CHAPTER 8

A high school dropout, and with her dreams of becoming a singing star dashed by pregnancy and a shotgun marriage to a failure, Kathleen appeared to have no future. The only light in her life was her daughter. Everywhere Kathleen went people were enthralled by little Kathy.

“She was an absolutely stunning child,” says her aunt, Donna. “She was so perfect with beautiful light blond hair and an absolutely gorgeous face like a China doll.”

When little Kathy was in her terrible twos, big Kathy came to the conclusion that her baby had very marketable assets—her looks and cuteness—and that the darling child, if handled properly, could become a little walking, talking, moneymaking machine—a real life Chatty Cathy doll, only with a capital “K.” At the same time, Kathleen, then working as a cosmetics salesgirl in a Long Island drugstore, had hit on a career for herself that didn’t require a diploma—just lots of moxie: full-time stage mother and manager of little Kathy’s seemingly bright future.

“Big Kathy was going to make sure little Kathy did what she didn’t do—and that is become a star,” observes Adele Avanzino, who would always have a close relationship with her ex-sister-in-law.

The self-styled mother-manager began schlepping little Kathy on the train into Manhattan, taking her from agent to agent, advertising agency to advertising agency, all of which was the last straw for her husband. Larry Avanzino thought it was wrong to promote his daughter like that, plus he was envious of his wife’s drive and ambition.

“Larry didn’t like it,” asserts Adele. “Little Kathy was just a baby and Larry didn’t like her being gone a lot of the time with Kathy running around, taking her here, and taking her there. Kathy worked very hard at it. She put all her energy into that child who she adored. And Larry was not happy about it.” Adds their brother, Ken, “I think he felt inferior. The next thing I knew, they were separated.”

After two years the marriage was formally severed. According to Kathleen’s sister, Donna, “Larry did not keep up with the child. Kathy Hilton never really knew her father.”

Enter Constance Bannister.

If anyone could be mesmerized by little Kathy’s baby beauty—and do something to promote her big-time—it was Bannister, the photographer who invented the “pinup baby” concept. Bannister herself was a beautiful babe. Photographed in a bathing suit in a Saturday Evening Post wartime story, she became a “pinup girl” for sailors aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, her world-renowned baby pictures—known as “Bannister Babies”—were published in dozens of books and calendars. Bannister Baby posters helped sell War Bonds during World War II. One of her baby photos, which had run in an American magazine, was even found in the pocket of a captured German soldier. One of her many books, The Baby, stayed on the bestseller list for two years, was reprinted in eight languages, and featured in Life magazine.

During the 1950s some of the more than one hundred thousand baby pictures she took appeared on popular TV shows—hosts such as Perry Como, Garry Moore, and Jack Paar adored her images and featured them with humorous commentaries.

Once Kathleen discovered that Bannister had a photo studio and home nearby on Long Island, she wasted no time making contact. Bannister saw star potential with the toddler, and Kathleen eagerly put her signature on the photographer’s Model Release for Minors, which assigned all rights of twenty-eight-month-old little Kathy’s image to Bannister.

One of the many photos of little Kathy shot by Bannister shows the child wearing a skimpy diaper and a halter top. Another cute one shows her in a child’s rocking chair talking on an oversize telephone; she’s wearing a frock, Mary Jane shoes, and white socks, and her blond hair is up in bows. A caption on a little Kathy headshot, apparently for an advertisement, reads, “Smart girls wear seat belts.” Another is of her in profile—on her knees in prayer.

Because of the charming pictures, and with Bannister opening doors for her—the famed photographer had contacts ranging from advertising in New York to TV and movies in Hollywood—little Kathy appeared in a Dial soap advertisement, the first of a number of such modeling assignments.

As the years went by, Bannister also played a key role in the TV and film careers of Kathleen’s other daughters, Kim and Kyle, from her second marriage to Ken Richards, according to Bannister’s daughter, Lynda Hatcher. “Mom took one look at those girls and fell in love,” she says, “and she took them under her wing. Connie had a knack of picking the ones who had it. Kim landed a major role—Prudence on Nanny and the Professor, and that was huge—due to Connie’s contacts. They were nothing when Connie met them. She did not receive one dime in commissions or management fees; not one red cent was paid to my mother. My mother (who died at ninety-two in August 2005) did it out of sheer belief in what these little girls were capable of doing.”

         

AROUND THE TIME little Kathy’s modeling career was taking off, a new man came into big Kathy’s life, one far different from her first husband.

Kenneth Edwin Richards, the son of a Methodist minister, was already married with three children. A successful business executive, he was two decades older than Kathleen. He served as a lieutenant colonel under the army’s surgeon general during World War II. In 1942 he married blond, pretty, and petite Evelyn Henderson, part Scottish, part American Indian, who brought three children into the world—Kenneth Alan Jr., Diane, and Grant Benson Richards.

For a fellow who grew up in very modest circumstances and whose father just squeaked by financially as pastor of the Valley Stream Methodist Church on Long Island, Richards was a genius when it came to developing and marketing ladies’ clothing. No-iron cotton? Credit Ken Richards as its codeveloper. “The Skort,” women’s shorts with a flap or panel across the front to make them resemble a skirt? His idea. Mix-and-match sportswear? Richards’s concept. He was, as they say on Seventh Avenue, a macher—a mover-shaker who got things done.

He had started as a junior buyer at J. C. Penney and within a decade had become the department store chain’s head of women’s and girls’ sportswear apparel. By 1960 he had become director of S. H. Kress & Company, an iconic but fading chain of five-and-dime stores located in the downtown areas of many American cities. When he was appointed, the company’s president optimistically noted he would “play an essential role in the company’s progressive policy of entering the junior department store field.” Less than two years later, though, Richards was ousted at a time when Kress faced diminishing profits and was under attack for refusing to serve blacks at its lunch counters in the South.

Around the time Kathleen landed him, he was earning a princely salary as special consultant to the president of Mohasco Industries Inc., the world’s largest carpet manufacturer. Besides a fancy home on Long Island, he had a beautiful apartment in Manhattan and had purchased a lovely family farm upstate in Claverack, New York, and he was in partnership in a motel and restaurant venture nearby. All in all, the Richards family lived a very high life—the kind of life Kathleen wanted for herself and was determined to get.

Richards was tall, slim, handsome, sophisticated, bright, and well-off, but there was a catch—and a big one. He was still married, although his union of some two decades was on rocky ground, mainly because his wife, Evelyn, had a serious drinking problem.

Kathleen met Ken Richards for the first time at a party she attended at Richards’s sumptuous home on Whitehall Boulevard in Garden City, Long Island. Long after she had snagged him away from his wife, leaving the family devastated, Kathleen boasted to her stepdaughter, Diane, “I knew at that party your father was the man I was going to have.”

The two, however, actually began an intimate relationship sometime later at a Long Island restaurant and bar where Kathleen, when not in her stage-mother persona, was working as a hatcheck girl while someone babysat for three-year-old little Kathy at home.

It was at that nightspot one horrific night when Kathleen perpetrated the first of a number of bizarre and violent acts—emotional and physical—that punctuated what would be a long and stormy relationship with Ken Richards and his daughter.

Diane Richards, sixteen, and her older brother, Ken Jr., were at home watching television late one evening when a policeman, accompanied by a shouting and angry Kathleen Dugan, a woman the Richards children had never seen, or even heard of, before that moment, appeared at the family home, then on Stewart Avenue in Garden City.

“We answered the door and she started ranting and raving, going on and on, making incomprehensible accusations about my mother, trying to make it seem like my mother had done something to her,” says Diane.

The police officer had accompanied Kathleen to the Richardses’ home because of an altercation that had just happened involving her and Evelyn Richards, who had been rushed to the hospital.

Arriving at the emergency room, Diane and her brother found Evelyn in agony—one of her ankles had been seriously injured—and she was in a foggy state. “It was very hard to understand her speech,” recalls Diane vividly. “She was in a state of shock and a great amount of pain and she was drugged.”

Richards’s wife had gone to the restaurant-bar that she and her husband frequented, most likely to confront Kathleen Dugan about the affair. The two women had words. Another restaurant employee later told Mrs. Richards that she saw Kathleen “put knockout drops in [her] drink.” Earlier in the evening the coworker had warned Richards’s wife, “Be really careful when you’re dealing with Kathleen.”

What happened next at the restaurant remains a dark memory for Diane. “Kathleen drugged my mother and then followed my mother, who was staggering, trying to get away, out to her car, a Lincoln Continental, that had heavy, heavy doors. As my mother was getting in the car Kathy purposefully slammed the door on her ankle and crushed it. The whole thing—the knockout drops, slamming the door—was intentional.

“When we got to the hospital her ankle was horribly mangled. After we got home and my mother came out of her drugged stupor, she said, ‘Who was that maniac?’ She couldn’t believe what had happened.”

In a cast for weeks, her mother’s injury eventually healed, but the assault has remained with Diane ever since. “I believe Kathy came to the house with the police officer to try to turn around what really happened, to put the blame on my mother. She was going on and on, trying to make it look like my mother had done something to her. As I later learned, Kathy was good at doing that sort of thing. My mother most definitely was the victim.”

Kathleen never apologized and showed no remorse. “I think there was a part of her that was missing,” observes Diane. “She had no conscience.”

Meanwhile, Kathleen aggressively pursued Ken Richards, even showing up unexpectedly at out-of-town hotels when he was on business trips. Richards later told his third wife, Sylvia, that Kathleen “was all over him because he had money and she was determined to get it.”

Kathleen “deliberately got pregnant” around January 1964, in order to rope Richards into marriage, just as she appeared to have done with Avanzino. When she told Richards that she was with child, he secured a Mexican divorce from his first wife. Diane Richards asserts that Kathleen “contributed heavily” to her parents’ breakup, even though the marriage was already in trouble.

Ken Richards and Kathleen Dugan began living together, at first in the home of her parents, who had moved from Manhasset to Wantagh, and then in the small town of Lynbrook, Long Island, home of Ken’s mother, the widow of the Methodist minister.

Because Diane “worshipped” her father, because she “adored the ground he walked on,” because she “couldn’t bear growing up not being with him,” and because she was having problems at home with her mother, she decided to move in with her father and Kathleen—this despite “a lot of strain…. We didn’t get along at all. My brothers and I all had problems with…exposure to Kathleen.”

Diane’s brother, Grant, who became a successful rancher, supports all of his sister’s allegations and attests to Kathleen’s violent behavior. The night of the assault on his mother, he had been the first to arrive in the emergency room to find her in agonizing pain, and years later he harbors enormous resentment toward Kathleen, who he describes as “some lady my father met in a bar in Long Island. It caused a great deal of grief for my family.”

When Richards moved into his mother’s home with Kathleen, it sparked a tense living situation, especially for his mother, a religious woman who questioned the morality of him living in sin and who held Kathleen, his pregnant mistress, in contempt. Moreover, “Maunie,” as she was called, was elderly and suffered from osteoporosis.

Returning home from high school one afternoon, Diane found Kathleen alone in the kitchen, laughing hysterically. “I said, ‘What’s so funny?’ And I was starting to laugh, too, and I again asked, ‘What are you laughing about. What’s so funny?’ And when she stopped laughing, she said, ‘I fed Maunie dog food for lunch!’

“I was horrified. I don’t know whether I told my father because anytime I tried to tell him things Kathleen did, she’d start accusing me of being a troublemaker. I was so afraid of her that I just finally withdrew into a complete shell. She had a violent disposition and she intimidated me and she knew she intimidated me and she enjoyed it. She had a sadistic streak. She needed help.”

On another occasion, Richards’s mother got out of the house and was wandering around the neighborhood, essentially a cul-de-sac of several homes. “When Kathleen discovered she was missing, she was furious,” asserts Diane. “When she found her, she dragged her back to the house and threw her down on the concrete floor in the garage. It was terrifying.”

Richards later claimed that Kathleen once “tried to kill his mother” by purposely allowing the elderly woman to wander off into frigid winter temperatures on Roxbury Hollow Farm, the property he owned in upstate New York.

Not long after his divorce, Richards married Kathleen. His children weren’t present, and friends and relatives of Kathleen apparently didn’t learn about the quickie service until afterward. Their marriage sparked more anger. Richards’s children viewed Kathleen as “a gold digger.”

“She wanted fancy sports cars and big homes and expensive jewelry and expensive clothes and expensive furs,” states Diane.

Diane confronted her father. “I was so upset at the things that were happening that I told him, ‘Kathleen’s the most materialistic person I’ve ever known in my life.’ I said, ‘She just married you for your money.’ I’m afraid it didn’t set well with him.”

On September 19, 1964, in a hospital in Mineola, Long Island, big Kathy gave birth to her second child, another beautiful baby girl, the love child whom the now-married Richardses named Kimberly. She was called Kim for stage and TV and was known as Kimmy to friends and family. Ken Richards had wanted to adopt little Kathy, but big Kathy adamantly refused his loving gesture “because she wanted complete control of her,” maintains Sylvia Richards, his third wife. However, Richards would raise the future Kathy Hilton as his own.

Kim was just a few months old when Kathleen, with the help of her husband, got the baby her first job, a Firth Carpet commercial. Richards was in a business meeting with the Firth executives when big Kathy unexpectedly showed up with Kimmy in her arms; she believed in direct marketing. The agency that handled the account “fell in love with her,” and Kim was hired to crawl around on one of the company’s plush rugs. Like little Kathy, Kim would be driven hard to become a star by her demanding and enterprising stage mother.

Meanwhile, for Diane Richards, the only bright light in her increasingly hellish teenage life was little Kathy. “Having her around brought me happiness,” she says. “She was just so sweet, and I thought she hung the moon. Having had two brothers growing up, I felt I finally had a beautiful little sister. She was just so precious. I used to take her with me all over the place, even to parties. I was so proud of her.”

At first the newlywed Richardses, with little Kathy and baby Kim, rented a beautiful home in Lloyd Harbor, on Long Island’s North Shore, where Diane Richards finished high school. But Kathy wanted more than just a rental.

Kathleen picked out a new car for herself, a green Jaguar XKE convertible, and chose a large, gorgeous home with a swimming pool behind an exclusive golf course in the tony Long Island enclave of Old Brook-ville, about twenty-five miles east of Manhattan and close to the Sound. Like Manhasset, it was home to captains of industry and socialites who built mansions along what was known as the Gold Coast.

But despite the fancy address and opulent lifestyle, life was not sweet in the Richardses’ household. “There were,” as Diane Richards asserts, “assaults on my father by Kathleen.”

Very late one evening, for instance, Ken and Kathleen Richards arrived home from a night on the town and got into the kind of heated arguments that had become commonplace—so loud was it that Diane and little Kathy, a toddler of about five years old, and baby Kim, were awakened and frightened by the yelling and screaming.

Diane, then eighteen, raced downstairs in time to witness a scene that is etched in her memory. “They were really fighting, and the next thing I knew it escalated and one of them had opened the basement door and Kathleen tried to literally push my dad down the basement stairs. He was holding on for his life, and I was in the middle of it because I was trying to defend my father. I was scared to death that he was going to be killed right there. I was trying to get her off of him.

“When that incident happened, my father kept saying over and over, ‘She’s crazy! She’s absolutely crazy!’ And I think he realized at that point he was in over his head.”