Cover Story: Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

Lindsay Lohan has been eighteen for just under a week when she tells me her breasts are real. I did not ask (gentlemen never do), though my reporting (discreet visual fact-checking, a goodbye hug) seems to confirm her statement. Lohan fields queries about her breasts in most interviews, which is probably why she decided to pre-emptively address the issue. "My little sister reads that stuff," Lohan says. "She called me up one day and was like, 'I heard you got that Pamela Anderson thing.' It's just so retar-"

Lohan stops and glances at her assistant. They smile at each other in an inside-joke sort of way. "Stupid," Lohan continues, and when I look puzzled, she says, "I have to watch myself. I guess I say 'retarded' a lot, and this group got mad at me."

There comes a time in the life of every teenage girl who works for the Disney Corp. when that girl realizes she has suddenly -- how shall we phrase this? -- "broadened her appeal." For Annette Funicello, back on the original Mickey Mouse Club, that point came when boys began to notice the tightness of her regulation Mouseketeer sweaters. In more recent years, fallen Mouseketeers Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera recognized that music videos involving school uniforms and/or nude body stockings would exponentially increase fatherly, big-brotherly and creepy-uncle-y tolerance for music that's pretty much unlistenable if you're not a thirteen-year-old girl.

For Lindsay Lohan -- or, more accurately, for Lindsay Lohan's breasts -- the tipping point came somewhere after the 2003 remake of Freaky Friday. Lohan has been a charming screen presence in kid-friendly fare such as The Parent Trap (another Disney remake) and the subsequent Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. But suddenly, this year, it became socially acceptable to note that the redheaded child actress was hot. At that point, Lohan became a different kind of star. She made Mean Girls, her first film to appeal to adults as well as to teens, thanks to a smart Tina Fey script, and she became the youngest-ever host of the MTV Movie Awards.

Despite the fake-breast rumors, something about Lohan seems far more real than her contemporaries. Mean Girls is often compared to Heathers, Winona Ryder's breakout film, and, like Ryder, Lohan manages to look striking without coming off as an empty vessel. In real life, she has been willing to talk shit about rival teen star Hilary Duff and didn't hide the fact that she liked to party. All of which resulted in Lohan becoming a favorite object of scrutiny for the paparazzi and the online pervert community alike. These days, if Lohan wears a low-cut dress and makes the mistake of, say, bending over slightly to step out of a vehicle, enlarged photographs of her cleavage will be analyzed as meticulously as the Zapruder film.