The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty (35 page)

Trish

P
atricia “Trish” McClintock was seventeen when she met Nicky Hilton one Saturday in the summer of 1958 at the Del Mar racetrack in Del Mar, California. From a well-to-do family whose wealth had been made in the banking and oil businesses, Trish was accustomed to trafficking in the circles of high society. Her parents were both college-educated; her mother had dated Joseph Kennedy, the oldest Kennedy brother, who was killed in the war, and her grandmother was assistant treasurer of the United States. Born elite, Trish was raised with maids and servants at her feet in an enormous Oklahoma mansion. Her education was an expensive and private one at the Ethel Walker School in Connecticut, from which she received glowing grades. Her vacations were spent traveling through Europe with her recently divorced mother, who was now remarried to Broadway actor and producer (of
South Pacific
) William Horace Schmidlapp, who had been married to film star Carole Landis for three years until her suicide (a Seconal overdose) in 1948. Sometimes, Trish would find herself in California, where she and her grandparents would loll away the hours on Wednesdays and Saturdays at the racetrack in box number 203 (which happened to be directly below one shared by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his protégé, Bureau Associate Director Clyde Tolson).

Trish was the kind of woman men looked at twice. About five foot four, with bright brown eyes and shoulder-length brunette hair, she was shapely and carried herself with great élan. She was stylish, not just with her clothing but in the way she comported herself. She had what the French call “je ne sais quoi,” that ineffable quality that made people take note of her. This isn’t to say that she was a Hollywood-style glamour girl, though. She wasn’t. Rather, she had a homespun quality about her. She was approachable, not aloof, a girl-next-door type.

One Saturday, Trish’s grandfather—who was a member of the Federal Reserve Board and, as president of First National Bank in El Paso, was also Conrad Hilton’s banker—spotted another board member at the races in the company of Nicky Hilton. Introductions were made all around, which was how Trish McClintock ended up meeting the tall and darkly handsome—and older—Nicky Hilton. “Here’s some money,” Nicky told the young ingénue as he handed her a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill. “Now, go bet on whatever horse you like.” Was he trying to impress her? If so, it hadn’t worked. “I’m not taking your money,” she said, more intrigued than insulted. “You can give me two dollars to bet if you like, but not a hundred.” Then, catching herself, she quickly said, “Wait! I don’t need your money! I have my own!” He laughed and said he liked her spunk, her lack of pretense. She had to admit to herself that she found him interesting. “But he was too old for me,” she would recall many years later. “He was thirty-one when I met him. I thought that was
old
. At seventeen, I had never dated anyone over the age of twenty. I’d certainly never gone out with anyone in his
thirties
.” The two spent the afternoon gambling together, however, and getting to know each other. The following Wednesday they saw each other again, and then again on the next Saturday. “But there was no interest from me at all,” she recalled. “Not in the least. We would talk and he would flirt and I was not interested.

“At the end of the day on Saturday, he said, ‘I have a party I’m going to on Saturday night and I’d love for you to be my date’,” Trish recalled. “ ‘It’s Natalie Wood’s party,’ he said. So that piqued my interest. And then he told me it was a Gay Nineties theme. I told him I would have nothing to wear to such a party, and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it. You and Natalie are the same size. I’ll tell Natalie to get one of her costumes from Warner Bros. for you.’ I thought all of this was exciting and said yes, I would go.”

Trish’s excitement would be short-lived, however. When Trish told her father. Frank Grant McClintock, of Nick’s invitation, he objected. “He said, ‘Forget it. You are not going out with a man who is old enough to be your father.’ And that was that. I was seventeen. What was I going to do? My father had such a fit, I had to call Nicky and tell him the date was off. He was disappointed. But not so disappointed that he didn’t continue to pursue me.”

For the next few months, Trish and Nicky would continue seeing each other at the racetrack, but never dated. He would turn thirty-two in July; she would turn eighteen in August. Finally, on September 14, 1958, Trish returned to New York, where she was scheduled to begin her freshman year at Briarcliffe College. She would stay with her mother and stepfather while in the city. The next day, Nicky telephoned her. He missed her, he said, and wanted to continue their relationship, even if by long distance. Before long, he was courting her in New York.

“One thing led to another,” she recalled, “and before I knew it, I had gone from being not that interested to being completely in love. It was sudden and surprising. When I realized how I felt, it was like being on board a fast-moving train, everything moving quickly. I was young and excited and it felt romantic and new. Finally, just before Halloween 1958, Nicky asked me to marry him.”

“The Woman to Give My Children Life”

N
icky Hilton had never before met anyone like Trish McClintock. First of all, she didn’t drink. She most certainly didn’t do drugs, and she didn’t swear. She was also a virgin. “She’s practically a nun,” was how Eric Hilton put it at the time.

After the succession of glamorous, sophisticated women in his life, Nicky’s friends and family were baffled by his choice of Trish McClintock as a partner. He was used to being in the company of much more experienced women. Though Trish was quite pretty, she wasn’t what one might think of as a bombshell. She didn’t emanate the confidence or sexuality of his previous romantic conquests, a wide range of self-possessed beauties from Elizabeth Taylor to Mamie Van Doren to Betsy von Furstenberg to Natalie Wood and Joan Collins. Trish was unaffected, a genuine innocent. “She’s a breath of fresh air,” Nicky told Bob Neal about Trish McClintock. The two were throwing back Pabst beers in a bar in West Hollywood in October 1958, just before Nicky would ask for Trish’s hand in marriage.

“She’s not your type, though,” Bob observed. “She doesn’t have that
edge
your girls usually have.”

Nicky smiled. “Yeah, well, if you look at my track record with girls, it’s not so great, is it? I think it’s time for a change.”

“But is there passion between you two?” Bob asked, pushing a little more. “I just don’t see it, Nick.”

Nicky took a drag from his cigarette as he considered his friend’s statement. “Passion is overrated,” he countered. “I had passion with Elizabeth and look what that got me. Now I want something more. She’s the one,” he concluded. “I think she’s the woman to give my children life.” Because it was such a poetic way to put it—“give my children life”—Bob Neal would always recall the moment with vivid clarity. “He really meant it,” Bob would say many years later. “I think it came from a deep place in him.”

It was as if, at the age of thirty-two, Conrad “Nicky” Hilton was finally growing up and looking for something more significant in a partner than just the temporary thrill of sexual fireworks. He had recently begun talking about having children and said he was searching for a woman who would not only be a romantic partner for him, but a suitable mother for his children. “Can you see Elizabeth Taylor as a mother?” he asked Bob Neal. “No way. [Actually, Elizabeth had three children by this time, and from all reports, she was a pretty good mother.] But can you see
Trish
as a mother? Absolutely. When am I ever going to find another girl like her?” he asked.

Also distinguishing Trish McClintock was that she didn’t know much about Nicky’s past and therefore held no judgment about him. “At first, I didn’t really know anything about him at all,” she now allows. “I never knew, for instance, a thing about his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor. I didn’t even know that he had been married to her until I read about it in stories that ran in the press after Nicky and I announced our engagement. That was—honest to God—the first time I had ever heard a thing about his involvement with Elizabeth.
^*
And even after that, Nicky and I never discussed her. He never discussed any of his ex-girlfriends with me. And I was just as happy that he didn’t. I didn’t want to know the details, and he never told me any of them.

“But after our engagement, I started hearing rumors about this one and that one, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t know whether to believe the stories or not. I would have been horrified, at the time, to learn that these rumors were true.”

If Nicky Hilton ever had the benefit of starting over with a clean slate, it was with this woman. It wasn’t that Trish had decided to trust him; she was so inexperienced it never occurred to her
not
to trust him. Considering how high-profile his past exploits had been, Nicky probably was correct in thinking that he would likely never find anyone else so blind to his past.

“She didn’t judge him,” said Bob Neal. “She made him feel like a winner at a time when he was tired of feeling like a loser. I understood it. It was like everything that had happened in the past was finally in the past, and he now had a chance to write a new future. Also, he finally had alignment in terms of how his family felt about his romantic life, because all of the Hiltons fully supported Trish. They felt that she was just what the doctor ordered, that she could keep Nick on the straight and narrow because that was the way she lived her own life. Conrad decided to accept the fact that Trish was Episcopalian and not Catholic. I think at this point he felt she had so many redeeming qualities, he could live with her faith.”

Trish’s character was a pleasant counterpoint to her sisters-in-law, Marilyn and Pat. Whereas Marilyn was regal and Pat stylish, Trish was more the babe-in-the-woods type. What the three wives had in common, though, was their intelligence and determination. They were not weak-willed women; they had strongly held opinions. Of course, their husbands didn’t always pay attention to their viewpoints. In this era before the women’s liberation movement, many wives found that their husbands weren’t eager to hear their views about business, and the Hilton sons were no exception in that regard. Whether or not the fellows heeded their wives’ advice, though, they were going to hear it anyway. None of the Hilton wives were silent or demure.

“We all attended the party in New York [at the Colony restaurant] where the engagement was announced to the press,” added Robert Wentworth. “I just remember Nicky’s mother, Mary, being happy and generous toward Trish.”

“Does she make you happy?” Mary Saxon asked her son Nicky at the Colony party. Mary, who was now fifty-two, was sitting at a table with Pat and Marilyn when Nicky came over, took a chair next to her, and kissed her on the cheek.

“She makes me happy, Mom,” he said.

Mary smiled at him. “Does this mean you’ll finally be giving me more grandchildren?” she asked him. “Because, as you can see, I’m not getting any younger.”

Nicky laughed. “I don’t know how we can avoid it,” he answered. He then stood up. “Mom, may I have this dance?” he asked her.

“Oh my!” Mary exclaimed as she rose from her chair. “You know, I do love to dance,” she enthused as she and her oldest son took to the floor together.

Nicky and Trish Marry

A
fter Natalie Wood’s admonition to her, Trish McClintock was concerned enough about her future with Nicky Hilton to at least raise the subject with her mother, who said that she wholeheartedly agreed with her father that Trish should not marry Nicky. Trish’s mind was made up, though. She was going ahead with the wedding. However, her father, Frank Grant McClintock, was so unhappy about the upcoming nuptials that he wouldn’t even allow her to marry in his hometown of Tulsa. He explained that he would be too embarrassed in front of his personal friends and business associates to have his daughter walking down the aisle with a man close to his own age, and the fact that her bridesmaids would be around her age and Nicky’s groomsmen approximately his age didn’t make matters any easier to accept. Instead, he would host an engagement dinner for about a thousand people in one of the elegant banquet rooms of the Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa.

After the engagement was announced, Trish felt that she needed to clear the air with Nicky once and for all. “Look, I’ve heard some stories about this starlet and that starlet,” Trish began tentatively, according to her memory. “And I don’t know what you could see in me after some of the women you have had. But I have to tell you, Nicky, that if you ever cheat on me,
ever
, I will walk out on you and never return.”

Nicky was stunned. Trish’s direct approach took him by complete surprise. “Okay,” he finally said. “I get it. I understand.”

Emboldened by Nicky’s submissive response, Trish took things a little further. She said that she needed him to know that she did not come from a family of abuse, and she wasn’t used to it, nor would she tolerate it. Therefore, if he ever hit her, it would be over between them. Nicky couldn’t help but become a tad defensive. After all, this was quite a indicting suggestion for Trish to make. “But I would never do that, Trish,” he protested. “Why would you ever think that?”