CHAPTER 11

Paris Hilton’s maternal grandmother’s third husband was far different from her second. While Ken Richards was a mild-mannered, beaten-down-by-big-Kathy businessman, Jack Catain was a hot-tempered mobster who had the connections to put out contracts.

Short—five foot eight, round—190 to 200 pounds, and hunched over, he was not the healthiest of gangland types. “We called him the six-million-dollar man,” referring to all the money he spent on his numerous surgeries, says his daughter, Mickey.

In a 1969 U.S. Senate investigation into organized crime headed by then–Arkansas senator John L. McClellan, Catain, son of a Chicago produce market worker, was identified as a member of the Mafia. In a subsequent probe involving a major extortion case, Catain was linked to Philadelphia Mafia godfather Angelo Bruno, who was murdered the same year big Kathy and Catain said “I do.”

To this man, Kathy Hilton’s mother was married—twice, according to his son.

It took years for the government to nail Catain. They finally won a conviction in 1987, after he was divorced from big Kathy, for his part in a $3.3 million counterfeiting operation, though he claimed the government used liars to convict him. According to the prosecutors, Catain conspired to sell part of a multimillion-dollar cache of counterfeit $100 bills.

Catain had been linked to a number of major cases, including a wide-ranging, national headline–making Internal Revenue Service probe into alleged ticket-scalping at the 1980 Super Bowl in Pasadena. There was testimony in that case that Catain “was aware” that a key witness “was to be killed” because he “was to testify against Catain” in his counterfeiting case.

Catain also figured in the case of charismatic financial “wonder boy” and convicted “con man” Barry Minkow, who ran a $100 million Los Angeles–based carpet-cleaning and building-restoration business called ZZZZ Best. It was all one huge Ponzi scheme in which early investors were paid off with money thrown at the twenty-one-year-old Minkow by later investors hoping to make a fast buck. At one point, Minkow reportedly borrowed $400,000 from Catain at interest rates between 2 and 5 percent a week. Catain would later sue Minkow for failing to split with him certain of ZZZZ Best’s profits.

Among those who lost money to Minkow was big Kathy’s and Kim Richards’s close friend Kay Rozario, whose daughter, Leanne, dated Minkow briefly and says he was smitten with Kathy Hilton’s sister Kim. “She was beautiful and she was such a talent,” he says. “Back in the day I was trying to hit on her when I was this jerk who was a lying, cheating thief. I pursued her in the sense that she was good-looking and I was a sleazeball.”

He recalls one evening when he pulled up in front of famed chef Wolfgang Puck’s tony West Hollywood restaurant, Spago. Sitting beside him in his Datsun 280ZX was the lovely Leanne Rozario. Stopped just in front waiting for the parking valet was the couple with whom they were having dinner—Rick Hilton and his sister-in-law, Kim Richards. “Leanne looks at me and says, ‘See, they drive a Ferarri.’ So the next day I went out and bought a Ferarri.”

But he claims he never even got to first base with Paris Hilton’s aunt.

Big Kathy and Jack Catain were introduced by a mutual friend, Los Angeles produce king Chet Frangipane, who says he picked up Paris’s grandmother on the Hollywood freeway one afternoon when she flashed by him in her black Corvette convertible. “Kathy was not a bad-looking lady and I pulled her over in my Mercedes, gave her my business card, got her number, gave her two pounds of fresh mushrooms, and made a date,” says Frangipane years later.

The two went out for about a month, but then he lost interest. “It’s like a piece of food,” he explains gruffly. “You want it, but the more you look at it you say, what the fuck do I need this for?” It was then that he introduced big Kathy to Catain, whom Frangipane had met at a golf tournament in Palm Springs that was sponsored by an organization called the Italian-Western Golf Association. “It was like an Apalachian meeting. There were more FBI than golfers,” he jokes, referring to the infamous meeting of all the top crime bosses back in the ’50s in upstate New York. He says that Kathy and Catain “hit it off” immediately and about a year later got married.

With all of Jack Catain’s wise-guy attributes, big Kathy could still “break my balls,” as he used to intone, and make his life miserable. But she was intensely attracted to him.

“My dad was a tough guy, and Kathy just loved that image of a guy being tough and kind of treating her rough. She liked that mafioso thing,” observes Mickey Catain. “There was just a lot of energy between them.”

Kathy raved about Catain to friends like Jane Hallaren, who was among the first outside of her immediate family who learned they had gotten hitched. “She called and said, ‘Janie, you are not going to believe this but I got married, and you can’t tell anybody that he’s mafioso, and he’s fantastic.’ She was nuts about him—and liked the danger. She talked about him all the time, how she was really taken with this guy, that he had given her a lot of jewelry. Kathy’s one of those people who was just absolutely addicted to chaos and drama.”

Moreover, Kathleen saw dollar signs when she looked at Catain, even knowing that most, if not all, of his wealth—the roll of dough in his pocket, his cars (a Rolls-Royce Corniche and a special edition Cadillac convertible), all the jewelry he gave her, his 8,000-square-foot house high on a hill in Sherman Oaks—had come from the proceeds of criminal activities.

“Kathy was a gold digger, no doubt about it,” concludes Mickey Catain. “And so were her daughters. She trained them that way.”

Her brother, Michael Catain, who, like his sister, had become close to big Kathy and got to like her despite her avarice, nevertheless agrees that her agenda always was their father’s money. “The funny part was she made no bones about it,” he offers. “It wasn’t as though she hid the fact. She would laugh, and she would kid, and she would literally say, ‘I’m here just for the money,’ but in a joking way. In the end, though, she wasn’t joking.”

One of Catain’s big calling cards was the flashy ring he gave Kathleen—a huge fifteen-carat rock, most likely “straight off the truck.” Behind Kathleen’s back he snickered about the stone because it was yellow, and far from a pure specimen.

(Years later her granddaughter Paris beat big Kathy by nine carats when she reportedly received a $4.3 million, twenty-four-carat diamond engagement ring from the young Greek shipping heir Paris Latsis. However, the authenticity of the ring, whether it was actually given to her, and what happened to it, was in dispute.)

The ring Catain slipped on big Kathy’s finger had had a number of wearers. According to Catain’s son, his dad gave the same ring to many women in his life and always made certain he got it back when they were through. One woman to whom he was married for a short time, Joan Parnello, widow of Frank Sinatra’s orchestra conductor, Joe Parnello, returned the ring to Michael Catain in a park “stuffed in a stuffed animal’s ass,” he recalls, chuckling at the memory. Big Kathy, however, is the only woman in Catain’s life who refused to give back the rock when their marriage was over. “Kathy ended up with it,” says Catain’s son.

He says his father married Parnello after his first marriage and divorce from big Kathy and then remarried big Kathy before they divorced a second time. “Kathy probably had something to do with his marriage to Parnello breaking up.” Chet Frangipane says Catain decided to divorce Kathy the first time because “they were always fighting. She’d get drunk and he’d tell her to get the fuck out. Why’d he remarry her? What the fuck does a guy do for a good blow job? So Jack went back and forth with her.”

Of all of her many bizarre relationships with men, big Kathy’s involvement with Catain was surely the oddest. After all, what couple would enjoy spending a weekend at a Hilton Hotel in the San Fernando Valley getting injections of lamb’s urine, or some other odd potion, from a La-La Land New Ager in hopes the shots would make them healthier, prolong their lives, and rejuvenate them? His daughter, Mickey, recalls, “We did have some guy come to our house and we got these strange injections. I took them also. I remember turning red and becoming very hot after receiving them. They were expensive. We would have numerous people at the house in line for those shots.”

Big Kathy may have got the idea for the shots from Hilton family chatter. The patriarch, Conrad, was known to have made trips to Switzerland to get injected with urine from a sheep that he was told would help him stay healthy and keep up his stamina sexually.

Hilton, though, was in far better shape than Jack Catain, who desperately needed rejuvenation. He had a long history of medical problems, including a bad heart that would eventually do him in, and he got about on artificial hips, often using a walker.

Big Kathy tried her best to keep up his heart rate. For instance, she never permitted Catain to see her without her makeup on, even going to bed with her face fully made up. Once Catain started snoring, she’d tiptoe into the bathroom and take off the makeup. In the morning, she’d wake up before him and put her makeup back on.

“She always cared about how she looked, always had to be dressed up for my dad,” says his daughter. “She used to yell at me, ‘Put lipstick on! Put makeup on! What’s the matter with you?’”

Despite how hard big Kathy tried to make herself look beautiful, Catain still chased other women, or at least big Kathy suspected he did. She was so jealous that one night she climbed over the wall that surrounded his house to spy on him to see if she could catch him with another woman, but it was so dark that she fell on her backside and limped around for a few days. “It was funny, the stupid things she did,” says Kay Rozario, who heard about the incident from Kathleen.

Around the time big Kathy became involved with Catain, nineteen-year-old little Kathy was starting to get serious with Rick Hilton; Kim Richards, about thirteen, was making appearances on TV shows like Hello, Larry, Kraft Salutes Disneyland’s 25th Anniversary, and a sitcom called Why Us?; and ten-year-old Kyle was in one of the first big scary teen flicks, Halloween, appeared in the Disney feature The Watcher in the Woods, starring Bette Davis, and was on TV’s popular Little House on the Prairie.

By that point in their lives the girls were so shell-shocked by their mother’s freaky lifestyle that her involvement with a mobster was something they just shrugged off. “Little Kathy was not happy, and after she married Rick she was even more unhappy because now she thought she was upper crust, and just look who Mama was with,” notes Sylvia Richards. “Kim and Kyle were kind of numb with everything because they had gone through so much with their mother that her relationship with Catain just seemed to roll off. After a while it was just, ‘Oh, well, it’s somebody else.’”

Because of little Kathy’s impending marriage into the Hilton family, and Kim’s and Kyle’s very public careers, big Kathy had kept her relationship with Catain low key even to the point of not actually sharing the same residence with Catain after they married. Incredibly, the odd couple lived in separate domiciles throughout their marriages—big Kathy in her Bel-Air manse and Catain in his immense home on Royal Oak Road in Sherman Oaks.

Early in their relationship, when things were going well, they began house hunting, looking at multimillion-dollar properties together. But when it came to signing the papers, big Kathy balked.

“My dad wanted the house to be in both their names and Kathy said, ‘Oh, no you don’t! You buy the house, but it’s all in my name!’” states Mickey Catain. “Kathy was very adamant about money. Kathy came to me and she said, ‘Look, I don’t want to split the ownership with your father because if your dad dies, I’m not going to split the house with you. I want the house in my name.’ She was real open about it.”

Most of the time big Kathy brought her lap dogs, her luggage, and Kim, Kyle, and little Kathy before she married Rick Hilton, to stay for a weekend or longer with the Catains. “We used to all party together,” says Mickey. “Every night there was something going on. Kathy would bring her brother, Chuck, and his wife, Jane, and her mother, Dodo. She’d bring her friends. We had a wild time.”

On other occasions they hit the bar, nightclub, and disco circuit—Jimmy’s, Pips, or The Daisy in Beverly Hills, which catered to the rich and famous, or a tony club Catain liked on Ventura Boulevard in Encino. Once Kathleen started drinking, though, she got wild and would begin flirting with other men, which infuriated Catain.

“She used to love to make my dad jealous,” maintains Mickey. “She would flirt with any guy, even with just a friend of ours, someone she had no interest in whatsoever, just to get my dad jealous. Then they’d yell and scream at each other. It was never physical, he never hit her or beat her or anything, and because they had separate houses, he’d scream at her to go home.”

Big Kathy got turned on by professional athletes, and one she knew from her teenage years was Jim Brown, who had played at Manhasset High School and with whom she sometimes hung out in Los Angeles where he lived after retiring from the Cleveland Browns as a Hall of Fame star running back.

“She was friendly with him and she used to brag about it and she used to try to make my dad jealous because my father was kind of a little bigoted,” recounts Catain. “She’d see Jim Brown at this one club we’d go to, and she’d go sit on his lap and put her arms around him and flirt with him in front of my dad, and that used to drive my father insane. They’d have some big fight and then they’d go home and make love. That was kind of their pattern.”

         

SOMETIME AFTER CATAIN and big Kathy were married, an explosion and fire destroyed his Sherman Oaks home. A number of years later Kathleen turned over to Mickey Catain a suitcase filled with irreplaceable Catain family photos and memorabilia. Mickey was thrilled because she assumed everything had been consumed in the flames.

When Catain expressed surprise upon seeing the items, Kathy told her a deep, dark secret. “‘I collected all those pictures and your father and I got them out of the house the night before it blew up.’ She said that my father blew up the house for the insurance money because he was in trouble. I literally had no idea my father did this.”

In the end, it was Catain, in ill health and using a walker, who wanted a divorce from Kathleen; when she balked, he threatened to sue her—or worse—to get back all of the expensive jewelry he had given her.

“He gave her a lot of jewelry. I saw it. I mean lots of jewels, like some big ruby and emerald deal,” says Jane Hallaren. “She told me that if she gave him any trouble, or asked for any kind of alimony, or wanted the jewelry back, he would make her life miserable. I got the feeling he was threatening her life. She said, ‘Listen, this guy is Mafia, he’s involved, he’s a gangster. He’ll kill me.’ Whether that was drama or not I tended to believe that it was true. She said, ‘He’s crazy.’”

According to Kay Rozario, Catain also “took Kathy for some dough. He wiped some money out of her. He told her to invest in God knows what. Part of it might have gone to ZZZZ Best. But I think Jack just took it and that was it. She dumped him, and she told me, ‘That no good bastard. He stole all my money.’ I don’t think he took everything, but he took a big chunk. He was a royal piece of work.”

Big Kathy and Jack Catain were divorced in 1982, and a year later he remarried, this time to Phyllis Sherwood, a onetime showgirl who had been divorced from Bobby Sherwood, a popular big-band leader from the ’40s.

Catain told Sherwood, who also got taken for a lot of money in the ZZZZ Best scam, that big Kathy had pushed him into marrying her. “It was one of those things where she said let’s get married real quick—bap, bap, bap, and he was, like, well, okay,” says Sherwood, who met Catain at a wedding and was married to him for five years until he died. “Jack made it sound like he wasn’t really serious about marrying her. When Kathy married Jack she was looking for exactly the same as what she wanted for her daughters—she wanted the money. That was the most important thing in her life. And I guess it worked out pretty good because Kathy Hilton did very well for herself by marrying Rick. I mean, she’s no brain trust. And big Kathy’s the grandmother of that charming child, Paris. Oh my God, the whole bunch of them are idiots!”

Jack Catain died on February 21, 1987, in the cardiac intensive care unit at Encino Hospital. He was fifty-six years old. At the time he was free on bail, waiting to begin a fifteen-year federal prison sentence. No one remembers big Kathy being one of the mourners at his funeral service.