Britney: Inside the Dream
Steve Dennis
Britney Spears – the Princess of Pop – is making a comeback, and there isn't a person out there who hasn't heard about it. In this, a fully up-to-date and authoritative biography, Steve Dennis reveals all there is to know about the much-loved star.Hitting our radios for the first time in 1998 with '…Baby One More Time', Britney Spears quickly became a pop idol. Now, at just 27 years of age, she has racked up five number one albums, seven top-ten singles and seven sell-out world tours, as well having performed on stage with both Madonna and Michael Jackson. Just a decade after breaking onto to scene, she has become nothing short of a pop legend.Her private life, however, has not been so easy. In 2004 Britney famously married a childhood friend at The Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas; since then her personal life has seemingly been thrown into turmoil. In the last five years she has had numerous failed relationships and endured a very public divorce and custody battle - all in the full glare of the international media.Drawing on exclusive interviews with those closest to the superstar, Britney: Inside the Dream is a engrossing portrait of fascinating star. A frank biography, with no detail spared, it reveals the real Britney Spears, like you’ve never known her before.
Steve Dennis
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Helen Keller, US educator
(1880-1968)
Contents
Introduction:The Search for Brit-Brit (#u9e1c6921-5d93-5913-bba4-6d3576417799)
Chapter 1: Home Sweet Home (#ua2313685-e53e-52d8-adea-bafae005cc6c)
Chapter 2: The Inner Child (#uaade6fcf-81b3-576c-b76c-c6989c1fa3bb)
Chapter 3: Sins of the Father (#ue4dbf456-56f3-5725-885d-96f5d6237f3f)
Chapter 4: Bridges to Stardom (#ua3be7b06-a5cd-5b15-b505-f28750b67284)
Chapter 5: The Disney Dream (#ubad768d8-51b8-5a09-966f-f9a7cf925cc3)
Chapter 6: Teen Pop Sensation (#u4201f8fe-86fc-55c1-b59b-ebfe039707c8)
Chapter 7: The Making of Britney (#u978ebccb-ac84-5435-a4c9-38f935af4cab)
Chapter 8: Backstage: In the Zone (#ue2cbbb94-dc88-5f2b-a5b0-93c83e22b349)
Chapter 9: Love and Loathing In … (#u5daa0050-472c-5e92-8b51-fea3ca5ff6c2)
Chapter 10: It’s Her Prerogative (#uc6ca5693-0086-54b8-930c-0f5af2bd67a2)
Chapter 11: Little Girl Lost (#ua4283540-f0c7-5112-9e8a-7ab96929f060)
Chapter 12: The Self-Destruct (#u6bf656f4-ad47-503c-885c-0fc308a1d5fb)
Chapter 13: Through the Lens (#u2ab6b943-f8c9-5370-9805-c48d94e63666)
Chapter 14: Rescue Mission (#ucb61bcb4-f3a1-5cad-ba5d-ac87c8ea4c82)
Chapter 15: The Resurrection (#u4b0dd6ab-ccd2-5b9f-9919-cb09a5bf9a8a)
Chapter 16: Britney … One More Time (#u4daabdd2-b5d0-524c-8292-420e26d7fecb)
Author’s Research Note (#ue9de18ca-1064-5b0d-b487-42714f946ccc)
Acknowledgements (#u23d408ed-90f4-5321-ad95-174360e48337)
Copyright (#u69760618-b5b1-5a2b-8b01-f78173af8877)
About the Publisher (#u30532a71-fa56-599f-b8a9-ca719e542ab9)
Introduction The Search for Brit-Brit (#ubf154d7a-bbbc-52c9-8b9c-8afb7fb6cbcd)
‘It is so weird how stories are told. There is your side, my side, and the truth. Somebody has to figure it out. I guess we will never really understand or figure out life completely. That’s God’s job. I can’t wait to meet him—or her.’
–Britney, 2007
LOCATION: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
‘You’re wanting to do what?’
‘Understand the real Britney…the human behind the brand,’ I repeated.
The music-industry man seated opposite eyed me curiously, and his cynical smile suggested he’d already viewed some greenness behind my intentions.
‘Like pulling back the curtain to reveal the true Wizard of Oz?’ he said, ‘As easy as that, right?’
He’s among the few who truly know Britney Spears, and was an integral part of her set-up long before the conservatorship became an issue, and long before Sam Lutfi, Adnan Ghalib et al. arrived on the scene. That, perhaps, also explains why he viewed me with suspicion as I fished for co-operation, and he fished for motive.
We’re at the Mondrian, an all-white boutique hotel where, apparently, it’s hip to be seen off the Sunset Strip in LA. And the sun is indeed setting, dunked by the sky into the Pacific Ocean, 17 miles away, tinting the skyline orange. This used to be a favourite haunt of Britney, with the glass-backed patio of the ‘Sky Bar’ providing a commanding view from the foot of the Hollywood Hills, overlooking a metropolis fading into night; a darkness that helps mask the ordinariness of the concrete basin which falls away down the hill and stretches to the 10 Freeway and beyond. That same view provided a distraction during an awkward silence, which I broke by saying: ‘I want to know her reality.’
Now, he really did scoff.
‘Reality as defined by you is incomprehensible to Britney. An artificial world is her normal. Outside of that, she is lost—completely and totally lost. Great kid, great girl—but lost.’
This meeting has taken weeks to set up and the door into Britney’s world is merely ajar, with the chain still on. And this is just the outer-ring to an understandably cagey group of people who guard Britney Corporation Inc as if it were the one bank that can never be allowed to fail. But I’m determined to keep my foot in the door in this attempt to get closer to understanding a fragile colossus within the music industry. Her image might well be a parade of many revitalised masks, and the headlines may have echoed the management’s talk of ‘comebacks’, but the smoke and mirrors of show business shouldn’t lull anyone into a false sense of believing everything is suddenly okay again. The act may be back, the persona rescued, but the human being inside remains as brittle and vulnerable as ever. Behind the hype is a woman who is searching for direction, screaming to be understood, listened to and allowed to breathe as someone other than Britney Spears the Performer.
There is a barely concealed fragility to this free spirit, who finds herself encased within a micro-managed structure built by her own dreams. To all intents and purposes, she is a robotic brand functioning on remote control; steered by managers Larry Rudolph and Adam Leber in consultation with Jive Records, controlled as a person—and by order of the courts—by her father, Jamie Spears.
This is her recent reality, cocooned within a legal ‘conservatorship’—a guardianship where responsibility for all corners of her life and decision-making rest with her father, in consultation with others. It is, of course, the consequence of a very public meltdown, effectively being made a ward of court under the guardianship of adults who ‘know best’ because Britney was not deemed to have the mental capacity to make compos mentis choices in life, according to a judge. In her 28th year, she seems to enjoy all the rights and freedoms of a twelve-year-old; an adult woman forced into a child-like situation, policed by her own father. In 2008, she was granted ‘pocket-money’ and ‘allowed’ a credit card of her own. Dad Jamie was even permitted to comb her mobile telephone bills, checking who she’s called or texted. He still does.
In any other life, these would be the traits of a possessive controller. But under a court-appointed conservatorship, this is the permitted interventionist control exercised to ensure the life of an iconic figure remains on track. Its juxtaposition is hard to fathom alongside the pop superstar who has sold 84 million records worldwide, and has been crying ‘freedom’ since 2004.
In early 2009, the terms of her conservatorship were made indefinite, as her dad was made permanent guardian. Britney has struggled with this set-up as it further reinforces her belief that fame has become her prison. We are told conservatorship is a price she must pay for her own welfare and to redeem a career that was spectacularly imploding throughout 2007-8. Hers was an infamous ‘meltdown’, played out in agonising slow motion on the public stage before being dissected, shaken and tipped upside down by the world’s media. Britney Spears seems to perform, live and self-destruct within a commercial snow globe for the entertainment, prurience and profit of others. But what cost to her soul? What about the human being inside?
The man I’m speaking with at the Mondrian leans forward, seeking to educate me.
‘People get it so wrong. Look, she has a huge heart and is so sweet. But there’s also a dark side, and it’s not of her making. The girl’s got shit going on and everyone’s dealing with it the best they can. Tough love harms no one when all they can do is harm themselves. So you want to find the real Britney? Good luck, bro’! Even the woman herself ain’t found that one out yet.’
To be fair, he didn’t say much more, but his impassioned testimony was typical of the consensus encountered over the past eight months traversing the show-business landscape of Hollywood, the southern terrains of Louisiana, then Florida, and the roads of a chaotic childhood.
People were keen to assist with the depiction of a ‘true soul’.
‘No one’s troubles should reflect on who they really are,’ said one backstage ally from the MTV Video Music Awards, ‘but the problem with Brit is that her troubles went public, and that projected an image that was a travesty to the essence of who she is.’
Wherever I go, she is talked about as someone who is immensely likeable and great fun. It seems the harsher judgements passed down on Britney were, in the main, generated by media commentators and faceless bloggers. Such is the consequence of the human spirit when constructed into a brand that people view as faulty product. But the one thing I’ve learned is that no one is tougher on Britney than Britney herself. Within the privacy of her own counsel, she sits with self-berating judgement, keen to learn lessons and remind herself to ‘keep thinking positive’. Positive thinking is her shield from the dark moods that can consume her.
There is also an emotional depth to Britney that few appreciate. She might not be someone who can easily articulate herself, and she may just be a simple girl from a small town, but in her own mind she finds a simple connection with words, lyrics and poetry, which she expresses on paper. It is her way of making sense of the madness. In moments of quiet, she’ll analyse everything, then toy with words, which she scribbles in her journals in looping handwriting, attempting to reflect her mood of the moment. She is passionate about maintaining a journal—it’s her one true confidante.
Britney is today a young woman and mother-of-two searching for an identity away from her music and fame. And yet she’s searching for her own sense of self, while simultaneously fighting back to redeem the brand.
Hollywood celebrates ‘comeback kids’ who once stared into the abyss, like actors Robert Downey Jr. and Mickey Rourke but few redemptive stories are as compelling as the rise, fall and fight back of Britney Spears. Her life has commanded a level of curiosity that refuses to loosen its grip or avert its gaze. In 2008, Yahoo announced she was the most popular name entered into its search engine—in a year that saw the momentous election of Barack Obama. It is evidence, if such were needed, of a fascination of Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe proportions.
‘She is by far the most powerful celebrity on this planet,’ was how she was once described by ABC’s chat show host and American Music Awards compere Jimmy Kimmel.
Anyone with an ounce of compassion cannot help but wish Britney all the best in her current resurrection. She has clawed her way back from the edge, pulled by the rope of people’s good wishes. No doubt such public empathy is drawn because an entire generation has grown up alongside her music from 1999 onwards. In America, the pre-teen set of the nineties shared its pubescent years with her as she broadcast daily into their front rooms via The All New Mickey Mouse Club.
Most likely, her ardent following is because Britney embodies the dreams within every girl who has ever posed with a hairbrush for a microphone in front of the mirror that becomes a TV camera. She represents a billion dreams with which those dreamers identify. And then, of course, there are the boys who became men, entranced by the girl in school uniform whose provocative image enticed their equal adulation.
Within the enduring brand that is Britney Spears, the canny marketing that mixes innocence with seduction has ensured that here is an artiste who has been shaped, sold and viewed as all things to all people. She has seemingly transported everyone on a journey into a collective fantasy about her dance with the devil called fame.
But it’s also the tale of that old adage, ‘Be Careful What You Wish For…’ because no one, let alone a teenage girl, is sufficiently wired to cope with such impossible expectations, not to mention the rabid attention of the paparazzi. Few families would be strong enough to sustain without injury the ‘tornado’ that leaves ‘debris scattered all over’ as mum Lynne Spears described it in her memoir, Through The Storm.
As Vanessa Gregoriadis wrote in the February 2008 edition of Rolling Stone magazine: ‘More than any other star today, Britney epitomizes the crucible of fame for the famous: loving it, hating it and never quite being able to stop it from destroying you.’ Such nightmares seemed impossible at the start of a story where the précis is simple enough: an angelic teenager from Kentwood, Louisiana, bursts onto the pop scene with ‘…Baby, One More Time’ in 1998. A fledgling career goes meteoric and she is crowned the world’s princess of pop. Fame and fortune take their toll and the wheels fall off a once unstoppable juggernaut after Britney marries and soon divorces an ex-dancer called Kevin Federline, mothering two sons, Sean Preston and Jayden James.
Devastated, Britney numbs the pain by keeping occupied, transforming herself into a party girl. She starts to court the paparazzi and rebels against her family, which leads to an infamous head-shaving incident, a mean-looking umbrella attack on photographers and a custody battle with her ex-husband. She then loses her custodial rights until the rock bottom moment plays out on our television screens: Britney being strapped to a gurney and loaded into the back of an ambulance, looking lost and bewildered as TV-news helicopters beamed spotlights from above and paparazzi trailed in pursuit. Cornered by her own demons, she had nowhere to turn but the psychiatric ward of an American hospital. It was a physical and mental breakdown not afforded the usual rights of dignity like a bad episode of the Jerry Springer Show.
But it is the underlying causes, the elements not readily visible, which drive this story and provide an insight, which in turn helps us understand much of what has been played out. It is these hidden factors which this book attempts to explore within the unravelling story: where Britney came from, what drives her, what makes her tick, what has rendered her so fragile and what circumstances ultimately conspired to de-rail her. It is a raw story so no one should expect the saccharine taste of brand-driven publications. There are no villains in this story—and there are no heroes either. But I sincerely believe there’s a huge amount of people wishing for a happy outcome to this endless saga and it is within this collective hope that the redemption of Britney Spears is rooted—and this book was born.
LOCATION: KENTWOOD, LOUISIANA
The hit song is in full-stride: ‘I’m runnin’ this like-like-like a circus…’ Six men sit at a bar, barely noticing Britney’s lyrics. Two somewhat inebriated women close their eyes and sway on the empty dance floor, paying homage.
The song continues: ‘Yeah, like a what? Like-like-like a circus…’
I’m inside The Dub bar room in the Louisiana backwater of Kentwood, Britney’s hometown, where there are no hip places to be seen. Outside, there’s just pitch darkness. Inside, Billy and Sue from Starlight Entertainment are giving ‘Circus’ their best shot.
‘Y’all wanna know Britney?’ shouts the man at the bar, ‘The sweetest kid, sweet as pie. She’s alright, she’s alright. She knows where home is.’
If anywhere is rooting for her, it is Kentwood. It is here that she relaxed ahead of the launch of her 2009 ‘Circus’ tour in New Orleans, and it is here that she’ll head once an expanding worldwide tour wraps. Then, somewhere between here and Los Angeles, Britney will retreat to consider writing an autobiography first teased in the MTV documentary, Britney: For The Record, in December 2008: ‘I’ll have a good book one day…a good, mysterious book.’
Discussions have already taken place with publishers but plans remain on hold. Whether it happens sooner or later, one can only wonder how truly candid such a memoir can be under the control of the brand and the policing circumstances that come attached to her conservatorship. If her expressed attitudes of the past are any measure, Britney might feel like a prisoner writing a letter to the outside world, only for the guards to first check its content.
A true life story is always measured but the written word must be allowed to breathe with honest self-expression. I have some knowledge of the autobiographical market because, ordinarily, I’m a ghost-writer—that person who collaborates with a subject to translate their life into words. In that part-symbiotic, part-parasitic professional relationship between ‘ghost’ and ‘subject’, I’m granted an all-access pass to get under their skin, look through their eyes, get into their heads and capture their voice. It’s been my job for six years now, and has transported me into the world of royalty, sport and music as a detached observer who has vicariously witnessed life and media storms from within the ‘fame bubble’, always able to walk away yet often stunned by its intensity and ferocity. It is a perspective which has taught me the vast difference between the sold or reported ‘image’ of a celebrity, and the truth of the actual person; the distinction between reputation and true character.
There is, of course, a sliding scale of ‘celebrity’ from A through to Z-list. But Britney’s profile belongs in another stratosphere entirely, entering the realm of the iconic, where very few names reside. As much as many high-profile individuals talk about fame, few know what this level entails. It attaches twenty or thirty paparazzi lenses to your coat-tails, every day of the week, following and scrutinising your every move; a Home Office curfew-tag that diminishes personal freedom to such an extent that the only place to find true sanctuary is corralled by the four walls of your home or hotel suite.
Fame zooms in and magnifies every expression, foible, flaw or mistake and holds it against you for life. It clocks every bad skin day, every dimple of cellulite or extra pound on the hip or thigh. If you beg, scream or cry to be left alone for just one moment, it captures this and turns it into a headline of weeping, crisis, heartache or woe. Victoria Beckham once summed up this reality during a conversation at the World Cup in Germany 2006 when she said: ‘It is like a jacket that’s stitched to your back forever. Once you’ve put it on, there’s no taking it off.’
As a ghost-writer I hope to bring about an empathy that belongs more on the celebrity side of the fence, informed by the books I have written, the environments in which I have found myself, and the trusted circles into which I’ve been invited. As I’ve discovered, Britney’s circle is harder to get invited into but I have met her once, for about ten seconds, back in October 2003.
She was a guest on Channel 4’s Richard Se Judy show. A client had just finished recording that afternoon’s programme and we were in the Green Room for after-show drinks. Both Richard and Judy, and executive producer Amanda Ross, were on their toes, awaiting the arrival of the pop princess herself, ready to present her with a pink designer handbag and matching bracelet. I found myself waiting, both fascinated and curious, with a small group of pre-teens at the window overlooking the car park. I knew she’d arrived when a presidential-like cavalcade swept in, and this 22-year-old stepped out of an SUV with what can only be described as a ‘Ready Brek glow’. Her star-like radiance was somewhat obscured by the rolling bubble of hefty bodyguards in which she was cocooned. I moved into the corridor near the front entrance and she couldn’t have been more gracious with everyone. I said ‘Hello’, she said ‘Hi’ and that was the full extent of our memorable chat, which in my world has gone down as The Day I Met Britney.
I wasn’t the only one rendered giddily star-struck that day. Just ask former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. She, too, had been a guest, promoting her memoir. But when she saw her dressing room was adjacent to Britney, Bill Clinton’s hardened chief diplomat suddenly came over all soft. She asked that a photo be taken of her door nameplate next to that of ‘Britney Spears’ to impress her grandchildren. Such was the power of Britney’s fame.
With this book, it is my intention to reach behind the curtain and into that dressing room: to peel off the mask and discover the person inside. But a true understanding of character requires an expert analysis of both Britney’s childhood and life, and I’m no expert in such psychological matters. With this in mind, I have consulted a psychotherapist known for her spiritual and compassionate approach in dealing with clients in Hollywood. Like actors, psychotherapists are ten a penny in this town. But within the quantity, I’ve found quality via informed recommendation. This lady, who has clients in the entertainment industry, cannot provide an in-depth and 100 per cent accurate analysis that would ordinarily be derived from one-on-one sessions. However, within the discoveries embedded in Britney’s life story and the information gleaned from discreet sources, the insights that emerge will, I hope, encourage a compassion that gets people thinking about this story in terms of Britney the person, not Britney the act.
For four hours a week, for three months, I sat on the psychotherapist’s couch ‘as Britney’ in an attempt to get inside her head, and look through her eyes, based on all the information that was collated. Therapy, by its nature, is challenging because it often faces a wall of denial in the truth that it asks individuals to face. One thing I can state categorically: therapy—and the insights it stirs—provides more hope for Britney than returning her to the stage.
Of course, in Hollywood, it is the entertainment value that counts. Publicists and promoters are retained to prop up the facades. These are the ‘The PR Generals’ employed to defend, mitigate, deny and obfuscate when human frailty starts to unstitch a carefully woven celebrity image. Britney’s cry for help in 2007-8 meant her image fell apart at the seams. No longer could she maintain the act, leaving behind elements of truth that only a psychotherapist can properly discern.
For obvious professional reasons, the psychotherapist has asked not to be identified. It is, she says, the insights that matter, not the messenger. As you read on, you’ll notice her guidance and opinion throughout, marked by indented paragraphs, and in italics. This differentiation is deliberately designed to set apart my voice and that of the expert.
Aside from her couch, I have also sat with and interviewed the people who best know Britney, having worked with or shared friendship with her, witnessing the person at close quarters backstage. You’ll note, too, that many discreet sources have asked not to be identified. Such is the level of paranoia within Britney’s controlled world. But through their eyes and unique accounts, I hope a better picture emerges of the girl still struggling to be a woman as she continues to hold our fascination.
Britney wants to be loved and is desperate to be happy. If she can’t say it out loud, she expresses it in the big heart shapes that she doodles on paper and the large smileys she draws. That’s her one aim in life: big hearts, permanent smiles. In her 2002 publication, Stages, she said that if anyone really wants to understand who she is, they should go talk to the people who know her best.
With this in mind, I set off for America to explore the life of the idol that friends simply refer to as ‘Brit-Brit’.
Steve Dennis
Venice Beach 2222
Los Angeles 2009
1 Home Sweet Home (#ubf154d7a-bbbc-52c9-8b9c-8afb7fb6cbcd)
‘Kentwood’s in my heart. I’m a country girl.’
–Britney, 1994
They call it the ‘Boon Docks’—the middle of nowhere. It is only when you have stood in the rural remoteness of Kentwood, in the vastness of Louisiana’s pine-lands, that you begin to understand two things: the very obscurity from which Britney Spears was plucked and the sheer determination required to even get noticed by the show-business radar. Britney might as well have screamed her dreams from the middle of the desert.
The entertainment worlds of Los Angeles and New York seem light years away on the country roads and when walking beside the creeks. This region is a flat, sparsely populated landscape of pastures and woodland, broken up by little pockets of hamlet towns, connected by narrow back-roads; sandy veins webbing across endless greenery.
Modern-day life is serviced by Interstate 55, running north from its starting point on New Orleans’ outskirts in a 70-minute drive to Kentwood, transporting visitors deep in-land. The 55 is the ‘hurricane evacuation route’ out of the city that remains haunted by Hurricane Katrina but aside from such emergency circumstances, there seems little reason to even contemplate a visit—unless you’re a die-hard Britney fan or a member of the paparazzi.
Louisiana is a state sandwiched by Texas to the west and Mississippi to the east—a thick, giant ‘L’ on the Gulf of Mexico coast, with stifling summer heat that can reach 38°C (100°F) within 90 per cent humidity. Kentwood lies on the top ridge of the L’s lower section. There, it relaxes in its rocking chair on a state-line porch, with Mississippi out front and Louisiana out back, minding its own business in the twilight zone between states. Stay too long, not far from the Mississippi River, and you’ll dream of Huckleberry Finn wandering by, thumbs braced in dungarees, spitting dust into the dirt. Set against Britney’s conservatorship case, it is something of an irony that Huck himself searched for freedom away from the guardianship of Widow Douglas.
First-time visitors almost certainly rock up with preconceived notions of Gone with the Wind and then struggle to match the reality with the fiction, or fathom the idealised version of what Britney Spears’ home town is supposed to be like. Kentwood is part of the Britney legend, the first facade encountered. Over the years, its projected image is that of a clean-living, God-fearing, conservative-church town, which upholds the strictest Christian values. Such a description conjures up an image of a joyous Britney running down the hill in her Sunday best, like Laura Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie. But the truth is a little different.
In fact, Kentwood’s roads travel a surface-deep reality covered with asphalt PR on one hand—and then the more raw, less polished under-belly; the scratched truths before the gloss is applied. This is the beginning of a thread of a noticeable show-don’t-reveal pattern, from grass roots to celebrity pedestal.
Kentwood is home to just under 600 families, according to the last consensus. The Spears are one of them. Population is barely above the 2,000 mark, the average income is estimated to be around $17,000 (about £12,000) and the average house price is $70,000 (about £40,000). It is a hardworking, low-income town—deeply human, truly organic.
If you blinked coasting north along Interstate 55, you’d miss its entry point off Exit 61—the last exit before the border with Mississippi, 5 miles away. Liverpool lies to the left, Kentwood to the right, turning onto the local Route 38. In many respects, it’s like driving into a location that time forgot; a place caught between the interstate and the tracks of the Central Illinois railroad that cuts through en route to Chicago.
Three budget stores—Dollar General, Family Dollar and Super Dollar—come up on the right, alongside a local supermarket and volunteer fire station. Further into town, there is Kentwood Cafe, Connie’s Jewellers, Schillings Pharmacy and two small banks. There is a store that sells guns, ammunition…and toys, and then a truck and tractor parts shop. Almost all retail shops are metal-fronted, constructed of corrugated iron with metal roofs. It is a cheaper, quicker way to build, and these roofs will better withstand the storms that often threaten. Residential streets don’t have names, but letters of the alphabet: Avenue A, Avenue B, Avenue C, Avenue D and so on, with not a two-storey house in sight. Most homes are set back from the roads on scraggy grassland: ranch-style bungalows, ‘double-wide’ mobile homes or ‘cracker-shacks’—rickety-looking structures built from plywood and elevated on brick-built stilts. Everyone else lives on farms or bungalows within the mass acreage of Tangipahoa Parish. Wheel-less cars and truck shells have taken root where they rust. It becomes instantly clear that this is the lower-end of the socio-economic spectrum in the rural US, and the poor relation to Hammond (26 miles away), McComb (15 miles) and Amite (10 miles).
Two main roads dissect Kentwood: the 38 travelling east to west and feeding off the Interstate, and Highway 51 running south to north to the state line with ‘Ole Missy’. Their meeting point creates the only crossroads with a single over-head stoplight that sways in a stiff breeze. A traffic jam is when four cars wait on red. It’s at this crossroads where the paparazzi loiter with intent.
‘It’s not hard to pick out the Spears’ family’ said one snapper. ‘You see Lynne’s white Land Rover or a Lexus on roads where everyone else has a GMC or Chevrolet truck, compacts or rust-buckets.’
Turn left at the lights and first right into Main Street and Kentwood’s true decay becomes all too evident. This was once the hub-and-buzz of the parish with a drive-in, cinema, bars and restaurants.
‘People used to come here just to be seen but what y’all seeing now is Kentwood’s slow death,’ said one veteran. He remembers a thriving dairy industry that once supported 200 farms but the arrival of Wal-Mart in surrounding towns soon put milk-plants and dairies out of business. Only 10 dairies are said to survive and for the past 20 years, the town has been in gradual decline. Today, Main Street is the thoroughfare of a ghost town. Not one shop has survived along its 100-metre stretch. Every window is broken, buildings and roofs have crumbled, the gable-ends collapsed in a pile of brick and debris. Amid this dilapidation and neglect, one starts to question whether the pop princess really does originate from here. It is hard to marry such glaring decay with the impossible wealth of its famous daughter. But then, by way of confirmation, the visitor is confronted by a Disney-like sign on the town’s outskirts reading: ‘Kentwood—Home to Britney Spears’. On first impressions, it seems the townsfolk are mighty proud of their girl who, along with bottled Kentwood Spring Water, put this parish firmly on the map.
Not that it seems to have done much good.
No one has yet been entrepreneurial enough to launch the ‘Britney Tours’ guide but it would be easy enough to organise by following the footsteps that trace back to an ordinary past. What used to be Granny’s Deli is on the street corner where Britney once assisted on weekend mornings; also the First Baptist Church where she sang in public for the first time; her favourite restaurant—Nyla’s Burger Barn; the bungalow of Kentwood Museum which celebrates her roots within its own memorabilia exhibition and then her former childhood home: a brown-brick, ranch-style bungalow with three bedrooms and two bathrooms.
It is tucked away off a side-road, backing onto dense woodland, and lies behind the immaculate Greenlaw Baptist Church, where the family attended Sunday service. There is the backyard where Britney’s trampoline was housed and a driveway where her brother Bryan practised basketball on the hoop above a carport. Often Britney came barrelling out the front door as she performed cartwheels and back-flips on the front lawn, putting on a show for her neighbours, the Stricklands and the Reeds. On the adjacent land, a large, high barn stands derelict in overgrown grass.
Times have, of course, changed and Britney’s fame and fortune allowed her to build her mama a property called ‘Serenity’ and this is where Lynne Spears continues to reside, 6 miles away. There is also a detached guest-house for when Britney visits. Serenity is a piece of Beverly Hills built in a backwater of Louisiana, providing a permanent reminder of the dreams that can exist beyond Kentwood’s horizons. This immense home would be an ostentatious eyesore if it were built in the town’s centre, but it is discreetly hidden away in 7 acres of pine woodland, set off a narrow country road.
It also proves one truth about Kentwood life for the Spears clan: no matter how successful life might appear, there is no leaving this foundational bedrock. Here, they are tethered by generational roots that have grown deep into the red earth, bound by a sense of community that makes everywhere else seem distant and foreign. Whatever glamorous façades are erected, whatever the trappings of wealth afforded, they remain deeply ingrained as country folk.
Behind the church, Britney’s childhood home is tenant-occupied these days, but it’s still the place visitors seek out. Kentwood’s proximity to the state border is evidenced by the property’s very location—a short run, hop, skip and a jump to Mississippi, where the homey pavilion of Nyla’s Burger joint sits on the main road and celebrates its near-neighbour with an entire room decorated in memorabilia. Even the menu boasts: ‘Britney Spears’ favourite family restaurant’.
Then there is Kentwood Museum, a converted funeral parlour near the relic of Main Street, where curator Hazel Morris showcases Britney’s career to date. It was first opened in 1975 to honour veterans of war and Britney’s grandparents take pride of place—Jamie’s dad June Austin Spears, a former sergeant in the US Air Force in the Korean War; and Lynne’s dad Barney Bridges, a technical sergeant with the US Army during World War II. With 66 headshots to a frame and 15 frames around the walls, Kentwood’s contribution to America’s freedom is evident.
In another section of the room, among these men, are reminders of ‘The pin-ups who went to war’: Veronica Lake, Lana Turner, Vivien Leigh, Jane Russell and Barbara Stanwyck. It seems apt that the door adjacent to this display leads through to the area celebrating the modern-day icon: Britney Spears. She dominates three separate rooms and everything the eye sees used to hang on Britney’s walls until dad Jamie decided to loan to the museum in 2000: platinum record plaques, framed magazine covers, family-framed photos, childhood dresses and awards—MTV Awards, American Music Awards, a CD: UK trophy, and awards from Smash Hits and Hollywood Reporter.
If visitors are not arriving as fans, this town is automatically on the back-foot. The official speed limit is 35mph, but locals drive 25mph so anyone travelling that 10mph faster provides the giveaway that an outsider is in town. Heads turn and beady eyes take note. If the local sheriff spots the number plate of a rental car, the ‘suspicious’ invader will be asked to pull over and some searching questions will be posed.
Locals have one another’s backs covered, and everybody knows everyone’s business. It is the essence of a close-knit community that many city-dwellers would find alien. But if your intentions are good, and you tread respectfully, then people shake your hand and give you the time of day, consistent with good old southern hospitality. These are down-to-earth, hardworking and honest folk, the working rather than educated type. There’s no tolerance for idealising, moralising or posturing but there is warmth to their simplicity and an enviable contentment. Here, working life is authentic, insular and raw. Its small-town sensibilities don’t contemplate the filters that would ordinarily check conversation that might shock and offend. The social rules are simple: if you don’t like it, keep moving on through.
Whether or not they know you, questions will always be respectfully answered in a thick southern accent—‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, ma’am’. They will address you as Mister or Miss, as a title attached to your Christian, not surname. If an ‘Alan Jones’ wanders into town, he’ll be greeted as ‘Mr Alan’. Should his wife Mary join him, she’ll be ‘Miss Mary’. The vernacular and attitude belongs to a bygone age.
In Britney’s younger days, there used to be at least six drinking holes but now there’s just one: a rough-and-ready pavilion, once called the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) but, now decommissioned, it is known as ‘The Dub’. From the outside, it resembles a mini-warehouse with its window-less, corrugated iron structure. Local laws mean it has to hide its neon-Budweiser signs inside. The Dub is the community gathering point and it’s the kind of joint where all eyes turn to the door when an outsider first enters and walks into a wall of automatic wariness. It’s the same at Country Boys, a bar 14 miles away in another cultureless land, attracting people from both Mississippi and Louisiana, and it’s a tribal feel that becomes a recipe for regular brawls: ‘Mississippi’s in tonight,’ one local warned, ‘it’s going to break.’
For many men in these parts, decompressing after six days’ hard graft on the land or faraway refineries, the week is not complete without several beers and a good fight. They are not afraid to tell you that fighting is regarded as a release of pent-up energy. Men—and women—will even fight among themselves when bar banter is fuelled by alcohol, spilling outside into the gravel parking lots. The next night, those same combatants will sit down, share a beer and recount the incident with laughter.
Until recently, each patron had to sign in at the front door of The Dub, but it still remains advisable to walk in with someone with whom the locals are familiar, otherwise you’ll be invited into that same parking-lot and asked what your business is. Those who ‘don’t belong’ include lone outsiders, the paparazzi and African-Americans. Locals regard The Dub as Kentwood’s white-bar. The black-bar, ‘The Sugar Shack’, is further into town.
At Kentwood High School, only a handful of white faces can be seen in a predominantly African-American enrolment. White families tend to send their children out of town: to Amite’s Oak Forest Academy or Park Lane Academy in McComb, Mississippi—Britney’s former school. Both these private schools, which come with relatively affordable fees, have good educational standards but there is no escaping the fractious attitudes concerning race. State segregation may be illegal now but segregation from choice remains a way of life. They will tell you it’s no different in countless other areas of middle America.
All around the town, frank conversation about colour and creed is not for the ears of the easily offended because there is an unapologetic use of the word ‘nigger’. It forms an everyday part of many people’s vernacular; the legacy of generational hand-me-downs which has left a deeply-entrenched mind-set among people who don’t care for worldly experience, or what the world thinks. But it seems to be a powerless mind-set, as indicated by the 2002 election of the first non-white mayor, Harold Smith, erstwhile assistant principal at Kentwood High. Now there is talk of a new dawn and increased integration.
Smith is the Barack Obama of Kentwood with a Herculean mission to alter hearts and minds. He travelled to Washington to witness the President’s inauguration in January 2009 and returned to write a piece in Amite Today: ‘It revived my spirit and motivated me to return home to share the necessary ideas and feeling of hope and change to benefit all people, regardless of background…because there is no place like home’.
A mother who knew Britney from school, and still talks to the star’s cousins, is quick to point out that, ‘Britney knows how people talk but she don’t agree with it. She’s had black friends, management, dancers and bodyguards. It don’t matter the colour of a guy’s skin.’
It would be unjust to apply a broad brush and say this one issue sums up Kentwood. In fact, whites from Mississippi are viewed with just as much suspicion as blacks. But it remains a social indicator of the background in which Britney has grown. Inevitably, her fame has broadened her own perspectives and afforded her a life education that few will sample. But Kentwood is also where she feels safest and most known. In her 2008 MTV documentary, Britney—For The Record, she referred to her ‘meltdown’ and wondered out loud why she didn’t seek out its sanctuary and serenity of home: ‘You would think that I would have gone home…I think back now and I’m like, “Why did I, in that fragile state, why didn’t I just up and go to Louisiana?’”
Her aunt Chanda McGovern, formerly married to John Mark Spears, explains: ‘People here love Britney for Britney, and nothing else. People see past all the fame and celebrity, and accept her for who she is. Kentwood is where people have got her back covered, where she has all the love and support she needs. Whatever the image of Britney, she is a country girl and Kentwood’s own.’
Kentwood takes its name from Amos Kent, an early settler who established a brickyard and sawmill to kick-start the lumber industry that survived until the early twenties. He was also a confederate rebel, jailed for not swearing allegiance to the US during the American Civil War; a leader of a unit within the 12,000 Louisiana infantrymen who served the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Kent was one of ‘Lee’s Tigers’, which earned the sobriquet ‘The Fighting Tigers’ because its soldiers were rowdy fearless drunks whose behaviour was tolerated because of their immense achievements in battle, according to historian Arthur Bergeron. That work-hard, play-hard, fear nothing attitude is just as prevalent today and the ‘stars-and-bars’ of the Confederate Flag fly just as proudly in this town as Uncle Sam’s stars-and-stripes.
There is little to do for children growing up there. They become accustomed to a southern life of playing and hunting in the woods. Basketball and football are the main pursuits for boys and the girls’ focus is basketball and also cheerleading before settling into early domestic bliss.
The roads are so remote that fathers will ride with their children sat between their legs in the car, in front of the steering wheel; they ride with children on their laps in the same way as many dog owners do with their pets. When Britney became a mother and attempted to transfer this practice to the roads of Malibu in 2007, she soon realised a Louisiana way of life won’t wash elsewhere. But that incident served to highlight the conditioning influences spilling over from her childhood.
Kentwood is a hunt-shoot-fish town but it’s not ‘country life’ in the same fashion as England’s tweed jackets and picnic hampers, or Balmoral shoots. Men throw a rifle and ice-packed beer in the back of their trucks and hunt for deer and rabbit, sitting in ‘deer-hides’—wooden shacks where they sit to hide from the deer. They’ll then return home and throw a ‘crawfish boil party’, thanking God for the catches they’ve snared.
For God is one of the chief grandfathers of this ‘Bible Belt’ town. His presence is observed in the community and in locals’ vernacular. The Spears family merely had to walk across the road from their home to Sunday service. Christian values formed the backbone of Britney’s upbringing and education. The way that Mum Lynne explains it is that they are not a religious, but deeply spiritual family and yet they are strongly tied to the Christian faith.
As a child, Britney kept a prayer journal and was encouraged to have discussions with God and confide in her local pastor. Of course, as a child, it is easy to nod one’s head in blithe acceptance of a faith that perhaps holds more of a worship indoctrination than actual meaning. Britney almost certainly found pleasure in the ‘performance’ and rituals—the ceremonies that would ultimately allow her to showcase her talents. Yet, regardless of meaning, she was obviously influenced by the beliefs instilled in her by her elders.
What she was told, she believed. So, when Britney went to bed each night, she believed God was watching over her and that everything happened because of His higher reasoning. He was her mainstay. Indeed, this is illustrated as she grew up and found her dreams coming true, blessing Him for the opportunities she had, acknowledging His guidance in the albums she made and believing He places obstacles in our way to make us stronger. Britney’s early-stated philosophy on life was that: ‘He has a hand in everything, good or bad. It’s all part of God’s plan.’
In a book penned by Britney and Lynne together, called Heart to Heart, Britney wrote: ‘I pray all the time. I find a lot of comfort and strength in knowing I can talk to God and He’s listening. That’s the way we were raised.’ On the wall above her bed, she hung a cross-stitch of the 18th-century prayer:
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Each night before bed, Britney wrote down her thoughts for ‘God to read’. Her jottings complete, she kneeled at her bed and prayed, hands steep led in prayer. Then she reached under the blue, glass-plated bedside lamp and turned out the light to disappear into dreamland.
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