For some time, there had been signs — if you cared to read such things — that Lindsay Lohan’s life was about to take a very public turn for the worse. Early last month, she appeared on former jailbird Martha Stewart’s TV show, wearing a Fifties throwback cocktail dress and whipping up a tray of cream puffs. (If that’s not a signal of impending doom, what is?) Then, just hours after she’d been arrested in Beverly Hills last week for drink-driving, failed presidential candidate John Kerry endorsed her hypothetical bid for the White House — a sure bet that nothing of the kind will ever happen. Addressing a graduating class at the University of Massachusetts, Kerry attempted to show how much things could change in 10 years by jovially referring to the future ”President Lohan”.
The very next day, Lohan was all over the front page of every tabloid in America, slumped in a passenger seat, slack-jawed, wiped out and on her way to the celebrity-studded yet ambiguously named rehab facility, Promises.
Though the tabloids have long been rubber-necking around the 20-year-old Lohan’s decline and freefall, she has now become a much more ingrained cultural phenomenon.
She is the most ostentatious of Hollywood’s underage celebrity partygoers, but she is not by any stretch alone — nor is she without precedent. Certain movie buffs have compared her night-owl ways to those of Lana Turner, whose impromptu Vegas weddings used to drive MGM to distraction in the 1940s. Lohan’s time-keeping, which has come in for a good deal of criticism, barely begins to rival that of Marilyn Monroe. When directing Some Like It Hot in 1958, Billy Wilder considered it something of a miracle if Monroe turned up at all. ”Every day after lunch?” he reasoned with Monroe’s husband Arthur Miller, who had naively asked if she could have the mornings off — ”Please, I would be delighted to have her.”
So one of the most perplexing questions about Lohan’s apparently sealed fate is whether she is being made a scapegoat by the very people who have ruled her life since she made her first major movie at the age of 11.
There is no question that Lohan is troubled in ways Hollywood could not have manufactured — her father Michael is a violent ex-convict, for one thing. She has struggled with bulimia, and there seems to be little doubt that she is addicted to one substance or another (she went into rehab last January for substance abuse, and Michael Lohan — perhaps an unreliable source — stated last week that she is addicted to a prescription narcotic). Yet ultimately, the small, multibillion-dollar town she now calls home has its own ways of working: who finally decided it was time to pull the plug?
To clarify: last Thursday, amid the gleeful schadenfreude and online photo galleries of the ”falling star”, Los Angeles correspondent Sharon Waxman reported in the New York Times that producers in Hollywood would not hire Lohan again unless she posted her salary (which last year was reported as $7,5-million per movie) as bond, or even paid her own insurance.
This arrangement would apply, producers said, even to an independent film — one of which, due to start filming this week, is awaiting her recovery — and many filmmakers stated that they were crossing Lohan off their short lists when it came to casting.
This translation of weekly gossip to real-life after-effects seems somewhat extreme, particularly when Lohan’s gifts as an actress and as a box-office draw are continually extolled. In her first film, a Disney remake of The Parent Trap, she played twin sisters with different accents; in Freaky Friday, she swapped bodies with Jamie Lee Curtis and effortlessly played her own character’s nagging mother; she spun a ton of money out of the teen classic Mean Girls; and more recently, she has been cast in films opposite Jane Fonda, Sharon Stone, and Meryl Streep — the latter in Robert Altman’s final work — all of whom have commended her liveliness and sensitivity in performance. And perhaps more particularly, the reaction seems extreme at a time when recovering addicts Robert Downey Jr and Drew Barrymore are doing their best work, and when Paris Hilton is selecting her prison wardrobe as if it were a glamorous trousseau. The producers, of all people, should be able to judge which came first: the Hollywood lifestyle or the Hollywood ending.
‘Spoiled child’
When Lohan made Freaky Friday in 2003, Disney Studios, who have since parted company with her over her failure to show up for a press junket, gave the 16-year-old a $1-million bonus cheque — a gift Lohan’s supporters argue was an invitation to take off on the life she currently leads. Similarly, when a producer of Georgia Rule, a film currently on general release in the US, sent Lohan a letter berating her for her recurrent lateness and calling her a ”spoiled child”, the letter was ”leaked” to the press as it was being delivered.
In other words, those who have overseen her work, who under the old studio system would have actively positioned themselves in loco parentis, have had no interest in protecting her privacy or guiding her personal decisions. And now they are happy to say, quite publicly, that Lohan will have to forgo her fee if she ever wants to work in that town again.
Though the notion of Lohan as the victim of a large, oppressive system has its limits, it seems that she may have fallen into a trap laid by another bogeyman altogether — not Hollywood but a major pharmaceutical company.
If Lohan’s father is to be believed, she is addicted to Oxycontin. A few weeks ago, the manufacturers of Oxycontin, Purdue Pharma, were required to pay $600-million in fines for falsely claiming that the drug was less likely to lead to addiction than other prescription painkillers such as Percocet and Vicodin.
In the course of a stunning legal case, it was shown that Purdue had made $2,8-billion over six years, as a result of marketing the drug on the basis that it had less potential for addiction and abuse than other painkillers. Oxycontin has become the most popular narcotic painkiller in America and its abuse has allegedly been responsible for such skyrocketing rates of addiction and crime (especially in rural areas) that it is referred to as ”hillbilly heroin”.
Around this time last year, I spent a day with Lindsay Lohan. I was profiling her stylist, Rachel Zoe, and Zoe’s work that day involved dressing Lohan for the cover of I-D magazine. Various people were milling around the studio — photographer and assistants, magazine editors, PRs, make-up artist, hairdresser, Lohan’s mother and her younger sister Ali, who was due to be photographed with her for Cosmo earlier in the day.
Hours went by. Eventually, Lohan turned up, accompanied by Zoe, who had one eyebrow raised because she had been corralled into bringing Lohan personally — no one knew if she would ever make it otherwise. For the rest of the afternoon, Lohan — still wearing false eyelashes from the previous night’s fashion awards, at which she said she’d been ”glued” to Karl Lagerfeld, and where, a New York tabloid reported, she repeatedly left the table to ”powder her nose” — pepped and panicked, gripped her stomach, absented herself, returned, and tried on clothes.
Assistants wandered about muttering that a doctor was due to come and give Lohan ”a shot” to perk her up. The doctor never came. Lohan asked to be photographed with her own digital camera in every outfit, and made notes on the images with a special pen. ”Oh, I have to send this to Karl!” she exclaimed, admiring a snap of herself in some Chanel leather shorts. Then she drew a love-heart on it, just like a little girl.
Lohan — who constantly takes pictures of herself, whose PR admiringly presents her with her paparazzi portfolio every day, who changes outfits up to eight times in one evening — obviously loves the attention. But it works both ways: for someone who’s been famous since the age of 11, the public eye is like a mirror. No matter how many times people warn her to take a good long look at herself, she must know that everyone else is looking too.
The wild bunch
Louise Brooks
Brooks made her screen debut in 1925 aged 18 and became an icon for the flapper girl era. Her career floundered after she appeared in several erotic European films and for a time she was an escort for several wealthy men before eventually becoming a film essayist. She fought a lifelong battle with alcoholism.
Lana Turner
When Turner’s father was murdered in 1931 her mother moved with her ten-year-old daughter to LA. By the age of 16, Lana was making her name as an actress. She was married eight times. In 1958 Turner’s boyfriend Johnny Stompanato, a small-time gangster, was stabbed to death by her 14-year-old daughter Cheryl.
Judy Garland
Garland achieved fame aged 16 as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Given amphetamines and barbiturates by the studio to cope with her heavy workload, she struggled with addiction and died at 47 from an accidental drugs overdose.
Marilyn Monroe
Signed aged 20 in 1946 after several years as a successful model, Monroe was one of the biggest stars of the 1950s. Throughout her career she was dogged with rumours of bad behaviour on set. In 1962 she was found dead after an overdose of sleeping pills.
Drew Barrymore
Born into an acting dynasty, Barrymore found fame as a star of ET aged just six. By the age of 12 she was using cocaine. After a stint in rehab aged 13, she is now one of the most bankable actresses in Hollywood and a successful producer. – Guardian Unlimited Â