Paris: The Memoir(73)
YouTube launched in 2005, three days before my twenty-fourth birthday, taking the potential for self-promotion and self-embarrassment to a whole new level.
Within the first six weeks of the new year, I hosted SNL with musical guest Keane in February, announced and broke off my engagement, and wrapped a third season of The Simple Life. In May, I blew a lot of tiny minds, wearing a bikini and washing a car while eating a Carl’s Jr. burger in a Super Bowl ad, which was later banned from TV for being too sexy. So, no one was terribly surprised to see me on the cover of Playboy.
Except me. I was surprised. And not in a good way.
Back when we lived at the Furley house in LA, Jen and Nicole went out with Hugh Hefner every Wednesday night in a Hummer stretch limo with a bunch of other girls. I started going along with them, clubbing on Wednesdays, and to parties at the Playboy Mansion on Halloween and Midsummer’s Night, and other special occasions. This was back in the day when those parties were so dope. I lived for events like that.
Hef kept wanting me to be a Playmate, and I thought that would be awesome, but when I told Mom about it, she said, “Are you insane? No! You’re not being a Playmate. That is so trashy.” (Fun fact: Hef had asked my mom to be a Playmate when she was a teenager, and Gram Cracker shut it down for the same reason.)
Years later, as I got more famous, Hef really wanted me to do a Playboy cover. He kept offering me more and more money, saying I wouldn’t have to be totally naked, just topless. And then saying, I didn’t have to be topless, just sheer. And then saying I could wear whatever lingerie I wanted. Even when he offered seven figures, I turned it down, because I knew my mom would lose her mind, and because I had already been branded as a slut after the sex tape. I felt like a Playboy pictorial would just cement that in people’s minds.
One morning a friend called me and said, “I love your Playboy cover.”
I was like, “Whut?”
Hef had “honored” me with the Sex Star of the Year Award, which means they can claim it’s “news” and not a pictorial. He got a picture from an old test shoot with a woman photographer who was really great. It’s kind of an old-school pinup-girl vibe: red bustier and heels, black fishnets, very little actual skin—nothing as sexy as the Carl’s Jr. shoot. I imagine it sold well because people expected to see me naked inside the magazine.
Surprise, suckers. They got nothing. Same as me.
My parents were pissed, and I cried, but none of us confronted him, because you just didn’t do that.
That summer, I starred in House of Wax. The poster featured my face and the tagline: “Watch Paris die!” I didn’t mind that marketing approach, and I wasn’t na?ve about why they chose it. And I like that movie. It stands as a campy classic. I starred in National Lampoon’s Pledge This, and I got to play Barbara Eden doing her iconic I Dream of Jeannie character in American Dreams.
I made huge money during those years, and I did waste a lot of cash, but only the percentage you should waste as you move through your twenties, which should be an exploratory decade no matter how many zeroes show up on your paycheck.
“You’re young,” Papa told me. “You can tolerate high-risk investment.”
He was talking about mutual funds and real estate, but I believe you can apply that advice across the board, financially, emotionally, professionally, and fashion-wise.
I screwed up sometimes. I said some things I wouldn’t say now. I hurt people’s feelings, and I’m sorry. I drank a lot and had some unfortunate moments. Some I can laugh about, others not so much. I’m not going to wallow in any of that here. I’m not offering explanations or asking anyone to explain themselves to me. So, no walk of shame here. Sorry, not sorry. The only people who don’t screw up are people who never do anything.
I wasn’t fully prepared for the tidal wave—love and hate—that came my way, so I focused on the love and recognized the hate for what it was: Pigface.
Hollywood’s Pigface is not a person; it’s a mentality. A power trip that comes from a deep well of helplessness. When Provo Pigface put you “on bans,” no one was allowed to talk to you. Hollywood Pigface is great at shunning, shaming, and canceling people who don’t play the tribal games.
Provo Pigface mocked and bullied kids and got them to rat each other out. She had only one goal—to control us—and her power came from turning us against each other. As soon as I figured that out, I was no longer afraid. I took delight in messing with her. This got me slapped around and thrown into solitary. But I survived it. There was nothing Hollywood Pigface could do to me that was worse than what had already been done.
I was twenty-three years old, working on the third season of The Simple Life, when South Park did an episode about me. This was so trippy! South Park was my favorite cartoon. I’d met cocreators Trey Parker and Matt Stone at a party and found them cool and interesting. If anyone could stand up to Pigface, I would have thought they could.
Womp womp.
The episode—directed by Trey and written by Trey, Matt, and Brian Graden—is called “Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset.” I’m the title character, but they also apply that epithet to Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Tara Reid, and all the little girls who were fans, which upset me more than anything ugly they could say about me. It also upset me that the episode graphically portrays Tinkerbell being shot and killed. The thought of that made me sick. I’ve been involved in some pretty edgy media, but I don’t even know where something like that comes from.