By Helen Elliott
The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton’s novel about Undine Spragg, a girl from nowhere whose determination to be somewhere and somebody, was written in 1913. Wharton was writing about her Gilded Age and here, in 2023 another heiress, non-fictional, is writing about her Gilded Age.
Updated craftsfolk but the same values, parties, excesses. Nothing changes; who was Marie Antoinette imitating? Madame de Pompadour, and she was probably imitating Helen of Troy. There are women who always suggest a moment in time. Paris Hilton is one.
Famous for being famous, a phrase possibly invented for Paris Hilton.Credit: AP
″Undine” Paris Hilton was born in 1981 to an actor/socialite mother and a Hilton empire heir father. When they open their mouths money and cliché drop out. They are spectacularly conventional, spectacularly self-absorbed and hard to like, although I tried because Paris is forgiving. This book speaks to a generosity of spirit in their unconventional daughter. Her love for her family is genuine.
Genuine is a troubling word to use about Paris Hilton, whose life has been a performance. We’re all performative sometimes, but Paris Hilton hasn’t been able to stop her performances to glimpse any consistent, stable element beneath the surface. Star, her father labelled his lively eldest daughter from the outset, valuing the in-transition aspect of her but unable/uninterested to see further.
Paris: The Memoir by Paris Hilton.
Paris wasn’t taught about the possibility of a moral universe (the Trumps were family friends), and making money was regarded as the peak aspiration. And looking pretty. Any education, emotional or intellectual, was left to hired help.
Her mother’s advice on the world? “Don’t do it till you’re married. The guy will be obsessed with you if you don’t do it.”
Paris had extreme, undiagnosed ADHD. She is insomniac and always “on”. Partying at 12, drugged, raped, the victim of a paedophile school teacher at her exclusive school; at 15 she was done with schooling. But she was uncontainable. So her parents had her kidnapped at three in the morning and taken to some isolated institution where she was imprisoned and psychologically abused for two years. Not educated but made to do hard labour.
Other children died, Paris kept escaping, kept calling her family but no one would listen. Her parents stayed away, relieved of the responsibility for the unconventional daughter. Two weeks before her 18th birthday her parents collected her.
Paris grew up having no instruction except the television series and movies she watched and the fairytales spun by her cartoonish family: that the Hiltons were American royalty, she was beautiful, money could buy anything, people were to be manipulated, she was better than other people who were here on earth to be her audience and servants.
Paris Hilton speaks at a Stop Institutional Child Abuse event in Washington DC last May.Credit: AP
She was unschooled in anything but being the performative, smiling, dancing, partying, shameless blonde, who would change her outfits four times a day, and say or wear anything.
In the years before Instagram, she became the first influencer. Paris herself became the marketplace; she made billions. Famous for being famous, a phrase possibly invented for Paris Hilton, is accurate.
Born into the hollowness of her family, as ignorant as she was entitled, Paris has fictionalised herself. As we all do, if we have any courage. But for her, it took more than ordinary courage. She has flung herself at life, decided that there is nothing she cannot do, used her manic energy, a naturally sweet nature (was Alexis in Schitt’s Creek modelled on her?) and her uncanny ability to understand tech in the world, to try to become someone other than the name and family she was born into. Although, it has to be said, using the name and the money every step of the way. Oh, well. Life is layered.
At 42 she has undergone therapy and takes medication for ADHD, she is starting to understand herself and her past sometimes unspeakable behaviour. “I don’t just love fun. I need fun. Fun is my jet fuel.” She’s blissfully partnered, has become a mother, through IVF, and she has become a vocal advocate for children like herself who were abused by institutions. She also reflects what the words Feminism and shame might mean.
I felt I was talking to an extraordinary 12-year-old as I read; funny, sharp, observant all put in at speed and in patois so contemporary I often didn’t know who was who or what the acronyms stood for.
But what must it have taken for Paris Hilton, renowned for sexuality, to confess that she never understood or enjoyed sex, thought it all a performance? And to confess, in the alarming world that is contemporary America, that she had an abortion? She’s right when she says she’s no longer the cartoon character that she was.
Hilton is still negotiating who she is, but she’s thoughtful and brilliant in her unique way, a woman who has a lot to say and will be heard.
Paris by Paris Hilton is published by HarperCollins, $34.99.
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