Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr, better known as Perez Hilton, the self-proclaimed "Queen of All Media," clearly operates by media rules of his own.
Take a recent week from his datebook this month: On a Friday morning, he was sparring with Joy Behar and Elisabeth Hasselbeck on The View about the not-so-nice dish on his celebrity gossip blog, Perezhilton.com. The next Monday, he made a cameo appearance on Victoria Beckham's reality special on NBC, followed by Kathy Griffin's reality show on Bravo on Tuesday. Then he wrapped up the week with a Nightline profile on Friday.
After all that dignified mainstream exposure, he challenged a rival to a hot-dog eating contest on a paparazzi-patrolled block of Los Angeles, and the next day exposed himself to a camera crew from the celebrity news Web site TMZ.com, which merrily posted the footage.
At present, sitting at a Cuban restaurant for an interview and picking at his ropa vieja (which he promptly dismissed as inauthentic), Lavandeira said that even he himself, who has seen his share of the baffling and surreal since coming to Hollywood, is surprised at his own rapid ascent.
"I'm doing things on my own terms," he said. "I don't have to answer to anyone but me."
In barely three years, Lavandeira, 29, has risen from the blogosphere to reap some of the same fame and notoriety as the entertainers he celebrates and humiliates daily on his Web site.
With his shameless self-promotion and buffoonish appearance, Lavandeira, a childlike bear of a man, has become a hard-to-ignore Hollywood player.
But exactly what game he is playing is hard to define.
One day he was a struggling actor, paying bills with nonglamorous day jobs (publications manager for a gay organization; publicist for trade shows; a reporter for Star magazine, which fired him).
The next, he was an orange-haired pop culture phenomenon: a blogger whose infantile but easily digestible style of scrawling crude commentary on celebrity pictures has helped him triple his traffic in the last year alone, earn enough income to employ his family members, and, most crucially for the Perez Hilton brand, score his own television show on VH1.
"Perez Hilton obviously found a great formula," said Tyler Gray, a senior editor at Radaronline.com, who admitted he was jealous of Lavandeira's Internet following. "So did Robert Oppenheimer. It doesn't mean it's good for the public."
It has been good for Lavandeira. ComScore Media Metrix, the Internet tracking firm, places Perezhilton.com among the top 10 entertainment news sites, saying that every month it draws 1.7 million unique visitors in the US alone (2.6 million worldwide).
Lavandeira brags about his "exclusives" and "sources" but describes his formula simply: He says what many people think but never utter aloud.
In his blog postings, he lavishes exclamation points on the ravishing looks of arbitrarily chosen heroes like Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lopez and Dita Von Teese, and snarkily picks on so-called villains like Clay Aiken, Kirsten Dunst and Sienna Miller for perceived sins like excessive drinking, promiscuity or denying homosexuality.
"I'm like Madonna, I'm not afraid to offend," Lavandeira said in one of several self-generated comparisons to the pop star.
Nothing seems off-limits on his blog. He has labeled both Victoria Beckham and baby Suri Cruise "aliens" and drawn antennae on their heads. He chronicles the foils of Hollywood's bad girls - Britney, Lindsay, Nicole (but not his namesake Paris, a friend) - in breathless, telenovela-style story threads. And when a talk show or entertainment program cannot book a genuine celebrity to fess up to their most recent scandals, they often turn to Lavandeira as an unofficial surrogate.
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