Are They For Real?

Heidi says that on her way to the shoot she thought it might be a scam. "I thought I was walking into Punk'd or getting killed or something," she says.

"Heidi really wanted me there for backup," Spencer says. "She was like, 'This is a setup.'"

But the shoot happened — even though Perez Hilton, the celeblogger and Hills' Boswell, loudly tipped his readers off to the Lauren-Heidi summit and paparazzi staked out the parking lot of the Culver City, California, photo studio. (A pap shot of the four Hills girls together, Spencer claims, could command up to $200,000.) Inside, as MTV publicists and show creator Adam DiVello nervously looked on, the atmosphere was cordial but chilly. Hills Kremlinologists studied cast interactions, but over the course of a nine-hour day, Lauren and Heidi never spoke to each other. "You can feel it," Whitney, The Hills' doe-eyed Switzerland ("I'm neutral"), told me at a quiet moment. "There's a separation."

Heidi is sanguine about the split. Lauren, after all, is why she's on The Hills — Heidi was just a spitfire from the small ski town of Crested Butte, Colorado ("A seven-block town with one main street," says Heidi's mom, Darlene Egelhoff), when she met Lauren at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. "We were the only blondes in the class," Heidi recalls.

"We were such. Good. Friends," she says emphatically. "A part of me just wants to go up and be like, 'Hey, how are you?' But the other part of me is so mad. . . . It's like I'm the odd man out."

However awkward the Heidi-Lauren squabbling may be, it has been juicy business for The Hills. This spring's season premiere earned the show a record 3.9 million viewers — the highest-rated cable telecast of the year so far — with an estimated 5 million more views online. Graden believes The Hills is now a bigger franchise than other generation-definers like The Osbournes, TRL or Jackass.

"People love feuds," says Spencer, taking a chomp of quesadilla. "Who were Paris and Nicole before they weren't friends? That's when they became superstars. If Lauren and Heidi were friends, people wouldn't tune in."

Every rivalry needs its black hat, however, and Heidi, through Spencer, has eagerly, and perhaps too ingeniously, complied. The pair now operate, sometimes to the dismay of MTV handlers, like a MySpace edition of Bonnie and Clyde — courting reporters, vacuuming paparazzi attention, and deflecting Hills hype to outside projects like Heidi's Heidiwood clothing line and her would-be music career, not to mention her new nose and breasts ("It was the right thing for my life," she says unabashedly). This winter, a homemade video Spencer shot of Heidi prancing on a beach to her dance single "Higher," groundbreaking only in its lack of self-awareness, quickly got more than 1 million Web hits. The pair engender eye-scorching animosity on the Internet, but in their minds, at least we're paying attention. "Good girls are so vanilla," Heidi says. Spencer is routinely referred to as "the most hated man on television" — but he wears the title like a badge ("Who is that person they always compare me to, on Dallas?" he asks).