CHAPTER 27

Having proved he had settled down by becoming a family man, or at least that’s how it appeared, Nick was finally brought into the Hilton business fold by the old man, and even Newsweek magazine took note of the move in March 1960, observing that the “onetime full-time man-about-town…has been looking more and more like his man-about-the-world father…plugging away” on a new chain of Hilton hotel-motels called Hilton Inns, “with Nick running the show as vice president in charge.”

The article, however, misjudged Nick’s standing with his father by stating that he had been “singled out as heir apparent,” noted that he had “mastered executive syntax,” and quoted him (or more likely a Hilton press release) as saying, “The division has unlimited expansion potential. Its future is parallel to transportation factors, new modes of living, and the healthy complexion of a growing America.”

According to Trish, Nick for the first time seemed to feel good about himself, because his father was giving him a modicum of respect and responsibility. “Nick was thrilled,” observes Trish. “He wanted his father’s attention. That’s all he ever wanted.”

The Hiltons’ home life, however, was something else altogether. Trish learned that Nick was hooked on Seconal—just as he had been in the early 1950s when he was involved with Betsy von Furstenberg. He had never kicked that addiction, though he was drinking a bit less.

“Seconal was the drug of choice of whatever anyone was doing back then,” says Trish, scornfully.

On one horrific occasion, about two or three years into their marriage, Nick and Trish were vacationing in Acapulco when she caught him stoned and flushed his beloved downers down the toilet. It almost killed him, literally.

“I had to learn quickly about addiction,” she says. “I called a Mexican doctor and he told me I almost killed Nick by throwing away his pills. He was withdrawing and you can’t withdraw off those pills. He was three days in withdrawal. He carried on frighteningly, and then he had a convulsion. I thought he was going to die. The Mexican doctor gave me more Seconal to start Nick back on them in low doses. I didn’t know what to do, but throwing away the pills was a no-no.”

Trish claims that their close friend and Nick’s physician, Dr. Lee Siegel, was obligingly writing Seconal prescriptions for him. “Nick always had a friendly doctor in his back pocket,” she asserts. “The downers, that was Nick’s big love, and Lee was getting them for him. I thought what he was doing was awful, and that I had to get this man out of Nick’s life. He was in our lives for years.”

Noreen Nash Siegel, the doctor’s widow, denies that her husband was a “Dr. Feel Good,” though she acknowledges that he was like a “father figure” to Nick and that Nick confided in him. She was aware of Nick’s use of Seconal, because, she says, Nick was “an insomniac.”

“I know that my husband was very sympathetic to people who had insomnia. But he was also very cautious. It’s very easy to say ‘he supplied’ Seconal to Nick, but sleep deprivation is a horrible thing, and he was sympathetic to people who had it. Lee would try to limit the pills, but these addictive personalities—and that’s what Nick was—get hooked.”

There are others besides Trish who viewed Siegel as a “Dr. Feel Good” in Nick’s life. Pat Hilton, Eric’s first wife and Nick’s sister-in-law, was shocked when, on one of the overseas Hilton celebrity junkets, she says she saw the doctor “going up and down the aisle in the plane saying, ‘Here, take this. It will make you feel really good.’ He came up to me and said, ‘Here, this will keep you awake so you can really enjoy everything,’ and he said, ‘If you need a pill to go to sleep, I’ve got those, too.’ I said, ‘I don’t need anything to make me feel better than I do right now.’”

Siegel’s widow, Noreen, acknowledges that her husband adored the Hilton Hotel opening freebies. “He always gave up everything to go on those junkets. We had a good time.”

There are those who felt the doctor acted inappropriately. For example, not long after Eric Hilton married Patricia Skipworth in El Paso in August 1954—Nick was the best man—they were visiting Nick in Los Angeles and Siegel also was present. Says Pat, “He asked, ‘How many times have you done it since you got married?’ I was a new bride and blushing beet red, I’m sure. Then, he said, ‘What you need to do is put a penny in a jar every time you do it, and after the first year start taking them out and you will never get to the bottom of the jar.’”

She thought the doctor’s advice and philosophy on sex was “weird, in bad taste, and totally uncalled for. I told Eric it really bothered and embarrassed me, but he said, ‘Don’t worry about it. That’s just the way he is.’ But I thought he was a creep.”

The doctor’s widow acknowledges that Siegel “had plenty of advice about women and sex” to offer patients and friends. “He counseled a lot of people on those issues.”

The end of Connie and Siegel’s friendship came about in 1967, when the Los Angeles Times, reporting on the fifth marriage of seventy-five-year-old author Henry Miller in the living room of the Siegels’ elegant English Tudor home, stated erroneously that the doctor was the brother of the notorious mobster Bugsy Siegel.

When Siegel saw the mention in the story’s fourth paragraph he howled with laughter. Connie, however, fumed. He immediately called Siegel and demanded that he sue the paper for libel and defamation.

Noreen Siegel, who married the actor James Whitmore after the doctor’s death in May 1990 at the age of eighty-one, recalls Connie telling her husband, “You’ve got to sue the Times. I want it made clear that I don’t cavort with criminals! You’ve got to prove that’s not true!”

As Noreen notes, laughing about the incident years later, “Lee didn’t care what anybody said or thought about him. He told Connie, ‘So what, it doesn’t bother me. We just called the paper and they ran a little retraction.’”

She says Connie and Lee never spoke again.

         

BECAUSE OF NICK’S prescription drug abuse and alcoholism—“drinking was a thread through our entire marriage”—Trish left him several times, threatening divorce if he didn’t straighten out. He tried, but it never worked. “There were many months of normalcy, but it [his addictions] sat like a little black cloud over our lives. It was never going to be a marriage made in heaven. I was just too young to deal with all of it. My lack of knowledge [about addiction], my fear that I wasn’t doing right made me feel I was an enabler.”

Nick and Trish had their first formal separation—at least one that became public—five years into the marriage. Some six months later, in February 1964, she sued for divorce for the first, but not the last, time. She charged that Nick had caused her “extreme mental and physical suffering.” Trish sought custody of the boys, four-year-old Conrad and two-year-old Michael, and asked for community property and child support.

Years later Trish asserts that the split was over Nick’s drinking. “He went on one of his binges and I kicked him out, and that’s when he went into Hazelden [the alcohol and drug rehab center], and he came out looking like a god, and from that time on I had to always do something drastic to get him to do things, and the only drastic thing I knew to do was to leave him.”

A few months later, their roller-coaster ride of a marriage appeared back on track. As Dorothy Kilgallen reported, “The Nicky Hiltons’ reconciliation seems to have worked out nicely, and she’s wearing a huge new ring—an emerald surrounded by diamonds—to prove it.”

         

BY THE TIME Nick turned forty in 1966, Connie believed he had settled down enough to take on the biggest job he would ever hold in the worldwide hotel organization: chairman of the executive committee of the New York Stock Exchange–listed Hilton International Company. Nick would oversee Hilton’s whole overseas operation, although it was veteran Hilton executives who would actually run the show. It was more of a figurehead position, but to Nick it showed he’d gained more of his father’s respect.

The Hilton international empire was immense. Since the late 1950s, and by the time Nick took over, Connie had put together a mind-boggling thirty-nine hotels in twenty-five countries, employing forty thousand workers. Most of the hotels were leased from their owners—a far more lucrative deal for the Hiltons than actually owning them. One press wag declared that Connie had “an edifice complex.”

The “empire builder,” as the Los Angeles Times called Connie Hilton, had also become involved in domestic and international political affairs and was often invited to give patriotic speeches. Awards and honorary degrees were bestowed upon this living legend.

Celebrity friends celebrated his enormous international success. The actor Bob Cummings, one of the frequent Hilton junketeers, threw what Earl Wilson called “a smasher of a Beverly Hills party” for Connie, with guests wearing the native costumes of the countries where Hilton had its hotels. Nick showed up as a Turk, while Barron bedazzled as a French wine steward.

With Nick running the international division, thirty-eight-year-old Barron, by then the father of eight—one of them being Rick Hilton, Paris’s father—was named president of the Hilton Hotels Corporation, the domestic division, of which he’d been vice president since 1954.

By the time Nick and Barron moved up the ladder, Connie, though still chairman of the board, had stepped down as president and chief executive officer of Hilton Hotels Corporation to devote all of his energies to the international arm, which allowed him also to keep close tabs on Nick’s behavior.

With his new position, Nick, with Trish, sold their first home and bought a palatial stone colonial in ritzy Holmby Hills for $450,000 and change—a lot of money in those days. Like his father who picked up Casa Encantada for a song, Nick had negotiated down the price of his new house by more than $200,000 and brought it up to speed with another hundred thousand or so in renovations.

Trish, meanwhile, got into the swing of Beverly Hills society, becoming one of the ladies, or, in her case, one of the very young ladies, who lunched at the chichi Bistro Garden. And she ran in a circle that included Dino’s wife, Jeannie Martin, Janet Leigh, and Sammy Davis’s bride, Altovise. Along with them she was part of the fund-raising, charity, and gala circuit, joining the organization SHARE.

While Nick lent his name to some charity events and organizations and contributed money, he rarely made an appearance at the functions and, after years of well-documented nightlife, had become something of a stay-at-home loner. “We didn’t have friends together per se,” says Trish. “Our life was really very, very separate in many ways because I had my own friends, he had his work and golf.” Besides golf and cards (and drinking and popping pills), Nick liked to read—his favorite book, read over and over almost obsessively, was Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. However, on Saturday mornings he could not be interrupted from his other favorite form of entertainment—watching children’s cartoons on TV—and on Sunday evenings he was riveted by Bonanza.

Because the Hiltons were staunch Republicans, Trish joined an organization of prominent women—among them Shirley Temple Black and Mamie Eisenhower—who were backing the 1968 presidential ticket of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Trish was among a large group of rich, coiffed California women pictured in a full-page political advertisement in the Los Angeles Times that declared in big, bold words: “Women For Nixon Look To You For A Better America.”

         

LESS THAN A YEAR after Nick took over the international division, Trish was finally able to wean him off of Lee Siegel’s downers and replace Siegel with a new doctor. But she soon came to realize that the situation had gone from “bad to worse” because, she asserts, Nick was now getting “mayonnaise jars filled with Seconal” from him.

Nick, like other people who were insomniacs, had started taking the pills to sleep. But he had become so addicted over the years that they had the reverse effect on him. “Instead of going to sleep, he became absolutely crazed,” Trish says, the memory still painful. “He’d stay up for forty-eight hours at a time, just absolutely loop-legged, and finally he’d crash. But during those four or five days I’d have to have nurses with him. I didn’t want him out of the house.”

Beyond that, the sudden death of Nick’s mother, Mary Barron Hilton Saxon, whom he worshipped, left him devastated.

Of Mary’s three sons, Nick, Barron, and Eric, it was Nick who was most like her, and it was Nick who helped her financially after Connie gave her virtually nothing in their divorce. (Mack Saxon left her with little but a navy pension.) Concerned about her financial welfare, Nick had established a small venture for his mother selling ballpoint pens to the Hilton Hotel chain for guest rooms, but when a cheaper vendor was found, Connie dropped her company, and Mary lost the account.

“But she was never in want of anything,” says Mary’s friend, the producer Hank Moonjean. “She got in to all the Hilton hotels for free. Nick took care of her because Nick was her favorite.”

For years, the first wife of one of the wealthiest and most influential businessmen in the world had been living quietly and alone in a simple second-floor walkup apartment in a nondescript stucco building wedged between high-rises in West Los Angeles. She kept to herself and had few friends. Her only real pleasures in life were playing cards, shooting dice, and betting on the ponies; she read the Daily Racing Form like the Bible and had her own personal bookie.

Despite their marriage scandal and divorce decades earlier, Mary and Connie kept a semblance of a friendship through the years. As Trish points out, “Connie just sort of forgot about everything that had happened between them, and he just wandered around and made business deals. He just didn’t hold grudges. In business he would, but in his personal life he was like la-la-la. In many ways he was a very naive man. Mary used to say to me, ‘I can’t believe a man who’s that smart gets lost coming home from the Dallas Country Club.’”

Trish was at home alone on Sunday morning, November 20, 1966, and Nick was at the golf course when his mother telephoned to say, “I’m in terrible pain.”

“I went over to her apartment,” recalls Trish, “and she was sitting on her little daybed in the second bedroom and she just looked very uncomfortable. I called for an ambulance and I went with her, and they took her to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. The doctor told me, ‘I don’t know how to tell you, but she may not make it.’ It was her heart. So I called Marilyn who then called Barron, and I found Nick at Bel-Air, and they all met at the hospital. She died about eight o’clock that night with all of us standing around outside her cubicle. Nick and Barron went in and I let them be alone with her.”

The true matriarch of the contemporary Hilton clan, a woman long lost to history, died just five months before her sixtieth birthday. A requiem mass was held three days after her death at St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church, and Mary was the first to be interred in a new Hilton family plot at Holy Cross Cemetery, in Culver City, where stars like Rita Hayworth, Loretta Young, and Bela Lugosi were buried.