Hot Gossips Of Celebrity

It was a classic American dream. The sweet child actor who became one of the biggest global music stars ever: Britney Spears had it all. But then the nightmare began and her wild and erratic behaviour took its toll - last week she lost custody of her children. Elizabeth Day travels to Los Angeles to trace the roots of a celebrity meltdown.
It is Wednesday night in downtown Los Angeles and the smoggy air carries with it a tang of anticipation. The sweep of Hollywood Boulevard is clogged with bulky black SUVs and over-polished sports cars.

My cab takes a left onto Schrager Avenue and draws up outside Opera, one of LA's most exclusive nightclubs. Uniformed valets swarm like bees around the parking lot, opening car doors for petite, tanned women, their hairstyles a confection of serum and curls. Across the street, a huddle of photographers jostle for best position. They are here, they tell me, for one reason only: to stalk the woman who has become the paparazzi's holy grail. Her face can boost magazine sales by several hundred thousand, her appearance at a club ensures sell-out attendance and her photograph is gold dust. She is one of the most popular musical performers of the 21st century, a former child star who was named the world's most powerful celebrity by Forbes magazine and the singer credited with releasing some of the most perfect pop songs ever written. Her name is Britney Spears.

'I have a hit list of 10 LA It-girls that I want to photograph and at the very top of that list is Britney Spears,' says Twist, a snapper for X17, one of Los Angeles's most successful celebrity photographic agencies. 'She's the major story in this town. All the trouble that she's gone through, all the bad publicity - if anything, that just makes her hotter right now. Britney sells.'

On such brutal realities is the fragile edifice of modern celebrity constructed. Britney has always sold - and sold spectacularly well. Packaged, primped and promoted since the age of eight, she is the pre-pubescent performer who grew up to redefine mainstream pop music. Now 25, she has shifted over 76 million records, racked up seven No 1 hits and is the eighth best-selling female artist in American music history.

Her hotly anticipated fifth studio album, to be released on 12 November, looks set to earn her around £5m. Spears's image has been used to promote everything from soft drinks to acne cream, her personally endorsed range of perfumes is believed to have made her £14.5m over five years and, like Madonna and Kylie, she is one of the few female pop stars recognised by their first names alone.

Her marketability has made her a global phenomenon, a performer whose cheerleader looks and bubblegum charm have catapulted her into the pantheon of modern fame. So successful was her branding that it was almost impossible to see where the product ended and the person began. Her ability to sell was the cornerstone of her success. It was also her fatal flaw.

Over recent months, the Britney brand has undergone a very public disintegration. The carefully constructed image of a wholesome, all-American girl from Louisiana has dissolved like so much Alka-Seltzer in a glass of water. Last week, while the paparazzi were gathering outside Opera, a Los Angeles judge awarded temporary custody of her two young children to her ex-husband Kevin Federline, after Spears ignored court orders to attend therapy sessions, submit to drug tests and go to parenting classes.

There are rumours of substance abuse, the inevitable failed stabs at rehab and an estrangement from her closest family. There is the constant partying at assorted nightclubs in barely-there dresses and never-there underwear. There are the hit-and-run accidents, the court conviction for driving under the influence and without a licence, the frenzied attack on a paparazzo's car with an umbrella. In February, she walked out of a rehab centre after barely 24 hours in residence and made straight for a hair salon in Tarzana, California, where she shaved off her hair in full view of the gawping public. When her smudged, empty eyes looked out at us from the next day's newspapers, it seemed that she had finally hit rock-bottom.

But then, at a supposed comeback performance at the Las Vegas MTV Video Music Awards last month, she stumbled over the lip-synced words to her new single, 'Gimme More'. Her eyes were unfocused, her dancing conspicuously out of rhythm and she had squeezed herself into a tiny sequined bikini - a sartorial choice that led to half-sniggered comments about her weight gain.

'She was out of it,' says an MTV employee. 'She'd barely turned up for rehearsals because she'd been out partying till four and then she wanted all the costumes changed. We'd wanted to put her in a flattering corset, but she said it wasn't sexy enough. She fired her hairdresser, she wanted the whole routine changed, it was insane. When she saw herself performing on the video monitors, she came running off stage yelling that she looked like "a fat pig". She was inconsolable.'

It was a grotesque pantomime, an uneasy reminder of what Britney had once been and of what she has now become. This was the popstar who, at 16, appeared in the music video to her hit single '...Baby One More Time' in a schoolgirl uniform with plaited pigtails and a kohl-eyed Lolita gaze. The breezy pop tune sold almost 1.5 million copies in its first week of release, breaking records for the highest sales in a debut week by any solo artist. It also rocketed the adolescent Spears into the big time.

Back then, much was made of her Southern Baptist roots and her stated intention to remain a virgin until marriage. She was apple-pie American goodness with a side order of unthreatening sexiness. It was a marketing man's wet dream.

Yet nine years later, here is Britney bleary-eyed and puffy-faced, having lost her family, her friends and her self-respect, a woman whose first response to handing over custody of her children was to go to her favourite tanning salon in Bel Air, trailed by hundreds of paparazzi. What became of that teenager who seemed to embody Southern wholesomeness and sweet girl-next-door naivety? Where did it go wrong for Britney Spears?

Britney Jean Spears was born in Kentwood, Louisiana, a small, rural town of clapboard houses and conservative tastes. The second of three children raised by Baptist parents - she has an older brother, Bryan, 29, and a younger sister, Jamie Lynn, 16 - she was marked out for fame from the beginning. Her mother, Lynne, a second-grade teacher, exerted an extraordinary influence, signing Britney up for jazz, ballet and tap lessons at the age of three. Soon, she was being entered for gymnastic competitions, regional dance festivals and beauty pageants at the age of four in a peculiar emulation of adult sexuality - all crimped blond hair, pink lipgloss and cutesy charm. By the time she was eight, she had an agent. At 11, she had relocated to Lakeland, Florida, to become a regular presenter on the Disney Channel's all-singing, all-dancing New Mickey Mouse Club, where her similarly precocious co-stars included Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake and the Oscar-nominated actor Ryan Gosling.

The sources I talk to say that Lynne's single-minded determination to make something of her daughter caused tensions in her marriage to building contractor Jamie Spears. The couple were rumoured to have divorced when Spears was 12, but so focused were they on their daughter's nascent stardom that they hushed up their separation for six years in case it jeopardised her career.

'It seemed strange for a young child to be so confident,' recalls Steve Hood, Spears's childhood dance coach. 'One minute, she would be this mature and serious competitive performer, the next she would switch into being a giggling schoolkid again - but she always acted the star.'

If Spears ever felt conflicted by the tension between her obvious youth and the mature demands of her profession, she did not show it - or she was not allowed to. By the time she was 13, she was being managed by the highly experienced showbiz agent Larry Rudolph, a man so adept at controlling the image of his clients that he was said to have chosen the precise shade of Spears's nail varnish.

A childhood contemporary of Spears who does not wish to be named, but who was also part of the Disney TV stable, tells me that Rudolph was 'obsessed with protecting this innocent, clean-cut image because it was what everyone was buying into'.

'I was with Larry the first time that Britney flicked [a finger] at the paparazzi and he just flipped,' she says, when we meet in her plush West Hollywood apartment, all cream carpets and ornamental Buddhas. 'He was straightaway on his cellphone setting up chat show appearances for her so that she could apologise.'

And so the marketing of Britney Spears began in earnest. Her debut 1998 album, ...Baby One More Time, was artfully constructed to garner maximum attention. From the teasing provocation of her schoolgirl uniform in the video for the accompanying single right through to the album's cover art featuring a close-up of Spears with her hands clasped in prayer, the slick packaging did everything it could to exploit the titillating contradiction between Britney's burgeoning sexuality and her insistence on remaining chaste till marriage.

'Unlike Christina Aguilera, Britney has never really been a great singer,' says a source close to her former management team over lunch at a discreet sushi restaurant off La Cienega Boulevard. 'But she's a great performer with a series of obvious assets. The virgin thing was a complete fabrication. It was selling an image that people could have hope in.'

In reality, Spears had, since 1998, been dating Justin Timberlake, a fellow Mickey Mouse Club presenter who later became a member of the American boyband 'N Sync and a highly successful solo artist. But throughout the course of their four-year relationship, she was also, according to the industry insiders who speak to me on condition of anonymity, sleeping with several other men. One of them was reputed to be the choreographer Wade Robson, who co-ordinated stage shows for both Spears and 'N Sync and counted himself as one of Timberlake's closest friends.

'Wade started getting a guilty conscience and told Justin in 2002, and that's when Justin broke up with her,' says the management source, prodding a piece of vegetable tempura with his chopsticks. 'She was very psychologically affected by it: she was in tears a lot of the time, didn't want to get out of bed but her publicists were pushing her to promote her tour.'

As if to reassure herself of her own attractiveness, Spears started taking more creative control, injecting her image and her sound with self-conscious wantonness. On the music video for 'I'm a Slave 4 U', taken from her eponymous third album, Britney, she gyrated like a souped-up Pamela Anderson wearing little more than a pink bra and a sheen of baby oil. At the 2002 MTV Music Awards, she shared an on-stage kiss with Madonna.

Off stage, her behaviour was becoming considerably more erratic. In 2004, she married childhood friend Jason Alexander during a drunken night in Las Vegas. The omnipresent Larry Rudolph managed to get the marriage annulled within 55 hours, issuing statements that it had all simply been 'a joke that went too far'.

But other aspects of her demeanour were less easy to dismiss as humorous high jinks. One of her former business associates talks to me at length about Spears's disquieting facial tics and obsessive-compulsive behaviour - characteristics that he says have been concealed from her fan base for several years. 'I remember walking along the street with her and she had all these facial twitches, like head wobbles, that she couldn't control,' he says. 'She will talk about hearing voices and have conversations with herself in weird languages and tell herself to shut up. It's like she has multiple personalities. When you sit down with Britney, she'll focus on you for two minutes at most. She'll start jiggling her leg, then her hand will start tapping on the table, then she stands up and has to be somewhere else.'

She has also, I'm told, developed a phobia of people touching her, supposedly as a reaction to the constant pawing of obsessed fans. When I ask Ruben Garay, the founder of the now defunct World of Britney website, what her attitude is towards her fans, he pushes back his baseball cap and raises his eyebrows. 'Britney has never really cared about her fans,' he says, with a sigh. 'We ran a competition on the website to meet with Britney Spears at her album launch party in LA [in November 2005]. It was all agreed with her management. We said that whoever won would have to fly themselves to California and, in the end, two guys flew in all the way from Ohio buying tickets on a maxed-out credit card.

'On the evening, we were standing by the bar waiting for her. She comes in, walks right by and passes straight through us without saying a thing. It was unbelievable. I just thought: "Show some respect." But she doesn't give a shit about her fans. She thinks the world revolves around her, she's very selfish, very self-absorbed and all that nice Southern girl shtick is total bullshit.'

But the Britney branding truly began to unravel when Rudolph quit as her manager. The apparent trigger was Spears's relationship with her backing dancer, Kevin Federline, who left his eight-months pregnant girlfriend to be with the singer. Friends tell me that Rudolph issued an ultimatum: it was either him or Federline. Britney married Federline in 2004 and Rudolph promptly ended their 10-year working relationship. He was reinstated after Spears announced her divorce two years later, but she fired him again in April, supposedly blaming Rudolph for insisting she go to rehab.

It was to mark the beginning of a gradual isolation for Spears. Insiders say that she began to mistrust even her closest associates, frustrated by the amount of control they exerted and simultaneously convinced that they were trying to exploit her for their own financial ends. Ruth Hilton, the deputy editor of the LA-based celebrity weekly OK! magazine, says that it got to a stage 'where she didn't realise how much her team was her'.

'I don't doubt that people have taken advantage of her and she feels that keenly, but she's gone from one extreme of being totally overworked to being completely without focus,' Ruth says, leaning back in her chair in her airy office overlooking the thrumming bustle of Wilshire Boulevard. 'You have to listen to people around you sometimes even if you don't want to hear what they have to say.'

Spears became increasingly needy at a time when her constant demands were paradoxically driving people away. A friend of Laura Wasser, Britney's former lawyer, recalls: 'Laura would be out at dinner and she would get 20 calls from Britney about every little decision. It was "y'all this, y'all that". She'd even want her advice on what to wear. Laura quit a few weeks ago because she just couldn't take it any more.'

Over the past two years, Spears's management team has fallen to pieces. She has either fired employees for trivial reasons - bodyguard Tony Barretto said he was sacked because he failed to pick up a hat she had dropped - or driven them to such levels of exasperation that they reportedly felt forced to walk out. She fired her publicist, Leslie Sloane Zelnick, last year, while her new manager, Jeff Kwatinetz, one of the most respected agents in Hollywood, is said to have dropped her after her lacklustre MTV performance, citing 'current circumstances [that] prevent us from properly doing our job'.

Whereas previously, Britney's growing unpredictability had been ringfenced from the outside world, now details of her emotional instability started leaking into the public arena. The situation was exacerbated by her highly publicised divorce from Kevin Federline in 2006 and the ensuing custody battle over their two children, Sean Preston, two, and Jayden James, one.

The copious mud-slinging included damning testimony from Barretto in which he claimed that Spears snorted cocaine in nightclubs, was under the influence of drugs in front of her children and subsisted on a daily diet of Special K and cans of Red Bull. Barretto was allegedly instructed not to sweat or eat in her presence.

Other sources tell me that Spears is addicted to everything from tanning salons and cigarettes to Jack Daniel's and Coke. Several witnesses say that they have seen her strip off in front of them for no reason or go to the lavatory with the door open in front of total strangers without any hint of embarrassment. 'The exhibitionism I think partly comes from her desperation to be thought attractive,' says a music industry acquaintance. 'She's been taught her whole life to use her sexuality as a marketing tool, so she goes out without wearing underwear and flashes to the paparazzi, almost as self-affirmation.'

Indeed, one singer-songwriter tells me that when Spears goes to Winston's bar on Santa Monica Boulevard, the bouncers are instructed by her entourage to let in only male guests. Her pole-dancing video for the forthcoming single 'Gimme More' was allegedly rejected by her record label, Jive, for being too provocative. And last week, rumours surfaced of a videotaped sexual encounter, filmed while Spears was holidaying in Hawaii earlier this year.

Quite what the effect of all this is on her children is a matter of fevered conjecture. 'There was a time I thought she was going to hurt the kids,' Barretto said in a newspaper interview last month. 'She'd put the kids at risk by driving on the wrong side of the road and into oncoming traffic for no reason at all.' When I put this to one of her party organisers, they concur: 'She doesn't know how to be a parent. She'll come back from clubs in the middle of the night and wake them up and want to play with them because she's got no idea of what it means to establish a routine.

'She wants to spend all day in bed. Sometimes, she'll walk from her bed to the kitchen to pick up a bag of Cheetos, she'll eat half, then drop the rest on the floor and it will stay there for weeks unless someone else picks it up. The children will walk through the mess - she won't even notice. She doesn't care.'

It seems self-evident to draw the link between Spears's own upbringing and her haphazard attitude towards her children. Having been a child star, working professionally from such a young age, she arguably has little concept of what a normal childhood should consist of. Nor does she choose to seek the advice of her own parents: when Lynne and Jamie Spears tried to book her into rehab against her will, Britney cut them both out of her life.

As a result, former associates tell me that Spears has no reference point as to what constitutes normal behaviour and no guidance from people with her best interests at heart. Having grown up in the limelight, with an assortment of flunkies on hand to do whatever she desired, she now seems to be struggling to make her own decisions in isolation. But she is unused to being on her own. Tellingly, she is said to be afraid to spend the night by herself in her seven-bedroom, £4.25m Malibu home and employs a coterie of staff to keep her company, including two 'sober companions' - former addicts who act as informal counsellors - at the rate of £500 each a day. Barretto said that she keeps a scrapbook called 'My New Friends Photo Album', which she constantly updates. Yet the tragedy is that many of these new friends are self-serving hangers-on - or 'enablers' in LA-speak - who enjoy their flirtation with the limelight and who encourage Spears to do what makes her happy, rather than what makes her better.

It is perhaps unsurprising that Spears attracts such an entourage: despite all her recent troubles, she remains very rich - court papers lodged by Federline's legal team suggest that she enjoys an income of around £370,000 a month.

Friendless, isolated and with an increasingly loosened grip on reality, Britney's troubled state of mind has become ever more disturbingly apparent. At a magazine photo shoot in August for OK!, she went into meltdown. 'She decided she wanted to eat chicken and she was wearing this beautiful designer pink silk dress,' says Ruth Hilton. 'When the stylist asked her to take it off while she was eating and put on a dressing gown, she wiped her greasy hands all the way down the front of it and all the way down the back. She was stubbing cigarettes out on the floor. She had brought along her new puppy called London, and there was a £3,500 Zac Posen gown on the floor in the bedroom that she had tried on, and the dog relieved himself on it.'

After a few minutes posing for the actual shoot, Spears walked out with no explanation, taking with her £10,000 worth of clothing and jewellery that she has never returned. 'The photographer tried to talk her back in, but she just wasn't with it,' says Hilton. 'There was no recognition of how erratic her behavior was. She didn't really understand that she'd done anything wrong.'

So where will it end? Family members are said to be extremely concerned that the loss of her children could further endanger her physical and mental health. Her record company, meanwhile, is insisting that Spears's new album will silence the naysayers when it is released next month. 'It's easy to forget that Britney is all about the music,' says Teresa LaBarbera Whites, the senior vice-president of A&R at Spears's record label, Jive. 'She put in 150 per cent and it's a great record, full of the freshest, hottest and best beats out there.'

But however good the new album, however upbeat the promotion and however glossy the packaging, it is doubtful that this will be enough to lift Spears out of the quagmire. Behind the airbrushed image, there exists a young woman with an extremely contradictory attitude towards the centrifugal force of global fame, whose celebrity has proved to be both the cause of her ruin and her raison d'etre. Ruthlessly marketed from early childhood, she has lived most of her adult life as a sort of public performance. While Brand Britney might have been her undoing, it was also her identity. For all that the outside world wants Britney Spears to confront her demons, perhaps the saddest realisation is that she has yet to confront herself.

Back on track: Exclusive preview of the new album

In eight years Britney Spears has sold 75 million albums, become one of the best-selling women in American music history, won countless awards, been named the world's most powerful celebrity by Forbes and sold millions of concert tickets. It's useful to bear these accomplishments in mind when the topic of Britney's uselessness as a popstar rears its head.

Certainly those looking for career apocalypse (as they were prior to Britney's last album, before she delivered 'Toxic') will be dismayed to hear that, on the basis of tracks available at the time of going to press, her new - as yet untitled - album's pretty good: a spunky and sonically adventurous collection of electronic pop tracks. Beyond the groove-fuelled but reassuringly hooky lead single 'Gimme More', one of the standout tracks is 'Piece Of Me', a crunchy cry of self-justification produced by 'Toxic' knob-twiddlers Bloodshy & Avant. By contrast 'Heaven On Earth', crafted by 'Gimme More' producer Danja, is a hi-NRG Moroder-esque dance track whose lyrics veer more into the territory of generic love song fluff, while 'Break The Ice' is an incredible cross between Nelly Furtado's 'Maneater' and Prince's 'When Doves Cry'. The icy, downbeat and melodic number 'State Of Grace' is another highlight on an album whose final tracklisting is yet to be confirmed - one brilliant track is based around a huge 1980s sample, which may or may not be cleared in time for the album's release.

This is a style of pop music which only works in a mainstream dominated by guitars and R&B when it is forced through by a megastar of Britney's stature. It failed in the UK for Rachel Stevens and in the states for Hilary Duff, but they are both uncompelling popstars. Britney, as the ultimate modern pop performer, looks like she might just pull it off.

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