CHAPTER 26

Despite Nick’s reputation as a rounder, much of it engorged by the columnists, he more often was interested in being seen with lovelies, such as Jeanne Carmen, rather than actually being with them, in the biblical sense. And to get turned on, he needed liquor or pills, and then was too stoned to perform, or he became physically abusive.

Many years later a number of women in Nick’s life wondered about his sexual preference. Was he gay? Was he bisexual? Even Bob Neal, his closest surviving friend who still boasted of Nick’s heterosexual exploits a half-century later, looked back and acknowledges he wasn’t certain if Nick really liked women. “I don’t know,” he says plaintively.

Nick’s Hollywood in the 1950s—not much different from Paris Hilton’s Hollywood in the twenty-first century—was a hothouse for sexual experimentation. Girl-girl, boy-boy, and all other combinations were in vogue, and the drugs and the booze added to the orgy. The studios covered up the sex scandals, and gossip columnists kept the secrets. Rock Hudson’s gay life, for instance, was an open secret in the industry, but didn’t become public until decades later when it was revealed he was dying of AIDS.

Nick Hilton had a secret life, too. He was part of a small, private social circle that included John Cohan, who claimed psychic powers and advised a number of Hollywood stars, such as Joan Crawford. Nick had an interest in the psychic world, astrology, and the like and developed a kinship with Cohan, who began doing readings for Nick about his future. On one occasion, Nick had planned to drive up the coast to San Francisco with a friend, but Cohan foresaw danger and advised him not to go. Nick took the advice, and the friend was involved in a serious auto accident. Whatever it was that Cohan felt, Nick was forever grateful.

As friends, they’d sometimes have lunch or dinner, so Cohan didn’t think it odd when Nick asked to meet in a suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel, in Hollywood. As it turned out, though, Nick and Cohan’s meeting would be far from routine.

“I go up and the door is open because he was expecting me and we were going to do [psychic] readings, and he said from the other room, ‘John, I’m in here. I’m just getting up.’ I walked in and my jaw dropped because who’s in bed with him but Troy Donahue. They were both nude. I sat on one of the chairs and then they both got up—stark naked.”

Donahue was one of the blond, blue-eyed, pretty-boy heartthrobs in 1950s films who, along with Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson, were managed by the predatory homosexual agent Henry Willson—known as the man behind Hollywood “beefcake.” After Hudson appeared with Donahue in the film Tarnished Angels, Rock wanted to have sex with the six-foot-three hunk. “He saw me as a score,” Donahue later stated. When friends asked Hudson about Donahue, Rock responded, “Great cock-sucker, tiny dick.” Donahue, however, consistently denied that he was gay. He told People magazine in 1984, “Once in a while people get me confused with another blond, blue-eyed actor who was around at the same time, but it’s no big deal…I love women. Sometimes, I guess, too much.” (For nine months in 1964 he was married to the actress Suzanne Pleshette and had two other short-term marriages, fathering a daughter and son.)

Like Nick, Donahue was an alcoholic. In addition, he was addicted to painkillers, amphetamines, and cocaine, and at one point he reached such a low that he lived on a park bench before he became sober and pulled his life together.

Cohan claims Nick confided to him that his relationship with Donahue was “an on and off kind of thing. Nick liked to have experiences with women and men, but he told me he wanted to settle down only with a woman.”

         

SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD Tulsa, Oklahoma, oil heiress Patricia “Trish” McClintock was a five-foot-four, 103-pound brunette, an Elizabeth Taylor archetype in bobby sox. From a big-money Oklahoma banking and oil family, she had gone to a fancy Connecticut girls boarding school, traveled in Europe with her socialite mother, summered among the wealthy in La Jolla, and bet on the thoroughbreds at Del Mar. She grew up in an enormous home with maids and butlers and wings on the family homestead “where everyone spoke every once in a while.” Her parents were divorced and her mother had recently married multimillionaire producer W. Horace Schmidlapp, onetime husband of beautiful blond 20th Century–Fox actress Carole Landis, who had committed suicide by drinking and overdosing on a handful of Seconal, Nick’s favorite.

Trish was one pretty, prim, and sophisticated teenage package. As she says many years later, “I was privy to things a lot of girls aren’t.”

It was at the track one glorious Southern California Saturday afternoon in 1958 that Nick, then thirty-two, spotted teenage Trish, who was there with her grandfather, a member of the Federal Reserve Board; Nick was with another board member, a friend of Connie’s. “They introduced us,” she says. “That was how I met him.”

Nick wasted no time asking her out—to a Gay Nineties party in Los Angeles being thrown by his friend, the head of the Hyatt Hotel chain. And Nick made a rather odd request of Trish: he wanted her to wear one of Natalie Wood’s outfits—a costume from a film she had made. They were the same size and, well, he thought it would be kinky.

When Trish told her father, Frank Grant McClintock, that the infamous playboy was sending a plane for her, he practically locked her in her room; she had never dated a boy older than twenty. Moreover, she says, “I never thought there was anything between Nick and I. It was so ridiculous. I was so young, and he looked so much older to me. He looked like my father’s age. I had never, ever had anyone that old pay attention to me, so that sort of amazed me. I looked like a child.”

Trish saw Nick a few times, always at Del Mar, and she thought that was the end of their friendship. At summer’s end, having just turned eighteen in August, she flew east to begin her freshman year at Briarcliff College, outside New York City. She was there just ten days when Nick tracked her down and aggressively began pursuing her. Academics were out, and love was in.

“His sense of humor, the way he kidded me, how very, very protective of me he was—that’s what attracted me,” she says. “He was good-looking—tall and handsome, and very athletic. He’d never had children, and I definitely think he saw me as a woman he wanted children with.”

He asked her to marry him just before Halloween 1958, and their engagement made headlines across the nation. It was announced at a private party at the chic Colony restaurant in Manhattan in late October 1958. Just a few days after that momentous occasion, Trish saw Nick dead drunk for the first time in a scandalous incident that left her future brother-in-law Barron hospitalized. That same evening she also received a warning to “be careful of this guy” from Nick’s ex-girlfriend, Natalie Wood, who had become Trish’s friend.

On the evening of November 4, the newly engaged couple, along with Natalie, her beau, Robert Wagner, and one of her other former boyfriends, the actor Nick Adams, had gone out to dinner. Nick Hilton drank steadily, and by the time they got back to his suite at his father’s Plaza Hotel he couldn’t walk a straight line, but continued drinking. “It was the first time I had seen him drink—ever,” recounts Trish, almost a half-century later. “He got really, really drunk, and I think it had to do with the whole thing about getting married to me.”

At some point, Barron came into the suite, and he and Nick got into an argument. “I remember Nick was really drunk and saying something like, ‘I don’t believe that!’ And then he pushed Barron, and Barron stepped back on a piece of newspaper and slipped, went straight up in the air, and fell on the floor. It was an accident that you would never dream could happen.”

Barron was in severe pain. Whatever happened in that boozy instant, Nick’s push had resulted in Barron suffering a fracture of his right leg, and he had to be rushed to Manhattan’s Hospital for Joint Diseases. “Nick went to pieces and sobered up quickly over what happened,” says Trish.

While Nick accompanied his brother to the hospital, Trish stayed in the suite with Natalie and Wagner, spending the night with them. Natalie, who had had long experience with Nick, and Trish, who had very little but was about to marry him, stayed up and discussed her future as the wife of America’s most notorious playboy.

“We talked about Nick into the night,” recalls Trish. “Natalie said, ‘Have you ever seen him drunk before?’ I told her no, and she said, ‘If I were you, I’d go home and take a hard look about marrying him.’ She was very sweet and was warning me about what I was getting into. She said, ‘He’s one of the brightest men I know, he’s one of the most charming, but you’d better be careful.’ So that day I went home to Mother, and Mother said, ‘I don’t think you should marry him.’ And I said, ‘Nope, I’m going ahead.’”

And so, against her father’s and mother’s wishes, and with Natalie Wood’s warning ringing in her ears, Trish McClintock became the second Mrs. Nick Hilton the day before Thanksgiving, 1958, in a civil ceremony in the White and Gold Suite of the Hilton-owned Plaza Hotel. Nick’s brother Barron, walking with a limp, was best man. Their mother, the widowed gambler and reformed alcoholic Mrs. Mary Barron Hilton Saxon, was present, as well as her ex-husband, the groom’s father, Connie.

Forced by the Catholic Church to marry Zsa Zsa in a civil ceremony because of his divorce from Mary, the hotel czar was ashamed—and angry—that Nick had been put in the same situation because of his divorce from Elizabeth Taylor.

The New York Times reported that Trish wore a long-sleeved gown of reembroidered Alençon lace over white satin, made with a portrait neckline and an Empire sheath skirt terminating in a full court train, and carried a bouquet of white orchids. The “Gray Lady,” however, noted slyly, “Mr. Hilton’s marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, the actress, ended in divorce.”

Trish’s father felt his daughter’s betrothal to the notorious playboy was so scandalous and embarrassing to his moneyed and ultraconservative oil family that he banned her from being wed in her hometown of Tulsa. “He didn’t want me walking down the aisle with bridesmaids who were seventeen and eighteen years old, and Nick’s friends who were in their forties,” Trish says. Instead, Frank McClintock threw a country club party for seven hundred.

Trish’s mother couldn’t believe Nick would actually marry her teenage daughter; she predicted to Trish, “It’ll be a great first marriage.”

Trish acknowledges that she was “a virgin” when she was betrothed and believes that her lack of sexual experience was what appealed most to her groom. “Had I dated a lot and been to bed with other men,” she observes, “Nick would never have married me.”

Despite his playboy reputation, she states, “Nick was never terribly, overly romantic. He didn’t go around kissing me. On top of everything else he was a prude, which is hard to believe about a man who supposedly slept with everyone. But when it got down to his wife and making babies he was definitely a prude.

“Looking back, Nick may not have really liked women,” she acknowledges. “My feeling is that the reason he behaved like that with other women is that, on the whole, he did not respect women, but I don’t think he disliked them.”

And she added emphatically, “Nick was not anywhere near being a homosexual, I can promise that.”

Moreover, she acknowledges sadly, “I do not think Nick loved me when he married me.”

Aware of Nick’s past transgressions with the ladies, Trish laid down two rules of behavior for her husband, who was fourteen years her senior. “I told him I’d leave him if he screwed around on me, or if he ever hit me.”

However, still “starry-eyed” by the quickie marriage, she had no intimation that Nick had had a serious prescription drug problem, which he hid from her (as he did with many of the women in his life) during the honeymoon period.

Beyond that, Trish found herself living in the shadow of one of the world’s great beauties. For years after they were married, Nick was dubbed “the first Mr. Elizabeth Taylor” by the press, which had him seeing red and made Trish feel insecure. Moreover, throughout their marriage, whenever Nick heard that Elizabeth was ill and in the hospital, which was often, he’d dispatch Trish to send her flowers in his name.

The thoughtlessness of people didn’t help, either. For example, one night Trish was at the ritzy El Morocco nightclub in New York. The ladies’ room attendant knew her and greeted her by name. “Suddenly,” Trish recalls, “the woman standing next to me at the mirror turned and said, ‘Are you married to Nicky Hilton?’ I just wasn’t used to things like that and I said, ‘Yes, I’m Mrs. Hilton,’ and she said, ‘Tell me, darling, what’s it like to go to bed with the man who’s gone to bed with Elizabeth Taylor?’ I didn’t know how to answer. What I finally said was, ‘It’s fine!’ and I went downstairs—we had Jack Kennedy’s table—and I broke into tears and no one knew what the hell I was crying about.

“The things I had to live with when I married Nick were horrible,” she continues, the bad memories still lingering. “People would ask me unbelievable things about my being married to Nick, about being a member of the Hilton family. I even changed my credit card from ‘Mrs. Nick Hilton’ to ‘Trish Hilton.’ I always said, if I didn’t have seventeen years in Tulsa, I’d be completely nuts.”

But it was hard to hide from the world back then if you were a Hilton. Early on, at a ball at the Waldorf, a photographer prodded Nick and Connie to kiss Trish on each cheek, and the next morning her picture between them was on the front page of the New York Post. “It was because the Hiltons were so famous,” she observes. “We couldn’t make a move without the press writing about us.”

The first stop on their whirlwind honeymoon was West Berlin, where they attended the opening of the latest global Hilton, a seven-million-dollar, fourteen-story affair. The flight out of New York started on an ominous note and just may well have set the tone for the Hiltons’ tumultuous marriage. The chartered four-engine airliner, carrying some sixty celebrity passengers including Connie and the newlyweds, developed engine trouble over Nova Scotia and had to turn back. It was a scary and bumpy ride.

In Berlin, at the fancy black-tie dinner celebration that included such dignitaries as West Berlin’s mayor Willie Brandt, who was Trish’s dinner partner, and German statesman Conrad Adenauer, among many others, the bride shockingly witnessed for the first time her groom getting plastered, at least in public.

“Nick was way down at the end of the table with Bob Neal, and he was absolutely smashed. I got up and walked over and accidentally on purpose spilled his parfait on him, and I got one of the waiters and we carried him out to make it look like we wanted to clean him up.”

From Berlin they flew to the Middle East, followed of course by a pack of invited, freebie-loving gossip columnists who never reported Nick’s German drinking episode.

Once several months after their honeymoon, and twice within the first year of marriage, Nick left Trish for short periods to carouse. The first time was devastating for the child bride because he chose their first Valentine’s Day together to go to Miami Beach and hang out with Bob Neal. “It just killed me,” she remembers. But because of a sudden cold snap in Florida, he returned after several days, tail between his legs. She rationalized that he needed his freedom because he was “terrified” from the start of getting married. “He just suddenly woke up and he was married and he hadn’t been married since 1950.”

The second time he took off for the Playboy Mansion to party with his friend Hugh Hefner. “I thought, he’s off to his bachelor ways and I’m not going to put up with this. I’m not dumb and I’m not naive to think nothing happened there between him and one or more of those Bunnies. But I had to get over it very quickly.”

         

THE HILTONS BOUGHT a charming three-bedroom, two-bath “starter home,” as Trish calls it, in Beverly Hills, on Alpine Drive, where their neighbors were movie stars and titans of industry. As Trish observes, “The only thing Nick wanted to do was prove to his father that he could be a settled, married man.”

As he had with Elizabeth Taylor, Nick, egged on by Connie, ordered Trish to convert to Catholicism. “I went to Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills for about three sessions,” she says, “and I came home and told him I couldn’t be a Catholic, but that I would raise our children as Catholics up until seventh grade, and he agreed.”

A few months after they were wed, Trish became pregnant. Nick, as she recalls, was “speechless, overjoyed, and unnerved.” He found the best obstetrician money could buy; it was to be the same doctor who had handled the pregnancy of the Shah of Iran’s wife and delivered Lucille Ball’s babies. As far as Trish can remember, it was the only time Nick was willing to give up his play dates with his crooner pal Dean Martin—golf and gin rummy every day at the Bel-Air Country Club. “That’s when I knew he liked me,” she says.

At nineteen, Trish gave birth to a son, whom they named Conrad Nicholson Hilton III, in honor of his grandfather. Fourteen months later, Trish had a second son, Michael, who was named in honor of Nick’s friend Miguel Aleman, the president of Mexico. Nick would have liked four or five little Hiltons to compete with Barron.

While Nick and Trish had many acquaintances from their separate lives—her teenage schoolgirl and young Tulsa socialite pals, and his carousing buddies—between them they shared a very small circle of close and loyal friends who stood by them through their turbulent marriage. Besides Bob Neal and his B-movie beauty and future wife, Dolores Faith, their circle included Carole and Lawrence Doheny IV, he the scion of the fabulously wealthy Southern California oil- and property-rich Doheny family, and she the gorgeous actress Carole Wells, who starred in a number of TV series through the mid-1950s and 1960s; and Nick’s doctor, Lee Siegel, and his actress wife, Noreen Nash.

“Nick and Larry and Bob Neal were wicked, rich, bad boys,” observes Carole Doheny years later. “Nick and Larry really liked each other—Larry looked up to Nick, and Nick was kind to him, and they were the guys who played gin rummy together—Nick and Larry and Bob Neal and Dean Martin—they were all the same skin. The Katzenjammer guys.”

As a father, Nick was like his own dad; that is, he wasn’t much of one. But every year he took his boys on a two-week trip—hunting, perhaps, or to Europe, but as Trish points out, “Nick wasn’t a day-to-day husband-type daddy.”

But Carole Doheny, Trish’s closest friend, remembers being at the Hiltons’ one evening and thinking how happy Nick seemed having a family. “I saw him as a loving father. He adored Trish. He adored those two babies,” she says. “Trish was lying on the floor and she had one of the boys near her and she was wearing black jeans and a big silver belt and she had that gorgeous little body and those beautiful boobs, and we were sitting there quietly talking and having a drink, and Nick was just staring at her. Just entranced. And he suddenly said, ‘She’s the best-looking girl I’ve ever known.’ And because I knew his history with women, I said, ‘Wow! With all the girls you knew, that’s quite a compliment.’ And he said, ‘And she’s even better-looking naked.’”