CHAPTER 29

At 9:30 on the morning of Wednesday, February 5, 1969, the telephone rang in Natalie Wood’s home. Trish, who was still living there, answered the phone and froze in horror. Nick’s accountant, Richard Cohen, informed her “fairly brutally” that Nick was dead.

The onetime playboy of the Western world was just forty-two years old. “I never forgave both of them for that—Nick for dying, and Dick for calling me like that.”

Despite her threatened divorce, Trish had visited Nick the night before, still pleading with him to seek help. There was nothing that indicated an impending death—nothing had changed emotionally or physically; he didn’t seem any better or any worse.

In a state of shock, Trish got into her car to pick up her now fatherless sons, nine-year-old Conrad and seven-year-old Michael, at their Catholic school in Beverly Hills.

Meanwhile, Nick’s closest and dearest chum, Bob Neal, was testing his new Maserati on the winding roads outside of Rome with his fiancée, Dolores Faith. Barron left a message for him at the Hilton Hotel, requesting Neal to return posthaste to be a pallbearer at his brother’s funeral. Barron had already arranged to hold a TWA flight to Los Angeles for the couple.

Elliott Mitchell, the nurse, had just gotten home after a routine twelve-hour shift with Nick—everything had seemed as normal as normal could be with a patient like him—when he received a call from his relief nurse that “something was wrong.” He got in his car and headed back and on the way spotted a policeman whom he convinced to escort him because of the emergency situation.

“When I got there Nick was on the floor in his bedroom and he was already dead.”

Nick’s death certificate was signed by one Dr. Webster Marxer, who listed the cause of death as “cardiac arrest” due to, or as a consequence of, “probably coronary artery disease” and stated he had been Nick’s physician from September 1964 until the time of his death. He said he had last seen Nick two days before he died.

Trish Hilton, however, contends that everything on the death certificate was a pack of lies, part of a cover-up by Connie to hide the truth from the public about Nick’s condition, that his consumption of pills and alcohol was what killed him. She said it all stemmed from the loss of his job when the international division was sold behind his back.

“Dr. Marxer was not Nick’s physician,” she maintains. “He was Connie’s doctor. I met Dr. Marxer once at a party, but he was never in our home. He never treated Nick.” (At the time of Nick’s death, Marxer was a “physician to the stars” and was medical adviser to MGM. Marxer died in 1985.)

Trish also emphatically maintains that if Nick had been hospitalized for a heart condition, as Marxer claimed, she would have known about it from talking to Nick on the phone or visiting him almost daily after they split, or from the maid, Mary, who was regularly reporting back to her about Nick’s condition. Moreover, she says, “I’d never even heard that Nick had a heart problem, ever, in his entire life. As his wife, I certainly would have known.

“It never got in the paper that Nick overdosed. His death was induced in the last three or four months of his life by drugs and drinking. I don’t think he did it on purpose. I don’t think he sat down at eight o’clock that morning and took twenty Seconals and alcohol, but who knows?”

As far as she can recall, there was never an autopsy. Newspapers across the country reported Nick’s death, most stating that he died of a heart attack. However, there were reports that he had shot himself. United Press International, whose story appeared in hundreds of newspapers, also said Nick had been “ill about a month.” It also quoted an unnamed Hilton family spokesman as saying that Nick had recently returned from the hospital because of “a heart condition” and that it had worsened in recent days. The New York Daily News, which displayed parts of the UPI story across the top of page three, ran almost a full page of photos, showing Nick with Elizabeth Taylor, along with headshots of three of the “many beauties” he courted—Betsy von Furstenberg, Mamie Van Doren, and Terry Moore, along with “Nicky’s estranged wife,” Trish.

Trish took over the funeral arrangements because, as she says, “none of the Hilton family came to my rescue. None. I will never know why Connie didn’t, except after spending ten years with him I realized he couldn’t deal with family issues. And so I was terribly angry at everyone—at Connie, at Barron, and I refused to talk to them, and they treated me like I had divorced Nick, like I was the divorced wife.”

The night before the funeral, Trish, accompanied by Carole Doheny and Dolores Faith, went to church. “I spent an hour with Nick privately at eleven o’clock,” Trish remembers.

A requiem mass was held the next day, a Saturday, when Nick usually was at home watching cartoons on TV. An estimated thousand people came to his funeral, a depressing scene with autograph hounds looking for celebrities. Elizabeth Taylor, whose looming presence was a part of Nick’s short and troubled adult life, was not among the mourners. However, just prior to his death, she had finally agreed to give Nick the annulment that he had been seeking for years, one that the Catholic Church secretly granted, influenced by Marilyn Hilton, Barron’s wife. “A contribution was also given to the church,” says Trish.

Because of the rumors that her husband had committed suicide by gun, Trish wanted to show the world otherwise and arranged for an open casket, which required a special dispensation from the church that was arranged for by a friend.

Connie Hilton came to the funeral of his firstborn son, but an angry Trish made her eighty-two-year-old father-in-law sit in the second row, right behind her. After the service, Connie wandered around looking for a ride to the cemetery. He approached a Los Angeles policeman and said, “Is there a car for me?” When the cop asked him if there should be, Connie responded, “I think so. I’m the father of the deceased.”

Nick was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in the same family plot near his beloved mother, Connie’s first wife. Afterward Connie threw a huge wake at Casa Encantada. “Not one member of the family came to my house, except for close friends,” Trish recalls sadly. “People thought I had divorced Nick, or was divorcing him, so they blacklisted me. They had no idea what was going on in our household. So I sat with my twenty friends and had a glass of wine and a cigarette.”

Pat Skipworth Hilton, Eric Hilton’s wife before their divorce and his remarriage, had dinner with Barron shortly after Nick had passed away. “I was being very frank with Barron, and I said, ‘You know what was wrong with Nick?’ He said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘You saw to it that he never had a chance to become president of the international division.’ He said, ‘I had nothing to do with that.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s what helped kill Nick, and he thought you did have something to do with it.’ I remember the day Nick died, Barron called me to tell me he’d passed away, and Barron said, ‘But he forgave me.’ I’ll never forget that because Barron never called me, and he called me to tell me that.”

In his last will and testament, dated December 18, 1968, less than two months before his death, Nick, furious that Trish had separated from him and was threatening to divorce him, declared, “I have intentionally and with full knowledge omitted to provide for Patricia M. Hilton,” stating that she had “filed for the dissolution” of their marriage.

Trish was shocked by the will. Years later she says, “Everything I did [the threatened divorce, the sale of their home] was really to get him to go and get help, and it turned around and bit me.”

For no discernible reason, Elizabeth Taylor also got a mention. Nick noted in the first paragraph of his will that they had been formerly married and divorced, and no issues remained from their seven-month union. He left trusts for his two sons for their schooling, with monies to be divided when they reached the ages of twenty-five, thirty, and thirty-five. Eric Hilton was bequeathed fifty thousand dollars, and Nick appointed him guardian of his minor sons’ estate.

Several years after Nick was dead and buried, Connie quietly acknowledged to Trish that the sale of the international division, which led to Nick’s decline and fall, “was one of the worst business deals” he had ever made.

Ironically, in early 2006, Hilton Hotel Corporation’s stock spiked upward when it made a deal for more than $6 billion to essentially reacquire its international hotels from a British group.

         

ALMOST FOUR YEARS to the day of Nick’s death, his friend, thirty-year-old Larry Doheny, committed suicide on Valentine’s Day, 1973. After suffering three heart attacks in one year, he had just come home from the hospital in an agitated state with prescriptions for Valium and sleeping pills. Carole Doheny, Trish’s best friend, was visiting with Marilyn Hilton, Barron’s wife, and called her home to see how her husband was feeling, but there was no answer. When she arrived home he was dead. “Larry just took all the sleeping pills, everything,” she says years later.

About a week after her husband’s funeral, Carole was sitting with her young son, Sean, in front of the fire in the library of her Brentwood home on a dark and rainy afternoon when she received an unexpected caller—Conrad Hilton.

“It was out of the blue,” Doheny recalls. “I always saw Connie in a group of people, or at a party, so it was strange having him in the house like that. He came in and he just stood there and stared at me and at my little boy and then my one-year-old toddled in and Connie didn’t say anything. I asked him to please sit down. I offered him a drink and he said no, and he just sat there. It was all very strange.

“Then, after a while, he started to talk, and he spoke in a very low voice. He told me how sorry he was that Larry died, how horrible it was that he had left me with two small children. He said how hard it was for a father to lose a child.

“And the more he talked I realized that he wasn’t talking about Larry after all. He was talking about Nick. He said Nick was the brightest of his children, and that he had been too hard on him. He actually said that Zsa Zsa told him many times that he was in competition with his own son, and he said, ‘I shouldn’t have always tried to compete with Nick.’ And that to me was one of the most telling things he could have ever said. It said it all because Nick was always trying to please him.

“And then Connie put his hands up to his face and started crying. He stopped for a moment, and he looked at my little boys, and he said he was sorry he never spent enough time with Nick, and then he started crying again, and my little boy went over to him and held his leg. He spent several hours there. We just sat there quietly. And then he left.

“A few weeks later Trish called me and said, ‘Connie really likes you,’ and we joked about whether I should marry him, and then I could be her mother-in-law. It was the first time both of us had laughed in a long time.”

         

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL, flamboyant, and scandalous hotelman in history had outlived his firstborn son by a decade.

Barron had been running the company, but Connie still demanded respect from his son and received it. Tim Applegate, who had worked closely with both father and son from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s, recalls that after Applegate had private meetings with the old man, a concerned Barron would pull him aside and ask, “What did Dad want this morning? What’s he saying?” More often than not, Applegate says, the senior Hilton “was worried that somebody was manipulating the market. He would say, ‘The wolves are after us!’

“He got to be a handful in his last years. He would show up at stockholders’ meetings and tell people that he was really in charge, not Barron, so Barron had to be careful and make sure his father didn’t jump up and start talking. He’d say, ‘It’s okay, Dad, everything’s in control here.’ A lot of people just kind of ignored Conrad at that point, but Barron showed respect, which wasn’t reciprocated. Conrad acted like you would expect the chairman of a corporation to act toward the president, and the fact that he happened to be the father of the president didn’t seem to matter.”

A pioneering visionary and entrepreneur in business and an icon in public, an icy and eccentric man in private—but a true red, white, and blue American original—Connie Hilton died at 10 P.M. on Wednesday, January 3, 1979, three days after being admitted to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica with pneumonia. Long before he died, the name Hilton had become synonymous with the word hotel. Travelers the world over had begun saying “Take me to the Hilton.” At the time of his death, the Hilton banner flew over almost two hundred hotels and inns in the United States, and there were more than seventy in foreign lands.

Connie had celebrated his ninety-first birthday a little over a week earlier on Christmas Day and had been working right up until just before the holiday when he became ill. With him at his birthday celebration at Casa Encantada, with its nineteen servants, were some members of the Hilton tribe and his third wife, Mary Frances Kelly Hilton, whom he had married in December 1976, when she was sixty-one and he was eighty-eight. They had been good friends for years; Mary Frances was a chum of one of Connie’s sisters, was a religious Catholic, had served with the Red Cross during World War II in the South Pacific, and had worked for an airline. When she and Connie tied the knot, there were fears she “might be a gold digger,” says former Hilton Hotel Corporation vice president Tom Parris. “Certain members of the family were upset. But she was actually very good to Conrad.”

A funeral mass was offered for the hotel czar at St. Paul’s Church, where Nick’s mass had been held. A memorial mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York drew dignitaries from around the world. Connie’s body was flown to Dallas, where he was buried in Calvary Hills Cemetery next to one of his brothers, August Harold Hilton. His death certificate was signed by Dr. Webster Marxer.

Connie’s final will and testament, one of thirty-two such documents he had drafted over the years, left an estate worth hundreds of millions, but less than two million dollars was bequeathed to survivors, among them Barron, who received $750,000; Eric Hilton, $300,000; and Zsa Zsa’s daughter, Constance Francesca Hilton, $100,000. The big prize, Connie’s 27.4 percent controlling interest in the hotel chain he had started with a fleabag in Texas, went to the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to be used for charity, which he called in his will “a supreme virtue, and the great channel through which the mercy of God is passed on to mankind.”

Barron, who had become chairman and chief executive of the hotel and casino superpower, went to court in 1983 and sued the foundation. His lawyers claimed that there was a little-understood provision in the old man’s will that permitted Barron to buy the stock for about $165 million—the market value when his father died. At the time he made his challenge, the value of the stock had soared to $490 million.

One of the key witnesses at the 1986 trial, which Barron subsequently won, was one of Connie’s top advisers, James Bates, who testified that the innkeeper to the world didn’t want to leave “unearned wealth to relatives and members of his family.” Bates told the court that Connie believed in “a strong work ethic” and that his goal was to have all of his relatives and children “get out and go to work and earn their own living.”

If that was the case, Connie isn’t “rolling over in his grave,” as a number of Hiltons contended years later, about his great-granddaughter Paris’s moneymaking hustle, although he’d probably be offended at what she did to earn her millions. But no one could question the fact that Paris had certainly inherited her great-grandfather’s work ethic, good or bad.