Paris Hilton is the latest in a long line of rich girls who partied their way to fame. But with a hit TV show, a budding singing and acting career and a tell-all book, could the sexy heiress actually be more than this year's model?
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Someone could make a chart of Paris Hilton's dizzying rise to fame and practically use it as a Rorschach test to measure American attitudes toward celebrity. To some, Hilton's speedball ascent on the 21st century fame-o-meter might be viewed as an inevitable outcome of being born famous--great-granddaughter and heiress to one of America's wealthiest men, hotel baron Conrad Hilton. Others watched Hilton, now 23, as she grew into young adulthood and soared higher and higher in the public consciousness, undoubtedly shaking their heads and uttering clichés like "poor little rich girl," as she emerged bearing all the earmarks of a relentless post-Madonna-style self-promoter. Until very recently, one might well have asked, "Who is this Hilton girl, anyway, and why are we always hearing about her?" Is she a model? A celebutante? Just another float-rider in the passing parade of interchangeable and transitory "It" girls? Or could she possibly be the real thing, a genuinely absorbing personality that Hollywood will catapult to new levels of fame and fortune?
"It's not about fame, really," says Hilton, in the currently fashionable style of those who pretend not to want it even if they do. "Years from now, I would just want people to say, 'She was young. She was a crazy girl for a while or whatever, but then she married and had a great big family. She was good to people and did a lot for the world. And that she was a nice person.'"
Well, OK, but as a nation, we've seldom elevated and worshipped nice the way we have famous. When you come right down to it, there is nothing especially new, scandalous or even toxic about Paris Hilton and her fame. Rich and famous have long gone hand-in-glove and, as a deeply class-conscious populace, we have always been profoundly entertained by the excesses and escapades of the rich, the egomaniacal and the wayward. We take comfort somehow in watching how an heiress, for all her privilege and advantages, can act just as wild and crazy as one of our own trashy, low-rent cousins at a suburban wedding.
Think of glamourpuss Barbara Hutton, who inherited a $40 million fortune in Woolworth money when she was 4, made her high society debut in 1930 during the economic ruin of the Great Depression at a bash costing well over $60,000, then spent much of her life earning headlines with her non-stop partying and seven marriages to various scurrilous barons, princes and counts (including Hollywood royalty Cary Grant) before dying a virtual pauper in 1979 at age 66. Or what about eccentric tobacco heiress Doris Duke, who died in 1993 after parlaying a multi-million bequest into a $1.2 billion fortune, enjoying widely reported affairs with the likes of General George Patton and Errol Flynn, and "accidentally" in 1966, crushing to death her lover while he was opening the iron gates of her estate?
Duke, Hutton and other gilt-edged playgirls of the past ducked the limelight because they knew how harsh and unforgiving it could be. But that was then. These days, notoriety is the new cool. Fame is almost a constitutional right, the instant reach of the Internet (exhibit A: Hilton's sex video) making anyone a known commodity in 15 minutes. But it's Hollywood that propels a merely well-known personality into the stratosphere of icon. Madonna sang, "Everybody comes to Hollywood." It's true. That's where the money is bigger, the stakes higher and the sunshine eternal. Where else can a white-bred, nearly bankrupt mogul like Donald Trump reinvent himself as a sexy symbol of American know-how, or a aging, doddering rock 'n' roll star like Ozzy Osbourne become an overnight sensation for, well, being himself? Get yourself a reality TV show like, say, The Apprentice, The Osbournes or The Anna Nicole Show and suddenly, you're not merely rich and famous, you're mega. Entire new universes open to you. Everyone wants to know you, do business with you, to be "in bed" with you. TV commercials? Celebrity product endorsements? Spin-off shows? An unending stream of magazines covers? Movie and record deals? Sure, whatever you want. You're not merely rich now, you're a full-fledged multimedia star--that sexiest, most sought-after permutation of 21st-century fame. And now Paris Hilton is the newest member of this exalted club.
Hilton may look merely like the latest incarnation of that alternately beloved and reviled phenomenon--the rich girl who can do anything she damn well pleases. Yet, one hallmark that sets her apart from her predecessors, that makes her very modern, is an iron-clad determination and brilliance in achieving fame by using a famous family name as a mere jumping-off point. Why be just "a Hilton," when you could be "the Paris Hilton"? (It's telling that her family wanted her to go into the hotel business but she wanted no part of it.) And in that effort she is cunning and thoroughly up to speed in knowing how to manipulate the apparatuses of fame. Hilton transformed herself from bad girl to hugely famous by starring in a reality TV show called, ironically, The Simple Life. With Pais having notched that achievement on her Prada belt, don't be surprised to watch her now make a full court press for global domination on the scale of, say, Madonna or Jennifer Lopez.
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."
By now, it should be apparent that Hilton is not merely dabbling at acting, anymore than she dabbles at anything else. For the past four years, she has studied as often as four times a week with sought-after acting coaches including Janet Alhanti and Howard Fine. "Right now, I'm giving people what they want to see, and the obvious thing people think of me for is the ditzy blonde. Later, I'd definitely like to surprise people, like Cameron Diaz did in Being John Malkovich. Doing something with brown hair, glasses, being a total nerd would be really fun. Or like Charlize Theron did with Monster. I've been training and I think I'm getting better and better."
Before giving Theron and Diaz a run for their money, though, Hilton is strategically building herself up in smaller roles, such as the boyfriend-stealing fashion-show guest in the new Garry Marshall comedy Raising Helen, starring Kate Hudson. She is filming a larger role in House of Wax, a Joel Silver-produced horror remake due out later this year. "Before there was a director or anything, Joel called up the head of my agency and said, 'I need Paris in my movie.' That was very cool."
Whether or not the Silver movie makes her a star, she promises the film will at least be scary. After that, "I want to do something great," she says. "I'm not going to do anything cheesy. I'd rather do something smart than just do a bunch of things."
Another project Hilton would like to do is a screen version of Gigi Levangie Grazer's satirical Hollywood novel Maneater. "I loved that book and if they make that a movie, I want to be in it. I love Jackie Collins, too, everything she does, and I love her, personally," says Hilton, who could easily be a character in one of Collins' racy novels.
Hilton's affection for girly books is perhaps part of her reason for doing a comedic as-told-to book, Confessions of an Heiress, due out in the fall from Simon & Schuster. But another reason is that today invariably, every celebrity must publish a book. She breezily describes it as "about my life, my friends, it has lots of pictures, and it's just kind of a book for girls about how to be an heiress. If people actually take it seriously, I'll be embarrassed. I mean, there's a chapter from my dog Tinkerbell, who has her own diary."
With that, her adored teacup Chihuahua Tinkerbell, who sometimes sports her own designer booties, goes prancing around the studio like the pampered princess she has every right to be. "Tinkerbell is my life," says Hilton, with genuine emotion. "I love her so much, I can't imagine losing her. I will die when she dies. I really won't know what to do."
But before she goes, there's a lot she wants to accomplish. If the Hilton Plan unfolds according to expectations over the next year or so, she will no longer be merely famous for being famous but internationally celebrated as a singer, movie star and author. Who needs notoriety when you can have that? She's way too young, clever and, yes, compulsively charismatic to be content being anybody's footnote or punchline. Like many before her, she will have parlayed her fame into the one thing only Hollywood can deliver--stardom.
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Stephen Rebello