ON THIN ICE
“Paris Hilton. PAR-is. Yes, PAR-is, as in France,” explained Paris Hilton, the unlikely new belle of the Sundance Film Festival, to a confused Park City, Utah, police officer Saturday night.
Trapped in a party shuttle bus at the film festival, Hilton suddenly realized she’d left her bag of clothes and jewelry, including mommy’s borrowed diamonds, on the roof of a car in the parking lot.
“There was a Gucci hat, Manolo Blahnik shoes, a pink ballgown, a Moschino outfit and the diamonds,” she shouted into her cell phone at the officer on the other end of the line. “What am I going to tell my mother?”
Although Hilton did recover her bag, diamonds and all, the message was clear: Sundance is no longer about the movies.
“It’s all the same industry people,” said Kate Driver at the Saturday night bash for Donovan Leitch’s new documentary, “but for the first time, none of them are talking about work.”
“It’s such a relief not to have to wear a fancy dress,” said Julia Stiles. (The knee-length parka is Sundance’s uniform.)
The numerous nightly affairs continued with Mick Jagger’s party for his movie “Enigma,” and a lavish Motorola-sponsored event up the mountain, where Miss Hilton blinded guests once again with a nugget-sized diamond belly button stud.
“How many carats? I don’t know,” she shrugged. “A lot.”
Back in New York, Karole Armitage celebrated a 10-year retrospective of her choreography with a performance at the Joyce Theater and a party afterward at Serena.
A few days earlier, Princess Michael of Kent blew into town to give a lecture at Sotheby’s to benefit the New York Botanical Garden.
At the dinner that Ann Nitze and Marjorie Rosen threw for her afterward, the Princess ran into Bob Guthrie, the longtime head of Save Venice — the organization from which her beloved Venetian Heritage recently separated.
“Bob, I think you should go back to calling me ‘Mam,”‘ said the princess to a man who’d been calling her “Marie Christine” for more than a decade.
“Boy, are you talking to the wrong guy,” Guthrie replied.