Ian Sansom on a clan famed for hotels and humanitarianism
In the third season of Mad Men, Don Draper meets Conrad Hilton, played by the actor Chelcie Ross, at a party at a country club. They drink together ? Draper expertly mixing them a couple of Old Fashioneds ? and they recognise one another as fellow outsiders. Hilton confesses: "No matter how expensive my cufflinks, I feel like I've got the head of a jackass." Draper later takes Hilton on as a client, and Hilton takes to calling Draper in the middle of the night, whisky in hand, saying he has been inspired by God, and announcing plans to put Hilton hotels on the moon. In other words, Hilton is a character more unpredictable and exasperating even than Draper.
Conrad Hilton was born in San Antonio, New Mexico, in 1887. His father owned a grocery store, and the family sometimes rented out rooms. In 1919, Hilton bought the Mobley hotel in Cisco, Texas: the unlikely foundation for his international hotel chain. In his autobiography, Be My Guest (1957), he describes the Mobley as a "cross between a flophouse and a goldmine". The phrase might serve as a useful motto for the Hilton family.
Hilton went on to build hotels throughout America, and styled himself "the innkeeper to the world": the Hilton Worldwide hospitality company now has more than 3,600 hotels in 81 countries. The company vision, apparently, is "to fill the earth with the light and warmth of hospitality" ? and Hilton hotels.
Hilton was a devout Catholic. He married three times and had four children. With his first wife, Mary Adelaide Barron, he had three sons. With his second wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, he had a daughter. And in 1944 he established the Conrad N Hilton Foundation. When he died in 1979, he left just $500,000 to each of his sons, and $10,000 to his daughter, the rest of his estate going to the foundation. His son, Barron, by then president of the family company, contested the will and won the right to substantial shares in the company stock. Then, in 2007, emulating his father, Barron decided to bequeath most of his wealth to the foundation, so it looks as if the Hilton millions will eventually end up where Conrad Hilton intended.
Another of Conrad's sons, Conrad "Nicky" Hilton, was married to Elizabeth Taylor, but he and the many other Hiltons are really only footnotes in Hilton family history, because there is only one Hilton who has rivalled Conrad's fame and wealth ? his great-grandaughter, Paris.
The journalist Simon Hattenstone has suggested in this paper that Paris may be the "ultimate post-feminist", while the author Naomi Wolf has said she is an "empty signifier". According to her unofficial biographer, Chas Newkey-Burden, in Paris Hilton: Life on the Edge (2007), she is "a naturally positive and generously spirited person" and "a role model for women across the world".
She is definitely a TV and movie star, a model, a perfumier, an author and a jewellery and clothing designer. She was also, briefly ? incredibly ? a kind of protest singer, with her 2008 "Paris for President" campaign video, in which she sings "Incentivise nuclear nonproliferation / And ratify Kyoto today ... Waterboarding is torture and / Global warming is totally not hot."
It is just possible that she is a kind of 21st-century Oscar Wilde. "There is no sin worse in life than being boring," she says in her autobiography, Confessions of an Heiress (2004), which is knowingly subtitled "A Tongue-in-Chic Peek Behind the Pose". Certainly, like her great-grandfather, she is laughing all the way to the bank.
The ultimate example of art-imitating-life-imitating-art would be for her to appear in an episode of Mad Men as a romantic interest for Don Draper.
Applications are now open for the 2012 Hilton humanitarian prize, administered by the Conrad N Hilton Foundation (hiltonfoundation.org).
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/23/hilton-hotel-paris-family-dynasties-ian-sansom
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