I'm on the phone with Lynne Spears, Britney's mother, when my five-year-old grabs a wad of cash, waves good-bye, and disappears into the elevator.

Lynne and Britney Spears.

"See?" says Spears as she listens to me scream at my son. "It's not so easy, is it? You can't even get your five-year-old to listen to you."

True, my son had not yet publicly flashed his crotch, vomited in his limo, wiped up dog poop with a $6,700 Zac Posen gown, or accused me of forcing him into rehab. But her point is a good one. Mothers take a lot of hits.

Some are unfair. Some are not.

This year the mothers of Hollywood's wild girls—Paris, Lindsay, and Britney—have found themselves almost as much a part of the tabloid circus as the daughters themselves.

A recent cover of Life & Style magazine featured photographs of Britney and Lynne and spewed, i hate you, mama! On June 28, Britney reportedly presented her mother with a letter warning her to keep away from Britney's two kids if she was abusing prescription pain medication. Apparently Britney has rethought the premise behind the book she co-authored with Lynne in 2000, Britney Spears' Heart to Heart, a mutual lovefest between mother and daughter. Dina Lohan, frequently seen living la vida loca with her troubled daughter, has been pitching reality shows, and once told Star magazine that Lindsay's friends called her mother "the white Oprah" because they all told her about their problems. And then there is Kathy Hilton, Paris's mother. Kathy sobbed when Paris was sentenced to jail for driving with a suspended license, calling the 23-day stint "Paris-cide." When Paris was released, her mother came to pick her up, seated at the open window of an S.U.V. in full hair and makeup as the cameras flashed. Kathy Hilton appeared ready for her close-up.

"All these crazy daughters and their mothers!" says Janice Min, editor in chief of Us Weekly. "These girls have one thing in common: troubled childhoods." (Mysteriously, the stage fathers tend to get more of a free pass: Joe Simpson does not get a lot of criticism for running the lives of daughters Jessica and Ashlee.)

There are plenty of stars whose mothers are their constant companions and succor; Justin Timberlake and Leo DiCaprio, to name two, escort their moms to big events all the time. But they don't make good copy. More intriguing are the parents who seem hell-bent on helping their children realize their dreams. But what dreams? And whose?


If ever there was a woman to make Gypsy Rose Lee look shy and unassuming, it's Kathleen Elizabeth Avanzino Richards Hilton. Hilton was herself the daughter of a stage mother, the pretty, vivacious Kathy Dugan, known to everyone as Big Kathy. Dugan, writes Jerry Oppenheimer in his 2006 book, House of Hilton, was an Irish Catholic high-school dropout who grew up in Manhasset, Long Island, eventually marrying four times. She told her daughters again and again that marrying rich wasn't a goal; it was the goal.

Paris and Kathy Hilton.

From the time Big Kathy's children were infants, they were in the spotlight. Little Kathy was only a small child when she started modeling. Eventually Big Kathy moved to L.A. to help boost her daughters' careers. While sisters Kim Richards and Kyle Richards are working as actresses today (Kyle in frequent TV gigs and Kim most recently as Christina Ricci's mother in Black Snake Moan), Big Kathy's namesake snared only a few bit parts, on shows such as The Rockford Files and Happy Days. "Of course Kathy wanted to be a star," says Hollywood party cougar and Hilton friend Nikki Haskell. "Who didn't?"

Kathy never got her big break, but she did find her Prince Charming. According to Oppenheimer, she had known Ricky Hilton—the sixth child of eight born to Barron Hilton—since they were teenagers, and they began dating seriously in 1978. Rick was a sweet University of Denver party boy. (Not that the entrepreneurial Hilton spirit was dead within him: he was known for throwing fabulous parties at the Denver Hilton and charging students 20 bucks a head.) Soon he was smitten with Kathy, and the two were married in Beverly Hills on November 24, 1979. They have, by all accounts, a very loving marriage (Rick is known to call his wife "Mommy," the New York Post noted in 2005), though whether that love is shared by the extended Hilton family is questionable.

In 1981, Kathy had Paris, whom she nicknamed "Star." From infancy, says Oppenheimer, mother and grandmother told the angelically pretty little girl that she would be bigger than Marilyn Monroe, bigger than Princess Di. All she needed was a little boost. (Kathy Hilton did not respond to *V.F.'*s requests for comment.)

"After my research I came away with sympathy for Paris," says Oppenheimer. "When she was a kid she thought about becoming a veterinarian. But she had no chance to do anything but what she has done." (For her part, Paris once told a reporter that her professional dreams changed when she realized she "could just buy a bunch of animals.")


"Kathy and Rick would host parties at these little clubs in New York, where they'd hand out flyers—something like 'Young and Rich Party hosted by Nicky and Paris Hilton,'" says Suzan Hughes, who was married to Herbalife founder Mark Hughes and is godmother to Kathy's younger son, Conrad IV. "You throw a great party, you get a celeb to show up—or you say that a celeb will show up—and when the camera crews come the celeb may not be there, but there's your gorgeous daughter, dancing on a table. That's how it all began."

Hilton observers all have their favorite story about Kathy's curious lack of appropriateness. For former Daily News gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, it was this: "When Paris went on Saturday Night Live after the release of her sex tape, in 2003, she did this bit with Jimmy Fallon where he wasn't allowed to discuss the sex scandal, but he asked her all these double-entendre questions about 'the Paris Hilton [Hotel],' like 'Is it hard to get into the Paris Hilton?,' 'I may need to go in the back entrance,' 'I'd love to have my balls held by the Paris Hilton,' etc., etc. And wouldn't you know, Kathy and Rick were there with their two young boys. Afterwards, Kathy was saying, 'Wasn't your sister great? Wasn't she funny?'—and these two boys, who were barely teenagers, had to listen to this whole thing about their sister being in a porn tape.… It was just so awful."

Kathy made a lot of noise about Paris's infamous sex tape with her older boyfriend Rick Salomon: "The Hilton family is greatly saddened at how low human beings will stoop to exploit their daughter Paris, who is sweet-natured, for their own self-promotion as well as profit motives," read the Hiltons' statement. (A few years later Paris told British newspaper The Guardian that her parents knew she hadn't done anything wrong, and, after all, making a tape of yourself staring at yourself in a mirror while you have sex is, as she put it, "something everybody does.")

But it was after the tape that the money really began to roll in. Paris's showing up and waving became a major source of income. Hilton gets paid anywhere from $50,000 to upwards of $150,000 to appear at an opening, says an executive who books stars for events. (This year, he says, she got $150,000 to host her birthday party at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas.) Then there are the endorsements for lines of jewelry, makeup, and fragrance; the Club Paris nightclubs; and her reality show, The Simple Life, with fellow bad-girl-trying-to-turn-good Nicole Richie. The show was dropped in July; Hilton is reportedly in talks to star in an upcoming season of the British version of Celebrity Big Brother, where cameras and mikes follow your every move as you live in a house with a bunch of other famous people—which shouldn't be all that different from how she's living now, except that she'll be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it for a few weeks.

The manna of stardom was not showered only on Paris. Her parents must be benefiting from her notoriety, and observers have begun to take note. "Take just one example," says Jerry Oppenheimer, "that horrible reality show I Want to Be a Hilton," where people vie for the chance to live the way Kathy Hilton thinks New York socialites do. (Fun fact: upon arrival, contestants were taught the proper way to hold a wineglass—by the stem—and in the last scene everyone is holding the glass correctly, except Kathy Hilton.) "Kathy made a chunk of change as the host, and Rick was [a] producer." She is even staking a claim to the showing-up-and-waving business; right now, says the booking executive, she can bring in around $5,000 or $10,000 for an appearance. (Dina Lohan, he says, can get "a free room and booze.")


More recently, Kathy signed a deal for her own skin-care collection—"reflecting the luxurious Kathy Hilton lifestyle"—which she began selling on the Home Shopping Network on July 31. (While Kathy Hilton declined to be interviewed for this article, the publicist for the beauty products told me she could set us up, as long as I wrote exclusively about the beauty products.)

Such moneymaking endeavors seem almost ridiculous when compared with the vast Hilton fortune amassed by the hotel chain's founder, Paris's great-grandfather Conrad Hilton. Conrad believed in a strong work ethic (though he, like his progeny, also enjoyed certain extravagances), and when he died, in 1979, he left his children and grandchildren relatively modest shares in the company. His own, 28 percent stake was to go to his foundation. In his final will, he advised the foundation's directors to "shelter little children with the umbrella of your charity." One of the will's primary beneficiaries was a network of Catholic nuns who have taken a vow of poverty.

But Conrad's son Barron had other plans. As chairman and chief executive officer of the family business, he challenged the will and spent the greater part of the next decade suing the I.R.S. and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation for the ability to buy back the contested shares at their 1979 stock price, which would have amounted to a little less than $200 million. In the resulting settlement, in 1989, Barron came away with the majority of the shares. (The foundation exists to this day.) The family's stake in Hilton Hotels Corporation is now in a trust, where it provides income to Barron's eight children, including Rick. Assuming that that income, from stock dividends, is equally split, Rick likely receives a little more than $400,000 a year from the family fortune. (All this may soon change once again; the Blackstone Group recently offered $26 billion for Hilton Hotels, and a deal is pending.)

According to Jerry Oppenheimer, Rick Hilton also likely received several million dollars from his mother, Marilyn, who died of multiple sclerosis in 2004.

All of which is nothing to sniff at—and, after all, Rick Hilton does work for a living. (He co-owns Hilton & Hyland, a high-end real-estate business in L.A., which recently handled, among other deals, the sale of Paris's Spanish-style Hollywood Hills home for just under $4 million. His brother-in-law Mauricio Umansky—the husband of Kyle Richards, Kathy's sister—took care of the sale and pocketed the commission. Might as well keep it in the family.) But, for a family who has inherited wealth, the Hiltons have certainly picked up quite an assortment of odd jobs. Whatever money they have, it's hardly the vast fortune it appears to be.

"Listen, they don't have any real Hilton money there; Rick makes his money as a broker," says a friend and prominent New York real-estate developer. Anderson Cooper devoted an entire episode of his CNN show to a panel discussion of Paris's Larry King interview, and a good amount of time was spent discussing the question, "How much is the Hilton family really worth?" Cooper speculated, "I never believe people have as much money as they say or are portrayed on TV to have," and then invited *Forbes'*s Matthew Miller and others to rattle off a laundry list of Paris's independent enterprises.

The Hiltons' relatively modest means might explain "why they cultivate friends that have jets and yachts," adds another friend—who had a yacht. "They like to hitch rides." Her relationship with Kathy Hilton ended, the friend says, when she and her wealthy husband divorced. Kathy followed the wealthy husband, the new wife … and the money. Still, this friend and the Hiltons stayed in touch, until one memorable day about five years ago. "I went to Big Kathy's funeral—she'd died of breast cancer—and afterwards Rick and Kathy had people over to their house. Paris had just turned 21, and the Hiltons had a running loop of footage from Paris's 21st-birthday party up on their big-screen TV. Rick was running around going, 'Look at Paris!' It was a promotion."


One might argue, though, that, given her own ambition and sensibilities, Big Kathy would have been proud.

Further questions about the Hiltons' riches abound. For example, do very rich people commonly rent out their homes? The Hiltons have been renting out their seven-bedroom, seven-and-a-half-bath house in Southampton, New York, for years—this year, for approximately $350,000 for the summer. "He has money from his real-estate business, but it's nothing that can cover their lifestyle," says a wealthy New Yorker familiar with the Hiltons' housing situation. She has seen the house. She has heard this summer's renters try desperately to get some of the problems fixed. "Do I have to give you another $300,000 to get screens on the windows?" the tenant shouted, according to a mutual friend.

"Usually when people rent [out] a house for the summer, they clean it up," continues the woman. "This house was left exactly the way it was when the renters saw it in November. Everything in it is moldy and filthy. Most of the screens on the windows are broken. Their dogs are obviously not house-trained. But they don't see it. These are people whose daughter has sex on tape, and they think that's fine." (Kathy's friend Nikki Haskell, for her part, says Rick and Kathy are "adorable people," "diligent" parents who "love their children" and "want the best.")

And then there was the widely reported recent kerfuffle over Paris's post-jail interview. Barbara Walters and the Hiltons were doing the interview tango, seemingly successfully: Walters had known Kathy Hilton for years; Kathy and Nicky appeared at the celebration for Walters's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the Hiltons gave a party in her honor. The interview seemed to belong to Walters, but the Hiltons were being courted by other networks; Rick is said to have called Walters and told her NBC had made an offer—reportedly close to $1 million, which made ABC's $100,000 seem paltry. It was time for Walters and ABC to pony up.

One Hollywood publicist sees the squabbling over the interview as a betrayal of Walters by Kathy Hilton. "Not only was [Walters] furious at not getting the interview," the publicist says, citing a Variety article, "but she also knew how shabby it looked, letting it be known that the networks were paying for these interviews to begin with." The networks scuttled away from the project. Paris Hilton ultimately appeared for free on Larry King Live, where America learned that she had spent her jail time reading the Bible, but that she couldn't name her favorite passage. (Barbara Walters would say only, "Kathy seems to be a very nice lady who cares about her daughter.")

But why would people of still-considerable wealth care about being paid for an interview that (a) immediately makes them look morally suspect and (b) inevitably would make their poor daughter look mentally challenged? "Well, why not?" says columnist Lloyd Grove. "I mean, even if they are rich, money's money."

Dina Lohan has none of the pretensions of Kathy Hilton. She is staunchly proud of her Irish-Italian-American, Merrick, Long Island, upbringing. She does not sugarcoat her turbulent marriage (now over) to Lindsay's father, Michael, who racked up a long list of criminal charges and a D.U.I. before discovering God and Larry King. Dina's beauty (she actually looks younger than her daughter in many of their photographs together), her taste for the high life, and her terror of appearing, God forbid, matronly are well documented. (Lohan, in Harper's Bazaar, on why she introduced herself to George Clooney as Lindsay's assistant: "I don't want them to know I'm her mom. It's a whole nother demographic. People just go dark." Someone needs to introduce her to the concept of milfs.)


And yet Lohan, like Kathy Hilton, does not appear to have a close personal relationship with reality. "Lindsay's no different than any other 20-year-old girl who's doing some experimenting," Dina says to me during our brief phone conversation, which took place several days before Lindsay, fresh out of rehab, got arrested again, this time for D.U.I. and cocaine possession. "It's just that when we did this kind of thing we didn't have cameras turned on us all the time. What were you doing when you were 20, for goodness' sake?" I didn't have the heart to say, Well, not crashing my Mercedes into a tree! But nor was I beautiful, talented, and surrounded by people who couldn't say no to me.

"When Lindsay lost a drastic amount of weight two years ago, Dina Lohan called to arrange a meeting with me," says *Us'*s Min. "She was very nice, very protective of Lindsay, but very willing to look beyond what seemed like obvious problems with food. 'These things happen—she's a girl who lost her baby fat.' She has blind spots. In the end she might not be helping her daughter by not giving her a sense of accountability." Dina insists she does what she can. "Like I don't scream at her for screwing up?" she says. "It's just no one's business."

Given her modest past, perhaps Dina's bids to make a little extra cash off her daughter's fame are more understandable than Kathy Hilton's. Dina says she is currently developing a show for the E! channel about her family. "When she came in to pitch us her TV show, I was predisposed to not like her. But I was wrong," says a network executive who met Dina before she made the deal with E! "She was warm and sincere, but totally deluded. [In Dina's head,] Lindsay's this totally normal kid, a girl like anyone else, who just has the normal problems of youth, only because of the fact that she's in entertainment she finds it hard to make friends and trust people—as if that explains it. [The show was supposed to be] about not being this crazy, partying woman, but just a soccer mom," the executive says.

"My feeling about her," adds the source, "is not so much that she craves fame. I think it's money. I think she is very angry. She's had a tough time in her marriage, and for quite a while Lindsay has been pretty much the sole support of the family."

Lindsay and Dina Lohan.


According to a couple of people close to the situation, Dina fired Endeavor, the talent agency, when Adam Venit, then Lindsay's agent, tried to persuade Dina that her daughter's career depended on her getting her daughter sober. Dina says Lindsay left Endeavor when "it was time for her to do independent films … and to work with the Meryl Streeps and the Jane Fondas of the world."

Lindsay started at Endeavor "when she was 14 or 15, and while she was there her career grew exponentially," says a Hollywood executive. "She's really, really talented, no one argues about that. She and the mother moved to L.A., partially to escape the father and his problems. The mother seemed helpful—a little controlling, not that unusual." But as Lindsay's fame grew, so did her problems. She went out on the town a lot. And, according to a number of sources, her mother started going out with her. Dina says she goes out with Lindsay not as a "party mom," but as her manager.

"When Lindsay was doing Herbie Fully Loaded, there started to be a lot of issues," continues the executive. "It was a Disney movie about a car, and she was drinking and driving." Part of the problem, too, was that Tommy Mottola, co-owner of Casablanca Records, had signed Lindsay to a record deal, and so she was trying to record the CD, shooting a movie, and going out all the time. Filming was repeatedly shut down when she claimed to be exhausted—but the tabloids and paparazzi were quick to notice that Lindsay continued to travel, shop, and go clubbing in her free time. Dina calls these accusations "completely absurd," and attributes Lindsay's problems at that time to a severe asthma attack, "way, way, way too much pressure," and her breakup with actor Wilmer Valderrama.

After Herbie wrapped, Endeavor got her cast in Just My Luck, Lohan's first foray into being a lead in a romantic comedy, directed by Donald Petrie (Miss Congeniality); it was scheduled to begin filming in January 2005. The Endeavor team was worried. Lindsay was sick and dangerously thin. In order to be insured, she needed a physical. It was December. She repeatedly blew off the physical, the executive recalls. The insurers sent a doctor to her door, who was "literally sitting on her step, and no one is answering the door," says this executive. Just by chance Dina Lohan visited Venit the day a higher-up at the studio producing the film was going ballistic, saying that Lindsay would be replaced if she didn't take the physical.

The source goes on: "Adam was pretty desperate. He told Dina, 'Listen, your daughter's career is on the line. You need to get her to take the physical.'" Adam had sympathy for the mother; after all, Lindsay was her source of income, and even though Lindsay was doing well they were spending a lot of money. "The most Lindsay ever made on a movie at that time was $6 or $7 million—and that was for a movie she hadn't made yet. They were spending money before they made it," says the executive. And Venit was very vocal about genuinely admiring and liking Lindsay, who everyone knew "was a really sweet girl … just so messed up."

Exasperated, Venit turned to Dina and said, "Look, I'm not her parent, but there's no slippery slope here. You just fall off the cliff." And Dina got furious and screamed, "Well, maybe you should start acting like her father," and then screamed, "Fuck you! I'm leaving! You're fired!" (Dina disputes this account.)


"I mean, her child was basically killing her career," the executive says. "What mother would behave that way?" (Lindsay is now represented by CAA.)

Perhaps more disturbing than wanting to be her daughter's friend, Dina Lohan also wants to share the spotlight—at least according to those who have spent time with the two of them. "This is a woman who jumps into her daughter's makeup chair before the premiere.… Her message to everyone is basically 'Lindsay would be nothing without me,'" says a Hollywood producer familiar with the two of them. "And now she's going to do this show where she shows how she's making her other daughter, Ali, a star. It's like she's saying, 'Look, I can do this with any kid.' … Her deal isn't 'I want my kid to be rich and famous.' It's 'I want to be my kid.'"

"I can't even comment on that ridiculousness," Dina says, insisting she is Lindsay's manager, not her competitor. "My daughter is gorgeous and 21 and I so don't want to be 21 anymore."

But, in fact, it's this tendency that makes some Dina-watchers sympathize with her.

"People on staff here have seen Dina out partying with her daughter," says *Us'*s Min. "But look, she's a woman who spent her 20s [and 30s] raising children in a terrible marriage. In the way that Lindsay and Britney were these child stars who are having a delayed adolescence, she's having a delayed adolescence. Or worse than that: a delayed youth. That stress of scraping by, keeping your family intact when your husband is a ne'er-do-well.… Dina is doing what a lot of women in that situation do, which is holding it together as best as she can."

Oddly enough, the child who is perhaps the most unhinged at the moment (see MTV's 2007 Video Music Awards) is the one who may have the most stable mother, a mother who is beside herself about her daughter, who is apparently having a mental breakdown. Britney is no stranger to public feuds, but even Britney's fans were shocked by her June 28 antics, when, to the delight of the paparazzi, she put her two sons in her car and drove an hour to Valencia, California, where she knew she would find Lynne on the set of younger sister Jamie Lynn's Nickelodeon show, Zoey 101. It was there that she handed her mother the infamous letter warning her to stay away from her grandsons, Sean and Jayden, if she was taking any medications that cause her to be impaired. "I'm praying for [my mother] right now," Spears told reporters in L.A. over the summer. "I hope she gets all the help she needs."

Recent paparazzi photos of Spears's parents pushing Britney's boys in their red plastic cars outside Kevin Federline's house pretty much say it all. (Britney and Kevin are currently battling over custody of the boys.) When you are Britney Spears's mother and you're looking to your son-in-law, Kevin Federline, to be the responsible, mature one … well, if that's not a sign of trouble, what is?

"This isn't a woman who's out partying with her children, or trying to live their lives," says journalist Larry Getlen, who wrote the book Britney: Not That Innocent and an article earlier this year about the many entertaining ways Britney's hometown, Kentwood, Louisiana (population 2,600, of which about a third are supposedly related in some way to Britney), tried to cash in on her fame. "Some kids are just driven. When I was talking to people in Kentwood, there were all these stories about how, whenever you saw Britney—even if she was in the dentist's chair—she was singing," says Getlen. "Her mother was definitely not cracking the whip." (Her father was a good ol' boy who once chased away a bunch of teenage girls who had dropped by their house to try to get Britney's autograph with, The New York Times wrote, "a pistol in his shorts.")


According to the 2000 census, the median income in Kentwood is less than $18,000. Star magazine once reported that the Spearses faced major financial hardship in the late 90s—right before Baby One More Time shot to the top of the charts. Getlen notes that if Britney hadn't hit it big when she did, her family "would have had real problems. It was like putting your money on a horse—and winning." This financial boon may well be in the past. While Britney bought them the mansion she called, ironically enough, Serenity, what are the chances their daughter is funding them while they side with her ex? ("The Spears family loves Kevin," an "insider" told Life & Style magazine.) "Lynne Spears is probably suffering financially," adds Getlen, "for taking a principled stand."

Janice Min agrees. Though Lynne Spears, as Min notes, allowed her daughter to perform "in a highly sexualized fashion as a young teenager, that was probably a natural outgrowth of the pageant circuit in the South." Not that Britney was in pageants. "But," Min continues, "maybe having her playact sexy wasn't that weird. And she saw that her daughter had the desire to perform, and the talent. It's very hard to say no to that, wanting more money and a better life."

"I certainly had my dreams that I had to postpone because of my children—but they had nothing to do with show business," Lynne Spears, a former elementary-school teacher, told me in our brief telephone conversation. (She could not be reached for further comment.) "Actually," she says wistfully, "I really wanted to be a college professor."

Lynne Spears, a beauty in her own right, does not have or seem to want her own line of cosmetics.

‘A mother-daughter relationship is going to be tested no matter what. It's going to be tested a lot harder if the child's in the entertainment business," says Christine Peters, former wife of film producer Jon Peters and old flame of Sumner Redstone. Peters, who has a production company at Paramount, where she has produced several movies, should know. She was estranged from her own daughter, Caleigh, 18—who has a recording contract with Disney's Hollywood Records and sang songs in Herbie Fully Loaded and Ice Princess—for more than a year over her relationship with Rod Stewart's son Sean. The younger Stewart, who stars in the A&E reality show Sons of Hollywood, was most recently in the news for allegedly punching and throwing rocks at two people outside a Hollywood party. ("He's uneducated, … he's been in jail," says Peters. "If you were a mother and you made a list of everything you didn't want your daughter to be with, this would be it.") They're repairing the relationship now, Peters says, but the way the parent-child relationship can be warped by media attention and by the sheer power of even the most meager fame—"you just have no idea."

"With these women we see who are all over the tabloids, if you look at their families you see addiction … trauma, and neglect," says Drew Pinsky, M.D., known to many as Dr. Drew of MTV's Loveline, an addiction specialist and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at U.S.C.'s medical school, who has studied the connection between celebrities and narcissism. (Shocker: celebrities really are more narcissistic than the rest of us.) "So to see a mom partying while her daughter is [suffering from] alcoholism … it's just terrifying." This fall Pinsky will be hosting a show on VH1 called Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, in which—no joke—the cameras of VH1 will follow around eight famous people as they dry out.

"It's not like celebrities have a separate diagnostic manual," Pinsky continues. "The thing is, they spiral into more serious situations because they are often buffered by people who say yes to them. They don't have to face real consequences for their behavior." Ultimately, the profoundly insecure and narcissistic are left with their retinue of stylists, publicists, hairdressers, and yoga instructors; their actual, unpaid friends have taken a hike.

"Unless an enlightened, responsible person is willing to put him- or herself on the line, the behavior will continue," Pinsky adds. In the lives of many young people, that person is a parent. But what if it's not?

What if the whole family is along for the ride, with photographers and TV crews watching from the sidelines? Let's ask Nicky Hilton, Ali Lohan, and Jamie Lynn Spears in five years.

Additional reporting by Helen Vera.

Judith Newman has profiled Sumner Redstone, Rosie O'Donnell, and Bonnie Fuller for Vanity Fair.