Paris Hilton, an heiress to the Hilton hotel fortune, is co-starring in a reality TV show titled 'The Simple Life'(AFP file photo) 

But did she take this outfit to Arkansas? Paris Hilton models at Australian Fashion Week in November. (Getty Images)

    BEIJING, Dec 3 (Xinhuanet) ¡ª On a gray, gusty autumn afternoon in a city preparing for an incoming storm, Paris Hilton manages to steal even Mother Nature's thunder. 

    Months before snippets of her private sex video became public, the now-infamous Hilton hotels heiress arrives for lunch nearly three hours late. She's here to promote her Fox reality series The Simple Life, premiering tonight (8:30 p.m. ET/PT). The show, shot in five weeks in rural Arkansas, has her and pal Nicole Richie roughing it on a farm to prove that they're not idle, spoiled rich girls who don't know what Wal-Marts or water wells are.

    "I was playing a character," drawls Hilton, 22. "I'm totally normal. I think it's obnoxious when people demand limos or bodyguards. I eat at McDonald's or Taco Bell. My parents always taught us to be humble. We're not spoiled."

    The we refers to her sidekick Nicky, 20. Together, they're the Hilton sisters, two platinum-blond party hoppers who've never met a red carpet or camera they didn't love. Until, that is, a three-minute highlight reel of the 27-minute sex tape Paris made with then-boyfriend Rick Salomon three years ago somehow surfaced on the Internet in November.

    The brouhaha can only boost ratings for The Simple Life, but Fox execs refused to comment on what impact, if any, it might have. As for Hilton, she's gone into seclusion. Aside from a teary lunch at the Ivy and an L.A. shopping expedition with an unknown male companion, the once spotlight-loving socialite has been out of sight.

    "She's very upset about this tragedy that's occurred," says her father, Rick Hilton, who spent Thanksgiving weekend in the Hamptons with his family, Paris included. "She seems to be recuperating from it, but she's quite devastated from it all."

    Paris has been paying the price for her indiscretion.

    "I can't walk the streets," she told Us Weekly as she flew to Los Angeles from Australia. "It's too embarrassing. I don't want to go out anymore. I don't want to party. This has really made me think about changes I want to make."

Paris Hilton, left, and Nicole Richie pose with Tinkerbelle in this undated publicity photo. The friends star in Fox's new reality series 'The Simple Life,' in which Hilton and Richie try to survive on a farm. (AP Photo/Fox)

    Even during this interview, in a secluded corner of Oscar's eatery in the Waldorf, Hilton draws gapes from diners, waiters, busboys. In person, she is an innocuously pleasant mix of languid, jaded entitlement and giggly every-girl awkwardness. She saunters in clad in a powder-blue velour sweat suit, her perilously low-cut pants perched on those narrow boyish hips.

    "Everywhere we go, people know us," she admits.

    "Last night, we were at the party for Elite Models, and there were no cabs on 42nd Street, so we walked. Every single person, even those 80 years old, were surrounding us and taking pictures. We stood there for literally an hour. It was really annoying."

    That gawking is the result of Hilton's relentless pursuit and attainment of a peculiar sort of celebrity. She's famous purely for being famous ¡ª for being sexy, saucy Paris. Her friends swear she's a good kid with big dreams, but she has a reputation as outsized as her inheritance, estimated at $30 million. Yet the tabloids tell a different story.

¡¡¡¡"She's really a smart, very nice person."

    Sure, she wears skimpy dresses, prances down catwalks and jets from party to premiere. But Hilton, say those around her, is just having fun.

    "She likes to go out and have a good time," says Manhattan publicist Lizzie Grubman, who has known Hilton for six years. "But that doesn't mean alcohol and drugs are involved."

    In fact, insists Paris, she doesn't even hit the bottle. "I hate the taste of alcohol," she says. "When I'm drinking, I'm drinking Red Bull. When I was younger, yeah, I drank before."

    It's that before, though, that's been raising eyebrows for the past six years. Back then, a teenage Paris, accompanied by Nicky, started hitting the New York party circuit full force. Big deal, shrugs Hilton, adding that "if you were 16 or 17 and invited to these parties, and you could get in, and you knew all those people, you'd go, too."

    It was a feature in the September 2000 issue of Vanity Fair that first introduced the Hilton sisters as skin-baring, party-hopping, limelight-loving teen socialites. To this day, Hilton is furious about the article, calling the writer "mean-spirited. We were 18 and 15 at the time. To do that to little girls is so messed up. It was really hurtful. That was the beginning of it all, of everyone trying to be mean."

    Now, Paris, the oldest daughter of Rick Hilton and his wife, former child actress Kathy Richards, wants to be taken seriously. She was born in New York, raised in Los Angeles and attended a slew of posh schools on both coasts, including Professional Children's, Dwight and Buckley and a school for troubled kids in Utah. Her father won't confirm if she ever earned a high school diploma. But, says Richie, who has been best friends with Hilton for years, "She's really a smart, very nice person. She's a good, good, good person, and if you spend 10 minutes with her, you know that."

    But if you know Hilton at all, it's from seeing her strike saucy poses at the September premiere of Wonderland or the Scary Movie 3 bash. Hilton shrugs off her party monster image, saying she goes out only to promote her work and is home by 10 p.m., although most movie after-parties, at which Hilton is in frequent attendance, usually don't get going until well past that.