the simple life in the cozy cab of an eighteen-wheeler.

“I don’t remember anything about a stalker ever surfacing in the hotel at the time,” states Neal Schwartz, whose family ran the valet concession for decades at the Waldorf on a handshake between Schwartz’s Hungarian-born grandfather, Harry, and Conrad Hilton himself. (The two men had bonded after Hilton scandalously married the Hungarian spitfire Zsa Zsa Gabor back in the 1940s. “Zsa Zsa would go off into rants and rages in Hungarian which no one but my grandfather could understand, so Conrad would say, ‘Harry, find out what the hell she wants and just quiet her down.’ Mr. Hilton liked and trusted my grandfather and that’s how my family got the hotel valet business.”)

Schwartz scoffs at Kathy Hilton’s story about the stalker. “It sounds like something the Hilton spin machine would put out,” he maintains. “Certainly there was no increase in security, and I’m sure Paris’s grandfather [Barron Hilton, who ran the show at the time] would have made sure they would have done that. But there was no change in security at the hotel or the Towers. When Paris took off she had a bit of a wild-child reputation already.”

Schwartz, whose family’s company had offices at the New York Hilton and the Waldorf at the time of Paris’s departure, was hearing about all the excitement from Waldorf managers who were sworn from talking publicly about the hotels’ innermost secrets if they wanted to receive their pensions.

“There was a big to-do at the Waldorf—you know, how are we going to explain to Barron that we lost his grandkid?” says Schwartz, who was not a Hilton employee and therefore not subject to any Hilton gag order.

At the same time, there were whispers within the tight-lipped, low-key Hilton family circle of provocative and distressing behavior involving Paris and a group of young men, actions that had gotten her into a jam at school. There was chatter of Paris’s sticky fingers, snatching everything from a relative’s lingerie—“stupid things like panties,” says a Hilton family insider—to an expensive car belonging to a girlfriend’s parents. “She took it and was driving all over New York City. Of course, they hushed it up.”

Whatever the reason for Paris’s disappearance—deranged stalker, horny trucker, or some other shenanigans—one fact is crystal clear: Kathy Hilton shipped Paris off to stay with her own mother—Paris’s maternal grandmother, Kathleen Mary Dugan Avanzino Richards Catain Fenton, known as “big Kathy.” She lived in Palm Desert, part of Palm Springs, the sizzling California desert Babylon for the rich, famous, and infamous.

Kathy Hilton, known as “little Kathy,” had high hopes that her mother—considered “a driven, ambitious stage mother from hell”—could straighten out the wild child.

Paris’s grandmother adored her, called her my “Marilyn Monroe,” and pledged she’d one day be world-famous. When Paris was still an adolescent big Kathy had tried to get her into modeling. At one point big Kathy called her close friend Jane Hallaren, who had been in the runway business years earlier, to secure Paris a catwalk slot at Eileen Ford’s famed agency. “Paris was thirteen, fourteen years old and she was breathtaking, but she was kind of shy if you can believe it, and I didn’t think she had the personality for it,” says Hallaren.

“Paris was Kathleen’s first grandchild, and they had a very special bond, and Kathleen thought she could take Paris under her wing, straighten her out, and make things happen for her,” says Adele Avanzino, big Kathy’s first husband’s sister.

“Little Kathy sent Paris to live with her mom because Paris was totally out of control,” states Michele “Mickey” Catain, the daughter of Paris’s grandmother’s third husband, Jack Catain, himself a real-life Tony Soprano–style mobster.

A young divorcée at the time, Mickey Catain had become like another daughter to big Kathy and had partied with little Kathy before she married into the Hilton family. A member of Kathy and Rick Hilton’s wedding, Catain had seen Paris when she was just a baby and later when she was in her terrible twos. “She was gorgeous,” she says. “Her face was incredible, like a porcelain doll.”

But other than reading the burgeoning gossip about Paris’s feverish frolics, Catain hadn’t seen her face-to-face for some years until she was invited by big Kathy to visit her in the desert when the naughty teenager was under her jurisdiction. “I went and stayed for a weekend, and Paris was such a snot,” Catain recalls vividly. “Even back then she thought her shit didn’t stink. She was just a very spoiled girl.”

However, Catain didn’t get the impression that the change of environment had improved Paris’s behavior. “I hardly ever saw her because she came into the house, changed her clothes, and disappeared again. She was always with a group of girls and they’d all go out together, which cracked me up because that’s exactly what her mother [Kathy Hilton] used to do when we partied together. It wasn’t New York nightlife, but it was Palm Springs. Paris must have had the town going crazy!”

After Kathy and Rick Hilton placed Paris in the hands of her grandmother to be tamed, the concerned parents took off for a much-needed breather from the stresses and strains of parenthood by going on a cruise aboard another wealthy couple’s yacht. “They were gone for a long, long time,” says a family insider. “And Mama [big Kathy] took care of Paris. And was that ever a trip!”

While staying with her grandmother, Paris was enrolled at the very fancy Palm Valley School in neighboring Rancho Mirage, where she had a reputation as a flirt who cared little about her studies, though she came prepared for algebra class in style, bearing a bejeweled calculator.

There were other schools on Paris’s journey through secondary education. For a couple of months, she attended the Canterbury School in Connecticut, but was ejected when she left for a weekend without permission. For a time, she had matriculated at the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, California, where her friends and classmates included Kimberly Stewart, the wild daughter of rocker Rod Stewart, and Nicole Richie, the equally wild daughter of singer Lionel Richie. “I just remember at Buckley all the guys loved her because, you know, we had to wear uniforms, like we had these proper uniforms, and there’s a certain way you had to wear your skirt and everything, and I’d kind of lift mine up and she’d lift hers up a little further and our skirts would be a little shorter than everyone else’s and we always used to get in trouble for that,” recalled Stewart.

Paris also attended Professional Children’s School in Manhattan, and spent some time at a school for troubled kids in Utah that featured behavior modification therapy. Because of her growing bad-girl reputation, Paris was said to have been refused admittance to a private Catholic school in New York. “Another family was considering enrolling their daughter but heard that Paris also was applying,” maintains a knowledgeable source. “The parents threatened to send their daughter elsewhere if Paris was admitted.”

Paris claimed years later that she had been diagnosed as a child with attention deficit disorder. As she got older, this led some to believe she was on drugs, which she denied using.

While big Kathy had serious concerns about her granddaughter’s behavior, she was also extremely proud of Paris’s growing fame. In fact, it was in a Beverly Hills condo owned by big Kathy where Paris struck the sexy pose for the Vanity Fair article in which little Kathy told the stalker story. Big Kathy thought her grandbaby’s spread was fabulous.

“Big Kathy bragged about her and was so excited she was in the magazine,” notes Catain. “She was looking at the layout and saying, ‘This is the vehicle to make Paris a star. She doesn’t realize how much this is going to do for her. Her fame’s just starting to take off.’ I remember her telling me, ‘This is the turning point for Paris’s career, but we’re not going to tell her.’ She goes, ‘We’re not going to let it go to her head.’ Like it wasn’t already there.”

To her first husband’s brother, Ken Avanzino, big Kathy predicted a most spectacular and grandiose future for her granddaughter. “You watch,” she declared with the utmost confidence, “Paris is going to be bigger than Princess Di.”

And to Linda McKusker, a friend from her high school days, big Kathy, referring to her granddaughter’s uninhibited ways, asserted, “Paris really isn’t like that”—that is, a poster child for exhibitionism—“she’s just your sweet, average girl next door.” Years later, Paris attributed her success to big Kathy.

Meanwhile, big Kathy threw the blame for Paris’s bad-girl behavior on her very own daughter, Kathy Hilton.

“Big Kathy used to tell me, ‘My daughter does not know how to be a mother. She’s a good businesswoman, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, but she’s not a good mother,’” maintains Catain. “She said Kathy never paid attention to those kids, Paris and Nicky, until they started to become famous. And that’s because she had her own agenda, and because she’s a very self-centered, selfish lady, just interested in how much higher she could climb. Big Kathy always said, ‘Kathy’s the worst mom.’”