CHAPTER 15

As a cancer-riddled Ken Richards was dying in 1998, big Kathy discovered a lump in one of her breasts. It was malignant and would later spread to a lung and then to her brain. Her daughters, who lived on her every word, who were so dependent on her, were devastated.

The Dugan family suddenly seemed cursed by cancer. Both of big Kathy’s brothers would be stricken not long after her diagnosis. One would die of cancer of the liver, the other would require treatment for bladder cancer, according to their sister, Donna. Because of the genetics, fear of breast cancer would hang over Kathy Hilton, her daughters, Paris and Nicky, and Hilton’s half-sisters, Kim and Kyle.

Big Kathy’s initial reaction to the diagnosis was “Oh, no, not me,” according to Adele Avanzino. “But then in her next breath it was, ‘You know what? I’m going to fight this thing until the end,’ which she did. She was unbelievable through the whole thing.”

Among the first of her friends she called to break the terrible news was her childhood pal Jane Hallaren. “She said, ‘I have cancer and I think this is it.’ I burst into tears and she burst into tears. She said, ‘I thought I would have so much longer,’ and I said, ‘I thought you would live forever, too, honey.’”

She also telephoned the man who got away—her first teenage love, Bob Conkey. Big Kathy wept and said, “We never did get together after all these years.” She talked about “all those missed moments in life.”

Despite her suffering, she also took the opportunity to bad-mouth her caretaker husband, Bob Fenton. “She told me that he basically bullshitted her when they met, telling her that he had a lot of money, and she said he didn’t have any money, and that basically he was living off of her,” says Conkey. “It’s funny because she thought she was going to live off of him. It was one of those classic—you mean you don’t have any money, either?”

Bob Fenton, who once again would have to care for a wife with cancer, accompanied her, along with Adele Avanzino and a couple of Kathy Hilton’s friends, to the doctor’s office in Palm Desert. Big Kathy was adamantly against having a mastectomy, so her course of treatment would involve having surgery to remove the tumor, and then chemotherapy and radiation. “Nothing is going to put me down,” she confidently told her husband and companions after the visit. “I’m going to fight this as hard as I can. I have too many things to live for.” Always concerned about how she looked, she seemed more worried about losing her hair as a result of the chemo than about losing her life.

Ken Richards’s widow, Sylvia, who had forged a modicum of a friendship with big Kathy years earlier when they shared his daughters, Kim and Kyle, also had had breast cancer and had decided to have a double mastectomy in order to survive. “I told Kathy, ‘You better have them removed,’ but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said she had this wonderful doctor who patted her on the butt and pinched her on the boobs and said the way he was treating her was the way to do it. She didn’t want to lose her breasts.”

However, Kathleen may have had second thoughts mastectomy-wise after she started her treatments. She had another friend who had had the surgery and was then living a normal life. Kathleen’s sister, Madonna, remembers her complaining, “She’s now on a cruise having a good time, and here I am getting chemo and radiation, and dying.’ She had a rough ticket with the cancer.”

Despite how shabbily big Kathy had treated him, Bob Fenton became her devoted, around-the-clock nurse. Even those in Kathleen’s camp who disliked him and believed all the nasty things she had to say about him attest to how concerned and compassionate he was during her illness.

According to Adele Avanzino, Kathleen “felt terrible” that Fenton would have to go through the same trauma he did with his first wife. “I remember her saying, ‘Bob, you don’t have to go through this with me.’ She suffered in his grief, too. He went from one grief to another.”

The situation, however, infuriated Fenton’s daughters, who saw a completely different picture. “I really felt sorry for my dad because I think he was used,” declares Barbara Frank. “Here was this man who was totally vulnerable, who really wasn’t thinking clearly, and had just gone through the most horrific, unimaginable loss of my mother to cancer, and then here he had to do it again.”

By late 2001, big Kathy’s cancer had spread to her brain, and she had to undergo surgery in Los Angeles. It was at that point that she knew she didn’t have much time left.

On one occasion, Judy Goldstone called the house hoping to speak with her father, but Kathleen answered. “She started screaming at me,” recalls Goldstone. “She told me how much she hated me and what a horrible person I was, and that her cancer had now spread to her brain and that she was going to die, and that I was nothing but ‘a cunt.’ Then she hung up.”

Some six months before she died, Kathleen prepared her will. A relative of Fenton’s who was staying at the house at the time had warned him, “You better get in there and listen to everything that is going on, Bob, because she’s going to screw you.” Fenton’s response was “No, she isn’t. She loves me.”

During Christmas 2001, Adele Avanzino and her brother, Ken, visited Kathleen. “When we got to her house in the afternoon, she opened the door and she was using a walker and she didn’t have her wig on. We asked if we could take her to dinner and she said that would be great, that she hadn’t been out at all. When we got back to the house, she had her wig on and she was all dolled up and ready for some fun. That was Kathy.”

On March 2, 2002, some six weeks before her sixty-fourth birthday, Kathleen Dugan Avanzino Richards Catain Fenton, Paris Hilton’s maternal grandmother, died.

She succumbed peacefully in her daughter Kim’s home where she had been moved a week or so earlier. Her obituary in the Palm Springs Desert Sun newspaper, which was prepared by her daughters, described her glowingly as “a homemaker for twenty-five years.”

Kathy Hilton, the first of big Kathy’s brood, and son-in-law Rick flew in. Accompanying them was Paris, who arrived with her latest arm candy, hunky model Jason Shaw (with whom she would later appear in a steamy video, reportedly answering the door naked.)

Because a number of friends and family couldn’t get in at the same time there were several services for big Kathy, who was cremated. Two small services were held in Kim’s home. Fenton is said to have missed the second one because the widower was out playing golf. A larger, private service was held at the Palm Springs Mortuary in nearby Cathedral City, and Kathy Hilton arranged for another in Los Angeles.

In the wake of her death, now two-time widower Bob Fenton quickly came to the stark realization that he should have heeded his relative’s warning about monitoring his late wife’s will. Aside from the urn containing her ashes, which he kept by the side of his bed, he wound up with nada. The way his daughters saw it, their father had been taken to the cleaners. “Financially, my dad was screwed over big-time,” claims Barbara Frank. “He sold his home, gave her the money, moved in with her, and ended up with nothing.”

Big Kathy’s house, in which Fenton had invested a quarter-million dollars of his own money to fix up, was left to Kathy Hilton, Kim Richards, and Kyle Umansky.

Even from the great beyond, Paris Hilton’s devilish maternal grandmother would make life a living hell for her fourth and final husband. According to a stipulation she is said to have made, Bob Fenton was permitted to stay in the house for a year after her death. However, he could not have any female company, or he would be evicted. To make certain that he was abiding by that condition, Kim Richards had been instructed to check to make sure there were no ladies on the premises.

Actually, big Kathy, in one of her last acts in this life, might have been doing a good deed for Fenton by barring women from the house.

Once he got back on his feet he again fell into his serial Casanova persona, met a sexy middle-age babe who his daughter said lived in a trailer park, and married her. The union didn’t last very long.

Almost three years to the day that big Kathy passed on, Fenton, who had been battling pancreatic cancer, died. His cremation took place at the Discount Cremation and Burial Services of the Desert in Palm Springs.

Some years after big Kathy’s death, her childhood pal, Jane Hallaren, observes: “All Kathleen ever wanted out of life was to see her daughters become stars and marry rich men. Her favorite granddaughter surpassed them all. Whether Kathleen’s in heaven or hell, I’ll bet she’s thinking of Paris and saying, ‘You go, girl!’”