There death came hurtling along the boulevard in waning sepia light—Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde.
New York Magazine pulled a coup and got Lindsay Lohan naked for this week’s cover. You can’t even open the story right now on the mag’s website….
Last spring, when Lohan was in New York just before her big breakdown, I asked Simon Hammerstein, The Box’s owner, to describe his nightclub’s best customer, “Oh Lindsay, she’s our Marylin Monroe isn’t she…” This was an interview for, duh, New York Magazine. Now they’ve convinced her to get naked!
While reporting the Box story, I crossed paths with Lohan three times in one week. I dubbed her The Box’s “mascot.” She was some partier back then. Here’s a little “reporting” on Lohan (from Box notes):
The Mascot
Getting in to the Box proved incredibly difficult. In one week’s time I was denied entry four out of six nights (The Box is closed on Sundays). Being shut out one Tuesday gave me the chance to bounce around the club scene, where I was lucky enough to observe America’s favorite party animal, Lindsay Lohan, in captivity at the West Chelsea club Stereo. Lohan is the country’s most valuable partier: The Las Vegas nightclub Pure inked a deal to pay her—gulp–$400,000 to celebrate her 21st B-day there. She perfectly represents the nexus between celebrities, PR, and media that market upscale New York nightlife. She’s also been The Box’s best customer.
Inside Stereo, dirt-rockers The Bloody Social (Sienna Miller’s boyfriend’s band) had just finished playing. My neighbor, Michael Ruiz, promotes for Stereo and at his table sat Lohan atop a booth between her sex partner Colum Best (son of English soccer playboy George Best) and the DJ Steve Aoki. Lohan wore a waist length leather coat over a tight low-cut shirt; a black headband was wrapped around her bleached blonde hippy hair. A crush of hundreds surged and swarmed Stereo’s VIP section, but Aoki, looking very Rasta/Fu Manchu with dreads and facial hair, disbursed a Zen chill. Ten years ago Aoki was a student in Santa Barabra, CA, booking emo and hardcore shows at a house called the Pickle Patch alongside Kent McClard, founder of anti-commercial Ebullition Records and the man who coined the phrase “rage against the machine.” Times sure have changed. When Aoki got in the DJ booth, a hype man yelped in a whigger voice, “This is A-Ron, New York City. What up! Uh-Uh! Yee-ah!”
Past 2am, Lohan stood on the couch, slowly gyrating to a Swizz Beats song with a great chorus: “You know who it is: It’s me bitches!” Her table hosts were “JZ and Seamus,” two jobless skater dudes who share a 600 sq foot East Village studio dubbed “The Man Shanty,” or, hardly the ambassadors de fabulousity one would expect to find guarding the borders of Lohanistan. But that’s Stereo: the ultimate, traditional egalitarian downtown-minded club.
By cruising with downtown grime-sters and post-punk DJs, Lohan is taking the Chloe Sevingy cool, Kate Moss druggy vibe to a Hollywood, Madonna in the 80s level. She’s become the ultimate club kid, and thus a club’s best mascot. “She’d be our t-shirt,” Richard Kimmel said. A bold faced Lohan in print next to Stereo or the Box is nightclub PR’s equivalent of a politician getting a Washington Post endorsement.
The next night at the Box, a Wednesday, was a slow one. The room was half-empty, and, aside from a few gays and their fashion industry female stragglers, the crowd was all mid to senior level managers in open blazers with ridiculously good-looking women. Ditta Von Teese was walking around. Lohan arrived at around 2am, fresh from the Maxim Hot 100 party. (Aside from Stereo the night before, I’d seen Lohan at Tenjune the previous Thursday for a Nylon Magazine party, making this the third time in six nights I’d seen her partying past 2am, or: She’s a fucking champ!)
Lohan needs to write a memoir. Merely in that week alone she had released a feature film (it bombed), been sued by a paparazzi she’d crashed her car into, been caught bumping coke on camera, been in a public 5am brawl at the Soho Grand with make-out chum Colum Best, had a nipple-slip in the Bahamas, had grand larceny charges brought for robbing an model’s closet in LA (the judge dropped the charges for lack of evidence), and was named Maxim’s #1 on its Hot 100 Women list. “There is no other star in the world that causes more of a stir in the public eye than Lindsay. Her every move is watched and reported on,” said Maxim’s editor-in-chief Jimmy Jellinik. Let us watch.
The second show was about to begin, and Lohan’s party of ten sprawled across the stage-front couches. There were no “Man Shanty” dwellers, no Zen hip pop DJs, no downtownies with her. No one at The Box seemed to notice or care she was even there.
Such is the difference between Stereo and the Box: the former is an updated version of all clubs of time’s past and the latter is like nowhere else. “We wanted to put the club kids, the promoters on stage,” Hammerstein said. “We pay them to perform as opposed to paying them to party.” He added: “Even Lindsay has performed. She’s like Marilyn Monroe, isn’t she?”
Raven O was leading the crowd in singing happy birthday to Janet Jackson, who sat in a VIP booth above the stage. Lohan sat on the floor, wearing a short, sparkly black and blue dress, hardly caring that Janet was in “da house.” The curtain lifted and Mini-Britney appears in a red latex body suit, backed by the Hammerstein Beauties. An excited Lohan jumped to her kness, grabbed a digital camera and snapped some pics. Happy, distracted, young, might these have been the last days of Lohan?
Lohan left for LA the next day. A week went by and…There came Death hurtling along the Boulevard in waning Sepia light. That’s the haunting opening line of Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde, her Marilyn Monroe fictional autobiography. At 5:30 am on Sunday May 27th Lohan was busted in LA for the scumbag trifecta: DUI, ditching an accident scene, and coke possession. Add “under-21” to the cause and you’ve reached starlet quagmire. But the next night she partied until 4am anyways.
Lohan’s depravity, her “Flirting With Death,” as an NY Daily News headline read, and her subsequent thuggish not giving a fuck, could be seen as a sort of coda for The Box: One life, drink, fuck, and be merry like there’s no tomorrow.
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