“People say I meet all these older men and sleep with them,” Lohan says. “That’s disgusting. God knows where all those guys in this business have been! They should start picking on them a little more.” Room service arrives with chicken teriyaki, and Bella, a teacup Pomeranian belonging to a friend, jumps up and down with delight. “But, like, everyone is friends,” she says of the byzantine tangle of intrigue. “It’s like a big high school—that’s what Los Angeles is, and now New York too and Miami and even New Orleans. Everyone that’s out, you know them from being at parties and being on red carpets and being at events, and everyone is friends.”
But the bum rap may fade as Lohan’s professional output begins to overtake the extracurriculars. “I think Lindsay’s kind of a genius,” says Angela Robinson, who directed her in Herbie. “Stepping into a role is effortless for her. I get really upset when I read this stuff about bad behavior. I was there, and I can tell you that she works incredibly hard. She’d be recording songs in her trailer in between takes.” Lohan recently switched to CAA, and she’s thrilled to find that her new agents are putting more substantial scripts in her hands. This month she begins filming Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, starring Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kevin Kline. (“I’m wondering how I’m going to get through doing the scenes with her,” she says of Streep, who plays her mother.) Meanwhile, Lohan’s first album, Speak, came out this past winter, and “Rumors”—a song about the hardships of celebrity—was a hit. Lohan spent her Long Island youth idolizing Ann-Margret (along with Jodie Foster and Kate Moss), and it was with Ann-Margret in mind that she decided to make a foray into music. “A lot of the people that I looked up to, the Ann-Margrets and the Marilyn Monroes, everyone was a triple threat,” she explains. “You had to sing, dance and act, and you did it in all your movies. And as a singer, you can get away with being that kind of rock-star person, and it’s okay to go to parties and stuff.”
Her principal ambition these days, though, is to polish her acting chops. “The stuff that I’ve been doing, I haven’t been able to really act yet,” Lohan says, waving off the terrific reviews she has consistently received in comedic roles. “I feel better when I’m crying in a scene or I’m fighting with someone or I’m getting really upset. With movies now, it’s very easy for a girl to dumb herself down or look ugly or be naked or be a lesbian or gain weight—those are the ones that win Oscars. The only one who didn’t have to do that was Julia Roberts. And she never took her clothes off.”
