Celebrity backlash finally appears to be flagellating former Disney darling Lindsay Lohan, who is, this week, less known for her new film Just My Luck than for allegedly possessing a noxious, freckled "fire crotch."
Or so says Brandon Davis, the scurrilous grandson of dead billionaire Marvin Davis, who is currently appearing on-line in a paparazzo-made film, featured on L.A.'s self-styled "gossip rag" Defamer, which features him and Paris Hilton staggering to their limo while he denounces the Love Bug driver in the vilest terms possible.
What he says, or appears to say (let us not preclude the possibility that the film is fake or produced with robotic actors), is too disgusting to repeat at length, yet Davis is not alone in taking up arms, within Camp Hilton, against Camp (Nicole) Richie and Lohan.
The latter women, according to the Defamer's Skinny Publicity Whore Random Catfight Generator, linked fates after the Hilton / Ritchie feud, and the ensuing battle fairly screams that it's time -- as The Godfather's Clemenza states -- to hit the mattresses during the heavy fire.
The most chic of the gossip websites are revelling in displaying image after image of Lohan "working" her "stoned" look, and baldly insinuating that she is a reprobate addict. The tabloids, effectively the pure laine celebrity-news sources, are simply making cold allusions to Lohan's stick figure and, more recently, her "lazy mule" on-set behaviour. According to the National Enquirer, Lohan, who likes to call herself a raging workaholic, held up production on Just My Luck by refusing to shoot when it rained; when her cigarette delivery was delayed; until (preposterously) the FBI returned her calls; and until a medic attended to her self-inflicted cheek bite.
The Lohan backlash seems unwarranted, as she is the only member of her Hollywood gang who actually works for a living, and, her shifting shape and hazy eyes notwithstanding, is a highly promising talent. With the exception of Herbie Fully Loaded, all of her films contain the addictive properties of was-queen Julia Roberts movies, and if one loves to hate Lohan, the equation is emotionally precise.
So how did she become just another Hollywood party girl, stuck between the blurry regions of falling-down Tara Reid and anorexic-friendly Nicole Richie? The actress's asthma-be-damned determination to party, often with her oblivious mother, has not helped her case. Neither has it been helped by her decision to run with the beautiful people, a klatsch of useless rich kids whose lifestyles evoke both the Lost Generation chronicled in The Great Gatsby and the eighties club kids whose epicene drug scene terminated with the public's inability to countenance the sight of snotty boys commandeering a Burger King while wearing feathers and carrying ironic lunch pails.
When Davis was vilifying Lohan, he sneered that she was worth a mere $7-million and lived in a motel. "Disgusting," he editorialized, as if playing Tom Buchanan to Lohan's nouveau Gatsby; worse, as if performing Mr. Howell's "Heavens, Lovey, a Yale man!" bit on Gilligan's Island.
Any actual artist would immediately dismiss such worthless posturing on the part of Davis for what it is, knowing that only actual artists get to, like Jackson Pollack, piss in their host's fireplaces, or, like Norman Mailer, end a soirée by stabbing his wife. Artistic misconduct is one thing, but the venal behaviour of artists' hangers-on is quite another. If van Gogh's landlord had cut off his own ear, or if Errol Flynn's butler played the piano with his penis, would this information have survived?
While Lohan's troubles are not limited to her squatting at Motel Hell, a.k.a. L.A.'s Chateau Marmont, or to her association with the kind of beau monde that, essentially, destroyed Truman Capote, her extracurricular activities are not doing her any favours.
Like the good / bad girl she plays in all of her movies, she appears to be torn between asserting herself as a style icon and as an actress (a combination that her sworn rival, Scarlett Johansson, manages with irritating élan).
The character Lohan reverts to on film would take sweet vengeance on the cool bad likes of Davis by joining a math club, or writing a power ballad called Fire Bush and yelling it into his face. The character she is playing in life, however, seems helpless, as we all were once, when we sided in high school with those we believed to be powerful because they were simply entitled to be faster -- and meaner.
The born rich and their spawn, like heiress Barbara Hutton or Howard Hughes, tend to end their days in sorrow and redundancy, because they are, as Fitzgerald writes, "careless people . . . [who] smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness."
Others surrender to "the last and greatest of all human dreams": to live entirely in the moment, to embrace the wonder that is "an aesthetic contemplation" of one's fleet and fiery place in the world. Lindsay Lohan, buzz girl and fashion worshipper, needs to take pause and consider the remains of her talent, and to extricate these remains before they are destroyed by a carelessness that is ultimately her own -- and by those who never falter, unless crying, in Ray Romano's words, "on a big bag of money."