CHAPTER 2

Before she bagged and tagged a scion of the Hilton Hotel family at the age of twenty, before she gave birth to the It Girl of the New Millennium, before she sold glitzy shmattes and art in her Sunset Boulevard boutique, before she hawked overpriced tchotchkes on her QVC home shopping network show called Many Splendid Things, and before she starred as the hostess of her own reality TV show, appropriately titled I Want to Be a Hilton, blond and perky little Kathy was as desperate for fame and fortune as would be her wild-child spawn.

Pushed by big Kathy, and discovered before she was two years old by a famous children’s photographer who was knocked out by this perfect little creature’s blond, all-American look, little Kathy’s career was launched. But unlike her younger, very pretty and more talented half-sisters, Kim and Kyle Richards—who had had enormous success in TV sitcoms and movies in the ’70s and ’80s—Kathy never really made it and wasn’t bankable.

During her fifteen minutes, however, she modeled in print ads and appeared in some three dozen TV commercials. By the age of thirteen she had made two appearances on her sister Kim’s popular program, Nanny and the Professor, and got mostly one-shot gigs on such network prime-time shows as Marcus Welby, M.D., Family Affair, Bewitched, The Rockford Files, and Happy Days. She appeared in a CBS movie called Johnny Comes Home and had a chance at a TV pilot, but it never got the green light. It was all downhill, career-wise, from there.

Based on her fancy-schmancy attitude teaching manners, style, and refinement to her supposed rube contestants as mistress of ceremonies on the ill-conceived 2005 NBC reality flop I Want to Be a Hilton—a program that had genuine Hiltons seeing red, and which Kathy herself famously declared “fucking sucks”—one would have expected the fabulous Mrs. Hilton to have been groomed at a proper finishing school, to have had matriculated at one of the elite Seven Sisters colleges, and to have done the grand tour of Europe in style, entering polite society as a refined debutante. After all, she had married into one of the planet’s wealthiest and most powerful families.

But, as it turns out, Kathy Hilton was not to the manor born.

         

THE FUTURE KATHY HILTON was groomed for the stardom that eluded her by the overbearing, determined, and very outlandish big Kathy, who lived vicariously through her daughters’ ups and downs. A materialistic diva, big Kathy was obsessed with accumulating money, diamonds, fancy cars, expensive homes—and husbands to pay for it all.

She was a mistress of manipulation who dominated and controlled little Kathy’s and her sisters’ every professional and personal decision, from the outfits they wore, to the jobs they took, to the men they dated and married. By the time the future Kathy Hilton was thirteen, her mother had made her take singing lessons, dancing lessons, guitar lessons, horseback riding lessons, swimming lessons, and ice skating lessons—all salable talents on the résumés she sent to casting directors and producers, hoping to make her daughter a star.

“She talked to her daughters every day, probably three, four times a day,” recounts a friend. “She loved sitting for an entire day on the phone with her dogs around her dictating to her daughters. Even after little Kathy became a Hilton and was living like royalty in New York she’d be calling her mom every day, and big Kathy would give her orders.”

Big Kathy’s constant mantra to little Kathy, her firstborn, and to her other daughters—and later to her granddaughters, Paris and Nicky—was: Marry rich men and have lots of babies. And she made certain they did just that. (Besides the Hilton whom Kathy lassoed, Kim Richards tied the knot for a time with one of the sons of billionaire oilman and Hollywood mogul Marvin Davis and had two children with him. Kyle for a time was wed to the scion of a wealthy foreigner and had a daughter with him. Later, she married a well-to-do agent in Rick Hilton’s hugely successful Beverly Hills real estate firm.)

“My daughters are married to men who have a total net worth of $13 billion,” big Kathy once bragged to her friend Linda McKusker, as if she were hawking an IPO. “Big Kathy,” McKusker felt, “had visions of grandeur. She really did drive her kids hard.”

Friends jokingly compared big Kathy’s mind control over little Kathy and her sisters to that of twisted ’70s cult leader Jim Jones—sans the killer Kool-Aid. But more on the mark, they likened her to that famous-for-being-famous Hungarian hot mama Jolie Gabor, the Queen Mother who dictated that her glamorous offspring—Zsa Zsa, Eva, and Magda—marry rich and famous and live the high life draped in furs, diamonds, and rubies. (The drag queen RuPaul once described the Gabor girls as “guts, glamour, and goulash.”) Zsa Zsa took her mother’s advice to heart when she roped in and married the big kahuna himself, Conrad Hilton, the second of her many husbands.

         

BIG KATHY’S MAIDEN NAME was Dugan, and she never quite had much luck marrying really rich. Avanzino, Richards, Catain, and Fenton are the surnames of the serial bride’s four husbands.

The first of her mostly horrific unions—essentially a shotgun wedding—was to a bad boy named Larry Avanzino, an Italian-American, who had gotten the pretty Irish-American Dugan girl pregnant in the backseat of her 1957 black Chevrolet convertible. The unplanned bundle of joy conceived in that cramped vinyl and chrome General Motors love nest would grow up to be none other than Kathy Hilton, Paris Hilton’s mother.

The identity of Kathy Hilton’s biological father and how her birth came about has been a long-held family secret. Says an Avanzino relative, “It’s really made me angry that with all of Paris’s fame the real identity of her [maternal] grandfather has been covered up. You only hear the name Hilton, never the name Avanzino. I guess it just doesn’t have the same ring.”

Big Kathy’s third husband was Jack Catain, an organized crime figure, whom she is said to have married and divorced twice—turned on by the big diamond he gave her and by his tough-guy persona. When little Kathy was about to marry into the Hilton family, big Kathy split from the mafioso to avoid a scandal.

In her pantheon of husbands, number two, Ken Richards, and number four, Bob Fenton, were submissives to big Kathy’s dominatrix. Richards, whom big Kathy had stolen from his wife and three children, raised little Kathy. Until she became a Hilton, she always publicly used the Richards name, never Avanzino. Richards also was the father of Kim and Kyle, whose careers he helped finance. Once Kim was bringing in a hefty revenue stream from her screen work, big Kathy gave Richards the heave-ho. As for Fenton, she boasted that she denied him sex throughout their marriage.

Big Kathy could be cruel—physically and emotionally—as a mother and a wife, the no-sex rule being just a minor bit of torture in the scheme of things. She had a frightening propensity for violent behavior such as physically abusing people. One eyewitness to, and target of, Paris Hilton’s maternal grandmother’s anger—a stepdaughter—says she was left “emotionally scarred” from their hellish relationship.

It was at the knee of this oddball of a matriarch that Kathy Hilton learned the good, the bad, and the ugly and later passed on her mother’s philosophy and values to her own daughters, Paris and Nicky.

         

BY HER MIDTEENS, little Kathy’s show business career was in the proverbial toilet. She lacked that elusive magical elixir for a successful run, and her mother’s dream of making her into a star had all but faded. The kind of media that would rocket Paris Hilton to international celebrity status—the World Wide Web—sadly didn’t exist back in the 1970s. Moreover, she was thought to be slothful by her stepfather, Ken Richards, who often complained, “Kathy’s so lazy she won’t get up—all she wants to do is party at night.”

Studies were never Kathy’s cup of tea, either. When she did attend classes, when she wasn’t auditioning or working, it was at a small, curious private educational institution in the Los Angeles suburb of Encino—Valley Girl country. California Preparatory School, Cal Prep as it was known, attracted a mélange of child performers and wannabes, ranging from some of the Michael Jackson clan to Partridge Family star Danny Bonaduce, who assaulted a transvestite prostitute years later, giving him the proper credentials for his own reality show in 2005, when Kathy Hilton’s was airing.

“Cal Prep was a joke,” says a former student who went there and was a close friend of Kathy’s. “It was just a place for rich kids and celebrities to go. Their parents paid the money and the kids went and hung out.”

One mother, a close friend of big Kathy’s, sent her daughter there because she suffered from dyslexia and possibly attention deficit disorder. “It was a good little school for more individualized attention, which is what my daughter needed,” she says. “I got a letter from a teacher saying my daughter was never going to graduate with her class, but two days later she’s up there on the stage—graduating. We paid the tuition and they just pushed her through.”

If little Kathy wasn’t academically inclined—and why should she be, her mother, big Kathy, was a high school dropout at sixteen, and Kathy Hilton’s biological father, Larry Avanzino, turned out to be an alcoholic housepainter—one could blame her lack of interest on the school’s odd methods of teaching. For instance, there was little or no homework, the philosophy being that “a student does not need to repeat for five hours after school what he should have learned in school.” When one of the students was asked to name the days of the week, he replied, “Five school days and two days off.” Learning history wasn’t considered necessary, and tests were thought of as a big hoax. “The right answer isn’t as important as the thinking process behind the answer.” With no homework, no tests, little or no history, and classes in fencing and, oddly, Mandarin Chinese, Kathy thought Cal Prep was the coolest.

Having been indoctrinated with her mother’s rules of mating behavior—Marry Rich!—teenage Kathy sought out suitors who were wealthy and well connected to show business. But one of the ones she picked early on didn’t meet the profile developed by her mother.

Like big Kathy, little Kathy’s first serious boyfriend was another bad boy, according to his public high school buddy and Kathy’s close friend at the time, Pierce Jensen. He compared Kathy’s steady to the pot-smoking, long-haired Jeff Spicoli, Sean Penn’s character in the 1982 film about southern California teen life, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Kathy and her guy had four common interests—steamy make-out sessions, partying, hanging out…and steamy make-out sessions.

“Kathy was dumb as a nail,” asserts Jensen, who at the time was a college-bound senior with Kathy’s boyfriend in the class of 1974 at William Howard Taft High School in affluent Woodland Hills. Taft was a real-life Ridgemont High and, like Cal Prep, was attended by a number of child stars and the children of stars—among them Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia Brady on The Brady Bunch.

“Kathy’s whole thing was going out and having fun,” recalls Jensen. “And if we weren’t going out to the restaurants in West LA, or cruising the Sunset Strip we would pretty much just hang out at her home.”

Kathy lived in a pretty house that big Kathy’s second husband, Ken Richards, had had built on Aqua Verde Drive on the edge of Bel-Air.

“At Kathy’s we played paddle tennis or listened to music,” says Jensen. “She never talked about anything except, you know, nonsense—going with this guy, going with that guy…‘he’s cute, she’s cute’…‘oh, I really like that song.’ There wasn’t a book in the house, no newspapers except for the trades and the tabloids. We never went to the beach, never went hiking, never did things that I would do with other girls that I would date. Just like her daughter Paris, Kathy was only interested in being seen.

“Her boyfriend was a partyer like we all were,” says Jensen, chuckling years later. “We dropped acid, smoked pot, drank. He had a rattletrap car, and I know Kathy was embarrassed to ride in his clunker. I remember her mother saying, ‘My God, my daughter—you’re not riding in that car!’”

Unlike little Kathy’s boyfriend, Pierce Jensen was much more acceptable to big Kathy, especially because his mother, Pat Priest, was a major mid-1960s TV star who played the role of Marilyn in The Munsters and had starred in one of Elvis’s films, Easy Come, Easy Go. “Big Kathy gushed all over my mother when they met,” recalls Jensen.

Jensen remembers Kathy’s mother as being very overbearing and saw her as the epitome of the stage mom. “But by the time I knew Kathy the drive wasn’t so much to get Kathy into acting—it was to get her a rich husband. Before we would go out her mom would say, ‘Oh, you’ll never get a rich man with that skirt on. Put this on,’” Jensen recalls vividly. “Big Kathy had an agenda. When we would go out and Kathy would see men in expensive cars, or men who looked wealthy, she’d make comments like, ‘Oh, I’m going to bag me one of them one day…I don’t have time for acting now, I’m busy looking for a rich guy.’”

Kathy’s only known girlfriend at the time was homely and overweight, thus no threat or competition when she accompanied Kathy on her frequent outings looking for cute, rich guys. Also, she had a car and was Kathy’s chauffeur.

Kathy’s vanity didn’t end there. In her room the failed starlet, who was jealous of Kim’s and Kyle’s success, kept stacks of eight-by-ten black-and-white publicity glossies from the days when she thought her career would blossom—sort of a contemporary teen version of Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond reliving the glory days. She autographed the photos for friends or anyone who might have recognized her from her TV or modeling gigs.

Among the photos was one of her posing in a bikini—G-rated. Another was a shot of the wholesome blond teenager wearing a broad Pepsodent smile, her hands wrapped around a tree branch, the kind of photo Seventeen would run, sparking envy in girl readers with acne and baby fat. Kathy had given both to Jensen, inscribing one of them on the back with the words “Pierce, I love U! Kathy.” Another note, on the back of the same photo, was inscribed, “Dear Pierce. You have been such a great friend and escort”—she underlined the word escort twice. “Maybe one day we will get 2-gether. Love ya, Kathy.”

There was one other photo of Kathy that Jensen kept through the years, one he held dear to his heart—a Polaroid that he shot of her at a party.

“Everybody was fucked up,” he remembers about that night. “We were all drinking, carrying on, smoking dope—although I never saw Kathy ever get high. I always got the impression that she was afraid to because she would lose control and be herself.”

The photo looks like one you would see on an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, except Kathy eagerly volunteered to be the model. She never was, nor would she ever be, a victim.

Kathy is seen lying on a bare mattress with flower designs on it, her head propped on a pillow, her eyes wide open like a frightened deer staring into headlights. Her midriff is bare because she has the tails of her blouse tied, the sleeves rolled up, and her legs in jeans are spread wide and bent at the knees.

“She was just being her outrageous, flirtatious, outgoing, exuding-sexual-charm self,” explains Jensen. “That night, at that party, she just plopped down on that mattress like, ‘Come on, baby, do me…. Look at me, boys.’ She was just being Kathy. But if I were to say, ‘Come on, Kathy, take your top off,’ she would say no. She would only go so far.”

Back then Jensen and others in their crowd had a nickname for Kathy, who dressed “extremely provocatively and was the most flirtatious girl” they’d ever met. “We called her ‘PT,’” reveals Jensen. “Everybody called her a prick tease. I’ve never met anybody like her since.” (By coincidence her mother, big Kathy, had an X-rated nickname during her own wild teen years. She had been given the moniker “Pussy” Dugan.)

“Kathy flirted with every guy who crossed her path,” maintains Jensen. “Even though she was involved with my friend, she flirted with me. She flirted with our friends. That’s why it didn’t surprise me the way Paris turned out, because her mother was the same way—although back then I don’t think Kathy was sleeping with people. But you’d think she’d slept with every guy in the city by the way she acted.

“Me and my buddies always wondered whether she and her boyfriend were having sex—because the way she acted you would say, yes, ten times a day. They were just all over each other like cheap suits, making suggestive comments to each other, and rubbing and groping. I can imagine her mother telling Kathy all about sex—but also telling her you can please a guy in other ways, and string him along and you’ll have him hooked.

“Her mother told her all her life that she was great and wonderful, so she had a huge ego, and you know that when you have a huge ego you don’t act like yourself. You think you’re better than everyone else and you act that way. She was always on, never a genuine person.

“I thought when she eventually hooked up with Rick Hilton that she must have pulled off the perfect acting job, that she nailed him with her fake personality, her false way of being. I thought, ‘Well, she did it.’ The prophecy is fulfilled.”