Conrad Hilton’s Secret of Success

Conrad Hilton at the peak of his power, in 1957.

(Courtesy of the Conrad N. Hilton Collection, Hospitality Industry Archives, UH\CNH Portrait Images)

In today’s cultural zeitgeist, the name Hilton may conjure red carpets and racy videotapes more than hotels and humanitarianism, but long before Paris Hilton became an inescapable fixture in the world of popular culture, her great-grandfather Conrad built a hotel empire on a foundation of perseverance and faith.

Today marks the eighty-first anniversary of the opening of the first Hilton hotel. After starting out in the lodging business by taking over the small, 40-room Mobley Hotel in the sleepy town of Cisco, Texas, in 1919, Hilton built the first hotel bearing his own name in Dallas six years later. How he went from their to establishing one of the world’s largest and most respected hotel chains was, as he himself saw it, largely a matter of faith. Perhaps the single most powerful influence on him, from his years as a lieutenant in World War I to his later career as hotel magnate, was his religion.

His devotion to Catholicism and its tenets permeated his practices in both business and personal life. His mother, the former Mary Laufersweiler, and his father, Augustus Hilton, a first-generation Norwegian immigrant, shared a deep commitment to Catholicism, and they infused their son with their faith from an early age. He graduated from the clerically run St. Michael’s College, near his home in the New Mexico Territory, and his mother encouraged him from boyhood to pray and attend church, especially at times of difficulty and loss. He would need to.

The Great Depression proved debilitating to rich and poor alike, and Conrad Hilton was one of many future titans of business the devastatingly stagnant economy left grappling with a drastic loss of profits. His nascent hotel industry spiraled into debt and bankruptcy, and his marriage to his first wife, Mary Adelaide Baron, foundered. He couldn’t afford to finish hotels he had committed himself to building, and he began losing ones already open.

Faced with challenges that might have seemed insurmountable, he did what he had done since he was a boy—resolved to work hard and have faith in God. Others, it seemed, made up their minds to put their faith in Hilton. He was able to buy goods on credit from locally owned stores because they trusted his ability and determination to one day pay them back. As the kindness of others and his own ingenuity helped him rebuild his hotel empire to proportions previously unheard of, he solidified his commitment to charity and hospitality—two characteristics that became hallmarks both of Hilton Hotels and of the man who began them.

Kendra Walker, the vice president of brand communications at the Hilton Hotel Corporation, says, “He envisioned a world where acts of hospitality built bridges between people and even nations—hospitality as almost a social, respectful form of love; consideration, charity, and respect given unconditionally from one person to another. And there is no better place than the hotel business to become a beacon to encourage greater hospitality between people.”

By 1949, when he fulfilled a dream and made national headlines by purchasing the famed Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City, his financial problems were far in his wake. He was a father four times over and had recently finalized a divorce from his second wife, the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor. He was famously quoted as saying “Success seems to be connected with action. Successful men keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.”

His death, in 1979, didn’t end his charitable giving. His will called for a large portion of his considerable fortune to be set aside for humanitarian efforts, and in it he wrote, “Love one another, for that is the whole law; so our fellow men deserve to be loved and encouraged—never to be abandoned to wander alone in poverty and darkness. The practice of charity will bind us—will bind all men in one great brotherhood.”

To that end he left the money that created the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. Despite disputes among Hilton family members, especially Conrad’s son Barron, about the foundation’s endowment, it continues to work to aid the Catholic Sisters, promote safe water development, blindness prevention, housing for the mentally ill homeless, and substance-abuse prevention, among other things.

Charity is something that has not been lost on Conrad Hilton’s descendants. Asked about the moral value that has most affected her life, his great-granddaughter Paris, undeniably the most famous living Hilton and one more widely associated with feckless hedonism than with anything deeper and more abiding, said, “Compassion. It is something that has always been very important to my family. It’s in my blood; it runs through my veins.”

—Erin Gaetz is an undergraduate at the University of Virginia.