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Lobster Cocktail. In his hotels, Hilton does not make a practice of greeting the prominent guest or throwing his rank around the lobby. Recently when a temperamental Town House barber said that he was too busy to come to Hilton's room, Hilton went to the barbershop, borrowed a straight razor and shaved himself. A small-towner for all his wealth, Hilton is still often horrified at hotel prices. In Chicago, while dining with Hotelman Kirkeby in Kirkeby's Blackstone, he ordered an appetizer, then spotted the $1.60 price. "My gosh," he exploded, "what a price to pay for a lobster cocktail!"
Such naivete cost Hilton considerably more when he married for the second time in 1942. Divorced from his first wife, Mary Barren Hilton, eight years before, he married beautiful, 25-year-old Sari ("Zsazsa") Gabor, Miss Hungary of 1936, the day he opened his Palacio in Chihuahua, Mex. After 4½ years of off & on marriage, exotic Zsazsa told an exotic-sounding story to the press. For six months, said Zsazsa mysteriously, she had been confined in a hotel room under dope; it would probably take $10 million to make her forget it. Actually, she forgot it for a divorce, which cost Hilton $250,000, and a handsome trust fund for the daughter she bore him. She has since married Movie Star George Sanders.
Chuck-a-Luck. For all his seeming artlessness, Hilton has the adding-machine mind of a banker, and never forgets a figure. His hotel-running day begins at 8. At home in his $55,000 house in Bel-Air, Calif, he breakfasts in bed, usually on orange juice and coffee. A practicing Catholic, he walks to church almost every day, then rides to his Town House office in one of his two Cadillacs. He keeps close tabs on all of his hotels from the daily operating reports, which are detailed down to such items as corkage and the weather. Though Hilton can generally guess very close to the actual profit figures, sometimes he gets a jolt. In a report from a hotel that he had just bought in Las Vegas, Nev., he once read: "Craps, $1,200; chuck-a-luck, $800; twenty-one, $750." Said Hilton: "It's money, all right, but it's not the kind of hotel business I understand." He sold out at a $1,000,000 profit.
Promptly at 6 p.m. every day, Connie Hilton stops working, starts playing. On a flying trip to Manhattan last week he started playing at a cocktail party for Socialite Felice Vanderbilt, then went to the Plaza's Rendez-Vous Room for dinner & dancing. His favorite dance step is the Varsoviana, described by a friend as "a Texas version of a Hungarian square dance." From the Rendez-Vous Room he dashed to zebra-upholstered El Morocco, then on to the Waldorf's Wedgwood Room. He finally rolled into bed at 3:15 a.m.—the end of a perfect Hilton day.
On weekends at home, he roars around the Pacific in a converted PT boat, plays golf in the high 80s, or drives to his mountain retreat on Lake Arrowhead. Trying to describe hard-playing, hardworking Connie Hilton, one associate said triumphantly: "He's a. . .a. . .Texan!"