I’m not Paris Hilton you know: Paris
Sara Hall

NEW YORK—Celebrity socialite Paris Hilton says she is a normal girl and insists she is completely misunderstood. We’ll always have Paris. That would be the blonde, willowy — and, she says, completely misunderstood — Paris Hilton, who insists that she’s not some passing fad, not a debutante dabbling in show business for the fun of seeing her picture in the papers. “There are just a lot of misconceptions, but people like to be mean,” the 26-year-old heiress says in her familiar sweet, little-girl voice, speaking by telephone from a Beverly Hills hotel. “Sometimes that drives me crazy, but it comes with the territory.”
The truth, she says, would sell many fewer tabloids. “I’m really a normal girl,” Hilton says. “I know you see me out at times, because I have to be visible, but there is nothing better for me than staying home. I like to hang out. I have my dogs. And I make an amazing lasagna for friends — I really do cook great Italian food.” Yes, perfectly normal. Except, of course, for the paparazzi and the occasional stalker — which, she admits, is a problem. “This guy slept outside my house for two weeks,” Hilton says. “He stole my cat and then pretended to give it back.”
And then there are the men who, despite the fact that she has a boyfriend, Benji Madden, insist on pushing themselves on her. “A lot of guys will come up to me and try to be cool and say, ‘Hi! So, uh, what’s your name’?” Hilton says. “And I’ll be like, ‘I’m Deborah.’ And they’ll go, ‘Oh, really?’ And they’ll just keep talking to me, pretending that they don’t know who I am.
“I’m like, ‘Dude, don’t let it rub off’!” Hilton giggles at her own joke and, while everyone is trying to figure it out, pauses for an aside to her publicist. “Could someone please get me a lemonade?” she says. “Oh, could someone draw the blinds? Oh, could someone please turn on the air conditioner? It’s so hot in here.” And she’s back. “I’m so sorry,” Hilton says as she returns to the telephone. “As I was saying, the biggest misconception about me is that I don’t really work hard all day, because that’s one thing that’s completely not true. I never quit.”
These days that work include singing, dancing and acting in one of the year’s stranger movie offerings: Hilton co-stars with Nivek Ogre, Paul Sorvino and Alexa Vega in “Repo! The Genetic Opera,” set to open on November 7. It’s a musical set in the year 2056, when an epidemic of organ failures has wiped out most of the human race. Life or death rests with Geneco, a biotech company that can do organ transplants — but only at sky-high prices. The owners of those new organs can’t miss a payment on that new kidney or liver, for fear of having their new parts repossessed by the dreaded Repo Man.
Hilton plays Amber Sweet, a young woman with many secrets. “It’s this big musical and horror film,” she says. “You can’t even tell it’s me in most scenes, because I look really different. I just love that someone took a chance on me to prove that I could do it.” The singing was no major hurdle for Hilton, who has cut her own album and even has her own label, Heiress Records, through which she released the single ‘Stars Are Blind’ (2006).