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At one point during the lavish opening of almost every new Hilton hotel, the houselights dim and spotlights pick out a lean, tall man with a shy smile on his permanently suntanned face. He escorts a pretty girl—usually a new one each time—to the center of the ballroom floor. Then, to the slow, stately strains of the violins, they point their feet, bow, turn about and sweep elegantly into an unfamiliar step. The dance is the courtly Varsoviana, brought to America from the palaces of Europe by Mexico's Emperor Maximilian; the man who puts his foot out so skillfully is Hotelman Conrad Nicholson Hilton, who calls the tune for the $293 million Hilton Hotel chain. Hilton has adopted the obscure Varsoviana as a ceremonial dance of good luck with which to open each of his new hotels—and lately he has been dancing more frequently than ever before in his 44-year career.
In his 76th year, a full decade after most businessmen retire, Hilton is busy spotting the world with hotels wherever the U.S. tourist and businessman alight, girding the globe with new links in the longest hotel chain ever made. Already this year, Hilton has opened new hotels in Teheran, London, Athens, Rotterdam, Rome, Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York and Portland, Ore. Under construction are two new Hiltons in Paris, one at Montreal airport, and others in Brussels, Honolulu, Tel Aviv, Guadalajara, Rabat, Mayagüez, Tunis, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Worcester, Mass., and Washington, D.C. Soon to be started are hotels in Curaçao, Cyprus, Addis Ababa, Dublin, Manila, Caracas, Barbados, St. Paul and Kuwait. Fortnight ago, Hilton added the Dorado Riviera in Puerto Rico to his empire, and last week he took over the Arawak in Jamaica.
By the end of 1964, Hilton will have just as many hotels abroad (39) as he will have in the U.S. Hilton's overseas hotels last year brought in more than a quarter of the chain's net operating profit of $5,700,000, and Innkeeper Hilton expects that they will soon account for more than half his earnings. Not counting the many millions that foreign investors will have put into these overseas hotels, the Hilton chain by 1964 will be worth well over $300 million. "Where does Hilton go from here?" asks Lawrence Stern, chairman of Chicago's American National Bank, a Hilton director. "To the moon!" Hilton people get to talking like that.
Two-Way Streets. This year nearly 12 million Americans—12% more than last year—will travel outside the U.S., and a surprising lot of them will want the comforts of home. Newly affluent Europeans and Japanese have also joined in the wanderlust, and the world's byways are fast becoming two-way streets. Virtually everywhere there is need for modern hotels. "Very few new hotels have been built outside North America in the past 40 years," says Conrad Hilton. "In Istanbul ours is the only first-class hotel in a city that for a thousand years was the biggest city in the world. There have been no great hotels in Paris for 40 years, and the same is true of Rome and Athens."