BRITNEY SPEARS? "A dumb, druggy, awful bitch." Lily Allen? "A cheap ho." Kate Moss? "A hairy ballerina on crack." Jennifer Aniston? "A black soul." The author of "Hollywood's most hated website", Perez Hilton, carries all the celebrity news that is not fit to print, writes BRIAN BOYD
His super, soaraway blog is a giddy, camply extravagant and sarcastically irreverent impaling of celebrities and their public-relations enablers.
Hilton is quite the bitch – and people love him for it. He gets in the region of a remarkable 10 million hits a day on perezhilton.com and is now the most famous blogger in the world.
“Everybody hates me but I don’t care,” he says. “I don’t have to be nice. I don’t want to be nice. All I want to be is someone who provides something of value to my readers. I do entertainment news. But I do it my way. I’m not a nasty and mean person but if a celebrity is in anyway dishonest or humourless or talentless I’ll say so – and screw their PR handlers.”
If you find celebrity news a bit on the vacuous and frivolous side, and are in some way concerned about its increasing encroachment into the space usually reserved for “real news”, you’ll be doubly troubled by the Perez Hilton global success story. A self-appointed arbiter of a meretricious world who is serious about the frivolous and frivolous about the serious (as Susan Sontag would have it), Hilton doesn’t see himself as just another gossip columnist, but rather, and rather grandly so, as a “champion of free speech”.
“I know people dismiss my blog as being trivial and of no consequence whatsoever but it entertains people – an awful lot of people,” he says. This is a world where a report on his blog about Britney getting hair extensions can almost cause the site to crash such is the amount of interest in the “breaking news”.
He delights in the fact that pop singer Avril Lavigne once rang him and beseeched him to stop writing about her – all journalists were ever asking Lavigne about was what she thought of Perez Hilton calling her “talentless” and accusing her of having “a freakishly long arm”.
The Desperate Housewivesactor Jesse Metcalfe (he plays the gardener) approached him in a club once and said: "Do you know how many times I've fantasised about killing you?"
Born Mario Lavandeira in Miami of Cuban parents, the 31-year-old changed his name (Perez as a nod to his Latino background and Hilton in honour of the celebrity deity, Paris) when his blog launched in 2004. Before the blog he was a drama student and wrote for a number of gay publications. Lavandeira was a pudgy depressive; Hilton is slim, has blond highlights and is irrepressibly Ab Fab.
His over-arching life philosophy is simply: “Fun!” Writing crude captions on the pictures of celebs is “fun!”; saying of the actress Tara Reid, “When we think of Tara Reid we think of vodka and yeast infection” is “fun!”; drawing dots of cocaine around the nose of Amy Winehouse and calling her “Albino Wino” is “fun!”.
But there’s a curious morality to his work. True, he goes full-bore on nugatory nuisances such as Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan, but he loves real talents, such as Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway and Scarlett Johansson because “they are good girls who get it right and are great role models for women”.
This Hedda Hopper of the web age is now a celebrity. “Oh, I hope not,” he demurs. “I’m an entertainer not a celeb. I work 18 hours a day.” He does agree that he is a “brand”: “I’m a bitch and I made a brand out of that.”
Apart from the widely syndicated radio show, Radio Perez, the numerous reality TV appearances and a spin-off fashion blog called CocoPerez, he now has his own record label, Perezcious Music. "I was hearing people talk about the "Perez effect" in music circles and I found it that if I mentioned I liked an act on my blog, then the next day the interest in the act and their sales figures shoot right up," he says. "So I figured if I had that sort of influence then the next step was to set up my own label.."
His first big signing was the French singer Sliimy (it rhymes with Jimmy). “Sliimy is going to be huge – he’s such an entertaining and eccentric person,” Hilton says. “The only problem for me was that he had his album done before I signed him up, so I couldn’t really mould him the way I wanted.”
To help launch the label, he called in a few favours from some of the celebs he’s been nice to on his blog. Lady Gaga and Kate Perry both used their Twitter accounts to send out “Who Is Sliimy?” tweets to their thousands of followers thus generating an industry buzz about the new act. He also got Britney Spears (despite all he’s said about her, they’re friends) to have Sliimy support her on her European tour.
If the story ended there – with the hugely influential celebrity blogger now also a high-octane record company executive – it would all be fine and dandy, but over the last few weeks Perez has come up against something he has never before encountered: failure.
Two months ago, he organised a US tour of hip contemporary acts under the “Perez Hilton Presents” banner. On the bill were big names such as Ladyhawke and Little Boots, and the whole exercise was an attempt to announce his arrival as a major player in the music world.
Tickets, however, failed to shift. Prices were slashed and in some cases admission became free to the shows. One of the headliners, the Norwegian rocker Ida Maria, pulled out mid-way and didn’t return for the remaining dates. She had found herself playing to 250 people in a 2,400-capacity venue in Boston.
Hilton’s detractors (of which there are many) went to town on the story. A post (and it was one of the less hate-fuelled ones) on the influential music blog Idolator read: “His blend of self-aggrandisement, barely concealed agendas, misogyny and poor grammar is quite a noxious cocktail. It works, but I suspect it works largely because he was one of the earliest online gossipmongers and definitely the first to build an outsized persona for himself. He trumpets things like click-throughs to artists he mentions on his site, but the moment the users have to make any commitment or lay out any money, any ‘influence’ he has evaporates.”.
“I’m not going to lie to you or try to spin this. I will place the blame for that tour squarely on myself,” he says. “I’m not afraid to fail or to have a failure.
“You need failure to have success. I’m not afraid what people think. I’m not precious. Yes, I am getting all this ‘who does he think he is running a record label?’, but screw them. Kanye West comes to my parties, not theirs.”
Perez Hilton Wants You
“The only reason I discovered Sliimy and signed him to my label was because he emailed me one of his songs and it really impressed me. I get loads of music sent to me every day and I do listen to every single thing. A lot of it is rubbish but I’m always looking for that musical gem. I don’t read music magazines, I don’t read music blogs, so I rely on people sending me stuff. I want to hear what’s out there in Ireland, so if any of your readers want to send their music my way, all they have to do is email the track to me at perez@perezhilton.com.”
