Paris Hilton, Nicole Richies parents admit they were wrong to warn daughters against The Simple Life

Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie became stars thanks to their 2003 reality show “The Simple Life,” but their famous families weren’t initially on board.Hilton, daughter of Kathy and Richard Hilton, members of the Hilton Hotels family, and Richie, daughter of legendary musician Lionel Richie, had been friends for years, living a life of luxury and growing media attention as socialite starlets when they signed on for the show. “I was completely wrong.I never wanted her to do any of that, modeling, I wanted her just to go to school.

She was going to become a veterinarian, and she went ahead and did that show, and I was wrong,” Kathy told Fox News Digital during “DIRECTV’s Christmas at Kathy’s” holiday party, benefiting families at Ronald McDonald House Charities of Southern California.She added, “It was the funniest.There will never be another [like it].

You can’t even try. Lionel also was uncertain about the girls going to the middle of nowhere, telling Entertainment Tonight earlier this year, “When they first started doing things like driving down the freeway backwards and I kept saying, ‘What are you guys doing?’ [they’d say] ‘It’s reality television, Dad!'”“Our parents did not want us to do it and told us not to,” Hilton told Glamour in their December cover story. “The Simple Life” sent the duo to rural Arkansas, with no cellphones, money or designer gear to live and work with a family on their farm and revel in the fish-out-of-water contrasts as they struggled to adjust and as the people of the town marveled at their seeming cluelessness.The show became a hit, spawning four more seasons and setting the tone for reality series to come, like “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”“And I don’t know if the world knows this, they started this mess, and I was the first guinea pig daddy to go along with this,” Lionel told ET of the show’s success.“It was the first of its kind.They hear that we’re going to b...