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Audacious Horse Trading. Still, there is a hard streak of practicality in Conrad Hilton. The son of a successful merchant in San Antonio, N. Mex., he put down his entire savings of $5,000 in 1919 to buy his first hotel, the bustling Mobley in oil-rich Cisco, Texas. He managed to put together a small chain in Texas before the Depression wiped him out, bounced back with shrewd and often audacious horse trading to collect a lineup of prestigious hotels. His first major move was to acquire the high-priced Town House in Los Angeles, but he really broke into the big time in 1945 when he bought Chicago's 3,000-room Stevens (which had been occupied by the Army during the war, was later renamed the Conrad Hilton), the world's largest hotel, and Chicago's esteemed Palmer House. The deal that gave him the greatest satisfaction and made him the nation's leading hotelman came when he made the Waldorf-Astoria a Hilton hotel in 1949.
While he was rushing about adding links to his U.S. chain, Hilton's unfailing courtesy launched him almost by accident into the international hotel business. When Puerto Rico decided in 1947 that it needed a first-class hotel to help lure U.S. businessmen to set up shop there, Teodoro Moscoso, chief of the Puerto Rico Development Corp. (and now the director of the Alliance for Progress), fired off letters to leading U.S. hotelmen inviting them to come down. Only Hilton answered promptly, with a warm, friendly letter that began by greeting the Spanish-speaking Moscoso as "Mi estimado amigo." After that, Hilton had no difficulty signing a partnership deal with Puerto Rico to build the Caribe Hilton, now one of the most popular and profitable hotels in his chain.
Hilton's own board of directors, composed mostly of Midwestern and Western businessmen, were appalled at the thought of moving out of the U.S. But they decided to let him have some hotels abroad as playthings; they voted him a paltry $500,000 and set up the international division as a separate subsidiary so that its failure (which they expected) would not pull down the whole company. Working with profits from the Caribe, Hilton in the next ten years built eight more international hotels from Mexico City to Berlin. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Hilton added the ten Statler Hotels to his collection and started a little belatedly to build his chain of eight Hilton Inns to compete with motels.
Princely Aloofness. Even at his age, Hilton is very much in command of his empire and often seems to have more energy than his younger colleagues. He regularly scans reports from each hotel and reads complaints that guests send in. If he sees something amiss, a hotel manager somewhere will get a quick telephone call from Hilton. Recently Hilton launched a big drive to make Hilton employees more courteous to guests, had behind-the-scenes spots in Hilton hotels plastered with posters that asked: "Have you smiled today? It's bound to give you a lift."