Hotel magnate Barron Hilton dies at age 91
Barron Hilton, who oversaw the vast expansion of his father’s hotel empire and took part in changing the pro sports landscape as an original club owner in the American Football League, died Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. The last survivor of the AFL’S founding ownership, he was 91.
The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, of which he was chairman emeritus, announced the death.
Hilton embarked on a business career at 19, when he acquired a citrus distribution company in the Los Angeles area. He had turned down an offer from his father, Conrad Hilton, for a $150-a-week job and a chance to work his way up in the chain he founded in 1919 when he bought his first hotel, in Cisco, Texas, capitalizing on an oil boom in the area.
Barron Hilton’s citrus business proved successful. But he joined Hilton Hotels in the early 1950s, became a vice president in 1954 and then rose to president and chief executive in 1966 and chairman in 1979, when his father died.
“Barron, like Conrad, was a man who paid great attention to the day-to-day operations of his hotels,” J. Randy Taraborrelli wrote in “The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty” (2014), explaining that Barron Hilton reduced company payrolls, economized on food preparation costs and centralized purchasing in the 1960s.
“Everything is about the bottom line,” the author quoted Hilton as saying. “That’s where I keep my eye, all the time.”
Still, Barron Hilton pursued new ventures, turning the family enterprise, based in Beverly Hills, California, into a business that included thousands of hotel rooms, casino-hotels, timeshare apartments and an early credit-card company, Carte Blanche.
He engineered Hilton’s entrance into the Las Vegas casino market in 1970. He purchased Kirk Kerkorian’s International, the world’s largest resort hotel, renaming it the Las Vegas Hilton, and bought Kerkorian’s Flamingo as well, renaming it the Flamingo Hilton.
The company’s casinohotels later extended to Atlantic City and other locations. At varying times the Hilton empire also included the Waldorf Astoria and the Plaza in New York, as well as the Sir Francis Drake in San Francisco, the Mayflower in Washington and the Conrad Hilton and Palmer House in Chicago.
The Hilton company split off its United States and international hotels into separate entities in the 1960s, but reunited its properties in 2006 with the acquisition of more than 400 overseas hotels, creating an empire of 2,800 hotels.
Barron Hilton was cochairman of Hilton Hotels together with financier Stephen Bollenbach when it was sold for some $26 billion to the private equity group Blackstone in 2007.
Hilton largely kept away from the spotlight that fell on others in the family.
His father had a brush with show business when Zsa Zsa Gabor became his second wife in 1942. Barron’s older brother, Conrad Jr., known as Nicky, married a teenage Elizabeth Taylor in 1950. Barron’s socialite granddaughter Paris Hilton transformed herself into a pop culture brand.
Barron Hilton entered the sports world as a member of the so-called Foolish Club: the eight team owners who defied long odds in challenging the National Football League by forming the American Football League in 1960.