Paris: The Memoir(71)
I loved curating music and collecting people who made these all-night events strange and magical: musicians, models, artists, actors, and just a lot of random people doing wildly interesting things with technology and media. So many fresh faces showed up at my door. Anna Faris recently reminded me about the night she arrived, starstruck and shy, new to a world that was moving so fast. I took her upstairs, and we sat in my closet, talking and laughing while I showed her how to do the smoky eye that was about to be retrending.
This may be the real beginning of my life as a DJ, because I never let the music stop. I steered every party like I was piloting a starship, never allowing anyone to be left behind. The 2004 soundtrack was defined by Outkast’s double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below and Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot.”
There were so many great movies that year: Mean Girls, Anchorman, The Notebook, 13 Going on 30, Napoleon Dynamite, Shaun of the Dead, Howl’s Moving Castle, 50 First Dates.
Nicole and I started filming season two, which had us driving all over the country on a road trip, working odd jobs to finance our journey. One of the situations was at a dude ranch, which I was excited for. I love horses. I felt confident about riding, even though I hadn’t done it in a while. Everything started out fine, but I think my horse was jumpy because of all the unfamiliar camera equipment and people around. He lurched forward and picked up speed. I lost the natural rhythm and started bouncing high off the saddle, so when the horse bucked and kicked, I couldn’t hold on.
I hit the ground hard. The wind was knocked out of me, so I lay there for a minute, struggling to breathe. By the time crew people got to me, I was sitting up, saying, “I’m okay, I’m okay.” And then I felt this weird sensation like molten lava pouring down the side of my body. I’d fallen in a patch of stinging nettles, weeds that look soft and fuzzy but are actually covered with millions of tiny needles, each one as fine as an eyelash and filled with acid. It felt like a javelin went through my torso. I tried to stay in character and make this funny, but I was in agony. The big joke in the show was one of the cowboys offering to pee on me, which was supposed to take away the sting. No thanks.
(FYI, that’s a myth, probably stemming from a situation where some cowboy peed himself because it hurts so bad.)
As the show got more and more popular, the bits Nicole and I came up with went everywhere. Walking down the street in New York, I’d hear girls giggling and singing, “Sanasa sanasaaa!” “That’s hot!” caught on the same way it had back in sixth grade. After we wrapped season two, I trademarked the phrase. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it; I only knew I didn’t want anyone else to get there first.
Nicky was nineteen and killing it. She debuted her high-end clothing line, Nicholai, at New York Fashion Week and unveiled a collection of dresses and rompers for her Chick ready-to-wear label. We did a collab with Samantha Thavasa, a Japanese company that made high-end handbags. Nicky was the designer and signed the bags, and we were both the faces, modeling for billboards, runways, and ad campaigns. Every time we went to Japan, fans went crazy. It was like the Beatles had landed. Promoters packed the schedule with a month’s worth of work in seven days.
We loved working as the Hilton sisters. For a while we lived together at my place on Kings Road, and we did a lot of traveling, promoting our product lines all over the world, and having a lot of fun.
That summer I got into a weird moment that was not huge, compared to some of my other moments, but it was upsetting: the first of many break-ins at my house on Kings Road. Not the Bling Ring break-ins. And not the stalker with the knives. Somebody else. People broke into that house like it was a Cadbury crème egg.
The place had been ransacked and was a straight-up crime scene. I wanted to get inside to get away from the paparazzi, but the cops had it all taped off, so I popped across the street and climbed over the fence at a neighboring property, which happened to be the home of my former boyfriend Jason Shaw, and I got so tangled up on the gate that the alarms were set off. Cops came swarming, followed by the paps. It was beyond.
Nicky said, “I’m calling Elliot.”
Back in the 1960s and ’70s, Elliot Mintz hosted Headshop, a television talk show where he interviewed legends like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Timothy Leary, and Salvador Dalí. He was a close friend of John Lennon and Yoko Ono and was by Yoko’s side after John was murdered. To this day, Elliot is a regular at my parents’ Thanksgiving table. He had a deep understanding of fame and media and a vast network of interesting friends who trusted him, which is a rare thing in Hollywood. People called him a “Hollywood fixer” or “spin wizard.” If you ask Elliot Mintz what he does, he says, “I clean up what gets tainted and magnify what glows.”
Nicky made the call, and Elliot was there within the hour.
As he fought his way through the crowd, I noticed he had no trouble making the paparazzi behave. Access is Elliot’s superpower; they were in awe of it. When he rolled up, they parted like the Red Sea. He dealt with the cops, got me back into my house, and crafted a media statement that magically shifted focus away from my violated household and fence-climbing effort to my emerging brand and new fragrance.
When it was all said and done, Elliot ordered some food to be delivered, and we sat talking for a long time. I liked his Jiminy Cricket integrity and the deliberately thoughtful way he spoke. All these years later, this is still the one thing that most impresses me about Elliot: He never speaks without thinking. Every word is a precise footstep.