A Must Read for Any ‘The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ Fan ~ Book Review of ‘House of Hilton’ by Jerry Oppenheimer

I’m assuming if you clicked on to this article that you are a fan of ‘RHOBH’ are at least curious about the book.  You’ll have to excuse me as I get my disclaimers out of the way because I don’t necessarily want to be known as the reader of this book, but my bloodlust for information about a set of certain housewives siblings outweighed my desire to be thought of as someone who wouldn’t read this book.  Granted it isn’t as if I’m ashamed in my personal life to be seen with this book, why just the other week for my birthday celebration I carried this book in to a Thai restaurant in to show and discuss with my friends.  Between the soft spring rolls and the crab rangoon my friends and I flipped through the picture section in this book (these sort of books have picture sections) and discussed our speculations about a woman referred to in her family as ‘Big Kathy’ the maternal grandmother of Paris Hilton.  It’s just that normally I don’t go around afterwards and write reviews about what amounts to my dirty little reads.

 

                I first heard about ‘House of Hilton’ by Jerry Oppenheimer on a discussion thread of one of Richard Lawson’s (Gawker) masterpiece episode synopsizes.  If you have any interest in any of these ‘Housewife’ franchises, except for ‘Atlanta’ and ‘D.C.’ (which Lawson doesn’t write about) you need to check out his columns.  The writer of the comment said the book alluded to some unsavory child rearing practices for which Big Kathy inflicted on Little Kathy (Paris Hilton’s mother) in hopes that she would find a rich husband.  I took this as a recommendation that the book might help explain the relationship between Kim and Kyle Richards. 

 

                  For those not in the know, sisters Kim and Kyle Richards, prior to their ‘Real Housewife’ fame were child actors.  Their older half sister is Kathy Hilton.  While on the ‘Housewives’ Kyle has distinguished herself as being a likeable mother of several children, one of which graduated from college while her mother was filming the show.  Kyle seems to have a happy marriage and has the luxury of trying to decide between pursing her acting career (she was a child actress) or possibly having another child.  On the other hand Kim, who was one of the most prominent child actors of the 70s starring in various Disney movies and network television shows, has appeared sad and nervous on the reality program.  Like many child actors from the past, she blames her social awkwardness on not having friends while growing up because her work schedule and childhood fame wouldn’t allow it.  Up until the show’s finale Kim wasn’t a focus of most of the storylines that prompted discussion amongst the masses following the show.  The big conflict for the majority of the season had been the disagreement between Kyle and Camille Grammer over Kyle ‘implying’, as alleged by Grammer, that no one would be interested in Camille without Kelsey AND if Kyle also thought Camille was insecure.  Really, it was much ado about nothing, but it did expose Camille as someone who made petty observations that someone else was jealous of her because she had everything; luxurious homes, a famous rich husband, and beauty unbounded…until her husband said he wanted a divorce to marry someone new.  Of course the finale made Kyle’s and Camille’s squabble pale in comparison. 

 

                   The setting was cast member’s Taylor Armstrong’s birthday, but really it was the wrap party that each of the ‘Housewife’ franchises have so the audience gets one last look at the reality stars and the producers give updates as to what each woman has been up to since filming ended.  During the episode Kim took the time to learn how to do her own makeup.  She claimed, of course, that since she was working throughout her teen years she never had a chance to learn makeup application well as her sister Kyle who didn’t work as much as Kim and had time to make friends and learn such girly things like the proper way to apply eye shadow to make your eyes pop.  For the party Kim donned a ball gown, her first for the show, and wore an interesting choice in jewelry.  When she arrived to the party she seemed happier than she had ever been on the show.  Kyle leaned over to castmate Lisa VanderPump (Best. Name. Ever.) and said her sister was drunk.  From there it was all here go hell come.

 

             The one thing I was hoping for when I purchased Oppenheimer’s book I did get from it; a better understanding of the undertones of the family dynamics that helped define Kyle and Kim.  There are several books that I have read in the past that help explain dysfunctional family relationships, one that comes to mind is ‘Dance of Anger’ by Harriet Lerner.  Throughout the season the audience could tell that something was brewing between the siblings.  Kyle came off as too critical too many times over issues involving her sister.  In the individual interviews with the producers she noted more than once that she had promised her mother (Big Kathy) while the woman was dying of cancer that she would watch over her older sister Kim.  On the other hand Kim came off as someone who had been damaged by some nameless event/s.  She was sad and at times overly sensitive (she had that look in her eyes that at any moment she was about to cry) but didn’t seem to complain when she was talked down to.  In the finale, Kyle stated Kim was an alcoholic and the last bit of information the audience was given about her was that Kim went into a rehab for alcoholism but checked herself out a week later (all of which was summarized with a photo still of Kim drunk and crying alone in the back of a limo).

 

             Many people who participate in a co-dependent relationship with a loved one will see the pattern demonstrated on ‘The Real Housewives’, if we take things at face value, between an alcoholic and the people who rescue them from themselves – along with the resentment.  However in most circumstances you don’t have the element of someone like Kim Richards, who as a child was tasked with supporting her family as the major breadwinner – at least according to Kim and Oppenheimer’s book.  These issues are unique to this series and after reading ‘House of Hilton’ it gave me a better understanding of the dynamics between the two women.

 

             ‘House of Hilton’ is divided into two parts; the maternal side of Paris Hilton and the paternal.  It was interesting to note that Big Kathy married five times to four different husbands.  She married Jack Catain, her third husband, twice because she divorced him prior to the announced engagement of her eldest daughter to Rick Hilton because of Catain’s ties to organized crime and her fear of the Hilton family’s reaction and possible rejection of Little Kathy.  She remarried Catain after Little Kathy’s wedding which secured the name of Hilton.  Oppenheimer describes her as opportunistic and at times a real ‘Mean Girl’ from elementary school onwards when it came to friendships with other women.  Both of her first two marriages were described as shotgun affairs.  Her pregnancy of Kim Richards resulted in Ken Richards leaving his long term marriage and children in order to marry her.  Several of her former spouses ended up dying in poverty including Richards and Laurence Avanzino father of Little Kathy of whom she did not see past a very young age.  The author notes that Big Kathy was proud of Paris once her granddaughter started to obtain some notoriety.  She died in 2002 at the age of 63 from breast cancer. 

 

               The second half of the book dealt primarily with Conrad and Nicky Hilton.  Conrad was Paris’ great grandfather, but Barron is her grandfather, not Nicky.  I thought it odd that Oppenheimer spent so much time on the sad short life of Nick Hilton.  Granted, he was Elizabeth Taylor’s first husband, one she later told Larry King used to beat her, and he dated a zillion Hollywood starlets before marrying a second time and fathering two sons, but that doesn’t change the fact that he still ain’t the grandfather of Paris.  I get it, Nicky Hilton is a much more interesting read than perhaps Barron Hilton who managed to stay married to his wife until her death in 2004, fathered eight children, and spent most of his life helping run the Hilton Hotel Corporation.  Besides being a cautionary tale about how disappointment, drinking and prescription drugs can lead to an early death (Nick Hilton died at 42) if you say the book is about the people who influenced Paris Hilton to be a culturally phenomena than perhaps you should concentrate on the man who still holds the majority of the family purse strings and not a relative who died before she was born.  In fact, the book has little about Paris Hilton except for her singing career that went nowhere (‘House’ was published in 2006) and the fact that she says, “That’s hot” a lot.

 

            A book like ‘House of Hilton’ is a awkward read in the first place because the flow of the story is often interrupted with detailing who is saying what about whom and why it matters.  One definitely gets the idea that some of the people who spoke on record with Oppenheimer did so because they still had axes to grind with someone in Paris’ family tree.  You have to take everything alluded to with a grain of salt, but even so a picture emerges where someone like Big Kathy, who had dreamed of one day being a professional singer until she had her first child, probably had issues on top of issues of which many remain unresolved at the time of her death and have been passed down to her daughters.  On the ‘RHOBH’ finale, there was a scene where Kim yells at Kyle accusing her of “stealing my house” to which Kyle reacts by looking like she was enraged enough to smack her sister senseless.  Earlier in the episode Kim talked about how she had paid for the family’s home when she was growing up and purchased Kyle’s first car at sixteen (in earlier episodes Kyle talked about having to work as a child and driving herself at fourteen to the studio lot).  Could the house Kim was talking about be the one in Palm Springs where the family met for Easter which was where their mother lived (I assume until she died)?  Kyle also lets loose that her husband has been supporting Kim financially as if she were a second wife.  Perhaps the audience will learn more on the two part reunion show. 

 

           I can’t say I adored ‘House of Hilton’ but I did find it interesting in areas although it proved to not be the quick read I was hoping for because the narrative wasn’t very smooth.  Of course there was scandals galore including a rehash that Conrad Hilton’s second wife, the irreducible Zsa Zsa Gabor, having an affair with his son Nicky Hilton while still married to Nicky’s Daddy-O.  I didn’t think the revelations about Kathleen Dugan Avanzino Richards Catain Fenton were such that they would shock someone’s socks off (I don’t buy the van story).  After all, we live in an era where the pop culturally aware have seen the streets littered with the sorry souls of child actors who were never able to make the transition into adulthood whose parents either spent all of their money or they themselves gave it to drug dealers.  The ones who seem stable are the ones who seem to not have had the responsibility of financially caring for their families. 

 

           I do think Big Kathy was manipulative and preached to her daughters the importance of marrying men with sizable bank accounts.  I also think that there is probably some truth in the idea that she lived vicariously through her daughters when it came to their fame and marriages to more prominent men than she herself was able to land.  None of what I have just written is unique to the Richards clan except for the element of fame.  Despite if you are Team Kyle or Team Kim…or Team Taylor, Lisa, or God forbid Team Camille (Adrienne Maloof doesn’t need a team because all evidence of the first season indicate she wins the award for unlikely voice of reason) I think that something rings true when you witness two women sisters go at each other with a fierceness that is close to primordial; their exhibited emotions didn’t develop during the course of one season of a reality show.  As it is interesting to speculate it is hard to watch.  As easy as it is to dismiss as mindless entertainment, there is something there that speaks the truth of the complicated components that make us human – the rage, the grief, and the sins of our collective pasts as well as transgressions of those no longer living can fester in the present.  Above all the issue isn’t giving in to the hurt but being able to address and heal the pain through grace.  I suppose fans of ‘The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ will have to wait until next season.   

 

Westerfield © 2011