EPILOGUE

In the summer of 2006, Paris Hilton, then twenty-five, and having been in the public eye going on nearly a decade, was on a major promotional tour—hawking everything from her first single and her first record album, to her first music video and her first videogame (which she embarrassingly called by the wrong name at its highly publicized introduction), to her signature perfume line.

With the money rolling in from her numerous and sundry lucrative ventures, Paris ordered a 190-mile-per-hour Bentley convertible and considered buying a fancy Manhattan apartment and becoming truly bicoastal, not that she didn’t already seem to be everywhere at once—partying in New York on a Friday night, boogying in a trendy Hollywood club on Saturday night, and exhibiting herself in a London hot spot on Sunday night, at least according to the gossip columns.

With her home base in Hollywood but playing often in New York, she pondered snapping up an almost $8 million, four bedroom, six-and-a-half-bath bachelorette pad in Hilton family friend Donald Trump’s building on Park Avenue, a short walk from what had once been the jewel in the crown of Connie Hilton’s empire, the Waldorf-Astoria. Paris’s mother, Kathy, who had considerable influence over her firstborn’s career choices and personal decisions just like her mother had over her, was said to have done a walk-through of the apartment and given the place two thumbs up.

No doubt Paris’s great-grandfather would be extremely proud of the Hilton entrepreneurial spirit that Paris had inherited and was aggressively exhibiting. At the same time she rarely talked, or seemed to know much, about Conrad Hilton’s history. Though she believed his ambition and drive “runs through my veins,” she thought he “was a bellboy”—a bellboy!—“and had a dream to do a hotel chain….” Her “hope” by the middle of the first decade of the new millennium was to become a bigger mogul than the great hotelman. However, she asserted, “I don’t want to be known as the Hilton heiress,” while, in fact, her fame came about only because she had the Hilton name attached to her. Paris had achieved the kind of stardom her late maternal grandmother, big Kathy, and her mother, little Kathy, had themselves always wanted. Of her daughter’s madcap, moneymaking antics, Kathy Hilton once haughtily boasted, “My daughters are stars, and stars may do anything they please.”

Other Hilton family members saw it differently.

“Yes, Kathy’s very proud of Paris’s ambition and drive and claim to fame,” says a Hilton, rolling her eyes and fuming at Paris’s publicity-seeking ways. “Kathy’s okay with anything Paris does. Any-thing. I can’t say that for the rest of the family. Paris is an embarrassment. In my opinion she’s tarnished the Hilton name forever. She makes her great-uncle Nick seem like a saint.”

Paris had become one of those celebrities many people loved to hate; her fame and infamy had provoked schadenfreude around the world. The more outrageous she acted, the more publicity she received, and the more money she made. If anyone understood the shallowness of celebrity culture in the early years of the twenty-first century, it was the Hilton gal. As the British social critic Taki pointed out, “Paris underlines our ongoing interest with celebrity-for-the-sake-of-celebrity today…our apparent interest in her and her ephemeral emptiness says more about us than it does about Paris.”

But Paris had become inured to criticism and attacks—the ka-ching of the cash registers racking up sales of whatever she was peddling made up for the slings and arrows. She was able to cockily thumb her nose at all those naysayers who put her down, those who thought of her as everything from “spoiled brat,” “stupid,” “dead-eyed dope,” “superficial,” and “publicity whore,” to a bimbo who fixed herself up to look like “a high-class escort.” As one savvy marketing expert had noted about her, “You don’t have to have stories saying nice things about you; you just have to have stories saying something about you.” And as Paris declared, “I’m laughing all the way to the bank.” She claimed her image—“the whole Paris thing…It’s all a game.”

With her TV appearances, record, books, and movies, Paris was being thought of in mid-2006 as the “dominatrix of all media.” As a child, though, she wanted to be a veterinarian. (She was once quoted as saying that in every girl’s life there should be four pets: a Jaguar in the garage, a mink in the closet, a bed with a tiger in it, and a jackass who pays the bills. It was much the same philosophy handed down by big Kathy.) As an adult, Paris saw herself as “a businesswoman, a brand…. There’s nobody else like me.” She modestly envisioned herself as an icon. “It’s just something I always wanted to be,” like Monroe and Madonna. “I love that timelessness.”

The Paris blitzkrieg was amply demonstrated when hundreds of her fans descended on Macy’s famed Herald Square department store in Manhattan. They were there to buy Paris’s “fragrance”: $49 a bottle, or $76 for the gift bag, which included a stuffed Tinkerbell dog and a Paris T-shirt. (Paris claimed $220 million of her perfume had been sold.) The purchase gave her followers the exclusive right to stand in a sweaty line on grubby Broadway for more than two hours to meet Paris face-to-face for about thirty seconds and get her personalized autograph on a glossy headshot. All were warned, “No personal memorabilia will be signed while Ms. Hilton is on-site.” (On the other hand, Paris, unlike her own customers, liked to get her stuff for free if she could get away with it. One such incident occurred not long after the Macy’s event, when she strode into a chic Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, jewelry boutique seeking a pricey silver dog tag as a freebie. Her line to merchants on such occasions was “You get publicity, and I get whatever I want.” The jeweler didn’t buy it, but other shopkeepers in the past had; after all, Paris wearing their things meant enormous exposure and sales.)

The lineup of Paris’s fans outside of Macy’s included adolescent boys and girls with their mothers in tow; cosmetically enhanced suburban teenage Paris wannabees wearing fashionably low-slung jeans and strappy high-heel sandals; plain-Jane secretary-types on their lunch break; Upper East Side ladies who lunch; downtown club kids; some oddballs; and lots of gay boys. (The flamboyant celebutante had, indeed, developed a large gay following, much like a drag queen star. In 2005, Paris had been crowned a gay diva when she was named—along with her mother—as grand marshals of the Los Angeles Gay Pride parade. The getup Paris wore that day became part of an exhibit at the Hollywood Museum, along with outfits of such gay icons as Bette Davis, Judy Garland, and Paris’s personal favorite, Marilyn Monroe. Paris even learned her red carpet wiggle from a popular black drag queen, the voguer Willi Ninja. Paris believed she was embraced by gays because “I’m free-spirited. I’m real. I like to have fun. I enjoy life and I think that’s what the gay community’s all about.” She made no mention of the AIDS epidemic that was still killing off members of that community, like Ninja.)

A full-page Macy’s ad in the New York Post, the daily tabloid that had first recognized Paris’s outrageousness in its “Page Six” gossip column—she was known to personally call the column with items about herself—and the first to dub her a “celebutante,” “celebutard,” and “heir-head,” had announced her appearance at the store. “Spending an afternoon with a hotel heiress and world-famous socialite,” blared the ad. “That’s hot!”

And so they came, packing Macy’s first-floor fragrance arcade, tossing credit cards and cash at harried salesgirls in order to possess the outrageous entrepreneur’s perfume, which offered “a feminine, flirtatious charm and classic sophistication,” and in the process get to meet her and secure her autograph.

Paris seemed to represent different things to different people. As a whole, she felt that “people think of me as like an American princess fantasy, like Tinkerbell the fairy, the little blond pixie.” A well-dressed mother of a ten-year-old boy carrying a homemade sign reading “I Love You Paris” said her whole brood actually loved Paris. “We all watch The Simple Life as a family. I’m obviously not thrilled about that X-rated video she was in, but we don’t really focus on that. I think her talent is appealing to all people. We adore her.” But she had difficulty defining whatever talent it was that Paris had. “Well, she’s Paris Hilton. That’s all. That’s enough.”

A man of indeterminable age with a shaved head, who was sporting a Spice Girls T-shirt and rose-colored boxing shorts engraved with the names of Naomi Campbell, Hillary Clinton, and Reese Witherspoon, and with the words “Fountain of Youth 1969” over the crotch area, said he had met other celebrities through the years with “better talent than Paris,” but he loved her because “Paris is the total package. She shows that anybody can make it. She represents the American dream, whether you’re born rich like her, or if you come from the projects. She has determination.”

A gay Hispanic man announced he was a big fan because Paris “is, like, very different. She’s very crazy. She’s very flamboyant. People dislike her because she’s rich and beautiful, but they’re just jealous. Paris is smart. She knows how to promote herself, and she doesn’t care what anyone thinks. I respect that.”

Arriving fashionably late by twenty minutes to screams of “Paris! Paris! Paris!” she was showcased on a thronelike platform in front of a battalion of paparazzi, and every so often between signing autographs she struck sultry poses for the cameras. Although other celebrities try to avoid photographers, Paris learned early on to use them to her best advantage. Her rule: “It’s better just to smile than give the middle finger, or [be] rude to them, because that’s what they want you to do. They want to get a bad picture.” (Paris sometimes affected a pose, and, when she felt it was perfect, she’d actually yell to the stunned photographers, “Shoot!”) Kathy Hilton, keeping a critical eye on her daughters’ performance, sat nearby on the Macy’s podium, and later posed (along with Rick Hilton) for digital snapshots with some of their daughter’s fans, who were rather disappointed because Paris herself skipped out in a sea of security.

However, Paris was extremely gracious throughout the tedious Macy’s event—after all, the cash registers for her product didn’t stop ringing up sales. She smiled sweetly and chatted briefly but amiably with each fan seeking her autograph—people who had eagerly shelled out hard-earned money for her fragrance package just to meet her. As one wag noted as he watched her sign hundreds of photos, “I’ll bet she’s never written so many words at one time in her life—but they’re all the same words, ‘Paris Hilton.’”

An enormous detail of plainclothes security guards, along with brawny uniformed members of New York’s finest, one of whom acidly referred to himself as the “Paris Pussy Patrol,” kept tight surveillance over her. As fans climbed a few steps to stand in front of their idol and get her autograph, their shopping bags and handbags had to be turned over to, and examined for weapons by, bodyguards, some with bulges in their jackets. “What the fuck!” exclaimed one tailored, coiffed, and trash-talking twentysomething who refused to give up her $5,000 Birkin bag “for privacy reasons” and left the line after an hour’s wait. “She’s just Paris friggin’ Hilton, not the friggin’ Queen of England.”

One of those waiting in line to secure Paris’s autograph was a dapper, mustachioed businessman by the name of David Hans Schmidt. He was not a fan, but he had a vested interest in talking to her face-to-face.

Known in the tabloid world as a “celebrity porn peddler,” Schmidt had earned a purple reputation after he arranged for Bill Clinton’s gal-pal Paula Jones’s Penthouse spread and brokered topless shots of convicted killer Scott Peterson’s girlfriend, Amber Frey.

In Paris’s case, Schmidt made worldwide headlines in early 2006 when he became the broker for all of the contents of her Los Angeles storage locker after she failed to pay the rent on it. The locker was said to contain a trove of Paris memorabilia, including raunchy photos, videotapes, and sex toys, along with personal documents, letters, and more than a dozen diaries reportedly brimming with tales of X-rated dalliances, all of which Schmidt hoped to sell back to her, or someone else. One figure bandied about had been $20 million. Most of the weekly tabloids and celebrity glossies, who often pay for such mother lode, had passed on buying the material, considering it too risqué.

To prove he was genuine, Schmidt showed Paris a G-rated photo of herself as a child with her sister, Nicky, that was part of the locker’s contents. When Paris asked him what she should write on her photo, he said, “Make it out to, ‘The guy who has my storage locker stuff.’” Paris told Schmidt, who was looking to do a reality show called The Sultan of Sleaze, that she’d meet with him in Los Angeles, presumably to talk about buying back her belongings. Though she had been described as “incredibly upset and angry and victimized” by Schmidt after news broke of his involvement, Paris diplomatically signed her photo, “To David, Love Paris Hilton xoxo.”

That night Paris made another appearance, this one at a trendy downtown Manhattan club called Butter, where she wasn’t as diplomatic. She had a fiery confrontation there, one of several over a period of weeks, with one of her archenemies, the nineteen-year-old actress and playgirl Lindsay Lohan. (Paris tended to have schoolgirl-like feuds; members of her enemies list have included Lisa Marie Presley—who Paris claimed threw a drink at her “because she thinks I fucked Nic Cage!”—Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Sophia Bush, Jessica Simpson, Hilary Duff, and Mischa Barton, who once accused Paris of “hating everyone around her age who is more successful,” to which Paris responded, “I could care less…she seems to be spending a lot of time thinking about me.” Paris also was accused of planting a false story in the New York Post about diamond heiress Zeta Graff, a onetime gal-pal of Paris Latsis. Graff brought a lawsuit claiming that Hilton had fabricated the story that Graff had attacked her in a London nightclub. Hilton admitted the incident never took place but denied planting the story, though her publicist at the time claimed she instructed him to give the story to the Post. During a deposition Paris went after Graff, declaring, “She is old and should stay home with her child, instead of being at night clubs with young people…. She is not cute at all.”)

With Lohan, there appeared to be an extended history of bad blood. Some weeks before the Manhattan incident, Paris and Lohan had gotten into a brawl at the Los Angeles hot spot Hyde. Paris’s party-pal Brandon Davis, who once squealed about Paris’s alleged racial and religious slurs, made headline-making sexual innuendoes about Lohan to the paparazzi stationed outside the club. Paris, who was said to have been furious because Lohan was seeing her ex, Stavros Niarchos III, was at Davis’s side, laughing and seemingly egging him on, all of which was caught on video and aired on the Internet. Later, Davis offered Lohan a semblance of an apology for referring to her as “fire crotch,” among other lewd remarks. Not long after the verbal assault, Davis was admitted to Passages, a $75,000-a-month rehab center for cocaine and alcohol addiction, under orders from his wealthy family, but soon left.

In the bathroom of club Butter on the evening of Paris’s perfume-touting personal appearance at Macy’s, Paris and Lohan, who was with a party that included Prince, Sean (Diddy) Combs, and Beyoncé, were said to have had another “huge fight.” Comparing the bout to a “high-school catfight,” the New York Daily News gossip column asked, “Sometimes don’t you wish there was a principal who could suspend Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton?”

         

AS PART OF HER mid-2006 promotional tour, Paris had made a heavily advertised guest appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman on CBS. Letterman had had her on his show a number of times because he enjoyed using her as a foil for his snarky humor, and he just plain enjoyed laughing at her. She’d often been the target of his wacky “Top Ten” lists. Following her appearance in 1 Night in Paris, Letterman did the “Top Ten Paris Explanations” for her starring role, two of which were: “He told me we were making a workout video,” and “It was a tender act of love between me and my then-boyfriend—Rick something.”

After Paris’s Sidekick 2 cell phone was famously burgled and hacked, and the private numbers of her celebrity pals in her phone book were posted all over the Internet (another headline-making incident that invariably helped push up sales of the device to the teen and young adult market because of her involvement), Letterman’s Top Ten list included hilarious fictional voicemail messages such as “It’s Bill Clinton. I’ve been meaning to call you for some time,” and “Sorry I missed you. You must be at work…. Just kidding.”

For Letterman, chatting with Paris was like pulling teeth; in interviews with him, and with other talk-show hosts, she never had much to say. Her only reason for sitting on Letterman’s couch before millions of viewers across America that night was to talk about her singing career and get free plugs for her first-ever single, “Stars Are Blind,” one of the tunes on her first CD, released in summer 2006.

The song was featured on her first music video that one critic described as looking like a Calvin Klein underwear commercial shot on a beach. It showed a skimpily clad Paris writhing around with a hunky boy-toy as her lyrics droned on for more than three minutes. (Paris had spent several days on a Malibu beach shooting the video, which was directed by the same man with whom she had collaborated for the infamous and short-lived Carl’s Jr. hamburger commercial.) The music video, like Paris’s infamous X-rated see-all, was uploaded to the Internet and was part of the marketing for her inaugural eponymous album—a mix of reggae, pop, and hip-hop, which was being rolled out nationally by her label, Heiress Records, in conjunction with Warner Brothers. (She claimed she even composed some of the tunes, but most were written by lyricists who had worked for pop superstars like Gwen Stefani, Christina Aguilera, and Madonna.)

Always a star performer on the Internet, Paris’s “Stars Are Blind” video was aired on MTV.Com’s “Hot 5 on Overdrive,” and was rated the all-time best performance on a single day. At the same time, the single became one of iTunes Top 20 downloaded songs overnight.

When New York disc jockeys began playing “Stars Are Blind,” they expected to get hate e-mails and nasty text messages from outraged listeners who despaired of her singing. Instead, Paris was getting positive reviews.

One New York radio station program director, Scott Shannon, said he was “shocked” that “it actually isn’t a bad record.” However, two of his deejays expressed hope for Paris’s sake that she isn’t asked to sing live. As one pointed out, Paris “got significant [technical] help from [the record’s] producers—though that’s true for a lot of songs today.”

Sharon Dastur, the program director for one of the Big Apple’s major FM stations, observed, “Everyone realizes Paris Hilton is the epitome of pop culture, and we’re a pop culture station. So we were going to let the listeners decide. Our jocks play it and ask what the listeners think.”

Within the first week of the single’s release, Paris’s voice was being heard on more than fifty stations across the country, and in many such markets was the number one requested song. “We knew it was going to polarize our audience,” observed Romeo, the music director and on-air personality of one of New York City’s top stations, Z-100. “We were right…half of the calls said they hated the song, but it was still among the five top requested songs [and then became] our number one requested song…. Her timing is perfect, she has the sound of summer—pure pop with a reggae beat.”

But media predictions that Paris’s single would hit Billboard’s Top 10 in the first week failed to materialize. In fact, it didn’t make the top 200 in the first week of release.

The New York Post’s music critic, Dan Aquilante, snarkily observed that “the socialite media whore demonstrates that, with enough time, loads of cash and electronic vocal manipulation, anyone can be a pop star…. The lyrics, which she reportedly had a hand in writing (sure), are mostly puppy-love growls that will appeal to young teens. Those older kids who knew Hilton’s history will have a rough time finding the honesty in lines like, ‘If you show me real love, I’ll show you mine.’” He noted that her producers had “‘fattened up the skinny heiress’ sound by layering her voice upon her voice—several times. The echo effect is almost imperceptible, but manages to erase any trace of thinness. It also erases any trace of identity.” He speculated that Paris wouldn’t sing live on stage because the “knob twisting production is so complicated” that “it would be nearly impossible to reproduce the sonics…”

The New York Times gave “Stars Are Blind” a glib mini-review, declaring, “The melody is a bit cramped, almost as if it were written to accompany a singer with moderate range (must be coincidence); the bridge is aimless, but it’s over soon enough.” The Times added, tongue-in-cheek, “A quick Internet search turned up very little information about the singer, name of Paris Hilton.”

The nationally syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith, usually known for her adulatory celebrity items, observed, “I do not think Madonna need worry.”

The Boston Herald’s website declared, “Paris Hilton is once again a multimedia sensation—but this time there’s no nudity involved.” The site’s critic, Heather V. Eng, described Paris as “an amateur porn star, reality TV simpleton, and the world’s most famous person for doing absolutely nothing…”

Just before “Stars Are Blind” began receiving airplay, Paris told a magazine in Hong Kong that she had to overcome shyness—shyness!—to become a singer. (Interestingly, however, shyness was one of the problems her maternal grandmother, big Kathy, suffered from when she was Paris’s age and was asked to get up and sing. “Kathleen always needed a few drinks in order to ease her nervousness,” her friend Jane Hallaren recalls.)

Paris, on the other hand, admits to no need for such relaxants, her arrest in September 2006 for allegedly driving while under the influence notwithstanding.

“I have always had a voice and always known I could sing, but I was too shy to let it come out,” she confidently revealed. “I think that is the hardest thing you can do, to sing in front of people. When I finally let go and did it, I realized it is what I am most talented at and what I love to do the most.”

But when David Letterman asked her to sing for his vast television audience, she nervously declined, claiming she wasn’t prepared. But she did reveal musical talents theretofore unknown. She boasted that she played both the violin and the piano.

Letterman moved on to other subjects, such as the latest season of her hit reality show, The Simple Life 4: Till Death Do Us Part, and the current state of her love life. Paris claimed that her much-publicized feud with costar Nicole Richie was strictly a publicity ploy to generate ratings, which is a complete contradiction from her earlier statements in which she claimed that Richie “cannot stand being around me because I get all the attention and people don’t really care about her…. [W]hen I brought her on to my show, she got very jealous and turned on me for no reason…. She let fame go to her head. I never want to speak to her again—ever.”

Some months earlier, appearing on CNN”s Larry King Live to plug her roman à clef about the Hollywood fast lane, Richie said one of the bitchy characters in her book had “things in common” with Paris. When asked about her relationship with Paris, she stated emphatically, “We’re no longer friends” and that there was no chance they’d ever be friends again. “We do run into each other. We just don’t talk.” Admitting to having recovered from addictions to heroin, cocaine, and pills, Paris’s friend since they were two years old confessed, “We just went in two separate directions…. I had to make some decisions in my life about what’s right for me and what’s not and so that’s what I did.”

Richie also acknowledged reports that she had been receiving “late-night prank calls.” But she stopped short of accusing her former best friend. (Stories about the calls had been reported in the tabloids.) “I’ve been getting prank calls. I’m not going to say who they’re from.” (In season four of The Simple Life, in the wake of the feud that Paris maintained never existed, she and Richie were never seen on camera together.)

When asked by Letterman about her breakup with Paris Latsis, Paris Hilton contradicted assertions that his parents refused to have her in the Latsis family and had broken up the relationship. Said Paris, “We’re just better as friends…. I just wasn’t ready to get married. I just want to be single. I love it.” She maintained she was thrilled not to have a man in her life and was savoring the freedom to pursue her moneymaking enterprises. “I’m single for the first time in my life,” she continued. “I just want to be alone. I’m just going out with my sister and my girlfriends. It’s cool not having to answer to anyone. I’ve never had time to get to know myself. I always put all of my energy into the man. I don’t get to spend time on me. I’m just getting to know who I really am, until I can find someone else.” (A year earlier, she was quoted in Newsweek magazine as saying she planned to start a family in 2007. But not long after her Letterman appearance, she announced to the world that she was going to remain celibate for a year. “I’m doing it just because I want to. One-night stands are not for me. I think it’s gross when you just give it up…. You have to make guys work for it.” Was a book on relationships next on Paris’s to-do list?)

Anyone watching Paris’s ladylike performance that night on the Letterman show would have thought her years of infamous partying were finally behind her, that she’d finally grown up. But later that night she showed up once again at Butter and, according to one report, confronted Lohan, yelling, “I can’t believe you and Stavros! You are ridiculous!” Paris was said to have barraged the actress with insults and curses. Lohan took what was described as the “high road” and didn’t return the fire.

After Lohan left the club, Paris, performing a one-eighty from her reserved appearance on Letterman’s couch, did what was described as a “stripperish” dance on a banquette for a small group of professional basketball and football players.

That’s hot.

With her album released, Paris hit No. 1 in The Guinness Book of World Records, not for her singing, but rather as “the most overrated celeb” based on polls in magazines in which readers chose their least favorite celebrity.

That’s not hot.