Aliana Lohan: Naughty or Nice?

Little sis to big mess Lindsay, self-proclaimed good girl Aliana lives on the edge of a bad rep by association. Can she keep steady, or will her last name be the devilish thorn in her angelic side?
By Alison Prato

On a recent sunny Sunday afternoon, the sidewalk in front of the Bowery Hotel is packed with well-heeled brunchers. Aliana Lohan darts past them all and dives into the hotel’s dark confines with ninjalike precision. She sits down in the courtyard, shoulders hunched, as if trying to blend in. She scans the room. She checks her BlackBerry. She scans the room again, her chocolate-hued eyes going left, right, left. She’s safe. For now.
At 17, Aliana (never “Ali,” a nickname she no longer uses publicly) is accustomed to being watched wherever she goes. Life under a microscope comes with the territory when your big sis is Lindsay Lohan. Now arguably one of the most famous celebrities in the world, LiLo’s every move—whether stumbling out of Greenhouse nightclub in NYC or not-so-slyly flipping off a judge in a Los Angeles courtroom—is documented.

But it’s not just Lindsay who has ensured that the spotlight remains firmly affixed on the Lohan clan. Aliana’s mother, Dina, and her father, Michael, haven’t exactly led life under the radar. They boast two reality shows between them (E!’s Living Lohan, which ran for 10 episodes in 2008, revolved around Dina, and last fall’s Celebrity Rehab featured Michael battling a codependency addiction). Both of Aliana’s parents, who divorced in 2007, seem to have an uncanny inability to keep their mouths shut in front of the press.
So it’s no surprise that Aliana’s guard is up as she navigates the mean streets of New York. It is shocking, however, that she arrives at both Page Six Magazine’s photo shoot on Saturday and our interview on Sunday completely alone—no bodyguard, no entourage, no famous parents or siblings in tow.
Sitting down for a chat, Aliana is polite, sweet and, for the first 20 minutes, guarded. She’s wearing a conservatively chic ensemble of light gray American Apparel pants, a black sleeveless American Apparel blouse buttoned all the way up to her neck and vintage black Chloe booties. (“I love the ’50s. That’s my style,” she says in the trademark Lohan rasp. “I just think it’s really beautiful how they didn’t show as much skin back then.”) Her long, dark brown hair is parted in the middle. She’s five foot eight, and her spiderlike limbs seem to go on for yards, making her look at least five inches taller.
Aliana orders green tea because, she says, she hates tea that’s minty. She’s excited to talk about her burgeoning modeling career, which includes a multi-year contract with Next Model Management, signed this past August. When she leans in to talk, her endless arms hang at her sides and her fingers—which are devoid of nail polish or rings—nearly sweep the ground.
“I signed with Ford when I was four years old, so I started pretty early,” she says. “At 14, I did a Teen Vogue shoot, and that was a big thing.” She also appeared on the cover of the trade mag Supermodels Unlimited in 2007 and posed for Lindsay’s clothing line, 6126, wearing a skimpy red lace dress. As a kid she appeared in a few of Lindsay’s movies (including The Parent Trap), released a Christmas album and (as chronicled on Living Lohan) worked on a pop record. But now, she says, it’s all about modeling.
“Just recently I was like, I really want to focus on this, and just this. This is the only thing I wanna do.” A Marc Jacobs campaign, she says, would be “the ultimate thing.” Cindy Crawford, whom she admires for having “branded her name really well,” is her role model.
Alexis Borges, Next’s Los Angeles director, says of Aliana, “She represents the future face of fashion and will be a photographer’s dream with her chameleon-like beauty.”
It’s true that she slips effortlessly between façades. At the photo shoot, in full hair and makeup and Mark Bouwer gowns and Karl Lagerfeld jewels, she looks closer to 21 than 18. On set she is the ultimate professional, staring intently into the camera, barely cracking a smile and taking direction from the photographer (only asking, mid-pose, “Are you sure this looks good? It feels so awkward”). Sitting at the hotel, sans makeup except for a smidge of mascara, she looks like a high school kid, talking animatedly with her hands (“Hey—I’m Italian!” she says when called out on it), her trendy Chanel purse splayed on the seat beside her.
Although she continues to look around the room cautiously and lowers her voice to a whisper when talking about her family, her face is highly expressive: She raises her eyebrows for emphasis, sticks out her tongue when making a self-deprecating crack and rolls her eyes as she quickly jumps to her mother’s defense when asked whether Dina has been treated unfairly by the media.
“Yeah, she has gotten a bad rap,” Aliana says. “People don’t really know what has gone on. It upsets me sometimes when I see stuff that’s the complete opposite of the truth. I don’t listen to the negative stuff. I just try to take the positive. I don’t go on blogs.”
A teen who doesn’t read gossip blogs?
“Noooo, noooo, noooo, noooo,” she continues, shaking her head emphatically. “It’s so much less stressful if you’re not dealing with that stuff. I mean, obviously you [might] hear something from someone…but I just let it roll right off my shoulders. I don’t validate it. I’m just like, yeah, whatever. I know I’m fine. Everything’s great. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone who’s making up stupid stuff. I don’t get it. I would never do that, so I don’t know how someone could be that mean.”
Aliana, whose sister starred in the 2004 hit Mean Girls, has had a few brushes with cruel cliques herself. “I had a little bit of a hard time,” she says of “the bullying thing” that happened in 2008, when two of her former classmates from Merrick Avenue Middle School on Long Island made a catty video about her and posted it on the Internet.
“I would never think, like, they’re jealous of me—that doesn’t make any sense. Like, they’re my friends—why? I never think to see bad in people, so I would never assume that. But yeah, they did stupid things. It wasn’t, like, horrible going to school…There was something that happened, and I just thought it was better to home-school.”
This month Aliana will not only turn 18 but will also graduate from high school early. “I get three or four months extra to be free,” says the Criminal Minds fan, who, if she goes to university, would choose Ithaca College, like her older brother Michael, 23, and study “how to profile serial killers or something cool like that. I am taking one step at a time,” she continues. “I will focus on [school] when I get to it.”
But home-schooling hasn’t spared Aliana from the real world’s mean girls (and guys), the ones who sit behind their computers and talk trash about celebrities. Aliana has seen Lindsay deal with them for years, most recently after receiving a 30-day jail sentence for blowing off her court-ordered community service. (She checked in to jail on Nov. 7 but was released in less than five hours due to overcrowding.)
In September it was the younger Lohan’s turn for public scrutiny, when two very different looking photos of her were juxtaposed, creating an Internet frenzy and fueling rumors of severe weight loss, Botox and plastic surgery gone awry.
Lohan’s camp was quick to deny the claims. “Her success as a model lies with her natural looks, and she has no interest in changing that,” her rep, Steve Honig, said in a statement. “During the past two years, she has gone through a normal teenage growth spurt that has made her taller and slimmer.”
“Contrary to recent reports, I can confirm that Aliana Lohan has not had any surgery,” Next Models rep Borges said.
“She has never,” Lindsay told E!
When asked about the rumors, Aliana’s eyes mist up. “Oh my gosh, that’s so funny,” she says. But she doesn’t mean funny ha-ha. “I mean, I heard it from one of my friends, and I was kind of like, ‘Why are you my friend? Because I shouldn’t be hearing this. If you’re my friend you wouldn’t even talk about that stuff.’ ” She leans in close and gets almost too quiet to hear. Again, her eyes glance around the room cautiously before she continues.
“When they did tell me, I was cracking up. Because, like, when would I do that? I’m 17 years old. That’s not legal! I would need my mother’s signature, and do you think my mom would ever sign off on that? No! It’s not the right thing to do. I mean, if you wanted to, that’s great, for anyone else. I know a girl who had a nose job in seventh grade, which is craaaazy. In seventh grade! I think that’s more of, like, the mom’s decision, not the kid’s. But I don’t know. It’s stupid. I don’t listen to it. It’s absolutely not true.”
It’s such an emphatic denial, and her face is so expressive when she talks, that it’s hard not to feel for her. She says she’s “always had a fast metabolism” and is able to eat what she wants, from scrambled eggs with American cheese and hot sauce to Nutella. “I can just eat [it] out of the jar with a glass of milk,” she confesses. And in person, she looks more like a young Keira Knightly than a baby Jocelyn Wildenstein. But if Lindsay’s plumped-up lips and Dina’s youthful glow are any indication, can plastic surgery and “touch-ups” truly be verboten in the Lohan household?
Born in New York City in 1993 and raised in Cold Spring Harbor and now in Merrick, Aliana has no relationship with her father (“Um, no, no. Let’s keep it at that,” she says with a nervous chuckle). She calls Dina “everything,” her eyes lighting up. They talk on the phone at least once a day. “I’ve learned everything from my mom. Growing up, it was her raising us, so I remember her as my mother and my father figure. But she’s tough on me, especially when it comes to school.”
After this interview, in fact, Aliana is going to hang out with her mom and brothers, Michael, who now lives on the Upper East Side, and Dakota, 15, who still lives at home in Merrick. According to Aliana, Dina makes a mean Cap’n Crunch chicken. “Instead of bread crumbs, she puts cereal in the grinder. It’s really good. You get sweet and salty,” she raves.
Aliana does normal, 17-year-old girl things too, like obsess over vintage fashion and American Apparel. She’d like to get an apartment in the East Village, Soho or the Meatpacking District someday. She wants kids eventually (preferably two boys, because they’re “more low key” than girls). She’s not dating anyone, and she’s never been in love before, but if she did have a boyfriend it would probably be “a surfer type.”
When she’s in L.A., Aliana stays with Lindsay. “We’re extremely close,” she says, lowering her voice again to a barely audible whisper. “It’s just, you can’t, like, trust anyone, so we talk to each other about everything. All of us do. It’s always been that way.” When they’re both in L.A., the sisters cook big Sunday night dinners. “She makes the best angel-hair pasta with vodka sauce and shrimp,” Aliana says.
Comfort food for the soul—and for a battered reputation, perhaps? While Aliana refuses to comment directly on her sister’s legal woes, which, for the record, include multiple arrests, three trips to jail, a failed court-ordered drug test, and a four-month stint under house arrest, she insists Lindsay is resilient through her troubles.
“I admire how strong she is,” Aliana says. “She’s an independent woman, which I respect so much. She doesn’t listen to any of [the rumors], either. Like, someone will tell her something, and she’ll be like, ‘Wait, what?’ You can’t listen to it because it’s like, you’ll want to have to fix everything, right? And it’s like, once you fix something, someone else is gonna say something bad. It’s never-ending.”
Although Lindsay continues to get snapped by paps coming out of L.A.’s hottest clubs at all hours of the morning—and will appear nude in the January/February issue of Playboy, don’t expect her little sister to be rebelling, too.
“No! Oh, god, no!” Aliana says when asked if she has a fake ID. “Noooo. I don’t go out at all. Honestly. Have I ever drank? No. You can ask any of my friends. I’ve never drank.”
Smoked?
“Noooo!” She looks horrified. “I just want people to know, that’s a no. I mean, my sister smokes cigarettes, but I don’t even like to be around [it]. The smell grosses me out. I like fresh air and nice candles. I don’t like smoke or anything.”
People must have offered other stuff, though, right?
“Yeah, but I just say no. That’s what I’m saying. I’m lucky enough that I had my sister to learn from. I’ve seen people do it to her, so I’ve learned to be like, ‘That’s stupid, no.’ That’s why me and Lindsay are also so close, because we’re able to talk about those things together.”
As dysfunctional as the Lohans may seem, it’s obvious that they stick together. And considering all the drama they’ve been through, it’s pretty impressive that Aliana seems to have a good head on her shoulders at such a young age. It’s a peculiar place for a 17-year-old to be: She’s a household name, even though she hasn’t done anything to earn the distinction (yet). A weaker person might shun the spotlight, but Aliana is facing it head-on.
“I try to be aware of my surroundings,” she says, rushing to the sidewalk. “I’m very cautious. I like to be smart with things.”
So is she a good girl?
“Oh, for sure,” she says, holding up a lengthy limb to flag down a cab. “If there is any misperception about me, I do want people to know that I’m a normal girl like anyone else. I don’t walk in a place like, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ ”