The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty (50 page)

Conrad then talked about Nicky’s untamed, controversial youth, his turbulent marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, and his reputation with the ladies. He shared with Carole many stories and secrets about Nicky that she promised never to reveal to a single soul—and she never has. He also talked about his son’s successful second marriage to Trish and how throughout it all—the bad years and the good—he had remained conflicted about Nicky’s work ethic. “Zsa Zsa always felt I was in competition with Nicky,” he continued. “That wasn’t true, though,” he concluded. “How could I ever compete with Nicky? He had it all over me, didn’t he?”

Carole nodded. Though Conrad never really answered the question of what he would have done differently, she understood his torment. “I guess the great irony is that you wanted his life,” she said, “and all he ever wanted was your approval, Connie. That is just so sad.” She instantly regretted stating the obvious, especially when Conrad bowed his head and, much to her astonishment, began to shed tears. So moved by Conrad’s unabashed display of heartache was Carole’s son Ryan that the tot took several jerky steps toward the old man and stared up at him. Then, just as he was about to tumble backward onto his bottom, he wrapped his little arms around the hotelier’s leg to steady himself. “Well, my goodness! Will you just look at that?” Conrad exclaimed. It was a powerful moment, compelling and appropriate in its symbolism. Regarding with affection the youngster at his knee, Conrad ran his fingers through the boy’s soft hair several times. “Maybe I should have spent more time with Nicky when he was this lad’s age,” he said. He said that it was easy to lose sight of family when “you’re all in business together. I have always understood the fundamentals of power,” he said, “but the fundamentals of
family
, those are…” His voice trailed off.

Carole rose and walked over to Conrad. Standing behind him, she gently put her hands on his shoulders. She observed that, as parents, they had always done the best they could for their children. She knew in her heart of hearts that her husband loved her and his boys, and it was that knowledge that sustained her, she said, patting Conrad’s shoulders. “Nicky loved you, too, Connie,” she continued. “All of your children do. You must know that.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” Conrad said. He then revealed to Carole that he’d had a brief conversation with Nicky the night before his death during which the two proclaimed their affection for one another. He said it was strange, as if Nicky knew he was not long for this world. “He told me he loved me and I told him I loved him, too,” Conrad recalled. He said that he then hung up the phone while wondering to himself how many years it had been since they’d said that to each other—and he didn’t know the answer to that question.

“Then you must remember that last conversation,” Carole told Conrad, “because it will help you get through the years ahead.” Still standing behind him, she pulled Conrad in closer. “Your friends and family will help you, Connie,” she told him. “We are all here for you.”

Joined in their mutual grief, Carole and Conrad spent the next couple of hours gazing absently at the flames while remembering their lost loved ones and talking about the importance of family. From talking to him that night, she recognized that one thing about Conrad Hilton had not changed: He was still a man of great faith who believed that his sins were forgiven as swiftly as they were acknowledged and then confessed to his God. He also believed that, by the grace of his Lord, it—
all of it
—would somehow be made better. In other words, it was in God’s hands now. That said, she also knew that he would mourn the death of his son until the day that he too would be gone from this world. There was nothing she could do about that, either. That would be Conrad Hilton’s cross to bear.

PART ELEVEN

Frances

At Long Last Love

A
re you ready?” Conrad Hilton asked the attractive woman at his side. The two were in the backseat of his sleek black 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood.

“I am,” she replied enthusiastically.

“Okay, here goes.” He grinned. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” he started, now bowing his head. “The Lord is with thee.”

“Blessed art though amongst women,” she continued, her head also lowered, “and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

It was a Sunday morning in November 1977 and life had taken an unexpected turn for Conrad. Married to two enormously different types of women and divorced for many years, Conrad was about to embark on a new life’s journey he dared not hope for at this late stage of the game—real romance. About to turn eighty-eight in December, on this day Conrad found himself cozying up to an elegantly mature and still pretty woman who was more than twenty-five years his junior, Mary Frances Kelly, age sixty-one. The two were being driven to a Catholic church in Beverly Hills by her brother, William P. Kelly, who was visiting from Illinois and had volunteered to take them to mass. The couple, who had been dating for more than a year, customarily enjoyed playing out a little ritual on their way to church; both devout Catholics, they would recite a prayer familiar to both of them as a way of beginning their day of worship.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Conrad continued, “pray for us sinners—”

“Now and at the hour of our death,” she added.

Then, in the spirit of comfortable solidarity, they concluded, “Amen.” At that, they raised their heads and smiled unabashedly at one another. He leaned over to give her a quick peck on the cheek. “It’s going to be a wonderful Sunday, isn’t it?” Conrad asked, smiling.

“That it is,” she agreed. “That it is.”

“Keep it down back there, you kids,” admonished Bill from the front seat. He winked at Conrad through the rearview mirror.

“Well, you know how we youngsters are,” Conrad said. “Incorrigible.” He seemed to enjoy nothing more these days than just being lighthearted. After all of the darkness that had plagued him in recent years, it felt good to be playful once again, especially since he wasn’t really working these days.

During this period, Conrad Hilton was still involved in many Hilton Corporation decisions, but it was Barron who was really running the company from their three-story office building in Beverly Hills at 9990 Santa Monica Boulevard, across the street from the Beverly Hilton Hotel. “Conrad would come into the office just about every day,” said Virginia “Gini” Tangalakis, who worked as an assistant to Hilton attorney David Johnson from 1973 to 1980. “I remember he would show up in a black Cadillac driven by his butler, Hugo, and always with his fluffy white poodle, Sparky, following him on a leash up to his office on the third floor, where you would also find Barron and Eric. He was always immaculately dressed in a blue business suit, once in a while a gray one, but primarily he wore some shade of blue. He treated the staff so well. Mr. Hilton had a private chef named Wilhelmina, an African American, grandmotherly type, who came in every day to prepare hot lunches for the staff. We would be served every day in an enormous conference room, the food all laid out on a boardroom table buffet style, with linen napkins and porcelain plates, for all of us working in the office. The girls all had a crush on Mr. Hilton, despite his advancing age. He was just so charming. He would walk with a little shuffle through the office and everyone was just in awe of him.”

The last corporation board meeting where Conrad actually presided had been back on August 14, 1975. As long as he still had an impact on certain aspects of the company’s operation—as corporate chairman, he attended all of the board meetings and was sure to register his views—he was satisfied. He was proud of his son Barron and thought he was doing a terrific job. In 1975, Barron made the decision to sell half the company’s equity in six major hotels to Prudential for $83 million. In what is still viewed as one of the first major management leaseback deals in the business, the Hilton Corporation would run those hotels and in return collect a percentage of the profits. Conrad wholeheartedly approved. He had been using similar leaseback strategies overseas for years, but never to build operations domestically.

With Barron in charge, Conrad no longer had the constant chaos of the hotel business to keep him occupied. He felt a definite void in his life. Actually it was an emptiness he had experienced for decades. It had just been easier to brush aside when he was the ultimate man in charge. Now it was much more difficult to distract himself from his longings.

Conrad had obviously achieved a great deal in his life, but it had always frustrated him that both of his attempts at having a fulfilling relationship with a woman had ended in failure. Failure was not something he could easily bear. While he could always plan and strategize his way out of a business dilemma, solutions to the complexities of love and romance had eluded him.

Hilton family lore has it that Conrad prayed for the void in his life to be filled—and that this was when Frances Kelly came along. She had been a good and trusted friend for at least thirty years. But she had been more a background figure in his life, their friendship solid but quiet. After having known her for so long, he had never viewed her as a romantic partner. “But then they had a few casual dinners and one thing led to another,” recalled Bill Kelly, “and they just sort of tumbled into a relationship. Fran said it felt natural, so much so that they didn’t fight it. They just welcomed it.”

“They were incredibly happy,” Bill Kelly, who was four years Frances’s junior, would recall. “The perfect match. It took us all by surprise, but Frannie—that’s what we called her, Frannie—was a wonderful woman who, I think, turned out to be a good influence on Conrad at a time when he most needed it.”

Frannie

I
n 1977, Mary Frances Kelly was sixty-one years of age. She was tall and stately, with piercing blue eyes and short, wavy dark hair that was quickly graying. In stark contrast to most of the women in Conrad’s social circle, she favored clothing that was for the most part conservatively tailored: long, straight skirts, and classic button-down blouses. She sometimes accessorized with simple jewelry, but she was by no means flashy or ostentatious. She had a distinct air of breeding about her, a certain dignity that commanded attention and respect. She was soft-spoken, but direct. Though she appeared to be fragile, she actually had a strong, formidable core that often surprised people. When her long-standing friendship with Conrad finally blossomed into romance, she was delighted. She didn’t mind that it had taken so many years for them to “find” each other. Instead, she was just amazed that they had finally discovered their true feelings for one another.

Frances Kelly was born on January 29, 1915, the daughter of Scottish-born parents, William Patrick Kelly and Christine Crawford, who had immigrated to America in the early 1900s. At the time of his death in 1936, her father was a vice president and comptroller of the International Harvester Company, a successful farm equipment manufacturer, a position also later held by her brother, Bill.

Raised in tony Highland Park, Illinois, near Evanston, twenty miles outside of Chicago, Frances came from a family that is described by her relatives today as having been “well-to-do.” She attended the Catholic Marywood School for Girls, where she was valedictorian of her class. She then enrolled in the School of Speech at Northwestern University, and afterward attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London with dreams of becoming an actress. When World War II broke out, she and her sister, Patty, volunteered for service in the American Red Cross and served in the South Pacific. After Patty returned to the States, Frances stayed on with the Red Cross and was among the first Red Cross workers stationed in Japan.

In 1946, Patty married John Rutherford Fawcett Jr., who was still in the Army and stationed in El Paso. Because she suffered from polio as a baby, Patty swam every day as therapy at the El Paso Hilton. At the time, Conrad’s sister Helen Buckley and his mother, Mary Saxon, happened to be living at the El Paso Hilton. Since Helen had also been in the Red Cross, the three women became good friends.

When Frances’s father died at the age of fifty-two, Frances and her mother, Christine, decided to move from their fifteen-room home in Highland Park, citing the weather as a major factor in their decision. “Patty knew Conrad’s sister, Helen Buckley,” explained Bill Kelly. “So when Helen learned that Frances and Christine were moving to Los Angeles, she said, ‘Well, you really have to meet my brother Connie. He lives there!’ ”

It was the late 1940s when Frances and her mother finally settled in Los Angeles. Frances became manager of convention sales for United Airlines, her job being to promote and organize conventions for the employees of hotels nationwide. Because her work involved the hotel business, it gave her plenty to talk about when she and Conrad finally met in 1948. It was their easy, unthreatening conversation—free of any agenda—that compelled them to remain fond friends for thirty years before their first date. Conrad was such a staple in Frances’s life that there were many youngsters on her side of the family who called him “Uncle Connie.”

Frances’s niece and namesake, Frances Kelly Fawcett Peterson (the daughter of Frances’s sister, Patty), recalled, “When I was about six months old, Aunt Frannie took me and my mother with her for a vacation with Uncle Connie at his home in Lake Arrowhead—and that was around 1960. I also remember that when I was four, we went to Germany and had to leave from New York, so Uncle Connie put us up at the Waldorf. I distinctly remember a huge spray of roses on the mantelpiece in the suite, all bright red, from my Uncle Connie to my mom, Patty. So, yes, he was a good and longtime friend of the family’s.”