Either Leave Lindsay Alone, Or Get Her A Better Media Coach

While there were two reasons for Lindsay Lohan to have agreed to appear as a guest on last night's Late Show (she's guesting on this week's Anger Management, and co-stars in Scary Movie 5, which opens Friday), there were many, many more reasons for her not to have done it. Like: she doesn't look so hot; she has less than a month before her (next) ninety-day stint in rehab; host David Letterman has made a lot of jokes at her expense over the years and clearly wasn't going to stop just because she was in front of him (he's not Jimmy Fallon, after all). Above all, she shouldn't have done it because it made me feel bad for her.

This is not a sensation I enjoy, because I believe that Lohan's many very serious problems are of her own making. Yes, she had an assist from her spectacularly terrible parents, Dina and Michael, but at this point Lohan is pushing thirty: that's long enough for most non-famous fuck-ups to pull themselves together and become functional members of society. Some of Lohan's oopsies are standard-issue dumb celebrity stuff, like DUIs. And some might argue that Lohan isn't even the biggest former-child-star train wreck of the moment anymore: at least Lohan, unlike a certain Amanda Bynes we could mention, hasn't pierced her face or taken to Twitter to threaten libel charges, baselessly. But someone close to Lohan should have been less concerned about getting her a slot to plug her latest actual paid work in her field, and more concerned about protecting her from judgment and emotional harm. (The side effect would have been to prevent me from feeling sorry for Lohan, which I would have preferred.)

Throughout the interview, Lohan made it clear that the experience she was in the middle of having wasn't what she had anticipated. It's not that she didn't have some sense of humour about herself: she mentioned that she'd had the idea of joking about her theft charges by coming out with the tag still on her dress and having Letterman cut it off for her. But the first thing out of her mouth was a factual correction on something Letterman had said about her in the monologue -- that if she showed up at all, he owed Paul Shaffer $50. "I was here early," she said defensively. ...Okay. That was a joke? He's a comic -- and a famously mean one?

Things declined from there, with Lohan repeatedly responding to Letterman's questions about her legal issues and upcoming rehab date by quietly pointing out that these were topics they hadn't covered in the pre-interview, and trying to steer the discussion back to the movie she was ostensibly there to promote. But of course they didn't talk about any of this in the pre-interview, because if those things had come up, Lohan would have been spooked, and cancelled, and we would have been watching Regis Philbin again last night.

And even if Lohan isn't sharp enough at the moment to have anticipated that "I thought you were going to be nice!" wouldn't actually make Letterman back off, a friend or a loved one should have suggested that he might not be the best talk-show stop for her to make this week, because he does not give a fuck if she regrets being there in the moment, or if she ever comes back; as a veteran broadcaster, all Letterman cares about is keeping her there long enough to get a good couple of segments out of it -- which, frankly, is his only responsibility. And actually, once Letterman got past reading out some of the jokes he's made about Lohan over the years, many of his questions did seem to originate from some kind of concern for her well-being. After all, as we saw, Lohan made her first appearance on the show back in 1992, when she was just five or six, playing the floor of the D train on that year's Hallowe'en episode. Letterman, like the rest of us, has watched Lohan grow up in public. So even as she implored him, "Come on, be a father figure," maybe the tough line of questioning was his gruff, grumpy way of doing that.

In any case, it was a poor showing for Lohan, and her winding up the interview by crying didn't help. For all her early bravado, she clearly wasn't actually ready for any joking at her expense that she didn't manage or control. And while any troubled celebrity obviously hopes to swing public sympathy to his or her side, if the purpose of the interview was to focus attention back on her work and project an image of professionalism, putting Lohan in a position that made her appear fragile and weak was not the way to do it. Now we're not excited to see her in Scary Movie 5 or on Anger Management, if there were ever a chance that we would be (there wasn't); instead, we're concerned that May 2, the day she's supposed to report to rehab, is a very long way off.