Paris Hilton presented her mother Kathy Hilton with a blue Chanel bag as she announced the arrival of her newborn son Phoenix Barron.
In late January, Paris, 40, announced that she and her businessman husband Carter Reum had welcomed a baby boy through a surrogate mother.
The couple kept the birth a secret from both their immediate families until Paris was about to break the news on Instagram.
Now, in a new interview with Rolling Stone, Paris revealed that she gave Kathy a designer handbag and then handed her Phoenix for the first time.
“I was like, if I give her Chanel first, maybe she won’t be so mad that I didn’t tell her this,” Paris confessed to the magazine.
The moment when Kathy first met Phoenix was captured on reality TV cameras for the Peacock series Paris In Love.
Paris described the scene: “I held the baby on my shoulder with a blanket over him, and then I just sat down.”
The hotel heiress said Kathy was like, “What’s that?” And I was like, “A baby… meet your grandson.” She says, “Is this yours?” And she starts to cry. She says, “Let me hold him. He’s the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen in my life. Oh, he’s so beautiful.” She was just in tears.’
She recently explained why she and Carter hid the baby’s birth from even their closest families until just before she made the Instagram announcement.
“My whole life has been so public,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “I’ve never had anything for myself. We decided we wanted this whole experience to ourselves.”
She said of her son, “I want to protect him and be with him every second. You have a maternal instinct kicking in that I’ve never had before.”
While the surrogate went into labor, Paris was so determined to protect her privacy that she even went to the trouble of disguising herself with a dark brown wig and checking into the hospital under an alias.
Her decision was especially notable given the closeness she has to her family, especially her sister Nicky Hilton Rothschild and their mother.
However, tension between mother and daughter flared in November when Kathy let E! News that IVF had been a ‘struggle’ for Paris.
“I don’t know where she got that from,” Paris replied in a TMZ interview the next day. “It’s never been a battle.”
When Paris announced the arrival of her firstborn child, in a photo of the baby’s hand holding Paris’s finger, she simply said, “You are already loved beyond imagination.”
On a recent episode of her This Is Paris podcast, she revealed that Phoenix was “about a week old” before telling Kathy and Nicky about his birth.
“When I introduced my mom to our baby boy, it was amazing to see the look on her face, she was so surprised,” Paris said. “Just the look on her face, it was just priceless.”