CHAPTER SEVEN 

Before the Kardashians, the world spent a lot of time keeping up with Paris Hilton. As with the now-ubiquitous reality-show family, the name Hilton was already quite familiar to the American public by the time Paris burst to fame in 2003. It was Paris’s great-grandfather Conrad Hilton who gave birth to an empire when he arrived in Texas just after the First World War, as the oil boom was reaching its peak. He had intended to buy a bank, but the purchase fell through when he couldn’t come up with enough funds. Instead he ended up buying a lively forty-room hotel called the Mobley in Cisco, Texas, when he noticed that the rooms were changing hands three times a day to accommodate the eight-hour shifts of oilfield workers. The purchase ended up being more profitable than a bank would have been when Conrad parlayed his new expertise in the hospitality business into a chain of hotels throughout Texas, including a fourteen-story structure that was the first to bear his name—the Dallas Hilton—in 1925.

By the end of the Second World War, Hilton hotels were everywhere, and Conrad Hilton was a very rich man, describing himself as “the innkeeper to the world.” In 1925, he married Mary Adelaide Barron, with whom he had three children, including Paris’s grandfather Barron, before divorcing in 1934. Eight years later, Hilton married Zsa Zsa Gabor, a flamboyant socialite who would become known as “the original Paris Hilton.” The two had one daughter, Constance Francesca, who Zsa Zsa later claimed was conceived when Conrad raped her while they were married.

Barron had eight children, including Richard, who would carve out a lucrative Southern California real-estate business of his own. In 1979, Richard married Kathy Avanzino—an actress who had attended high school with Michael Jackson and was one of his closest friends—and together they had four children. The oldest they cheekily named Paris, even though there is no hotel bearing the name Paris Hilton in the French capital.

As one of the heirs to her great-grandfather’s multibillion-dollar fortune and the recipient of a trust fund created by her father, Paris never needed to work. Growing up in New York—where her father worked as an investment banker before moving west—she enjoyed a life of indulgence and luxury, living for a time in one of the world’s most luxurious hotels, the Waldorf Astoria, which was owned by her family. Yet from an early age, she harbored professional ambitions, and she was willing to work hard to achieve her goals. At fifteen, she was signed as a model by Donald Trump’s Trump Model Management agency, having honed her craft appearing in a number of charity fashion shows as a child. “I wanted to model and Donald was like: ‘I want you at my agency,’ ” she explained. “I called Donald and told him, ‘Don’t tell my folks but I am signing with your agency.’ ”

Trump remembers the precocious teenager well. “Paris is someone who really understood from an early age the meaning of the word ‘celebrity.’ She understood what it meant and that it had great value,” he recalled. As a teenager, she walked the runway during New York Fashion Week, appearing in campaigns for a number of major lines. At sixteen, she and her younger sister, Nicky, were even featured in the Best Dressed section of the New York Post.

Although well underage, Paris soon became a fixture of the New York club scene, where she honed her soon-to-be-legendary party skills as the It Girl of the era. During the day, she attended the Dwight School, a prestigious Upper West Side prep school that had turned out such notable alumni as Truman Capote, Roy Lichtenstein, and Fiorello LaGuardia.

Although she possessed an undeniable flair from a young age, the early media coverage of her presuperstardom modeling career and club hopping always noted her status as an heiress. When the UK newspaper The Guardian asked what she thought of the media preoccupation with her family name, Paris replied, “I think it’s retarded. . . . They call me ‘Paris the Heiress.’ I was going to go to school to study hotel management, but I don’t want to be behind a hotel desk. My sister, she’s really into all that. I’m more of an artsy person. I’m getting ready to record my album, I have my modeling and acting.”

The first time the world outside of a tiny segment of the New York social scene got a glimpse of the Paris Hilton that we all know today was in a 2000 Vanity Fair photo spread, produced by the iconic photographer David LaChapelle, entitled “Hip Hop Debs.” In it, Paris is photographed in, among other locations, the living room of her grandmother’s Beverly Hills mansion, giving the finger to the camera and dressed in a see-through top. The photos would become known as the “nipple shots” and would catapult Paris to instant notoriety. They would also cause great consternation among her storied family, with one of her cousins sniffing that she was “ashamed” to be related to Paris. Tellingly, other relatives accused Paris’s mother, Kathy, of encouraging such behavior, not the first time that her mother was linked to Paris’s outrageous antics. In the accompanying Vanity Fair text, the writer, Mary Jo Sales, quotes one of Paris’s friends: “All Paris wants to do is to become famous . . . to wipe out the past, to become somebody else.”

If it was fame she was after, she got her wish in the summer of 2003, when a tape featuring Paris and her ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon—who at the time of the release was married to Hollywood actress Shannen Doherty—first surfaced on the Internet. Recorded with a night vision camera, the tape featured Paris and Salomon having sex and had reportedly been shot two years earlier, when Paris was twenty and Salomon thirty-one. When rumors of the tape surfaced, Paris at first denied its existence. Then when it began to circulate, her parents issued a statement declaring that they were “saddened at how low human beings will stoop to exploit our daughter.”

There were claims and counterclaims, and suddenly Paris Hilton had gone from someone known mostly to readers of Page Six and Vanity Fair to someone that all of America was talking about. It was auspicious timing. The controversy just happened to coincide with a new Fox TV show called The Simple Life, which was scheduled to debut on December 2, 2003, only three weeks after the tape surfaced. The show would feature Paris and her childhood friend Nicole Richie—daughter of singer Lionel Richie—as fish-out-of-water Hollywood socialites thrust into rural living and forced to leave behind all the luxuries of their spoiled rich-kid lives, inspired by the ’60s sitcom Green Acres.

The notoriety of the sex tape guaranteed an audience. The premiere, in fact, garnered monster ratings, with thirteen million people tuning in to watch Paris and Nicole move in with an Arkansas family, the Ledings, for a month. People magazine credited the sex-tape scandal with the show’s strong debut. “Critics retched, but viewers watched,” the magazine noted that week.

“I think a lot of that stemmed from the curiosity that was built in the media about who Paris Hilton was,” recalled her manager, Jason Moore. “She lived the ultimate image and was the ultimate brand based on the right name, the right look, the right height, the right hair color, the right eye color, the right everything for a formula that far exceeded anybody else at that time. She was the ultimate package that corporate America would want to make for itself as a marketing tool, but it was already made for them. They say to be a famous person, people want to be you or fuck you, and she encompassed both of those.”

Paris had denied any knowledge of the sex tape and claimed to have had nothing to do with its release. “I didn’t want to be known as that,” she later told Piers Morgan. “And now when people look at me they think that I’m something I’m not just because of one incident one night with someone who I was in love with.” She described it as “the most embarrassing, humiliating thing that has ever happened to me in my life. . . . This was not just some random person, it was my boyfriend who I was with for a few years and who I really loved and trusted. It was such a violation of everything. I was so hurt and so in shock and it’s been hard for me to ever really trust anyone again, especially guys, because it’s the most horrible thing you could do to a person.”

Yet only a week after The Simple Life aired, she appeared on Saturday Night Live, with her parents and younger brother in the audience, and participated in a send-up of the controversy—with sexual innuendo that left no doubt as to its meaning—that had many wondering whether the release of the tape had been a publicity stunt to guarantee her show’s success. In the skit, Jimmy Fallon interviews her:

FALLON: Is it hard to get into the Paris Hilton?

PARIS: Actually, it’s a very exclusive hotel, no matter what you’ve heard.

FALLON: Do they allow double occupancy at the Paris Hilton?

PARIS: No.

FALLON: Is the Paris Hilton roomy?

PARIS: It might be for you, but most people find it very comfortable.

FALLON: I’m a VIP. I may need to go in the back entrance.

PARIS: It doesn’t matter who you are. It’s not going to happen.

Within weeks of the reality show’s debut, Paris had ascended to megastardom, seemingly out of nowhere and without any discernible talent. Unbeknownst to most observers, her rise to fame was being orchestrated by her manager, Jason Moore, who had big plans for what he called “the branding” of Paris. He had first recognized her potential a year earlier after seeing a seven-page parody of her and Nicky in GQ magazine featuring two fictional sisters, Frenchie and Dallas Marriot—described as “spoiled party girls” who are raised by their parents, Denver and Piper, and hang out with the DAT Pack (Daughters of the Affluent and Tony).

“I read a piece in PAGE SIX that said Frenchie was traipsing around Tribeca in a flasher’s jacket, a fishnet bra and a black Dolce & Gabbana thong,” Piper says in the story. “Well, Dolce & Gabbana doesn’t make a black thong. Honestly! It’s so outrageous, the stories you hear.”

In another passage, Dallas says the two of them have more offers than they can deal with and are always “exploring their options” but that eventually she would like to move to the Paris Marriott. “Ah, Paris,” she sighs, looking out the window wistfully. “I totally love that property.”

Controversy broke out following publication, when the Marriott hotel chain took issue with its portrayal, even though the fictional sisters’ last name was spelled differently. “After that article, I recognized she was a brand,” Moore told CNN. “It wasn’t a Smith or Franklin that they parodied. It was a brand name and that’s when I recognized that she is going to be bigger than anyone thought about, which was before anyone was thinking about anything at all.” He explained that he had formulated a plan for Paris’s rollout long before the TV show aired and had studied the way major rock stars such as the Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead had developed their branding. “Those guys aren’t releasing new material, but they’re making money hand over fist every year from what? Touring. Selling merch. Building more fan base. Exploiting more territories. Planting more seeds. The key was planting seeds with regard to everything we did. Even if it didn’t feel big and it didn’t feel necessary, if there was a seed to be planted, we planted it. She understood that a ripple will, after a while, create a wave.”

Together they created plenty of waves as Paris became a full-fledged paparazzi phenomenon, landing on magazine covers, in tabloid gossip columns, at charity functions, and on fashion runways. “I said to Paris, we’re on tour,” Moore recalled.

Every venue is a stage. Always be in front of the fans, always perpetuating your brand, your merch, building new relationships. Encore, goodnight and we’ll be back. It was important that we celebrate [native] culture too so you don’t come in and step on them. Paris was amazing, she would immediately get a local designer and wear their clothes. The media and paparazzi loved it because she was wearing their hometown. Then you do something charitable. Then you party. And then do it over and over and over again. It was a machine. It was a Mike Tyson knockout.

In 2004, Paris published a memoir, Confessions of an Heiress, in which she took issue with what she called society’s preconception of how to be an heiress. “It involves wearing white gloves, big hats, and pearls, having some dowdy debut or a coming-out party, and going to fancy, snobby all-girl colleges—boring, old-fashioned stuff like that,” she wrote. “I totally disagree. There is no sin worse in life than being boring—and nothing worse than letting other people tell you what to do.”

The continuing controversy over the sex tape was anything but boring. In 2004, the infamous tape was released commercially by Salomon under the title One Night in Paris, after a series of legal maneuvers that left people more confused than ever about what had happened and whether one or both parties on the tape had been involved in its distribution. An Internet porn company, Marvad, claimed in court documents that it had struck a deal with a friend of Salomon in August 2013, months before The Simple Life first aired, to distribute the tape. Marvad alleged that they had Salomon’s permission and that Paris Hilton had “consented to the public exploitation of the video.”

In July 2004, Salomon came to an out-of-court settlement with Paris, agreeing to pay her $400,000 and a percentage of profits from the tape’s sales. She would later claim that she never saw any money from the tape. But she hardly needed it, because its notoriety helped build her an empire in excess of $100 million.

By the time the second season of The Simple Life aired in 2004, Paris was getting $25,000 to $100,000 just to appear at a club, and even more to DJ. Before long, with Moore’s help, she had developed an assortment of fashion accessories, including a purse collection for a Japanese label and a jewelry line marketed on Amazon, which she described as “beautiful and very high quality, yet affordable and available to everyone.”

Next came the first of many perfumes for her own company, Parlux, which proved to be an almost instant success, with sales increasing by 47 percent in just one year. Paris Hilton fragrances would gross more than one billion dollars over the next decade. Soon came the first of forty-four Paris Hilton stores, a racing team, a lingerie line, and even a Paris Hilton Beach Club chain. “I’m not just putting my name to any old product,” she explained. “I’m hands-on. I sleep with a notepad next to my bed and design everything from the bags and sunglasses right down to choosing the smell of my perfumes.”

Paris was riding high, and then she suddenly started crashing down. In September 2006, she was arrested on a DUI while driving erratically in Hollywood just after midnight. She registered a blood alcohol level of .08 percent, above the California legal limit. She was released shortly after arriving at the police station, and a trial date was set for the following January. The next morning, she called in to Ryan Seacrest’s radio show to say that the incident had been blown out of proportion; that she had just been “really hungry” and was racing to In and Out Burger after having one margarita with friends. “It was nothing,” she insisted.

She said she was surprised the press had made a big deal out of it. “Everything I do is blown out of proportion,” she said. “It really hurts my feelings.”

When the case came to court, she pleaded no contest to alcohol-related reckless driving, was placed on thirty-six months’ probation, and was fined $1,500. Her license was also suspended and she was ordered to enroll in an alcohol-education program.

Days later, police pulled her over and informed her that she was driving on a suspended license. They forced her to sign a document acknowledging that she was not allowed to drive. But six weeks later, on February 27, she was stopped once again after being clocked driving seventy miles an hour in a thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone with no headlights on, and she was charged with violating her probation. Her publicist insisted that she was unaware that her license had been suspended, but a copy of the statement she had signed in January was in fact found in her glove compartment.

In May, the scene outside her court hearing was a circus, as the media gathered to find out whether she would pay any consequences for her repeated violations. It emerged at the hearing that Paris had never reported for the alcohol-education program she had been ordered to enroll in as part of her probation. Nor did the judge, Michael Sauer, find credible her claim that she did not know her license had been suspended, noting that police had found the “smoking gun”—the document that she had signed acknowledging this fact. “I’m very sorry and from now on I’m going to pay complete attention to everything,” Paris said before the judge ruled. “I’m sorry and I did not do it on purpose at all.”

Delivering his ruling, the judge issued a withering rebuke to her legal team, saying, “I can’t believe that [her] attorneys did not tell her that the suspension had been upheld. She wanted to disregard everything that was said and continue to drive no matter what.” Sauer proceeded to sentence her to forty-five days at the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood. Well aware that celebrities are often accorded special privileges in jail, the judge made it clear that Paris was to get no special treatment. To ensure that this was taken seriously, he decreed that she would not be allowed work release, furloughs, alternative jail, or electronic monitoring.

Visibly upset by the ruling, Paris’s mother jumped up and sarcastically asked the judge, “Can I have your autograph?” Afterward, she told a reporter outside the courtroom who asked what she thought of the decision, “What do you think? This is pathetic and disgusting, a waste of taxpayer money with all this nonsense. This is a joke.”

Her lawyer, Michael Weitzman, was quick to react. “I’m shocked and disappointed at the sentence by the judge,” he told reporters. “To sentence Paris Hilton to jail is uncalled for, inappropriate, and ludicrous. She was singled out for who she is. She’s been selectively targeted. Paris was honest in her testimony. We plan to appeal. Shame on the system.”

After attending the MTV Movie Awards on June 3, 2007, Paris reported to jail to serve her forty-five-day sentence. But only four days later, Los Angeles County sheriff Lee Baca signed an order releasing her to serve the remainder of her time at home under electronic monitoring, due to an unspecified “medical condition.” It later emerged that the condition was a supposed psychological disorder, and it seemed to many observers that Paris had been given special treatment, especially since Judge Sauer had been very specific in his original sentence: “No electronic monitoring.” When Sauer heard about the sheriff’s actions, he immediately summoned Paris for a hearing the next morning. There, he reimposed the original sentence and sent her back to jail. When she heard his ruling, Paris shouted out “It’s not right!” and broke down in tears, asking to hug her mother.

At the request of her lawyers, she was held for psychiatric examination for five days, before being sent back to Lynwood to serve the remainder of her sentence. In true Paris fashion, when she was finally released two weeks later, she had a special outfit delivered to the facility and changed in a bathroom before exiting past hordes of paparazzi in a chic jacket, jeans, and heels, and in full makeup. She would later use the outfit to launch a new clothing line.

At first, the notoriety of the arrest and subsequent legal proceedings appeared to solidify her brand. “Paris Hilton being arrested just makes her more famous,” said veteran Hollywood publicist Michael Levine. “She has devoted her entire adult life to appearing to be the princess of parties.” Her handlers wasted no time attempting to cash in on the new attention. Moore even trademarked her signature phrase from The Simple Life, “That’s hot.” But a phrase already existed that came to be even more closely associated with the heiress. Those who chose to disparage her usually dismissed her as “famous for being famous.” The phrase had its roots in a 1961 book by the social theorist Daniel J. Borstin, who defined a celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” Until 2007, there was only one celebrity whose name would instantly come to mind when the phrase was used. Soon there would be another.