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Lindsay Lohan: The Girl Can't Help It
Lohan is embarking on her toughest challenge yet: becoming a serious actress. Is she for real? You bet. By BROOKE HAUSER March 2006 issue (cover story) Meet Lindsay Lohan by Mattel. She is 12 inches tall, weighs approximately one pound, and will always have red hair. Her best friends are Madison, Chelsea, and Nolee, and even though they're all super-pretty and famous and go to movie premieres together in an SUV party limo decked out with a beverage bar and a hot tub, unlike the Lindsay doll—available for only $27.99 at select toy stores—they'll never really break out of the box. Lindsay is more like Barbie: She has potential. She may not be able to fully stand on her own yet (damn those vinyl legs), but she's got enough personality for a whole line of girls. Just imagine: Long Island Lindsay in pajamas and a "Hi, Mom" trucker hat. Socialite Lindsay in head-to-toe Chanel. Paparazzi Victim Lindsay in a crashed Mercedes. Okay, so Barbie may be an Olympic figure skater, a pediatrician, and a presidential candidate, but at 19 the real-life Lindsay has evolved from child star (The Parent Trap) to teen queen (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) to A-list actress-in-training. And she definitely has a bigger entourage: There's her mother and comanager, Dina (a former Rockette, like Barbie); bodyguard Dean; publicist (who comes with a BlackBerry in case of PR emergencies, of which there have been several); various hair, makeup, and wardrobe stylists; and, of course, her personal assistant and water-bottle holder, Lindsay #2. (Each sold separately.) ***
Perhaps it is partly due to the Nabokovian cadence of her name that lately "Lindsay Lohan" has been on the tips of so many tongues. For better or worse, it is a moniker made for tabloid headlines, whether the subject of the day is the Vanity Fair article detailing the starlet's battle with bulimia (which she has since denied), her anguished relationship with her convict father, disappearing freckles, or alleged make-out sessions with various actors. Why is the public so obsessed with Lindsay—Linds, La Lohan, L.L., or LiLo, as she is alternately known? "She has talent, beauty, and a great backstory—child actress, stage mom, dysfunctional father," says New York Post gossip columnist Liz Smith. "She's inherently dramatic." When Lohan arrives (three hours late) to a photo shoot for premiere, she doesn't so much walk as charge forward, leaving a "whoosh" where the memory of a ponytail might have been. After making a few introductions (she calls everyone "hon"), she beelines toward the racks of clothes and rows of shoes. Before long, she is wearing nothing but curlers and a pair of sheer nude underwear, rummaging through various slips and dresses as a stylist yells, "Where are the chicken cutlets?!" Pins, emery boards, and brushes are brandished as a tailor, a manicurist, and a hair guru descend on Lohan, now outfitted and sitting under the broiling lights of the vanity mirror. "It's so hot in here," she says, panting. "I can't breathe!" When she is out of earshot, someone on the set sighs and says, more matter-of-factly than maliciously, "Every time I work with Lindsay, I want to smoke." In person, she can be exhausting. There simply aren't enough hours in a day for everything she has to do: e-mail back Virginia Madsen ("She just bought my record!"), visit Strawberry Fields in Central Park, thank Karl Lagerfeld for the shipment of Chanel T-shirts he sent to her hotel, baby-sit her sister Aliana, party at Bungalow 8, and read Yoko Ono's little yellow book of instructions, Grapefruit, before she goes to bed (sample excerpt: "Laugh Piece/Keep laughing a week. 1961 winter"). After nearly a decade in the business, Lohan has become a master of multitasking, chasing a bite of lentil soup with 19 push-ups and a quick meeting with her accountants, who, today, will eat a tray's worth of pigs-in-a-blanket before getting a minute of her time. She is, in a word, intense. And though she may veer toward melodrama in real life, onscreen Lohan is adept at subtlety; she is able to convey as much in a quiet, charged moment as she can in an emotive scene. In the big-screen adaptation of public radio's A Prairie Home Companion, directed by Robert Altman and due in theaters this June, she gets to do both as an introspective teenager who fluctuates between angst and admiration for life on the set of a folksy midwestern radio show. "Going to Minnesota was just freeing for me as a person," Lohan says later, on the way to dinner in the backseat of a luxury SUV. "I didn't have any distractions. Being in an ensemble cast, not having to necessarily carry a movie by myself. There was a lot of peace of mind. It's more about the art and the character and just kind of getting into it." For most of the film, Lohan's character waits in the wings as her mother and aunt (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, respectively) take to the stage for the program's last night on the air. Lohan's dramatic apogee occurs when an old-time singer dies in the theater, and the show's host, Garrison Keillor, won't do a tribute. "She rises to a moment of passion, in grief and disbelief, and marches over to me and leans against me and accuses me of being heartless. She did that six or seven times," Keillor says, "and each time she did it, she was firmly within that character. Each time she did it, she had tears in her eyes. And each time she did it, she made me feel like hell. I wrote the lines she was saying, and she just made me feel terrible—I walked away. Everybody was shaken by what she did." A Prairie Home Companion, with its all-star cast, including Kevin Kline and Madsen, is one of several decidedly un-Disney films that Lohan will star in over the next few months. In May, she'll take a turn in her first romantic comedy, Just My Luck. Director Donald Petrie, who gave Julia Roberts her big break in Mystic Pizza, was impressed by Lohan's willingness to get her hands dirty in a scene where her character falls face flat into the mud. "I kind of couldn't keep her out of it," Petrie says. "She really wanted to get in there and go, 'Splat!' " If nothing else, the sheer range of her upcoming films shows Lohan's eagerness to jump in and splash around a bit. She recently began shooting Chapter 27, a thriller in which she stars as a Beatles fan who has a chance encounter with John Lennon's murderer (played by one of the starlet's many rumored beaus, Jared Leto). And before that, she wrapped the Robert Kennedy assassination drama, Bobby, also starring Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, and Elijah Wood, and directed by Emilio Estevez. As the story goes, Estevez wanted to set the film over the course of 16 hours on June 4 and 5, 1968, when Kennedy was shot inside the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Faced with writer's block, he drove up to Pismo Beach and checked into a motel, where he got into a conversation with the clerk, a middle-aged former activist named Diane, whom Lohan now plays in the movie. The actress's eyes widen as she tells the rest of the secondhand anecdote with firsthand emotion: "She asked him what he was writing, and he said, 'Actually, it's about the assassination of Robert Kennedy.' And the woman grabbed the desk, and her eyes started to well up"—at this point, Lohan's thin frame has become rigid with anticipation—"and she said, 'I was there.' " Later, when Estevez cast Lohan in the part, he told her that Diane is the heart of the film. "And I was like, 'Oh, jeez. Pressure!' " Although Lohan's image-makers seem intent on positioning her as Hollywood's next can-do actress (in Prairie, she belts out a rousing rendition of "Frankie and Johnny"), sometimes the best recognition is none at all. "I didn't pay much attention to her," Altman says. "She's no different than anybody else in the film—she didn't seem of a different race. I mean, she's just an actor, and a very good one. She was a human being." ***
Little girls worship Lindsay Lohan. They sneak up behind her at restaurants, such as Next Door Nobu in TriBeCa, clutching pens and napkins to their concave chests. Sometimes, they're so stealth that they give her a scare. "Ah!" she says at the sight of a flushed eight-and-a-half-year-old with straight brown hair. "I thought you were my little sister! What's your name?" "Natalie." "Natalie," Lohan repeats as she bends over to write: "Stay as sweet as you are now. I love your freckles." While Lohan is used to signing autographs for the Disney demographic, these days the actress is just as popular among adults. No one is more excited about that fact than Lohan herself. "I actually started to watch Mean Girls the other night in L.A., and Kristofer, who does my makeup, works with Mariah Carey, and it's her comfort movie!" she says, in between sips of Coca-Cola. "I was really flattered by that! That's really cool." In the film, which Saturday Night Live writer Tina Fey adapted from the book Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence, high school is divided into a few basic groups, ranging from Asian Nerds to Girls Who Eat Their Feelings to the Plastics. Hollywood, of course, has its own cliques: Cottage Industry Kewpies (the Olsen Twins, Hilary Duff), Blasé Rich Girls (Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie), and Respected Ingenues (Scarlett Johansson, Kirsten Dunst, Evan Rachel Wood), to name a few. Though she has tried, Lohan doesn't fit into any one crowd: She's too edgy to be a Kewpie and too full of life to be blasé, and while she is as naturally gifted as the A-list ingenues, for some reason she has so much more to prove. Says Fey: "If Paris Hilton wastes her life partying, who cares? But Lindsay really has the talent of a great actress." "She's vulnerable. She's adventurous. She's a real girl," says celebrity makeup stylist Paul Starr, who wants to name his first lipstick after Lohan: Lindsay Pink. "It's not too naughty and not too nice." Lohan holds the rare distinction of having made her acting debut, at age 11, starring opposite herself as twins in Disney's remake of The Parent Trap. "She probably could not have had a more difficult first screen performance," says director Nancy Meyers, who is giving Lohan a cameo as herself in her new movie, Holiday. "But she was a natural: just the way she would swing her arms and smile at the right time. She was a funny kid. She knew where the humor was, and that's the greatest thing. You can't micro-manage a performance, and I didn't have to with her. I could put a movie on her back." Surely, Lohan has carried her fair share of burdens, in work and in life. As the oldest of four children raised in Long Island, New York, she is sometimes thrust into the role of protector of "the little ones" when it comes to the antics and aggression of her father, Michael Lohan, a former Wall Street trader who is serving time in a New York prison for a series of incidents, including drunk driving. A random survey of headlines from the Post speaks volumes: "LOHAN'S DAD BUSTED AGAIN." "LOHAN A WRECK-LINDSAY'S DAD IN BOOZY L.I. CRASH." "LOHAN GRANNY'S PLEA—ASKS TEEN STAR TO BAIL OUT BAD DAD." Though Dina Lohan filed for divorce in early 2005 after 19 years of marriage—she reportedly accused Michael of having thrown her down a flight of stairs and having threatened to kill the family—they eventually opted for a legal separation. There has been much speculation about how Lindsay has coped with problems in her "private" life. Even if she has become accustomed to the constant scrutiny, some of Lohan's costars are fed up on her behalf. "I have a lot of compassion for her," says Madsen, who befriended the star on the set of A Prairie Home Companion. "Every interview I read, somebody was asking her about her weight and, 'Do you throw up in the bathroom?' " Before her 18th birthday, Lohan was fielding questions about the size of her breasts and whether or not they were real. Says Madsen, "I mean, nobody asks teenage boys, 'Do you have pubic hair yet?' 'What size are your balls?' Whereas they'll ask a teenage girl, 'Are you still a virgin?' " "It's hard, you wonder if it's only going to get worse or if it's just going to get worse before it gets better, and if it will calm down," Lohan says over dinner, popping a hot pepper into her mouth. "Do you just not go out ever? Do you not leave your house because then they'll have nothing to say? Or do they just give up and get bored of it? But then, do they get bored of you?" She is willing to address at least some of the tough questions—but on her own terms. At the end of last year, she released her sophomore album, A Little More Personal (Raw), featuring the track "Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father)." She wrote the lyrics while in Europe to promote Herbie: Fully Loaded: "I wait for the postman to bring me a letter/I wait for the good Lord to make me feel better/And I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders . . . Tell me the truth did you ever love me?" Because of the personal nature of the song, Lohan chose to direct the music video herself. She staged a domestic fight between the actors who play her parents in the family living room—which happens to be on view in a New York City storefront. "People go through things in their life and have abusive family relationships," she explains, "and I want people to know that with all the glitz and the glamour and the red carpets and nice dinners, whatever it may be, you can still go home and it can still be shit." She holds up her wrist. "I want to get a tattoo, 'Breathe,' right here. Whenever anyone's stressed out around me, or I am, then I can just, 'Haaaaaah.' " Mostly, she takes it all in stride. After the swirl of publicity surrounding her car accident last spring (which, along with other high-profile incidents, led California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to pass a bill increasing the penalties for paparazzi who commit assaults to get photos) and another crash in October, she came up with a rather offbeat idea for a Los Angeles-based charity event for some of her fans in the Make-A-Wish Foundation. "I'm going to take them to the Ivy on Robertson Boulevard and show them where I got into my [second] accident," she says, with a sexy little grunt of a laugh. It may sound far-fetched, but then so do the best of big plans. Lohan has started collaborating with a screenwriter for a project about a girl DJ, based on her friend Samantha Ronson, who's a recording artist on Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella label. "I think she's just a talented person; whatever she sets out to do she's going to succeed at," says Ronson, 28, who has started giving Lohan lessons behind the booth. "I mean, if you told me tomorrow that she was going to build a city in the ocean, I'd be like, 'Just let me know when you're opening—I'll DJ the party.' " ***
New Year's Eve is about to get freakier than an R. Kelly video. Here at Privé, the upstairs V.I.P. lounge within the South Beach nightclub-compound Opium Garden, the party is well under way. The girls wear bunny ears and tube dresses and whitish lipstick—violet in the black light—and bounce like they've got built-in hydraulics. The good-looking guys play coy and pretend not to notice, drinking Imperia vodka and smoking roaches. In the corner, a couple with dilated pupils as big as M&Ms lunge at each other, failing to register that the girl's left breast has just nudged its way out of her halter top. Around midnight, those who are sober enough to remember that they've paid up to $3,000 for a magnum of Möet and a glimpse of their host, Lindsay Lohan, start to get peeved when she still hasn't shown. Then they see the cameras: They swarm the DJ booth, where Lohan makes her grand entrance, briefly borrowing a pair of oversized black headphones from Ronson that makes the slim five-foot-six actress look a bit like a parking meter. 10, 9, 8—with her back to the crowd, she bows her head and karate chops the air, turning to flash—7, 6, 5—a smile bubblier than just-popped champagne—4, 3, 2, 1. "Happy New Year!" From out of nowhere, a small man wielding a fire extinguisher blasts drunken revelers with wind as the room explodes with confetti. Lohan meanwhile slips unnoticed into an alcove behind the booth to dance with her mother, brother Michael, cousin, and many friends to her hit single, "Who Loves You." 2006 has barely begun, but the next couple of weeks will be some of her worst. In less than 24 hours, Lohan will be hospitalized for an asthma attack. Misconstrued or not, her Vanity Fair confession will become one of the biggest stories of the new year, along with the deaths of 12 West Virginia coal miners and Ariel Sharon's stroke. Later, the Post's Page Six will run a cartoon depicting Lohan as a preening skeleton, next to an item suggesting she took a pregnancy test while in Miami. In unrelated cyber-spheres, bloggers will link her to Leonardo DiCaprio (whom she met at Privé) and claim to have seen her with Kate Moss in New York, tagging up a bathroom wall in a bar and swinging from a pole at the strip club Scores. It's going to be a lot to handle, and even harder to spin—so tonight, she might as well keep on dancing. After all, tomorrow is another day. © 2006 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc. Reprinted with permission. premiere.com » |