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"  It&amp;#039;s nothing less than shocking when Lindsay Lohan bounds into Da Silvano, an Italian restaurant at the bottom of Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. She&amp;#039;s 40 minutes late for lunch; for anybody with even a glancing familiarity with the 20-year-old actress and sometime pop singer, this particular fact does not shock. What is shocking is that she materialized at all. She&amp;#039;s blown off two interviews already; the morning of the first, her longtime publicist reported that she had missed her flight from Los Angeles to New York &amp;quot;due to meetings,&amp;quot; which cynical Lohan-ologists might conclude had something to do with the fact that she was seen partying at Paris Hilton&amp;#039;s house early that morning. The second interview was ditched when, after showing up at her hotel, the Gansevoort, I was beckoned by cell phone across town to the Mercer hotel where her friend and apparent cell phone holder, Nate, said she was finishing lunch. Upon arriving 15 minutes later, the restaurant was deserted, and Nate, back on the cell, informed me that they&amp;#039;d returned to the Gansevoort, but now, unfortunately, what with all the preparation for that night&amp;#039;s event, she didn&amp;#039;t have time to do the interview. At this point, Lohan herself commandeered the phone, and in sweet, husky tones suggested that we reschedule, girlo-a-mano, without all the muddled communication through publicists.  So, London at 2:30 the following Tuesday it was. Everything was spectacularly arranged, except that on the day of my flight, Nate took a holiday from answering repeated calls until 15 minutes before I was to leave for the airport, at which point he sleepily informed us that, Geez, I totally meant to call you. Lindsay&amp;#039;s not going to be in London after all. Can we do Da Silvano instead? It was clear that I had entered some odd universe where time, manners, and rational thought seemed to bend irreparably into the vortex surrounding one much-talked-about starlet. I was taking a trip through Lohanland, and if I had to pen a travel article on my stay there, it would be one-word short, and in the diction of its indigenous people: &amp;quot;Whatever.&amp;quot;  It was not what you would expect if you knew Lohan only through her performances on film. Starting when she was 11 years old, with The Parent Trap, and continuing through her teens with Freaky Friday, Mean Girls, and Herbie: Fully Loaded, she has been the most consistently watchable actress of her generation, and until recently, has hewn close to the persona created by her Disney films: the feisty, sweet, not especially popular girl who blunders through all the rites of adolescence with equanimity. Her tabloid profile, however, suggests that perhaps the dewy innocence she brought to the screen is a testament to how deft an actress she actually is. Her father, Michael, very publicly spun out of control and, depending on the success of his appeals, may still be serving time in a prison outside of Buffalo for, among other things, reportedly beating his brother-in-law bloody with a shoe at a family party. Her mom and comanager, Dina, a onetime Rockette, has raised eyebrows with her presence at clubs alongside her underage daughter. Since her breakup in late 2004 with That &amp;#039;70s Show&amp;#039;s Wilmer Valderrama, Lohan has been linked in the tabloids with, among others, Sean Lennon, Bruce Willis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jared Leto, singers Jamie Burke and Ryan Adams, model Jamie Dornan, James Franco, Brett Ratner, Colin Farrell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Olympic snowboarder Shaun White, Joaquin Phoenix, and Diego Garcia, the lead singer of a New York band called Elefant. There was that dramatic weight loss, the persistent drug rumors, the mysterious hospital stays, and a spate of stories suggesting that her many late nights haunting clubs didn&amp;#039;t mesh well with early film-set call times. And then, of course, there were girl-on-girl feuds, notably with fellow Disney sweetheart Hilary Duff.  There are two distinct schools of thought on Lohan right now. &amp;quot;Just because you&amp;#039;re dancing in a nightclub doesn&amp;#039;t mean that you&amp;#039;re doing all these things the tabloids are saying,&amp;quot; says Harvey Weinstein, the independent film giant whose company is releasing Bobby, about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, in which Lohan&amp;#039;s character marries her boyfriend&amp;#039;s brother to keep him out of Vietnam. &amp;quot;I think everybody is in agreement that she&amp;#039;s a marvelous actress. The screen loves her. Right now, she just wants to have fun and I don&amp;#039;t think anybody can blame her. We were all 20 once, weren&amp;#039;t we?&amp;quot;  Lohan herself has long maintained that the coverage is having no adverse effect on her career prospects. &amp;quot;I think Tara Reid said that too,&amp;quot; says Richard Johnson, editor of the New York Post Page Six column, which faithfully chronicles her nocturnal rambles.  And though her recent choices to take small roles in more adult-themed independent films like Robert Altman&amp;#039;s A Prairie Home Companion, Bobby (out in November), and the upcoming Chapter 27, about the murder of John Lennon, suggest a decision to mature onscreen, her life off-camera indicates that she&amp;#039;s not ready to surrender her adolescence just yet. The days preceding her appearance at Da Silvano\u2014four hustling paparazzi in tow\u2014have found her wading hip-deep through a war of words with Paris Hilton, which had been ignited over Lohan&amp;#039;s association with Greek shipping heir\u2014and Hilton-ex\u2014Stavros Niarchos III. The first public volley occurred when Hilton appeared on a widely circulated video, laughing delightedly as oil heir Brandon Davis unleashed a graphic tirade about Lohan outside an L.A. club. The fight continued with trendy Manhattan nightclubs such as Butter and Bungalow 8 sufficing as battlegrounds; neither combatant appeared to be obeying the Hollywood equivalent of the Geneva Convention.  Lohan plunks down, out of breath from being chased by the photographers, who immediately lean against parked cars on Sixth Avenue and, like crows on a power line, just wait there for something to happen. She&amp;#039;s wearing a Hanes wife-beater and a microscopic pair of denim shorts from Imitation of Christ and is badly in need of a manicure. Lohan is certainly not her former skeletal self, but she&amp;#039;s so thin that if you squinted, the only thing you&amp;#039;d likely see would be her gigantic, buglike Dior sunglasses and her fabled chest, which, praise the Lord, has made a remarkable recovery since those skinny days of 2005. Lohan, though seemingly unwilling to let me finish a sentence, is disarmingly open and alluring in a disconcerting manner that makes you forget that she is, as they say, barely legal. Although part of me had wanted to shake some sense into her, instead I just grin like a submissive chimp and pose a question.  ELLE: Do you think you&amp;#039;re in the tabloids too much?  LINDSAY LOHAN: You kind of ask for it when you go to nightclubs. People are like, &amp;quot;Just don&amp;#039;t go out!&amp;quot; but I can&amp;#039;t help it. I literally come out of my hotel and the [photographers] are there. It&amp;#039;s not like I ask them to follow me. But you know, it&amp;#039;s actually weird when the paparazzi&amp;#039;s not there and things aren&amp;#039;t being written, because you kind of wonder, Do people not care anymore? ELLE: You must have at least initially loved all the attention.  LL: I still sort of do. ELLE: Let me read you this quote from your Prairie Home Companion costar Garrison Keillor....  LL: ...let me just say, that man is so talented, and I asked him to write me a sequel and he said he wanted to. ELLE: Neat. Here&amp;#039;s what he said: &amp;quot;Her tabloid life is a separate thing. It&amp;#039;s a whole game that she plays with the tabloids, and it goes back and forth. It&amp;#039;s valuable for her up to a point\u2014but I think she&amp;#039;s now past that point. And so one fears for someone who continues a game beyond where it ought to go.&amp;quot;  LL: So what does that mean? ELLE: I think he means that the whole tabloid presence isn&amp;#039;t really doing your career any good.  LL: But Garrison and Meryl [Streep] both said to me, &amp;quot;People that you work with know how hard you work.&amp;quot; People in the industry don&amp;#039;t read this bullshit. I work so hard, and I can&amp;#039;t point that out enough. I need a break more than anyone, but I don&amp;#039;t even know how to take a break, because I go crazy. I just sit in a room and I don&amp;#039;t know what to do. I went to the Metropolitan Museum and just sat there. But they didn&amp;#039;t take pictures of that, which sucks, because that would have been more interesting than pictures of me coming out of a club. ELLE: Your publicist recently said you were dating....  LL: Well, [I] say things that aren&amp;#039;t true a lot, just because it&amp;#039;s fun. Yeah, if I was dating one person [I&amp;#039;d] probably tell them I was dating someone else and then I&amp;#039;d call my friend and be like, &amp;quot;Do you mind if I say that we&amp;#039;re dating?&amp;quot; I figure I&amp;#039;ll f--- with them, because they f--- with me. But what did she say? ELLE: She recently told Page Six that you were &amp;quot;dating several men who live overseas,&amp;quot; which sounded kind of tawdry.  LL: Yeah, like I&amp;#039;m Angelina Jolie, taking on lovers. I don&amp;#039;t want to put myself in the position where I&amp;#039;m in a monogamous relationship right now. I&amp;#039;m not dating just one person. ELLE: How many times do you sleep with someone before you&amp;#039;re officially dating them? I don&amp;#039;t know the rule these days.  LL: I don&amp;#039;t either. But Sex and the City changed everything for me, because those girls would just sleep with so many people! My mom&amp;#039;s going to kill me for talking about sleeping with people. But if I&amp;#039;m going to give my body to someone, I&amp;#039;d rather them not be with other people. ELLE: That&amp;#039;s very old-fashioned of you.  LL: Yeah, but I want to be able to if I like someone else. ELLE: Huh. Interesting. It&amp;#039;s the variety of partners that you like?  LL: I think everyone does, especially at my age. I mean, if the sex is bad, the relationship&amp;#039;s not going anywhere. But I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;ve had enough experience with dating one guy for a long time. The only one was Wilmer, and apparently Jared, but Jared was so paranoid. He&amp;#039;d always be like, &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t come over if you&amp;#039;re going to bring 15 f---ing paparazzi!&amp;quot; That gets hard too. Like, if I&amp;#039;m seeing a guy, or if he&amp;#039;s coming out with my friends and I have a crush on him, I&amp;#039;ll say, &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re probably going to be written about as dating tomorrow, and they&amp;#039;re going to take a lot of pictures. Sorry.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s different when it&amp;#039;s a guy who&amp;#039;s already in the public eye. But if it&amp;#039;s, like, a guy who&amp;#039;s just starting out in a band, or a model, or a new actor, you feel like, &amp;quot;Okay, this is weird that they&amp;#039;re getting so much press for just being with me.&amp;quot; And they might get a big head. You have to think about those things. ELLE: It seems that when somebody famous starts dating someone unknown, there&amp;#039;s an immediate feeding frenzy among young Hollywood girls.  LL: Yeah, it&amp;#039;s like vultures. ELLE: Those Greek shipping heirs, for example, seem to be popular now. I wonder....  LL: You mean Stavros? He&amp;#039;s not being fought over. I would never fight with a girl over a guy. I mean, they&amp;#039;ll say you date all these people, that you&amp;#039;re a slut, or stealing boyfriends, or a man-eater, as I&amp;#039;ve been called. But I would never steal anyone&amp;#039;s boyfriend. It&amp;#039;s bad karma, and I&amp;#039;m a big believer in karma\u2014hence the fact that I&amp;#039;ve studied kabbalah. I&amp;#039;m very true to the &amp;quot;Treat people the way you want to be treated&amp;quot; sort of thing. ELLE: Can you really deny that men who are dating are more appealing than available guys? Don&amp;#039;t you think.... LL: ...it&amp;#039;s true. You want what you can&amp;#039;t have. It&amp;#039;s alluring. But it does bite you in the ass. It&amp;#039;s happened to me. I recently liked someone, and [he] went out of town, and something happened with his friend\u2014I mean, I didn&amp;#039;t sleep with him, but something happened. It was a mistake, obviously, and now I&amp;#039;m in a fight with the first guy and we&amp;#039;re not speaking.  ELLE: This Brandon Davis video.... LL: ...I still have not seen it. I will never see it. I got this call from a friend saying, &amp;quot;Did you see this video that Brandon and Paris did outside of Hyde?&amp;quot; I go, &amp;quot;No, I didn&amp;#039;t see it.&amp;quot; And then I started getting prank calls from them on my voicemail. They&amp;#039;d be screaming and saying the stuff that was said in the video. I don&amp;#039;t want to fight with anyone. But obviously, she&amp;#039;s very comfortable making videos. I just feel like people need to think more before they act. Even me sometimes.  ELLE: Could you give an example?  LL: I went to [Butter] last night, and Paris was there. I could have avoided going, but I didn&amp;#039;t know she&amp;#039;d be there. When I got there I saw my friend Richie Akiva, who runs the place\u2014I love him to death, they said I was dating him once, and they said Mary-Kate dated him, it&amp;#039;s so incestuous\u2014and Richie said, &amp;quot;Paris is downstairs,&amp;quot; and I went, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t care. Whatever. Big deal.&amp;quot; I could have just not gone in. But I saw her and she went off on this Stavros thing, grabbing my arm saying, &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t believe you f---ing called Stavros.&amp;quot; But you know what? I don&amp;#039;t want to come across as talking shit about people. That&amp;#039;s one thing I learned from Meryl: Take the higher road.  Lohan glances outside and notices that the paparazzi, whose ranks have swelled to nine since she arrived, are training their mammoth lenses on the windows and snapping photos. Though she says this is distracting, she declines my offer to move to a table in back, where they can&amp;#039;t see her. She does, however, begin furtively smoking Parliaments under the table, despite an earlier pronouncement that she only smokes at night. She picks up her BlackBerry and starts searching through names.  LL: Isn&amp;#039;t this weird? Now maybe they&amp;#039;re going to say that we&amp;#039;re dating. I&amp;#039;m seriously going to call my friend Jamie and see if he can come here. Then watch: Tomorrow we&amp;#039;ll be reading about me dating him. But he has a girlfriend.  ELLE: Maybe we should hold off on that. Your little sister, Ali, is getting into the movie business. What advice do you have for her? LL: Stay away from the boys. And watch who you associate with publicly, especially if someone has a certain rep\u2014and it may not be their fault; maybe they have a party-girl image. I guess people would say she&amp;#039;d have to stay away from me, but that&amp;#039;s not true. Because I&amp;#039;ll nurture someone if they&amp;#039;re out with me and take care of them. I love to do that. ELLE: Do you worry about her? I feel like it&amp;#039;s one in a million of the girls who make it....  LL: Now it&amp;#039;s not. Now you just have to be on a reality show. I&amp;#039;m an actress who appreciates movies like To Catch a Thief, Kitten With a Whip, and Niagara. And then there&amp;#039;s these other girls\u2014and I&amp;#039;m happy for them\u2014who basically go to the clubs, sit in a booth near me or Kirsten Dunst, do a few rebellious things, and they get put on the covers of magazines. They&amp;#039;re getting their own shows, and now they&amp;#039;re doing movies. What the f---? I&amp;#039;ve had to work since I was four years old! ELLE: But the public isn&amp;#039;t so welcoming to famous siblings. Ashlee Simpson seemed to experience this backlash....  LL: ...it&amp;#039;s like when they said I got my chest done and it wasn&amp;#039;t true and my sister read it to me. She shouldn&amp;#039;t be hearing that about her sister! [The tabloids] kind of blew off the fact that Ashlee got a nose job. I&amp;#039;ve never done anything. People say I got Botox in my armpits. No! ELLE: Why would you get Botox in the armpits?  LL: So you don&amp;#039;t sweat. I know someone who did it. You sweat more here [touches the sides of her nose].  A waiter brings over the restaurant&amp;#039;s cordless phone and tells Lohan she has a call. Holding it to her ear, she initially registers shock, gasps, and asks the caller if she&amp;#039;s being Punk&amp;#039;d, then, after a few moments of listening, a smile spreads across her face. She points to one of the younger paparazzi outside, who it becomes clear is conversing with her on his cell from 30 feet away. Despite the intrusion, she&amp;#039;s animated on the phone and promises she&amp;#039;ll emerge soon for a picture. Afterward, she explains that though she initially thought it might have been one of her stalkers\u2014&amp;quot;these crazy older men&amp;quot;\u2014she was relieved that it was just the paparazzo she had recently sprayed with Reddi-wip after he followed her into a grocery store.  ELLE: It seems like every other gossip item about you mentions that you&amp;#039;re in and out of bathrooms. They seem to be intimating....  LL: ...that I&amp;#039;m doing cocaine. And I&amp;#039;m not. There you have it. It&amp;#039;s not true. I remember my dad would always look me in the eyes and be able to tell that I was lying if I looked away for a second. A security guard taught me that too\u2014and he works in the CIA! So look me in the eyes. I&amp;#039;m not looking away. I&amp;#039;ll talk to you for the rest of the interview like this if you want, aside from me having to eat my food. It&amp;#039;s not true! My mother would take me out of the business. I want to get away from that whole thing, because I know what it does to relationships and families. And the guys that I&amp;#039;m attracted to now are guys that have either been to rehab and don&amp;#039;t drink and don&amp;#039;t smoke, or guys that just drink and smoke and don&amp;#039;t do anything else. People say one thing leads to another\u2014that&amp;#039;s bullshit! I think whatever you consume can be done in moderation. Whatever it is. But why even go there? Because it kind of came up in Vanity Fair? ELLE: See, you lost a ton of weight a while back, and you seem to have this capacity to stay up very late, and....  LL: ...I&amp;#039;m 19! I can handle later hours! And I have a rule: I have to be home before the sun comes up or I start panicking. Unless it&amp;#039;s, like, your birthday or whatever. I tried to keep my mom out with me the other night. She was in the city, so I said, &amp;quot;Come to Bungalow, please!&amp;quot; And she comes there, and James Franco&amp;#039;s sitting there, and Stavros is there, and then Jared came in. My mom was like, &amp;quot;I cannot be here.&amp;quot; ELLE: I was going to ask about that because people do see your mom....  LL: ...but there are so many older women at those clubs later than I am! Why don&amp;#039;t you write about them? My family&amp;#039;s gone through enough shit. My mom&amp;#039;s my best friend. I have a young, hot mom. ELLE: You never long for a more traditional relationship with your mother?  LL: Mischa Barton was out at Bungalow with her mom!  Lohan&amp;#039;s assistant stops by the table and says that the woman who is to administer her spray-tan for that evening&amp;#039;s Calvin Klein event is waiting back at the Gansevoort. Lohan, who over the three-hour lunch has consumed only an artichoke and two pinot grigios, says that she wants to eat something else, and could the girl come over to the restaurant and spray her there so she can have an early dinner? And can Nate come too? Several minutes later, the Brazil Bronze Glow Bar spray-tan woman trudges in, but soon discovers that Lohan&amp;#039;s plan to doff her clothes and get sprayed in the Da Silvano bathroom has one significant hitch: There&amp;#039;s no outlet in either restroom into which the tanning gun can be plugged. So she sits at the table and waits patiently for Lohan to finish her plate of scampi so they can head back to the Gansevoort, where the appointment was originally scheduled.  ELLE: Any big plans for the next year?  LL: I&amp;#039;ve been trying to go to Iraq with Hillary Clinton for so long. Hillary was trying to work it out, but it seemed too dangerous. I wanted to do what Marilyn Monroe did, when she went and just set up a stage and did a concert for the troops all by herself. It&amp;#039;s so amazing seeing that one woman just going somewhere, this beautiful sex kitten, who&amp;#039;s basically a pinup, which is what I&amp;#039;ve always aspired to be. So I tried to go there. I&amp;#039;m not afraid of going. My security guard is going to take me to a gun range when I get back to L.A., and I&amp;#039;m going to start taking shooting lessons. He says if I&amp;#039;m going to go there I should really know how to shoot. Yeah, I have a dark side. I go to my dark side. I watched all these videos on Charles Manson for a while. ELLE: Huh. Older people like me don&amp;#039;t understand this kind of meanness that&amp;#039;s pervaded the young Hollywood set.  LL: Hollywood is about reality-show stars, taking people&amp;#039;s boyfriends, and tabloids making up stories, and not about the work and the art, the craft. Stop writing about me and start writing about how people are dying overseas for our country! ELLE: I understand that. But I have to say, the first time I became aware of you was not because of your work, but because you were having a public feud with Hilary Duff....  LL: ...you know that I met her twice? I swear to God. I met her twice. ELLE: Are you saying she started the whole thing?  LL: No, I&amp;#039;m not saying that. I&amp;#039;m saying that people just started selling stories. We were two girls coming up and it was like the Christina and Britney thing. It was easy to write about. I have this Andy Warhol lighter\u2014it means so much to me\u2014that has this quote on it. I wish I knew it exactly, but it says something like, &amp;quot;Everyone in the world will eventually have their 15 minutes of fame.&amp;quot; Something similar to that. But it&amp;#039;s so true! And it&amp;#039;s like, &amp;quot;Let us enjoy the time while we have it!&amp;quot; But I swear to God, mark my words, I will not let any of these tabloids stop me from doing what I&amp;#039;m doing. I&amp;#039;m never not going to be in the movies. I&amp;#039;m not going anywhere. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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