House of Hilton

October 2, 2006
Master of the quick celebrity bio (Idol: Rock Hudson
, etc.), Oppenheimer does a cursory, glib job of dishing the dirt on the famous hotelier dynasty established by Conrad Hilton by the 1920s. Oppenheimer begins and ends his increasingly sordid saga with the plight of the youngest in the Hilton line, arriviste Paris, who made herself an instant household name in 2002 with an erotic home video pirated on the Internet. Oppenheimer works backward from Paris's maternal line, which stars a succession of pushy stage moms and gold diggers like her mother, Kathleen, a successful child model; he then moves on to her paternal line, featuring great-grandfather Conrad Hilton, a big-talking Catholic German from San Antonio, Tex., who made a name and a fortune buying hotels, eventually marrying the apocryphal Miss Hungary, Zsa Zsa Gabor. However, with his first wife, Mary, he produced the three sons (Nick, Barron, and Eric) who would fuel the subsequent family slide, especially glamorous firstborn Nicky, the deeply alcoholic Hollywood skirt chaser who had the honor of being Elizabeth Taylor's first husband (for seven months). The reader will gasp to learn of the Hilton men's sexual athletics—and shudder to hear that such a privileged family could be so shockingly uneducated and uncouth.