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• Video: Behind the scenes at the cover shoot
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• The Hills Universe: A guide to who's who on TV's hottest show
It's a chilly spring night in Los Angeles when I arrive at Don Antonio's Mexican restaurant to join the End of Western Civilization for nachos and chicken enchiladas. The EOWC, of course, is Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, a.k.a. Speidi, the fabulously toxic power couple of The Hills — the real-ish MTV reality drama about L.A. twentysomethings praised as "the most influential show we've ever had" by MTV president of entertainment Brian Graden — and watching the fair-haired lovers stroll through their beloved Don Antonio's feels like seeing Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe walk into the Stork Club back in the day. That is, if Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe were, instead of a sports hero and a legendary sex symbol, the irresistible villains of a maddeningly addictive TV show in which nothing ever really happens.
We take seats at a dimly lit corner booth, and you can almost hear the text messages being tapped underneath nearby tables — omfg spencer n heidi r here!!! Spencer, 24, who's wearing a black Don Antonio's polo and a wispy blond goatee, rattles off a grande order without consulting the menu. Heidi, a 21-year-old mane of blond highlights dressed in a blue sweater and white sweatpants, tucks her tiny head into his shoulder.
"I wish I got to see what you saw today," Spencer says.
He's referring to this afternoon's cover photo shoot attended by Heidi and her three Hills castmates: Audrina Patridge, 22, Whitney Port, 23, and the show's protagonist, Lauren Conrad, 22, with whom Heidi has been engaged in an ugly feud. Once best friends and roommates, the two women have spent the past year and a half bickering back and forth in celebrity weeklies — a rift that, depending on whom you talk to, stems from either a Lauren sex-tape story that Spencer and Heidi leaked to the press (Lauren's version; they deny it), or Lauren's jealousy of Spencer and Heidi (their version; Lauren denies it), or Spencer's overall control-freakiness, or a cabal of genius MTV executives secretly pulling ratings/goosing strings behind a curtain. Whatever the case, the shoot was the first time Heidi and Lauren had been photographed, and not Photoshopped (as MTV has been forced to do), together in more than a year.
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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).
"It's jealousy, man," Spencer says. "It's human. I'm jealous of Jay-Z, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch. I feel for these people who wish they could be on reality television and not in their cubicles. You got to thank your haters."
"You have to understand, we have so many fans," Heidi says. "The haters are the ones who ask us for photos. The haters are the ones who are downloading songs." She looks out at the restaurant, which is packed. Don Antonio's has always been a popular joint, but since she and Spencer started eating here on The Hills, it's getting crazy, she says. "The world works on haters now."
[Excerpt from Issue 1052 — May 15, 2008]