"When I got the reports that he had died, I reached Lindsay on her cell phone, and she had no idea. She was devastated. She started crying," Sloane told Reuters. "She quickly put something together on her Blackberry."

"Here was a girl who found something special in this man that she felt so close to," Sloane said. "And she was completely shocked and blown away that he just died. It was written very quickly and it was from the heart."

Lohan titled her November 21 e-mail "Dead is hard, Life is much easier," a quote she attributes to actor Jack Nicholson. In it, she sent condolences to Altman's family, adding, "I feel as I've just had the wind knocked out of me."

The film star, who is famously estranged from her father, also describes Altman as "the closest thing to my father and grandfather that I really do believe I've had in several years."

Days after the missive was made public, Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison ridiculed it on a Web site as "alarmingly incoherent," apparently referring to misspellings and grammatical errors by Lohan, and wrote that Altman himself might find it "comedic."