CHAPTER 3

In September 1974—well before Rick Hilton came on the scene—little Kathy focused her attentions on another young man who, for a number of reasons, caused consternation for her mother.

Jane Hallaren, who had been a confidante of big Kathy’s since childhood, clearly heard the tension in her voice when she telephoned her in New York to discuss little Kathy’s latest romantic travail. Jane and big Kathy’s close bond had been formed when Hallaren, a street kid from Brooklyn, “beat the shit” out of big Kathy in the schoolyard of their Catholic parochial school after Hallaren had a Heathers-type confrontation with a clique of girls whom Kathy controlled. A onetime model’s rep instrumental in Martha Stewart’s brief commercial and print modeling career, Hallaren had later gone into acting—stage and film—receiving critical acclaim as a predatory lesbian college professor in director John Sayles’s 1994 art film Lianna.

Over time, big Kathy had kept Hallaren in the loop on the goings-on in her life—“a book in itself,” she states—and on little Kathy’s various teen romances, all of which Hallaren thought “quite banal and superficial.” But the long-distance phone call on the night in question is one she has never forgotten.

“Kathleen said, ‘Janie, Kathy’s having an affair. It’s with one of the Jackson Five. I don’t know what to do.’

“Kathleen said she was allowing the relationship to proceed, rationalizing that the relationship was a step up for Kathy because it was a connection to a well-heeled show business family and celebrity. At the same time big Kathy didn’t like black people, and here was Kathy involved with a black kid. It’s the only conversation I ever remember having with her about any man in her children’s, or her own, life, that she had trepidation about.

“I was sitting in bed listening to this, thinking, ‘Oh—My—God.’ I thought, ‘This is so absurd, so insane’ that I said to her, ‘I can’t believe you’re sanctioning this.’”

After that call Hallaren heard nothing more about the claimed romance until long after Kathy had become Mrs. Rick Hilton.

“It was when people started asking, is Michael Jackson straight or gay? When he was getting weird, and I said to Kathy, ‘He’s straight, right, being he had that affair with Kathy,’ and she said, ‘No, no, no, no—it wasn’t Michael. It was one of his brothers.’”

Hallaren assumes big Kathy was telling her the truth about her daughter’s relationship, but she also emphasizes that big Kathy was histrionic, an über drama queen who often exaggerated a situation to make it sound more intriguing and make her life appear more exciting.

Another bizarre situation arose when big Kathy’s second husband, Ken Richards, learned that big Kathy had actually asked a young man to give little Kathy “sex lessons,” according to Sylvia Benedict Richards, who married Ken Richards after his acrimonious divorce from big Kathy. “Big Kathy told Ken that she wanted Kathy to know all about sex, and how to perform sex, literally, the best way possible,” asserts Sylvia Richards. “So she asked a young man to teach her in his van. Ken had a fit when he found out about it and confronted Kathleen. She told him to mind his own business, to keep his nose out of it, that Kathy was her daughter.” (Years later, Paris received sex instruction from her mother, who warned her that performing fellatio would put “holes” in her face. “I totally believed her. She’s, like, ‘It’s from sucking,’ I’m, like, ‘Ewwww!’”)

Having watched big Kathy in action for more than two decades, Sylvia Richards observes, “She believed that rules didn’t pertain to her. And this is the way she brought up the girls. There were no rules for them, either. And that’s the way Kathy brought up Paris.”

         

AFTER LITTLE KATHY finished high school there was a series of well-heeled, handsome, show-biz types whom she pursued. And she was known as a partyer—one of the pretty girls-on-the-make who frequented the bashes at the Playboy Mansion. As Sylvia Richards states, “Little Kathy partied all night, and slept all day.”

For a time Kathy had “a big crush” on and “chased and dated” Dean Martin’s son, Dean-Paul, discloses Jeanne Martin, Dino’s widow, herself the 1948 Orange Bowl Queen. At the time, the handsome actor, who was a half dozen years older than Kathy, was ending a bad first marriage. “Kathy definitely wanted celebrity and wanted to marry somebody preferably in show business,” recalls Martin. “She loved the limelight, that I know.”

Kathy also chased and saw Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s son, Desi Jr. “She used to drop his name all the time,” says Mickey Catain. “He came up to her mom’s house a couple of times. She talked about him a lot.” But that ended quickly because, as a well-placed observer notes, “Lucy would have none of it. She didn’t think very highly of Kathy.”

Dean-Paul Martin, who died in a plane crash in 1987, and Desi Arnaz Jr., who later married a dancer, fit perfectly the profile of the kind of man with whom big Kathy would have liked little Kathy to walk down the aisle—they came from money and had major show business connections.

“Kathy was desperate to chase them—not for her own sake but rather because her mother wanted her to. That’s the pathetic part,” observes Jane Hallaren.

After each and every date little Kathy, on instructions from big Kathy, would call her mother and give her an intimate description of what went on. “I was there at the house visiting when she called,” says Sylvia Richards. “Mama wanted to know a blow-by-blow description of what went on. And little Kathy gave her a blow-by-blow description. Big Kathy didn’t care what little Kathy did as long as she married somebody rich. She was that way with all of the girls. Kathy was out for the buck—as much as she could get.”

When none of those relationships worked out, little Kathy trolled the trendy clubs and restaurants of Beverly Hills and the Valley. Riding shotgun on those manhunts was Mickey Catain, whose mobster father was married to big Kathy at the time.

“I was hanging out with her because our parents put us together,” she says. “I was just divorced and I wasn’t in that world of Kathy’s with all the celebrities and with going out every night to the clubs. That girl loved to party. Kathy was very sophisticated when it came to that scene. She’d meet some guy and he’d call her for a date. A lot of them were foreigners, guys with money—Iranians, Persians, Asians. So she’d go on the date, but she’d invite like five other girls to go along with her and then we’d get there and the guy would go, ‘Who are they?’ I’d be so embarrassed. I’m like, ‘Oh, Kathy, I can’t stay,’ and she’s like, ‘Oh, no, no, no. Stay, stay. It’ll be fine.’ And she’d make the guy take us to the most expensive restaurant and pick up the tab for all of us.”

On one unforgettable occasion, big Kathy took the girls to meet the entire Dallas Cowboys team, apparently in hopes of securing dates for them. “She knew somebody with the Dallas organization and we showed up at their training session,” says Catain. “First we watched them play and then we’re limoed off to have dinner with them, the whole team. It was just to meet the guys and have fun and flirt. It was like one of the best nights I ever had.”

Because big Kathy surrounded herself with gorgeous young women, wild stories and unfounded rumors circulated about her activities. Sylvester Stallone’s mother, Jackie Stallone, a self-styled psychic, says she heard from her friend Eva Gabor that big Kathy “ran an escort service. Eva told me many times that the mother introduced girls to eligible men.” David Patrick Columbia, who documents the Manhattan and Hamptons society scene on a popular website called New York Social Diary, lived in LA for years, helped Debbie Reynolds write a memoir, and followed the movements of the contemporary Hiltons, says he had received reports from sources on the West Coast that one of the girls was connected to convicted “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss, who in 2005 was planning to open “Heidi’s Stud Farm,” a luxury brothel for women to have sex with male prostitutes. On the other hand, Fleiss claims she never heard of any of them.

At one point, big Kathy bought a used navy blue Cadillac limousine so she and her companions, among them Mickey Catain’s mother, Marlene, could ride in style and meet affluent men. The car had a vanity plate with a portion of her name on it. At the time both women were divorced from Jack Catain, and the two had become friends.

“We went out together and I thought through her I could meet other people because I was married for so long,” Marlene Catain states. “I would drive around with her in her limo while she was smoking grass, and she would have Arab guys in the car. We’d drive into Beverly Hills and everybody would look at us. She took me to the Playboy Club, which was very exclusive at the time. I had the impression she had connections there, or knew Hefner. I met some interesting people there through her. I thought it was fun. I felt like a voyeur.”

Her daughter, Mickey, didn’t think that Paris’s grandmother took money in a play-for-pay sense from any of the men she encountered during her adventures. “She would pick them up and have them take her to dinner, or she would set them up with other women. She would hit on them, get them to take her out, take her on a trip—whatever she could get. And I think she always had in her mind the idea, is he marriage potential?

“She loved the idea of being married, of family. That’s why she had her daughters’ friends like me around her,” Catain continues. “Big Kathy was just like a mother to everybody and she just loved all these girls to death and they just flocked to her. They hung out and talked and had sleepovers and got dressed to go out together. Kathy just kind of provided a shelter. It was fun and you’d get so wrapped up in it you didn’t think of it as being really weird.”

Kay Rozario, a close friend of big Kathy’s, points out that she was “very kind to a lot of young girls” and that she had “a lot of goodness in her.” Among the girls who were in Kathleen’s circle “were two who lost their mother,” recalls Rozario, “and Kathleen practically adopted them and helped to raise them. The house was always full of young girls, and all those girls loved her. There was a great deal of kindness and love there that those girls weren’t getting in their own homes, or from their own parents, so they were drawn to big Kathy.”

When little Kathy wasn’t out partying, she and her friends lolled by the pool or hung out in her enormous bedroom. Her clothing was piled everywhere—she had a huge wardrobe—and the decorating was very feminine—cute upholstered chairs and a king-size bed.

What little Kathy desperately wanted, though, was a car of her own. Big Kathy’s brother, Chuck Dugan, had a used car lot in Encino, and he found an old Fiat and had it fixed up and painted black for his niece. For a girl who in the not too distant future would be chauffeured in Rolls-Royce elegance as a Hilton, Kathy was overjoyed with the little sports car. “But the first or second day she took it out, the thing blew up,” remembers Mickey Catain. “Kathy just left it sitting there and walked away. I’m thinking, ‘You just can’t abandon a car like that.’ But she says, ‘Let someone else take care of it. I don’t want it anymore.’ That was always her attitude, and she never went back for it. She had no concern for anybody else. It was just what her needs were.”