How a pudgy Miami poseur became gossip's new queen

It's 10:30 p.m., and Mario Lavandeira—or rather, his online alter ego Perez Hilton—is 30 minutes late to the AOL Style Lounge on the outskirts of the MTV Video Music Awards site in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center. Here vendors give away cologne, liquor, clothing, shoes, jewelry, accessories, and even real, permanent tattoos to any famous person who will take them—or to Perez (assuming he shows), who is virtually guaranteed to plug the products on his blog. When one non-famous passerby attempts to score a free pair of D&G shades, though, a polite PR princess tells him firmly, "We're only gifting to talent."

"I'm an insider, but I'll always be an outsider"Then Perez arrives. Six-foot-two with grown-out bleached-blond hair styled in a faux-hawk, he's dressed like a caricature of a Hollywood It boy, in a soft pink blazer with the word arrogant embroidered down one sleeve, a graffiti-patterned T-shirt, sagging, intentionally ragged jeans, and matching pink slip-on Vans—"a very Perez outfit," Lavandeira, 28, says later. "Mario would never wear that." He's doughier than many of his pictures suggest and considerably sweeter in person than readers of his celebrity-skewering blog, perezhilton.com, might expect. Floating from booth to booth, he doles out generous attention to anyone who says hi. As he wanders across the room, scores of publicists flock to his side, stuffing his weekender-size tote bag with free products. Over the years, Lavandeira's vocation has earned him everything from Xtreme Lashes mascara to a T-Mobile Sidekick, which he reliably plugs in a category of his blog called Schwag Report. At the D&G table, he scores a free pair of shades worth about $400. "The gold ones," Lavandeira trills later, noting that they're the same kind Snoop Dogg sports. "I wore them for my Getty Images portrait."

Dubbed "Hollywood's Most-Hated Website" by Pat O'Brien's Insider, perezhilton.com is cotton-candy-pink junk food for millions of celeb-hungry Web surfers. Most come for the candid photographs leaked to Lavandeira by the paparazzi or lifted from other websites (he rarely shoots and almost never pays for images), to which he adds captions and digital scrawls in the style of a 14-year-old with a Magic Marker: a drawn-on pee-pee near Clay Aiken's mouth, or white dots meant to represent cocaine under Lindsay Lohan's nose. In addition, the self-proclaimed "Gossip Gangsta" and "Queen of All Media" incorporates tips he gets from celebrity magazine sources and others into bitchy, shoot-from-the-hip rants studded with snarky nicknames. He's dubbed Kevin Federline "K-Fag," Clay Aiken "Gayken," and Nicole Richie "Baby Zahara" (a seemingly racist allusion to Angelina Jolie's adopted Namibian child). His shining moment involved several "exclusive" sightings of former *NSync member Lance Bass at gay hangouts. Bass officially came out on the cover of People weeks later. Lavandeira, who is openly gay, casts a wide net of speculation, though, and similar insinuations about the sexuality of Lance Armstrong, Jake Gyllenhaal, Matthew McConaughey and Kyle XY star Matt Dallas (whom he calls "Kyle KY") have yet to pan out. Dallas did, however, go on Howard Stern's radio show recently to declare his heterosexuality. Remarkably, Lavandeira has never had to go to court over a post. "I'm more trustworthy than Page Six," he brags, but a prominent disclaimer on his site suggests otherwise: "Postings may contain erroneous or inaccurate information. The owner of this site does not insure [sic] the accurateness of any content presented on perezhilton.com."

His accomplishments, such as they are, are all the more notable given his inauspicious history. The son of Cuban parents, Lavandeira was a self-described "fat, gay kid in Thespian Society" at Belen Jesuit Prep in Miami before moving to New York in 1996 to become an actor. Instead, he wound up making ends meet by working as an assistant to a club DJ, tutoring students in Spanish, babysitting, handing out flyers, and "for one hot second," as he puts it, bartending at Broadway theaters. He graduated from Tisch School of the Arts in 2000, but aside from some extra work on soap operas, The Sopranos (playing Male Student in the 2001 episode "Fortunate Son"), and a NY 1 cable network ad, his acting career was a bust. So in 2002, Lavandeira moved to L.A., where he worked at a boutique PR firm and began freelance writing for local gay publications. In 2005 he returned to New York to work as a reporter for Star magazine, but was fired after a few months for spending too much time on a personal project—a blog, which he had started in September 2004. Star considered the blog a conflict of interest since it relentlessly ripped into stars Lavandeira might cover for the magazine—from Christina Aguilera to Christina Ricci. Plus, the site was starting to get lots of attention, due in part to its catchy name, pagesixsixsix.com.

"I want to sell out as fast and as hard as I can"With so many options and differing traffic estimates, it's hard to say with any certainty just how much perezhilton.com rakes in. But Web industry insiders who know the site and have used the same BlogAds system estimate that he's netting a minimum of $20,000 per month from BlogAds alone—likely more when all levels of ad sales are factored in. Henry Copeland, president and founder of BlogAds, considers perezhilton.com one of his biggest financial success stories, given that it's a one-man operation with almost no overhead. While refusing to talk specifics, Copeland says Lavandeira "works the same hours as a brain surgeon. But he gets paid better." (For what it's worth, the median income for a neurosurgeon is about $300,000 a year.)

Lavandeira won't talk about his income. "A lady never tells what she makes," he says. In response to a guess of $250,000, he e-mails back, "Naughty. Naughty."

His thrifty lifestyle offers no clue about the fistfuls of cash he may be pocketing, either. He drives a '99 Honda Accord (paid in full, he says). He lives in a one-bedroom, sparsely furnished apartment on Sunset Boulevard with no landline or Internet access of his own—mostly he blogs from the Coffee Bean, an Internet cafe nearby. He doesn't own a television, he says, and learns about TV stars primarily via marketing posters and YouTube clips. When he does end up in the VIP section with a celebrity, "They usually pay," he says.

There are some clues that Lavandeira is trying to become a star himself. He may have found his foothold among D-listers, but more and more often he's posting pictures of himself—with the Hilton sisters and their friends—in his Personally Perez section. Details magazine recently ranked him fifth on their list of the most influential men under 42, and Us Weekly named him one of its Power Players. Some celebs, too, have been treating him like one of their own. Singer-songwriter John Mayer recently aped perezhilton.com in several joke posts on his own blog. Lavandeira swears Fergie is talking about him in her new song "Pedestal," in which she disses Internet gossips with lines such as, "You hide behind computer screens so that you don't have to be seen. How could a person be so mean?" And at Jessica Simpson's recent album-release party at Manhattan nightclub G-Spa, he was rebuffed at the door and was on his way home when Simpson's cousin caught up with him. "Jessica personally escorted me in," he recalls triumphantly. "They weren't letting any other media inside the party. I think they even kicked [Page Six editor] Richard Johnson out." (Johnson's rep couldn't confirm the story.)

This increasingly high profile seems to be rankling some Perez readers, who snipe away in his comments section—occasionally overloading his bandwidth and shutting down the site—every time he posts a picture of himself with someone famous. "You look like you forced yourself in that picture," writes "Becky" in a typical response to a shot of Lavandeira, Paris Hilton, and the band A Simple Plan (see above). "You were that dork in high school that was always trying to hang with the cool kids."

Lavandeira counters with a favorite mantra: "I'm an insider, but I'll always be an outsider."

Meanwhile "Becky" and hundreds of other commenters are helping perezhilton.com rack up page views, and that high school dork is laughing all the way to the bank. "Everything I do is strategic," Lavandeira says. "I think people hate seeing my picture on my website, but it's a brand-building thing. The more I put my picture up there, the more people recognize me, the more they're familiar with me, the more it opens the doors for me to do bigger things. I'll worry when I see my traffic dip, but my traffic has been exploding." It's a lesson he's learned directly from his namesake. "She's established herself as a brand," Lavandeira says of Paris Hilton, which is his plan exactly. "I want to sell out as fast and as hard as I can."

For example, a publisher is interested in his book pitch, he says, and he's shooting a reality show (working title: Gossip Queen). A VH1 spokesperson acknowledges that the network is in talks with Lavandeira to air it, while pointing out that his is one of hundreds of shows they consider each year.

"I want my reality show to make me a celebrity," Lavandeira says. Asked later why he would want the kind of fame that makes people targets on his own website, he clarifies: "I never said I wanted to be famous. You can be famous and be Tara Reid"—a frequent target of Lavandeira's who once threatened in person to push him in a pool for his comments. "I said I want to be mainstream."

Next week, Lavandeira will celebrate two years of tirelessly chronicling the follies of the famous, in which time he's managed to pick up the ultimate celebrity accessory: several stalkers of his own. One calls at all hours to yell at him, criticize his weight, and hurl various insults at him. The other just phones him and squeals like a pig. He shakes his head at the idea. "You would think after a while," he says, "a normal, sane person would grow tired of it."

"Getting fired [from Star magazine] was one of the best things that ever happened to me. The other was getting sued by Page Six"Lavandeira later temped as a receptionist at E! Entertainment but was canned from that gig, too, after he had a face-to-face encounter with D-list diva and former supermodel Janice Dickinson. According to Lavandeira, she passed him on the way to the bathroom and blurted out that she needed a tampon. Moments later, he says, she sent her assistant back to the front desk to fish mysterious pills out of her bag to pass to Dickinson in the restroom. "Of course I had to write about it," he says now. The next day, his contract was abruptly terminated.

From there, Lavandeira's bad luck turned rotten. His car broke down. His bank account dried up. He pictured himself running back to Miami to work a 9 to 5 job. Then Page Six sued him, forcing him to abandon the name of his blog. "I was near suicide," he admits, in what might one day make a great scene in an E! True Hollywood Story. "I felt like I was in a black hole, a tunnel, and I couldn't see the light at the end. My mom was this close to having me committed. I was always thinking about how I was going to do it ... with pills, with a gun, or what."

Eventually, however, the newly christened perezhilton.com would prove an enormous hit. "Getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to me," Lavandeira says. "The other was getting sued by Page Six." The site, bolstered by the legal action, became profitable in March 2005, he says, and within a year, he was taking on some of the airs of the spoiled celebrities he was writing about. In February 2006, he got into a pissing match with a publicist from Manhattan PR firm Harrison & Shriftman that offered a glimpse into his ballooning ego. Perez had written on his site that a number of stars passed up a Playboy magazine party to attend one thrown at the same time by Maxim magazine. The publicist for the Playboy party e-mailed:

"Thank goodness only non-insiders read your unreliable page. You need to really be more responsible if you desire longevity in this business. I understand being snarky, but lies only make you look stupid in the end."

Perez snapped back:

"... I can choose to write whatever I play. I never claim to be objective. In fact, I reslish [sic] in my perspective and point of view. That's why people visit my site, so much that I get more visitors in ONE day that visit me than read Star or OK in one week. If and when Harrison Shriftman decides that I am 'worthy' of being invited to your events, then I will begin to give them favorable coverage...."

The gossip monger became gossip himself when the whole exchange was picked up by Gawker, whose founding editor Elizabeth Spiers was Lavandeira's former roommate. Later, the same site unearthed another, even juicier tidbit about Lavandeira—a profile on gay website adam4adam.com, featuring Lavandeira's picture and proclaiming a fondness for group sex, "various fetishes" and "PNP," an abbreviation for "Party 'n' Play," i.e., combining drug use and sex. Declining to refute the validity of the profile page, he says he's not ashamed of anything he's done in the past. As for his sex life these days, "I would love to say I still got laid a lot," he tells me, "but the truth is I haven't had sex in months."

By his own account, he doesn't have time. He's up before dawn most mornings and often online until past midnight when he's not attending an event or club. "I don't take days off," he says. On those rare Friday or Saturday evenings when he takes a break, Lavandeira claims he and friends usually hang out at home playing Balderdash or Charades. "My second favorite thing to do is sleep, because I'm always exhausted," he says with a sigh.

If numbers are any indication, all this frenetic activity has started to pay off. Perezhilton.com is currently ranked 60th among all blogs on the monitoring site technorati.com, well ahead of such popular blogs as Rocketboom and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. He says he averages 1.8 million page views a week (the measure used to determine ad rates) and has recently cracked 2 million in a single day. According to independent tracker Nielsen/NetRatings, the site garners 800,000 unique visitors a month, but Perez says it's more like twice that number per week—which would represent about the same size readership as Us Weekly. His ad rates reflect that success. Premium ads go for $5,000. Smaller "classified" ads go for $501 a week. There are also options for even more visible ads (backgrounds and banners at the top of the site) that are more expensive, earning $3 for each 1,000 times the page loads.