Lounging cross-legged on her bed at home in Beverly Hills and wearing a turquoise hoodie, Paris Hilton appeared at ease. There were none of the affectations that have defined her public image for two decades: the flat baby voice, the tiny, shimmering outfits, the faux ditziness, the stance that everything cool was “hot.”
“I built this kind of shield around me and kind of this persona, almost to hide behind, because I’ve been through so much where I just didn’t even want to think about it anymore,” Ms. Hilton, 39, said over Zoom. Behind her stood a towering mirror illuminated by a sea of LED lights that refracted off her platinum hair like diamonds.
Before there were influencers, there was Paris Hilton: a beautiful blank slate of a person onto whom all kinds of ideas and brand sponsorships could be projected. She was the celebrity burnished, if not created, by a sex tape. She was the face of the Sidekick (and the victim of a Sidekick hack that brought more of her personal life into the public eye). She was a reality star, trying her hand at manual labor as a rich person. She recorded music, modeled, appeared at parties, made TV cameos, wrote an advice book. And she was mercilessly criticized, written off as “famous for being famous.”
Regardless of whether that characterization was fair at the time, it seems pretty hard to defend these days. Ms. Hilton spends more than 250 days of the year traveling the world as a D.J., raking in a reported $1 million per gig. She oversees more than 19 product lines, including fragrances, clothing (for humans and pets) and accessories. And so many people are now famous for being famous, she might now seem more venerable pioneer than contemptible fly-by-night.
Now, moreover, she’s ready to talk about the past. On Sept. 14, the documentary “This Is Paris” will be released on YouTube. It aims to crack the facade she created in the aughts, focusing instead on the decade that preceded her fame.
Ms. Hilton said that she gave the director, Alexandra Dean, full creative control over the project. “It was really difficult for me because I’m so used to having so much control and ‘The Simple Life,’ just having everything perfect and edited,” she said. “And with this, I had just to let go of all that control and let them use everything.”
There are moments of opulence in the film — jet-setting around the world, endless racks of gowns and stilettos and closets stacked with jewelry she’s never worn — and she’s quick to remind that she’s “never been photographed in the same thing twice.”
But at the heart of the documentary is trauma, stemming from Ms. Hilton’s years spent in boarding schools for troubled teens. The last one she attended was Provo Canyon School, a psychiatric residential treatment center in Utah, where she would spend 11 months.
“They just assumed it was like a normal boarding school because that’s the way that they portray it to parents and people who are putting their children in these places,” Ms. Hilton said of her parents, Kathy and Rick Hilton (her mother appears in the documentary). Before the making of the film, Ms. Hilton had never told her family about what happened to her.
Full interview: nytimes.com
