What’s In A Name

A friend told me it looked like I’d been hacked. That there were so many blogs by Nick Hilton that didn’t seem connected to me. I thought it was funny, as today I get at least an email a month that’s meant for a guy in England who seems to be doing pretty well, as they’re from car dealers and landscapers and folks like that. Then there’s Nicky Hilton, Paris’s somewhat less famous sister, who’s in the — is it shoes? cosmetics? — business. I guess it’s common for a bunch of folks to have the same name, but for me it’s been a life-long comedy of errors. So I thought I’d post a chapter from the book to tell my somewhat unique version of “rose by any other name” game. To supply a bit of context, this is the lead-in to how I decided to call my own menswear line the “Nick Hilton Collection,” and the source of the neurosis around it.

It’s chapter 30 of A Tailor-Made Man, my 2022-published memoir.

The Name Game

It’s possible my father embellished the story, but he always told me that when my mom found out she was pregnant with me and she and Norman started up the name game, Norman’s preference was “Nichols.” Whatever. Not “Nicholas”? That’s what he told me, and that Tom Carens, Norman’s father-in-law talked him out of it.

This conversation cocktail hour on the porch of the beach house in North Scituate, Dewar’s on the rocks in Harvard tumblers, sunset glinting off the windows of the Provincetown Ferry as it passed on the horizon. My grandfather, Boston Bigwig (Herald Editor, Clover Club President, stylish Irishman,) Thomas Carens, with his new son-in-law, Norman, in the heart-to-heart.

 Tom saying, “You should call him Norman Hilton Junior.”

This was 1948, after all, and there were some pretty good Normans out there: Vincent Peale, Rockwell, Mailer… Nobody would have thought that Norman, such a simple, straightforward first name would, by the 1960s have gone the way of Elmer, Clyde, or Hugo. But, and here’s the rub, at Tom’s advice and with Connie’s apparent consent, they decided to have me christened Norman Joseph Hilton, Jr., and to give me a nickname. Namely, Nick.

Sounded great. Classy. Nicky Hilton. Bouncing baby boy. Except that inevitably I grew up and went out into the world. To grade school, say, where everybody found out what my “real” name was, at roll call, in any kind of formal function, whenever I graduated from anything; in short, whenever my name was pronounced in a public gathering: Norman. To your schoolmates, it’s Ha-ha! Norman! Then, vulnerable, in sixth grade, a ridiculous song, “Norman,” Ridiculous words, sung in a ridiculous voice, one every radio station: “Norman, ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo!” Everyone sang when the teacher left the room… The experience might have toughened me up, thickened my skin, but it didn’t. Hence I lived in a state of alienation from my own name, my non-secret identity. A fundamental source of neurosis, like teenage acne, or a lisp.

And then the Liz Taylor thing. The “original” Nicky Hilton, Conrad Hilton’s famous playboy son, and, more famously, Elizabeth Taylor’s first husband, loomed large in those days. It seemed that for at least the first twenty years of my life absolutely everybody knew who he was; that being called Nick Hilton was kind of like your name was Mickey Mantle, or Errol Flynn. No one was ever at a loss for words when they heard my name. It was a knee-jerk response: “How’s Liz?” Or “Are you related?” Even though the guy died, in 1967, at the age of 47, from having had too much fun, his celebrity haunted me long after.

“Weren’t you married to Elizabeth Taylor? Ha Ha.”

I bet you can guess I never said, “My real name is actually Norman,”

If you don’t feel sure of who you are is there any way to find out? In high school people talked about something called an identity crisis. I could not figure out what this phrase meant. It would be like trying to imagine a color you’ve read about but never seen. Does anybody know who they are? This was partially due to my name, but it was something bigger, too; an emptiness. Identity? It was like when people talked about insecurity. Does anybody feel secure? Really?

I didn’t think of myself as a designer. It was what I did, sure, but calling myself a designer seemed pretentious, inauthentic. Another tear in my tattered identity. I was truly myself in the fabric mills, or with Umberto in the design room in Linden, or making presentations to editors and writers, but to think of myself as “the Designer?” Sounded phony.

 It was the accepted thing, the way of selling and marketing apparel. Every label was a Designer Brand. Guys like Joseph Abboud and Alexander Julian didn’t seem to be suffering or embarrassed at the self-promotion. I’d always thought designers were artistes, folks like Coco Chanel, Givenchy and Balenciaga, Paris types with ateliers in the Avenue Montaigne. Not a guy who spent three hours a day on New Jersey Transit.

We’d developed a brand-new kind of a collection, a radical departure from the look and sensibility of Norman Hilton. What to call it? The Hilton name was famous for quality, but synonymous with Ivy League. Our publicity agent, Pat Harrington, was insistent. She thought we should call it, simply, The Nick Hilton Collection. I thought something else would be better but couldn’t think what.

It was imperative for the presentation to Saks; the name had to be established, a logo created, labels imagined, all that. The deadline looming, I spent a week of vacation lost in thought, trying to decide. I paced around, called Pat Harrington, walked the beach, speechless, delirious, and finally decided. My father had chosen to use his own name. We were competing with designer companies. From jump street, the idea, the styling, the marketing, everything had been of my own invention. What was I dithering about, anyway?