Paris Hilton Announces Her Newborn Son's Name (& It's Also A City That Starts With P)

When Paris Hilton picked a name for her son, she had a tough act to follow. After all, her own parents, hotelier Rick Hilton and "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" star Kathy Hilton, seemed to know that their heiress daughter was destined for so much more than the simple life when they named her after one of the world's most iconic cities.

Paris and her husband, entrepreneur Carter Reum, welcomed their baby boy in January. For their journey to parenthood, Paris and Reum opted to go the surrogacy route, with Paris telling People that she started IVF early in the pandemic. "We knew we wanted to start a family, and I was like, 'This is perfect timing,'" she said. "'Usually I'm on a plane 250 days out of the year, and let's just get all of the eggs stocked and ready.'"

Paris was mulling over moniker options a few years before she became a mom. In a 2020 appearance on the "LadyGang" podcast, she revealed that she wanted to have twins — a boy and a girl — and had already picked out a name for the latter: London. She was having a harder time deciding what she would name a son. "I don't want a theme of cities, but I don't know," she said. As it turns out, she did exactly the thing that she was trying to avoid.

Like the living legend that she is, Paris Hilton turned her baby name announcement into a promotional opportunity. In this instance, the product she was plugging was her autobiography, "Paris: The Memoir." She read an excerpt from it on her "This is Paris" podcast, saying, "If all goes well, by the time you read this, Carter and I will have a boy ... His name is Phoenix Barron Hilton Reum." Phoenix got his noble middle name from Hilton's grandfather.

Hilton revealed that she ultimately decided to use a map to search for her son's moniker, rather than a baby book. Phoenix, Arizona, stood out to her because the city shares its name with the flaming bird of myth, a symbol of renewal. "I want my son to grow up knowing that disaster and triumph go around and come around throughout our lives," she says. 

Hilton clearly had the name on her brain when she dressed up like a Phoenix for Halloween in 2020, but when she appeared on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" in January 2022, she would only drop a hint that it was a place out of fear that the moniker would get filched. Host Ellen DeGeneres first guessed, "Argentina?" Her second hunch proved to be correct, although Hilton wouldn't confirm it at the time. After learning the name a year later, DeGeneres tweeted, "I named @ParisHilton's baby! What do I win?!?! A hotel?!?!"