Paris: The Memoir(77)
I wanted everyone to love me—constantly on, constantly moving—making connections, finding ways to work with people I admired. I was out with boyfriends or girlfriends every night, and most of the time, Elliot went with us as our designated driver. But every once in a while, I just wanted to do my own thing. I love to drive, so I usually took my own car to and from work.
September 7, 2006, I got up around three in the morning and dozed in the chair while I got glam done for the second day of a music video shoot for my song “Nothing in This World.” The storyline is about a kid who’s getting bullied at school until I move into the house next door and go to school with him so he can be a big man on campus. It’s sort of a callback to when I went to prom with the sweetest, nerdiest kid. His big sister asked Nicky to go with him, and she didn’t want to because she had a boyfriend, but I was like, “Yaasss!” I was twenty-three and wasn’t completely over the fact that I never got to go to prom. We did the whole thing—corsage, limo, mom taking pictures in the backyard—and when we showed up at the dance, everybody lost their minds. “Paris fucking Hilton is here? With that guy?” It was one of the greatest nights of my life.
So, this video is really sweet, but there were a lot of moving parts. We worked for about sixteen hours, and I never had a chance to eat anything, but when we wrapped at the end of the long day, I joined the crew in a toast with a margarita. I felt fine, but on my way home, I got stopped for speeding and blew a 0.08 on the Breathalyzer—the absolute minimum required for a DUI in California. I pulled up into In-N-Out drive-thru, waiting for a burger and fries, which probably would have solved it.
It’s the least spectacular flameout in celebrity flameout history.
And the most expensive margarita in margarita history.
I went through the whole processing feeling stupid and angry—at myself more than anyone else. It was way after midnight. I couldn’t decide if it was worse to call my parents and ruin their sleep or let them wake up to the news in the morning. I called Elliot, and he picked me up from the station house. I just wanted to go home, but I knew the paparazzi would be waiting. I suggested maybe I should go to a friend’s house, but Elliot said, “You should go home. They need to see that you’re stone cold sober.”
When he pulled up to the gate, I sensed I wasn’t in for the usual dance I’d always done with the paps. There was a different sort of energy. Even through the closed car window, I could hear one of them mocking me in a high voice—“Hee hee hee hee, I’m here!”—as I waited for Elliot to come around and open my door. I got out pretending to be on the phone.
“Paris! Paris, how ya feeling? Paris! Can you tell us what happened?”
“She’s not going to make any comment this early,” said Elliot. “I’ll come out and see you in about ten minutes.”
“Okay, bye. I love you,” I said to the imaginary person on the phone. I punched the code into the alarm on the gate and flashed a smile for the cameras before I went in. The guys must have gotten paid well for staying up late; I saw that footage over and over again on the news the next day, followed by a brief Q&A with Elliot.
“You saw her moments ago,” he said to the paparazzi outside my gate. “She clearly was not intoxicated. She was not drunk. But the officers did what they have to do in a situation like that. They took her to the station. She went through the same procedure that everybody else does. When it was determined that she’s obviously not a flight risk and she’s not inebriated, they released her on her own recognizance.”
He emphasized that I’d had only one drink and received no special treatment during processing.
“Will Paris spend time in detox?” they asked. It seemed like that’s what people wanted. A big addiction/redemption sob story, but I didn’t have one, and I remembered Elliot’s advice the day we met: “Don’t lie. Just own it.” I called Ryan Seacrest and gave a calm, candid interview on the radio the next morning, accepting responsibility, making no excuses. I went to court and got three years’ probation, a fifteen-hundred-dollar fine, a four-month suspension of my license, and court-ordered alcohol education classes.
Fair enough. I accepted that. Even if they were stretching to charge me with DUI, there have been times when I probably was over the limit and didn’t get caught.
Pause for an important message: DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE.
It’s stupid and dangerous and will fuck you up. Even if you don’t feel drunk, just don’t go there. Also DON’T TEXT AND DRIVE. Same reason. DON’T DRIVE if you’re distracted, upset, sleepy, or whatever. Even though I was only on the fringe of testing positive for tipsy, I was way too tired to be driving, and I’ve heard that’s worse, even though it’s not illegal. I deserved to take a knock for the stupid choice I made.
I didn’t deserve what happened next.
I was told by my lawyer that I couldn’t drive at all for thirty days and then for ninety days after that, I could drive only to and from work. The day the suspension was lifted (according to him), I was driving to work and got stopped for speeding. And I didn’t have my lights on. The city street was brightly lit, but that’s such a stupid mistake, it still hurts my head. What seriously screwed me is that my lawyer, who’d never handled a DUI, didn’t have the drive-for-work waiver he thought he had. He told Elliot and Elliot told me that I could drive as of that day, but that’s not what the paperwork said. My license was straight-up suspended.