There’s trouble in the Hollywood playground, the like of which hasn’t been seen since kiss chase was the hottest exercise trend. Schoolyard insults are flying between LA’s fashionable young things — and the more inane and publicly hurled they are, the better. As ever with facile Hollywood trends, one heiress seems to be at the root of it all. The favourite words of Paris Hilton are “ ugly”, “idiot”, “fat”, “jealous” and “bitch”, and she slings them at any friend, foe or unfortunate passer-by who happens to get in her way. In Paris-world, Hilary Swank is “ugly”, Sharleen Spiteri is a “f***ing ugly idiot” and Jessica Simpson is “fat”.
But it isn’t just Hilton. Every young hottie in Hollywood is at it. These days, it seems, it’s plain unhip to leave a West Hollywood nightclub without letting the pavement audience know what you think of your social competitors. To say the insults are puerile would be a big understatement. You’ll find more wit scrawled on lavatory walls or etched on desks with a compass point. While nobody has actually said: “Your mother’s a prostitute,” or: “My dad’s harder than your dad”, it’s only a matter of time. The billionaire oil heir and party boy Brandon Davis came close when he called Lindsay Lohan “poor” — fair enough: she earns only about £3.5m per film.
Hilton and Lohan are the pivotal figures in this A-list bitch-fest, like school bullies with Dynasty-esque Krystle-and-Alexis chutzpah. Hilton alone has chalked up so many cheap insults that it is almost impossible to know where to begin. Throw into this vicious soup the girl’s near-clone, the television starlet Mischa Barton, the size-double-zero heiress Nicole Richie and Hilton’s (slightly) less bolshie sister Nicky, and you have a full-on celebrity war of insults being played out for the pleasure of the Heat-reading public. Kelly Osbourne, Christina Aguilera and Jessica Simpson are in on it, too. If you want to get anywhere now, you have to bitch.
Of course, it’s possible that the whole thing is one big joke, like the Comic Relief Little Britain sketch in which Vicky Pollard tells her twin sister, Katie (Moss), to “lose some weight, you fat bitch”. What’s more likely, though, is that these spoilt, limelight-hungry women have simply seized on the dumb insult as a new form of status symbol, flashed around with the same pride as their little dogs or giant handbags. For them, the ability to say stupid, throwaway things about famous people and have it all over the papers the next day is not just funny, it’s, like, really cool.
The brilliant display of verbal atrocities is not only a freaky West Coast fad: our home-grown gobby girls are just as quick with the asinine name-calling as their glamorous American counterparts. Britain’s very own mouth almighty, Lily Allen, has been handing out the evils since her ball-gowned debut this summer. Madonna is “overrated”. Her on-off friend Peaches Geldof is “a useless oaf”. Geldof’s retaliation has been to label Allen a “ cokehead” (although, ha ha! She later said it was a joke), and she has shared some illuminating thoughts on Victoria Beckham (“thin” and “slutty”) into the bargain. The tattooed soul bird Amy Winehouse can barely open her mouth without a diatribe against a defenceless fellow fame girl spilling out (according to her, Dido is “f***ing appalling”). Meanwhile, Sarah Harding, of Girls Aloud, has added her own thoughts on Mrs Beckham (“ sick”); and Harding’s bandmate Cheryl Cole (née Tweedy) has had a year-long public slanging match with Charlotte Church, whom she says has a “fat head”.
Insults don’t get much dumber than that. Or do they? Well, yes, actually. The trend for pathetic name-calling reached profane new heights recently when Lohan was filmed getting into her gigantic 4x4 and announcing to the ever-attendant paparazzi that “Paris Hilton is a c***”. The videotape of her measured outburst subsequently registered the most hits on a single day for the internet video library YouTube. There was something about the efficient brusqueness of the moment, as if Chaucer himself were sitting on the back seat, applauding her use of archaic English. Who taught that girl her language?
You’ve got to love Lohan. When I interviewed her recently and asked her about the choice of description for her sometime rival, sometime friend Hilton, she stared me straight in the face and said: “You know, the British and American meanings of that word are quite different.” How so, I inquired. “Well, over here [in Britain], everyone calls people that the whole time.” She paused for a while. “Don’t they?”
Her suggestion that the word is almost a term of affection here seems a little confused, but in a way, the foul-mouthed starlet is not wrong. Our jeunesse dorée does seem rather fond of it. Bob Geldof and James Blunt have both been given the honorary c-word salute by Allen. The newest Sugababe, Amelle Berrabah, has called Gary Barlow — possibly the nicest man in show business — the same. It may not be big, and it’s certainly not clever, but the word is starting to look like something approaching a fashion trend — even British Vogue recently devoted space to its correct etiquette and usage. Is nothing sacred?
So, where did all this come from? Perhaps it was inevitable in a visual climate, where every move a celebrity makes can be captured on a phone, with sound and motion, then posted on the web the next day. When the queeny blogger Perez Hilton set up shop in 2003 with the most poisonous website in Hollywood, gossip took on a whole new, uncensored and spiteful dimension. When you’re using pictures of stars doing, well, nothing, what else is there to do but pointlessly bitch for a commentary? After “Lohan uses the c-word” stories hit the international news wires as quickly as a stock-market tumble, Perez scrawled “c***” all over pictures of Lohan on his website. He then went on to turn the most daring of schoolyard disses into flattery (of sorts): “That’s what’s entertaining about her. She’s a tragic heroine, like a young Elizabeth Taylor. You can’t help but be fascinated by her.” Then he called her “ fat”.
In this cruel climate of bickering and celebrity name-calling, perhaps we should start considering insults the new compliments. After all, at least they’re noticing you. Then again, they say that celebrities have a kind of arrested development from the moment they become a public figure. For a former child star such as Lohan, that may have been when she was as young as three. Is it really any wonder the world’s most fashionable nightspots have become just one big primary-school playground?
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“I’ve got much more style than Jordan. I don’t go out in just a bra and knickers, and I don’t think I dress like a tart” — Jodie Marsh
