“I am technically a princess,” says Paz de la Huerta over lunch on the Chateau Marmont — her fortress, in case you recall her look in Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.” Born in New York Metropolis to Judith Bruce and Spanish aristocrat Ricardo Ignacio de la Huerta, Duke of Mandas y Villanueva, De la Huerta doesn’t maintain an official title. Born to the Aristocracy; finally powerless.
But in New York’s SoHo, the place her household settled within the Eighties, she was royalty of one other sort. Larry Gagosian lived above the household, and once they moved to Tribeca, Miramax — the distribution and manufacturing firm based by brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein — rented the residence subsequent door. De la Huerta attended Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn with Lena Dunham and Jemima Kirke. In school, she met designer Zac Posen and have become an early muse. She babysat Lexi Jones, daughter of David Bowie and Iman, and appeared in a movie nominated for finest image on the 2000 Academy Awards — all earlier than turning 21. Paz de la Huerta is an actual downtown princess.
Paz wears her personal Dolce & Gabbana gown, stylist’s personal classic Louboutin sneakers.
She now sits comfortably contained in the courtyard of the Chateau, 13 years after “Video Games” made iconic the TMZ footage of her stumbling away from a Golden Globes after-party hosted on the resort. On the time, she was engaged on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” and the incident virtually bought her fired. Clear-eyed and regular at this time, she finishes her earlier thought whereas piling salt on her arancini: “It’s forbidden for the aristocracy to speak to the press. But in my case, I had no choice.”
Let’s start with that evening on the Chateau. Author Jay Bulger’s notorious 2010 profile for New York journal described her as somebody who “excels at creating, and causing, drama.” An comprehensible status, on condition that was the 12 months De la Huerta alleges Harvey Weinstein stalked and assaulted her. In 2011, she approached a journalist concerning the alleged assault. “Somehow,” she says, “Weinstein learned I had spoken out right before that night.”
On the time, De la Huerta was taking Suboxone for opioid withdrawal. Mixing it with alcohol might be deadly, but drinks stored showing in her palms. “There’s the back door for drunk celebrities,” she says, pointing behind me as a waiter approaches, then turns away. That evening, she was kicked out the entrance, the place paparazzi awaited. For some time, the scene tarnished her credibility.
Pals advised me to brace myself for the petulant film star, the diva. What I discover is a lady early to our date, keen to speak. Her lengthy, Modigliani face has softened over time, extra stunning than in photos. A scoop neckline and string of pearls body her often-photographed bust. Her gown, with banded sheer sleeves and an embroidered bodice, remembers Adjani in “Queen Margot,” however the thigh-high slit makes it distinctly Paz. The look flirts with the Fifteenth-century-inspired French Gothic arches behind her. She orders one other arancini, overlaying it with a lot salt it spills onto the cellphone subsequent to her plate.
When she recounts her life, De la Huerta speaks overtly, typically repeating particulars. Generally she lunges ahead to emphasise, shaking the four-top wicker desk, giving the impression that hardly anybody has believed her. Sexual assault is discredited when particulars fumble, as if reminiscence isn’t elastic and unreliable. However De la Huerta’s timeline is all the time the identical. She punctuates tales with smoke breaks, ignoring the poor air high quality, and taking them incessantly.
Los Angeles is burning, a tragedy so huge it renders Didion’s prose on the Santa Ana winds unhelpful. The pictures I noticed from New York have been apocalyptic, the GoFundMe hyperlinks fixed. In Hollywood, it feels as if nothing has occurred. I assumed De la Huerta’s newest duo present with Jaxon Demme on the gallery Spy Tasks can be canceled. But, right here we’re.
On Instagram, she posts in a continuing finsta-like stream — lengthy captions of horrors she has confronted combined with previous shoots and aspirational photos. On Oct. 10, 2024, De la Huerta posted a black-and-white nonetheless of Helena Christensen in a 1992 Revlon business. The caption reads: “I want to take photos like this. I have some photo shoots coming up, but I am feeling the need for some glamour in my life, and I am looking for a modeling manager.” I’m fortunate to know many gifted photographers, so I messaged her to say I may very well be of service. Sebastian Acero was set to {photograph}, Fern Cerezo to type, and Sonny Molina to bless the hair.
It was via images that I found De la Huerta — her brazen sexiness, typically captured in Purple journal, collided with my adolescence. I gazed at her the best way she appears at Helena Christensen. Continuously photographed by Terry Richardson for Purple, she asserts that he was by no means inappropriate together with her. That’s her reality, although it could not replicate one other’s expertise. (Richardson has confronted accusations of sexual assault as just lately as 2023; he denies all claims of non-consensual intercourse.)
The record of photographers who’ve shot De la Huerta reads like the best hits of the flip of final century: Terry Richardson, Tina Barney, Nan Goldin, Juergen Teller, Mario Sorrenti, Bruce Weber. De la Huerta has lived a lifetime of photos, and when the whole lot was misplaced, it was the images that remained.
Round age 6, her mother and father cut up. Her father, described by De la Huerta as drunk and abusive — claims that he has denied — moved again to Spain. De la Huerta moved together with her mom from SoHo to 311 Greenwich St. in Tribeca. In Barney’s portrait “The Lipstick” (1999), we see a teenage De la Huerta because the punky Lolita making use of rouge in her bed room as her mom appears on. Behind Judith Bruce, a French door is barely ajar. That door, De la Huerta alleges, related their residence, 3C, to 3B, rented out by her mom to Miramax.
Paz wears her personal jewellery, stylist’s high and backside, stylist’s personal classic Louboutin sneakers. Rocky wears Primrose Classic LA high and overalls.
In 1998, Billy Hopkins, a casting director from Miramax, approached De la Huerta and her mom on the road in entrance of their residence a few function in “The Cider House Rules.” A criticism filed in Los Angeles by De la Huerta and her then-lawyer Aaron Filler in 2019 states: “Miramax selected their next-door neighbor — 13-year-old Paz De La Huerta — to star in Cider House Rules, so it is indisputable that senior executives at Miramax — almost certainly Harvey Weinstein — were well aware of Paz.” In the identical criticism, De la Huerta alleges a collection of intimidations and assaults that she stated came about in 2010 and 2011 between her and Weinstein. These alleged occasions would happen years after they met on the set of “The Cider House Rules.” Final 12 months, Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction was overturned by New York’s highest court docket — a case constructed on a number of testimonies and allegations. De la Huerta has since been organizing a GoFundMe to restart her case towards him. “It is crucial that someone big takes this story on, someone my family can’t pay off,” says De la Huerta, “someone like Amal Clooney.”
When Luis Bobadilla, one of many muses of our group, picks me up from Union Station, Madonna’s “Live to Tell” — De la Huerta’s exhibition title at Spy Tasks — performs. The synchronicities in L.A. preserve accumulating, and I’ll be taught that is much more true round De la Huerta. A religious Catholic, the artist makes work which can be heavy with sporadic, jagged symbolism. Larry Gagosian bought Basquiat upstairs whereas De la Huerta was a child under, and her work generally has the impact of childlike depictions of what she realized by osmosis.
The narrative of her 10-painting providing is as follows: A princess is cursed with by no means receiving the love she’s given. A butterfly breaks the curse, offering her with a child woman, born with the love the princess badly wanted. Consider Sarah, the conspiracy daughter of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Jaxon Demme’s sculptures within the gallery’s heart are princesses encased in chrome and wire, nonetheless ready for the butterfly to reach and the struggling to finish.
“Which is your favorite?” De la Huerta asks me on the opening. I level to the big portray within the center that bears the phrase: I believed I needed to grieve you. Phrases spoken by a therapist who inspired her to color as a strategy to heal. “I thought I had to grieve you,” he’d say after lengthy stretches of silence from De la Huerta — situations when she’d be dedicated and recommitted to psychological hospitals.
Paz wears Swarovski jewellery, stylist’s personal gown tailor-made by Bontha, underwear tailor-made by Bontha, stylist’s personal classic Louboutin sneakers. Rocky wears stylist’s personal high, shorts and belt.
Contained in the portray is a rendering of Kenny the Tiger, the well-known inbred white Bengal. “That’s what they do in the royal family,” she says, pointing. “Incest.”
This story is tough to inform: It’s her story — uniquely, terribly hers.
On the opening, all is effectively. A cooler filled with beer under a cheese desk alerts the place I’m: the present of an early-career painter. De la Huerta is consuming solely the cameras and eyes which can be on her. On this evening, she is Rita Hayworth. The day earlier than, I’d encountered a hardened grace reserved by life for a choose few. What I see on this evening is the spell of hair and make-up; I imply this as glamour, a strategy to make others see what you need them to see. On her non-public Instagram, she posts lengthy captions about reversing the getting older course of, and tonight, I watch her do it.
In attendance is De la Huerta’s buddy Marilyn Manson; sexual and home violence costs towards him had simply been dropped earlier that day. She insists on his innocence greater than as soon as, and my abdomen turns. I wish to imagine her as I do the whole lot I’ve written above, however I can’t. I’ve seen girls converse towards Manson with the identical urgency and element that De la Huerta has proven me.
Why can we imagine some folks and never others? Throughout #MeToo, I dated somebody who misplaced their Condé Nast job over related accusations. I selected to imagine their innocence. I can’t ask De la Huerta to show her again on her buddy, simply as she can’t ask me to show my ear from Evan Rachel Wooden’s testimony towards Manson. Every time he comes up, I modify the topic.
These photos, that gentle. The explanation we’re in Hollywood is to make photos. A month prior, on Zoom, De la Huerta advised me and photographer Sebastian Acero that this is able to work finest if it felt like a film. She set three characters: Whore, Mom and the Ghost of Marilyn Monroe. By style, hair and make-up, she would direct herself into three viable paths her life might’ve taken. We start with Monroe and finish on Whore. After I advised her the order, she smiled: “So, we’re starting at the end.”
Within the remaining accomplished function of her life, Marilyn Monroe performs divorcée Roslyn Taber in “The Misfits” (1961). In it, Clark Gable asks her, “Why are you so sad? You’re the saddest girl I’ve ever met.” As a toddler, Monroe went to the flicks to mission desires of a father onto Gable. Realizing the whole lot we do about Monroe — and the way a lot remains to be unknown — the movie’s penultimate scene is grating. Gable and his crew of males tie up a distressed horse whereas an equally distressed Monroe watches. She runs, screaming at them, on the digital camera, on the world: “Horse killers! Killers! Murderers! You’re liars! All of you, liars! You’re only happy when you can see something die!” The scene unsettles Monroe followers, realizing it was her husband, author Arthur Miller, who maybe plagiarized her intimate phrases for the display.
As Linda in Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void” (2009), De la Huerta delivers a scene that evokes an analogous feeling for me, that feeling that the actor’s actuality is braiding with the movie. Linda, a dancer at a membership referred to as Intercourse Cash Energy, is working when she learns her drug-dealing brother has died. His spirit hovers over the complete movie, witnessing the wreckage of his absence. Linda, left with out her solely buddy, crumbles when the one that gave her brother up tries to apologize. She will solely scream: “I don’t wanna be here, I don’t wanna be here with these evil f–ing people! They’re f–ing evil!” A video on De la Huerta’s non-public profile, posted on Jan. 12, reveals her being pushed round in a van. Laughing, she says, “Gaspar was right — my memoir should be a comedy. But I’m angry with Gaspar because he hasn’t written a statement against my father.”
For the ghost of Monroe, De la Huerta insisted on sporting a pink rose-printed Dolce & Gabbana gown she purchased herself as a birthday reward years in the past. She says it was the gown she wore throughout a near-death expertise. Within the nice purge of her outdated life, this gown is one thing she determined to maintain, as a result of it protected her. She needs to put on it at Monroe’s grave, as a result of she says it might’ve been her. What does she imply? “The dead actress,” she places it merely.
Paz wears her personal jewellery, stylist’s personal high, backside and tights.
The evening earlier than our becoming, I dream my father is observing me menacingly in a loud membership. I’m begging my buddies to depart, however they will’t hear me over the music.
When it’s lastly time to see the Dolce & Gabbana gown at our becoming, I inform her concerning the dream. I ask for extra particulars concerning the evening her gown saved her. De la Huerta says she was taken out to dinner by the individuals who handle her father’s cash, on the event of her birthday, and felt one thing horrible was imminent. Later that evening, in a membership, she begged strangers to assist her disguise. Nobody listened. My dream connection goes ignored as her focus zeroes in on the gown zipping up. Our affected person stylist, Fern Cerezo, does their finest, however the zipper received’t shut — the hole is simply too broad.
“I’ll be thinner in the morning, but don’t worry, I won’t make myself throw up.”
Ought to I be apprehensive about that?
The subsequent morning, after the “Misfits” wig goes on and make-up artist Kennedy’s Warhol paint is stamped, I watch over Cerezo’s shoulder as De la Huerta steps into the gown. The zipper goes up with ease.
It’s raining on the drive to Westwood Memorial Park, the place Monroe is buried. At first, I take it as a very good signal — then I’m advised of mudslides. We Google Monroe’s favourite music and decide on Ella Fitzgerald. De la Huerta requests “Love for Sale,” a track realized again when she hoped to turn into a lounge singer. She turns round from the entrance seat and counts Fitzgerald’s totally different loves from the refrain: outdated love, new love, each love however real love.
She performs it on repeat on the grave. We hand her the white roses she requested — “It’s customary” — and watch in whispers. “Quiet!” De la Huerta shimmies towards Monroe in homage. Extra lipstick goes on, and she or he kisses the title plaque. On her knees, she bows, splaying her arm in reward. Marilyn Monroe, the guardian angel of all working ladies. A saint whose picture nonetheless works and sells in smoke retailers, vacationer traps and museums.
A household tries to go to the grave however as an alternative watches De la Huerta carry out from throughout the road. The rain stops and the solar comes out on schedule for the subsequent look.
Paz wears Manolo Blahnik sneakers, expertise’s personal jewellery, stylist’s personal backside, tights and gloves.
Monroe skilled three miscarriages in her lifetime; De la Huerta has misplaced two youngsters. Her want for motherhood is obvious — not simply in dialog however within the narrative arc of her present at Spy Tasks. For our photograph shoot, she requested a toddler to behave out a maternal scene together with her.
Thankfully, our head producer, Palma Villalobos, had a connection: Rocky Mosse, age 8. For this look, De la Huerta is referencing “Domestic Bliss,” Angelina Jolie’s 2005 editorial with Steven Klein for W Journal. We’re fortunate to have Justin Bontha — tailor to Rihanna and Madonna — on set to tweak a caftan that Cerezo crafted from polka dot cloth.
By the pool, De la Huerta is playful with Rocky, and this time, the viewers is allowed to make noise. Our laughter emboldens her. “You’ve got to sleep for 15 days, Rocky!” As a result of it’s virtually “Mommy and Daddy day.” Rocky stamps his foot in giggly indignation. If he does his homework, she says, he doesn’t get to eat. If he doesn’t do it, he will get sweet.
She performs unhealthy mommy like a John Waters muse; I believe we have to see De la Huerta in a comedy. She nicknames her scene-mate “Rocko” in a Lengthy Island accent from 1985. Rocky protests this new title. De la Huerta accuses him of hating her. All is claimed with an air towards entertaining us, however one thing else hovers over the interplay.
Again within the make-up chair, gown on, she thinks out loud whereas her lipstick is being wiped off: “I don’t know what I’d do with a son, you know? I’m so feminine.” A few of us AMABs on set joke that our moms stated the identical.
We’re again on the Hollywood Roosevelt Lodge, the place De la Huerta is staying and Monroe as soon as lived as a mannequin. The doorman may be very pleasant and asks if there’s a celebration happening. “It used to be a party place,” says De la Huerta, lighting her first indoor cigarette of the shoot. On the becoming, I had requested if she was in a smoking room. She laughed, then mocked me as she blew out the window. “Is this a smoking room?”
Her finest buddy James Orlando has been her proper hand the complete shoot, a quiet and supportive presence. It was Orlando who paid for the Iboga, the West African psychedelic De la Huerta credit with rewiring her mind, permitting her to reside and not using a tablet in her physique.
Orlando met De la Huerta on set for a Bullett Journal shoot in August 2010. In a video interview for the difficulty, an off-screen voice asks her, “What was your first acting experience that did not involve a camera or a stage?” She lists a number of issues — taking part in dress-up together with her sister, negotiating together with her father, and studying the right way to manipulate him to get what she wished. If it was a gown she wished, she’d do “anything and everything to get it.”
Behind the digital camera, one thing about her reply unsettled Orlando. Perhaps it was that second, or perhaps it was the best way De la Huerta walked round bare on the Bullett workplaces, however his judgment was already forming.
In 2007, De la Huerta directed a brief movie referred to as “Pupa, Papa, Puta.” The tongue-twister interprets to “Doll, Dad, Whore.” The creator of the movie’s lead, a doll, is a violent man. It’s solely when the doll shatters that she will be able to come alive within the type of De la Huerta, her personal self-directed star, bare in broad daylight, sweeping up the items.
On the Hollywood Roosevelt, she’s channeling Anouk Aimée in “Lola” (1961), her present type icon, and whom she believes she most resembles. She’s energized, nonetheless talking within the Lengthy Island accent from earlier, lighting cigarettes continuously.
As we arrange for the subsequent shot, room service delivers a bottle of wine. To be clear, De la Huerta has by no means claimed sobriety. Orlando advises her to not drink on digital camera, as any good buddy ought to. By the lens of hurt discount, a glass of wine appears benign, actually much less dangerous than opiates. However the particulars of extreme consuming that she attributes to nervousness and despair in her 2019 criticism towards Weinstein ring in my ears. Should you imagine her — and I do, fully — it’s laborious not to consider.
De la Huerta calls herself a technique actor, and watching her now, I don’t see somebody with a consuming drawback. I see an artist doing what artists do: opening the wound, peering into it, and extracting what she will be able to.
Cerezo attire De la Huerta in a white petticoat and matching corset till she tosses off the highest and calls for complete silence. To maintain speaking amongst ourselves, we disguise within the toilet, the place I spray her fragrance — Queen Nzinga by Marissa Zappas — on my wrist. From exterior, I hear De la Huerta giving Sebastian Acero a striptease to “Nutshell” by Alice in Chains. Jerry Cantrell’s guitar weeps on the monitor for Layne Staley, who died of an overdose at 34. Irrespective of how a lot of De la Huerta’s story you imagine, it’s a miracle she has lived to inform it. Her fortieth birthday was this previous fall, a benchmark which may make an actor nervous, however De la Huerta nonetheless desires, wishing to promote work, make movies and star in style campaigns. At one level, she tells us she’ll fly us out to decorate her for a future marriage ceremony, wherever it’s that she lives.
We strive yet one more look, however she vetoes it. The shoot is over. Sonny Molina rapidly throws De la Huerta’s hair up for a dinner date she’s late for. As soon as dressed, she pulls me over to share a secret. It leaves me uncertain of what to do or the right way to neglect it. She says it’s one thing to bear in mind, you recognize, “as you write my story.”
Devan Díaz is a author from Queens, N.Y.
Inventive path by Devan DíazPhotography by Sebastian AceroStyling by Fern CerezoProduction Palma VillalobosHair Sonny MolinaMakeup KennedyChild mannequin Rocky MosseProduction assistant Luis BobadillaHair assistant Kalia White Smith