This is a book review, and let’s get this right out in the open: It’s a review for a friend. For Mark Ebner, the investigative journalist who writes Hollywood, Interrupted – of his scathing, disturbing and pathologically engrossing new crime book, Six Degrees of Paris Hilton: Inside the Sex Tapes, Scandals, and Shakedowns of the New Hollywood.
I read an advance copy of this book a few weeks ago and it’s taken me that much time to organize my thoughts because, well, this is no ordinary crime book. In fact, most people looking at the cover and title wouldn’t think it’s a crime book at all. They’d think it a Hollywood-gone-rotten expose, and they’d be right in that assumption. It’s both, those being far from mutually exclusive genres. As Ebner makes abundantly clear at the outset, to tell the story of the “Sub-Hollywood” cesspool at the center of this book – the Joe Francises, Rick Solomons and Brandon Davises of the world – is to tell a story of crime. And nothing white collar there. No simple embezzlements or fraud. Lurid, street-level stuff – Playboy centerfolds breaking into homes for cash, reality stars inside out on multi-million dollar coke deals and of course, Paris Hilton, and just about every other “actress” in her orbit turning tricks in lean stretches to keep up the appearances of an imperial lifestyle. (As Ebner uncovers, these C-list starlettes aren’t just morally bankrupt, but often literally so – going down on lines of well-heeled Peters to pay the Pauls holding the leases on their Benzes and Bentleys.)
But I’m getting ahead of myself here, and while all that classic Hollywood sleaze is wildly entertaining, it’s not what kept me in the book. And it’s important, essential, to remember, Six Degrees is more than just a shocking expose. The book’s a cultural indictment, and judged in the literary and journalistic sense, as fine piece of crime writing and social criticism as can be committed to publication. Fine enough that someone like me – a person with minimal knowledge of the players in the thing and who’s never paid a stitch of attention to any of the purported entertainment they produce – found the book a fantastic read.

The book is centered around Enber’s jailhouse interviews of an ex-Hollywood enforcer, Darnell Riley. Riley, the only sympathetic character in the book (because he appears to be the only person in it with more than a bird bath’s depth), is doing time for a unique crime. In January of 2004, Riley tied up founder of the Girls Gone Wild franchise, Guccione-wanna-be and alleged rapist Joe Francis in his Hollywood home and forced him to make a homosexual-themed porn video, repeating over and over, hog-tied and face down on a bed with his pants around his ankles and a whirring pink vibrator resting on the small of his back, “I’m Joe Francis and I like it in the ass.” (Considering the wealth of information in the book regarding Mr. Francis’s deeply confused sexuality, this may ultimately prove more confession than humiliation.)
Of course, this crime begs a few questions. What on Earth would be the purpose of such a bizarre assault? Why would anyone go through all that effort – take on all that risk – to degrade the undegradable?
The mystery of that serves as the jumping off point for the rest of the book. From there Ebner goes long, compiling dozens of interviews of tabloid celebrities, trust fund junkies, starfuckers and the world’s greasiest assortment of pimps, pedophiles and petty criminals – all connected within the proverbial six degrees of separation to a singularly pathetic celebutante – to paint the Sub-Hollywood in which such an attack seems normal. In the context of everything else going on in the book, the Francis battery is tame. You almost wonder why Riley’s even doing time for it.
And it’s in painting that picture where the book really hits its stride. The passages where Ebner pulls back from the action for a second and allows himself a rant are phenomenal. The author has a PhD in “Hollywood,” and wrapping them in literary allusions on the subjects of shame, decay and pre-destined failure, from Dante to Melville to, most aptly, Fitzgerald, Ebner’s riffs are at once biting, hilarious and in their juxtaposition of the highbrow with the incurably base, perfectly ironic.
Which is where the broader social critique comes into light. As the book peels back all the layers, trying to uncover the mix of motivations and motivators that drove Riley to this seemingly mindless crime, only to uncover deeper levels of malignant narcissism, perversion and stupidity, you can’t help thinking, “These are the imbeciles millions of Americans worship? Follow on Inside Edition? These talentless, wretched disasters, famous by dint of PR-contrived notoriety? These total and irredeemable wastes of useful plasma? This is what’s behind the curtain?”
I always figure they’d be at least, well… sort of intelligent.
Then you stop and think, “Wait a minute. Who are the real idiots here? The monkeys dancing for change or the crowd throwing the nickels?” If an audience mirrors its entertainment, and these low rate parasites are what the public wants, isn’t the actual question, “What the hell’s the matter with us?” I didn’t ask him, but I think that’s the inquiry Ebner was raising below the surface, the one that simultaneously drives and haunts this book from start to finish. All the talk of decline, freefall and collapse – of a new, McHollywood where Darnell Rileys sexually assault the Joe Francises of the world, where Paris Hilton fellates producers for mad money on Vegas weekends and Rick Solomon finances blow deals with the proceeds of night-vision sex tapes… If these people are the obsession of many Americans, then the circus they live within, the incestuous tornado of sleaze Ebner illustrates, also functions as a metaphor – a symbol of broader national illness. That so many of us are so easily bullshitted into emulating these people, into giving these ridiculous clowns money, forces me to wonder if he might have better titled the book Six Million Degrees of Paris Hilton.
Anyone can write a simple, linear book about a crime. You analyze from the outside in, dissecting how the forces combusted in the act at issue. Ebner did it in reverse, and that made all the difference – made this the definitive dissection of Hollywood’s darkest corners, circa the recent “Bling” Era. He took the crime and spun it outward – into a sprawling, ballbuster of a book mocking and filleting the forces creating it. That’s the point, I think. The crime isn’t important, just a symbol of the environment leading to it. An environment sustained with millions of dollars from people all across this country who’d sell their souls to live within six degrees of separation from Paris Hilton.
I’ll leave you with this passage about Ms. Hilton – for my money, one of the best written and deadliest deconstructions since Hunter Thompson eulogized Richard Nixon. And tell me, couldn’t this apply to many of the other systems and beliefs crumbling around us at the moment? The Government, Wall Street… our generally infantile expectations and head-in-the-sand approach to life? Ebner would tell you he just wrote a book about Hollywood. I think he might have stumbled into a much bigger metaphor – a cast of characters defined by their limitless vacancies, the ultimate symbols of this dim, low moment in our history. Either way, if for these sorts of passages alone, his book is more than worth the price:

Wars, nations, presidents and popes may come and go, but the one constant that anyone seemed to care about for most of the decade was Paris Hilton, the poor little rich girl with a name out of Greek tragedy – born of unspeakable privilege, flaunting her feral charms, flouting the laws of God and man alike, and blessed with both the callowness of youth and the callousness of impunity. For reasons that still mystify, even as her moment in the sun finally draws into merciful eclipse, Paris Hilton became the critical pivot in this as well as all stories – the celestial body around which all planets seem to revolve, and to which all her subjects, royal and commoner alike, are connected by no more than six degrees. She is the You Are Here sign in the universal shopping mall that is post-capitalism, the embodiment of what Darnell calls “dizzying, narcissistic wealth, and its corruption that predated her.
She is the doorstop at the end of the long century of mediated fame: From Marilyn, whose effortless sex appeal was as streamlined and aerodynamic as the Cadillac Coupe de Ville, who the camera loved so desperately that its handmaidens would tolerate any unspeakable behavior to keep her before it; to Madonna, an irresistible force who bludgeoned her way into fame through tireless effort and burning will, yoked to an outsized sexual persona at once brazen and pure burlesque. Who was briefly succeeded by Courtney Love, rank ambition enflamed to pathological proportions, who gave way to Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, creatures cloned in a lab somewhere and incorporating the seeds of their own destruction – up-sold as garish fad or guilty pleasure, down-sold as schadenfraude for the masses, their prefabricated rise and fall marketed to identical effect. Each brandished a more virulent sexuality – hyperbolic, vulgar, burrowing deeper and deeper into taboo as the surest path to notoriety.
And then there’s Paris, who strays beyond those gates, out into a post-apocalyptic landscape where fame carries none of the imagined perquisites, only a hunger sated momentarily by the flesh of her rivals. She is American Gladiator meets American Idol - the perfect star to preside over the eclipse of stardom itself. As fame has grown ever more corrosive, its victims are inevitably someone else’s investment – singers, actors, cultivated talent. And Paris is saddled with none of it. She is a catchphrase, bereft of talent. Having appeared in over twenty films and sixty episodes of television, she shows not the slightest aptitude for acting. She is the first reality superstar. Her one acknowledged accomplishment, The Simple Life, professionally humiliated her and made her into a standing joke, a symbol of inbred money and louche entitlement, a class division bordering on speciation, all with her willing complicity. And having no discernible talents, she can be replicated at will by the cynical Hollywood machinery that produced her, her exit hastened by the venues that once prolonged her and are now turning on her, who will ultimately consume all of her – hooves, horns and hide – until there’s nothing left. She is pure spectacle; her only job is to be eaten by lions. She is the perfect pop artifact, and she will take everything with her when she goes – even her memory.
The world that Paris Hilton inhabits isn’t even Hollywood, no matter if the name sticks like a noxious cloud to the club life for which she has become a media billboard and roving ambassador (paid per appearance) – its own private Angelyne, doomed to travel endlessly from one end of Hollywood Boulevard to the other for all eternity. With the exception of Leo and Tobey, Ashton and the Wahlberg entourage, the real Hollywood is usually home in bed, in anticipation of their 6 a.m. call time. If anything, this is Sub-Hollywood, a special circle of hell populated by cautionary tales in training, opportunists who fall prey to bigger opportunists, shark-eyed waifs, usurpers, bloodless parasites subsisting on cocaine dreams, Old Money gone rancid, curdled youth, lemmings drawn to sound and light. Whatever Elizabeth Taylor became at the end of her life (presuming she doesn’t live forever) – a mythological creature that outlived the movies, the premieres, a flotilla of husbands and everyone she’s ever known, to cling infant-like to the morphine drip of fame – with people like me parked at her curb, punching a clock on celebrity death watch – these people were born into. It’s their starting point. They are denizens of the perpetual night.

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