CHAPTER 17

In 1893, a tornado swept through Cisco, some fifty miles east of Abilene. The twister cut a devastating swath, killing more than two dozen and flattening most of the businesses and homes.

The next big wind to hit Cisco was Connie Hilton, his arrival coming just as the Roaring Twenties were about to begin. “I thought, dreamed, schemed of nothing but how to get a toehold in this amazing pageant that was Texas,” he stated years later. “It was waiting for me in Cisco.”

Once known as Red Gap, Cisco had been renamed in the early 1880s in honor of a New York financier, John A. Cisco, who built the Houston and Texas Central Railway, which intersected with the Texas and Pacific line. The railroad turned the town into the heavily touted “Gate City of the West,” a bustling commercial center that attracted immigrant workers and entrepreneurs alike. Connie saw it as a “cow town gone crazy.” He also saw his destiny there.

Initially, he thought of establishing another bank; there was one for sale, and three others in town. He was prepared to buy, but when the seller saw how anxious Connie was, he raised the price by five thousand dollars and told him “no haggling.” A born haggler, Connie passed.

Then he took a look at the two-story, red brick Mobley Hotel down the dusty street. When he saw the jammed lobby and heard the desk clerk yell “Full up!” he sought out the owner, who considered the place nothing more than a fleabag, a “glorified boarding house,” and was willing to unload “the whole shooting match” for $50,000 in cash. With his five thousand dollars in savings burning a hole, Connie anxiously telephoned friends and family for the remaining $45,000. Even his mother, looking for a tidy profit that she knew her little boy could make, chipped in five big ones.

When the deal was consummated, he sent her a telegram: “Frontier found. Water deep down here. Launched first ship in Cisco.”

“The Mobley,” Connie later told Time magazine, when he made the cover some years later, “wasn’t exactly a hotel—it was sort of a flophouse. We considered it a bad day when we didn’t have a three-time turnover on the beds. It was a bad night when I had a bed of my own.”

The hotel generated three thousand dollars the first month. Practically overnight, he had renovated the Mobley’s lobby, shuttered the little greasy spoon attached to the hotel, and put in more beds; he had the front desk cut in half, installed a newsstand that sold tobacco, and trashed the potted palm in favor of a stand that sold novelties.

With the Mobley, Connie set in stone some of the Hilton Hotel management philosophy that continued into the twenty-first century, which was to replace wasted space with moneymaking space. He also gave pep talks to his Mobley employees, giving them a sense of pride, with a promise of better wages.

In return, he asked them for complete and utter loyalty to him and his guests. He demanded that his employees offer service with a smile and provide clean rooms, spotless halls, fresh soap and linen. Connie also was credited with a ten-point “Code for Success” that would appear in “This Week,” a Sunday magazine newspaper supplement, which boasted the “world’s largest circulation” of more than fourteen million readers:

1. Find your own particular talent.

2. Be big.

3. Be honest.

4. Live with enthusiasm.

5. Don’t let your possessions possess you.

6. Don’t worry about your problems.

7. Look up to people when you can—down to no one.

8. Don’t cling to the past.

9. Assume your full share of responsibility in the world.

10. Pray consistently and confidently.

CONNIE’S NEXT HOTEL, The Melba, was in Fort Worth and was a grim and grimy sixty-eight-room place. However, he got another good deal, and within ninety days he had the place spick and span and minting money.

Then came the Waldorf—not the biggie in New York that he one day would own, but the six-story frumpy-dumpy Waldorf in Dallas. Other small and medium hotels became part of the growing Hilton chain. He had savvy partners who helped him along the way with financing and business acumen, but they didn’t always see eye to eye.

That was underscored tragically in the lobby of the Dallas Waldorf in April 1922, when one partner shot and killed another. When the shooter was released from prison, Connie feared he’d come gunning for him. There are two accounts of what happened next. In one, Connie convinced the prison chaplain to have the paroled gunman go to the West Coast and out of his range of fire; in the other Connie invited the man to his office and had his army automatic at the ready, but the man never showed, and the danger passed.

As Connie sped toward making his first million, his siblings also were doing well. One brother had gone to the Naval Academy in Annapolis and became an officer; another was studying at Dartmouth; a sister had married wealthy and was a young matron residing in a Massachusetts mansion; another was an actress in the road company of The Gold-diggers; and the youngest was valedictorian of her high school class. A cousin had won election to the U.S. Senate. The Hiltons were quite a successful, driven clan.

In the five years since he bought the Mobley, Connie had developed the expertise, put together the team, and had access to the kind of financing that allowed him to break ground on July 26, 1924, for the first full-fledged Hilton Hotel. It would be the Dallas Hilton, erected on land leased for ninety-nine years, rather than land he had to pay for out of pocket.

Connie used the leased land as collateral for a half-million-dollar bank loan, put up $100,000 of his own money, and raised another $200,000 from chums. He even convinced the building contractor to toss $150,000 in the pot. And when he ran out of money, Connie urged George Loudermilk, the former undertaker from whom he had leased the land, to put the finishing touches on the hotel and even furnish it. Connie was a natural-born businessman, a shrewd operator and manipulator who didn’t need a Harvard MBA to succeed.

With his growing riches, he joined a fancy golf club, started playing tennis, danced with beautiful young women, and even leased a theater, the Circle, in Dallas, where he started producing plays with a stranded stock company.

Connie Hilton was going on forty and still a bachelor. But not for long.

         

IN HIS 1957 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Be My Guest, Connie painted a saintly portrait of the young woman he married, who became the matriarch of the contemporary Hilton clan—Paris Hilton’s paternal great-grandmother. Her name was Mary Adelaide Barron, of Owensboro, Kentucky. Despite Connie’s glowing account of her in his book, she displayed, in fact, some of the same uninhibited traits as Paris’s maternal grandmother, big Kathy.

Connie and his ghostwriter, Elaine St. Johns, described Mary Barron as a churchgoing gal—“pretty, vivacious, alert, with laughing eyes…and the soft Kentucky voice.” He claimed he first spotted her in a red hat several pews in front of him at one glorious morning mass when she was visiting a cousin, Beauregard Evans, in Dallas, but lost her in the crowd when he tried to follow her out, and then spent “a month of Sundays” at mass in hopes of running into her again. They eventually were introduced; he wined and dined her; and they fell in love. Once his Dallas Hilton was completed, she promised she’d come back to marry him. Before she bade him adieu, the love-struck bachelor asked her to leave her red hat with him. In her absence he contented himself “with flying the red hat from my bedpost.”

What Be My Guest didn’t reveal was that Mary Barron Hilton, for whom Barron Hilton was named, was a happy-go-lucky, curvy and buxom brunette with Mary Astor looks who hailed from the Kentucky backwoods. A barely educated eighteen-year-old who liked her moonshine, loved to gamble, cursed like a sailor, and savored telling dirty jokes, she had a raucous whiskey laugh and came from what today might be described as trailer park trash. What’s more, Be My Guest quickly skipped over the fact that Connie was twice his teen bride’s age.

But it’s no surprise that Mary Barron pledged before she returned to her old Kentucky home that she’d be back to be the innkeeper’s wife. After all, what pretty gal in her right mind who lived the real-life simple life in the country without indoor plumbing and six brothers wouldn’t hitch her star to a sugar daddy who owned the beginnings of an international hotel chain?

On paper, though, Mary Adelaide Barron’s lineage looked just fine. Her father, Thomas Mason Barron II, was a descendant of George Mason, a patriot, statesman, and liberal delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention. He has been called the “father of the Bill of Rights,” which makes Paris Hilton a distant descendant by marriage of one of the drafters.

But Tommy Barron, Mary’s father, was no patrician politician. He was blue collar and a good ol’ boy through and through—a tobacco-chewing, moonshine-swilling native of Owensboro who was known in those parts of Kentucky as a tobacco “pinhooker,” a speculator who bought poorly prepared tobacco at auction, took out the bad parts, and resold it. “He made a modest living at that,” according to Jarred Barron, Mary’s first cousin.

“Mary’s family didn’t have much,” says Jarred, who at eighty-seven (in 2005) was one of the last remaining Barrons who had a clear recollection of his late cousin and her world when she became involved with Connie. “Back then her family moved to different places. For a while they lived with my grandfather, on the farm right close to where I’m sittin’ right now in Owensboro. They raised tobacco and corn pigs. Mary’s house didn’t have running water, and her father, who had seven kids to support, drank a little too much.”

If Mary Barron graduated in the 1924 class of Owensboro High School, as Jarred Barron recollects, school officials had no record of her attendance.

“Mary was young, around sixteen or eighteen years old, awfully good-looking and had a terrific personality, and was visiting a relative who lived in Dallas and met Conrad Hilton down there,” recalls Barron, who was a dozen years younger than his pretty cousin. “The family wasn’t too happy about it because Mr. Hilton was so much older.”

Mayme Mulligan Barron, Mary’s mother, was like Connie’s, a staunch Catholic who attended every mass at St. Stephen’s Catholic Church in Owensboro. That fact alone helped smooth things over with the deeply religious Mary Hilton, who had her doubts about whether this unsophisticated teenage looker was the one with whom her prized son should spend the rest of his life. “Mayme was a strong—strong—Catholic,” says Jarred Barron.

The grand opening of the Dallas Hilton occurred on August 4, 1925. The place was an instant moneymaker and was Connie’s first “minimax,” as he later termed it—minimum cost, maximum hospitality.

“I had climbed Mount Everest,” Connie boasted, and now he was raring to get hitched.

Keeping her promise, Mary Barron returned to Dallas to marry Connie just one month after the opening. In a simple ceremony at six o’clock mass on September 7, 1925, Connie Hilton, thirty-eight, and Mary Barron, nineteen, were married by the Reverend Thomas Powers at Holy Trinity Church in Dallas. Mary’s hometown newspaper, the Owensboro Messenger, described the bride as “a popular member of the younger social circle of Owensboro. The groom is president of a chain of hotels and is a prominent businessman of Dallas.” The newspaper noted that the newlyweds “left for a two months’ tour of Canada and the Eastern states before returning to Dallas to reside.”

One of their stops on the honeymoon was Chicago, where the newlyweds checked into the bustling LaSalle Hotel, which was fully booked. To impress his young bride, Connie whipped out his new business card—Conrad N. Hilton, President, Hilton Hotels—and the couple were quickly ushered to a room. Connie came away telling Mary, “Someday I’m going to come back and find a vacant lot. I’d like to build me a hotel here.” It was that kind of talk that would make him so successful, and would eventually wreak havoc on their marriage.

Ten months after their nuptials their first son, Conrad Nicholson “Nick” Hilton Jr., future darling of the gossip columns, was born on July 6, 1926. Nick, who looked like his mother, had “big eyes, curly hair, and was quite a howler,” said the proud father, who felt having a son as his firstborn was “the main event.”

At the time, the Hiltons were living in Dallas’s chicest residence, the eleven-story beaux arts–style Stoneleigh Court, an elegant apartment-hotel, which was the first luxury building of its kind in Dallas and the tallest hotel west of the Mississippi at the time. The Hiltons’ suite boasted a telephone, a wireless connection to the hotel’s own high-powered radio station, and circulating ice water in the kitchenette’s mechanical refrigerator, and each bedroom had a Murphy “California” wall-bed. The Stoneleigh was heralded as “the ideal home where all housekeeping problems have been solved for you.”

And what’s more, hotelier Connie got a steep trade discount on the rent. He liked to make money, not spend it, and through the years he’d earn a reputation as a tightwad.

With the new baby in tow, Connie bought an elegant four-bedroom home at 4800 St. John’s Drive, one of the most prestigious streets in fashionable Highland Park, an exclusive residential little city designed by a Beverly Hills landscape architect.

With wife and baby settled in, he returned to what he most loved—building the Hilton Hotel chain. His immediate plans were for more Texas Hiltons—Abilene, Waco, Marlin, Lubbock, El Paso, and way stops in between. He planned to open, as he vowed to Mary, “a hotel a year.”

However, he did take time from his to-do list to make another baby, William Barron Hilton, who came into the world on October 23, 1927, fifteen months after Nick. Barron was born just two months before his father’s fortieth birthday on Christmas Day 1927. By then, Connie had more than the holiday to celebrate. He now had hotels in Dallas, Abilene, Waco, Plainview, San Angelo, and Lubbock—and was close to renting two thousand rooms a night, all with the help of friendly bankers and venture capitalists. Outside of Texas, he planned for Hiltons in Oklahoma City; Wichita, Kansas; and Mobile, Alabama.

His biggest venture to date, however, was the Hilton in El Paso, to be built at a cost of $1,750,000 under the umbrella of his newly organized Hilton Hotels, Inc., a consolidation of all his properties in one fat, moneymaking group.

Connie, however, didn’t see the approaching storm. Less than three weeks after he announced the El Paso venture, investors and speculators were jumping out of windows as they watched their stocks fall like dead ducks shot out of the sky.

“Wall Street Lays an Egg,” the entertainment trade paper Variety famously declared, marking the devastating stock market crash of October 1929. The nation, the rest of the world, and Connie Hilton were about to sink into the Great Depression.