Paris: The Memoir(12)
Finally, I said, “We should get a cab and go back to the hotel.”
Nicole agreed, but everyone else on the street had the same idea. This was long before the days of Uber and Lyft. You hailed a cab on a street corner or stood in a queue outside a hotel, but there were so many people it was impossible to even see a cab, much less get in one. Eventually, we went up to a police officer who looked busy but friendly.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Is there anywhere we can get a cab? There’s like a million people waiting in line.”
The cop shined his light on me and said, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.” We didn’t miss a beat.
He folded his arms. “Show me your ID.”
“I don’t have it on me,” I said. “I lost it.”
“What’s your name?”
“Jennifer Pearlstein,” I said. “This is my friend Leslie.”
“How old are you, Jennifer?”
“I told you! Twenty-one!”
“No, you’re not.”
“Eighteen?”
“You are not eighteen,” he said, “and it’s illegal for you be out on the Strip after nine. There’s a curfew. You want to get arrested? I should arrest you right now.”
Nicole and I insisted we were so eighteen and just in town on business, but the cop wasn’t having it. He ordered us into the back of the cop car, and we sat there like, Holy crap! What do we do? What do we do? while he stood on the corner, talking into his shoulder radio.
We waited for a long time. It seemed like two hours, so it was probably about fifteen minutes in real time. Nicole and I whispered back and forth, getting our story straight, planning a strategy. Then the cop opened the car door and Nicole blurted out, “Her name is Paris Hilton! We’re staying at the Las Vegas Hilton! Her mom is Kathy Hilton!”
“Nicole.” I elbowed her. “Oh, my god.”
“We’re so sorry, officer. We didn’t mean to do anything wrong,” Nicole said. She gave him my mom’s phone number, and a little while later, my dad showed up to collect us. All the way back to the hotel, he yelled at us, as one would expect.
“What were you thinking? Do you have any idea what could have happened? You are grounded, Star. Grounded!”
I was like, “Grounded from what? I’m already in Las Vegas.”
“Grounded from Nicole,” said Dad. “Obviously, the two of you are a bad influence on each other. You are no longer allowed to hang out.”
Nicole’s parents were just as mad as mine, so it was like double trouble. They put us in separate rooms and told us we weren’t allowed to speak to each other. When we got back to LA, our moms confiscated the phones in our rooms, but Nicole’s house was across the golf course from mine, and we discovered that if we stood on our balconies and screamed, it echoed over the green, and we could hear each other.
Love will find a way. There was no keeping us apart.
Nicole Richie and I were ride or die from our terrible twos, and we’ll stay that way until the world ends. When we were teenagers, riffing off each other, doing silly voices, everyone around us was dying. We were dying. I’m dying now just thinking about it! I don’t know what it was; we just seemed to resonate like a tuning fork. We were having so much fun, a kind of Lucy and Ethel comedy magic happened, and that was the magic of The Simple Life.
Nicole is so genuinely kind and sweet, she catches people off guard with her raunchy one-liners, and the reaction she gets from people is comedy gold. Comedy has to be fearless, and Nicole doesn’t hesitate.
One of our favorite activities was making prank calls, which we learned from the prank-calling GOAT: my mom. Mom can disguise her voice and make you think a delivery person is on the way over with a hundred Hawaiian pizzas or that she’s locked in the trunk of her car or literally anything. Once she and Nicky took me to lunch at a little vineyard and made me think I was at a surprise wedding in which I was the bride.
Inspired by Mom’s epic prank-calling example, Nicole and I spent hours up in my room answering want ads in the Los Angeles Times or dialing boys from our class and pretending to be the appointment secretary for a professional sports scout. These calls usually went down pretty much like the ones Nicole and I did with random numbers we found on a bulletin board in a laundromat when we were shooting The Simple Life.
RANDO: Hello?
ME: (putting on a low, raspy voice) Yes, I’m calling regarding the room for rent.
RANDO: It’s big. You’ll like the furniture. It’s bad.
ME: I don’t like bad furniture, dear. Wait. Bad means good? I don’t know teenager lingo. I’m a lonely old man.
RANDO: Bad means good.
ME: It says no smoking. I love my cigs.
RANDO: No smoking.
ME: Okay. Am I allowed to go naked in the pool? I live in Caliente right now, which is a nudist colony. You don’t have a problem with nudity, do you?
(Click)
3
I turned fourteen in February 1995. I loved Toy Story and Jumanji and hopping up and down with one arm in the air, singing at the top of my lungs to Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It.” I was in eighth grade at the Catholic school. We wore uniforms—boxy basics—but Nicky and I found ways to shorten the skirts and style them in our favor with Hello Kitty accessories, clever shirt-tucking techniques, and blown-out hair. I couldn’t wait to get home and kick that plaid skirt and starchy blouse into a corner. I tore around in surfer shorts with baggy tees and sneakers. I slept in boxers and baseball shirts I swiped from Dad’s clean laundry.