CHAPTER 6

On a crisp, sunny fall afternoon the fire alarm sounded in the hallowed halls of Manhasset High School. The students and faculty were immediately evacuated and classes were canceled for the remainder of the day.

Within fifteen minutes, a beaming, gloating Kathleen appeared at the school’s local hangout, overjoyed that classes were called off and hoping to spend the rest of the day with Bob Conkey.

“Kathy did it. They got her for it. I think they suspended her for a week,” states Conkey, who, looking back years later, believes her motivation was to “make something, anything happen, to do something wacky, to get attention. She was a pistol.”

And Conkey wasn’t surprised by Kathleen’s antics at school that day. He had experienced other such acts by her. “She’d call me in the middle of the night and wake up the whole family,” he says.

Still, he found her fascinating. She was brassy, had an acid tongue, fired off the fastest and meanest put-downs, traits they shared in common. “Kathy was quick-witted, very flamboyant,” observes a high school pal, Les Sutorius.

Moreover, Conkey found Kathleen a turn-on in her glam outfits. “‘Cheap’ is not the word, but she was a drama queen,” he says.

Kathy was head over heels in love with Bob, but he didn’t feel quite the same about her when she began chasing him when she was a sophomore and he was a senior.

The son of a corporate vice president, Conkey’s favorite hangout was a bar called the Gay Dome—“gay” meaning “happy-hour gay” in those days, a place that served fifteen-cent beers to underage kids. He and his buddies would gather there after school, downing brews, talking cars and chicks. The front door had a round porthole-like window through which Conkey could see Kathleen anxiously staking him out in her idling, cool-looking Chevrolet convertible, one of two new Chevys her father had bought for the family. If he didn’t take notice of her, one of his bar buddies would warn, “Uh-oh, Kathy’s outside again.”

Says Conkey, “She’d always be there. She’d wait until I finished drinking. Literally, when I walked out of that bar, she would be waiting. I didn’t even have a date with her. Even though I had my car with me—I was hot shit with a ’49 Ford convertible—I’d ride home with her. We’d make out for a while and that was it.”

On those drives Kathleen Dugan fantasized about their future together. “Someday,” he remembers her rhapsodizing, “we will meet again when you’re a wealthy lawyer.” He, however, had no such plans. In reality, his biggest concern was whether he could even get into college, let alone a law school.

Behind Kathleen’s back Conkey and his pals joked about how she followed him everywhere like a hungry puppy. Kathleen’s gal pals also got a kick out of her obsessive behavior. “When she couldn’t find Conkey at the Gay Dome,” recalls Hallaren, “Kathleen and I would drive all over town desperately looking for him, and if we found him, he wouldn’t give her the time of day. She always made a fool out of herself—so she was a joke in those days when it came to him. She eventually had four husbands. She was always unhappy in love.”

Kathleen’s crowd also couldn’t resist doing riffs on her nickname. From the time she was a child, the Dugans had called her “Pussycat,” but that was shortened immediately to “Pussy”—Pussy Dugan—when Conkey and his chums got wind of it. They teased her incessantly.

Their dates, when he deigned to take her out, were at the Westbury Drive-In, and although she had Conkey in her clutches for the evening, Kathleen appeared more mesmerized by the movie. At home her only reading matter was movie magazines that featured gushy stories about Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, and teen heartthrobs like Troy Donahue. Little did she know back then that one day she would be linked to the Hilton family, whose members had intimate relationships with such stars. Otherwise, the Dugan house was devoid of any form of serious reading material, except for Dodo’s Holy Bible.

After the movies and fumbling in the backseat, Conkey took Kathleen to the Gay Dome for a beer nightcap, and she would launch into impromptu renditions of her two favorite songs, “Summertime” and “Danny Boy.”

After Conkey graduated from Manhasset High and was sent for a year to a prep school, which his father hoped would get him into a decent college, Kathleen’s pursuit continued unabated, as it would on and off for many years to come. “She wrote me, literally, every day when I was at school,” he says. “She’d write about what she did that day. She’d write about how much she missed me. She’d write about how she was looking forward to Christmas break when she would see me again.”

With Conkey away, Kathleen and her posse had started going into Manhattan for fun weekends, cruising Greenwich Village and Times Square, flirting with guys, and going to bars. “I would want to go to poetry readings in the Village,” recalls Hallaren, “but Kathy wanted to buy water pistols to shoot people.”

Somewhere along the way Kathleen had met a young fellow who worked as a clerk, by coincidence, at a Hilton hotel, the Statler Hilton, the sapphire in a hotel group that Conrad Hilton had scooped up in 1954 for a record $111 million, then the largest real estate transaction in history. Kathleen had teased and flirted with the Hilton employee, leading him to believe there might be some action in his future, so he invited her to be his guest, which turned out to be a reverse con job.

“It was one weird, strange situation,” notes Demaitre. “The guy said they were renovating a whole floor and we could stay for free. We went to the hotel and it was a beautiful room.”

It was still early so Kathleen, the clothes horse, got all dolled up, and she and Demaitre hit Times Square. “We thought we’d pick up some guys,” she says. They quickly met two cute fellows, one of whom was a Frenchman—and luckily Demaitre spoke French fluently.

“They were thrilled and must have thought, ‘Maybe we can sleep with them,’” she says. “Of course, we were certainly not putting out, and they were completely freaked and stunned. Kathleen was so covered in rhinestones, it was hard to get to her, anyway; her outfits were so sort of forbidding, and she wore a girdle. She was absolutely determined nothing was going to happen.”

Back at the hotel, the girls went up to the room that had been comped by Kathleen’s acquaintance. Behaving like first-class guests who had won a weekend for two, they ordered wagons of tasty treats from room service.

“The next morning,” says Demaitre, “the hotel caught us. They didn’t know we were there, and they called our parents.”

The Dugans were “remarkable” in their reaction, she says. Kathleen wasn’t punished and was allowed to continue her madcap ways.

         

KATHLEEN DUGAN’S HIGH SCHOOL career skidded to a screeching stop near the end of her junior year when she was a not-so-sweet sixteen. She was furious that her parents had left her at home and gone off to Nebraska to visit a relative. Preferring to be on a school week jaunt rather than attending classes, she decided to show her parents just how angry she was.

“She called me and she said, ‘You gotta come over. You can’t believe what I’m doing!’” says Hallaren, whose jaw dropped when she arrived minutes later and entered the Dugan house. “Kathy had painted practically the whole house gold gilt—the toilet seat, the switch plates, the frames around the paintings, some of the walls, and she even painted her own portrait with gold gilt. I saw her doing it, and I said, ‘Your parents are going to kill you.’ And she said, ‘If they’re mad, they deserve it.’”

When they arrived home, Dodo Dugan hid any dismay she might have had about her daughter’s demon decorating. “She said, ‘Kathleen, this is very pretty, this is very artistic, this is beautiful. You did a great job,’” recalls Hallaren.

Kathleen then quit school. “She simply just stopped going,” says Hallaren. “The parents didn’t make her go back. Kathleen was a very powerful girl.”

Instead of working toward a diploma, Kathleen just hung out, cruising town in her convertible, having fun. Curiously, she continued going to Manhasset High School social functions as if she were still enrolled. Some classmates who weren’t in her tight inner circle didn’t realize she had quit and thought she was still a student.

Meanwhile, her girlfriends, who stayed close with her through the years, graduated in June 1957 and went off to colleges that fall before securing glamorous jobs. Hallaren became a top model’s agent, working for the likes of Eileen Ford, then went into acting, winning her first audition on Broadway as Clara in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Martha Hanahan also was in the fashion business for a time, as an art coordinator at Mademoiselle, and later raised horses. Christina Demaitre quit in the middle of her senior year at the University of Maryland to take a job as a reporter in the women’s section of the Washington Post and later became a lawyer.

Kathleen still had her eye on show business, fantasizing about becoming an actress, or a singer like Joni James. She even considered testing her considerable talent as a vocalist against others on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, the American Idol of the time, but she couldn’t get past the fear factor of appearing on live television.

Instead, she went to acting school. Despite her lack of a formal high school diploma or an equivalency, Kathleen auditioned and was accepted in the fall of 1957 into the two-year program at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. One of her classmates, Robert Redford, graduated in what would have been Kathleen’s class of ’59. She, however, spent only one or two semesters before dropping out, because she’d fallen in love with a guy other girls considered an Adonis.