On the day her son was born, Paris Hilton put on a brunette wig and a hoodie and checked into a hospital under a different name. Her platinum-blond hair is one of her many calling cards, and it felt imperative that she go unnoticed. Her baby’s impending existence was, at that point, a secret to the rest of the world, known only to Hilton, her husband, Carter Reum, and their surrogate. Even their immediate families would not find out until just before she announced his arrival on Instagram.
“My entire life has been so public,” Hilton says over the phone in late January, hovering outside of the baby’s nursery and speaking quietly while he naps. “I’ve never had anything for myself. We decided that we wanted to have this whole experience to ourselves.”
Once he’d been cleared to leave the hospital, she and Reum brought their son home, to the house they recently bought in Beverly Hills. For two full days, they were truly alone (they’d told their staff the house was being painted), enjoying the relative quiet of life with a newborn—getting used to his sleeping and feeding schedules and singing him lullabies. (Hilton was partial to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” as well as her 2006 hit, “Stars Are Blind.” “The acoustic version,” she clarifies.) Then, when it seemed like the news was about to come out on its own, they broke the spell and announced they’d become parents.
Even with a surrogate, a pregnancy is a big secret to keep. But Hilton is used to keeping parts of her life hidden. In the 2020 documentary This Is Paris, she came forward for the first time about the abuse she suffered in her adolescence, after her parents, Rick and Kathy Hilton, shipped her off to a series of boarding schools that promised to reform troubled teens. She has since become a prominent advocate for shutting down the so-called troubled-teen industry; in 2021, she supported a bill to further regulate the schools in Utah, and she is now pushing for federal reform.
It was the start of a transformative three years for Hilton. The entrepreneur, reality-television star, DJ, performer, perfumer, model, and socialite helped invent a certain kind of vacuous fame in the early aughts, when she was mostly famous for her last name, going to parties, being hot, and saying “That’s hot,” but at 42, the endlessly iterative star has traded playing Paris qua Paris for a more authentic, transparent version of herself. Her memoir, Paris: The Memoir, out this month, puts Hilton squarely in charge of her own cultural recontextualization—“How do we not see that the treatment of It Girls translates to the treatment of all girls in our culture?” she writes at one point, sounding Elle Woodsian—and plunges into darker, shocking details from her high school years. It’s the final step in her unburdening and all of the attendant change that has come with it, including marriage, motherhood, and a fundamental shift in her priorities. “Advocacy,” she writes in Paris, “saved my life.”
Hilton’s own childhood ended abruptly, violently. One could understand why she’d want to ensure her son’s welcome into this world felt sacred and safe. “I want to protect him and to be with him every second,” she says. “You have this mother instinct that kicks in, which I’ve never had before. I feel so complete now.”
It’s well documented that Hilton has two distinct voices. One is her regular, private speaking voice, which is low toned and almost sonorous; the other is the voice she uses for the public-facing character of Paris Hilton, which is higher pitched and coquettish, the real-life Valley Girl standard. In a mid-2000s clip that went viral on TikTok, where Hilton has flourished thanks to a new Gen Z fan base, Hilton bellows to the driver of a waiting car to wait “two minutes.” When an awaiting paparazzo asks how she’s doing, she transforms midstep: “Goooood,” she purrs.
In Paris, Hilton describes the character as “my steel-plated armor,” a “dumb blonde with a sweet but sassy edge”: “I made sure I never had a quiet moment to figure out who I was without her. I was afraid of that moment because I didn’t know what I’d find.” Dropping the act would mean navigating, and overseeing, yet another public reconstruction of herself.
Full interview: harpersbazaar.com
