CHAPTER 10

When Kim Richards was nineteen, she began a relationship with gawky, curly-haired George M. Brinson—called Monty—scion of a wealthy supermarket chain family from the South. He wasn’t a Latsis, or a Niarchos, but the young man’s family did have big money.

Brinson had left the family homestead in High Point, North Carolina, to make his mark as a producer in Hollywood. With a Ferrari and a penchant for action and high-stakes gambling, he was instantly welcomed into a glitzy, fast Hollywood crowd. It was through a friend of Rick and Kathy Hilton’s that Kim was introduced to Brinson, and after a blind date dinner at the trendy Palms restaurant in Beverly Hills “we were basically together every day,” he says.

It was not an easy courtship. While she was living with Brinson, Kim started seeing other men, he asserts, rich boys from even wealthier families. One was John Davis, son of billionaire oil and entertainment mogul Marvin Davis.

“Kim would say she had to go babysit Paris and Nicky and, really, she was being fixed up with John, and I found out about it,” claims Brinson. “She was being influenced to do it. She was being pressured because of the billions of Davis dollars.” The pressure, he’s certain, was coming from one influential source—big Kathy—“who was looking for the best for her daughter, and those guys had megamoney.”

At the time, though, Kim would marry Brinson. Like big Kathy with Larry Avanzino, Kim’s was a shotgun wedding because she had become pregnant. “We found out and we did the right thing,” states Brinson years later. “It was Kim’s choice to have the baby. They [Rick and Kathy, and big Kathy] didn’t believe in abortion because they were Catholic. It wasn’t even an option.”

With marriage arrangements being rushed, Brinson gave Kim an engagement ring, but big Kathy didn’t feel it was suitably large. “She told Kim to give it back to him,” recalls Mickey Catain. “Kathy told me, ‘I’m not letting her take that ring.’ She made him give her a bigger one.”

The Brinson-Richards nuptials took place in July 1985 at the same house of worship where Kathy and Rick took their vows—the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. One of Kim’s wedding gifts was a watch and a pair of earrings worth about fifty thousand dollars. It was from one of her other very rich former suitors.

Photos of the Brinson-Richards reception appeared in a celebrity monthly called Teen Favorite Superstars with a story that was headlined “Here Comes the Bride (At an All-Star Wedding)!” It declared that Kim “…now has a new role—as the real-life blushing bride.”

The article disclosed that one of her bridesmaids was her sister, Paris Hilton’s other aunt, Kyle Richards, already at sixteen a veteran of six years of Hollywood work; she’d been one of the recurring cast of Little House on the Prairie and had appeared in a slew of cheesy movies and TV series, but nevertheless was a high earner for big Kathy, who now had two star contenders and one Hilton wife in her brood.

Kyle’s date at Kim’s wedding was teen actor Tommy Howell, a member of the Malibu rat pack of Rob and Chad Lowe and the Emilio Estevez–Charlie Sheen brothers. Teen Favorite Superstars asked the burning question, “Hmmm…is there another wedding in the future for the Richards family?”

The other bridesmaid was Moon Unit Zappa, who had introduced the whole “Valley Girl” concept with her 1982 song. A year later Valley Girl, the movie, was a box office smash, and “Valley Girl Speak” had spread across the country. The film’s tagline was: “She’s Cool! She’s Hot! She’s from the Valley!” It satirized the whole vapid “gag me with a spoon…fer sure” Valley Girl zeitgeist of which Kim and Kyle Richards were a part and little Kathy was an alumnus.

The Brinsons bought a spectacular two-story apartment in one of the ritzy condominium towers on Wilshire Boulevard. Kathy and Rick were so impressed with the place that they bought one as an investment, one floor below Kim and Monty’s place.

Some seven months after their nuptials, Kim gave birth on February 21, 1986, to a beautiful baby girl whom the Brinsons named Brooke Ashley.

A month later, they started a production company, Brinson/Richards Entertainment, with big Kathy, who envisioned herself a movie mogul, playing an active role. The company, however, produced just one film—the forgettable and pedestrian Escape, released in 1990—with Brinson as the cowriter, Kyle as a cast member, and Kim as the heroine, Brooke Howser, who comes to a small town where everyone and everything is “strange.” The film was made on a million-dollar budget, the money a gift from Brinson’s parents.

Like their film, the Richards-Brinson union tanked.

At a Christmas party at Marvin Davis’s, a curious incident foreshadowed the eventual end. “I actually lost my wedding ring because it was too big. It just fell off my finger,” recalls Brinson, laughing at the memory. “So it’s me, Britt Ekland, and her boyfriend, Slim Jim Phantom, from the Stray Cats, crawling around on the floor looking for the ring. We never found it.”

Not long after that party Kim went out for an evening to a private club in Beverly Hills with some girlfriends. Around 2 A.M. Brinson drove up in his Ferrari and discovered his wife leaving the club, walking hand in hand with Marvin Davis’s other son, Gregg. “It was the final straw,” Brinson declares.

The two got divorced but shared custody of Brooke, and the exes remained friends. Years later, Brooke and her cousin, Paris, became close pals, traveled together, and Brooke even roomed with Paris and Nicky in the sisters’ West Hollywood home.

Brinson, who became a professional poker player, maintained a close friendship with Kathy and Rick and continued to think of himself as “the brother-in-law.”

His ties to the Hiltons were so tight, in fact, that Brinson, with Rick and Kathy’s enthusiastic support, put together the 2005 first annual Nicky Hilton’s New Year’s Eve Poker Tournament, in the new poker room at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. “Rick and Kathy don’t play,” notes Brinson, “but Paris is learning and Nicky’s pretty good.”

         

BIG KATHY REJOICED when Kim Richards Brinson’s next future husband came into her life—this one via an introduction by her half-sister Kathy Hilton, who was prompted from behind the scenes by their mother. All big Kathy had to hear were the three words “Marvin Davis’s son” to realize that, like Kathy with Rick Hilton, Kim with a Davis son was hitting the marital jackpot. Or so it appeared at the time. “Big Kathy was thrilled!” declares Kay Rozario. “And why not? She saw Kimmy marrying a son of one of the richest men in America.”

Aaron “King of Prime Time” Spelling loosely based his ’80s network melodrama Dynasty on the family into which Kim would marry. The saga of the fictional Carringtons, a wealthy Denver family in the oil business, was Spelling’s view of his friends the Marvin Davises, a superwealthy Denver family in the oil business. (The Davises eventually relocated to Beverly Hills, where Davis turned his entrepreneurial skills to lucrative real estate investments, and even more bankable entertainment.)

The Davises, naturally, lived like royalty, with servants, expensive cars, private jets, yachts, and mansions, such as the Knoll, a 45,000-square-foot Holmby Hills palace. They were running neck and neck with the Hiltons in terms of big, big money when Kim Richards came into their lives. However, Kathy Hilton had her own thought on which was the superior tribe, one that she openly communicated to Sylvia Richards. Rolling her eyes about the Davises’ ostentatious lifestyle, she once declared, “I’m married to the Hiltons and they’re old money. I’m old money. The Davises are nothing but new money.”

The Davises, meanwhile, thought the Hilton bunch were trailer park trash.

Rick Hilton had gotten to know the family when he was enrolled at the University of Denver with Nancy Davis, Gregg’s sister. Their parents had rubbed shoulders in Los Angeles’s tight-knit, upper-stratosphere party and high-society circuit. Socially ambitious Kathy Hilton had become part of that orbit when she propelled herself into high-profile charity and committee work and elite, celebrity-driven fund-raisers as a reinvented young LA society matron. Kathy became involved in Barbara Davis’s glitzy fund-raisers, including one for multiple sclerosis; a spectacular event was held on the grounds of Kathy’s father-in-law Barron Hilton’s fabulous estate. (Barron’s wife, Marilyn, had been stricken with MS.)

So it was to no one’s surprise that enterprising Kathy—looking out for her newly divorced half-sister, Kim, a single mother with a jones for the high life—would through all her society connections and friendships introduce Kim to the immensely wealthy, most eligible bachelor Gregg Davis.

For big Kathy, the Davises were even bigger fish to fry for Kim than the Hiltons were for little Kathy—mainly because the Davises represented to her the embodiment of Hollywood glitz and glamour; they were flashier and more flamboyant and more fun than that stuffier, low-key hotel family who had refused to accept her into their elite fold. But she ran into the same kind of wall with the Davises. Big Kathy would later confide to Mickey Catain that she believed the Davises suspected “her daughters were gold diggers, so they didn’t like her because they knew the influence she had over the girls.”

The wedding of Kim Richards to Gregg Davis was “elaborate and humongous,” according to Sylvia Richards, who attended with her husband, the father of the bride. The ceremony was held at the Davises’ opulent estate. The Olympic-size pool had been covered and an enormous canopy placed over it, and that’s where the bride and groom exchanged their vows. Afterward, there was a sit-down dinner for some two hundred guests.

The newlyweds’ home, a gift from his parents, was in affluent, tree-lined “Little Holmby,” so named because of its nearness to the massive estates like the Playboy Mansion and the Knoll in ultraexclusive Holmby Hills. “Gregg was born with a gold spoon in his mouth,” says Kay Rozario, “and now Kim had a lot of money, and those two spent like there was no tomorrow; whoa, did they spend, with no concept of the real world and how people live.”

In the garage, they had a couple of Ferraris and Mercedes-Benzes, and a few other cars, which were detailed weekly by the staff. They had dune buggies and Ski-Doos—expensive snowmobiles—and had had trailers custom-built to carry their fancy toys when they went on trips. It wasn’t considered unheard of for Kim to go shopping and spend $10,000 in an afternoon as she prowled from one exclusive boutique to another on Rodeo Drive. “I’d shop with Kim and we’d go into a store and she’d see things she wanted and say, ‘I want every color in this, I want every color in that,’ and she just bought, bought, and bought some more,” says Sylvia Richards, who, with Kim’s father, were frequent guests of the young Davises, who had set up a special suite for them in their home. “She was like little Kathy—she loved to spend.”

It didn’t matter how much money they spent, because Marvin Davis kept doling out more. Every time he made a deal, such as when he sold his exclusive California golf resort, Pebble Beach, he lined up Gregg and his siblings and each one of them got a slice of the proceeds.

“When Marvin made that deal,” says Monty Brinson, who had kept up a friendship with the Davises and Kim, “Gregg gave her a check for a million dollars and told Kim to go out and buy whatever she wanted.”

When Brinson bet and lost $50,000 on a Los Angeles Lakers game, he only had $10,000 in his pocket to pay off his bookie. Gregg, at Kim’s request, loaned him the rest.

Kim had two children with Gregg, a daughter, Whitney, and a son, Chad. Now the mother of three, she had decided to retire permanently from acting, though she would work on and off over the years. “I thought I’d have my baby [with Brinson] and go right back to work, but when I held her, I’m like, I’m not putting her down, she’s mine—and then I had another one, and I had another one, and I had another one,” she once said, verbalizing big Kathy’s incantation to her daughters to have lots of kids.

While Kim was having fun spending lots of money, her husband, Gregg, was under his father’s thumb. If Marvin Davis made a deal, Gregg just had to watch. When Gregg talked about moving out of town with Kim and their children, Marvin would have none of it. “I want all your credit cards right here on my desk,” he told his son. “If you’re going to leave, we’re not going to support you.” Apparently the plastic meant more than the independence: Kim and Gregg stayed.

At the same time, Barbara Davis “was like big Kathy, but with money,” in that she dominated Kim, according to Sylvia Richards. “She would call Kim and say, ‘We want you at our house. Now!’ And Kim would say, ‘But my mom and dad are here.’ And Barbara would yell, ‘I don’t care! You get up here in a half hour!’ Barbara Davis was doing this to them constantly. Whatever Marvin and Barbara wanted, Kim and Gregg had to jump.”

Big Kathy had come to despise the Davises because they had snubbed her like the Hiltons had, and she resented how they treated her daughter. “Kathy kept saying, ‘Oh, someday we’re going to write a book about them. They’re horrible,’” says Mickey Catain.

Meanwhile, the marriage of Kim and Gregg Davis began to rapidly deteriorate. “Marvin and Barbara Davis broke that marriage up,” Sylvia Richards asserts.

John Jackson, who became the new man in Kim’s life after she and Gregg Davis separated, maintains the two split up “because Barbara and Marvin said, ‘Enough’s enough!’” They gave their son an ultimatum: either leave Kim or face being cut off from the family fortune. He chose the former.

Meanwhile, big Kathy, whom Jackson describes as “money-driven, amoral, and would in a moment backstab you,” tried desperately to keep her daughter’s marriage from falling apart. “I heard plenty of stories about big Kathy chastising Kim,” he states. Kay Rozario maintains that big Kathy’s hidden agenda was to keep her daughter’s marriage together because of the Davises’ money.

According to Jackson, “Kim finally pissed it all away and Gregg went in a different direction—and then it was all about money. For big Kathy it was all about how much money Kim could get from Gregg, which cars she could get, getting the house, all that crazy stuff.”

An acrimonious divorce and child custody battle ensued. Kim is said to have gotten a settlement and child support from the Davises, ranging between $20,000 a month that continues until the year 2009 and $23,000 a month for life, or until she remarries, and shared custody of the daughter and son she had with Davis. The divorce and custody battle also was said to have caused a major rift in the friendship between the Hiltons and the Davises.

“When Kim and Gregg split up, Kathy Hilton took sides with her sister,” maintains Jackson. “Then Nancy Davis [who went to the University of Denver with Rick Hilton] and Kathy were at each other’s throats. I could not believe the amount of shit that was going on.”

         

AFTER THE DAVISES DIVORCED, big and little Kathy set up Kim with other big shots with big money. Big Kathy, for example, arranged for Kim to go out with an Arab prince; big Kathy also borrowed his Mercedes and totaled it, apparently while under the influence.

Kathy Hilton, meanwhile, sought out wealthy men who ran in her Manhattan social circles. One was a Revlon cosmetics honcho. Another was Donald Trump, who once viciously declared that Kathy’s father-in-law, Barron Hilton, was “a member of the lucky sperm club”—a snarky dig that Conrad, not Barron, started the Hilton fortune. (But in March 2006, when Trump’s model wife, Melania, gave birth to a boy, The Donald named him William Barron in honor of the Hilton bossman.) Rick and Kathy socialized with Trump, and Kathy figured he and Kim might be a match made in heaven.

“Kathy couldn’t run around anymore because she was married, so she lived vicariously through Kim, just like big Kathy lived vicariously through little Kathy,” observes Sylvia Richards. “Kim told me that Kathy kept setting her up with Trump, and Trump would call—I was there when he telephoned—and wanted her to come to New York. He would give her the money and she would go. But I don’t think Kim was really too keen on him.”

         

A USED HARLEY-DAVIDSON motorcycle and an execution-style murder were the curious catalysts that brought Kim together with the next new love of her life, John Jackson, an aircraft parts supplier, who fathered her fourth child.

Immediately after her separation from Davis, Kim dated a bad egg, a twenty-nine-year-old securities broker and high roller with a house in Malibu. John Collett was a central figure in one of the country’s largest scams, involving eight thousand elderly investors and nearly $150 million in losses. He was under investigation on suspicion of illegally selling partnerships in oil and gas leases.

A former stereo salesman, Collett was talking to Kim on a phone outside of Brent’s Deli, in the San Fernando Valley community of Northridge, during lunchtime on October 28, 1991, when, as Jackson put it, “someone walked up to him and popped a cap in his head.”

Moments later Kim called the deli asking, “Have you seen my boyfriend, John Collett? He’s a nice-looking guy.”

Collett had been shot twice in the head at point-blank range by a hit man who had been paid $30,000 to bump him off.

“The killing devastated her, but I don’t know for how long,” says Kay Rozario. According to Sylvia Richards, Kim was “supposedly in love” with Collett, and “I know she was very shook up about that episode. But Kim was so dramatic all the time. And, of course, the killing was very dramatic, so she hung on to the story forever.”

Jackson learned the sordid story from the dead man’s mother, Jan, when he responded to a classified advertisement offering to sell her late son’s Harley. When Jackson bought the motorcycle, she suggested he call Kim “because it was her favorite bike. I thought it was kind of morbid, but one night on a fluke I dialed her number, we met and then from about that day on we started dating.”

Kim was still living in the Davises’ Little Holmby house when she hooked up with Jackson in the spring of 1992.

“We were living in the fast lane,” Jackson says. “We were jet-setters and bounced all over—Paris, St. Tropez, Orlando. And we were taking the kids with us most places. Kim was always very kid-oriented.”

While the two never married, they had a child, Kimberly, Kim’s fourth, and her third daughter.

Eventually, Kim moved out of the Davis house and into a home she had purchased in Calabasas, a rustic community that is home to a number of TV and movie celebrities in northern Los Angeles County. By that point the honeymoon period had ended, and Jackson states his relationship with Paris Hilton’s aunt became “the worst nightmare of my friggin’ life.”

Jackson blames many of Kim’s issues on big Kathy. “She was 100 percent the problem,” he observes. “Kim’s a spittin’ image of her mother in every way. The amorality, and the drinking, the revolving door of men who she [big Kathy] had in her life when Kim was with me, and just the conniving craziness about her, and the way she [Kim] spent money like water. Kathy was that typically frustrated mother of a child star who lived through her children.” And Jackson believes “without a doubt” that Kathy Hilton was the same kind of mother with Paris.

Jackson got an up close and personal look at the Hiltons—Kathy and Rick, and Paris—during the five years he spent living with Kim, and he came away with a bad taste. He got to know Paris, who frequently spent a week or two hanging out with Kim at the Richards-Jackson house, and he and Kim attended parties thrown by the Hiltons. He says that one of the things that struck him about little Kathy, big Kathy, and Kim and Kyle was how bitchy they could be.

“They always speak so derogatorily about people behind their backs,” he says. “It’s unbelievable, because they get joy out of making fun of people. They’ll be out shopping and they’ll be making fun of some other woman’s shoes or outfit.”

He says he also heard occasional racial and anti-Semitic slurs. “There were always those kinds of jokes,” he claims. (Paris would be accused publicly of making such remarks by Marvin Davis’s grandson, Brandon Davis, a member of Paris’s privileged posse.)

While Jackson attended a number of parties with Kim at Rick and Kathy’s, one of Kathy’s more intriguing ongoing theme bashes occurred during the sensational 1995 murder trial of O. J. Simpson. Only someone with the prestigious Hilton name like Kathy could have the key players in the O.J. drama over for private dinners to dish about the case. “It was wild,” observes Jackson.

Kathy had been a friend of O.J.’s wife, Nicole, and was part of the circle that included many of her friends. “Big Kathy told me that Nicole once told little Kathy that O.J. was violent and that she feared he might kill her someday,” recalls Jane Hallaren.

When O.J. went on trial, Kathy invited virtually all the key figures, as Jackson remembers, from prosecutor Marcia Clark to Simpson houseboy Brian “Kato” Kaelin. “Every time Kim and I went, there was a new person on the O.J. end—[Simpson ‘Dream Team’ attorney Robert] Shapiro, [Simpson pal and defense attorney Robert] Kardashian.” Another trial player who became a friend of Kathy Hilton’s was Faye Resnick, victim Nicole Brown Simpson’s so-called best friend—a onetime cocaine user who parlayed her role in the case into a nude layout in Playboy and a book deal.

“It was just so Kathy could get the scoop on what was going on behind the scenes—and also so she could feel important,” Jackson declares. “It was quite a show.”