photo by Anders Overgaard
April 1, 2007
Lindsay's Mother on Living La Vida Lohan
Dina Lohan speaks out about Lindsay's rehab, life as a single mom, and how she's living the American dream — whether her critics like it or not
By Phoebe Eaton
There is that necklace around her neck. BREATHE, it says. Her daughter Lindsay gave it to her after she had the word tattooed on her own wrist, one of those trendy white-ink jobs that had the press imagining the girl-gone-wild starlet had maybe slit her wrists.
We are sitting in the lobby of New York's Four Seasons Hotel, deep in the beige bucket seats. One week ago, Lindsay finally enrolled in rehab. And now her mother can breathe again.
"We are not a bunch of screwups," Dina Lohan is saying. The family's image clearly needed a tune-up. Her ex-husband is in jail, and Lindsay had been spiking her Red Bull with vodka, turning up late on set, or so it was said.
Lindsay is now safely checked into the Wonderland facility, a Balenciaga bag in one hand and a Jamba Juice in the other. But no mom. Dina has an explanation: "
Excuse me, excuse me, did you know I put my husband in Betty Ford three times? You can't go to family weekend until the third week."
Is her daughter, who's been trampolining through AA meetings in Los Angeles for the past few months, an alcoholic? "Noooo! She is just a 20-year-old who had to reel it in. And she's from an addictive personality genetically. And in
that world, they give you things like candy. You hurt your ankle? 'Let's give her something.'"
Dina is sipping from a glass of Montrachet.
It has been reported that sipping the Montrachet in front of Lindsay was an issue. "It's not a weird, freaky thing," Dina says. "No, we're normal. It's normalcy."
Sure, she's hit the clubs with Linds (as she calls her). Teddy's once. Bungalow 8 twice — after premieres, she says. "Listen to me: Lindsay would drag me, literally drag my loser butt there and say, 'I need you to know who these people are.' Yeah, she trusts my judgment. She's in such a whirlwind; she's in a tornado. I mean, we're talking serious earthquake, you know?" She bites her lower lip regretfully. She knows how people picture her. "Oh, the party mom, the party mom, the party mom!" she chants. "Whoever said that, my ex-husband or whatever, I'm not the party mom! You throw enough pasta on the walls, some pasta's going to stick, okay?"
But Lindsay can be fixed. Lindsay will be
fine. "Lindsay had to fall and get up," says Dina. "I knew it was coming. I told her, but finally she was like, 'Mommy, I had to do it myself.'" You can lead a horse to water. You can't make him drink."
[Wrong metaphor Dina! ]
She managed interventions for Linds a couple of times, she says. Not in the classic sense, with the entire family present. She told her, Reel it in. Lobbied for rehab, she says. After all, she was, and remains, one of Lindsay's managers. "But that's not for the public to know. Like if your child's in high school and they have a ******* problem or they're ADD, you're not going to stand on the stage and go, Oh, my kid's screwed up. I'm sorry, that's disgusting."
Everyone forgets that Dina has three
other children, the phone practically levitating off the table with their calls. Son Cody, 10, who plays soccer with the Long Island Rough Riders, is being trailed by ESPN. Michael, 18 months younger than Lindsay, "is on a merit scholarship at a college
I won't mention by name or he'll be swarmed by losers." He's a lacrosse player like his father. Andlittle Ali, 13, had a children's album out at Christmas.
photo by Anders Overgaard
Attention, everyone: Dina Lohan, née Donata Sullivan, will have you know she comes from solid Irish-Italian stock. And at 44, she still has her killer dancer's figure.
She pliéd and arabesqued her way through ballet classes, but "everyone was kind of neurotic and weird, and I liked food," she says, stealing a french fry from a plate. Then she was everyone's understudy, wearing leg warmers in the wings of
Cats, A Chorus Line, and the Rockettes. She'd see Demi Moore at auditions back before she found herself married with four kids.
Her dad, a psychiatric social worker [you couldn't make this up! ], taught her everything could be fixed, including her problem husband, Lindsay's father, Michael, a wavy-haired charm boy and former Wall Street trader now serving one to four years in the clink upstate for drunk driving and attempted assault. Dina's dad "always found the good: 'Get him help. Put him in a facility.' I just was, like, embarrassed," says Dina. She wasn't even supposed to marry him in the first place. "I'd met a gentleman in the movie business," she says — a grip working on
The Cotton Club. Her fiancé. Only then he died in a car crash. Six months later, she met Lindsay's father.
She was just 23 when she had Lindsay. "
Way young.
Lindsay was my eldest, so she was my caretaker, and she dealt with a lot of really hard situations as a little girl. I wish that had never happened to me, but it did, and I didn't know better." The gossip columns call Dina the "momager." The pair text each other "like 80,000 times a day." Dina has a single tattoo, a teensy star to match Lindsay's on her left wrist, from that time Lindsay "kidnapped me into going to the Stones concert and then tied me down."
Today Dina's in a mink-trimmed Prada jacket, slender slacks, and Jimmy Choo boots fastened with miniature horns. ("That's Italian. They deter bad people!") She says she hasn't shopped in two years, because Lindsay doesn't wear any of her stuff "and I'll wear it five times." The Prada jacket, the Jimmy Choo boots — apparently all hand-me-ups. "If you can button it and clip it when you're in your 40s? You're going out." Mama Lohan's palm shoots in the air, looking for a high five.
Why the media fixation on the party mom? Maybe because she looks a lot like one of Lindsay's personal icons, Ann-Margret: gor-
jus.
"If I looked like a tire, they wouldn't even give a damn," says Dina. "And I'm not that hot, trust me," she adds (though, verily, she
is that hot).
And why not stoke the exposure into a second shot at fame? On the side,
Dina's been pitching Oprah Winfrey's production house, Harpo, and the Oxygen network. She has a voice built for TV, a throaty Sambuca rasp. But this star will not rise on a reality show: "Reality shows, I get sick inside."
She proposes to host a show called CEOs of the Household, real-life hausfraus racing to complete the most tasks in a single day. Or "something like an Oprah where I'll take the family and bring it to another level."
Family is what she's about. She wouldn't rule out getting hitched again. She is finally, officially divorced and still lives in Merrick, New York, her hometown, near her own mom, a onetime radio-soap star. Dina's parents were married for 49 years before her dad died in 2004. "I had such a solid family. They never yelled, never screamed. Maybe my mother would give the silent treatment for like two days. That was it."
photo by Anders Overgaard
Lindsay tries to fix her up all the time. "And I'm like, 'Linds,
no.'
She's like, 'Mommy, you need to date someone in the business because nobody else will understand what you go through.' I'm like, 'Linds, who am I going to marry? Like, an actor? Not happening.'" Well, maybe a producer. She's been out and about with Steve Bing, Elizabeth Hurley's ex-beau. "I love him. He's a sweetheart. But we never dated.
Evuh." And she says it's
sooo not true that she told the
New York Post she wanted to date George Clooney. The one time they met, she introduced herself as Lindsay's assistant. "I don't want them to know I'm her mom. It's a whole nother demographic. People just go dark," she explains.
Lindsay's friends? A whole nother demographic. "Some of these kids are just lost," says Mom. Of course, she knows their parents.
"Paris Hilton's mom was wonderfully embracing to me. You know, you can't blame parents for kids, and Paris is a really smart girl, and she's come really far. They're the American dream. They're the Trumps of the little world, these kids." Then Dina points out that Paris is 26 and Lindsay is 20, and "Lindsay at 26 is not going to clubs!" she practically shouts. "She's
not. It's just not happening."
As for heir-on-a-tear Brandon Davis, who infamously branded Lindsay "Firecrotch" on a widely circulated video: "I know Brandon. I know his mother. A beautiful woman. You know, if her son went off and went dark? Whatever he did, he did, and it was bad and it was disgusting. He doesn't have a dad who was always there. I don't judge someone until I walk in his shoes. His mother was hurt by his father. My ex did that to me. And what does that do to a kid? That hurts him. So how does he have a relationship?"
Britney Spears is new to the gang. "I don't know her mom. But I love this kid, and I feel so badly for her because I'm a mom. The girl is a beautiful kid. She married some guy just to get out of the limelight. Cut her some slack. Her mother, I'm surprised she didn't come forward. I'm not gonna sit back and go, You're gonna trash my kid? If my daughter was in high school, I would be at the principal's office.
Hello?"
Back home in Merrick, Lindsay goes to the bagel store "and nobody gives a flying kahuna."
But L.A. is a 10-ring circus; Dina won't let her two youngest ride in Lindsay's car. "Look at me," she says, making deepest, darkest eye contact. "Diana will happen again," she says. The paparazzi remove their license plates, an anonymous hunting party that could just as easily be stalkers, for all anyone knows. Then Lindsay crashes "and they're like, 'Lindsay's a bad driver.'"
Sometimes she wishes Linds would quit the movie business altogether. But she won't. That's who she is. "If your daughter is a talented artist, you can't say, Stop drawing," Dina says. She nibbles her lip again. She smiles.
"We're just so misunderstood," says Dina. "My sons are in sports; my daughters want to be actors.
I was in the business, and I'm going to help them. You don't like that?" she says, her voice rising as she imagines how great it would feel to dump the spaghetti over her critics' heads. "I'm living the American dream, and you can go ..." She stops herself.
Until you walk in her Jimmy Choos, do not presume to judge.