PARIS HILTON & LADY VICTORIA HERVEY

,
“If you had to…” James laid a tabloid paper on the low coffee table beside my laptop.
. I looked across at the front page colour picture of two blonde socialites out on the town: Lady Victoria Hervey and Paris Hilton. Paris was fixing Lady V’s watch, or perhaps it was a bracelet, that had come adrift. Photographed at a nightclub in dresses that clearly didn’t like to stay up late, their whole evening seemed to be happily unravelling. The hotelier’s granddaughter and the mitred earl’s descendant embodied an idea of good times. But seeing these two heiresses partying together brought something else to mind.
. I took the question back to James: “Bristols or Hiltons – if you had to?”
. “Just for one night?”
. “Including breakfast.”
. “Hilton every time. But it would have to be a Cold War classic, a glass high-rise with views all around.”
. James and I were in the British Airways Club Class Lounge at Heathrow’s Terminal 2, trying to pass away the time that was stretching into oblivion, thanks to the knock-on effect of a lightning strike in French air traffic control that had delayed flights right across Europe. It was just coincidence that we were both there. I was waiting for a flight to Tallinn and a meeting of Baltic businessmen, and he was on his way to Helsinki for a conference on “The Dynamics of Poverty: Social Omnibus or Underclass Wagon?” I never found out what the answer to that question was.
. At first, I wasn’t sure if my brother’s answer to my proposition was serious or if he was just being perverse. I had certainly always avoided Hiltons because I thought they were brash and American, the hotel equivalent of McDonalds, and because of James’s politics and his work in the developing world I had imagined he would think the same. The closest I had come to staying in a Hilton was visiting the Windows Restaurant and Zeta Bar in the Park Lane Hilton in London and I will admit that the views are pretty spectacular. But it was also in London, in Trafalgar Square in the 1990s, where Hilton for the first time abandoned the branding of their hotels. They knew they were a symbol of the past.
. “The big ones from the 1950s and Sixties, like Athens and Cairo, are fantastic.” James removed his glasses, which was always a sign that a long discussion was imminent. “Brilliantly conceived, spacious rooms, wonderful views, swimming pools, bars, iced water taps in every room. Tip-top service, too. Americans can be relaxed with rich people. Europeans fuss. I’d choose a classic Hilton over a boutique hotel any day, and as for your Bristols, half of them are just Grand Hotels done up in that ghastly faux empire style and filled with weekday suits and middle-class weekenders who think they are minor royalty.”
. I protested that although this may be true of one or two Bristols, this was not always the case. There was such a diversity of Bristols that it was impossible to generalise. In fact on the whole they were nothing special but perhaps that’s what I liked about them. They had an anonymity that did not try to define the guests’ style, unlike brash, branded chains such as Hilton.
. James began warming to his theme. “Hiltons changed so many cities and the way we viewed them. They were put down like marker pegs – from this point on, the urban landscape grows. They were the first skyscrapers to come to town, and they forced the clutter of urban planning to look to the future. With all their glass and concrete, they made cities white and light. Although they were transparently American, they owed everything to Le Corbusier.”
. In the discussion that followed I began to see that James may well have been right, but my own opinion remained fixed against Hiltons not for what they were but for what they stood for. Founded on a mix of American imperialism, capitalism and Christian fundamentalism, they grew out of the Cold War in the 1950s. Their founder, Conrad Hilton, viewed them as America’s bulwarks in the front line against communism. Built close to the Soviet and Warsaw Pact nations, they would shine out like beacons across the enslaved lands. Of the first International Hilton, in Istanbul, he wrote, “Here with the Iron Curtain veritably before our eyes, we found people who had fought the Russians for the past three hundred years and were entirely unafraid of them.” As for the West Berlin Hilton, looking down on the East, it was an immovable daily reminder of the magnificence of mammon.
. Conrad was an evangelist, a Billy Graham of the hospitality industry. He could not abide people who had no religion, and though he was a Catholic himself he did not mind what anyone else believed, as long as they had some kind of god. In the bedside locker of every one of his hotels was a King James Bible and a copy of his own book, Be My Guest, the story behind his fortune with several chapters giving advice on how to be happy and get on in life. In the last chapter, “There Is An Art To Living”, he wonders “What is this thing – success?” And he offers his own thoughts under the headings:
Find Your Own Particular Talent
Be Big: Think Big. Act Big. Dream Big
Be Honest
Live With Enthusiasm
Don’t Let Your Possessions Possess You
Don’t Worry About Your Problems
Don’t Cling to the Past
Look Up to People When You Can – Down to No One
Assume Your Full Share of Responsibility for the World in Which You Live
Pray Consistently and Confidently

I returned to the newspaper picture of Paris Hilton and Lady Victoria Hervey, whose father, the 6th Marquess of Bristol would undoubtedly have agreed with just a few of the American’s ideas. He certainly thought, acted and dreamed big, and he lived with enthusiasm. But it is otherwise hard to think of two more different characters, one pulling himself up by the boot straps, the others dragging himself down by the necktie. While one built hotels the other was just as likely to burgle them.
. Victor Frederick Cochrane Hervey, eldest son of the 5th Marquess of Bristol, was born in 1915 at Ickworth with more advantages than ever could be dreamed of by Conrad Hilton, who came into this world in an adobe house in San Antonio on Christmas Day in 1887. Hervey’s brief passage through Eton was followed by an even briefer stop at the Military Academy at Sandhurst, where he was judged temperamentally unsuited to be an officer, and at the age of twenty-one was declared bankrupt. The Hervey Finance Corporation, which he had founded for adventures in the arms trade, had come unstuck with a £30,000 deal to supply the Provisional Government in Burgos at the start of the Nationalist uprising in Spain. Hervey had claimed to have been working as General Franco’s agent for four months, but the £30,000 he had expected to receive as commission for arms consignments had, he said, failed to materialise.
. Money from his father and the family’s 32,000 acres was still coming in, of course, so that when he was arraigned on two counts of burglary in Mayfair in June 1939, the newspapers described his occupation as “independent”. The burglaries were shameful affairs, committed with public school chums on people they knew in Mayfair. The first victim was Pauline Vincent Daubeny, sister of Prince Yurka Galitzine. Hervey’s accomplice was George Hering, a gossip column journalist with the pen name Peter Proud, who persuaded Daubeny to visit his sister over the Easter weekend, leaving her Queen Street flat empty. With a key to the front door, Hervey, Hering and a clerk named Coop simply let themselves in and made off with ten rings, a tie pin, three brooches, two necklaces, six bracelets and a mink coat, with a total value £2,500. When Ms Daubeny returned on April 10 and found them missing, Hervey sent around a bunch of flowers with his commiserations for her loss.
. A couple of days later, they robbed another female acquaintance. Hervey, Hering and Coop asked Gabrielle Burley of Seymour Place, to go out with them for the evening. After a few drinks in her flat, they all convened at the Ritz, then went on to the Grosvenor Hotel Bar, where behind her back the men concocted their plan. At one o’clock in the morning, after a meal at Quaglinos, they moved on to a dive called The Nest in Kingley Street off Regent Street. Here, as they watched a cabaret and drank their way through two further bottles of whisky, they stole from her handbag a pair of platinum and diamond dress clips, a platinum and diamond ring and a diamond wristwatch that were valued at £2,860.
. Arrested a few days later, the three accused appeared at Marylebone Magistrates Court on April 18 and were remanded in custody. A fourth arrest was made, of a silversmith “fence”, William Goodwin from West Kensington. It was reported that “one of the defendants” had threatened the others with a broken bottle through the throat if they “squealed”, and now, in Brixton Prison, Hervey told Hering that he could expect the worst if he uttered a word against them. It was not until June 6 that they were committed for trial at the Old Bailey and Hervey was finally allowed bail, which was put up by his father.
. The three-day trial, which began on Monday, July 1, excited intense public interest and society figures crowded the visitors’ gallery. Hering and Coop pleaded guilty; Hervey and Goodwin not guilty. All the evidence suggested otherwise. Inspector Barry told the court, “There is no doubt that Hervey is the ring leader in this case.” Passing sentence, Sir Gerald Dodson told the future Marquess of Bristol, “You have misused your talents, thrown away your opportunities given to you and you have been unfaithful to every trust you might have held.”
. Hervey was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude, serving two, on the Isle of Wight. Goodwin, Hering and Coop received two years’, eighteen months’ and nine months’ respectively. The stolen property was never found.
. At this point one might have expected some sort of change of direction, a conversion towards a Conrad Hilton-style straight-and-narrow path, but Herveys have too often proved to be beyond redemption. When he was released, Victor Hervey wrote a series of boastful articles about himself in the Sunday Dispatch, calling himself “Mayfair Playboy No 1”.
. This light-fingered heir to Ickworth did not come into the title of 6th Marquess of Bristol until his uncle died in 1960, four years after debts had forced the sale of the bulk of the estate to the National Trust and the disposal of the large London mansion in St James’s Square. The new Lord Bristol maintained a residence on the Suffolk estate, complaining that the upkeep cost him £300,000 a year. Victor may have been relatively impoverished but he revelled in his aristocratic role and, like his forebear, loved dressing up, sometimes most inappropriately. A decade later, as Chancellor of the Monarchist League, an international organisation that supported royalty everywhere, he amassed a number of new titles and decorations to add to his Ruritarian appearance, while growing more intemperate and writing pieces for the organisation’s journal that were filled with capital letters, exclamation marks and bad grammar. What is the world COMING TO!!
. In 1974, aged fifty-nine, he married for the third time. Yvonne Sutton, his secretary, was thirty years younger, and they became tax exiles in the principality of Monaco. Soon she was pregnant with Lady Victoria, the first of their three children, and there would be no shortage of displaced royals, pretenders all, to act as godparents at the christening, which was to be conducted by the Jesuit priest Alfonso de Zulueta at the Thomas More church in Chelsea.
In 1976, the year that Victor and Yvonne were starting a new family, Conrad Hilton, who had been single since divorcing the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor in 1946, also took a third wife, Mary Kelly. He was eighty-nine and he was the world’s most famous hotelier.
. Imagine this previous generation of Bristols and Hiltons in that happy first year with their new wives. Conrad was evidently delighted to have Mary by his side. This robust Christian soldier with a ramrod-back, mellow voice and a whole heap of Southern charm could still bowl a woman over. The Marquess of Bristol, too, must have been in good spirits, stepping out with Yvonne, his new Marchioness, bulging with the evidence of his undiminished virility.
  In Spain, following the death of General Franco, Juan Carlos had returned to reinstate the House of Bourbon on the throne. What better location for the Monarchist League’s annual get-together than Madrid? Victor felt at home in Spain; his father had been in the diplomatic service in Latin America and consul in Bilbao and his own godmother was Juan Carlos’s grandmother, Queen Victoria Eugenie. Various secretaries were given the task of finding a suitable venue for the Monarchist League to meet. Under normal circumstances the Marquess would not be seen dead in the brash Hilton hotel, but through a deal brokered by Don Luís de Requesens y Albania they were offered a conference centre and a dozen rooms in the Hilton at a discount that was difficult to refuse. Thus the Marquess and Marchioness of Bristol took the helicopter hop from the principality of Monte Carlo to Nice to board an Iberian airways flight for the Spanish capital.
. Heading in from the other direction on a Pan-Am jumbo jet was Conrad Hilton, proud in this honeymoon year to be taking his bride back to visit the first hotel he ever built in Europe.
. “This is where we really started to take off as a global player, honey,” he told her. “The Spanish people are great. Muy simpáticas. Aquí te vas a ser feliz. You’ll love it here.”
She smiled and squeezed his hand, impressed as ever with the language over which, like so many things, he had such a command.
. In their room on the tenth floor of the Hilton, Lady Yvonne, dressing for dinner, gazed out over the historic city that was fading in the twilight and was enchanted. She was so looking forward to the day when the child she was bearing, a child that already had within it her own blood mixed with some of the most noble blood in Britain, would begin to study languages, art history and all the other skills needed to take his or her place in European society. Lord or Lady, she professed not to mind what it would be, though seeing how Victor’s sons had turned out, she rather hoped it would be a girl.
. In the room behind her, Victor had finished pinning on his array of decorations and was rummaging through the drawers to see if there were any souvenirs worth acquiring. His hand alighted on the Gideon Bible, of which he already had several copies and which he knew more or less by heart. His conversion to Catholicism had followed his latest marriage, giving him a chance to become a member of Opus Dei, the ultimate club, the exclusive organisation to which General Franco himself and members of his Falangist cabinet belonged. Beneath the Bible was another book, and the proprietor’s memoirs, Be My Guest. On the cover was an illustration of the moustachioed, thin-haired businessman, Conrad Hilton, with twinkling eyes and a winning smile, leaning forward in front of one of his sky-scraping hotels.
. “I don’t know what the Yank has to be so happy about,” Victor said as he took it out and studied it. “None of his ghastly concrete blocks are a patch on Ickworth.”
. “Let’s go down now,” Yvonne said. “There are so many people I want to meet and I might not be able to stay up too late.”
. In the bar, members of the Monarchist League were starting to arrive. Some, like Lord Bristol, wore the badges of their orders, though the main gathering would not occur until the following day, when a conference room was booked for a series of talks and discussions. This was to be followed by a buffet luncheon at which glasses would be raised in a number of toasts, not least to the newly returned king of Spain.
. “It’s such a shame,” Yvonne said to the first prince she spoke to, “that His Royal Highness King Juan Carlos himself is unable to attend. We so much wanted to congratulate him in person.”
. “Of course, Juan Carlos is practically family to me,” Victor said to the monarchists. “But I know his diary has been crammed since the old caudillo died, and he is fully booked practically up to the millennium. Probably the most popular monarch in Europe. But he has sent me a message of good wishes, which I shall read out to you all tomorrow.”
. Victor’s chest puffed beneath his dapper grey suit, a neutral background that showed to best effect his orders and medals, some of which he had designed himself. He was looking forward to a brisk trade in titles this weekend; he hadn’t added a new one since he picked up the Grand Collar of the Order of Santa Agata di Paterno in San Marino more than a year ago.
. Only a few of the monarchists were actually staying at the Hilton. Others were scattered round the city hotels, arriving on foot or by taxi and, in one case, a horse-drawn landau. Some were house guests of titled Spaniards to whom they were probably related, one or two sleeping on sofas. Perhaps they were all related. They certainly all knew each other, though many doubted some were actually who they claimed to be. Discussions would be had, arguments would break out. There would certainly be a fracas with the arrival of Juan Arcadio Lascaris Comneno, Grand Master of the Order of St Eugene of Trebizond and claimant to the Byzantine throne, a claim hotly denied by sane genealogists. Nevertheless, as a Knight Commander of the Order himself, Victor had no hesitation in inviting the pretender to this gala event, and as he ordered Champagne he rubbed his hands in anticipation of the commotions to come.
. At this moment Conrad and Mary Hilton strolled into the bar with an entourage that consisted of the hotel manager and a few old friends. Don Luís de Requesens y Albania, to whom a handful of monarchists were indebted for their discounted rooms, stepped forward to greet him.
. “Señor Hilton, may I present our president, His Excellency the Ambassador at Large of the Monarchist League, Victor, the Most Honorable the Marquess of Bristol, Earl Jermyn, and Baron Hervey of Ickworth and Hereditary High Steward of the Liberty of Bury St Edmunds, and his wife, Yvonne, Lady Bristol.”
. Conrad, a modern high-rise to Victor’s stately pile, looked down in surprise. “All those starbursts on your jacket, your Honorable Excellency, make you look more like Merlin than a Marquess,” He shook Bristol’s hand with crushing firmness. “I’m sure monarchs everywhere sleep easier in their beds knowing they can count on such colourful fellows for support.”
. Victor lost not a second in confirming the importance of their gathering at the hotel, implying that Conrad was lucky to have such glittering guests, and once more emphasising his close ties with the House of Bourbon. “God grants us our royal families and we must protect them from the mob,” he said, and he gave the Americans a brief tour of the ribbons, medallions, sashes and orders that ensured he was the centre of attention.
. “Muy admirable,” said Conrad as the lengthy title of the last one came to an end.
. “Oh, you speak Spanish, Mr Hilton.” Lady Yvonne sounded surprised.
. “Just a few words I picked up when I was on the road selling stuff around Texas as a young man.”
. “He really does speak it very well,” Mary said with the loyalty of a new wife. “Do you speak any languages Mr Bristol?”
. Mr Bristol! Victor smiled the smile of a man who has once again been proved right. “Only Russian,” he said, and he proceeded to let off a blistering invective favoured by Cossacks, which he had learned forty years earlier. It had been taught to him by Victor Konasky, the head waiter at The Nest, who had been obliged to flee the country after the police had raided his club following the burglary trial.
. “Oh my,” said Mary. “I never heard real Russian before. It’s rather frightening, isn’t it?”
Not convinced that it was real Russian, Lady Yvonne was swift to change the subject. “We’re here to show our support for Juan Carlos,” she said.
. “A fine, God-fearing young man,” said Conrad. “If anyone can hold things together here, I’m sure he can.”
. “Have you met him?” Yvonne asked.
. “We have a brief audience scheduled for tomorrow.”
. Mary Hilton smiled at Yvonne, who could not contain her surprise, wondering how a hotelier, an American who wasn’t so much as a count, managed to obtain an audience with the King of Spain.
. “He will be with us in spirit tomorrow – he has sent me a kind message,” said Victor rapidly. And to show his own knowledge of Spanish and familiarity with Spain, said, “General Franco, El Caudillo de la Última Cruzada y de la Hispanidad, El Caudillo de la Guerra de Liberación contra el Comunismo y sus Cómplices, did wonders bringing up the king. The Generalissimo was a loyal friend of America and the West. If there was justice on this earth he would be made a saint.”
. “A brave man indeed,” Conrad concurred. “One cannot but admire a nation that has so thoroughly defeated communism in our own twentieth century. The Western peoples owe Spain a great cultural debt for that. I was only glad we could do our bit for the country at a time when it was struggling so. That was back in 1952 just after World War Two when nobody in Europe was taking the communist threat seriously and they all turned their backs on Franco, even though he had remained neutral throughout the war. You know, it’s a fact that in its first year this hotel brought in more than a million dollars in currency exchange, not to mention pounds, francs and liras. They really needed that, and I was proud to oblige.”
. “Franco still owes me £300,000,” said Victor, adding an inconsequential nought to the original sum. “It’s probably worth a few million by now, with forty years’ interest.”
. “You don’t say?”
. The medals jangled on Victor’s breast. “I helped to arm the Nationalists when they started out in Burgos in ’thirty-seven. But I was never paid a penny.”
. “Well, you sure helped the General to do the world a service, and I guess the Western world owes you a debt, too. Your rewards will be in heaven, Lord Bristol, I know it.”

Later, at the end of the evening, they climbed into bed, Victor in purple silk pyjamas, Yvonne in a bulging pink nightgown.
. “What a nice old man that Conrad Hilton turned out to be,” said Yvonne
. “That brash hotel-keeper? The man hasn’t got any form.” Victor turned his back on her to face the window.
. “You could say he belongs to America’s ruling class.”
. “Oh for God’s sake, he’s trade.” She would never understand; she was middle class and could never be anything else. He smacked the pillow.
. “But you two seem to have so much in common.”
. “Huh!” Victor pulled the duvet over his ears and was soon in the arms of Morpheus, chased there by his wife’s last remark.
. A few hours later, in the first twinkling of dawn, Victor awoke in need of the bathroom. At the large window, he pushed aside the curtain and stared down at the slumbering city safe now in the hands of the monarchy. It was a reminder of where he was and what he was supposed to be doing; looking down on the world was his God-given place in it. After he had relieved himself, as quietly as he could he went to his suitcase and slipped a hand into an inner compartment to find the barbed wire chain, his prized secret from Opus Dei. Removing the bottoms of his silk pyjamas, he bound the cruel device tight around his right thigh, which was already bruised and scarred. As usual it was exquisitely painful, wounding and wonderful. Just like the suffering of Jesus, it brought him closer to the sublime agony and ecstasy of martyrdom. Tomorrow he would limp a little, to show his own infinitesimal contribution to the wounds suffered by Christ.
. Dear God, he prayed, Bless every monarch in this world and send all liberals and socialists to hell.
. Then he took a wad of lavatory paper to put between thigh and bedsheet, to mop up any sanguine drops: this is my blood which is shed for you… Yvonne would be spilling blood soon. There would be another aristocrat in the world, another Bristol to mingle among the royal courts of Europe. He could not get back to sleep. He thought of his delicious pain and the speech he would be giving in a few hours’ time, reasserting the divine right of kings. But Yvonne’s last words kept coming into his head, repeating themselves like a mantra. “So much in common with Conrad, with common Conrad…”
. Beside him, she and the baby-to-be were lost to the world. He sighed, sat up and switched on the light, bracing his tormented right leg. Then he reached into the cupboard beside the bed and pulled out Be My Guest, which he started to read from page one.
. Somewhere among these thousands of words he hoped to find what on earth it was that he had in common with one of the most successful businessmen on the planet.