Paris: The Memoir(63)

Sliving.

I was back. Here. In this house where my family had celebrated two Christmases and countless birthdays without me. In this room where my cousins and siblings got to snuggle on the sofa with Nanu and tell her about their bad dreams. Maybe David felt my mood slipping; he teased and catcalled me. Finally, ready to wrap it up, he flipped me off and said, “Fuck you.”

Feet apart, chin up, I raised my middle finger and said what I wanted to say to the whole fucking dynasty. David caught the exact moment the F took shape in my mouth.

Try it! Bite your lower lip and let that F-bomb drop.

It’s not pretty, but it feels fantastic, especially when you’ve been holding it in, when you feel like you’ve been hidden away and dismembered. It felt like Jack Nicholson’s hatchet through the bathroom door in The Shining. I was just in the moment then, but I look at this iconic photograph now and see my declaration of personal independence.

These portraits manifested everything I was feeling inside: a celebration of freedom and fresh sexual energy with an undercurrent of bottled-up rage. They were so weird I didn’t really expect them to go anywhere. I thought we were just having fun. He didn’t even tell me he was showing them to Vanity Fair. When he called to tell me everyone there loved the photos and wanted to publish several of them, I was like, “Whut . . .”

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.

My mom is incredibly savvy about business. She gets the intersectional chemistry of fashion, art, and celebrity and quickly recognized what this photo shoot might do for me, but this was not the image she wanted Nicky and me to present to the world. She’d been teaching Nicky and me since we were little girls taking high tea in Peacock Alley, teaching us the ways of polite society. These photographs did not fit that narrative.

My mom called David LaChapelle and ripped him a new one. She called the editor at Vanity Fair and demanded they pull the pictures, but they had model releases—signed, sealed, delivered—and David held his ground, defending the artistic integrity of his work. It was a fight for a while. Ultimately Mom and Dad had to go along with it. All they could do in terms of spin control was participate in the accompanying article that was being written by Nancy Jo Sales.

I’d like to lie and say I got no pleasure from their distress, but after so many years of lying as an automatic fallback position, I’d rather just own it: I did get a little thrill out of the whole thing.

Nancy Jo observed Nicky and me at a Times Square nightclub called Saci. We arrived after midnight, because this was an after-party following the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards. Nancy Jo described Nicky as a “tall, blonde, ghostly girl” and called her sparkly Union Jack miniskirt “an expensive costume for an Austin Powers movie.”

When Nicky saw that, she was like, “What do you want from me? It was all Dolce!”

That part of the article is really all about Nicky, possibly because that night at the club, I was offsides, networking away. Ben Stiller was there doing research for a movie about male models, shooting test footage with a little handheld camera, and scouting out interesting people who might be cool for cameos.

I don’t know whose idea it was to have Nancy Jo interview my family as a unit, and thank God there was no such thing as reality TV back then, because we’d have won an Emmy for Most Awkward Family Dinner.

Mom tried to coach us all in advance on what to say and not say. This was Vanity Fair, not Page Six or some disposable tabloid that comes and goes in a weekly rinse cycle. We were all freaked out and nervous—for different reasons. For me, this was a huge opportunity, but Mom was not into the idea of me being famous. She was there to protect our family and the Hilton name.

The Hiltons are not new to the gossip economy. We’ve been in the tabloids since the invention of the flashbulb. Conrad Hilton lived in an over-the-top Bel Air mansion called Casa Encantada. When he was fifty-five, he married twenty-five-year-old Zsa Zsa Gabor. My great-uncle Nicky was briefly married to Elizabeth Taylor. The gossip economy was just getting warmed up back then, but Papa learned quickly that it was better to avoid that kind of exposure. My dad is a very private person. He was intensely uncomfortable with the revealing pictures and the whole idea of an article about the outsized nightlife of his teenage daughters.

The plan was to have lunch on the patio at my parents’ house in Southampton. Super casual. Just another day at Casa Encantada.

Dad was there as silent as a stone. Mom orchestrated everything with chatty energy. I felt intensely nervous and shy, just wanting it to be over. Nancy Jo asked a few general questions about my friends and who I was dating. The paparazzi had taken some pictures of me with Eddie Furlong, and she’d heard rumors about Leonardo DiCaprio. I hate it when articles define women by who they’re dating. Like that’s their résumé. Ick.

I tried to steer the conversation toward the movies and music I was working on, but Nancy Jo seemed super interested in the Leonardo DiCaprio rumors.

“We, like . . . we hang out at parties,” I said. “He’s nice, but—”

“Did you see the story?” Mom cut in with the spin. “A full page in the Enquirer. They just make this stuff up.”