She Was a $200 Million Hotel Heiress. Her Body Sat Unclaimed in the L.A. Morgue: Francesca Hilton

In this documentary, we explore the life of Francesca Hilton, the only daughter of hotelier Conrad Hilton and Zsa Zsa Gabor, a woman born into a two-hundred-million-dollar fortune who died at sixty-seven with a net worth of ten thousand and whose body sat unclaimed in the Los Angeles County morgue for several days while the wealthiest hotel family in America attended to other things. ------------------- Gain FREE access to secret full-length documentaries on wealthy families "too scandalous for YouTube" by joining our newsletter: https://www.substack.com/@oldmoneyluxury ------------------- Conrad Hilton married Zsa Zsa Gabor in April of 1942, twenty-five years his junior, a Hungarian actress trained by her mother Jolie to pursue wealthy men as a profession. Within two years, by several accounts, she had begun an affair with Conrad's own eighteen-year-old son Nicky, who was living under the same roof. They divorced in September of 1946, and Francesca was born on March 10, 1947, after the divorce was granted but before California law had finalized it. Conrad publicly denied that the child was his and treated the timing of her birth as a permanent license to keep her outside the family. In her 1991 memoir, Zsa Zsa alleged that Francesca had been conceived when Conrad raped her, a claim never tested in any court and never convincingly refuted. The film critic Kevin Thomas called Francesca a trophy child, the fancy child required to complete a picture that already contained the fancy house and the fancy car. When Francesca was seven, a burglar broke into the Bel-Air house, tied up Zsa Zsa and the housekeeper, threatened to kill the child, and left with three-quarters of a million dollars in jewelry. Conrad drew up his last will in 1972, seven years before he died, and directed almost the entire two-hundred-million-dollar estate to the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. Into that estate he inserted a single line for his only daughter: a flat one hundred thousand dollars, roughly one two-thousandth of everything he left behind. Barron Hilton, Conrad's second son, contested the same will from inside the company and walked away in November of 1988 with shares worth about two hundred twelve million dollars. He kept the empire and she kept the hundred thousand. At the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard, Mitzi Shore made Francesca a Paid Regular and painted her name onto the exterior wall alongside Robin Williams, David Letterman, and Richard Pryor. She opened her act by introducing herself as the original Hilton heiress, older and wiser and smarter than the famous one, and, she added, considerably wider. In the last year of her life she had a net worth of roughly ten thousand and moved between a weekly-rental apartment in West Hollywood and the front seat of her own car. The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation was at that moment running a fully active initiative to build permanent housing for the chronically homeless of Los Angeles County, backed by an endowment of more than four billion dollars. On the evening of January 5, 2015, she suffered a massive stroke at a restaurant in West Hollywood and was pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai that night at the age of sixty-seven. Her body stayed in the Los Angeles County morgue for several days before her nephew Steven Hilton, the chief executive of her father's foundation, contacted the coroner over the weekend to claim her.