To clear some crap up...
The truth behind Britney's backlash
Source: UK Glamour magazine/KarenRo
Hounded, reviled, humiliated...Britney Spears has been given a major hard time recently, amid rumours of her diva-esque behaviour. But what are the facts behind the gossip? And what's she really like on the road? Sylvia Patterson was the only British journalist granted backstage access on Britney's troubled Mexican tour. Here, she speaks to the people closest to the singer and gets the true story exclusively for GLAMOUR.
In a packed lavish conference room in the Four Seasons Hotel, Mexico City, Britney Spears is giving her first ever press conference to the excitable multimedia of central America. Three minutes in and a man from a Mexican TV station holds his microphone to his mouth and addresses the 20 year old Britney who is seated, alone, 15 feet away.
"Tomorrow in your concert," he says " would you like for Mexicans to say 'hi' to you like this?" And up goes his hand, displaying the middle-finger salute.
"Well actually, what happened was," replies Britney who was photographed driving from Mexico airport giving 'The Finger' from the back of her car, "I got off the plane and everyone was driving really recklessly. The paparazzi almost hit our vehicle. I love my fans here, it was the paparazzi...I was afraid we'd have a wreck. I'm human just like everybody, y'know I get mad too sometimes." ( much muttering ensues.)
Another TV journalist: "What is the most expensive thing you've bought and how much did it cost?"
Britney: "Probably my house."
Journalist: "How much?"
Britney: "That's none of your business, really."
Press pack: "Whooo!"
A Mexican radio presenter: "Some say you're dating Wade Robson, your choreographer. Is it true?"
Britney: " I don't wanna talk about my personal life."
Twenty minutes later - after a series of barren questions concerning Madonna ( Britney would "love to work with her"), why she doesn't sing live for 95% of her show ("I'm dancing hardcore, but there's a part of the show where it's just me singing no track at all") - Britney rises from her podium, declares, "That was the last question," (about where her music is progressing in 2002) and walks out to the sound of boos and disontented murmurs from 300 unimpressed journalists. Seconds later standing in a backstage corridor, waiting to walk onto the set of a TV show, Britney is cocooned inside her Circle of Protection with her hands up to her face. Surrounded as she always is on tour, by three bodyguards (two of whom are the size of and average garage), two PRs, her personal assistant, make-up artist, hair stylists and the hotel's own security, the atmosphere, you could say is atrocious: silence, concern, embarrassment. For 15 seconds, you can hear hair grow.
"Is everybody ok?!! shouts a male voice, piercing the vacuum.
"Come awn...it's all so serious!"
"We'll be laughing" says another male voice, "when this is over. Right?"
Summer 2002 and Britney Spears, Global Phenomenon, Corporate Entity and the woman Forbes Global business magazine has oficially declared The Most Important Celebrity In The World (whatever that might mean), is in cultural, physical and emotional meltdown. Or so the worldwide press wished to believe and is doing everything in its power to prove.
Since May this year and the split with Justin Timberlake, the press have been rentless, negative and merciless. Photographs appeared of her smoking and sporting an alleged 10-16lb post-split weight-gain (what we saw was a rounded stomach); reports claimed the crash diet that followed led to a post-show collapse in California. Reports claimed her parents had split up ( Mum loved the fame and the pressure, Dad didn't - all curtly denied by her PR). Reports claimed she'd become a diva-brat, ignoring fans at the opening of her restaurant, Nyla, in New York and again at the British premiere of her ill-recieved debut film Crossroads; reports claimed the supposedly virginal Britney was seen in a lap-dancing club, drunk and in a shop buying her Crossroads co-star Kim Cattrall's book Satisfaction: The Art Of The Femal Orgasm. A gleeful American press then reported, in July, that Justin Timberlake had been seen publicly frolicking with Janet Jackson. And today, Britney's being mocked in Mexico.
Standing here in the stone-walled corridor, she's visibly shaken, but otherwise the embodiment of physical perfection: lean, muscular and gorgeous in a customised denim jacket, deep red chiffon halterneck top, a black bra underneath, Miss Sixty hipster jeans and wooden sandals with 3in heels. She smooths her uber-blond hair, recieves a light dusting from her make-up artist ad marches onto the TV set, where she's greeted with genuine warmth.
Britney Spears, is of course the living embodiment of 21st century Pop Culture: protected in every way, kind to all, brilliantly and aggressively marketed: a 2D fantasy with pulsing sexual charisma and some of the greatest pop tunes and videos of the modern age. This week-end on Mexican MTV she's on permanent rotation including The Diary Of Britney Spears detailing her every movement in the summer of 2001. Thus, Central America sees her speak everyday about the love of her life. "Everything I do, I always ask Justin what he thinks, because I love him," she's saying. "I would love to be with him forever, I would." That was one year ago, almost exactly to the day.
Taking a five minute break from the conveyor belt processin of TV, radio, print press and phone interviews (where Justin is no longer mentioned) the ever focused, calm and smiling Britney disappears inside a hotel catering room and has a bowl of soup, with guatamole and tortilla chips. Her personal assistant and best friend on tour is Felicia Culotta, a genial, down-home Southern gal who Britney relies on for personal and professional support. She's known Brintey and her family since the star was eight, and has worked with her for the last five years. Britney calls her, "Heaven sent...I don't know what I would do without her! She takes care of me..."
Outside the catering room door manned by security, I'm hiding with Felicia in a space between two 10ft stacks of chairs.
"They were running us of the road," she says of 'The Finger' incident. "Runnin' us up into the kerb, they would jump out and just slam us. And what scared us so bad is we'd just talked about Princess Diana. That's what happened to her and so we were all just scared. And we were told you couldn't see through the [car] window. But we were being seen."
Felicia is philosphical about today's hostilities. "they wanna find something bad, because she's a good person and everybody wants a scoop." She defends Britney's position on not speaking about her personal life. Wouldn't it be better, though, you wonder if she just answered the questions, however inane the answers might be? Keeping a silence means the questions never disappear.
"At some point you do need a private life," says Felicia.
"Everything about her is so public that if she doesn't wanna talk about something that's OK. At some point she has to say, 'You know what? This is about me and my heart and if I have control over nothing else, I do have control of my heart.' She's entitled to that."
The reports of diva-dom are, she adds, conjured up by the press.
"At the Crossroads premiere," she says, "what they didn't tell anybody was that a designer in London had let her borrow a half-a-million dollar diamond necklace. the armed gurad the jewellery store sent said, 'No, she can't walk out in the middle of all those people with a half-a-million-dollar necklace on!' It was barricaded two-people thick, and what would we do? Pick her up and put her over the barricade? She did as much as she could. She walked out three separte times to say hello, but that didn't seem to be enough. And she felt so bad when we were elaving. She said, 'But I did everything they wanted me to do: I waved, I said hello. I couldn't get to the people to sign the autographs.' And its never reported that way. Someone on the inside like myself ought to sit down and write a tell-all."
These days, says Felicia, Britney's "found an inner peace". She shies away from anything negative. She's found, too, "her voice - and I don't mean musically. Just her voice to say, 'I'm not gonna do that', or, 'If I do do that, what are the consequences?' It's been nice to watch her come inot her own." Her daily celebration/villification in celebrity culture makes Felicia laugh.
"What's so funny," she smiles, "is none of its as big as they've made it. They make her bigger than life. She's just like the girl next door. We have to look at her as human and not a super being. It's hard for me to watch."
And here, Britney finishes the TV interview and comes back into the corridor, still surrounded, smiling and serene, holding hands with her bodyguard Rob, who is at least eight times her size.
"I'm doin' an interview about you!" shouts Felicia. "I told her all these bad things about you!"
Britney smiles, looks straight ahead and walks into a room for a meet 'n' greet - a photo opportunity with, on one side,a host of Pepsi VIPs and on the other, ten Pepsi Chart Show competiton winners, every one of whom looks exactly like - or certainly wishes to look exactly like - Britney Spears.
The banality of global pop TV interviews is legendary and Mexico's Pepsi Chart Show sticks with tradition. Britney's now wearing her hipster jeans and skinny-rib sparkly, gold tank top. Perched daintily on a silver block, she either claps her hands like an excited child or pulls a grimace at the stupidity of the questions:
"What does the word 'anticipating mean to me? It means you're nervous and excited about something, like waiting to go out at night..."
"Great! Great!" shrieks the female co-presenter, who nods vigorously enough to break her neck, at which Britney looks genuinely horrified.
This is what we learn: her favourite knickers are by Skimpies. She believes in angels. Her favourite food is ice cream. Her favourite colours are baby blue and baby pink. Brad Pitt is the sexiest man alive. The diary she would most like to read is Marilyn Monroe's. She'd like to work with Prince and Steven Spielberg. And her message to the Mexican paparazzi is "Just chill out a little bit....simmer down!" Outside the hotel, the fans arrived in their hundreds, voices shrieking up to the balconies and beyond The Pepsi Chart Show set: "Breet-nee! Breet-nee! Breeet-neeeee!"
The Foro Del Sol in Mexico City is an open-air race track/baseball stadium, which first doubled as a music venue for Madonna's 1993 Girlie Show tour. Inside 25,000 people on the left perform a Mexican wave as Britney arrives - "Ola! How you doin' out there?!" - and shimmers down through a brilliant laser-beam display; a golden, cat-suited, huge-haired alien beamed from Planet Perfection.
The show looks to be one of the most expensive pop shows ever produced. It has an additional T-shaped stage and features fireworks and face-painted dancers emerging from hidden cocoons in the floor. Britney's clothes are glam-pop superb: a glittering pink ballet dress, a floor-length, white, fake-fur coat, silken Miss World style evening wear circa 1974, a green sequinned bra and hot pants, a black bra and tight black hipster trews.
Halfway through, Britney sings a new song, a Whitney-esque ballad, she wrote herself, performed by just her and the pianist, no backing track. She's in shaky voice and Mexico talks all the way through.
The following evening, on the very last night of her world tour, Britney walks off stage after four songs, saying, "I'm sorry Mexico, I love you!" According to reports the crowd was appalled acreaming "Fraud! Fraud!" In an official statement an electrical storm was blamed, the lightening causing 300 robotic lights and pyrotechnics to malfunction, putting everyone on stage at risk. "I 'm sorry I couldn't finish the show for my fans," said Britney in a statement. "The Mexican fans are one of the best audiences to play for. We decided we had no choice but to cancel the show after the storm gave no signs of clearing up." Refunds were immediately made available.
Britney's official spokesman says she coped well with her Mexican experience. After the press conference she wasn't in tears. "No, no," he says. "She's much harder than that. She's used to it. But, yes it could have been better." On the reports of her collapsing on this tour , he refutes, " I don't know where that came from. She didn't faint or anything."
Rumours that she's retiring from the showbiz world are also untrue. But for the next five months, she is taking time off. She's going to do dance classes, take up painting, concentrate on her song-writing, read film scripts, have many massages and decorate her new second home in a swish Manhattan neighbourhood.
For months now, the tabloids have told us her too-perfect mask is slipping. If that's what we wanted - to see the heartbeat behind the hologram - it's ironic that the more the mask slips, the more she's punished for it.
"I would say she's coped better with everything than I imagined she would," says her spokesman. "Has she changed? Just in the regular way, from a 16-year-old to a 20 year-old, nothing abnormal. The worst case scenario for what happens next is she puts out another record or movie that does really badly, moves to Louisiana, gets married and raises some kids. The best case is she takes more challenging roles, makes better films and progresses as a musician. The film thing is a big deal to her; she's not confident in her acting ability."
How does Britney Spears compare to a 'normal' 20-year-olds?
" Well I think she's a very privileged 20-year-old who has lots of options!" he laughs. "And she's never taken a vacation. So she needs to take time off, like a normal 20-year-old. Who's rich...."