His real name is Mario Lavandeira but nobody besides his mother, his sister
and a handful of friends from “before” is allowed to call him that any more.
To me, to you, to the now formidable number of people around the world who
read his blog and share with him a non-ironic addiction to celebrity
culture, Mario Lavandeira, age 29, is Perez Hilton, currently the most
influential, perhaps also the most facetious, definitely the cruellest,
gossip columnist in the world.
He likes the pseudonym, he tells me, because: “I am Perez Hilton. And yet I'm
not Perez Hilton. You don't really know me.” In his real life, Mario (or
Perez) says: “I don't like drama or confrontation. I try to stay away from
it but I like writing about it, which I guess makes me a boring person.
“Cause there are some people, well-known folks, that love drama in their own
lives - but not me.”
I don't know about that last bit. There's some footage of Mario on the
internet, recorded some time last year, in which he seems to be relishing
what appears to be a genuinely dramatic fight with a photographer. The
photographer is heatedly accusing Mario of illegally using his pictures on
his site - for which Mario is currently being sued by a photo agency - and
Mario, teeth bared, ready, it seems, to kill the guy, shoots back: “C***!
And I don't want to work with c***s. And liars. And unethical people. And
that's what you are.” When he skewers famous people on his blog - when he
scrawls “Shit For Brains” over a picture of Heather Mills's face with
Microsoft Paint, for example, or describes Kate Moss at last year's Led
Zeppelin reunion as a “hairy ballerina on crack” - he will try to avoid them
in real life, he says.
Or, at least, “I don't go right up to them and start talking to them.” It's
not his fault if, say, Avril Lavigne “called me personally and said stop
writing about me,” after he repeatedly accused the Canadian pop singer of
lack of talent and an assortment of minor offences such as having a
“freakishly long arm”.
“What did I say? I said first of all stop reading my website. To which she
replied, ‘But it's not that, everybody's asking about you in interviews
now'.” This clearly thrills Mario, the thought of his great influence. “Ha
ha ha,” he laughs in that lusty, camp and gleeful way of his. “She said stop
writing about me and I said, ‘But you make it too easy!'” Before Mario was
famous he used to have mousey hair and wear bland slacker clothes over a
relatively slender, well-exercised body. He'd grown up a middle-class boy in
Miami, the son of Cuban immigrants, and won a scholarship to what he
describes as a “very posh” Jesuit all-boys school. He was a swot but also
obsessed with television and dreamt of becoming famous, perhaps as an actor.
I think it is significant, considering how focused he is now - he works
18-hour days, is writing a book, does TV, has a bit part in a forthcoming
film, and is working on his own record and fashion labels - that his father
died when he was 15. In his late teens, he won another full scholarship,
this time to NYU, where he studied acting and graduated with honours. His
sister, Barbara, whom he now employs as his assistant, tells me that: “I am
a bit surprised, though, that he has succeeded in this manner. With his good
grades and intelligence, our family always thought Perez would go on to
become an attorney, a doctor, or an engineer and such.”
Instead he bummed around in Los Angeles for a while. A friend remembers
hanging around with him in the late 1990s, watching the entertainment
channel E! and shooting the breeze on topics such as “Robbie Williams's
ass”. Mario jobbed as a journalist for a variety of gay magazines before the
friend suggested he start a blog. Within a year PageSixSixSix had been named
as “Hollywood's Most Hated Website” and he'd been sued by the New York Post
for infringing its copyright (it has a gossip section called Page Six). In
2005, he changed the name of his blog to Perezhilton.com, and his own name
to match. Which is around about the time that Mario proper started to
disappear.
The birth of Perez heralded in a complementary wardrobe and makeover. Today,
in the bar of a boutiquey London hotel (“I always stay here”), Mario appears
from his room with aggressively dyed hair - orange with blue streaks today.
These days the slacker gear is for downtime only. Instead he wears one
sleeveless black shiny gilet, one plain grey T-shirt, one pair of baggy
trousers in black and white dogtooth check, and a pair of shiny silver
shoes. He is tall and fat, and looks unhealthy. His pristine white teeth and
memorably silver-blue eyes are set deep in his face alongside hamster cheeks
speckled with what looks like rosacea. If he shed the weight, Mario could be
strikingly handsome.
But right now, if you glimpsed him across the street (and how could you not
glimpse him, given the get up) you'd think part chef, part clown, part
professional homosexual-cum-fashion designer. He's in London to do some red
carpet TV work at the Brits tonight and, what with all the travelling, his
diet has fallen by the wayside. His weight must make him stand out in the
crowd of beautiful people he increasingly consorts with. Does he like his
body? “No. Do you like yours?”
Except for a career-blemishing episode last year in which Mario pronounced
Fidel Castro dead, the king of celebrity bloggers is most famous for
breaking stories and siphoning his gossip not from secondary sources but
from the famous people themselves or the less famous people who surround
them: managers, cleaners, drivers, make-up artists, agents and enemies.
“A lot of people may dismiss what I do as trivial or inconsequential, but I
take what I do seriously and I think it makes the world a better place
because I'm entertaining people, even if that's just what I do,” he says.
Mario also perceives himself as a champion of free speech and, not unusually
for a gossip columnist, a moral arbiter. If a famous person behaves herself,
Mario finds himself writing about them less: “Like Sandra Bullock. Like
Julia Roberts. They moved both of them first of all. Julia moved to New
Mexico. Sandra moved to Austin, Texas. They're getting married, they're
having kids or stepchildren. They were successful for such a long time they
realised that there was more to life than just fame acting and being
successful.”
Mario's is only a half-camp ideology. The whole point of camp, as the writer
Susan Sontag has theorised, is that: “One can be serious about the
frivolous, frivolous about the serious.” But Mario is serious about the
frivolous and also serious about the serious. Working hard, providing for
your family are “good” in Mario's world. But so are Britney and Lindsey. To
paraphrase the ultimate camp statement, Britney's hair extensions, for
example, are so excrutiatingly bad, they're good.
How about Jennifer Aniston, whom he described as a “black soul” not long ago?
“My feelings have changed on her. Yeah. Now I'm respecting her in that she's
really gone above and beyond to make a concerted effort to try to be a
normal person. I just realised I'm not writing about her any more. Like,
where is she? She's not going to parties, she's not going to premieres,
she's being very careful about avoiding the places the paparazzi might be
and she's not dating another celebrity.”
If, on the other hand, a famous person behaves badly then they'll find
themselves at the sharp end of Mario's lowest common denominator witticisms.
The “haggard supermodel” Kate Moss should retire. Amy Winehouse, “Albino
Wino”, who is perhaps, incongruously, also a friend of sorts, should get
some serious help: “There's no way you can successfully treat heroin and
crack addiction in two weeks. You just can't. So. She needs to see someone
every day. Every day!”
And until she does, Mario will continue to doodle cocaine stains emerging from
pictures of Winehouse's nostrils. “I love Anne Hathaway but I don't write
about her that much. I love Scarlett Johansson! I love Natalie Portman. I
love good girls that get it right and that are good role models. Britney's
not a good girl. She's not a role model but she's FABULOUS to write about.”
Bad role models get it in the neck. On Kate Moss again: “I'm over her. I
mean she's a mom. She should focus on being a mom. You never see the kid.
That's a good thing. And, actually, I ran into the father the other day. The
babby daddy [Jefferson Hack]. I hope when I'm his age I'm not going out to
random clubs on a Friday night or whatever.”
If you're reading this and thinking “Why do we care?”, if you have no interest
in whether or not Jemima Khan wears underpants or that, incensed by Mario's
attacks on her “art”, the frequently barefoot white soul singer Joss Stone
feebly hit back at the gossip columnist, telling reporters: “We should all
come together and pray for that man because I hear he's very ill, upstairs,”
if you haven't a clue who Joss Stone is, and, moreover, have no interest in
finding out, then you fail to understand what the internet and gossip
magazines and this new, more meritocratic order in celebrity culture has
done to international attention spans. It may surprise you to learn that
when Lindsey Lohan - a celebrity with no known job - was arrested for the
second time, the public interest was so overwhelming that it crashed Perez's
site.
At least this is what Mario claims. On the day of Lohan's arrest he posted 60
Lohan-related updates. Eight million people, he says, logged on to his blog.
Mario, like his fans, suffers from the overfamiliarity disease which leads
him to speak of “Heath” rather than “Heath Ledger”, despite never having met
him. He was one of the first to circulate rumours about the actor's
mysterious death. If he has a USP, it's this, he says: “I am the outsider
who became the insider. That gave me a new perspective.”
Mario is so busy these days that he hardly watches television and only very
rarely goes to the cinema. Is Jodie Foster a good actress? “I can be a fan
of the person without being a fan of their work.”
He is pleased that Foster has finally come out as a lesbian because, as part
of his stated aim - “demystifying the image and keeping it real and showing
that culture and that world through my perspective” - he is a keen and
controversial outer of closeted gay people. This he does using his
time-honoured sledgehammer technique, painting the word “cock” across any
photograph of those under suspicion. It's in the same tradition as the
legendary Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who tried and failed to
out Cary Grant and “named names” of suspected Communists during the McCarthy
era. Only Mario insists that his motives are ethical. “There's nothing wrong
with being gay,” he argues. For those who don't agree with him, and there
are prominent gay activists who accuse him of homophobia, he has a stark
message: “The closet no longer exists... I think people who stay in the
closet do so because they are motivated by fear. I can't think of a single
person whom outing hasn't helped. I like to use the UK as an example. There
are so many openly gay celebrities it isn't an issue.”
But isn't the States, with its extremely intolerant right-wing component, a
more difficult place to be gay, especially outside the entertainment world?
“I do think celebrities have a right to privacy if they want it. In my ideal
world, if I was interviewing Jodie Foster I would like to be able to ask
her: “There are reports that you have been in a loving relationship with
another woman for almost 20 years and that you have children together. Are
those reports accurate?” And I would like her to say “Yes they are, and I'm
not going to talk about my private life.”
There's a streak of moral narcissism there which stands out in stark contrast
to his campaigning-style borderline vindictiveness. Mario's blogging
equivalent in politics, Matt Drudge, was once described by the cultural
commentator Camille Paglia as “the kind of bold, entrepreneurial,
free-wheeling, information-oriented outsider we need far more of in this
country”. And, one could argue, the same rule applies to the self-satisfied
and vacuous celebrity circus. Do the antics of the rich and famous annoy
him? “No, because I feed into it. I'm annoyed by some of the aspects of
celebrity but I help create the people who annoy me. Like Rumer Willis. No
one was talking about that girl before I started talking about her and -
bam! - she became famous and I was like, oh, I created a monster. Ha ha ha.”
Rumer Willis is the 19-year-old daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis and
is, of all of Mario's preoccupations, the most profoundly despised by him. A
selection of Mario's teaser headlines regarding Rumer read: “A Little
Photoshop Goes a Little Way”; “Would You Wear This?”; and “Unintentionally
Hilarious”. His main beef with Rumer seems to be her looks. “She's even got
ugly feet,” he jeers. Why hack a teenager apart because of her appearance?
“The main reason I lay into her is because I think she's ugly on the inside.
This is a girl who dropped out of college after the first semester. Rumer
walks the red carpet, she is actually courting the spotlight with the aim of
becoming a celebrity. I hate that word.”
Some of Mario's enemies try to fight back. Others try desperately to be his
friend, a perhaps wise attempt to keep their enemies close. Divas of any
variety he adores: Gloria Estefan, Mariah Carey, Dolly Parton, Janet Jackson
and Cher have earned his fawning approval. And Mario can't seem to find a
bad word to say about Paris Hilton, his inspiration, or Kelly Osbourne, his
friend.
But then there is in-between territory: Joan Rivers, who happily posed with
him in a photograph after he posted this item: “Looking more cartoonish than
ever, Joan Rivers showed off what her face has become at the premiere of her
new one-woman show.” Are famous people masochists? “I would imagine so. The
ones who like to create drama.” []
Mario's own private life? There's not that much to it. He is gay. By the time
he's 35 he wants to have earned enough money to be able to both
theoretically retire and adopt children, a “gay Angelina”. Does he have a
boyfriend? “I don't have one, although I did meet a lovely boy on Friday
night.”
His personal philosophy is fatalistic: “I assume I'm going to be alone without
a partner for the rest of my life. I like to have low expectations so I
won't be disappointed.”
It's easy to infer that he's lonely but I genuinely don't think he is. Without
his mother, whom he pays to do “mom-like things like cleaning” his hotel
bedroom is very messy. His obesity still puzzles me, considering his natural
good looks, and I was reminded of what a clinically obese psychiatric nurse
once said to me about “growing an extra layer to insulate myself from these
people”. I can't imagine Hollywood is so different but Mario disagrees. “I'm
like Oprah, I've been battling with my weight my whole life but I am trying
to change my eating habits.” When he does, will a newer, less fame-obsessed
Mario emerge? I doubt it.
Vile bodies - Tinseltown tattlers
There are two kinds of people who blow through life like a breeze,
And one kind is gossipers, and the other kind is gossipees,
And they certainly annoy each other, But they certainly enjoy each other.
Yes, they pretend to flout each other, But they couldn't do without each
other.
- Ogden Nash
Perez Hilton is just the latest pre-eminent dirt-digger in a cycle of mutual
exploitation between Hollywood stars (for publicity) and gossip columnists
(for material) that goes back to the 1920s.
The first great gossip of Tinseltown was Louella Parsons, pictured above, who
started reporting from California for William Randolph Hearst in 1925. By
1952 her column appeared in 12 Hearst papers and was syndicated in 1,200
others across the world. She liked her infinitives split and her movie stars
splitting - the studio press agents fed her information about their
contracted talent to stir up interest in their latest movies.
Parsons had a clear run until Hedda Hopper, who would become her arch-rival,
entered the fray in 1937. A former actress, she was signed up as a columnist
on the advice of MGM's publicity office. Although many of Parsons' and
Hopper's items were planted by the studios, they still riled their subjects.
The actress Joan Bennett had a live skunk delivered to Hopper's home - which
she described as “the house that fear built”. Hopper thought Charlie Chaplin
was a dangerously radical foreigner and made a huge hoo-ha in her column
over his paternity dispute with his mistress Joan Barry.
In 1952 a far more muscular mongerer of gossip arrived on the scene.
Confidential was the first full-blown scandal sheet, and thrived in
McCarthy's America by outing “Lavenders” and Communists. It outed Liberace -
called “the Kandelabra Kid” - for propositioning a dashing young press
agent. The pianist sued and won damages. George Nader, a friend of Rock
Hudson, said: “Every month when Confidential came out, our stomachs began to
turn.”
When Confidential - whose tagline was “Tells The Facts and Names The Names” -
wrote a scurrilous piece about Groucho Marx he responded by writing: “If you
don't stop printing scandalous articles about me, I'll be forced to cancel
my subscription.”
Confidential was not complicit with the film companies to the extent that
Hopper and Parsons were, but by the 1960s and 1970s the stars themselves
were beginning to wield power as the studio system faltered and died.
Publicists for individual stars assumed much more influence, but gossip
still thrived through syndicated grand dames such as Liz Smith and Cindy
Adams.
Page Six, a column published in the New York Post since 1977, created the
template for the modern gossip column. Written by a team, peppered with
blind items (stories in which the protagonists are not named), and leavening
its salacious scoops and scathing jibes against celebs with more obviously
placed stories, it remains top of its game. But the bloggers, led by Perez,
are muscling in on the act.
LUKE LEITCH
