By JERRY OPPENHEIMER
IN his sensational new tome "House of Hilton," celebrity biographer Jerry Oppenheimer details for the first time exactly where Paris Hilton came from - and it's far from pretty. From her stage-mother-from-hell grandmother to her own fame-famished mother, it becomes clear that Hilton's family roots are a twisted mix of celebrity wannabes and debauched scions. Below is an excerpt from the riveting new work from Crown Publishers: HOUSE OF HILTON

She lies on a spare mattress, her head propped on a pillow, her eyes wide open. Her midriff is bare, and her legs in jeans spread wide and bent at the knees. She is a wannabe pop singer who's considered posing for Playboy. A dizzy blond obsessed with rich party boys. "That night, she just plopped down on that mattress like, 'Come on, baby, do me... " says her high school guy-pal Pierce Jensen.

Her last name is Hilton. But before there was Paris, there was the woman in the photo - Kathy.

And if you want to know how Paris Hilton became who she is, consider her mother, who shared the same dreams and wildness in a time when sex tapes didn't make people stars. Though she sang (a little better than Paris) and acted (about the same), Kathy wasn't bankable and instead chose marriage into one of the wealthiest dynasties on the planet.

"By the time I knew Kathy, the drive wasn't so much to get Kathy into acting - it was to get her a rich husband. Before we would go out, her mom would say, 'Oh, you'll never get a rich man with that skirt on. Put this on,'" remembers Jensen.

"When Kathy would see men in expensive cars, she'd make comments like, 'Oh, I'm going to bag me one of them ... I don't have time for acting now, I'm busy looking for a rich guy.'"

Kathleen Elizabeth Avanzino Richards Hilton was groomed for the stardom that eluded her by the overbearing "big Kathy," who lived vicariously through her daughters' ups and downs. Perhaps it's because Mom herself never had much luck marrying rich. The first of her mostly horrific unions - essentially a shotgun wedding - was to a bad-boy named Larry Avanzino, an Italian-American house-painter who had gotten Kathy pregnant in the backseat of her 1957 black Chevrolet convertible.

The unplanned bundle of joy conceived in that cramped General Motors love-nest would grow up to be none other than Kathy Hilton. The identity of Kathy Hilton's biological father and how her birth came about has been a long-held family secret. Says an Avanzino relative, "It's really made me angry that with all of Paris's fame, the real identity of her [maternal] grandfather has been covered up. You only hear the name Hilton, never the name Avanzino."

As a child, little Kathy appeared in some three-dozen TV commercials. But by her mid-teens, Kathy's show business career was in the proverbial toilet. Moreover, she was thought to be slothful by her stepfather, Ken Richards. Richards often complained, "Kathy's so lazy she won't get up - all she wants to do is party at night."

Indeed, the matriarch encouraged her daughter's ways, much to the annoyance of her second husband, Ken Richards. "Big Kathy told Ken that she wanted Kathy to know all about sex, and how to perform sex, literally, the best way possible," asserts a family insider. "So she asked a young man to teach her in his van. Ken had a fit when he found out about it and confronted Kathleen. She told him to mind his own business, to stay out of it, that Kathy was her daughter."

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DOES NOT SURPRISE ME ONE BIT!!!THE APPLE DOES NOT FALL FAR FROM THE TREE!!!!