CHAPTER 14

Around the time that she met husband number four, the Silver Fox, big Kathy learned that husband number one, the Italian Stallion, was dying.

Larry Avanzino, Paris Hilton’s maternal grandfather, was in a near vegetative state in a long-term-care nursing facility, mostly for the poor and destitute, in Providence, Rhode Island. He had suffered serious brain injuries when he was viciously assaulted and smashed in the head with a baseball bat and knocked down a flight of stairs. The slugger was believed by family members to be someone close to him, someone to whom he might have been abusive. But nothing ever was proven.

Avanzino had lived a narcissistic and hard life after he and Kathy had gotten divorced, one far removed from that of the Hiltons’ glamorous world. Mostly, he worked as a housepainter, drank, pursued women, and made more babies.

When he was in poor financial straits, which was most of the time, he received help from his loving and loyal successful brother, Ken. “Ken owned the building that Larry was living in,” says John McKusker, who had witnessed Larry’s elopement with Kathleen and was a guest at Paris Hilton’s christening. “Ken was always bailing Larry out of shit. Larry was an alcoholic, a drug addict, whatever.”

After his marriage to big Kathy failed, Avanzino had two more wives with whom he fathered three daughters and two sons, who are distant half-sisters and half-brothers of Kathy Hilton’s. One of Avanzino’s sons, Laurence Jr., was in the Providence, Rhode Island, news in December 1995 when he was a witness for the prosecution in the case of his best friend, who was accused of beating and stabbing to death a girlfriend in an argument over her earnings as a stripper.

Avanzino rarely if ever had contact with his daughter Kathy Hilton as she grew up, or with any of her children, Paris included. As his second wife, Diane Campisi, whom he married in 1964, points out, “Larry didn’t bring Kathy up, so nothing in her life had anything to do with him, other than the fact that Kathy Hilton has his genes.”

When Campisi first met Avanzino at a cousin’s wedding he appeared to have potential, and “anybody would have fallen in love with him,” says Campisi’s mother, Josephine. “Larry had a Mercedes, a two-seater, with a canvas top, and at that time he was in sales, starting a new job with a company in New York. When Diane was dating him, all the waitresses paid so much attention to him. But his life went downhill. It was very sad.”

After the beating, Avanzino was comatose for about two years. His brother, Ken, had advised friends like John McKusker not to visit because of the terrible shape he was in. But when big Kathy learned of his plight she told a friend she had gone to see him and that her onetime Adonis “was toothless. That was all she had to say.”

On February 20, 1997, Paris Hilton’s maternal grandfather died in his hospital bed at the age of sixty-one. His obituary described him as a “self-employed painter.” There was a funeral mass for him in the Most Blessed Sacrament Church in Wakefield, Massachusetts, and he was buried in Oak Grove Cemetery, Medford, Massachusetts.

In the very public world of Kathy Hilton and her most famous daughter, Paris, there has never been a mention of Avanzino. It is as if he had never existed.

SOME TWO MONTHS after Larry Avanzino died, Ken Richards, big Kathy’s second husband, was stricken with cancer of the kidneys that had metastasized to his lungs and his bones. The doctors gave him a year to live.

Richards, who had raised the now-prominent Kathy Hilton from the time she was three years old and was the father of the moneyed and successful Kim and Kyle Richards, was just scraping by, living on his social security and the small salary Sylvia, his wife of almost twenty years, was drawing from her job as personnel manager of a discount store in Boise, Idaho, where the couple lived in a small condominium.

Richards, who was eighty years old and could no longer work, had been virtually abandoned by the Hiltons and by his daughters. With mounting medical bills, Richards, against the advice of his wife, who was “too proud,” contacted Kathy and Rick Hilton in New York, explained their dire straits, and asked to borrow some money.

At first the Hiltons made excuses. “Rick told Ken, ‘I have kids to put through school. I have party dresses to buy for Paris and Nicky, blah, blah, blah,’” recalls Sylvia Richards, still incredulous and emotional some years later at the Hilton heir’s response. “It was very humiliating because Ken had to beg. He literally had to beg.”

Finally, the Hiltons, living in a Manhattan penthouse with a spectacular home in the tony Hamptons, agreed to loan Richards ten thousand dollars. But there was a proviso.

“He made us pay back the loan,” states Sylvia Richards. “And they never once came to see Ken. Never once called and said how are you doing? Are you starving to death? Are you getting your medicine? This is the man who raised Kathy Hilton, but she was in the upper crust now and she didn’t need Kenneth.”

Choked with emotion, she adds, “Kathy Hilton’s just like her mother. She had a very good mentor, and she learned well. Kathleen, the mother, had no soul, and the daughter doesn’t either.”

With her husband becoming increasingly ill—the cancer had spread to his hips—Sylvia Richards sold their condominium and paid off Hilton, and the Richardses moved in with Sylvia’s daughter, Cyndi, from her first marriage, and her husband, who lived in Las Vegas.

“We sold everything, and by the time I paid off Rick I had, I think, one hundred and forty-nine dollars left,” says Richards. “We had maxed out our credit cards to pay for Ken’s medications.”

She says she didn’t ask for any more help from Kathy and Rick.

Things only got worse for the Richardses. At her wit’s end, Sylvia Richards telephoned her husband’s youngest daughter, Kyle, who lived in Beverly Hills, to see if they could stay with her while her father was being treated at the VA hospital in Los Angeles. Kyle and her second husband, Maurico Umansky, a broker at Rick Hilton’s high-end real estate agency, Hilton & Hyland, readily agreed.

But when Richards got to the hospital, accompanied by his wife and daughter, he was shocked to learn that the VA had made no room arrangements for him. “Ken was in a wheelchair in terrible pain,” says Sylvia Richards. “Kyle called her mother-in-law who is a psychiatrist, and she said to bring Ken to Cedars Sinai and she’d make sure he was admitted.” He was there for three weeks, and the cancer had spread throughout his bones, requiring daily radiation treatments.

By then Sylvia Richards had accepted an invitation—one she would come to regret—to stay at Kim Richards’s home in suburban Calabasas. “Being at Kim’s was just beyond belief,” she asserts. “Her father is dying and he’s hurting and she would get drunk and jump on the bed, bring the kids in, and could care less. Because she was a little girl TV and movie star, she’d been doted on all her life and was very selfish. She thought whatever Kim wanted, that’s what should happen.”

Richards couldn’t take it anymore and told his wife he wanted to return to her daughter’s home in Las Vegas where he could have some peace and quiet as death neared, but Kim and Kyle demanded that he stay in California.

“This way,” maintains Sylvia Richards, “if they wanted to see him they didn’t have to travel very far. They were that selfish. One day we were in the room with Kenneth and he was telling Kim we were going to go home, and she flew at me, came at me with hands and fists, and physically attacked me. She was screaming that I was trying to take her father away. She called the security patrol and tried to get me removed from her house. She told me that Rick and Kathy were going to do things to me. I said, ‘Let ’em come on!’ It was a terrible mess. Ken wanted to go home and I was going to take him one way or another.”

Kim finally consented and arranged for a plane to fly the Richardses to Las Vegas. The next morning, Ken Richards suffered a heart attack and was rehospitalized for a week. Shortly after he arrived back home, extremely weak, Kim showed up.

“It was midnight and she was drunk on her rear end and blubbering,” maintains Sylvia Richards. “She had two strangers bring her to our house in a pickup truck, and she didn’t know who those guys were. I refused to let her come in and wake up her father. Later, she told me she had gone to the Las Vegas Hilton and gambled all night.”

The next day Ken Richards, in critical condition, was taken to the Nathan Adelson Hospice in Las Vegas. That night his wife slept in a chair next to his bed, knowing he was dying. In the morning, when she went to get breakfast, a nurse found her. “He’s fighting to stay alive because he doesn’t want to leave you,” she told her. “You’ve got to tell him he can go.”

She did, and a short time later Kenneth Richards died. The date was April 28, 1998. His daughters, Kim and Kyle, didn’t show up until after he was gone.

Meanwhile, someone at the hospice had notified the Hiltons in New York. While the widow was still in the room with her husband’s body—he would be cremated—Rick and Kathy telephoned. “Rick is on the phone and Kathy is in hysterics in the background,” says Sylvia Richards, who has never forgotten the moment. “Rick says, ‘Kathy needs to talk to her dad.’ I said, ‘Rick, he’s gone.’ But he insisted. ‘She’s got to talk to him.’ Kathy got on the phone. ‘Oh, Dad, I love you so much and I miss you. You’ve done so much for me….’ I didn’t say anything. I just let her ramble. And I was thinking maybe somebody else was there besides Rick. I thought Kathy was putting on an act because she never gave a damn. She never showed him any love. If she loved him, she would have been there. None of them lifted a finger to help.”

Sylvia Richards’s daughter, Cyndi, who lived through that horrific period leading up to Richards’s death, still sheds tears remembering those events.

“Why didn’t Kathy Hilton help him out, because he might have lived longer if she had helped?” she asks, her voice choked with sorrow and anger. “Where the hell was Kathy Hilton when her father died? Getting them to help him was like pulling teeth. By the time they paid back Kathy and Rick for that loan, my mom and dad had no money. The Hiltons are a cruel family.”