CHAPTER 25

Through most of the 1980s, British actress Joan Collins’s claim to fame was her starring role in what was then the world’s most popular soap opera, Dynasty, in which she played Alexis Carrington Colby—one of the great bitchy, sexy, and conniving TV divas of all time. But back in the mid-1950s, after she arrived at 20th Century-Fox to pursue stardom after La Dolce Vita across the pond, she was hot prey for playboys like Nick Hilton.

By the time Joan hooked up with Nick, she was considered “one of the most dated girls in town.” She’d been linked to actors Robert Wagner, Michael Rennie, conductor Buddy Bregman, and both of Charlie Chaplin’s sons. At one high point, she’d set an unofficial Hollywood record by dating fourteen different bachelors in as many days and had just ended a brief live-in relationship with Arthur Loew Jr., grandson of MGM’s founder, with Loew telling her, “You are a fucking bore,” and Collins telling him, “And you are a boring fuck.”

Nick was captivated by Joan’s sultry looks and sexy, clipped accent. Early on he showered her with attention—a 24/7 chauffeur-driven car was a nice touch. And the twosome spent time in swinging Acapulco.

Collins’s relationship with Nick was part of what had the potential of being a volatile triangle that involved another starlet, Natalie Wood. The celebrity exposé magazine Uncensored put the Collins-Wood competition for the heart and mind of the hotel scion on its cover: “Natalie Wood & Joan Collins: The Untold Story Of That Feud Over Nicky Hilton.”

When asked by a gossip columnist about sharing Nick, twenty-three-year-old Joan said, “Oh, it doesn’t bother me. Besides, Natalie is much younger than I am—she’s only nineteen.” In fact, Joan wasn’t interested in a serious romance and neither was Nick.

Natalie, however, would see things a bit differently, and so would Nick.

Joan liked men with machismo, men who could dominate her but not push her around, so Nick was a mixed bag in her book from the start. She viewed him as “dissolute and rakish”—quite aware that he fancied himself a girl-chaser and “Hollywood’s swingingest bachelor.” Years later she observed, “He appeared as if he had seen and done everything. He had been everywhere, could get practically any girl he wanted, and was completely jaded.”

But there were more serious issues that eventually turned her against him. For one, she claimed in her memoir Past Imperfect that he was “racially bigoted,” noting that his ideas went with his “southern drawl,” which was actually Texan but sounded Alabaman to her British ears. And while she viewed him as a “devout Catholic” who kept a rosary and a crucifix next to his bed, she was shocked to discover that his night table also featured “an amazing array of pill bottles in all shapes and sizes, girlie magazines, pornographic books, bottles of Coca-Cola, and a gun.”

All of the Hiltons of Nick’s generation were brought up with guns for hunting, but Nick, drunk or stoned, was dangerous with a weapon in his hand. Joan said Nick loaded the gun he had next to him in bed with blanks and frighteningly fired at the ceiling in the middle of the night “to the horror of his neighbors on Doheny Drive, who would call the police in a frenzy of fear.”

Before long Joan Collins had had it with Nick Hilton and moved on, but Natalie Wood hung in.

NATALIE WAS EXCITED by the prospect of having an affair with a man who had slept with Elizabeth Taylor, one of her idols. As Dorothy Kilgallen reported, “Pals of reckless young Natalie Wood say her torch for Nicky Hilton is bright enough to light up all the territory west of the Mississippi.”

“Nick never discussed that he even knew a girl,” states Bob Neal. “He was very discreet and the girls knew this, and they liked it because they didn’t like guys with big mouths, so it took me about twenty years to find out who was the love of Nick’s life.

“It ended up it was Natalie Wood. Their relationship was based on something very simple—very fucking simple, and there’s one in every house. It’s called a bed.”

Nick and Natalie had met just before the opening of the new Hilton Hotel in Mexico City; she was one of a number of starlets and other celebrities who, in typical Connie Hilton fashion, had been invited to add glitz to the ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Each was wined and dined, given first-class accommodations, and anything else they desired. Nick, for instance, got Natalie.

Within hours of their arrival below the border, they were sleeping together. (Connie was not to be outdone. The world’s innkeeper divided his time between Barbara Rush, his first date on the trip; Ann Miller, his favorite dancing partner; and—on a quick hop over to Acapulco—Hillevi Rombin, the Swedish Miss Universe.)

At the big white-tie dinner, with all the dignitaries present, Connie noticed that two important chairs at the main table were unoccupied. “The people have come, the party is going, everything is functioning as it should, but Natalie and Nick are suddenly missing,” says Bob Neal, who shared a suite with Nick. “The old man comes over to me and he says, ‘Bob, I want you to go upstairs’—and he was talking between his teeth, he was very pissed—‘and get that guy and that girl outta bed and get ’em down here to this table. They are starting to serve dinner and they are embarrassing me. Goddamn it, get ’em outta that bed!’

“So I go upstairs and knock on the door and I said, ‘Nick, it’s serious. The old man’s ready to burn the fuckin’ place down if you don’t get downstairs with Natalie. Now!’ I bore down on him pretty good—and he knew when I was serious. So they got all their clothes on and they came down and had their consommé, or whatever, and they got up and they danced.

“The next thing I knew the old man came over to me and he says, ‘Now where the fuck are they?’ I look around and I said, ‘Well, sir, I’m not sure. I don’t know. I delivered them to your table as you requested, but now I have no idea.’ He said, ‘Goddamn! Nick can’t stay out of that fucking bed.’ And, for goddamn sake, they were back up in the suite in bed.”

Natalie was eighteen when she became involved with Nick, a dozen years her senior. Within a week of their get-together in Mexico City, the two were photographed dining at the Cocoanut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Nick gave Natalie a gold bracelet that she treasured, but no ring.

Meanwhile, Walter Winchell was reporting that Natalie had “transferred her affections again. From Nicky Hilton to Bob Wagner,” but noted in a subsequent column, “Coasters now believe Natalie Wood and Nicky Hilton will make it official,” and still later he wrote that when Natalie had trouble sleeping she “wakes Nicky Hilton by phone who chats with her until she dozes. That’s a gooooood bwoi. Whutz his number?”

By the time Nick and Natalie were going steady, she was starting to film Marjorie Morningstar, a plum role, and had already starred in Rebel Without a Cause and was cast for Splendor in the Grass. (She won Oscar nominations for all three films.) Natalie, née Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, whose parents were Russian Orthodox immigrants, was driven and ambitious—controlled and dominated by a stage mother on a par with big Kathy, Jolie Gabor, and Elizabeth Taylor’s mom. But unlike Kathy Hilton and Zsa Zsa, Natalie had real acting talent.

Unfortunately, she was also constantly stressed and riddled with anxiety and hypochondria. She was considered rather promiscuous, or at least that’s the impression she gave with so many men at her beck and call, much like Paris Hilton decades later. Besides Nick and Wagner, Natalie had been linked to Dennis Hopper, Robert Vaughn, Nick Adams, and the playboy Lance Reventlow. Curiously, Natalie also had a thing for gay and bisexual men, all of whom were closeted in those days. Among them were Sal Mineo, with whom she starred in Rebel Without a Cause and the handsome, sullen-appearing actor Scott Marlowe, whom she slept with on occasion; the gossip columnists hyped their relationship as Natalie’s “great love.”

Natalie’s pal Troy Donahue firmly believed she was madly in love with Nick. But she felt safer with Robert Wagner, whom she considered gentle and better looking, and who didn’t have alcohol and violence issues. Moreover, there was talk that during a visit to Casa Encantada Connie tried to coerce Natalie’s mother into permitting her to marry Nick by offering a financial incentive. Many years later, Natalie’s sister Olga maintains, “Nick’s father, Conrad Hilton, wanted them to have a relationship, and he tried to talk my mother into encouraging that by promising her stuff, but she didn’t go for it.”

On the other hand, Natalie’s British biographer, Gavin Lambert, asserts the mother “judged Natalie’s boyfriends on whether they were famous and whether they were rich. That’s what mattered to her.”

Nick, observes Lambert, “was a lord if not a prince of darkness, endowed with equal parts charm, sexual expertise, and cruelty. He probably slapped her around.” However, he found that Natalie was “excited” rather than put off by Nick’s playboy persona and intrigued by his bad-boy glamour. “Nicky was the dark excitement.”

Natalie’s younger sister, Lana, contended that their mother gave “full cooperation” regarding Natalie and sex, including her affair with Nick. While only a child at the time, Lana Wood remembered Nick and Natalie “stealing kisses in the pool.”

Nevertheless, Natalie chose to marry Wagner. But a decade later Nick and Natalie were still deeply attracted to each other. At a holiday party in London in December 1966, Nick, inebriated, came on to Natalie and she reciprocated—with Nick’s second wife, Trish Hilton, and Natalie’s second husband, Richard Gregson, at the same gathering, according to Lambert. (Trish Hilton denies it ever happened.)

Gregson said he “found Natalie and Nicky necking and dancing…. We had a huge row. Natalie became very wound up, full of guilt, and appalled at the way she’d behaved. Then she said she wanted to kill herself and grabbed a bottle of pills.”

Nick’s and Natalie’s lives would be forever entwined, and both would die tragically and young—Nick at the age of forty-two, Natalie at the age of forty-three.