Never tardy to the party
MANILA, Philippines - There are people who are good at throwing parties, and there are those who are pros at attending them, invited or not. And by pro, we mean it’s their means of living.
As semi-retired hardcore party girl Paris Hilton has demonstrated that being a constant party fixture comes with a reward that makes up for the effects of late-night debauchery on the body: notoriety. She may have had a reality show and her name stamped on various products, but Hilton will always be remembered as that girl who led a pack of fellow wild girls as they roamed around Hollywood, crashing one party after another and making serial headlines in the tabloids.
Hilton had tons of precursors when it comes to her party girl abilities, but the gangly heiress, who still hasn’t shown us any other apparent talent after all these years, was one who channeled these abilities into a full-time job in the age of the omnipresent media.
The fashion and perfume lines are negligible (I’ve never seen anyone walk out of the Paris Hilton boutique in Robinson’s Place Ermita with a shopping bag in tow), as well as those films and that one album she recorded, but Hilton proved to be good at being famous for nothing — good enough that even David Letterman (we’re so disappointed about this) resorted to letting her guest on his show, a publicity feat more than half of the starlets on the Twilight franchise can only dream of. She was more than just adept at dusting herself off every morning and preparing for another club/bar/hotel lobby appearance for the night; Hilton somehow amassed power as she made young girls everywhere believe that they, too, could become famous by just showing up where the bright lights, loud music and paparazzi are. And showing up meant more than just “showing up”: Hilton helped propagate a new breed of party girls, scantily clad skinny-limbed young women who, in lieu of bringing bundt cake as a thank you gift to their hosts, attracted press coverage by flashing their beef curtains to the public; their “thank you” cards arrive in the form of tabloid headlines the very next morning.
There have been a couple of beneficiaries who were able to ride Hilton’s coattails until they, too, managed to carve out their own presence in the celebutant totem pole: Kim Kardashian (whose success and popularity we’ll talk about in a while) and former BFF Nicole Richie. Richie, of course, has long since cut her ties with Hilton and made a 180-degree PR management turn after she got a mug shot for driving down the wrong side of the freeway. Also another girl with dubious talent (her childhood rap group Caution sounded promising, though), Richie is now a Boho Mama, a content newlywed and mother of two. Oh yes, she is also a fashion designer, an author, and a shopper of her wedding photos to the highest bidder. Richie may no longer be known for long nights out in Hollywood, but never doubt a party girl’s propensity and hunger for drawing attention to herself and making money at the same time — those don’t get snuffed out by maternity.
Hilton had her casualties, too: whatever goodwill the public had for Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan as child actors/entertainers who grew up not looking awkward was lost the moment they started fraternizing with Hilton. Of course, these girls had their own private demons present long before they were in Hilton’s clutches, but they got magnified under the pressure of hard partying. In addition to the drugs (alleged, of course) and the booze, these girls had dance-offs, thin-offs, and Round Robin games of cliques, the last three of which are normal parts of relationships between girls but can have tragic effects on young women who have super delicate egos to begin with.
Spears was the first to crack, her breakdown well-documented in media and gossip sites, while Lohan still seems to be on her way to rock bottom. Hilton’s business was about making enough noise for people to believe she has that certain “it,” whereas the other two already had It, and therein lies the mismatch.
The thrill of watching Hilton, Lohan, and their ilk perform circus acts in Hollywood gatherings wore thin, eventually. What with the upskirt shots compounded by sex tape videos, people grew tired of rubbernecking over the same group of sexed-up, inebriated, and cranked-up girls. One such casualty of the public’s fickleness is Tara Reid, whose story seems to teach the future generation that one can go from being a compellingly watchable train wreck to society outcast in a snap due to too much exposure, literally and figuratively. What was the last straw? The lumpy torso, a product of a botched-up liposuction, that she always finds ways to display? The boob she let hang out at some rapper’s birthday bash? The constant strung-out eyes she sports, as if girlfriend hasn’t slept for years? The lack of work?
The last buzz-worthy tidbit heard about Reid was her begging to be on Dancing With The Stars — even that mess of a show wouldn’t touch her now, poor girl.
Like virus strains, however, the smart party girl can survive changes in the environment. When people aren’t so easily shocked anymore and are turning to retro values (no matter how superficially) to cleanse their palates of the taste left behind by the early to mid-Noughties, it’s time to change tack. Who knew that Kardashian would turn out to be the smart one among her bunch? Harvey Levin (of TMZ) has griped how Kardashian, formerly a mere Hilton hanger-on, could not get enough of the cameras when she was still a nobody; now, she won’t even stop to wave and say hello to the paps. Kardashian has perhaps learned from the errors of others and found a way to squeeze everything out of this fame thing before she reaches her sell-by date. After the “leaked” sex tape and the Playboy shoot, she now plays coy with her dead eyes and her skin-tight sheaths. Kardashian rakes in dough for event appearances and Twitter updates, and while we all roll our eyes at how staged the party dramas in Keeping Up with the Kardashians are, we won’t see her passed out drunk in a club or snorting lines in a hotel room any time soon. Kardashian is now about propriety and decency, and any extra exposure means handing cash to her Mama Kris first.
Seriously, this girl has turned partying into a more lucrative venture than Hilton ever did. She’s got game; she even got her own W cover.
With the decade’s main group of women famous for their partying now aging into a semblance of respectability for some and oblivion for the others, there is bound to be a new batch of wild-eyed, wild-haired, and always, always skinny girls itching to get their party on. The barely-legal Disney girls Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato have been showing promise; it’s just a matter of time before they live up to their potential.
