All of the things that every teenage girl would go through: going to school, going to the prom, going to college, I missed out on so much of that,” Paris Hilton tells me. It would be natural to assume this was just the opportunity cost of her fame; the Shirley Temple of partying, she’s been red-carpeting so long that even if she’s younger than you – she’s 42 – it probably feels as if she’s lived longer. Of course she didn’t go to college: those sequins weren’t going to wear themselves to Coachella.

In the beginning, Paris Hilton was famous because her parents were, and they were famous because of her great-grandfather, hotel tycoon Conrad Hilton, and the whole family was famous because of its wealth. As she moved into her late teens, she became a name in her own right: a model and It girl, the “OG influencer”, as she describes it – the first person on record to seek and attain payment for turning up at parties. This, at the time, seemed to seal her in the public imagination as a bauble, one of life’s fripperies. Certainly, we didn’t spend a lot of time pondering that it takes quite a lot of entrepreneurial moxie to recognise the value of your stardust and monetise it, especially when you’re already minted.

Hilton’s gear change to global fame came in 2004, when a former boyfriend, Rick Salomon, released a sex tape filmed the year before that rapidly caught fire online. At this point, Hilton was already becoming known for the reality show The Simple Life, which she did with Nicole Richie: two fabulous, pampered socialites, slumming it in minimum-wage jobs, living with a regular family in Arkansas. It was strangely compelling and memorable: I can still get a pin-sharp visual on Hilton and Richie trying to make onion rings in a fast-food restaurant.

That show seemed to fix her reputation as the punchline of a joke she’d actually authored. The Simple Life marked the dawn of the age of a certain type of structured reality TV; the next nearest thing was Laguna Beach, which didn’t air until the following year. Hilton, obviously along with numerous TV execs, created what would become an endlessly replenishing genre, and yet managed to emerge from it the ditzy, clueless little rich girl.

With sidelines in perfume, boutiques, beach clubs and other product lines, she started DJing in the 2010s and, unarguably, by then had created more wealth and notoriety than had ever been bestowed on her by the accident of birth. Granted, none of this would have shaken out the same way without the privileged start, but she’s no Donald Trump character, sitting on piles of inherited gold and claiming to have made it. The late Barron Hilton probably put it most pithily when he said that he used to be known as Conrad Hilton’s son, until he was known as Paris Hilton’s grandfather.

But none of that is why she missed out on her teenage years, has no education to speak of, and spent years battling “so much trauma that I didn’t want to think”. She was “going out, travelling, doing all these things just to not have to think about what I had been through”. It sounds so improbable, impossible even, for anything that bad to have happened in a family so scrutinised, but her teenage years were horrific.

She’s speaking to me over Zoom from Los Angeles, and we’re talking about Paris: The Memoir – she looks on the screen much as she does on its cover: blond, glossy, flawless, features so strong and symmetrical that it makes her seem self-possessed and a bit remote, irrespective of what she’s actually saying. Her friend Kim Kardashian once said, while they were making frittata and french toast coated with Frosted Flakes, “I don’t know anyone who parties as hard as you do and looks as good as you do”, and that’s as true now as it was any other year.

In a story probably familiar to anyone with ADHD who grew up before it was common to get a diagnosis, Paris Hilton struggled at school, and the upsides of attention deficit disorder – “We’re so creative, we’re constantly thinking, our minds move as fast as a race car” – went unrecognised. “My childhood would have been very different if I’d been diagnosed: I definitely wouldn’t have been sent away,” she says. When she was 14, she was groomed by a teacher at her school, and her parents came home to find her in a car on the drive, kissing a grown man. They were about to move from Bel Air to the Waldorf Astoria anyway, and “they were worried”, she says, “to have a young girl in New York City at that point, and thought I would be safer with my grandma. But they had no idea it was a teacher.” So the Hiltons, having asked no questions about the incident, sent their oldest daughter to live in Palm Springs and moved with their other three children, Nicky, Barron II and Conrad.

Full interview: theguardian.com

THE CERULEAN SKY over Beverly Hills is silvering its way toward nightfall when I find myself trapped at Paris Hilton’s. The photographer and crew have packed up and left with their sundry equipment. The stylists have packed up and left with countless lumpy bags and a large box they’d struggled to fit in their car. The landscapers have packed up and left in a white truck laden with an alarming amount of foliage. Even the helicopters overhead have stopped their mosquito whine. A hush has fallen over Hilton’s stately driveway (where her pink Bentley sits with a flat tire) and over her Italianate mansion (where a neon-pink glow emanates from one entire wing). And here I am, shaking the curlicues of an elaborate wrought-iron gate that had been wide open earlier and wondering how the hell to get out of this gilded paradise.

It is, admittedly, not a bad place to be stuck, I think to myself as I wander the grounds looking for an alternate means of egress. There are palm trees of biblical proportions and a multitiered fountain. There are potted plants and cherubic statues. There is an entrance as imposing as the Vatican’s, save for a neon-rainbow welcome mat and a grand, columned foyer in which stands a life-size, stuffed alpaca (a gift from the Kardashians, as it turns out). Down a soaring hallway, there is a well-appointed family room of sorts, if family rooms typically boasted neon signs of the Chanel logo and studded Versace pillows and a smudge stick resting on an ashtray emblazoned with the words “You’re Fucking Awesome.” And in that very room, just moments ago, there was Hilton herself, nestled into a corner of the creamy couch, cozy in a hot-pink tracksuit and rainbow socks, and talking about her newish husband and her new baby and her even newer book, Paris: The Memoir, which, she later tells me, she wrote because she “suppressed so much” and found that “opening up was just so healing.” And because she knows what you might think when you hear the words “Paris Hilton,” and, truth be told, she was “so over that narrative.”

Plus, the narrative doesn’t even track. Now she’s a wife. Now she’s a mom. Now, on this day in late February, she has a one-month-old baby boy, Phoenix Barron Hilton-Reum, who is not just named for a city, like his mother, but also for a mythical creature that rises from the ashes. Now, she and her husband, venture capitalist Carter Reum, have successfully pulled off one of the most impressive moves in the history of celebrity by keeping their baby’s entire existence a secret until a full week after he was born. The Hiltons didn’t even know. The Reums didn’t even know. The only people who knew were the medical team and the surrogate, who watched episodes of The Simple Life while pregnant so that the fetus would get used to the sound of his mother’s voice. Hilton had thrown on a brunette wig when they got the news that Phoenix was arriving a week and a half early, and the couple rushed to Cedars-Sinai hospital, where they cried as they witnessed their baby being born. He’d been so healthy, they’d taken him home that very night, dispensing with staff (save for a baby nurse) and hunkering down in their mansion in awe at what they’d accomplished. “It was just like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m a mom,’” says Hilton. “My life has just been so public, my whole life has been, just, invaded; I felt like, for my baby, I just wanted him to come into the world and just be here and not have all this weird…” she trails off, not even sure how to articulate what “this” is, or the extent of its weirdness.

Then the moment gets meta: One of the most photographed women in the world — who in fact had just come from a photo shoot that was itself documented by a film crew for the second season of her reality show Paris in Love — begins scrolling through her phone for a picture of her own literal creation. She lands on the image, holding out the device to proudly show the tiny little features of a tiny little human under a tiny little hat. “This is when he was three hours old,” she says. “He was so freaking cute. He came out camera-ready.” She says this and then laughs at the ridiculousness of the statement, the Paris Hilton–ness of it. But then also: Look at him. He really did!

Reum, a boyish and buoyant Midwesterner in navy sweats, lopes into the room to check on his wife. “Oh, you got the preview!” he says to me excitedly when he sees the picture of Phoenix. Hardly anyone has yet seen the actual baby, though a few days ago at Hilton’s birthday party — a small gathering that included Sia, Rebel Wilson, and Hilton’s sister, Nicky — some friends had crept upstairs to take a peek.

Full interview: rollingstone.com

In November 2003, after we had filmed the first season of The Simple Life and before it premiered, I was living my best life. The show started getting tons of great press. My co-star Nicole Richie and I were working it, showing up, doing interviews. I was out clubbing almost every night, posing for the paparazzi, talking to everyone about this crazy, wonderful show about to come out, promising everyone that they’d be blown away. I shuttled between New York and L.A., working the red carpet at premieres and award shows, and wherever I went, the growing army of paparazzi followed. I was having a wild-child moment, and it was sort of glorious.

It all came crashing down when I realized I was pregnant at 22. It was like waking up on the ledge outside a 40th-floor window. I was terrified and heartsick. The hormones sent my ADHD symptoms spiraling. Everything I knew about myself was at war with everything I’d been raised to believe about abortion. No one can ever know how hard it is to face this impossible choice unless she’s faced it herself.

Luckily, I wasn’t fully alone. At the time, I had been dating a guy named Jason Shaw for two years. I had first seen him on the curb in front of the Four Seasons in L.A., waiting for valet parking, and recognized him from a towering Tommy Hilfiger billboard that featured him stretched out in his underwear in Times Square. He was a lovely, down-to-earth guy. He had a degree in history. He bought a house on Kings Road where we could live together… But I knew I wasn’t in the right place to make any sort of commitment. It had nothing to do with him or a baby. I just wasn’t capable of being honest or loyal or whole. After suffering abuse at Provo Canyon School and three other programs within the “troubled teen” industry network, I was damaged in ways I couldn’t tell him about, and the fact that I never confided in him about my past—that says it all, doesn’t it? Secrets are corrosive. They destroy anything you try to layer over them.

Choosing to have an abortion can be an intensely private agony that’s impossible to explain. The only reason I’m talking about it now is that so many women are facing it, and they feel so alone and judged and abandoned. I want them to know that they’re not alone, and they don’t owe anyone an explanation. When there is no right way—all that’s left is what is. What you know you have to do. And you do it, even though it breaks your heart.

Over the years, I’ve looked back on all this with sorrow, even though I know I made the right choice. In my loneliest moments, I’ve romanticized that time in my life and tortured myself with melodrama—thoughts like, What if I killed my Paris?—but the fact is, there was no happy little family at stake. That was not going to happen. Trying to continue that pregnancy with the physical and emotional issues I was dealing with at the time would have been a train wreck for everyone involved. At that moment, I was in no way capable of being a mother. Denying that would have jeopardized the forever family I hoped to have in the future, at a time when I was healthy and healed.

Until I met Carter, who would become my husband, I wasn’t totally convinced that forever was a thing for me.

With Carter, for the first time in my life, I began a relationship on a foundation of full disclosure. I made a connection that didn’t include separate corners for carefully kept secrets. We were honest with each other. Crazy concept, right? First you own it. Then you can share it.

We’re now a comfortable married couple. We love our Saturday mornings when we go to the farmers’ market for fresh eggs, fruit, and veggies, which we haul home so I can cook an elaborate brunch, and then we sit there and eat and eat and talk about exquisitely nerdy things like cross-collateralization and negative pickup. We laugh a lot and take time to wonder and be grateful. We love our work, our homes, our jobs, and we adore our dogs.

And we’ve started a family—on our own terms, because we were both ready to be parents. That doesn’t mean it was easy. I’ve always wanted twins: a boy and a girl. “It’s possible,” our doctor said. “In a perfect world…” If only my world were as perfect as it looks. For so many people, having babies is like plug and play, right? That’s how it seems, anyway. And when you want a baby, it seems like everyone around you is getting pregnant. It sucks, but I’m not alone in this either. There are so many young women at the fertility doctor’s office, so many families waiting to happen.

That’s what IVF is all about. Possibility. Hope. It’s hard, but you’re willing to go through anything to find your heart’s desire.

Month after month of injections, several egg-harvesting procedures, more IVF injections, new ADHD meds, my natural state of chaos—it was a lot. The shots are painful. At times, I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to confront the fact that my mind and body had never fully healed—and probably never will fully heal—from the trauma I went through as a teenager. But after two years, we finally welcomed our son, Phoenix Barron Hilton Reum, in January via surrogacy. He is my everything, the child I was always meant to raise.

I know I wouldn’t have this life if I hadn’t made that difficult choice in my early 20s. Women need to control their reproductive destiny. We need to know ourselves, trust ourselves, and know what’s right for us—and when—and stay in the driver’s seat.

Source: time.com