The Biggest

HOTELS The Biggest

A lank, hard-bargaining hotelman named Conrad Nicholson Hilton, 59, longed to own something really big. Inevitably, his gaze fell upon the world's biggest hotel: Chicago's 2,700-room Stevens. Last week, for $7,500,000, Innkeeper Hilton proudly added the Chicago colossus to his string of 13 hotels (including Manhattan's Plaza and Roosevelt, and Los Angeles' swank Town House).

Many another hotelman grinned when he remembered the Stevens' reputation as one of the world's outstanding peacetime white elephants (chief disadvantage: the Stevens is not convenient to the heart of Chicago's Loop). But they had enough respect for Hilton's reputation as a mon eymaker to predict that he would make even the Stevens pay.

Connie Hilton loves to color a white elephant. His technique, with hotels less lively than the Stevens, has been to humanize them according to Hilton standards, to free them of the dead, half-lit, intimate air. His chief bid is for freer-spending transients; Hilton hotels do not go after the trade of the hometown folks.

Music & Laughter. A Hilton hotel has never lost money. But some have lost a good deal of their old face and manner. In its aloof pre-Hilton days, Los Angeles' Town House frightened merry transients away with its forbidding, exclusive atmosphere. Then, in 1942, came Hilton. Out went the haughty air. In came bright flowers, elaborate bars, hot music and floor shows. Employes were instructed to stop freezing guests and make them feel at home. Soon Hilton's old Texas friends and others long awed by the Town House began to make it their California headquarters. Up went the profits.

Five-Room Start. When Connie Hilton was 16, he was managing a five-room inn for traveling salesmen over his father's general store in San Antonio, Socorio County, N. Mex. (pop. 760). The rent money put him through college. At 21, Hilton was elected to New Mexico's House of Representatives. He enlisted with the break of World War I, became an Army lieutenant, and fought in France.

In 1919, he bought the Mobeley Hotel in Cisco, Tex., on the eve of the Texas oil boom. This deal set the future Hilton pattern--step in when the boom is starting and the property value low, make it pay, unload at the peak. He applied this pattern to a long series of small Texas and New Mexico hotels, putting the profits of one into the purchase price of the next.

In 1923, Hilton built his first "mini-max" (maximum hospitality, minimum cost) hotel, and started out to become a Western legend. In Texas horse-trader fashion, he bought and sold more than two dozen hotels, naming most of them after himself, finally built the chain that has brought him an estimated fortune of $28,000,000 and made him one of the ranking men in the U.S. hotel business.* As a hotelman, Hilton has relied heavily on four attributes: 1) tremendous energy (he can get by with four hours' sleep); 2) a shrewd ability to analyze people and pick good employes; 3) a knack with figures; 4) a sincere love of playing host.

The Big Deal. Probably the only man to dampen the buying zeal of Trader Hilton is red-faced, reticent ex-Bricklayer Stephen Healy. A contractor at heart, Healy was an uneasy owner of the $28,000,000 lakefront gargantua. But Hilton's obvious passion to own the place made Healy stifle his own eagerness to sell. First, he wanted $500,000 clear profit on the $5,281,000 he had paid the Army for the Stevens, and the $800,000 he had spent on furnishings. Then he coolly upped his profit demand to $650,000, then to a million, finally to $1,500,000. Hilton groaned and swore, but Healy stood fast.

Soberly last week, the man who loved the biggest hotel in the world emerged from the office of the man who had jilted it. "I stood four raises," Hilton said, wonderingly. "Now how could a bricklayer have done that, do you suppose?" ^

*The Hilton string, excluding the Stevens, Plaza, Roosevelt and Town House: the Hilton hotels in El Paso, Lubbock, Plainview, Longview and Abilene, Tex.; the Hilton in Albuquerque, N. Mex.; the Long Beach, Calif. Hilton; the Dayton Biltmore in Ohio; the Rosslyn in Los Angeles, and the Palacio Hilton in Chihuahua, Mexico.

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