Kathy Hilton’s Incredible Brain, Explained by Jennifer Tilly

Kathy Hilton is the first recipient of Vulture’s Forever Icon award, presented as part of our annual “Masterminds” celebration. The award honors an onscreen star whose singular achievements extend far beyond the past year. To explain what makes Hilton so essential to the reality-television world, we tapped her Real Housewives of Beverly Hills colleague, Oscar-nominated actress and professional poker player Jennifer Tilly.

The thing about Kathy Hilton is that there are two Kathys. Well, there are probably a lot of Kathys. There are seven Kathys like the Seven Faces of Sybil.

The first has a wicked sense of humor. Dark, gallows humor. Chris Rock–caliber comedy. When she’s on and when she’s sharp, she’s ferocious Kathy and there’s nobody funnier. But a lot of people don’t see that because the façade she puts on for the show is someone who’s not quite sure what’s going on. I think a lot of women, myself included, who are very smart and intelligent, keep it hidden. Because floaty comedy is easier for people to take. Audiences like that better. If you’re a sharp comedian, if you let your feet touch the ground, you have a lot of enemies. So I think that she saves that part, that character — which is maybe the real Kathy; who knows? — for her friends.

Kathy will often ask, “Who is ‘hunky-dory’?” Why? “Well, everybody was yelling and I thought it would break the tension.” She does that a lot. Like when Dorit says, “We need to address the elephant in the room.” When I see that there’s some drama going on, it’s like I have a front-row seat to the Super Bowl. I know I’m not going to get a word in edgewise, but I want to be right next to it and maybe they will cut to my worried expression. But when Kathy sees storm clouds gathering, she will just vanish. Like I Dream of Jeannie going back into the bottle. Except she cannot leave our dinners. So she’ll say things like, “Oh, is there an elephant?”

So the second Kathy really does want everybody to get along. She wants everybody to be happy. She’s a friend to everybody, even people who rub her the wrong way. She’s one of the few who reached out to Amanda after filming. When the fans started really going after Amanda, Kathy reached out to see if Amanda was okay. Natalie really never found her place in the group, and Kathy made a point of being friends with Natalie and making Natalie feel like she is … not viable, not valuable, but you know what I’m saying. She really wanted to make Natalie not feel like a horrible outsider.

The thing that Kathy also does — I swear to God — is she has a party every two weeks. The third Kathy has really big parties that are like the Golden Globes gifting suite. Like Oprah’s favorite things. It’s like, I’m Kathy Hilton and I know about all these fabulous things and I want to share the knowledge with my friends. She has many Christmas parties, but the biggest one happens shortly after Halloween, and everybody gets a pair of pajamas. You take off your clothes and you put on the pajamas. Then you get this giant bag, like those bags you take to the flea market that have wheels on them. You walk around in your pajamas and you go to all these stations. There’s a Christmas wreath station. A flower station. A cosmetic station. There’s also caviar and cookies and Christmas trees and Housewives and Bravolebrities, all surrounded by twink elves in Christmas G-strings.

She has a lot of parties to promote products, but she’s always opening her house for LGBTQ+ causes, too. She opened up her house to the GLAAD Awards. The fourth Kathy is a philanthropist. I’ve been working with Project Angel Food for 30 years, and they wanted to give me an award. I never invite my friends to those things because the ceremonies can be boring. But Project Angel Food is a great charity, and they wanted a Housewife to give me my award. Sutton was out of town, so I asked Kathy, and she wasn’t like “I’ll think about it” or “I’m really busy.” She goes, “I work with Project Angel Food. I will do that.” And she showed up with bells on.

The thing that cracked me up so much is that Lisa Rinna is also a friend of Project Angel Food. And during the ceremony, they auctioned off a lunch with Lisa at the Polo Lounge. It went for a huge amount of money. (The gays love Lisa, as they should.) So onstage Lisa says something like, “Oh, for a certain amount, I’ll do two lunches.” I think that the two lunches with Lisa came to $45,000. Kathy got up, marched up to the front of the auction, had a little talk with the auctioneer, and they go, “We have a new item. Kathy Hilton is going to host 12 to 24 people at her house for a dinner. And she’s going to be there.” Of course the bidding went crazy.

The fifth Kathy is like a dog that locks his jaw to your leg and will not let go. You have to have five strong men peel the dog off the leg. She might not know how to use her cell phone or other very rudimentary things, but if she is being threatened or her children are being threatened, she goes in. Like at the season-12 reunion. She’s in a really sparkly pink dress with a matching purse sitting on her lap, and she is like Attila the Hun. Everybody’s mouth drops because nobody expects that out of Kathy.

The sixth Kathy is an anxious traveler. She brings all the little pots and the potions with her. She has all these pillows. But they’re not that little half doughnut you see people slumping around their neck. She’s a Hilton. She carries these pillows, six or seven of them, that look like what you’d see on a fancy lady’s bed. Once, we were going through Customs, she has her pillows, and I noticed she was sort of lurching, like Igor. I caught up to her and saw she had one high-heel espadrille on and then one hotel slipper. I go, “Could you not find your other shoe?” And she goes, “No, this is actually a very good exercise for your feet.” Later on, it transpired that she couldn’t find her shoe or the strap broke. Most people would put on two slippers in that case. But Kathy is special. She has the ability to charm everybody into seeing things her way.

And everyone should want to be on vacation with Kathy. When you see her out and about in her normal life, she is impossibly glamorous, the Hilton lady of the manor that she was born to be. But when she goes on trips with us, she will show up in these overwashed cotton dresses, the kind of thing you’d wear if you were a high-school student on a school trip to Hawaii. Everybody else? We’re wearing all these fantastical outfits. We know there’s going to be a big showdown and people are going to be tuning in. We are all dressed like we’re in Elizabethan court. Maybe Kathy does it to annoy Kyle. But I think in her mind, she’s like, I’m on vacation. I want to be comfortable. And she is. The seventh Kathy sleeps until one in the afternoon. In St. Lucia, she wanders the beaches at night, howling at the sea.

Sometimes on the show, there’s a thin layer of artifice. Sometimes when you’re watching, you’re like, Oh, this seems like a badly written, badly acted soap opera. And that might be because producers are trying to get us from one point to another. “Can you guys have a discussion about what happened the day before yesterday?” But I always say the show is the most fascinating when all the women are together. Some of these women genuinely hate each other, so it’s like improv when the air is electric but nobody knows it’s dangerous. Nobody knows who is going to say what or when it’s going to explode. Then all of a sudden you are sitting there holding up your arms while everybody is pelting bread at you. When Kathy’s not there for that, it’s like there’s something missing. It’s like you made a cake and you forgot to put the vanilla in it. When Kathy is not there looking around for the elephant, it’s more aggressive.

Everybody prefers to have Kathy around. There is nobody I would rather be sitting with in the bar at the Bel Air Hotel after filming than Kathy Hilton. She brings so much to the show just by existing. I personally try to do as much stuff as I possibly can during Housewives shoots because they cut so much out. But Kathy doesn’t seem to care. She doesn’t seem to be concerned with getting camera time or being involved in interesting scenes. She’s just there because she likes to be there. When I tried to decide if I wanted to be a “friend of” or a Housewife, she said, “Being a ‘friend of’ is the best. You don’t have to get into any of the arguments.” And now I really understand. She doesn’t want to be committing hari-kiri on-camera for the edification of the masses. She wants to have fun. She wants to make jokes. She wants to hang out with her sister. It’s not that complicated.

Kathy Hilton’s Incredible Brain, Explained by Jennifer Tilly

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