The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (7 page)

Tragically, it was the image, and not the woman, that Nicky Hilton fell in love with when they finally met in October 1949.

Chapter 3
Sexual, A-Loving Husbands
NICKY HILTON AND MICHAEL WILDING

Tall, broad-shouldered, dark eyes flashing mischief and desire, twenty-three-year-old Nicky Hilton was the son of hotel magnate Conrad Hilton. From the instant he laid eyes on Elizabeth at the Mocambo the night of Jane Powell’s wedding, he knew he had to have her. As vice president of the Hilton Corporation and manager of the haughty Bel Air Hotel, Nicky not only had money but powerful connections. When he found out that Elizabeth was working on a film at Paramount, he asked Pete Freeman, son of Paramount chief Y. Frank Freeman, to help him meet her. Pete later ran into Elizabeth and suggested a luncheon with Nicky. “Love it,” she said, aware of Nicky’s reputation as one of the world’s most eligible bachelors.
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They met at Lucy’s, a Mexican restaurant across Melrose Avenue from the studio. She wore a simple violet sheath dress with a round white collar. “Miss Taylor,” said Freeman, “may I present Nicky Hilton.”
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A Place in the Sun
had wrapped that day, and she was feeling a bit teary, explaining, “Excuse the way I look—we just finished Monty’s death scene,” but Nicky’s wild eyes, which were burning holes through her, lifted her mood even as they made her blush.
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With his clean-cut looks and masculine magnetism, he was easy to like after only a few minutes, during which they discovered a common passion for hamburgers with onions, outsize sweaters, and Ezio Pinza, the
basso profundo
who’d come to Metro from his Broadway smash
South Pacific
. “I thought he was a nice, pure, all-American boy,” she recalled, but something deeper in her, something torn and twisted, responded to Nicky’s essential helplessness and lostness, a dark side that would eventually all but swallow her up. The product of a broken home, he’d grown up since his eighth year without his mother, Mary Barron Hilton. Nicky later became the family’s black sheep—a secret heroin addict, compulsive gambler, and woman-beater. His younger brother Barron was already married. Though Conrad Hilton preferred Nicky’s company—both father and son were playboys—he’d been bugging Nicky for months to get married and to start raising a family. Referring to Nicky’s brother, he’d said, “Barron did it—it’s the only way to succeed.”
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At the end of their first date, Nicky asked Elizabeth in his beguiling Texas drawl, “May I call you, Elizabeth?” Charmed by the unfamiliar formality, she replied, “I’d like you to.”
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At home that afternoon, she tore open a florist’s transparent box containing three dozen long-stemmed yellow roses and pressed her face into the fragrant petals, wondering how he’d known her favorite flower. Hovering over her, Sara read the card, “To bring back the Sun—Nick,”
⁶
and screamed, like someone who’d just won the lottery, “Nicky Hilton! Nicky Hilton! Oh, Elizabeth.”
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Nicky told his father that he’d met the most beautiful girl in the world and was going to marry her, convert her to Catholicism, and sire a dozen kids with her. Conrad Hilton, who’d recently survived marriage to Zsa Zsa Gabor, greeted the news with mixed emotions. In his fifties, old enough to be her father, he’d married Zsa Zsa on April 10, 1942, expecting to get a beautiful simpleton who’d follow his orders. “Got Zsa Zsa and the Town House the same day,” he crowed. Instead, he got a complex, exuberant, and mercurial woman who would spend time in a sanitarium, “a world of straitjackets, insulin shock treatments, endless injections,” Zsa Zsa recalled. Being married to Zsa Zsa, Conrad once said, was “expensive,” a “joke,” and “like holding onto a Roman candle, beautiful, exciting, but . . . it is surprisingly hard to live the Fourth of July every day . . . Our marriage was doomed before it started.” Intrigued by her virile stepsons, Zsa Zsa later wrote cryptically, “Nicky, the eldest, was nearly seventeen, only a little younger than myself . . . I did my best to be a companion to the . . . boys.”
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When Nicky provocatively hinted he’d like Zsa Zsa to kiss him the same way she kissed his father, Conrad backhanded him across his face so hard that Nicky went staggering backward.
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In 1944, Conrad and Zsa Zsa went their separate ways and were finally divorced in 1946. That was not the last Nicky saw of his stepmother. Zsa Zsa told me, over a meal of “Dracula Goulash” she cooked for us in her Bel Air kitchen, that she was going out with Nicky after he met Elizabeth.

After Zsa Zsa, Conrad became involved with actresses Jeanne Crain and Denise Darcel and socialites Hope Hampton and Kay Spreckles. Both Conrad and Nicky loved glamour, but the father knew from experience it was a trap. His first instinct was to spare his son the agony of a bad marriage.

Nicky was drawn to Elizabeth for the same reason his father had sought out Zsa Zsa. He wanted an ego crutch in the form of a beautiful woman on his arm to confirm his masculinity. Conrad, as Zsa Zsa discovered, had sexual problems stemming from Catholic guilt.
¹⁰
Nicky’s problems stemmed from a shattered ego. Dominated all his life by his father, he’d been convinced from childhood that he’d never be a great businessman like Conrad. “The trouble with me is that I have a millionaire dad,” he said.
¹¹
As the elder son he was the titular heir apparent to the Hilton empire, but it was his younger brother Barron who demonstrated ability to run the international hotel chain, while Nicky spent his time drinking, shooting heroin, and gambling.

Two days after they met, Nicky called on Elizabeth at home, and Sara invited him to stay for a dinner of beef and kidney pie. During the meal, Elizabeth pushed the kidneys aside, trying to find the beef. Nicky saw what she was doing, followed suit, and they both started laughing. When Sara wanted to know if he drank and smoked, he lied, saying he did a little of both. Two days later, he invited the Taylors to dinner at the Hiltons’ sixty-four-room Bel Air mansion, Casa Encantada, which was located on eight-and-one-half acres off Bellagio Road. Barron and Marylin Hilton were visiting from Chicago with their two small children, and the other guest was MGM dancer Ann Miller, Conrad’s current girlfriend. Elizabeth’s father admired the Ming vases from China in the foyer, and Sara was agog over the fourteen-karat-gold fixtures in the mansion’s twenty-six bathrooms, five kitchens, and five wet bars. When reporters later asked Sara what she thought of Nicky, she said, “He couldn’t have been nicer or more charming. We couldn’t have liked Nick more.”
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After dinner, they all went out to the Mocambo for drinks and dancing. In the following days, Elizabeth and Nicky dated constantly—going to the theater with the Geary Steffens, to a football game with Marshall and Barbara Thompson, and to dinner with Howard Taylor and his steady girl, Mara. Gossip columnist Louella O. Parsons rang Elizabeth to inquire about her relationship with Nicky. “Nothing comes off until the ring goes on,” Elizabeth snapped.
¹³
After she’d broken up with Davis and left Pawley just short of the altar, columnists had dubbed her “Liz the Jilt.” She was determined to keep the lid on her relationship with Nicky for as long as she could, hoping to avoid a backlash of bitchy publicity if this romance aborted like the others.

An incorrigible youth-seeker who couldn’t get along with his wives and used his oldest son as a drinking buddy, Conrad Hilton wasn’t sure he was ready to give up Nicky to Elizabeth. He complained, “Nick was suddenly incapable of good times that didn’t center around his startlingly lovely, young star.” Conrad had risen from humble beginnings as the son of a New Mexico merchant to found a hotel empire so vast and illustrious that by 1949 it included the Waldorf-Astoria, New York’s flagship hotel. Zsa Zsa once described Nicky as “a young Conrad, proud, stubborn, hard to control.”
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Shortly after Elizabeth and Nicky met, Conrad insisted that Nicky, always his favorite son, accompany him to a party marking the opening of the first of his international hotels, the Caribe Hilton, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Nicky wanted to stay in L.A. with Elizabeth, but Conrad warned him that he’d fallen in love with a “photograph” rather than a woman and was moving too fast.

The domineering Conrad finally coaxed Nicky into coming with him to San Juan but soon realized his mistake. Obsessed by Elizabeth, Nicky no longer was an amusing sidekick for Conrad, who began to spend more time with Ann Miller. After hearing reports of Nicky’s playboy proclivities, Francis Taylor urged Elizabeth not to rush into an engagement. At Christmas, the Taylor and Hilton families flew together to Arrowhead Springs, where Conrad owned a luxurious hotel. There, Nicky and Elizabeth were inseparable. He took her down the toboggan run, holding her closely, and later everyone went sailing on the big lake. Conrad put up a majestic Christmas tree in the lobby and another in his suite. On Christmas morning, Nicky gave Elizabeth dangling diamond earrings set in clusters of pearls, and she gave him a gold ID bracelet. Taking Francis aside, Nicky asked permission to marry Elizabeth. Francis gave his blessing, though Elizabeth was not yet eighteen and still hadn’t graduated from high school. The Little Red Schoolhouse solved that problem by arranging for Elizabeth to acquire a legitimate high school diploma. At University High in West L.A., she was abruptly planted in a midterm graduating class. In white cap and gown she was graduated the final week of January 1950. “She wasn’t one of the class, really,” recalled Debbie Reynolds. “It was more like making a personal appearance.”
¹⁵

Nicky attended the graduation ceremony, but Elizabeth still felt like an outsider, a total stranger to the other graduates, who were laughing and chatting and hugging one another. Her haphazard education would hound her throughout her life, especially in the sixties when she would find herself among the intellectuals of the British stage.
¹⁶
After graduation, Nicky took her to the Mocambo and told her, “What I want to be is your
husband
. Will you marry me, Elizabeth?” Remembering her conflict with Pawley, she brought up the matter of her movie commitments, but Nicky told her, “I like your career.” Guessing, correctly, that Francis had already told her of his intentions, Nicky called her a “little ham, acting so surprised,” and insisted they set a date. As they swayed in each other’s arms on the Mocambo’s postage-size dance floor, Elizabeth said, “In May. In May. Early in May. Say the fifth. Is that okay?” Nicky agreed, exclaiming, “I get the most wonderful girl in the world. You know, when you marry a Catholic, it’s forever, Elizabeth.”
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She said she was ready to begin her instruction in the church immediately. As he gave her a lingering kiss, everyone in the nightclub burst into applause. The next day, Sara started drilling her in the catechism.
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As rumors of Elizabeth’s engagement circulated in the press, business picked up at Hilton hotels all over the world, and Conrad Hilton let his desire for free publicity override his better judgment. He came to believe Metro’s publicity leaks about the movie princess’s fairy-tale romance. One evening, he invited Elizabeth and Nicky to dinner at Casa Encantada, hosting a five-course meal served on solid gold plates by waiters in tuxedos. She was grateful to have his blessing. Indeed Conrad seemed almost unduly eager to have Elizabeth in the family. “He was probably a little jealous,” said Ann Miller, who added, “he’d like to be in his son’s shoes.” At Nicky’s urging, Conrad broke the news of the wedding date in the press, blurting to an inquisitive reporter who’d asked him if the couple was serious, “Serious? Of course they’re serious. They’re going to get married on May 5.” Elizabeth was furious, and Louella O. Parsons apologized to her, whining that Conrad himself had given her the scoop.
¹⁹

Yet Elizabeth also had a premonition of disaster, confiding to columnist Olive Wakeman, “Everything is against us.” Though she knew Nicky was eager to get her pregnant, she defiantly announced, “We don’t want children for two years yet. Nick and I want to have fun.” Unimpressed, Esther Williams predicted that Elizabeth would have a baby between every two pictures, but Elizabeth said, “Esther, that’s enough . . . I’ve never been talked to like this in my life.”
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During an interview with Jean Porter in 1998, I asked, “Why on earth did she marry Nicky?” Jean said, “She wanted to get off on her own. She liked her parents but wanted some independence.” Elizabeth herself later admitted that she’d at last surrendered to lust, “driven by feelings that could not be indulged outside marriage.”
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On February 20, 1950, Nicky gave her a five-carat diamond engagement ring and diamond-and-emerald teardrop earrings. Seven days later, she turned eighteen and invited Monty to her wedding, which was timed to coincide as nearly as possible with MGM’s June 6 release of
Father of the Bride
. Aggressively macho as well as a racist and a male chauvinist, Nicky had alienated Monty, who said, “Bessie Mae, I don’t think dear Nicky is my kind of guy.”