Free The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty by J. Randy Taraborrelli Page B

her in the crush of people despite attempts to follow the red chapeau down the street, hoping the woman wearing it would lead him to her home. As he wrote in his autobiography, “There was something about the way she wore the hat, the way she carried her head that was attractive.”
    Having lost sight of the distinctive hat and its owner, Hilton wrote, “For a month of Sundays I amazed that congregation with my piety. I attended every mass from six ’til noon. But I didn’t see her again.” Then, while wrestling with the growing problems of trying to raise funds to build the Dallas Hilton, he was taking a stroll one day to clear his head when he encountered her, wearing a different hat and accompanied by an acquaintance of his, Mrs. Beauregard Evans, who made the introductions. “This is Mary Adelaide Barron,” she said, “a relative of ours from Owensboro, Kentucky.”
    At the time, Mary Adelaide Barron—born in Kentucky on April 27, 1906—was a stern, serious-looking woman with strong bone structure and a robust frame. Her long, chestnut-colored hair was usually parted in the middle and pulled primly into a bun, just like the style worn by Conrad’s mother—a woman whose name she also shared. She bore a distinct resemblance to Mary Hilton. At just eighteen, about half Conrad’s age, she wasn’t exactly eye-catching, but the camera didn’t capture her full personality and charm. In reality Mary was a handsome young woman with expressive blue eyes, a small nose, thin lips, and a bright smile. Hilton recalled, “For a while everything took a back seat to the girl with the laughing eyes and soft Kentucky voice.” Still, hers was a different background than Hilton’s.
    Mary was educated at Owensboro High School, though some family members have said that she didn’t graduate. Her family (six brothers and two parents) was poor and moved about a great deal from one ramshackle farmhouse to another. Her father, Thomas Barron, raised tobacco and pigs for a meager living. Seeming undaunted by her lot in life, however, Mary Barron had an ebullient personality, often using salty language as she enjoyed her life to the fullest with many good friends.
    “Conrad saw Mary as the kind of fun girl who could add levity to his dry lifestyle, which was all about high finance and complex business dealings,” said Stanley Tucker, whose mother was a good friend of Mary’s, having grown up with her in Owensboro. Tucker would become a close friend of Conrad’s as well.
    Before Mary left Dallas, she promised that when the hotel was complete she would return and marry Conrad. (As a sentimental gesture, she also gave him her red hat.) Once she was back, Hilton began to see his financial problems, which had once seemed insurmountable, begin to resolve themselves one by one. Breathing more easily now, he took off for Atlanta, where Mary Barron was visiting. After ten days, their pact to marry was sealed, and he returned to Dallas for the August 4, 1925, grand opening of the first hotel he had ever built from scratch, the Dallas Hilton. The hotel was a smash hit from day one. Forty-five days later, on October 19, Conrad Nicholson Hilton, thirty-eight, and Mary Adelaide Barron, nineteen, were married simply at a six o’clock mass at Holy Trinity Church in Dallas.
    After the ceremony and bridal breakfast, Conrad took his new wife on a sightseeing tour of America, from Texas to Colorado, then on to California, where he introduced Mary to San Francisco, “whose elegant beauty had captured my imagination as a young army officer.” Then they were off to Canada and down to Illinois, next stop Chicago, “for I wanted Mary to see another kind of American city, a swarming, hustling, commercial city that could also stir the imagination.” At the LaSalle Hotel in Chicago, the Hiltons found a long line of frustrated tourists and businessmen attempting to check in to the popular and clearly overbooked establishment. Conrad, hoping to impress