CHAPTER 16

A couple of years before his death at ninety-one in 1979, Paris Hilton’s great-grandfather, Conrad Hilton, went to the hospital for his annual checkup. He always was as particular about his health as he was about the cleanliness and service in his worldwide chain of hotels. He thought of his thousands of annual guests as his extended family, though actual Hilton family members attest he was perhaps more concerned about his customers than his own brood.

Rarely ill a day in his life, the broad-shouldered, six-foot-two extrovert who often sported a Stetson and cowboy boots would rather walk than ride, and his long legs gave him an Olympian stride.

In fact, it was by fast-stepping up and down Fifth Avenue for days, discreetly scoping out the comings and goings of the then down-on-her-heels Plaza Hotel, that he assured himself she was well worth buying and giving a makeover. He always referred to his hotels in the female form as if they were his mistresses, and he described his love affair with hotels as “a series of romances in which girls played little part.”

Affectionately called Connie since childhood, Hilton had enormous charisma and tremendous energy. As the many women in his party-loving, party-giving life noted—such as (almost) Miss Hungary of 1936, Zsa Zsa Gabor, his second wife—Connie was as amply endowed physically as he was financially and had amazing stamina and staying power.

Besides walking, Connie Hilton also got his exercise by dancing the Varsoviana, a waltz done up Texas style, which he learned secretly and on the cheap at an Arthur Murray studio near his Beverly Hills headquarters. He instructed his administrative assistant, close confidante, and rumored onetime sweetheart, Olive Wakeman, to interrupt even his most important business meetings to remind him if he was running late for dance class by whispering, “You have an appointment with Mr. Murray.”

So Connie, who in his late eighties had married for a third time, was naturally mighty concerned when the doctors conducting his physical concluded that it might be wise to remove his prostate, the loss of which could severely impact his highly vaunted and much praised boudoir calisthenics, or so he feared.

“The old man stuck his head up and says, ‘Well, now, doc, how’s that gonna affect my sex life? You ain’t taking that out, if I can’t get this up.’ He’s almost ninety, for Christ’s sake, and he’s worried about his sex life,” recalls Maxwell House coffee heir Bob Neal, still shaking his head in awe years later at Connie’s geriatric virility. “He sure liked to chase the girls pretty good.”

In his eighties Connie still enjoyed flirting with young women, such as pretty and perky Gini Tangalakis, who worked as one of the Hilton Corp.’s lower-echelon secretaries. When she was at home sick with a cold, the most powerful hotelman in the world telephoned this twenty-one-year-old engaged-to-be-married office worker. “‘Oh, I understand that you’re not well. Is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all?’ I told him I just had the flu and that I appreciated his concern. ‘Well, Gini, do you have a nurse? If there’s anything I can do, feel free to call me.’” The next day he called her again. “‘When you get back to the office, why don’t you come up. I’d like to see you.’” When Gini got a small paper cut and was asking one of the other ladies in the office for a Band-Aid, Connie suddenly was hovering over her with concern—and romance—in his eyes. “He took my hand in his—‘Are you okay? Can I help? Here, let me see your little finger.’” She feared he was going to kiss it.

Connie had come on to another office girl who had occasionally visited him at his Bel-Air estate on weekends, where they would have lunch at poolside and he would watch her swim. “She would just spend the day enjoying his compound more than actually, I think, being with him,” says Tangalakis years later. “She took it for what it was—just an old man who wanted a little female companionship. That was kind of how he flirted. He’d say, ‘Why don’t you come to my house for brunch and a swim?’”

As Bob Neal notes with delight, “The old man was a real cocksman.”

         

CONRAD NICHOLSON HILTON came from the most humble of beginnings. He was born on Christmas Day 1887, in a primitive adobe dwelling in San Antonio, Socorro County, in what would become Texas but was then the rugged and barren New Mexico territory.

He was the first of four brothers (one of whom died at the age of two) and he had four sisters, brought into the world by slight, prematurely gray Mary Laufersweiler Hilton, a domineering, staunchly religious Roman Catholic of German heritage. Like clockwork, at sunup and sundown every day she dropped to her knees with her children gathered around her to pray, and on Sundays she traveled for miles through the wilderness to attend mass.

Connie was named for his maternal grandfather, Conrad Laufersweiler, and his middle name, Nicholson, was in honor of the longtime family doctor who delivered him. Connie was the fair-haired one whom his mother most loved and coddled. He would later describe her as “the loveliest lady I have ever known and the most gallant.” She would have an enormous psychological impact on his bizarre relationships with women later in life, and two of the three women he chose to marry, the first and third of his wives, were named Mary, like his mother. In his eyes, “Mary was a lady.”

While Connie inherited his strong religious beliefs from his mother, it was from his brawny, robust Norwegian father, Augustus Holver Hilton, a man who cared little about religion or prayer, that he got his mind for business. He had his father’s big hands, big feet, big voice, and big ambition. Connie would even sport a mustache like him, too.

The Hilton-Laufersweiler union took place on Lincoln’s birthday in 1885. Called Gus, or “the Colonel,” the Hilton patriarch had built “a tidy little empire,” A. H. Hilton, in San Antonio, that included a general store. Along with selling and trading, he was a loan shark of sorts—called “grubstakers” in those days—who supplied provisions and money to prospectors in return for a share of their profits.

San Antonio was a trading center, and A. H. Hilton sold and bartered everything from groceries to coffins, and when things were slow, the strapping Norwegian went into the wilderness buying and trading beaver pelts and furs and dealing tobacco and groceries to trappers. He liked to boast about his adventures and once even sold an article about them to the newspaper in Albuquerque, often reading it aloud to whoever would listen.

Connie remembered Gus Hilton as a “Viking of a man with energy to burn,” who considered seven o’clock in the morning the middle of the day. A jovial backslapper, Gus loved nothing more than to bargain with his customers when they claimed his prices were too high; it was from his type-A father that Connie learned the “art of the deal.”

The older Hilton instilled the values of working hard and making money in Connie, who earned five dollars a month during two summers laboring in the family store. Once, when he overslept, he heard the disappointment in his father’s booming voice. “Mary, I do not know what will become of Connie. I’m afraid he’ll never amount to anything. He’ll sleep his life away.”

Like many in the Hilton dynasty—all the way up through and including Paris—Connie would have limited schooling, bouncing from one institution of learning to another, though he dreamed in his youth of going to Dartmouth, a fantasy dashed by hard times. As he later acknowledged, “My so-called formal education was pretty informal.”

He received his basic reading, writing, and arithmetic in a one-room adobe grammar school. He attended some classes at the Goss Military Institute in Albuquerque but found the discipline too rigorous, and he was pleased when the school burned down, a fire he later claimed he “took no active hand in.” For a time he studied at the School of Mines at Socorro and at St. Michael’s College, run by strict Christian Brothers, in Santa Fe, mainly because his mother made him attend. For a time he was also a cadet at the New Mexico Military Institute.

         

THROUGH THE 1890S and early 1900s A. H. Hilton went through boom times, so much so that the money rolling in permitted the family to move in 1905 to sunny Long Beach, California, and rent a beautiful home a block from the ocean, while Gus Hilton stayed in San Antonio running the business. The Hiltons’ high life, however, was short-lived. Everything went bust in 1907 when there was a run on a New York bank, touching off a currency panic that spread across the land. The Hiltons were left holding the bag, their warehouses filled with merchandise that no one had the money to buy.

One of their salable assets, Connie quickly realized, was the rooms in their sprawling adobe home that had been added on over the years as each new Hilton arrived into the world. Connie, then twenty years old, and his father envisioned their hacienda as a stop on the road for traveling salesmen, miners, and railroad people who needed a comfortable bed and a warm meal.

Thus, the first informal Hilton Hotel was born, with Connie running things as day manager, night manager, room service clerk, and concierge. When the midnight, morning, and noon trains arrived in town with weary, hungry travelers, Connie was at the station to hustle them to the Hilton. As he later stated, “I can’t honestly say I fell in love with the hotel business as it was practiced by the Hilton family in 1907 or began to dream of the Waldorf or the Plaza.” The business then was more “a case of urgent necessity.”

But, like everything else Hilton through the years, it was a great success. The guests and the money rolled in. In less than a year the Hiltons had to hire outside help. Because the jerry-rigged hotel was a hit, Connie rated himself a “boy genius.”

When Hilton was twenty-one, his father gave him control of the family store in San Antonio and a share of the profits in the family business, now called A. H. Hilton & Son.

In 1912, when New Mexico became the forty-seventh state, Connie, at twenty-five, thought politics would look good on his résumé. He decided to run as a Republican candidate for the new state legislature. Like Paris Hilton’s maternal great-grandfather, her paternal great-grandfather also would become a politico.

The elections were “ruthless” and “only the fit” were able to survive. There were allegations that one side voted a herd of sheep, while the other the entire populace of the local cemetery. The dead and the sheep had spoken, and Connie Hilton beat his Democratic opponent by 243 votes, becoming the youngest representative to New Mexico’s first state legislature.

Connie utilized his two-year term by conducting a self-improvement program. Despite his supreme self-confidence, he dreaded speaking publicly, which he realized was a fatal flaw for a politician. When he was asked to make his first big political speech, he looked at the crowd and froze. His ultrareligious mother, however, heard one of his practice speeches, told him to forget about the teachings of Grenville Kleiser’s “Course in Public Speaking,” and intoned, “All those trimmings are sinful…. You’d do better to pray about it than practice this.”

He followed Mary Hilton’s advice, prayed on the opening day of the legislature, and made an acceptable speech. His stage fright never returned.

Connie’s womanizing days had started in earnest, too. He courted all sorts, including the vivacious debutante daughter of a judge and a hottie from Chicago who taught him ragtime “animal dances” like the grizzly-bear and the kangaroo-dip.

Politics, meanwhile, frustrated him. Once he witnessed the corruption, the graft, the self-interest, and the red tape, he never sought reelection. Instead, he envisioned himself as a wealthy banker. With almost $3,000 of his own money, plus some $27,000 more he raised from investors, he actually was able to open the New Mexico State Bank of San Antonio in September 1913, when he was just twenty-six. But the shareholders—“the smart-money boys,” as he called them—soon took control and Connie was named the bank’s cashier, unpaid no less. He fought back and collected enough proxies by the time of the first stockholders’ meeting to win back control, but by then the bank had gone bust. But Connie, never one to give up, booted the old guard, became vice president, and in two years the bank grew with assets of $135,000. He considered himself a success.

His banking career, however, ended when America entered the First World War.

Connie enlisted in the army in 1917, went to officers’ candidate school, and served in France, where, though he never saw a day of combat, he did manage to enjoy the painted ladies and the cheap champagne. The only personal tragedy he suffered was the death of his father, who was killed in a car accident back home.

At the time of the armistice with Germany, Connie was serving in the cushy Paris office of the army’s chief purchasing agent, with headquarters in the posh Hotel Élysée Palace, on the Champs Élysées. Connie himself was comfortably billeted in a nice little apartment on Rue de Bassano, with a cook to serve him, no less. “This,” he later acknowledged, “is going to war in style.”

When he returned home in mid-February 1919, he had $5,000 and change in savings—and a big dream of becoming wealthy and powerful. The dream would be fulfilled in the dusty, raucous Texas town of Cisco.