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
