Paris: The Memoir(91)
Days and weeks went by. I couldn’t stop crying. Losing Diamond Baby on top of the agonizing baby situation—it was too much. It was like losing my daughter, sister, and best friend all at once. DB was my everything. My arms and my heart and everything inside me ached with loss.
I had to suck it up and go to Milan Fashion Week. I was supposed to close the Versace show and DJ a party after. Donatella Versace is a dear friend. I couldn’t leave her hanging at the last minute.
“I’ll be okay,” I told Carter. “I can work.”
I can always work. I can always walk. Sometimes it’s the only thing I know how to do: put one foot in front of the other. So, I went to Milan. Nicky went with me, and I was grateful to have her there. She knew how much I loved Diamond Baby and assumed that’s why I was having such a hard time. I kept my magic sunglasses on during the fitting: a pink metallic mini with a shimmery bridal veil. This dress was a celebration of love in a show that was all about the bright future. Wearing my runway shoes, I went to rehearsal and followed the director around a runway that seemed to go on for eight miles. He never stopped talking, so it was okay that I didn’t say anything.
“Good turn, okay? You want to mark it. The beat is pretty hot. Straight into the camera.” He pointed to his eyes and then forward to where the camera would be. “Walking here. Staying center. Shoulders back, chin down, okay?”
I nodded and said, “Okay.”
Emily Ratajkowski came and kissed me on both cheeks.
“Hello, gorgeous,” I said.
“This is so exciting,” said Emily. “I’m so happy to see you.”
“You, too,” I said. “The baby is beautiful.”
“Thank you. He’s here!” She lit up—literally lit up—at the mention of him. I was glad for my sunglasses.
I’d been giving it a lot of thought. Having my baby with me at work, on the road, backstage at Fashion Week. That’s the world we live in now, and it’s a potentially beautiful world if you can step over the intrusive thoughts. If you can hope. And keep walking.
If all goes well, by the time you read this, Carter and I will have a baby boy. We plan to name him Phoenix, a name that I decided on years ago when I was searching cities, countries, and states on a map, looking for something to go with Paris and London. Phoenix has a few good pop culture reference points, but more important, it’s the bird that flames out and then rises from the ashes to fly again. I want my son to grow up knowing that disaster and triumph go around and come around throughout our lives and that this should give us great hope for the future, even when the past is painful and the present seems to have fallen to shit. It’s weird how two ideas that are so different—so completely opposite—can coexist like that, but they do.
Freedom and suffering.
Joy and sorrow.
Love and loss.
Shoulders back, chin down, staying center, I waited in the darkness until it was my turn to step into the light.
That director didn’t lie. The beat was pretty hot.
Afterword
I wrote this book in an effort to understand my place in a watershed moment: the technology renaissance, the age of influencers. There wasn’t room in this book for all the stories I wanted to tell, so I focused on key aspects of my life that led to my advocacy work: how my power was taken away from me and how I took it back.
I set out to create the truest possible representation of the life I’ve lived and the motivating factors that steered my course. The best and hardest thing for any of us to do is be honest, and I’ve tried to do that here. I hope you’ll accept me as I am, but if you can’t, I understand. Ultimately, I hope my story made you laugh and think and prompted you to love yourself a little more than you did at the start.
In telling my story, I’ve tried to be careful not to tell my version of the stories that don’t belong to me. Not everyone who’s important to me shows up as a character in this book. In addition to being Conrad Hilton’s great-grandsons, Conrad and Barron grew up being Paris Hilton’s brothers, but they both have their own stories. Fame is famous for inflicting collateral damage, and my little brothers were in that blast radius from the time they were small children.
Nicky has lived an extraordinary life in which I’m just a supporting player. I hope she and Mom will write their own memoirs someday, because intelligent, funny, hardworking, compassionate women rock this world, and sometimes their true stories get lost in the fog of toxic Real Housewives melodrama. My dad isn’t the memoir type, but he could totally do a Be My Guest–type business book.
Conrad Hilton ended Be My Guest with a bulleted list of long-winded advice for entrepreneurs. Maybe someday I’ll write another book on that subject, but for now, I’ll just say:
Follow your curiosity. It’s calling you toward your true purpose.
Don’t waste energy living a life someone else designed for you. Life is one per customer. Let them do theirs. You do yours.
Accept the necessity of endless reinvention. Staying the same is (a) boring and (b) impossible.
There’s no substitute for hard work. Keep killing it and something will happen. Probably not what you expected, but something.
Know the star you are. And see yourself as part of a galaxy.
Celebrate the positives, recognize value in the negatives, and be grateful for both because it all makes you who you are.