Lindsay Lohan has red hair, and freckles everywhere, including on her irises, where they collect like sunspots on a molten green background. The ones on her face, though, are disappearing by the second: Her makeup artist, the freckle-less Kristofer Buckle, is applying liquid foundation to her cheeks. Lohan’s mother sits a few inches away, offering an occasional anecdote from The Real Housewives or a makeup tip, like maybe add a little highlighter along the jawline, make the chin really pop?
In brief, Lohan is a 36-year-old actor who has been working for the vast majority of her life. In truth, that does not even begin to describe her. Beholding Lindsay Lohan inspires a range of reactions that may depend on the beholder’s birth year. To broad swathes of the millennial population, who met an 11-year-old Lohan in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and watched her in subsequent Disney vehicles, she is a childhood best friend who lives behind a screen. We may have lost touch, but we are always happy to see her. To those who worship the media sensations of the 2000s, she is more like a deity, one-third of a kind of unholy trinity with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.
And maybe that’s why, to generations who were more attuned to Lohan’s tabloid lore than they were to her onscreen performances, she inspires less than reverence. They will never understand: That’s our girl. Always has been, forever will be.
It may please every age demographic to know that by all accounts, including her own, Lindsay Lohan is the happiest she has ever been. And at some point in the near future, that happiness is scheduled to be eclipsed by an even more profound happiness: Lindsay Lohan is pregnant.
She bounces around the set of this photo shoot, littering the studio with smiles. The sunlight pouring across the studio floor threatens a comparison to Lohan’s own radiance. Lohan was surprised and delighted to disembark in New York with a fresh baby bump. “I popped!” she says. “She popped!” Everybody keeps saying so. And it is true: Even swaddled in a white robe, the bump has presence.
It will be a short stay in New York, but not as short as it could have been. Lohan has been filming for a secret (to me) project, plus this cover shoot, and then planned to skip town. Instead, though, she tacks on an extra weekend to spend time with her family. The Lohans are New Yorkers. There is dinner at The Waverly Inn one night, and a baby shower the next morning, attended by family and friends. Tracey Cunningham, the colorist, is there — Lohan is a natural redhead, but Cunningham has been toning and shading, occasionally blackening and bleaching, the star’s hair for well over a decade.
