Star-Spangled Blogger

A gossip and his peeps: Mario Lavandeira, aka Perez Hilton, with Nicole Richie (centre) and Lindsay Lohan (right). Courtesy PerezHilton.com.

Mario Lavandeira loves — loves — celebrity: the parties, the swag, the red carpets, the adrenalin, the catfights, the scandals, the money, the attention.

“What’s not to love?” he asks over the phone from his Los Angeles “office,” a café in West Hollywood called The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. “Everyone should treat themselves as if they were a celebrity.”

After years of wishing it were so, Lavandeira, a.k.a. gossip blogger Perez Hilton, has become famous in his own right. He shmoozes at Cannes, plays pundit on E! News, parties at the Super Bowl, raids the freebie suites at Sundance and pals around with Lindsay Lohan. He claims he’s still “definitely Z list,” but as he rhymes off recent media appearances — including the MuchMusic Video Awards in Toronto (“Canadialand,” in Perez-speak) — he says without a trace of sarcasm: “I’m living the American Dream.”

Since September 2004, Perezhilton.com — it used to be named Pagesixsixsix.com until The New York Post called in its lawyers — has been dishing out a precisely calibrated balance of bitchery and adulation. That is, just enough snarkiness to entertain bored cubicle drones and bitter stargazers, but not so much as to question the construction of celebrity itself. To wit: the caption under a candid shot of a rough-looking Jude Law and Sienna “Sluttyienna” Miller notes that they are “back together and stinkin’ up the streets of NY. The reunited couple took a stroll through SoHo this past weekend. Shower!” Across the image is scrawled, “Wash, rinse, repeat!” Meanwhile, under the headline “Definitely Sperminated” — a regular topic on the site is whether various female stars are “fat or sperminated” — is an image of Nicole Kidman with the caption, “Yup, she's preggers! We eagerly await a publicist confirmation any second now.” Drawn on the photo is an arrow pointing out the actress’s swelling belly and the chipper announcement, “No alien!”

Like most blogs, the site began as a sideline amusement. A transplant from Miami, where his parents had immigrated from Cuba, Lavandeira studied acting at New York’s Tisch School of the Arts before moving to L.A. to become an actor. He wound up with a temp job at the entertainment channel E! He worked as a freelance writer, promoting his celebrity blog on Friendster (“when Friendster used to be cool”). Up until a year ago, Perezhilton.com was averaging about 70,000 visitors per day; it was a funny but undistinguished addition to the fray of celebrity gossip blogs (Defamer, A Socialite’s Life and I Don’t Like You In That Way) that have sprung up in past few years. Then along came Brangelina.

The hits keep coming: Lavandeira's website. Courtesy PerezHilton.com.

“That was huge,” Lavandeira says of the photos he received from a well-connected source who reported that the Mr. & Mrs. Smith co-stars were travelling together in Africa. “Everyone had been speculating that they were a couple, but no one had any proof until I posted the images of them on vacation. Within hours, my site crashed from all the traffic.” A star was born.

The site, which has nabbed several more big celebrity scoops since then, now averages upward of 600,000 hits a day; Lavandeira earns enough from it “to make it my full-time job.” Also enough to necessitate employing both a lawyer and an agent — though not, Lavandeira points out, an assistant. “I still do everything on my own,” he boasts. He’s up at 5:30 each morning to do talk radio and post items for East Coast readers, and he’s out at parties and events until well past midnight. All his business is conducted on a laptop at The Coffee Bean. “I don’t have internet or a TV at home. I’m a total tech idiot,” Lavandeira says — yet he still manages to respond promptly to e-mails and phone messages.

It’s easy to see why celebrities like him, even after he’s made fun of their “zombie hands” (Nicole Richie) or speculated about their sexuality (Lance “Frostylocks” Bass). He’s ingratiating without being grating. He says “celebrities trust me because I’m a nice guy and I feel an affinity for them.” And he’s mastered a confiding tone of camp cattiness, coming across like the cheerfully gay lovechild of Carson Kressley and Michael Musto. (Following a recent party, Lavandeira reported: “Jessica Simpson smelled like vanilla. And, her boobies looked so killa!! Gay men love the tatas just as much as the hets!”)

Lavandeira says what sets him apart from other bloggers — besides wanting to be called an “online entertainer” — are his stellar sources and his ethics. “I get stories because people know that I will never lie, or make things up, or pay for information. I apply a journalistic standard to my work.” Lavandeira’s scoops usually pan out, but whether “journalistic standards” encompasses drawing dots of coke under the noses of celebrities is debatable. Twice in our conversation he insists, “I don’t hate anybody. And I don’t like drama!” Yet particular celebrities seem to consistently earn his disdain — among them, monomaniacal View host Star “Starzilla” Jones and kept man Kevin “K-Fag” Federline. Still, even though the blog’s tagline is “Hollywood’s most hated website,” it’s rarely malicious. Indeed, what Perez taketh away, he also giveth: he may mock Janet Jackson’s weight gain, and then months later rave about her newly sculpted abs.

“There’s so much more access to celebrities now,” Lavandeira says. “People take their pictures with cellphones and can immediately e-mail it to someone like me. Anyone can be a citizen journalist these days.” The ability of “citizen journalists” to rapidly disseminate news has changed the culture of celebrity gossip altogether. “Television and print magazines have had to find a whole new way to do business,” Lavandeira says. “They don’t get the scoops anymore. We do.” Even when the traditional media get there first, their scoops get scooped by bloggers. Along with a few other sites, PerezHilton.com posted leaked photos of People magazine’s spread of Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and their baby daughter well before it hit the newsstand. People’s lawyers threatened Lavandeira with legal action if the pictures weren’t removed, but the magazine later admitted that the blog coverage actually boosted the issue’s sales.

In his element: Lavandeira (centre, rear) mugging with Paris Hilton (right) and members of Simple Plan at the 2006 MuchMusic Video Awards after-party in Toronto. Courtesy PerezHilton.com.

The blogosphere’s appetite for newness almost trumps the importance of the actual news. It’s getting the scoop that counts, and the sheer volume of sites posting the same stories almost simultaneously has diminished the power of any one voice. Lavandeira’s Perez persona might have made him an overnight celebrity, but he doesn’t wield the kind of make-or-break influence malevolently enjoyed by legendary gossip columnists like Walter Winchell. Partly, that’s due to changing times; post-Cold War and post-sexual revolution, celebrities are no longer threatened by rumours of communist sympathies or extramarital affairs. Partly, it’s the unspoken contract that exists between stars and their fans: the former relinquish their privacy in exchange for fame and wealth. As a result, the paparazzi exist as a penance for being too rich, too thin and too good-looking.

Lindsay Lohan was recently rumoured to have snapped at an assistant, “Don’t talk to me like I’m some kind of normal person.” She’s not. Her fame has made her a public holding. Her outrageous behaviour — the boyfriends, the booze, the ego — has made her more famous than her film career. With a growing clique of stars like Paris Hilton — who are celebrities for simply being celebrities — their bad behaviour is the most interesting thing about them. Without the sex tapes and public feuds, Hilton is nothing but an insipid heiress. Minus the dumpster couture and eating disorder, the Olsen twins are just another pair of Starbucks-addicted undergrads.

Actress Julia Stiles recently opined that her boring life and the attending lack of gossip has prevented her from getting better roles. There might be some truth to that. It was a drug problem that landed Kate Moss a Vanity Fair cover and a bitter divorce that made Jennifer Aniston GQ’s Woman of the Year. In fact, in these tawdry times, it’s difficult to imagine any scandal that could wreck a celebrity’s career. I pose the question to Lavandeira: What could destroy a star now? Murder? Child molestation?

After rhyming off the names of two stars who’ve weathered such accusations, Lavandeira demurs. “I don’t know. Maybe child molesting and murder? You’ve got me.”

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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