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She has a whole room of Jimmy Choos, and a miniature villa for her dogs. But the socialite-turned-DJ Paris Hilton insists she’s ‘down-to-earth normal’. Can it be true?
BY Helena de Bertodano
20 July 2014
“Life is not about finding yourself,” reads a sign on the sideboard in Paris Hilton’s house. “Life is about creating yourself.” So whom or what exactly has Paris Hilton created? To some the celebutante-actress-singer-model-perfumer-brand known as Paris is an astute businesswoman peddling her naivety with acumen, to others a deluded Barbie-like child-woman completely divorced from reality.
Even the engraved name above her doorbell is designed to confuse: Princess Paris, it reads. “I am the closest thing to American royalty,” she once said – to widespread ridicule. Bashing Paris Hilton is an international sport. And it is tempting to follow suit – but, underneath all the layers, there seems to be a kernel of something genuine.
“The princess Barbie [image] is a fun character but in real life I’m very chill and down-to-earth normal,” says Hilton, 33, reclining on a black leather sofa in a pink Juicy Couture tracksuit in her nightclub. Of course, normal people do not have private nightclubs in their homes but Hilton’s perception of normality is a little different from most.
Once hailed as New York’s leading it-girl, Hilton is the great-granddaughter of Conrad Hilton, the founder of
Hilton hotels
, but has spent much of her life trying to escape her heritage. Last year she even launched herself as an international DJ at the
Amnesia
nightclub in
Ibiza
and the club nights proved so successful – “I killed it” – that she is returning this summer. “I feel like DJs are the new rock stars,” says Hilton modestly. Reviews, however, were mixed. One commentator described her as “fun and lovely”, while another said her residency marked “the end of Ibiza”.
When she is not singing, acting, posing or DJing, she is building
her business empire
, the cornerstone of which is her perfume line. “We’ve done over $1.8 billion in sales [on my fragrances]. I have 16 other product lines [including] clothing, sunglasses, shoes, lingerie, swimwear, eyelashes, nails, my own motorcycle team, dog clothes… I have 60 Paris Hilton stores that carry all my products.” Recently she opened her first hotel, in the Philippines. “It’s called Paris, not Hilton, just me,” she says, “because I don’t want people to think it’s my family’s. It’s mine.”
Her house is as gloriously over the top as you would imagine. It is, essentially, a shrine to herself – and maybe, on a much smaller scale, to Marilyn Monroe, her “icon”. Every gilt and lacquered surface, almost every square inch of wall, is covered with images of Hilton – Hilton covered with gold paint, Hilton greeting her fans, Hilton with Elizabeth Taylor (who married her great uncle), Hilton printed even on her cushions. A giant image of her, made up of thousands of tiny images, covers one wall, while her portrait looks over the sweeping banister of her staircase. “I like it because it looks very regal,” she says as we walk down the stairs past it. “In movies everyone always has an elegant picture painted of them and I was like, ‘I need one of those…’”
When Hilton “needs one of those” she tends to get it. But, as she is at pains to point out, it is on her own tab. “People assume because I’m a Hilton that ‘her parents gave that to her’. It’s annoying because it’s so far from the truth.”
Hilton parlayed her success as a socialite into a business, launching a lifestyle brand in 2004. She started with a jewellery line sold on Amazon, then helped create a perfume for Parlux. It was intended as a small release but, thanks to her name, became a huge success and the first of many scents. She has always stressed that she did this alone,
without financial assistance from her family
. Although Hilton gives credit to her “amazing team”, she says that all the key decisions are hers.
Paris Hilton with her parents Richard and Kathy and her sister, Nicky. Photo: REX
“I am the CEO and the creative director. I come up with ideas and I always make the final decision. I like to get people’s opinions but I’m the boss.” Later I speak to her manager, Jamie, who is downstairs putting the finishing touches to a video to launch her 17th fragrance. “I figure out how to mould and translate Paris’s ideas – for example, she gives me notes on wardrobe and accessories and I keep redesigning until we have it.”
She shows me her bedroom, with its black and gold bed and a terrace overlooking her swimming-pool and the San Fernando valley beyond. To the right is her dog-kennel, which looks like a small Italian villa, complete with cornicing, black crystal chandelier and designer furniture. “Hi baby, I love you,” she coos, waving at one of the dogs which has appeared on its own miniature balcony.
“I’ll show you my closet,” says Hilton, leading me into a room that is almost as large as her bedroom with multiple rows of shoes, predominantly
Jimmy Choo
. There are no clothes. “This is just my shoobies,” she explains, in baby-talk. “Here is my real closet.” We walk into another large room, where hundreds, if not thousands, of designer dresses are hanging. How on earth does she choose what to wear? “It gives me a panic attack sometimes,” she says with a laugh, throwing her arms against a rail of dresses and sinking theatrically into it. Her eye falls on a turquoise bejewelled mini sheath dress. “This is a custom piece I had made in India. I love it because it just blings.” She takes it off the rail: “I think I might use it in my music video.”
Paris Hilton on the decks
Hilton is making a video for her latest single, Come Alive. “It’s about that feeling when you’ve just fallen in love and feel so alive – it’s the best feeling in the world.” She has been in love a few times – as well as a rumoured relationship long ago with
Leonardo DiCaprio
, she was engaged to one Greek shipping heir, Paris Latsis, then went out with another, Stavros Niarchos. Later she had a relationship with the baseball player Doug Reinhardt. For the past couple of years she has been dating
the Spanish model River Viiperi
, 22, although I don’t get the impression that it is very serious – of the hundreds of photographs around Hilton’s house, I don’t see a single one of him. I ask her if they are still together. “Yes,” she says. “He’s a really, really sweet guy…”
She pays no attention to her critics these days. “If people want to be mean, that’s their problem. It used to be really hurtful. I would call and cry to my mom all the time but now I just laugh.” She has also become better at working out who her true friends are. “So many people have bad intentions, so many girls want to hang out [with me] to be someone. I weed those people out of my life. I call them hungry tigers.”
As a teenager she became a victim of a boyfriend, Rick Salomon, who filmed a sex tape with her that later went viral under the title 1 Night in Paris. “It was devastating because that was someone I was with for a few years. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully trust any man again after that. It was just the most hurtful and awful thing that anyone could do to a little girl. I was very young, it wasn’t my fault.”
Paris Hilton on the catwalk for Heatherette in 2004. Photo: REX
It has been suggested that Hilton herself allowed the tape to go public as a publicity stunt just before her notorious reality-television show The Simple Life was first broadcast. But as she said – quite wittily – in the 2008 documentary Paris, Not France, “If I was going to do something like that I would look hot. I looked gross in that video.”
By that point she had already built a level of fame: she had been on several magazine covers including Vanity Fair and had had a cameo in the film Zoolander, but it was The Simple Life, which ran for five series, starting when she was 22, that really made her name and was responsible for Hilton’s dumb-blonde image. She and her co-star
Nicole Richie
were uprooted from their lives of luxury and sent to Arkansas to sample how the other, poorer half lives. “Walmart – do they like make walls there?” was a classic Hilton comment. She has been trying to live it down ever since. “I played a character the whole time – I think a lot of people assume that must be who I am in real life.” She fell out with Richie during the show but now says it was nothing. “She’s like a sister to me.”
As a child growing up in Beverly Hills, Hilton always knew the import of her surname. “At school kids would be like, ‘Oh my God, you own Hilton hotels, you’re so rich.’ As I turned into my teens I realised I wanted to do something, I didn’t want to be a trust-fund kid.” Her relatives, particularly her grandfather, had a big impact on her. “Watching all these men create those empires was so inspiring. I observed and paid attention. From a young age I knew I wanted to do big things.”
With Nicole Richie in The Simple Life in 2003; with her boyfriend River Viiperi Photos: REX/GETTY
When she was 15, Hilton’s family moved to New York, where she fell under the laser gaze of Donald Trump, who decided she would be just the person to help launch his new modelling agency. “He called my dad and said, ‘Your daughter is gorgeous. I’d love her to be my first model.’ My mom and dad were like, ‘No way.’ So I called Donald myself and said, ‘Don’t listen to them. Let’s do this.’” I ask if her parents were angry. “A little bit but then they saw I was getting my school work done and being responsible.”
Her parents, she says, have always been supportive and she is still close to them: her mother calls her several times a day (at least twice while I am with her) and they all dine together once a week.
“I had the most amazing childhood,” says Hilton, hugging her knees to her chest. “My parents have been together since my mom was 15. In Hollywood almost everyone’s divorced. My friends would come to my house and see this perfect family and I realised how lucky I was. Now, when I’m looking for a guy, I’m always thinking of someone who is like my dad: a loyal person with a good heart, because that’s all that matters in life.”
She refers often to the day “when I have a family” and longs for children – but not yet. “I wouldn’t have time right now… I’m only in LA maybe 20 per cent of the time. I wish I was here more.”
Her home, she says, is her “sanctuary” and, given the choice between an evening out or in, says the latter is more appealing. “I love to cook for myself – my mom taught me how to cook lasagnes and pastas and bake.”
She believes her businesses are so successful because her fans (she has 12.8 million followers on
Twitter
) want “to buy a piece of me. It’s like a kind of Barbie American dream. I have that childlike quality so a lot of little girls especially [like me]. I’ve always been a kid at heart. I think I always will be.”
A big believer in astrology, Hilton says she is a true Aquarian. “We are social butterflies, humanitarians, geniuses: Einstein was one.” It takes a lot of self-control not to poke fun here. But even if she and Einstein have little in common, Hilton could easily have been nothing more than a socialite. She could have married one of her Greek heirs, smiled prettily for the cameras and wanted for nothing in life. That she refuses to settle for this says something for her.
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BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — After years of sticking its logo on all manner of T-shirts, dolls, drinkware and accessories, the rock band Kiss has stamped it on an entire arena football team as well. ¶ And the creation of the Los Angeles Kiss Arena Football League team did not go undocumented. So a reality show about the effort, “4th and Loud,” premieres Aug. 12 on AMC. ¶ It wasn’t crass commercialism that motivated the fire-breathing band, though.
The band’s irrepressible Gene Simmons, he of the tongue and blood-spitting, says he was filling a civic need.
“Los Angeles is the No. 1 media city in America and it doesn’t have football?” he asked rhetorically in a Beverly Hills hotel restaurant where he was doing promotion for the reality show. “You’re kidding me. So opportunity knocks, you answer the door and you give people bang for the buck.”
That bang includes, he says, the blasting brand of hard rock that put the still-active band — appearing at Jiffy Lube Live on Friday — on the map 40 years ago and more. “We have guys who rappel from the ceiling, we have extreme bikers, rock bands, pyrotechnics, girls in cages,” he says.
Looking somewhat more subdued out of his kabuki makeup, studded codpiece and the seven-inch platform boots he wears on stage, Simmons, in a dark suit and sunglasses, with a red rose he plucked from a hotel lobby display, resembled at 64 a dour mob boss or wizened tribal chief, his scowling face framed by the jet black hair.
With band co-founder Paul Stanley, 62, adorned with a flowing scarf and an open shirt, the pair came to sell the TV critics’ press tour on the show, just as they sell their catalogue of songs to audiences on stages worldwide.
“We wanted to create something that was very much keeping with Kiss,” says Stanley, who began his spiel with a vulgar joke that landed with a thud. “We want to envelop you and pummel you.”
The show-biz aspect is something natural to sports, Simmons says. “A long time ago, people figured out in boxing that it wasn’t just about the boxing; they put girls up there carrying the [round] numbers out there. Who gets the biggest hand, the boxers or the girl carrying the number?”
It’s not a rhetorical question. He waits in an interview for the answer.
Further, “A lot of the cheerleaders that teams have have become rather sexless,” Stanley says. “We wanted to have girls who were women.”
One might expect Kiss to go sleazy — into Lingerie Football League territory, perhaps — or even bigger, since Los Angeles does not have a National Football League team. But that would take years, if it happened at all, Simmons says.
Creating an AFL team was easier. “Eight or nine months ago, there was no L.A. Kiss — that’s how fast it happened,” he says.
And from the beginning, reality-TV cameras were part of the proposition.
“Sure. It takes the same amount to make cents as it does dollars,” Simmons says. “So if you’re going to do something, go big or go home. We don’t do anything small. Whether it’s our shows, our licensing and merchandising, our restaurant chain, whatever it is, you got to do big.”
Simmons, of course, is a reality veteran who invited cameras into his home for seven seasons of “Gene Simmons Family Jewels,” amassing 156 episodes. “I Love Lucy,’ he notes dryly, “lasted 145.” (His statistics are wrong; it did more).
For Stanley, the 10-episode reality show seemed more of a nightmare.
“You either have reality or you have television, and you sacrifice reality to create reality television,” he says. “Life’s too short to assume a fake life in place of your real one.”
He calls “4th and Loud” more of a documentary. “The fact of the matter is, the show is not built around us,” he says. “You are going to meet some very, very interesting characters and stars in their own right that we want to come to the forefront.”
They include the additional owners, longtime Kiss manager Doc McGhee, managing partner and owner Brett Bouchy and president and owner Schuyler Hoversten.
As telegenic as the new team might be, the team hasn’t had the best inaugural season under Coach Bob McMillen. With three wins in its first 16 games, it was not quite at the bottom of the AFL’s West Division.
“We’ve had some not-stellar games and we are scrutinized much more than other teams because of who we are,” Stanley says. “But that being said, by next season we should be smooth sailing.”
Still, the band doesn’t get involved in the life of the team — leaving the recruiting, training and playing to the managers and coaches, and keeping Kiss separate from the players except for the uniforms and logos.
“You want to make sure that it’s real football for real football fans,” Simmons says.
A suggestion in the show that players also wear Kiss makeup was nixed by the band.
“First you have to earn it,” Simmons said of the war paint. A more overriding concern was that it would run in the players’ eyes as they perspired.
“But you’ll see lots of Kiss,” Simmons says of the games. “You want football to be legitimate, and all around it we’ll give you all the bells and whistles and all the stuff that makes Kiss the most iconic band of al time.”
“What we do best is spread the brand,” he says.
The band on the 40-show 40th anniversary tour that comes to Northern Virginia on Friday is rounded out by lead guitarist Tommy Thayer and drummer Eric Singer, who have been with the band for more than a decade.
It was originators Ace Frehley and Peter Criss who joined Simmons and Stanley when Kiss was inaugurated into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this spring, 15 years after first being eligible.
But because Simmons and Stanley wanted to perform with the current lineup rather than the original, the band didn’t play at all.
“We just went up and said thank you,” Simmons says. Criss and Frehley “clearly were equally important as we were in making the band. But if they would have been in the band still, it would have destroyed the band. Not everybody is designed to be a marathon runner. Some people are just shooting stars.”
“Being in the band from the beginning is not a birthright,” Stanley said. “If you are compromised by drugs and alcohol,” he added, “then you no longer deserve to wear the uniform.”
With the band still wearing makeup and familiar, flamboyant costumes, fans don’t seem to mind, flocking to their many appearances.
After the tour winds up, for example, “we have a Kiss Kruise, which we do every year with about 3,500 people from around the world from 33 countries,” Stanley says. “After that, we do a residency in Vegas for a month.”
“The band’s never been in better shape because, perhaps, with these tentacles and diversifying and getting into so many other things, it only solidifies and magnifies the power of the band,” Stanley adds. “Other bands can’t do it. So some people will say what we do isn’t quote-unquote rock-and-roll. But that’s always based on someone else’s limitations.”
“Kiss continues in ways we never imagined,” Simmons says. “We have a Kiss golf course in Las Vegas, a Kiss limo service, there’s a Kiss cartoon coming, a Las Vegas show, there’s a Kiss motion picture coming that my company is fully funding, there’s a Kiss event series that Warner Brothers is doing, already hiring the writer. And a documentary film that will be in theaters this year.”
Among the endless licensed items, there is, famously, a Kiss casket. “And a Kiss urn, too,” Simmons adds.
Is there a commercial tie-in that the band would turn down?
“We’d probably say no to Kiss crack,” Simmons says. “On the other hand, if we could spell it with a K, I like the marketing possibility.”
style@washpost.com
Catlin is a freelance writer.
4th and Loud Premieres Aug. 12 at 9 p.m. on AMC.
Kiss performs Friday, July 25 at Jiffy Lube Live. 703-754-6400.
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