June 12, 2005

18 going on ...

The tabloids follow actress Lindsay Lohan's every move. Parties! Boyfriends! But while she's part adult, you have to remember: She's also a typical teenager.

By Melanie D.G. Kaplan

The new tattoo on her lower back tells part of the story. Inspired by a poem read at her grandfather's funeral, it reads, "La bella vita." And skin deep, a "beautiful life" it is.

In the past two years, Lindsay Lohan has starred in three consecutive hit movies, hosted the MTV Movie Awards and recorded a pop album. On June 22, just before she turns 19, Disney will release "Herbie: Fully Loaded," in which Lohan stars as an aspiring NASCAR racer. If the movie's a hit, it could put Lohan in the driver's seat, which is where she's most comfortable. "I'm one of those people who just likes to drive," says Lohan, who cruises around in her Mercedes SL65. "I love being in the car and not even going anywhere. Sometimes I trick my friends and say we have to go here and here and there ... and [after we're on the road for a while] they'll be like, 'Where are we going?' "

This bright afternoon in Los Angeles, Lohan walks into a photo studio wearing ripped jeans and goth-like chipped black nail polish. She looks as if she should be hanging out in a mall parking lot. She is quite chatty, and early in our conversation mentions offhand that her Beverly Hills home was recently broken into. "It was kind of violating," she says. She's thinking of moving.

The natural redhead has been blond for a week and is still adjusting to the new color. "I feel like a porn star," she laughs, looking in the mirror, blond strands falling into her face. "But I kinda feel stupid. I feel like I have to act according to my hair."

She has been so busy, having recently wrapped a comedy, "Just My Luck," that she's had no downtime. Not that she would know what to with it. Next week she's vacationing with her family, and she already feels a little lost. "I'm thinking, 'What am I going to do?' " she says. "Like, what do you do when you're sitting at a beach and, like, there's nothing around? Do you just sit on the beach? I don't know how to relax. It's weird, because I'm only 18."

This is the sort of spot Lohan finds herself in these days, straddling the teen and adult worlds. She's been acting long enough that she plays the starlet role impeccably, talking about how hard it is to be in "the business" and how she's matured so quickly. She is eager to take on roles that don't involve high school crushes. But direct the conversation to grown-up issues, and Lohan sounds almost gawky. Asked which public figure outside of Hollywood she'd like to meet, she draws a blank. "I always wanted to meet Princess Diana," she says after a long pause.

Lohan knows she's in a position to say things that can affect people's thinking, but she's not yet sure about her message.

Life in the Limelight

For years, she was the quintessential Disney girl, the cute redhead who overcomes obstacles with aplomb and, by the last scenes, ends up a more self-assured, thoughtful young lady. Lohan's growing pains aren't as tidy. Especially in the past year, her life and body have been gossip fodder, exasperating her. Her father's run-ins with the law (since his four years in federal prison for securities fraud) fueled the tabloid fire. So did her habit of clubbing almost nightly. "I thought if I didn't, I'd miss something," she says. "Totally screwed up my whole image."

But Lohan says she's just trying to think for herself and understand who she'll become. As she sings in "Anything But Me," a song she co-wrote on her album, "And it's so hard to live a dream/When the everything that they want you to be/Is anything but me."

So who is she? At heart, she's still all teen. She calls herself lazy and counts as a "workout" running down 11 flights of stairs in her hotel instead of taking the elevator. (When a friend said, "But you're in stilettos!" Lohan responded, "Better for your legs!") And she admits to having a shopping problem ("Like, it's dangerous"); both her home in California and her New York hotel room overflow with racks of clothes.

Some of her best finds come from vintage shops like Resurrection in Los Angeles and What Comes Around Goes Around in Manhattan. She loves to shop but hates to throw anything away. "I always get yelled at," she says, "but when you're traveling so much you're living out of a suitcase, so you don't take the time to hang everything up and look at what you have."

But she does take time for fun. On the Herbie set last fall, when she wasn't busy recording her album or hanging out with her then-boyfriend, "That '70s Show" star Wilmer Valderrama, then 24, Lohan watched horror movies in her trailer. Her co-stars treated her like their kid sister, getting away with all kinds of pranks.

One night, after she'd watched "The Ring," co-stars Justin Long and Breckin Meyer spooked Lohan by climbing on the top of her trailer, then hiding in the back seat of the car that drove her to the set. "She let out this bloodcurdling scream. It kind of scared me," Long says. Other jokes involved a fake rat in a popcorn bag and a stuffed tarantula under Herbie.

The Backstory

Lohan grew up on New York's Long Island, the eldest of four children born to a former Rockette and an investment banker. Her room was filled with pocketbooks and shoes, and the house was often crawling with friends who knew there would be junk food in the kitchen. Lohan's mother, Dina, taught dance classes, and Lohan used to sit in the back of the studios, watching herself in the mirror. "She grew up around musical theater," Dina Lohan says. "She would choreograph little shows for us, with singing and dancing."

Lohan also loved watching scary movies and was fascinated by vampires. She has always been bothered by blood and needles. (Oddly, she enjoyed getting tattooed. "I like the pain," she says. "It kind of freaked out my mom when I said that.")

Although she was a well-rounded kid, taking ballet, tap, gymnastics, soccer and basketball, it wasn't long before she spent most of her free time acting, modeling and shopping. She made a few commercials, appeared in the TV soap "Another World" and debuted on the big screen in 1998, adeptly starring as identical twins in The "Parent Trap," an update, like "Herbie," of a Disney classic.

From Barbies to Boys

Lohan looked up to Ann-Margret, to whom she's often compared, and collected porcelain Precious Moments figurines. "I thought I wanted to collect Barbie dolls, but that only lasted, like, two days, then I started cutting their hair off and redoing their clothes and crimping their hair with a crimping iron and putting my own version of blush on the Barbie dolls," she says, laughing. "Then my brother would take them into his room and have his GI Joe, like, killing them."

In high school (and today), she fell for grunge-rocker boys like her love interest in "Freaky Friday," in which she co-starred with Jamie Lee Curtis in 2003. She describes her own persona as a combination of characters she played in two 2004 releases: Lola in "Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen" and Cady in "Mean Girls." "Lola was a little out there and artsy," Lohan says. "She had her own sense of style. And I was like Cady because I just observed a lot."

These days, Lohan is on the other side of the fishbowl, being scrutinized by everyone from tween girls (who relate to her characters) to grown men (who discuss the origins of her breasts). Lohan says she appreciates how much she's learned in a short time, because now she can guide her younger sister, an aspiring actress. Lohan has even set an age requirement for her own future boyfriends: "Someone not 24," she says. "That's too close to my age."

THE NEED FOR SPEED

Lohan's history with cool vehicles goes back to long before she revved up for "Herbie" at the Richard Petty Driving Experience. She started driving when she was 14 and says she once drove a tractor into a tree in her back yard. Another time she blew the clutch on a Porsche that was a gift from her father to her mother when they first met. Now, she just likes driving fast. "I've got a lead foot," she says. But she was too scared to drive a real race car on the track. "The only race car I would drive," she says, "was Herbie."

Cover and cover story photographs by George Lange for USA WEEKED