The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty (10 page)

Throughout his lifetime, Conrad had often stated that his “secret weapon” in business was his close spiritual relationship to his God. He had made each of his major hotel purchases only after a great deal of prayerful deliberation. He fervently believed he would be guided in the right direction if he simply asked for such guidance. “It’s not enough to just pray,” he once observed. “You have to be able to listen. Call it intuition or call it gut instinct. Call it what you will, but I recognize that little voice we all have in our heads as being the answer to our prayers. You have to be willing to listen, and then make decisions based on what that voice is telling you. A major problem, as I see it anyway,” he continued, “is that many of us have not worked to cultivate that certain inner voice. We make snap decisions. We don’t pray. Many of us don’t even think. We just react to situations at hand. I have found that this isn’t the way.”

“A man knows his prayers have been answered if when he gets up off his knees he feels refreshed,” Conrad liked to say. After praying about the dilemma regarding Zsa Zsa, he did find that he felt much better. His inner voice told him to follow his heart, that he deserved to be happy and that a way would somehow be made for him and Zsa Zsa to be together. “I’m going to marry Georgia and trust that God will find a way,” he finally decided. His mind was made up; he wanted to be with her, and nothing—not even his religion—would stop him.

Had Conrad talked himself into believing he would be happy with Zsa Zsa, even if he were ostracized from the church that was so important to him? If so, was this a measure of just how powerful his feelings were for her? Or was it really just indicative of how powerful his feelings were about wanting that which he had been denied? Only he would know which—if either—of these scenarios was true. As often happens when a man is swept away by passion, he would have to admit in years to come that he really wasn’t thinking straight. He was only sure of one thing: He wanted to pick up with Zsa Zsa Gabor where he had left off with her. “Georgia, I can’t live without you,” he said when he called her to tell her he had changed his mind. “
Sanks
God,” she exclaimed. “I can’t live without you either, Connie.” And with those words, they were a couple once again.

At the end of March 1942, while the two were at the Mocambo nightclub in Hollywood with Zsa Zsa’s sister Eva and a friend of theirs from Budapest, Andrew “Bundy” Solt, Conrad presented Zsa Zsa with two small jewelry boxes, a diamond ring in each. She was stunned and delighted. “I still wanted to sprinkle stars in a lovely lady’s lap,” he would later explain in his memoir,
Be My Guest
, of Zsa Zsa and of this “incurably romantic” time in his life, “and I must confess I had never met anyone so willing or qualified to receive them.”

In one box, Zsa Zsa found a large gleaming diamond, the kind that would impress even the most seasoned collector of fine jewelry. It was breathtaking. In the other there was a smaller, much more conservative-looking diamond ring, not exactly eye-popping, but respectable just the same. As Zsa Zsa would later recall it, she wanted the larger diamond ring—of course! However, she knew that there were people in Conrad’s life who were certain that she was only after him for his money. She and Eva exchanged quick, anxious looks. Of course, she knew which ring Eva would pick. But Zsa Zsa decided to take the opportunity to prove to Conrad that she wasn’t materialistic, and she sensed that her selection in this moment might suggest as much to his friends as well. The truth, though, was that Conrad wasn’t exactly generous with his money when it came to her anyway. True, he bought her a few trinkets now and then, but he never went hog wild when it came to spending money on her. “I think, though, that this will change when I marry him,” she told Eva. “Surely a man like that loves to spend money! And I love to spend money. So, we should be a match. Don’t you think?” Eva wasn’t so sure. “Zsa Zsa,” she said, “a man most wants to impress a woman when he is courting her. If he isn’t spending money on you when he hopes to impress you, when will he ever?”

In the end, Zsa Zsa picked the ring with the smaller diamond. “It nearly killed me,” she would confess many years later, “because God knows I wanted the bigger ring.” Conrad was pleased. “I
knew
you would pick that one,” he told her.

“Does this mean you changed your mind about marriage?” Zsa Zsa asked hopefully.

He smiled at her. “Yes. We will marry in two weeks, my dear,” he said.

It wasn’t a proposal as much as it was a declaration. However, Zsa Zsa was thrilled with it just the same, and eagerly agreed to it. She said in a telegram to her mother that she was going to marry “a hotel manager. I
will
make a good life for myself now,” she declared. Eva still wasn’t convinced. When Zsa Zsa broke the news to her, she tried to be happy for her, but she wasn’t able to do so. “I know what you want, dear sister,” she said, according to her later memory, “and you will not find it with this man. Why? Because this is a cheap man,” she said. “Just because he has money this does not make him want to spend it on a woman. I am telling you, Conrad Hilton is not the man for you.”

Zsa Zsa was willing to take a chance that her sister was wrong. Shortly thereafter, on April 10, 1942, she and Conrad were married at the Santa Fe Hotel in New Mexico. Despite any reservations she had about the union, Eva stood up for her sister at the ceremony. Lawyers Gregson Bautzer and G. Bentley Ryan, friends of Conrad’s who were there when the couple first met, were both present.

Zsa Zsa was twenty-five; Conrad was fifty-five. They had known each other for less than four months.

For Love or Money

O
n the same day he and Zsa Zsa were wed, Conrad Hilton finally closed the deal to buy the Town House in Los Angeles. “I made a package deal,” he said, maybe only half joking about his double acquisitions. “I landed Zsa Zsa and the new hotel all on the same day!”

Also around this time, in 1942, the lease on the Dallas Hilton had expired and Conrad decided not to renew it. It was difficult for him to let the Dallas property go, however, because he had so many good memories attached to the city. After all, it was the first hotel built from scratch to bear his name. But it wasn’t turning the kind of profit he wanted and there was little room for sentiment in business, at least as far as he was concerned.

There was good news in Chicago, though. The day after the wedding ceremony, Conrad took Zsa Zsa to the Windy City, where he was about to close a deal to purchase the opulent Blackstone Hotel, which stood across Michigan Avenue from the Stevens Hotel. After the two admired the Blackstone, Conrad took Zsa Zsa across the street to the Stevens.

A towering Beaux-Arts brick structure overlooking Lake Michigan, the Stevens had been opened in 1927 at a cost of $30 million (more than it had cost to build Yankee Stadium) by James W. Stevens. It was then operated by Stevens, his son Ernest, and other members of the Stevens family. At three thousand guest rooms and an equal number of baths, it was the largest hotel in the world, complete with its own hospital and operating room, movie theater, ice cream parlor, restaurants, pharmacy, beauty parlors, dry cleaners, bowling alley, miniature golf course (on the roof), and banquet facilities that could accommodate eight thousand guests at a time. As a result of the Depression, the hotel went bankrupt and the property ended up going into the receivership of the government. Conrad wanted nothing more than to own the hotel himself, but that wasn’t possible at the time, not with the government’s intention to sell the hotel to the United States Army Air Corps for $6 million later in 1942. The building would be converted into living quarters and instructional rooms for military training during World War II, with more than 10,000 cadets in residence.

The hotel—the actual premises—now belonged to the Army, but the Stevens Corporation itself, its assets and its liabilities, was still up for grabs. It would be a solid investment for anyone smart enough to take it on, because when the war was over, the government was sure to let go of the hotel. Whoever owned the corporation would likely be first in line to buy the hotel itself. Of course, Hilton, with his gut intuition telling him that the war would soon end, wanted nothing more than the corporation behind the Stevens.

The trustees of the corporation asked for blind, or sealed, bids, meaning that any interested party would have to make his offer without any knowledge of the others being made. Conrad came in at $165,000. However, his intuition told him that was a lowball bid; he couldn’t seem to shake that feeling. After thinking about it, praying over it, and listening to his gut, he submitted a new bid of $180,000. As fate would have it, he would end up being the highest bidder. Therefore, the corporation was his. However, any profit Conrad might make on a reinvigorated Stevens Hotel was still just a pipe dream. For now, he just owned a corporation that was in a lot of trouble—taxes were owed, bills left unpaid. He would do what he could do to keep it afloat until the Army was finished with the hotel, and then he knew it would be his.

As Conrad and Zsa Zsa stood on Michigan Avenue looking up at the enormous Stevens Hotel, a cold wind came in from the lake, causing Conrad’s eyes to water. He looked at his new wife and, according to her memory, said, “I’m going to own that soon. Georgia, you watch. Before I’m finished, it’s going to be mine.”

That night, Conrad and Zsa Zsa had a wonderfully romantic evening of dining and dancing in Chicago. Later, they made love for the first time. Zsa Zsa would recall Hilton as being “strong, virile and possessive.” Finally, she was his. After all the angst, the heartache, and deliberation, they had each other. It should have been a triumphant moment. For her it was; she was elated. She later wrote to her mother and told her that she was sure to be taken care of now. She had married a wealthy man, she said, and there was no way she would ever go without, “not as long as I am Mrs. Conrad Hilton.” She wrote that she loved him very much and was happy to have found someone who could love her in return, “and also provide for me in the way that you have always wanted for me.” So she had gotten what she wanted and was satisfied. To a certain extent, of course, Conrad was happy too, but to say that he was overjoyed would have been an overstatement. He was distracted, not present during this night in Chicago.

As they lay in bed, Zsa Zsa whispered that she hoped they would be together for the rest of their lives, or at least that is her memory. “That blonde secretary of yours,” she said as she caressed his arm. “I don’t like her, Connie. I think she’s jealous of me. Would you fire her for me? I’m sure we could find you a better secretary.”

He was preoccupied and not really listening. “Yes, dear,” he said. “Of course.”

Zsa Zsa recalled, “In the silence, in the darkness, I whispered softly, ‘Conrad, what are you thinking?’ And I waited dreamily to hear him murmur, ‘Oh, my darling, I love you. I love you.’ ”

But instead, Conrad was quiet, just staring up at the ceiling, lost in thought with a small smile on his face. Zsa Zsa couldn’t quite read his facial expression; it baffled her.

“What are you thinking,
dah-ling
?,” she asked.

Conrad turned to his new bride and, at last breaking his silence, confessed, “By golly, Georgia! I’m thinking about that Stevens deal.”

The Roosevelt

I
n the spring of 1943, Zsa Zsa Gabor woke up one morning to find that Conrad Hilton was nowhere to be found. Though she searched from room to room, he was clearly gone. “Where is Mr. Hilton?” Zsa Zsa finally asked Wilson, Conrad’s majordomo. “Oh, he went to New York, ma’am,” Wilson answered. “But he didn’t even tell me he was leaving,” Zsa Zsa said, seeming crushed. The majordomo just shrugged. Zsa Zsa would later say that this was the first of many such occurrences—Conrad leaving town without so much as a goodbye. “Nothing hurt me more,” she would later admit. “I began to see clearly that he truly didn’t care about me as much as he did about his business.”

Not that it was a good excuse to treat his wife so dismissively, but Hilton did have some rather important business in Manhattan.

Back in the mid-1920s, Conrad had launched an ambitious campaign to acquire, build, and/or upgrade hotels in Texas, his adopted state. This included properties in Dallas, Waco, Abilene, Lubbock, San Angelo, Plainview, Marlin, and El Paso. At that time, the country’s economy was booming, which he viewed as favorable for further expansion beyond the Lone Star State. By organizing Hilton Hotels, Inc. in 1932, he consolidated his properties into one group. As his acquisitions increased in number, he kept itching to move into the big time, with an eye toward the urban Northeast, specifically New York City. Now he had his eye on the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan.

By the time Conrad Hilton set his sights on the Roosevelt—named for President Teddy Roosevelt—it had been in business for nineteen years and had become a destination point for out-of-towners and notable figures from the worlds of society, politics, and show business. Located at 45 East 45th Street, it covered a city block along busy Madison Avenue. In speaking of the Roosevelt, Hilton referred to it as “this great hotel adjacent to Grand Central Station, half luxury, half commercial—a socialite, so to speak, with a working husband.” In his mind there was nothing more beautiful than a towering hotel with a roster of satisfied guests.

Unfortunately, the hotel business in New York City was not booming in 1943, a consequence of the war and the Great Depression. But that situation was temporary. In the meantime, if there was any way to put together the capital to purchase hotel properties, Conrad’s gut told him to follow through and buy. One by one, with each acquisition, it became easier to put together the equity necessary for the next one.