Can a magazine cover gloss over a scandal?

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 the March 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 past 12 months thriving on yoga and a diet of sprouts.

It is the most sophisticated of a trifecta of March magazine covers 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.

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."

Hopes of being hired

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. "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 the March 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.

Readers love a scandal

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.

The kid-glove treatment from fashion magazines has long made them popular with public figures who have suffered a reversal, especially when they are seen as women scorned. For them, "the best revenge is looking good," Singer said. In 1990, Vogue put Ivana Trump on its cover weeks after her highly publicized split with Donald Trump, who had left her for a model. The magazine photographed Hillary Clinton in 1998, in the aftermath of her husband's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Jennifer Aniston scored her Vogue cover in April 2006, just after separating from Brad Pitt.

Alas, readers' approval is not an assurance of a career comeback. Ryder has not been in a hit movie since her conviction, despite the Vogue cover. In Hollywood there is a feeling that a fallen star needs more than a magazine cover to redeem herself.

Forgive and forget?

Fashion, and the reader, can be forgiving. Movie executives? Not necessarily. A star like Lohan, certainly, can hope to rehabilitate her image through fashion, said Robert Green, an executive producer of "Mad Money." "But until she gets in a movie and it makes a lot of money, no one in the industry is going to care."

Green had considered casting Lohan in "Mad Money." But the idea, he said, "was made moot by the fact that at the time she was not insurable." Her off-camera behavior was seen to be so irresponsible that the underwriters of film production budgets would not issue a policy.

"I told myself, 'OK, let's call Katie Holmes,' " Green said. "She may have a weird personal life, but nobody thinks she's not going to show up on time."

Green is skeptical that a fashion makeover, however slick, holds much sway with industry power brokers. "I don't think a Lindsay Lohan can overcome the things she's done in her personal life by being on the cover of a fashion magazine," he said.

Some of his peers are more generous, however. "An image on the cover of a fashion magazine could make you rethink somebody," said Janet Hirshenson, a casting agent whose film credits include the coming "Angels and Demons."

"People are not morons," said Alison Owen, the producer of the current release "The Other Boleyn Girl." "They know that with fashion, a lot of retouching goes on. Still, if you see someone in a magazine looking perkier, healthier and less skinny than they have for some time, consciously or subconsciously it makes you think, 'Oh, this person is back in the ring; they want to be considered.'

"That undoubtedly is going to have an effect on you."