Paris Hilton: Paris is Burning

She certainly appears primed for the big time when we meet at a red-hot Los Angeles photographer's studio during long breaks between a photo session. Although she has been up since the very wee hours, not partying but completing work on The Simple Life 2, and is preparing to jet to Australia in a matter of days to shoot a movie, she couldn't be more on her game. She appears acutely aware that being famous is a full-time, all-consuming undertaking, a pursuit more obsessively intoxicating than partying, globe-hopping, even sex. And, as she talks about her past, present and plans for the future, she practically invites one to look closer, to see her as a person in transition toward becoming more focused, tamed and, frankly, a lot more interesting than her public image to date would lead one to suspect.

To fully absorb how Paris Hilton plans to expand and elaborate on the fame she's accrued to date, and to make her mark on all forms of entertainment as we now know them, you'd have to hear her sing. That's right--sing. At the moment, she half-smiles as her ear is cocked to the sound of her own voice booming out of the photographer's studio speakers. It's Hilton's first single, due out the first week of July, called, rather shrewdly, "Screwed." She sounds relentlessly upbeat as she croons, "Please don't let it end... You're under my skin...Since I'm already screwed, here's a message to you... My heart is wide open...."

"I've always wanted to do this," she says. "As a kid, I sang Madonna songs and stuff like that, but not professionally. I'm really shy about singing, but in the past year I've been focused on that. And I really love it." When her CD, which she is thinking of calling Paris Is Burning, comes out as early as late summer, she may kick off a tour in Japan to ease herself into the frantic curiosity and chaos that American concert dates will undoubtedly attract. Word around town is that Hilton, given her surprising vocal chops, let alone her appeal and her high profile, could be "huge."

"Mostly, the songs I write are about being happy and having fun," she says, confiding that she's begun taking dance classes to help hone her stagecraft. "I just want to make people feel happier, make them smile and think, 'life is good.'" It is for her.

After all the uproar provoked by published tales of her partying ways and the now-infamous sex video peddled by a former boyfriend, Hilton clearly hopes to slam the book closed on that chapter of her life, while still maintaining the heat that keeps the public intrigued. "I was really very upset for a while," she says, quietly recalling the sort of nasty publicity she once got almost exclusively. "But then I finally realized, I have to live my life. I'm just so different than people's fantasy of how I am. I'm probably totally the opposite of what people might think. I just wish people wouldn't believe what they read."

But even if people believe what they read, it's only going to make her a more salable commodity. She certainly trades off her reputation in The Simple Life, in which she and longtime pal Nicole Richie (daughter of Lionel) rough it Green Acres-style in America's backwoods, delighting a working-class audience by milking cows, shoveling manure and working at a drive-in. Earning a maximum viewership of 13 million when it premiered last December, The Simple Life had to be judged a massive success, and although Hilton emerged to some observers as a fizzy ditz not especially well-equipped for any sort of real life, she was also--surprise, surprise--virtually impossible to dislike. Could she be more than just a name and a parade of self-promoting poses, after all?

"A lot of people think I'm playing myself on the show, but I'm not. I'm a lot smarter than I act on TV," says Hilton, who just finished shooting the second season of the series, which begins airing June 16. In other words, she knows exactly what she's doing. She says she's exerted more muscle in shaping the show, thereby helping polish her own image. She happily describes the new season as "like a thousand times more funny" than last year. "They wanted us to travel on road trips with the same family as on the first season, but I was like, 'That's going to be boring.'" Hilton is confident greater things lie ahead as an actor, something she hopes to prove when she becomes a movie star, the next step in her march toward big-time fame. In a way, she's been rehearsing for her close-up since childhood. Her mother Kathy is a former actress who occasionally appeared on The Rockford Files and Happy Days. "My parents would have parties and my sister, Nicole Richie and I would dress up and do karaoke and film ourselves singing and dancing. I just always knew that being an actress was what I wanted to do."

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