A glossy rehab for tattered careers

Lindsay Lohan is the latest celebrity to try to overcome scandal through the redemptive power of a spruced-up cover shot for a fashion magazine

By Ruth La ferla
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK
Wednesday, Mar 12, 2008, Page 13

Lindsay Lohan on the covers of Harper’s Bazaar, Paper and New York; Drew Barrymore on Vogue. PHOTO : NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Lindsay Lohan wants you to know that she's all right. Reminiscing about the series of scandals that have sullied her name and nearly deep-sixed her career, she is all contrition. "When I look back on this last year, it's like what was I thinking?" she confided in this month's issue of Harper's Bazaar. "I've learned so much, though, like learning to live my life a different way."

No need to take her word for it. Images speak persuasively, and in the case of Lohan, who appears this month inside Bazaar and on its cover, they do what they can to counter the perception that she is a train wreck, yesterday's news.

The cover, shot by Peter Lindbergh soon after Lohan's third round in rehab for alcohol abuse, makes her look as if she had spent the last 12 months thriving on yoga and a diet of sprouts.

It is the most sophisticated of a trifecta of magazine covers this month to feature the troubled star - including a near-nude shot by Bert Stern for New York magazine's spring fashion issue and a provocative pose for Paper, the alternative style monthly. Together the covers represent a full-court press by Lohan and her handlers to reposition her as fresh-faced and comeback-ready.

Lindsay Lohan on the cover of Harper's Bazaar PHOTOS: NY TIMES NEWS SERVIC

She is the latest Hollywood celebrity to seek to overcome scandal through the redemptive power of glossy fashion imagery. Last June, six months after her arrest for drunken driving, Nicole Richie modeled on the cover of Bazaar with Paris Hilton. In September, not long after Britney Spears' first go at rehab and her divorce from Kevin Federline, she vamped for Allure, the beauty magazine. Drew Barrymore, Vogue's current cover girl, first graced the magazine's front in 2005 when many readers still recalled her years of drug abuse.

"A cover on Vogue or Bazaar, I think of it as the new celebrity rehab," said Liz Rosenberg, the publicist for Madonna. "Some people go to Utah," she said, a reference to the Cirque Lodge detox program, where Lohan was treated. "Others go to Smashbox and do a photo shoot."

The audience for such makeovers is not just the ticket-buying public. The glamorous covers are also aimed at movie directors and executives - a very high-end head shot. "A person in a position to greenlight a movie project might say, 'Oh, I guess she's turning her life around,'" Rosenberg said.

That is Lohan's hope, her publicist, Leslie Sloane Zelnik, acknowledged last week. "Her appearance on Bazaar is part of a strategic repositioning," she said. It is an attempt to recast the actress as the pulled-together antithesis of the bad girl who was scolded in 2006 by a producer for failing to show up on the set of Georgia Rule.

"Right now I just want to find a great script, a great role," Lohan said in this month's issue of Paper. She is shooting Dare to Love Me, a movie about a tango star, but has not completed a movie since starring last summer in the horror film I Know Who Killed Me, which flopped.

"Fashion can put a calm, fresh and vital face on a recovering soul," said Sally Singer, the fashion features director for Vogue. "Some people can appear on a cover and suddenly seem relevant again."

Lohan, 21, looks mature and confident on the cover of Bazaar. Such a laboriously constructed image, thanks to makeup artists and digital retouchers, is meant to serve as a corrective to the awkward, sometimes ugly celebrity candids in tabloid weeklies. "As a publicist, I would be high-fiving myself for getting Lindsay Lohan on the cover of Harper's Bazaar," said Chris Miller, Barrymore's manager and publicist. "It tends to smooth out that edge and negate when she's on the cover of Life & Style."

He added that it can eventually translate not just to film roles but to advertising contracts. Barrymore, who wrote directly to Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, to campaign for a cover in 2005, according to Miller, is the current face of Gucci fine jewelry and the latest face of CoverGirl cosmetics. "That first cover was a power tool in putting her out there," Miller said.

More than a talk show appearance or a stroll along the red carpet, a magazine photo shoot, with its army of enablers to select the right clothing and makeup, casts a performer in the best light. "It's a safe atmosphere where the star has some control of her image, her words and the fashion that she is putting out there," Sloane Zelnik said.

Winona Ryder must have thought so. Last August, five years after a humiliating trial and conviction for shoplifting, she was persuaded by Vogue's editors to pose for the cover. It was Singer's job to reassure her. "Before the shoot I told her, 'You can show your face to the world in the context of clothes in which you look beautiful,'" she recalled. If an actress is hoping to dust herself off after a fall, she added, "this is a good way to do it."

Of course it also pays returns for the magazines, as scandal-craving readers snap up the issues, which often promise a star's first on-the-record account of her troubles. And if the interview is anodyne - or even nonexistent - there are always the pictures. Lohan's Marilyn Monroe-inspired striptease for New York was the magazine's biggest selling issue of the past four years, a company spokeswoman said.