The Bling Ring (25 page)

31

In late July 2009, Rachel moved to Las Vegas to live with her father. Nick said she told him she had to get away from her mom, with whom she wasn't getting along. “She was living with her mother in Calabasas, and she and her mother had a falling out,” Nick said. “It wasn't about a certain thing. They were just always kind of on edge, and she decided to make the decision to move in with her dad for a change of pace.”

It never occurred to Nick that Rachel's decision to move could have anything to do with the burglaries they'd been doing; or the release of the Audrina Patridge surveillance video in February 2009; or the fact that Rachel had just been arrested with Diana Tamayo for stealing makeup at Sephora, and was now “in the system”—that is, the judicial system (her previous offenses were allegedly committed when she was a juvenile and therefore sealed). He never considered that she might be skipping town, distancing herself from him and the robberies. “Not to my knowledge,” he said when I asked him about this. To him they were still Nick and Rachel, closer than ever.

He threw her going-away party at Les Deux. It was the last time that they all hung out together—Nick and Rachel, Tess and Alexis, Diana and Courtney and Johnny. “There's actually pictures of it,” Nick said. “I bought a table. I wanted to celebrate that Rachel was leaving in a good way. We all had drinks and I got really sick, of course. We had a really good time.”

He helped Rachel move to Vegas. They drove across the desert together, he said, his white Toyota crammed with her stolen goods: bags full of Paris Hilton and Audrina Patridge and Rachel Bilson and Miranda Kerr's clothing and shoes and handbags and hats and underwear and makeup and jewelry and watches and Orlando Bloom's paintings and rug. It didn't occur to Nick that he was assisting Rachel in taken stolen property across state lines. He said, “I really didn't think about that.”

He said he stayed with Rachel at her father's place for a week before coming home. “We were going to all the hotels and casinos and hanging out. Partying, I guess you could say.” He helped Rachel decorate her father's house with Orlando Bloom's belongings, hanging one of Bloom's paintings in her bathroom. “She was, like, decorating her house [with stuff] from these celebrity homes,” Nick said.

He said that Rachel assured him they would stay close, that there wouldn't be any change in their relationship, even though she'd moved away. She said she wouldn't be gone forever, she would probably come back when things with her mom cooled down.

That week in Vegas, Nick said, they didn't talk about all that they had done. He said they never really talked about it—why they did it, or what it meant. “It was, like, a weekend thing,” he said. “It was never that serious. In our minds, in the way we were—it didn't mean anything.”

But his friendship with Rachel did mean something to him. There were so many things he wanted to tell her now; but he couldn't bring himself to say any of them He just said good bye. “Then I went back to L.A.,” he said.

32

By 2009, it had begun to dawn on people that the life of Lindsay Lohan wasn't getting any saner, and that she might be on a trajectory from which her career might never fully recover. Lindsay's career, so far, consisted of a string of successful Disney films (notably the 1998 remake of
Parent Trap
, which made her a star) and a bona-fide hit with
Mean Girls
(2004), the Tina Fey–scripted comedy about a girl who attains popularity by becoming a member of a vicious high school clique.

It was a relatively thin resume for someone as famous as Lindsay, who by now was on a first-name basis with the world. She had stayed in the public eye over the last couple years mainly through the disastrous
Georgia Rule
(2007)—during the shoot she was publicly reprimanded in a letter from her producer, James G. Robinson, CEO of Morgan Creek Productions, for her “unprofessional” behavior and “ongoing all night heavy partying”—and her repeated run-ins with the law, her multiple car accidents and D.U.I.s, trips to rehab, and habit of falling down in front of paparazzi (once outside club Les Deux). There was also the sideshow of her made-for-reality television family, her stage mother Dina (who had actually had a reality show of her own,
Living Lohan
, 2008) and her ex-con father Michael, a pugnacious fame-seeker who acted the part of his daughter's nemesis, calling the tabloids on her, once selling her plaintive voicemail message to the gossip mill.

By 2009, Lindsay was already beginning to embody what is known as the celebrity “trainwreck.” The Internet was full of merciless chatter about everything from her latest legal battles to her breast size to her weight. She'd become a lightning rod for a new wave of misogyny as evidenced by the language with which it had now become acceptable to discuss a woman, particularly a young woman, at least online—that is, with the liberal use of the words such as “whore,” “slut,” and “bitch.”

A Google search of “Lindsay Lohan is a bitch” turns up over 13 million links; “Lindsay Lohan is a slut” comes up with over six million, and “Lindsay Lohan is a whore” over four million. Which says a lot more about the meanness of Internet culture than it does about Lindsay Lohan. In 2009, there was a popular drink among college kids, a “Redheaded Slut,” also known as a “Lindsay Lohan.” “It's a Red-Headed Slut with some Coke in it!” said a drink website. Which I guess is supposed to be hilarious. By 2009, abusing Lindsay had become a national pastime. Her famous frenemy, Paris Hilton, kicked off the game in 2006, when she was videotaped shaking with laughter as oleaginous oil heir Brandon “Greasy Bear” Davis dubbed Lindsay “Firecrotch,” a reference to Lindsay's fiery natural coloring. When Lindsay entered the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood, California, in July 2010 for probation violation, her fellow inmates reportedly taunted her with the moniker, chanting it.

By 2009, Lindsay was already wearing the scarlet “S,” for Starlet. While the others in her once infamous crew had settled down and begun to repair their images, Lindsay's continued to unravel. Paris hadn't been in a courtroom in almost two years. Nicole Richie, meanwhile, had washed her perceived sins away by becoming a mother, having had two children in quick succession with Good Charlotte lead singer Joel Madden in 2008 and 2009. And, in the most stunning turnaround of all, Spears, who had been committed to the psych ward of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in January 2008 for involuntary psychiatric observation, released her fifth Number One album,
Circus
, that same December, and then went on a wildly successful tour.

But in 2009, Lindsay seemed at her lowest point. In an emotional interview in
Us Weekly
, in the wake of her breakup with girlfriend Samantha Ronson, Lindsay cried—evincing a seemingly chronic inability to take responsibility for her actions—“Everyone's turned on me. . . .” Ronson's family had reportedly spoken to police about taking a restraining order out against her.

It pained her fans—and she did have fans—to see her fall, because Lindsay was talented. Meryl Streep said so, and so did Jane Fonda. Legendary director Robert Altman had cast Lindsay in a film (
A Prairie Home Companion
, 2006), in which she sang and acted nicely. Plus she was beautiful—“hot”—not yet transformed by the plastic surgery that would bury her fresh-faced looks a couple years later. In 2007, she was voted Number One on
Maxim
's “Hot 100” list. And that was the same year she was arrested for, outrageously, hijacking an SUV with two men inside and engaging in a high-speed chase through the streets of Santa Monica (she was allegedly pursuing her former assistant's mother, with whom she had been seen arguing earlier).

“It is clear to me that my life has become completely unmanageable because I am addicted to alcohol and drugs,” Lindsay said in court in 2007 upon being sentenced to a day in jail and three years probation for misdemeanor cocaine use and D.U.I. But shortly thereafter, she was in the tabloids again, fighting in nightclubs and tweeting angrily at Ronson.

What was wrong with Lindsay? Of all the Bling Ring victims, she bore an uncanny resemblance to the alleged members of the gang. She was the closest to them in age, only about four years older. And there seemed to be a powerful mirroring going on. To begin with, Lindsay seemed as caught up in her own celebrity as the burglars who came to rob her.

As part of research for a
Vanity Fair
profile of Lindsay I did in 2010, I had a long conversation with one of her friends, a former boyfriend who had met her in 2003 when she was 17 and having her first moment of white-hot fame. “She became infatuated with just being a celebrity and being in the press like a Paris Hilton or a Kim Kardashian,” said the friend. “At the time she was blowing up, there was this whole celebrity gossip craze that became so big so she concentrated more on that than on her work. She thought it was about being in the gossip magazines. She would plant stories about herself.”

When I interviewed Lindsay for the same story, she seemed to concur with this assessment of how she was sucked into the fame machine. “Tabloids were becoming, like the main source of news in the world,” she said, “which is really scary and sad, and I would look up to those girls in the tabloids. The Britneys and whatever. And I would be like, I want to be like that. This was around
Freaky Friday
[2003], before
Mean Girls
.”

“It's so ironic that Lindsay was in that movie
Mean Girls
,” another one of her friends told me, “because that's exactly what it was like.
Mean Girls
with coke and paparazzi.”

“She was young and she had no real guidance,” said Lindsay's former boyfriend. “Her mom”—Dina, who was then her manager—“had never managed celebrities before. Lindsay was her mother's boss. She was bringing home the bread. If Lindsay threw a tantrum, her mom wouldn't reprimand her.” Or worse, Dina was seen out partying with Lindsay; she was called an “enabler” in the media.

Without any discipline or guidance, Lindsay's former boyfriend said, “She developed this sense of entitlement. Since she was a little kid, people were giving her whatever she wanted. She just became rebellious and spoiled and thought that everything was hers and she had the right to everything. She didn't think anything could happen to her.” Which was strangely similar to how people had described Rachel Lee to me.

In 2008, Lindsay was accused of stealing an $11,000 mink coat from a 22-year-old Columbia University student, Masha Markova, at the New York nightclub 1 OAK. She eventually returned the coat after Markova saw pictures of her wearing it in paparazzi shots and reportedly had her lawyer call Lindsay's lawyer.

When I interviewed Lindsay in 2010, she said, “I'm a completely different person now. . . .I think self-control is something I've learned over the past few years.”

In 2011, surveillance cameras caught her walking out of a Venice, California, jewelry store wearing a $2,500 necklace she was accused of stealing. “Lindsay Lohan is a thief” turns up over four million links on Google.

33

On August 20, 2009, Rachel Lee was back in L.A. for a hearing in her shoplifting case. It was her first offense, and she and Diana Tamayo were sentenced to a year's probation and fined an undisclosed sum. It had been almost a month since Rachel had been in L.A., and in the time she was gone, her friends had been involved in some high drama. There had been an accident. Courtney Ames was driving her car with Nick Prugo in the seat beside her when they wiped out in Hollywood early one morning.

“I was in the front seat of her car,” Nick said. “Courtney was driving at seven a.m. We left a bar,” Miyagi's on Sunset. “She was drinking from midnight to seven a.m.” (Courtney's lawyer, Robert Schwartz, had no comment.) “She got behind the wheel on Sunset and Crescent Heights,” Nick said. “She makes a left-hand turn into a car, crashes into this van. Airbags go off. . . . I didn't even have a scratch, thank God, maybe a little whiplash. There were four people in the backseat of her car. Courtney got taken to the hospital.” She had broken her collarbone. She was charged with D.U.I.

With Rachel gone, Nick had been hanging out with Courtney, Tess, and Alexis more often. He missed Rachel. But he said he didn't miss the risk of doing the burglaries, or the anxiety it had caused him. He was surprised and reluctant, he said, when, upon her return, Rachel said she wanted to “go on a mission” to Lindsay Lohan's house. He said that he told her he thought it was too risky, that they were pushing their luck; but Rachel couldn't resist pulling off one last heist. “Rachel's like, biggest conquest was Lindsay Lohan,” Nick said. “It was her ultimate fashion icon.”