So how did this Miami boy become one of the most popular bloggers of all time? It started out as a hobby, really. Though Hilton gave himself the nickname ‘Perez Hilton’ (a play on Paris Hilton) and sometimes calls himself “The Queen of All Media,” (the tagline on his blog) his real name is Mario Lavandeira and that’s what his mother and sister still call him. His parents were born in Cuba, but Hilton was born in Miami, where he was immersed in the Cuban culture and didn’t learn to speak English until the age of 5. Even to this day, Spanish is the only language he speaks with his mother.
was started four years ago, gets about 2,000 hits a day. “But he started to get a little too vitriolic. I know it’s just to get hits on the site and to keep sponsors happy. Perez does inspire me in a way. He took an idea and ran with it.” Bacon says ordinary folks are so fascinated with celebrities because they’re more successful and prettier, and everyone knows who they are. “You can’t walk up to someone at work and say, ‘Did you hear what my sister’s brother-in-law did over the weekend?’ But you can chitchat about Julia Roberts trying to make a comeback or Rick Springfield getting busted for a DUI. You
Based on success— and some not-so-stellar moments—here’s
Perez Hilton’s toP Five Celebrities to WatCH in 2011
And while there have always been gossip columns whose writers have been either feared or loved, BusyBeeBlogger.com creator Cari Bacon credits Hilton for “breaking the Internet gossip thing wide open. “Everyone read him. He was the go-to source for anything and everything,” says Bacon, who lives in California and whose site, which 54
And these reasons are exactly why Hilton was fairly confident that people would read what he had to say about celebrities. Though, in the beginning, he blogged mostly about his own personal views regarding the trouble famous folks were getting themselves into. Ironically, a few years before he even started his site, Hilton wanted to be one of those celebrities. He scored a part in an episode of “The Sopranos” and starred in a direct-to-DVD horror film. When acting didn’t work out in New York he moved to Los Angeles to give it a try. But the acting career just never took off. He started his blog while working at Star magazine, a time in his life that he remembers with incredible sadness. He spent his days stalking celebrities and recalls tense and embarrassing moments, including being thrown out of a Manhattan hotel in New York after Russell Crowe had reportedly thrown a telephone at an employee.
Hilton, who still has family in South Florida, including Palm Beach and Hollywood, has always been intrigued by the lives of celebrities, partly because he says his life was boring and insists that it still is. He attended an all-boys Jesuit school in South Miami called Belen, where he was teased more for being overweight than for being gay. He didn’t reveal his sexuality until after high school, when he attended the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University with hopes of becoming an actor. It was there, Hilton says, that he felt like he could finally be himself. He began blogging about celebrity scandals at the age of 26, before the hordes of others joined the game.
already know them and don’t have to fill in the back story,” she says.
T h e B o c a R aT o n o B s e R v e R
Lady GaGa Justin BieBer Katy Perry CharLie sheen the Cast of “GLee”
“They threatened to arrest me. It was traumatic,” recalls Hilton, who says he only kept the job because he needed the money. “That job literally poisoned me. I became depressed. It was the darkest phase of my life.” Hilton describes himself back then as being someone who couldn’t get out of bed in the morning and he started thinking about suicide. But he eventually got fired from the gossip magazine and that firing helped him break out of his funk. He collected unemployment for six months and focused on his Web site—then called pagesixsixsix.com— without having to worry about finding another job. And as it turns out, he never had to search for work ever again. “I was amazed that only six months into starting the blog, the TV show
‘The Insider’ did a segment on Hollywood’s most hated Web sites and I was number one,” Hilton says. “I was excited because I was like, ‘Wow, people are paying attention.’ If my little Web site could get on TV, maybe it could happen a second time. That’s why I never gave up on it. I worked so hard.” Today, Hilton’s site gets 200 million views a month. He’s one of many to help shape American pop culture, especially in the last few years, FAU Professor Walleser says. His dive into posting gossip online has paved the way for other popular sites including tmz.com and radaronline.com. He also speaks to viewers through his Twitter account and YouTube.com. Of course, getting to this point wasn’t easy. When Hilton started the site, he lived in a small apartment and didn’t even have Internet access, so he worked from a nearby coffee shop that offered free Wi-Fi, often sitting outside its locked doors while waiting for it to open in the early morning hours. People met him there to talk about the latest notable scandals and he started making friends with those in Los Angeles who became great sources in the celeb world. This coffee shop became his temporary office for the next few years until, eventually, his site became so popular—as did Hilton—that he finally was earning enough money to upgrade to a nice two-bedroom apartment and get his much-needed Internet access. “Thankfully, I’m not motivated by money,” he says. “Now there are a lot of corporations and people who start blogs about entertainment or other subjects with the sole purpose to monetize it. I would still be doing this even if I wasn’t making money off it.”
Photo by Hannah Ross
The QUeeN OF ALL MeDIA