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Hilton's U.S. hotels are generally good commercial hotels, but the Hiltons abroad are luxury tourist hotels that are more like resorts than hostelries. Hilton has sited on some of the finest hotel locations in the world—looking up at the Parthenon in Athens, near the Diet Building in Tokyo, overlooking the Vatican in Rome and the Queen's private garden in London, on the Nile in Cairo and above the Bosporus in Istanbul, at the foot of the Elburz Mountains in Teheran. All of the hotels glisten and glitter, with an architecture that ranges from international slab to a crosshatched radio-cabinet style. They lean heavily on the anonymity of modernism, and display a spartan opulence designed as much to save the hotel money as to attract the clients. In countries where there is no previous standard of hotel excellence, Hiltons are oases; in such old cities as Rome, London or Paris, they are apt to seem a little off-key and alien.
Susceptible to Flattery. As the force that created this empire, Conrad Hilton might be expected to be as calculating, as antiseptic and as glossily sophisticated as his hotels. The surprise about Hilton is that he is so much like the guests he caters to. Boyish, candid, trusting, he never fails to be amazed and pleased—even astonished—by the world around him. He cannot get over the speed of jet planes or his possession of a $100 Texas-style Stetson, whose price he mentions to anyone who will listen. He is susceptible to even the most transparent flattery. "You know," he says, "after the Rotterdam opening, the president of the corporation that owns the hotel came up to me and said, 'Your dance was the greatest thing that happened here.' That touched me most." When something impresses him, he often slaps his knee and exclaims: "By golly!"
Hilton refuses to comprehend bad news or business reversals ("Don't bother me about that," he says), and his top aides instinctively try to protect him from the harsh realities of the world. Says one: "For all his financial genius, he's the kind of man who can't catch a plane by himself." He is essentially a lonely man, and his closest friend is neither a businessman nor one of his four children, but his personal secretary for 21 years, Olive Wakeman, fiftyish, who acts as his chief buffer against the outside world. "I've got to protect him," she says. "He's the most naive man for his experience I've ever seen; he will not believe that anyone would tell an untruth."