The shocking life of Paris Hilton’s man eater grandma ‘Big Kathy
- 7 months ago
In Paris Hilton’s just-released “Paris: The Memoir,” the bad girl of the early 2000s paints a glowing, saintly portrait of her late maternal grandmother as a major influence in her life.
But Kathleen Dugan Avanzino Richards Catain Fenton was more sinner than saint.
A high-school dropout at 16, Kathleen grew up in a raucous, well-to-do Irish-Catholic family in upscale Manhasset, in Long Island, and later had a reputation as a man hunter and a wife from hell, first revealed in my 2006 bestselling biography, “House of Hilton.”
Dugan was her maiden name; the other four names came from the men she had married — including a well-connected mobster chased by the feds and a handsome alcoholic who got 20-year-old Dugan pregnant in the back seat of a Chevy convertible.
That’s how Kathy Hilton — Paris’ mother and a star of “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” — was conceived. She would be known in the family as “Little Kathy,” while her mother was “Big Kathy. Big Kathy would subsequently give birth to two more daughters, actresses Kyle and Kim Richards, also “RHOBH” stars, with her second husband. She become a driven and obsessive stage mother, quickly pushing her girls into show business careers — in Little Kathy’s case, when she was just two years old.
The three daughters were taught to marry rich men and have lots of babies. They followed those lessons to the letter, later leading Big Kathy to boast, “My daughters are married to men who have a total net worth of $13 billion.”
But, in Paris’s telling, Big Kathy was simply the “single mom of three extraordinary daughters.”
None of Big Kathy’s marriages and her often bizarre lifestyle made it into Paris’s book. When Paris was 14, her parents, Rick and Kathy Hilton, sent her to Palm Springs to live with her grandmother, hoping Big Kathy could get the wild child to behave. It was during that year that the two had bonded.
Paris gave her the nickname “Gram Cracker,” and Big Kathy taught the girl about fashion, style and, more importantly, men and how to handle them.
When Paris complained that a boy in her class had been mean to her, Big Kathy went ballistic and called his home. “Listen, you ugly little pimple face, don’t f–k with my granddaughter. If you so much as speak to her again, I’ll come over there and destroy you.”
It was a threat to take seriously.
Big Kathy, a heavy drinker, was known to have a propensity to violence. She once put a screw in someone’s cheeseburger, apparently hoping they’d choke or break their teeth. As told in my book, she even tried to push one of her husbands down a flight of basement stairs.
The first guy to be lured into matrimony by Kathleen Dugan was Laurence K. Avanzino, a handsome, blond-haired football player at C.W. Post, part of Long Island University, and said to resemble a cross between Steve McQueen and Paul Newman.
But Kathleen Dugan Avanzino Richards Catain Fenton was more sinner than saint.
A high-school dropout at 16, Kathleen grew up in a raucous, well-to-do Irish-Catholic family in upscale Manhasset, in Long Island, and later had a reputation as a man hunter and a wife from hell, first revealed in my 2006 bestselling biography, “House of Hilton.”
Dugan was her maiden name; the other four names came from the men she had married — including a well-connected mobster chased by the feds and a handsome alcoholic who got 20-year-old Dugan pregnant in the back seat of a Chevy convertible.
That’s how Kathy Hilton — Paris’ mother and a star of “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” — was conceived. She would be known in the family as “Little Kathy,” while her mother was “Big Kathy. Big Kathy would subsequently give birth to two more daughters, actresses Kyle and Kim Richards, also “RHOBH” stars, with her second husband. She become a driven and obsessive stage mother, quickly pushing her girls into show business careers — in Little Kathy’s case, when she was just two years old.
The three daughters were taught to marry rich men and have lots of babies. They followed those lessons to the letter, later leading Big Kathy to boast, “My daughters are married to men who have a total net worth of $13 billion.”
But, in Paris’s telling, Big Kathy was simply the “single mom of three extraordinary daughters.”
None of Big Kathy’s marriages and her often bizarre lifestyle made it into Paris’s book. When Paris was 14, her parents, Rick and Kathy Hilton, sent her to Palm Springs to live with her grandmother, hoping Big Kathy could get the wild child to behave. It was during that year that the two had bonded.
Paris gave her the nickname “Gram Cracker,” and Big Kathy taught the girl about fashion, style and, more importantly, men and how to handle them.
When Paris complained that a boy in her class had been mean to her, Big Kathy went ballistic and called his home. “Listen, you ugly little pimple face, don’t f–k with my granddaughter. If you so much as speak to her again, I’ll come over there and destroy you.”
It was a threat to take seriously.
Big Kathy, a heavy drinker, was known to have a propensity to violence. She once put a screw in someone’s cheeseburger, apparently hoping they’d choke or break their teeth. As told in my book, she even tried to push one of her husbands down a flight of basement stairs.
The first guy to be lured into matrimony by Kathleen Dugan was Laurence K. Avanzino, a handsome, blond-haired football player at C.W. Post, part of Long Island University, and said to resemble a cross between Steve McQueen and Paul Newman.