The lost girl
Five different mug shots of Lohan from arrests clockwise from centre in July 2010, November 2007, July 2007, October 2011 and September 2010
IS Lindsay Lohan an anagram of ‘car crash’? The latest Lohan pile-up really does involve a car — her Porsche — and a nightclub manager who has accused her of a hit-and-run. It makes for great headlines of the Troubled Addict Jailbird Drives Into Innocent Bystander, Absconds variety.
We are so used to reading headlines about LiLo’s terminal frenzy of decline that another story about her reversing over some poor man before swerving off serves only to compound what we already suspect — that she is going the same way as Whitney, Amy, Judy, Billie, and all those other talented women who died from a lethal hybrid of addiction and fame.
A cut above her fellow hellraisers Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in terms of brains and talent, Lohan shares their ability to turn an ultra privileged life into a slo-mo public car crash.
Except this particular car story is untrue. In this instance, according to the LAPD, the man she ‘ran over’ had not been run over at all, until he realised who was driving. Lohan was leaving a nightclub, surrounded by paparazzi, when the manager of a nearby club, Thaer Kamal, accused her of hitting him and two other cars. So far, a typical Lohan story — she’s on probation until Mar 29 for a string of offences in connection with her addiction to drugs and alcohol. She’s perceived to be no longer an actress as much as a walking catastrophe. Ker-ching, thought Kamal.
Although he made no initial complaint to the police, he belatedly contacted them to claim that she had driven over his foot at a low speed. Except she hadn’t. The LAPD examined the car, questioned eyewitnesses , and dismissed his claims . On her Twitter account, Lohan tweeted, “Scrape? This is all a complete lie….these false accusations are absurd.”
But enough to make headlines — because Lohan if had been at fault, it could have counted as a violation of her probation, and landed her back in jail. Again. Lohan has subsequently placed herself under virtual house arrest until the end of the month when her final probation hearing takes place. You can’t blame her.
Another opportunist, a porn actor called Alex Torres, recently alleged on a Toronto radio station that he had had sex with Lohan. The unique selling point of this non-anecdote was that the sex happened when Lindsay’s father Michael Lohan was asleep in another part of the house. One gropes to find meaning in this information — a woman has sex with a man in a house — but nevertheless it still made headlines.
Anything connected with Lindsay Lohan makes headlines. She is tabloid gold, with all the components for a perfect storm of human frailty: the public seems to veer between wanting to rescue her and wanting to rip her to shreds. For a detailed chronology of Lohan’s decline, visit Wikipedia — it’s actually too boring to reproduce here, because like the descent of all addicts, it’s extremely repetitive. She may have been disintegrating in glamorous places like the Chateau Marmont and Bel Air, but being permanently off your head looks the same wherever you are.
Everything you need for sustained headlines is contained within this one 25-year-old woman: talent, beauty, success, wealth, pushy mother, awful father, cocaine, prescription drugs, alcohol, drunk driving, sex, boyfriends, a girlfriend, shoplifting, court appearances, rehab, jail sentences, electronic tagging, probation, violation of probation, more jail sentences, more rehab. All set against a backdrop of jaw-dropping Hollywood privilege, her scrapes often in the company of similarly unboundaried companions like Spears and Hilton. Such was their behaviour that it caused feminist academic Camille Paglia to sniff, “these girls are lowering themselves to the level of backstreet floozies”. Oh dear.
What sets Lohan apart is that she is talented. Meryl Streep, who played her mother in Robert Altman’s last ever film, 2006’s A Prairie Home Companion, called her “a terrific actress”. In an interview with W magazine, Streep said “It’s something that you could see even when she was little-bitty. I’m aware of the tabloid stuff because my kids tell me — but I don’t read it, and frankly, I couldn’t care less. When they say ‘Action’, Lindsay is completely, visibly living in front of the camera, and that’s all anybody really cares about. I think she could do anything she puts her mind to.”
Writer and radio presenter Garrison Keillor, on whose radio show the film was based, added, “She is a serious actress, she’s been very well schooled. I know nothing about what she does late at night. Not my business, nor am I that curious.” Lohan was just 20 when she appeared in that film, playing a teenage poet called Lola along with a heavyweight cast of Streep, Kevin Kline and Tommy Lee Jones. Quentin Tarantino has also called her “one of the best actresses in Hollywood“, adding “I could cast her in anything.” (She subsequently made an appearance as a gun-toting nun/spoilt rich kid in the Robert Rodriguez B-movie Machete, a spin off from his and Tarantino’s film Grindhouse — but she was cut from the film’s trailer).
In 2010, Lohan has been booted off the biopic of Deep Throat actress Linda Lovelace, whom she was set to play, and fired from the movie The Other Side because the director said she was “not bankable”. She is off the short lists of many casting directors, as Los Angeles correspondent Sharon Waxman reported in the New York Times; producers in Hollywood will not hire Lohan unless she posts her own salary as a guarantee, and pays her own insurance.
Such is her unreliability that her addictions have effectively devoured her career, despite multiple trips to treatment centres for dependency on coke, booze and Oxycontin.
Lohan’s career was not, of course, always like this. Remember, this 25 year old has been working for 22 years — she has never known anything except work and fame. So prodigious was her talent and appeal that she has been her family’s golden goose since the age of three; you don’t need a PhD in psychology to unravel the mystery of her decline.
Born in New York City on Jul 2 1986, Lohan is the eldest of four siblings of Irish Italian Catholic heritage — her father Michael Lohan was born in Galway, and her mother Dina’s maiden name was Sullivan. The children grew up on Long Island. When her parents first broke up when Lindsay was three she was put forward by her mother to work with Ford Models. She was a cutie, and ended up making commercials with Bill Cosby, before moving to soap operas. By the age of ten she was a veteran.
Lohan’s break into film happened in 1998 with the Disney remake of 1961’s The Parent Trap, in which she played two distinct roles — twin sisters — alongside Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson, while aged 11. Praise was heaped upon her for her precocious acting talent; one critic described her as the soul of the film. Disney snapped her up for three more films, and she appeared in a television series as Bette Midler’s daughter when she was 14. In 2003 she starred in role-reversal movie Freaky Friday, with Jamie Lee Curtis, a part which involved her playing Curtis’s middle-aged character, which she pulled off with aplomb. She began being nominated for awards, and one critic suggested that talent-wise, she was on par with Jodie Foster.
The following year, she played another Lola in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, but it was a second film that same year which catapulted her forward. Tina Fey’s fizzing script for high school espionage drama Mean Girls was perfect for Lohan’s smart, bright talent. Such was her poise that she became the youngest ever person to host the MTV Music Awards in 2004, aged just 17. Mean Girls was followed in 2005 by Herbie: Fully Loaded, another commercial success. She was also an accomplished singer, competent and deemed talented enough to release a couple of albums. Lindsay Lohan was pure gold.
What could possibly go wrong?
When Lohan was 16, Disney gave her a million dollar bonus for all the cash she was generating for them; later, they fired her when she didn’t turn up to a press junket.
A producer on another film, 2007’s Georgia Rule, on which Lohan co-starred with Jane Fonda and Felicity Huffman, sent Lohan a letter criticising her for her endless lateness and calling her a ‘spoiled child’. The letter was then leaked to the press.
But if you have been working since early childhood and are given adulation and million dollar cheques in your teens, it may be difficult not to be a spoilt child — unless you have rock solid boundaries at home.
It had been around 2005 when things started to go a bit tabloid. Lohan, fresh and funny and clever, had to go to hospital — something about a kidney infection, with added stress and exhaustion. Cocaine and alcohol were not mentioned, but behind the scenes she was caning it. Why?
In terms of imploding from all the golden egg production, Lindsay was starting to look not unlike Britney — an A-list battery hen slowly going mad inside her golden cage. Could her parents — her grasping, enabler mother and her volatile addict father — have had anything to do with her own increasing fondness for oblivion? Er, yes. Lindsay Lohan’s mother and father are the parental equivalent of a ten-car pile-up.
Obviously now that Lindsay is 25, she can’t continue to blame her parents for her own chaos, but it is fair to say they haven’t helped.
Let’s meet Michael Lohan first, the dad half of Lindsay’s parent trap. Handsome, alcoholic, frequently coked to the eyeballs, notoriously violent with women, and incapable of living his life away from the camera, he is one of those sublebrities — like Jackie Stallone or Christopher Ciccone — whose fame is wholly dependent on his connection to a more famous family member, in this case his eldest daughter. That in itself, however, is not what makes him so awful.
No, it’s his penchant for sleaze and violence which precludes him from ever being nominated Dad of the Year.
Born in Galway in 1960, he grew up in Long Island with an alcoholic father. At 20 he was a Wall Street commodities trader, and in true Bright Lights, Big City style, succumbed to the Eighties culture of cocaine, champagne and insider trading. He married Dina Sullivan in 1985, had Lindsay in 1986, her brother Michael in 1987, split from Dina in 1989, and went to jail in 1990. After three years inside for dodgy trading, he was released on five years probation, reunited with Dina, and had two more children, Ali and Cody (full names — Aliana and Dakota, respectively a girl and a boy). By the time Lohan Snr got out of jail, Lindsay’s career was in full flight.
Michael Lohan wanted Lindsay’s career managed by professionals, rather than by her mother and her mother’s family. This resulted in a 2005 punch up on the pavement outside the family home between Lindsay’s dad and her uncle, during a communion party for Lindsay’s youngest brother. Nice. Michael Lohan had already been jailed for breaking the terms of his probation when he flew to see Lindsay in California after she’d had an asthma attack; when he thumped his brother-in-law, he was done for assault. While awaiting trial he was also done for drink driving, and went back to jail. Dina broke up with him for good in 2005, with their divorce formalised in 2007.
Note the chronology; as her parents tear each other apart and her dad sets an example for drink driving and breaking probation, Lindsay herself starts to buck, even if she had no conscious intention of ever rebelling. In 2007, the year of her parents’ divorce, Lindsay spoke about her childhood in an interview: “I feel like a second parent in the sense that I helped raise my family”, adding that she ” was put between my mother and father a lot. Well, I would put myself between them to try and keep the peace, and I felt good doing that.” Despite the conflicts Lohan referred to herself “a family girl.”
Sadly, Michael Lohan couldn’t quite manage to keep his mouth shut about his daughter. Dad talked to the media, loudly and repeatedly, about his fears for his daughter — she had clearly inherited the family addiction gene, and coupled with the insane life of a child star in an age of digital media frenzy, the combination of zero boundaries with increasing wealth and adulation was more than his teenage daughter could handle.
Or as Lindsay told The Sun, ” When my father was going public, that’s when I hit roc k bottom. I tried to mask my problems with alcohol, cocaine and mind-altering substances. I ran myself down and lost track of who I was.” Since 2007 she cut contact with her father, although this has not stopped him from pursuing her; she refers to him as her “ex-dad”, and in 2009 got a court injunction to keep him away from her.
When he turned up unannounced at her home on Venice Beach last April, she reportedly hid from him. Their relationship remains fractured and volatile.
When Lindsay was going out with British DJ Samantha Ronson in 2008 and 2009, her father publicly condemned and criticised Ronson very personally via an odious email to the New York Post; Lindsay replied , also via email to the NYP, ” My father obviously needs to be on medication to control his moods. He is out of line and his words show how much anger he has, and it’s dangerous and scary as it reminds me of how he treated my mother and I my whole childhood. He needs to be stopped. This is yet another reason why we aren’t speaking.”
She went on, “Samantha is not evil, I care for her very much and she’s a wonderful girl. She loves me, as I do her.”
However, the relationship didn’t last. After about a year together, Samantha changed her locks, and Lindsay tweeted, “So you win. You broke my heart, now go away. I loved you.”
Meanwhile, Michael Lohan, having completed a stint on a reality show titled Celebrity Rehab (for those who cannot even get sober without a camera in their face), in February this year applied for a job in Burger King as a sort of minimum wage occupational therapy. This was after he avoided another jail sentence, this time for assaulting his ex-partner Kate Major; he allegedly threatened to slit her wrists and his own, and throw her off a fourth floor balcony because she did not want sex with him. He pleaded no contest. Major said of him after the assault, “I wish that he gets the help that he needs , and I feel sorry that Dina was stuck with him for 18 years , and my heart goes out to his children. ”
His concerns about Lindsay’s drug use were valid, however. In July 2010 , Michael Lohan told an interviewer that “Jail is the last thing I wanted for my daughter, ” adding “These [prescription] drugs are killing my daughter and killing millions of kids in America and someone has to stop it. Lindsay needs to go into a rehab that takes you off prescription drugs, not puts you on them. ”
In another interview with American tabloid The Daily News, he said, “I’m going to get her off the prescription drugs that she’s on. I hate it when people talk about illegal drug abuse… because it’s not just drinking and illegal drugs that kill you. Prescription drugs can destroy and kill a person and are sometimes harder to stop. Look at Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson.”
He justified betraying his daughter’s privacy thus: “When Lindsay doesn’t adhere or listen to what I say about serious situations, I feel I have to speak publicly to put pressure on her.” Oh right. Nice one, dad.
Lindsay’s first trip to jail in 2007 — for driving into a tree while over the alcohol limit, while being pursued by paparazzi — lasted 84 minutes. And thus began her ever decreasing circles between rehab and jail, jail and rehab; her mugshots became as well known as her movie posters. She was never jailed for anything violent — unlike her father — but for repeated violations of probation, and for failing to turn up for her community service. Of her times in rehab, she told The Sun “I went to rehab three times. The first time I checked myself in because I had taken Ambien. It’s a sleeping aid but it makes you hallucinate. I’d run a bath and fallen asleep on the floor and the bath had overflowed. When I woke up I was so scared, I called my therapist and said, ‘Can I just go somewhere for a month?’”
Then in February last year Lohan stole an expensive necklace from a jewellery shop — and got caught. Clearly, all was not well inside her head. Or as Dr Keith Ablow, writing for Fox News, put it, ” If she is guilty of stealing a $2, 500 necklace …. it isn’t because she’s financially strapped. She’s very, very rich. So, why would a wealthy and beautiful woman like her steal something she could easily have thrown on a credit card? If she’s guilty, she did it for the same reason she illegally used drugs and drove under the influence and — maybe — assaulted an employee at The Betty Ford Center : She had so much stolen from her as a young person, had her boundaries violated so feloniously, that she considers the boundaries of others irrelevant.” (Lohan was accused of grabbing a Betty Ford Center employee by the wrist; the employee promptly sued, and was fired for talking to gossip site TMZ; nothing happened. Another Lohan non-story).
So where was Mommy Lohan in all of this? With a cartoonishly villainous dad, what about Dina Lohan? Bebe Bueller, mother of Lindsay’s Hollywood contemporary Liv Tyler, believes that much of Lindsay’s problems come from her mother wanting (a) the lifestyle her daughter’s success brings her and (b) wanting to be her daughter’s best friend and party buddy instead of (c) being a parent.
Dina Lohan’s Wikipedia page — for naturally, she has one — describes her as an ” entrepreneur, actress, manager, TV personality, former dancer ”. However, according to the New York Post, there is little evidence of Dina’s past career as an actress or dancer; when Michael Lohan met her she was working at a cosmetics counter in a department store. She has never been a member of the Screen Actors Guild, or the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists
She has, however, made a reality television show with Lindsay’s younger sister Ali, who is still in her teens (Ali has also worked as a model since the age of three). As Lindsay’s manager, Dina Lohan did not dissuade Lindsay from making a BBC documentary in 2010 about child trafficking in India, where Lindsay was filmed crying and being comforted by one of the trafficked children. According to Michael Lohan, Dina got Lindsay to sign a lifetime’s agreement when Lindsay was 10, where Mommy takes 20% of everything Lindsay makes.
Dina is not keen on her ex-husband’s public interventions. “Michael Lohan needs to focus on being a parent, paying child support, of which he is… behind, and making up for all the years he was an absentee dad,” she told People magazine. “And stop going on national television talking about his children publicly.”
This has not, however, stopped Dina from writing a tell-all memoir about — yes — her daughter. At the end of last year Dina Lohan was schlepping her book around to publishers looking for a deal; the gossip site TMZ got hold of the prologue. Dina absolves herself thus: “I blamed her friends, her career and her handlers for an [sic] newfound lifestyle of partying excessively. Drinking, drugging and behaving irresponsibly became Lindsay’s way of daily living — and it tore me up inside .”
And this is how Dina justified sending Lindsay to work from aged three: ” How could I deny my daughter the chance of a lifetime? How could I hold Lindsay back from her dream of becoming an actress. So, I listened to others and sent my daughter to Hollywood with a few pieces of luggage and a chaperone.”
Yikes. Frankly, that Lindsay has survived at all — and made some great films — is to her enormous credit. Away from her own toxic parent trap, perhaps she can make the kind of comeback so successfully undertaken by other recovering addicts like Robert Downey Jr and Drew Barrymore. Or, as she put it herself to The Sun, ” I’ve made some dreadful mistakes but learned from them — that has probably saved my life. Partying so hard simply isn’t worth it. Life is worth living and there is so much to do and experience, it’s wonderful.”
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