Paris: A Memoir for Young Women in the Age of Influencers

by Paris Hilton

Without looking back, I went down a short hallway and, instead of going into the bathroom, I pushed through a door that said EMPLOYEES ONLY. I hurried through a back area full of boxes and produce pallets, slipped out a back door by a dumpster, and ran as fast as I could down La Cienega Boulevard until I saw a city bus pull up to a stop.

Amber Taylor would fool those guys, but Biff convinced me I was being silly. He took me to a diner on the Upper East Side. I was sitting there thinking how much I loved New York when my dad walked in, followed by a couple of transport goons. Fuck. I didn’t say anything. Didn’t move. Biff stared down at the table. “Don’t hate me,” he whispered. “I don’t,” I said. I figured it was karma for the way I dumped Mouse. Another lesson learned: No matter what happened from here, I’d be better off alone. Always.

“Let’s go, Paris.” He said it quietly, not wanting to make a scene. My throat felt hot and tight. I said, “My name is Amber. You must have me confused with someone else.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I know it’s you.” “No. I’m not who you think I am.” It’s sad to think now how true that was. “You don’t know me,” I said. “I don’t know you.” I gripped the edge of the seat, but the transporter grabbed my arm and hauled me out of the booth. I started kicking and screaming. The goons stepped in with that “easy way/hard way” line, and I couldn’t go the easy way, because I knew they were taking me to Provo. I went crazy on them, clawing and struggling. I didn’t really expect to get away; I just wanted to make those dickheads work for it. Hey—off topic, but not really—have you ever seen Repo! The Genetic Opera?

Repo! The Genetic Opera takes place in a dystopian world where the human race is plagued by genetic organ failure, so people have to buy transplant organs, and if they can’t pay, the organs get repossessed by the fiendish slasher Repo Man, who’s actually just a dad trying to protect his daughter Shilo. Meanwhile, Rottissimo, the heartless megarich titan who rules this nightmare world, finds out that he’s dying, and he has to figure out which of his twisted children will inherit all his money and power: sadistic Luigi, insane Pavi, or beauty-obsessed Amber Sweet.

Darren Lynn Bousman, who’d produced and directed three of the Saw movies,

After a limited theatrical release, the film went to DVD. There was a special screening at Comic-Con in 2010, and weirdly, it did really well in the Czech Republic.

Repo! is really a story about fathers and daughters.

At the end of Repo!, the Repo Man’s daughter escapes, but everything comes to a disastrous end. In agony, he sings, “Didn’t I tell you not to go out?”

“You did, you did,” she answers, miserable, but not sorry. “Didn’t I tell you the world is cruel?” “You did! You did!” sings the daughter.

The cover story to friends, relatives, and colleagues was that I was at boarding school in London.

The transporters brought me to Provo in handcuffs. We went up in an elevator to a floor with an infirmary. Somewhere down the hall, someone was screaming. A girl was huddled on a bare mattress in the hall.

Orderlies fell in step with the escorts and took me to a bare cinder-block room where a pig-faced matron waited with a creepy expression. Greedy. Hungry. A nurse who looked as small and nervous as a ferret said, “Face the mirror and take off your clothes.”

Nurse Ferret used a speculum to open me up and pushed gloved fingers inside me. I struggled to be still and not kick her in the face. Someone gave me faded sweats with the number 127 on the shirt. From that moment on, no staff member called me by my name. To them, I was 127, a numbered unit on an assembly line. They gave me the usual book of nonsensical rules and left me in an isolation room to study it.

“Clothes off,” said Pigface. “No, no, no, no, no, no!” Obs was an oddly shaped cinder-block chamber, not square, not circular—a hexagon maybe—about the size of a public restroom stall. There was nothing in there except a bucket and a roll of toilet paper on the cement floor near a drain hole. In the light of the open door, I saw blood and feces smeared on the wall. When the door slammed shut, the only light filtered through a small window with wire mesh inside the glass. It was freezing cold. I read somewhere recently that they keep it between fifty-five and sixty degrees, but it felt as raw and frigid as a meat locker. They took your underwear and bra when you went to Obs so you couldn’t use them to kill yourself. Sometimes they gave girls shorts and a tank shirt made of a sort of gauzy muslin. Other times not. I don’t remember having anything on that first time.

Eventually I was on the floor in a fetal position, my teeth chattering, my muscles screaming, my mind stuck in an endless loop: This is so fucked up. This is so fucked up.

I didn’t know it was possible to simultaneously love and hate someone as hard as I loved and hated my parents while I was huddled on that cement floor, freezing, starving, feeling chunks of my soul slip down the drain hole.

I kept my eyes on that small keyhole of light: February 17, 1999. My eighteenth birthday. Legally, I’d be an adult. More important: I’d be free.

Mom says I was at Provo Canyon School for eleven months: spring 1998 until January 1999. I know I was there that Christmas, because my family was allowed to visit, and my father shot some awkward home videos.

I leaned in close so Pigface wouldn’t hear me. “Get me out. If you don’t believe me when I tell you this place is fucked up, believe me when I say that I will leave here five seconds after I turn eighteen, go to the Wall Street Journal, and tell them everything. Every. Thing. I am not fucking kidding.”

My parents came and got me a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday, and we all left together as if everything was hunky dory. We didn’t talk about why I was getting out early, and I didn’t care. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.

fragile little Fabergé-egg rich girl;

I’m a girl from a good family who was very well brought up. One day I turned my back on it all and became a bohemian. BRIGITTE BARDOT

For two years, I was starved for music, for art, for food—everything that makes life beautiful or even bearable—but mostly I was starving for love.

I recently asked another survivor, “How did you cope with things that first year after Provo?” and she said, “I drank until I was blind.” Self-medication is common among survivors. So is self-harm.

Elegance radiated from her skin, her hands, her feet, the set of her chin, everything about her. She had Dad’s slender height and Mom’s flawless social instincts. Nicky always knew the right thing to do, and she did it, but not in a prissy or fake way. She knew how to pull it off. She has her wildly creative side, but her overall vibe is wise, keep-it-classy virtue with an edge of cool intelligence—like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face.

Nicky grew up with normalcy and nurturing. She thrived in the healthy school environment at Sacred Heart, learned from exposure to the rarefied social atmosphere of New York, and slept in a quiet room where she felt loved and protected.

Pigface had warned me that, even after I aged out of Provo, my parents could commit me to a mental hospital anytime they wanted. I didn’t really believe it at the time, but years later, I saw what happened to Britney—how her dad legally took control of her personal and professional life—and it shook me. My parents did their best to bring me back into the family dynamic, but there are some lessons you can’t unlearn.

the movie Big Daddy, an Adam Sandler rom-com

When I moved back to LA in 1999, I felt like I’d missed so much. I had a huge appetite for fun, music, laughter, clothes, people, places, and just a lot of everything. MUSIC CUE: Ultra Naté, “Free” This was my anthem after I left Provo. Go listen to it. Right now. And dance. Seriously. Your soul will be changed.

To this day, when I play it in a show, the iconic opening chord progression brings tears to my eyes. I’m instantly back in New York, dancing at a club where they projected the video on the wall—a bigger-than-life image of this stunning woman in a silver straitjacket. She stands in the middle of a cold, clinical environment that felt horribly familiar to me. Then comes the unstoppable pulse of the music. At first, there’s sorrow in the lyrics: Where did we go wrong? Where did we lose our faith? The despair is undeniable, but as the song evolves, joy takes over. You want it, you want it, reach for it

The staff at Provo had their favorites. Always pretty girls. But I don’t think it was about pretty. I think these were weak people in the outside world, men and women who got off on the power they had over us. They took us to the infirmary and made us lie on the table. Made us open our legs for their stubby fingers. If we resisted, they had the booty juice ready. There was always a tray with syringes.

I tried to smother the memory of that laughter with alcohol, Molly, and music, but even if I fell into bed, danced-out and drunk as the sun came up, I always woke up within an hour or two, sweating and screaming. I found more meaningful rest in cars, airplanes, makeup chairs, or even a dark corner with the comforting chaos of a party going on around me.

The only way I could sleep in my own bed—alone or otherwise—was if I had my dogs with me. Back then, I had two sweet teacup Pomeranians: Sebastian (named after Ryan Phillippe’s character in Cruel Intentions) and Dolce (self-explanatory). They weren’t trained as such, but these were therapy dogs in the truest sense. All that CEDU “emotional growth” BS left me with an abiding fear of human therapists, and I thought I’d die if any of my friends or cousins knew what had really happened to me. My dogs were my support network.

Dog love has always been my sanctuary.

I was constantly trotting, skipping, hustling, hopping, and dancing. I never sat down while I checked my messages, returned calls, and paged through the papers, soaking up the gossip and planning my evening. At night, I came alive.

There’s nothing like that LA nightlife anymore. Back then, we didn’t have to deal with any of the exposure and distractions that consume people now. Twitter and Facebook hadn’t been invented yet. Netflix was a thing where you literally received a

My friend Holly Wiersma, who later produced Dallas Buyers Club, produced a doc called Guest List Only—a character study of people on both sides of the velvet rope—starring club promoter Sarah Uphoff (everyone called her “Pantera Sarah”) and me along with other regulars at Opium Den, Dublin’s, and Vinyl—all my favorite LA hangouts. I remember Sarah running the door, selecting who was in and who was out.

The Penfifteen Club did a song called “Ms. Hilton” that kinda says it all: Ms. Hilton, you must be worth a trillion bucks. Get the feelin’ that you really don’t give a fuck. Ms. Hilton, I like the way you push and glide. Roller skates on a social butterfly, woo!

Anyway. Shortcut Your Startup. In their book, Carter and Courtney pose “three key questions before you start anything”: What does success look like for you? Why has no one else done this? Why you, why now? Looking back on the start-up I didn’t even know I was starting up:

The mid-mod wallpaper and furnishings—boomerang coffee tables, papasan chairs, and glass bricks—reminded me of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. We called the landlord Mr. Furley because he reminded us of the vaguely creepy old landlord played by Don Knotts on Three’s Company.

Go. Do your thing. I trust you.

Try it! Bite your lower lip and let that F-bomb drop. It’s not pretty, but it feels fantastic,

I knew if my mom saw those pictures, she’d be pissed beyond belief. And my dad—holy shit. I tried to pitch it to them like, “Well, the good news is, I’m going to be in Vanity Fair!” but the nipples, the finger, Papa and Nanu’s living room—they were literally like, What. The. Fuck.

“Paris, your eyes are so blue,” she said. “They’re contacts.” I almost said “thanks,” but then I thought she might be trying to trap me so she could call me out for pretending. (Which reminds me of another rule for life I wish I’d figured out sooner rather than later: STOP FUCKING PRETENDING. It takes too much energy and makes you paranoid.)

“Mine are real,” said Nicky.

Hotel pioneer Conrad Hilton strutted a parade of showgirls on his arm, and Zsa Zsa Gabor as his second wife. His son, Nicky, notoriously wed and divorced Liz Taylor. Now a fourth Hilton generation—19-year-old Paris and her 16-year-old sister, Nicky, in her wake—is setting society on its ear. Planning a cosmetics line, starring in a documentary about herself, and denying tabloid tales of a romance with Leonardo DiCaprio, Paris is the very model of a hip-hop debutante.

The Simple Life was a reality TV groundbreaker that no one—including me—has ever been able to repeat. I was instantly on board. Producers initially wanted it to be the Hilton sisters, and I begged Nicky to do it with me, but Mom and Dad were not in favor. Too many unknowns. Too many people. Too close to home. “Don’t be insane,” Nicky said. “You’ll embarrass yourself.” “Not if it’s funny.” “I don’t want to be funny,” she said. “I want to be classy, and if their intention was for us to look classy, the show would be about us living our lives as runway models at New York Fashion Week. This is not that.” She had a point. The theme song kinda says it all: Let’s take two girls, both filthy rich, From the bright lights into the sticks. There was no doubt about how it was supposed to play out: They’re both spoiled rotten. Will they cry when they hit bottom? Notice it says when—not if—they “hit bottom.” People expected this to be about two unrelatable rich bitches who get put in their place by “real” people.

I didn’t have to beg. She was there from hello, 10,000 percent.

we worked sixteen-hour days through the oppressive heat of the Arkansas summer.

Altus, a small town in Arkansas.