Word: hiltonization
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...Hilton's ego is as big as his house. He keeps the vanity press busy printing books praising himself, and his autobiography, Be My Guest, is in more of his hotel rooms than the Gideon Bible. A Roman Catholic who is relieved to be back in good standing after shedding Zsa Zsa, Hilton constantly composes prayers to the Almighty and has them printed in Hilton employee publications, likes to think that "God is a gentleman." His speeches are sometimes written by a Jesuit Priest, Father Thomas Sullivan of the University of Santa Clara, and at big receptions Hilton does...
...such feelings, it would not be enough to extend his hotel chain merely for the sake of profit. His international expansion becomes a Hilton plan for world peace in which "people gather together in our hotels and get along with one another." "We think we are helping out in the struggle that is going on in the cold war today with world travel," says Hilton. "These hotels are examples of free enterprise that the Communists hate to see." He likes to say that "we beat Communism into the Caribbean by ten years," and one of his top financial backers, Henry...
Audacious Horse Trading. Still, there is a hard streak of practicality in Conrad Hilton. The son of a successful merchant in San Antonio, N. Mex., he put down his entire savings of $5,000 in 1919 to buy his first hotel, the bustling Mobley in oil-rich Cisco, Texas. He managed to put together a small chain in Texas before the Depression wiped him out, bounced back with shrewd and often audacious horse trading to collect a lineup of prestigious hotels. His first major move was to acquire the high-priced Town House in Los Angeles, but he really broke...
While he was rushing about adding links to his U.S. chain, Hilton's unfailing courtesy launched him almost by accident into the international hotel business. When Puerto Rico decided in 1947 that it needed a first-class hotel to help lure U.S. businessmen to set up shop there, Teodoro Moscoso, chief of the Puerto Rico Development Corp. (and now the director of the Alliance for Progress), fired off letters to leading U.S. hotelmen inviting them to come down. Only Hilton answered promptly, with a warm, friendly letter that began by greeting the Spanish-speaking Moscoso as "Mi estimado amigo...
...Hilton's own board of directors, composed mostly of Midwestern and Western businessmen, were appalled at the thought of moving out of the U.S. But they decided to let him have some hotels abroad as playthings; they voted him a paltry $500,000 and set up the international division as a separate subsidiary so that its failure (which they expected) would not pull down the whole company. Working with profits from the Caribe, Hilton in the next ten years built eight more international hotels from Mexico City to Berlin. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Hilton added the ten Statler Hotels...