SALON

Lindsay Lohan

Tuesday, May 8, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

When Lindsay Lohan moved in

The actress turned my Venice Beach neighborhood into a media circus, but also brought us all together in a new way

By Amid a stream of confetti, Lindsay Lohan arrives at court in Beverly Hills, Calif., on July 20, 2010. (Credit: AP/Jason Redmond)

When Lindsay Lohan moved two doors down from me last year, I had briefly fantasized about some sort of feel-good neighborly encounter between us. This happened on the night when I spotted the first of many satellite vans that would defiantly park in the red zone in front of my house. The van, coupled with the all-male paparazzi contingent prowling the alley behind my garage with an abundance of video equipment, provided me with a fresh understanding of what it means to live under siege.

And so, hunkered down inside my house, I had imagined the following scenario: The actress, fleeing down the alley from these men and unable to enter her own home, would accept my offer of temporary shelter. I’d quickly usher her into my living room where I’d offer her a non-alcoholic beverage. My cats, who normally hate strangers, would allow her to pet them and she would feel inspired to reveal some shard of a more authentic self that existed beneath her celebrity train wreck veneer. She would confide her secret fears, gripes and vulnerabilities and I would nod with empathy.

My ability to just listen to her, to treat her like any other human being, would move her to tears. She would confess that she had never met anyone like me since becoming famous, someone who could just interact with her without any other agenda other than offering assistance. I would modestly dismiss this compliment yet secretly bask in a newfound sense of warm and fuzzy altruism. We would hug goodbye, and I would proceed to tell friends and family: Wow, Lindsay is so down-to-earth! The media has her wrong!

A year later, the actress has fled my neighborhood and I never once spoke to her. I never rescued her from the paparazzi hordes. I never knocked on her door bearing a homemade fruit pie. And I never found out whether discrepancies existed between the LiLo of the tabloids and the young, often harried-looking woman who darted in and out of her garage as if she were a soldier en route from the minefield to the relative safety of the barracks.

Instead, my year-long experience as the actress’ nearly next-door neighbor can be summed up in three missed opportunities for potentially friendly interaction, all of which occurred in the alley behind our houses.

Missed opportunity No. 1: While taking out my trash, I spotted her engaged in the identical task. It was a Sunday afternoon and we both had our hair in ponytails and wore sweat pants and T-shirts. Our sartorial similarities made her seem all that more approachable. Be neighborly, I told myself. Go over there and say hello! Tell her you don’t really believe she shoplifted that necklace. But before I could act, she had disappeared into her garage. After that, I only saw her assistants take out the garbage, along with the many strangers who combed through it.

Missed opportunity No. 2: Driving my car one day, I almost ran her over. She had been speed-walking down a sidewalk that intersected the alley, and I had to brake hard to avoid a collision. I raised my hand in apology, and she gave me an uninterested glance before walking onward. Up close, I could see the roots of her bleached blond hair, and she looked tired, fragile and older than her 25 years. After that, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her despite my increasing resentment that she had transformed my street into a media circus and necessary tourist detour from the nearby Venice Beach boardwalk.

Missed opportunity No. 3: My husband and I had just wheeled our bikes outside for a morning ride and could not help noticing the actress’s black Cadillac Escalade idling in front of our garage. So we stood there with our bikes and waited until she emerged from her own garage. We pretended not to watch her get into her vehicle and she pretended that we didn’t exist.

Recently, I told my sister that I had never met my famous former neighbor. She was shocked and not because she took me for a celebrity brown-noser. Rather, she lives in a New Jersey town where to be a good neighbor means to interact with the people who live among you. “I can’t imagine not knowing my neighbors,” she said.

I, on the other hand, have lived my entire adult life in either New York City or Los Angeles, in apartment buildings and on streets where most of my neighbors remained nameless if recognizable strangers. For the most part, I’ve lived in places that bear not even the slightest traces of the era where people traded gossip over clothing lines and knew when to knock on each other’s doors bearing cakes and casseroles. Today, I know much more about the lives of remote acquaintances who frequently post on Facebook than I do about the people who physically inhabit my street.

Of course, my neighbors and I knew plenty about the actress in our midst, no matter that she had installed a bamboo fence to obscure her roof deck. So when we did run into each other, we finally had a common topic of conversation to which we could collectively shake our heads and say things equal parts blasé and judgmental like: There goes the neighborhood. We could say these things with authority, because even though we couldn’t see beyond our neighbor’s bamboo fence, someone else could, since we could get online updates on the actress’ troubled life from dozens of celebrity news sites. Thanks to the actress in our midst, we now had a reason to gather on a street where privacy and anonymity generally trumped interaction. And we could mock her with impunity. Hadn’t the tabloids made it clear that she deserved it?

In truth, my fantasy of rescuing and bonding with the actress didn’t stem from a desire to be a good neighbor but from my own conflicted relationship with celebrity. As the actress’ year on my block progressed and people camped out on beach chairs hoping for Lindsay sightings, I had to ask myself whether I was any different from those interloping looky-loos I wanted off my street. Because while I might have physically avoided the actress all those months, giving her the privacy she seemed to desperately need, I also sucked up all the tabloid information on her I could in the name of wanting to know what was happening two doors down.

When meeting new people at parties, I could mention my famous neighbor and, boom, we’d have something to talk about for at least the next 10 minutes. I could feel special when friends told me they just spotted a fraction of my house in some TMZ photo that mostly depicted the side-by-side townhouses of the actress and on-again, off-again flame Samantha Ronson. My physical proximity to the actress made me interesting to other people and so I mattered in a way that could only apply in a world obsessed by celebrity and inundated by the public gossip of Internet tabloid culture.

A few months ago, I noticed the actress’ overflowing mailbox, much of its contents soggy from rain. So I did what I always did whenever I saw a crowd amass on the sidewalk in front of my house or spotted more than one news van parked across the street. I consulted TMZ and E! Online to help make sense of what I saw, and I learned, along with the rest of the world, that the actress, fed up with all the gawkers and stalkers, had evacuated Venice Beach for the Chateau Marmont.

Several days later, I watched two moving trucks cart away her belongings and observed her assistants darting in and out of her townhouse on last-ditch errands. Afterward, I went online to read more articles about the actress’s departure featuring anonymous quotes from my “rejoicing” neighbors who basically pronounced the nightmare over. The anonymous neighbors said other mean things about the actress that made me briefly resurrect my fantasy of rescuing her from peril. And then I said goodbye to the actress from a distance, in very much the same way I had not exactly welcomed her to the neighborhood.

Susan Josephs is a Los Angeles-based writer. She frequently writes about dance for the Los Angeles Times and is at work on a new play. More Susan Josephs.

Tuesday, Nov 8, 2011 7:30 PM UTC

Attention starlets: Please stop channeling Marilyn Monroe

As a new Marilyn biopic arrives, Lady Gaga, Lindsay Lohan and more keep mimicking Monroe's moves. Enough already

By The painting "Marilyn Monroe" by the artist Alexander Timofeev (Credit: AP)

Just in case you thought the news that occasional morgue worker, temporary L.A. jail resident, and all-around train wreck Lindsay Lohan posing for Playboy wasn’t agonizingly predictable enough, the magazine has announced that the photos will be a “classic tribute inspired by the original Tom Kelley nude pictorial of Marilyn Monroe.” Oh, please, make it stop.

Of all the dead idols that we keep digging up, Marilyn Monroe crushes all competition. Sorry, Elvis. Sorry, James Dean. There’s only so much to be done with sparkly jumpsuits and nice black pullovers. But Marilyn? She’s almost inexhaustible. Note: almost.

Nearly 50 years after the former Norma Jeane Baker’s death, the Marilyn homage has become the most clichéd thing possible for a starlet and a photographer. Which Marilyn do you want? Britney’s youthful, boop-a-doop Marilyn, shilling for Pepsi? Jennifer Lopez’s whacked out, poured into her dress, “Happy Birthday” Marilyn, serenading George Lopez? Steely blond Rihanna for Vogue? Scarlett Johansson’s tousled, Joe DiMaggio-era Dolce and Gabbana Marilyn? Kate Upton’s zombie twist on “Seven Year Itch” Marilyn? Nicole Kidman’s fragile “Some Like It Hot” incarnation? Kim Kardashian’s “tooling around with Arthur Miller” period Monroe? Last month, even Lady Gaga put her own spin on the star, wearing a flesh-colored outfit as she performed for Mis-ter Pres-i-dent Bill Clinton. At least Michelle Williams’ reincarnation of Marilyn comes with a full new movie attached, possibly even written by a human who didn’t just stop the concept at the words “Marilyn” and “Monroe.”

Then there are the Marilyn Hall of Famers. Let’s give a special shout-out, then, to Gwen Stefani, Christina Aguilera, Paris Hilton, every Guess jeans ad campaign, and all-time-champion Madonna, who have again and again throughout their careers proven a fierce determination to ride Marilyn Monroe’s image all the way to their own graves. Well done, folks. Even Monroe herself got tired of playing Marilyn Monroe after just 36 years. Would that she’d had your collective stamina in this onslaught of Monroe-verload.

But the one woman currently most hell-bent on filling the icon’s Chanel No. 5 has to be Lindsay Lohan. In 2008, she re-created Bert Stern’s legendary nude “last sitting” with Monroe for New York magazine, in a spread shot by Stern himself. “It was very similar, déjà vu you might say,” Stern said of the experience. “Like revisiting an old street.” And what’s more interesting than walking down an old street? Oh, that’s right — everything.

Now, both Playboy and Lohan are going down another old street, this time with Tom Kelley’s notorious 1949 pinup images of the very young and very naked starlet. It’s nothing if not proof that Playboy and Lohan combined have not enough spark or creativity to do something that isn’t itself derivative of an idea even Anna Nicole Smith already covered before she shuffled off this mortal coil.

In a statement, a rep for the dentally challenged actress said Monday that “The pictorial is absolutely fantastic and very tasteful.” Hefner himself has assured readers hungry to feast upon the spectacle of a troubled star posing as a troubled and dead star that “Oh yes,” Lohan goes full monty for the pictures. But he adds that the whole thing is “classy. Very classy.” At this point, the Playboy/Lohan definition of “very classy” seems to be “anything shy of a vagina cam.”

Would the Monroe myth be so indelible if she’d settled down and had a family? If she’d grown old and died like a mere mortal woman? Or is the fascination because she stayed forever youthful, forever vulnerable, forever a big hot mess? Disaster has its allure, for sure. But the constant dredging up of Marilyn stopped being sexy and interesting a long time ago. And though fulfilling morbid curiosity while providing sad spank fodder may be the only career option left for Lohan — assuming she’s not really into that gig down at the morgue — it’s time she and her platinum-tressed, baby-voiced ilk took a goddamn hike. Because at this point, the Marilyn thing isn’t like some some cute musical number from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Instead it’s like an episode of “American Horror Story” — a freaky alternative reality, one in which a long deceased beauty just keeps clawing her way back into willing new bodies, again and again and again – and boring her victims to death.

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Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Friday, Oct 21, 2011 3:30 PM UTC

Why are we still rubbernecking Lindsay Lohan?

The actress doesn't need a trainweck reality TV show -- her life has become one. Will it all end at an L.A. morgue?

By Actress Lindsay Lohan (Credit: Lucy Nicholson / Reuters)

Of all the places you’d expect Lindsay Lohan to be turned away from, you wouldn’t expect the county morgue to be one of them. Yet this week, the frequently SCRAM bracelet-accessorized, self-described “artist of many things :) ”  bombed out on her community service obligation by showing up 40 minutes tardy. Dear Lindsay, there is no “fashionably late” for court-appointed service.

Lohan’s apparently pathological inability to get her act together has made for reliable tabloid fodder for the better part of the last decade. What’s amazing – and by amazing, I mean horrible – is that the interest in her exploits refuses to die down. It’s been ages since she’s been in an even vaguely acclaimed movie (even “Bobby” was five years ago); her music career is nonexistent; she doesn’t even have a train-wreck reality show. Unlike the late Amy Winehouse, she doesn’t possess a tragic genius, a talent that burns so brightly it makes her struggles with demons frustratingly poignant. It’s hard to imagine a television studio full of fans dressed up like Lindsay Lohan because her work was so meaningful. Instead, the sideshow of a once promising, effervescent and undeniably beautiful woman deteriorating in public holds a different kind of allure – the morbid “How bad can it get?” kind.

Lately, things have been bad indeed for Lohan. Last week, she showed up on the red carpet for the release of a new video game – you could stop right there and have a tragedy. But what was truly alarming were her stained, snaggly teeth and dirty, scraped-up hands. A puffy and strangely bronzed Lohan was then handcuffed and briefly jailed for “blowing off” her court-ordered community service she’s been ordered to do for her “numerous” parole violations. Judge Stephanie Sautner noted that Lohan had already been kicked out of a program at a women’s shelter, after doing only 21 of her 360 assigned hours.

And so, after posting her $100,000 bail, what did Lohan do next? She sauntered in late for her community service the very next day. After missing her start time and orientation, the morgue turned her away, but offered her the opportunity to try again Friday. Her start time was set for 7 a.m., so good luck, Lins! Lohan, for her part, says the screw-up was caused by trying to get through the paparazzi and being confused over where to report. She tweeted, “With all of the stress and pressure from yesterday and today, I’ve never been so happy to go to therapy!!!! Also, I’m sorry for the confusion that I may of [sic] caused to those at the Coroner’s office. Won’t happen again, now I know where to go! Thank you for your help.”

Now, if I’d been led away in handcuffs the day before, I’d set the alarm and give myself a nice long lead time to get it together to show up promptly for my gig at the dead people’s office. But Lohan doesn’t live in that kind of world. Somehow, no matter how many times she stands before a judge, her sense of accountability remains firmly untouched.

Yet despite her failures, despite her slew of second chances, it can’t be great being Lindsay Lohan right now. Her mom is currently shopping around a tell-all memoir about her famous daughter’s “life-style of partying excessively.” Her dad, never one to miss an opportunity to mouth off, has declared her appearance to be clearly the result of  “meth or crack.” With those two for parents, you can see why a lady might want to hit the snooze button.

Lohan is a grown woman who has made her mistakes, and seems unable, despite numerous stints at rehab and admonishments from the legal system, to distance herself from them. With each new shambling red-carpet appearance, each grim court date, each pathetic tweet of vague remorse, her body of work becomes less about her performances and more just a collection of troubling photographs and sad headlines. She’s a pantheon to unfulfilled promise, a Hollywood story of having too much, too soon. She’s become the woman toddling on a high wire, a source of little more than, at this point, sick fascination. That’s what makes headlines and gets rubbernecking followers on Twitter. The fact that somewhere in there is still a vulnerable, obviously troubled person who seems to have none of the coping tools to make it to her next probation date gets lost in a story that an eager tabloid culture seems to have all but written. It’s the story of a former child actress who partied a lot and bounced unsuccessfully in and out of rehab and jail. And one way or another, it ends with her at a Los Angeles morgue.

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Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Tuesday, Sep 6, 2011 1:07 PM UTC

Lindsay Lohan isn’t the only celeb with a Billy Joel tattoo

First Lindsay Lohan shared her I Go To Extremes tattoo. Now Bono, Buffett and Bachmann unveil their Billy Joel ink

By Billy Joel and Lindsay Lohan

Last week, photos surfaced of Lindsay Lohan with a new tattoo: a line from the 1989 Billy Joel song “I Go to Extremes” — “Clear as a crystal sharp as a knife/ I feel like I’m in the prime of my life” — inked onto the right side of her torso. While it’s inspiring that the words of one of our greatest bards can provide such light and inspiration for one of our newsiest starlets, the act of rendering Mr. Joel’s lyrics permanently onto one’s body is hardly new. It seems that quite a few celebs have fallen under the Piano Man’s spell, as evidenced in this list of Billy Joel tattoos that didn’t make the headlines:

Warren Buffett (around left wrist; obscured by watch): I’ve got the old man’s car/ I’ve got a jazz guitar/ I’ve got a tab at Zanzibar.

Sean Connery (backward across chest): You’re my castle, you’re my cabin and my instant pleasure dome.

Michiko Kakutani (top of left foot): I’m a cosmopolitan sophisticate/ Of culture and intelligence/ The culmination of technology/ And civilized experience.

Barbara Walters (right bicep): Go on and cry in your coffee/ But don’t come bitchin’ to me.

The Edge (scalp): I still belong/ Don’t get me wrong –

Bono (scalp): And you can speak your mind/ But not on my time.

Michael Bay (under left eyelid): It’s alright, it’s alright, sometimes that’s all it takes/ We’re only human, we’re supposed to make mistakes.

Henry Rollins (left arm; hidden among other tattoos): When I’m blue/ When I’m lonely/ She comes through/ She’s the only one who can/ My baby grand/ Is all I need.

Russell Crowe (backwards on forehead; visible only under blacklight): You had to be a big shot, didn’t you?/ You had to open up your mouth.

Al Roker (right bicep; Old English script): We’ve got the cumulonimbus and a possible gale/ We’ve got a force nine blowing on the Beaufort scale.

Courtney Love (left calf): So you go to the village in your tie-dye jeans/ And you stare at the junkies and the closet queens/ It’s like some pornographic magazine/ And you smile.

Jesse James (left bicep): And if I could go back and start over somehow/ I would not change that much.

Lance Bass (inside of left forearm): I bet she never had a backstreet guy/ I bet her mama never told her why.

Demi Moore (right calf): But it’s sad and it’s sweet/ And I knew it complete/ When I wore a younger man’s clothes.

Alex Trebek (entire back): Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac/ Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge On The River Kwai/ Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball/ Starkwether, Homicide, Children of Thalidomide/ Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, Space Monkey, Mafia/ Hula Hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go/ U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy/ Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo.

Ted Haggard (lower stomach): And it’s fine with me ’cause I’ve let it slide/ Don’t care if it’s Chinatown or on Riverside.

Jackie Chan (right shoulder blade): Captain Jack will get you high tonight/ And take you to your special island.

Alec, Daniel, William and Stephen Baldwin (insides of left forearms; one line each): How about a pair of pink sidewinders/ And a bright orange pair of pants?/ You could really be a Beau Brummel baby/ If you just give it half a chance.

James Hetfield, Dave Mustaine (insides of right wrists): We’ll get a table near the street/ In our old familiar place/ You and I, face to face.

Angelina Jolie (inside of left thigh): She’s got a way of pleasin’/ I don’t know what it is/ But there doesn’t have to be a reason.

Jennifer Aniston (inside of left thigh): If that’s movin’ up/ Then I’m movin’ out.

Margaret Thatcher, Macaulay Culkin, Madonna (various locations; different artists): I’d go crawling down the avenue/ There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do/ To make you feel my love.

George Clooney, Vladimir Putin, Angus Young, The Dalai Lama (right bicep; same artist): Every time I go out/ I always seem to get in trouble.

Tom Hanks (inside of right wrist): I don’t care what you say anymore, this is my life.

Peter Scolari (inside of left wrist): Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone.

Taylor Momsen (left armpit): Come out, Virginia, don’t let me wait/ You Catholic girls start much too late.

Betty White (across chest; cholo lettering): ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (across chest; sailor lettering): UPTOWN GIRL

Lil’ Jon (upper gums/ lower gums): THA NIGHT/ IZ STILL YOUNG

Michele Bachmann (inside of lower lip; several backward letters): I GO TO EXXXTREMES

Billy Joel (across fists; hardcore lettering): XPIANOMANX 

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More John Peck.

Wednesday, Jun 29, 2011 10:01 PM UTC

Five pop culture items we missed

Today's catch includes Harrison Ford talking smack, Charlie Sheen's 'roid rage, and J.Lo's "American Idol" future

By Charlie Sheen on drugs.

1. Grizzled old man uttering profanities of the day:

Harrison Ford on Shia LaBeouf talking crap about the last “Indiana Jones” movie, “I think he was a fucking idiot.” Boom!

2. Major nerd accomplishment of the day:

Fifty thousand Lego pieces and a love of “Lord of the Rings” is what inspired Kevin Walter to create the world’s most complex model of the Dark Tower Barad-dûr. One block to rule them all?

3. Exposed Twitter (non)scandal of the day:

The reason for Lindsay’s sudden interest in the Federal Reserve? The Twitter blast was actually a sponsored message paid for by the National Inflation Association. Are there really so many people out there that look to Lindsay Lohan for financial advice? Wasn’t she just released from house arrest today for stealing a necklace?

4. American Idol holdout of the day:

What’s keeping Jennifer Lopez from re-upping her contract for Fox’s hit singing competition? I’m guessing the fear of sitting next to Skeletor Steven Tyler for another season.

5. Charlie Sheen of the day:

Sorry, folks, I know we had one of these yesterday, but Sheen just told the world he was on steroids during the filming of “Major League.” You know, that very realistic sports drama that required him to get fully in character as a drug-enhanced baseball player? Totally method, that guy.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

Tuesday, Jun 21, 2011 10:22 PM UTC

Five pop culture items we missed

Today's catch includes: Lindsay Lohan shooting a commercial on house arrest, Tom Hanks in Man Spanx, and more!

By Miss USA Alyssa Campanella with "Tudors" boyfriend Torrance Coombs.

1. Semi-famous couple of the day: Alyssa Campanella, the new Miss USA, is dating “Tudors” star Torrance Coombs.

2. Useful house arrest of the day: Lindsay Lohan shot a commercial for Beezid.com, an online auction site, while confined to her home by the rulings from the state of California.

3. Dating site of the day: New York magazine’s HowAboutWe section, where singles can suggest fun dating ideas and you pick and choose from among the applicants. Sorry, kids, it’s New York-specific right now.

4. Tom Spanx of the day: Tom Hanks talking about Man Spanx? Yes, please!

5. Freudian sex story of the day: The trailer for David Cronenberg’s “Dangerous Methods” has a hottie Sigmund (Michael Fassbender) boning a “Nell”-ish Keira Knightley.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

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