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For a man who strikes fear into the heart of the modern celebrity, Perez Hilton looks disappointingly unthreatening in the flesh. He resembles nothing so much as an overgrown adolescent dropout: all dyed pink hair and aggy surfer shorts.
You could imagine him at high school, sitting at
the back of the class in a T-shirt with an ironic slogan, the computer nerd who was never quite cool enough to be invited to the prom.
"Oh I don't think I was ever cool at school," he admits, with a disarmingly high-pitched giggle. "I'm still not one of the cool people. I'm a freak and that's a great thing."
It is not surprising that 29-year-old Hilton revels in his freakishness.
Over the past three years, the Los Angeles-based blogger has become an internet phenomenon. His blog, Perezhilton.com, an indefinable mishmash of exclusive celebrity gossip, acerbic put-downs and precisely targeted humiliation, now has 2.6 million visitors a month. It is one of the top 10 entertainment websites worldwide and so influential that celebrities themselves use it as a notice board - last month, Amy Winehouse issued a series of statements to deny reports her husband had assaulted her.
As a result, Hilton's one-man internet operation outstrips the readership of most gossip magazines and commands US$45,000 ($59,504) for its most expensive advertisement slot.
What started off as a bedroom hobby has become a global concern. Hilton is so popular and his brand so instantly recognisable, that he is a celebrity in his own right. His apparently effortless emergence from the internet boiler room into the Hollywood limelight has made him a major media player. A regular chat show pundit, he also hosts a Latino-themed music channel for MTV, and his own reality TV series, What Perez Sez, was launched this month. He is in discussions about releasing an album of cover songs, setting up his own record label and publishing a book on the art of gossip. A range of personally endorsed perfumed hair dyes is presumably just around the corner.
"Why do I think I'm so popular?" He stifles a yawn, then teeters backwards in his chair like a truculent schoolboy. "Well, I think a few different things have helped. The fact that I was one of the first celebrity news bloggers; the fact that I work really hard, because the more content I have each day, the more traffic I get. I start at four in the morning and I work straight for 16, 17 hours, updating the website up to 25 times a day."
On his celebrity status, he says: "I don't think my own fame prevents me from doing my job. When I go to parties, people recognise me and that's another tool in my bag of tricks. On the website, I'm not afraid to say what I think because I'm an individual. I'm not some big corporate machine and people can relate to that. I would describe myself as an entertainer who likes to inform: a sort of info-tainer."
Hilton fell into the business almost by accident. He was born Mario Lavandeira, the elder of two children, to Cuban parents in Miami, Florida.
His upbringing was, he says, "normal, conservative. I went to Catholic high school and watched way too much TV."
His father, Mario Senior, died of a brain aneurism aged 51 when his son was 15, an episode that elicits a wry smile and a single comment: "Yeah, that was pretty sucky."
Lavandeira studied drama at New York University, and spent several years as an actor and part-time journalist, briefly becoming managing editor of Instinct, a gay men's magazine. In 2004, he started a blog in his spare time "because it seemed easy", initially calling it PageSixSixSix.com, which attracted a lawsuit from the New York Post, home of the PageSix.com site. He swiftly reinvented himself as a Latino version of It girl and hotel heiress Paris Hilton and set about revolutionising entertainment news. His office was, until recently, a coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard.
"I genuinely know I'm making the world into a better place," he says. "I entertain people at work when they log on to my website in the morning. I bring happiness into their lives. Other people may think I'm damning the entire human race, but I think of myself as the McDonald's of the internet. Sure, it makes you fat, but I still love eating it."
So, it seems, do several million other people. Although he refuses to reveal his net worth, Hilton has just moved to a rented two-bedroom apartment in a gated community, full of trees, fake Louis XIV furniture and an ornamental garden fountain.
He gets his stories from an array of contacts: publicists, dog walkers, cleaners, sometimes even the celebrities themselves, but he does the bulk of the work himself. Hilton has just one employee: his sister Barbara, who is his personal assistant. His mother, Teresita, is about to move from Miami to live with him. What, I wonder, does she make of his bizarre life?
"She is happy that I'm happy. There's a bit of a disconnect because she doesn't even have a computer, she doesn't email, she's really old school. But she loves going around telling people: 'I'm Perez Hilton's mom'.
"She likes gossip as much of any of us do. People are curious by nature and that's a good thing."
Hilton is a new type of commentator: neither journalist nor PR apologist, he delights in his subjectivity and relishes the freedom to be indiscriminately outrageous. He is almost entirely arbitrary in his likes and dislikes. Nor does he pretend to be sophisticated: his site promises "celebrity juice, not from concentrate" and a typical posting will include crudely defaced paparazzi photographs. Victoria Beckham's likeness is graffitied with alien antennae; Britney Spears is rather more straightforwardly labelled "**** Up" in a handwritten scrawl.
Beckham was sufficiently exercised by Hilton's negative posts to give him a cameo in her reality show and was shown promising to send him naked photos of her husband, David, in exchange for Hilton saying nice things about her on the net.
"She hasn't sent them yet," he says. "But I'm still hoping. I've never felt any remorse about saying mean things because this isn't serious media.
"This is digging, biting, clawing, a reflection of my personality and interests, of the celebrities I do like and those that I don't.
"People come to my website because it's easily digestible. They read it for a few minutes, they hopefully have a reaction to it and then they move on.
"Perez is a character, an exaggerated version of me. He can say things I would never say. That's why I don't care when people say they hate me. They don't dislike me, they dislike a perception of me."
The flamboyant appearance - magenta hair, fluorescent yellow tracksuits - is very much part of this self-styled caricature. He likes to call himself the "gossip gangsta", a modern-day Savonarola, pricking the bubble of absurdity. In reality, he comes across more like a strange hybrid of Liberace and Yogi Bear.
And yet, despite the more ridiculous aspects of his character, he wields an extraordinarily aggressive power. The internet has now become the first port of call for celebrity gossip. Paparazzi agencies have their own internet TV channels. When O.J. Simpson was arrested for alleged armed robbery this month, an apparent audio tape of the stand-off was leaked not to a TV channel, but to the TMZ.com website.
"I can react more quickly than print media because I can update my website 20 times a day," Hilton says. "It also means that publicists have less leverage because they have less time to control a negative story. I've helped change the way they play the game." Publicists accuse him of outright lies, and several paparazzi agencies are suing him for copyright infringement. "I'm not worried about it," he says. "I don't have the kind of money they are asking for anyway."
He is accused of politicising his personal crusades, often with hurtful results. Last year, he began outing homosexual celebrities, a move that saw him condemned by gay rights organisations as a crass, self-serving ideologue.'N Sync singer Lance Bass was one of Hilton's first targets: he wrote relentlessly about Bass's intimate friendships with men, scrawled the word "bottom" across his photograph and, when Bass eventually went public with his homosexuality last November, claimed the admission as a wholesale victory for gay rights.
Hilton tells me he has always known he was gay, but critics say it is difficult to see how he can justify showing such scant compassion for those who remain confused by their own sexuality.
"I would never out a regular person," he says. "But I consider what I do to be reporting. When I say that [he mentions the star of a popular US drama] is gay, it's because I know for a fact that he is. Why, when we can break stories about a heterosexual man's secret relationship with a new girlfriend, can we not do the same for a gay man?"
Hilton himself is resolutely single, insisting he has no time for a boyfriend but that he would eventually like to adopt children, "like a gay Angelina".
Yet for all his insistence that he reports the facts, Hilton can still get it spectacularly wrong. In August, he announced the death of Fidel Castro, citing "exclusive sources".
"I still think he is dead," Hilton says blithely. "He's been wearing the same outfit for months."
It is probably only a matter of time before someone sets the record straight by sending in snapshots of the Cuban leader in various states of undress. In Perez Hilton's world, nothing is too implausible. Even the magenta hair.
Hollywood Websites Go Head-To-Head
Hilton posts gossipy items about celebrities in a disparaging, sardonic style. Includes photographs to which he adds his own captions. Likes to mingle with the stars and describes celebrity awards shows, clubs and private events he has attended.
Legal run-ins: Hilton ran into trouble with Colin Farrell after posting a link to a sex tape, and with Universal Studios for a topless image of Jennifer Aniston.
Making the news: In July 2006 Hilton was criticised for forcing Lance Bass of pop band 'N Sync to come out as gay.
TMZ.com
Style and content: Celebrity gossip and news site, a collaboration between AOL and Telepictures Productions, a division of Warner Bros.
Legal run-ins: In June 2007 court action was taken against it for publishing the manuscript of If I Did It, O.J. Simpson's fictional account of the murders of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.
Making the news: It posted transcripts of drunken remarks to police by Mel Gibson in July 2006, and put up a copy of the alleged birth certificate of the daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.
popbitch.com
Style and content: A British email newsletter. Combines celebrity stories and quirky ones from other fields. Has quotes from celebrities and allegations about stars.
Legal run-ins: False allegations against David Beckham were published on the site's message boards by its users, leading to legal action against its owners.
Making the news: One poster reported David Beckham's move from Manchester United to Real Madrid at least four months before sports pages picked up on the story. It was also the first to report the name of Madonna's son, Rocco.
