‘Waiting For Britney Spears’

Jeff Weiss’s terrific new book, Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly, chronicles Weiss’s young adult life shadowing Spears while working as a celebrity journalist for the tabloids.  Weiss fell into the job almost by accident; he was one of those college kids who had no solid sense of direction when he graduated from school.  He took the job as a temporary diversion.  As he follows Britney Spears traipsing around Los Angeles and records her repeated lapses into depression, drug use, and manic chaos, he is forced to reckon with his own lostness.  It is the interplay between his own confused desires and Britney’s turbulent journey that give this book its phenomenal spark.

Weiss’s father is a lawyer who wanted him to go to law school which never appealed to Weiss.  His mother ran a small children’s clothing store.  They were busy working parents who raised him in a secular Jewish home in Los Angeles and seemed to expect him to figure out his own path.  But Weiss was uncertain.  He writes, “When I was sixteen, there was only inalterable destiny and dim instinct.  A lacquered mirage of limitless peace and prosperity.  All outcomes were divinely ordained.

At every angle, the horizon appeared jiggy.”  Weiss seemed unable to go to his parents and reveal to them his confusion.  We get the feeling nothing held exalted meaning for him.  Weiss never speaks about the quality of his friendships, or any girl who stole his heart.  He seems to have gone through his childhood years unscathed by much around him except for the accidental death of a basketball player he played basketball with during high school who died tragically in a car accident. Though he wrote a book about the event,  no one seemed interested in purchasing it.  He always loved rap and hip-hop but seemed to lack the zeal and infatuation so many young people feel at that age when their entire future lay ahead of them.

As a tabloid journalist he learned to sneak into clubs and befriend bouncers.  Oliver, a British photographer, often accompanied him on assignments.  Weiss would complain to Oliver about the merits of what they were engaged in, but Oliver would shrug his criticism off as ridiculous. Oliver insisted they were giving people exactly what they wanted to read and see and were getting paid a decent wage for doing so. But Weiss had his doubts.

Ironically, Weiss had seen Britney when she came to his high school gymnasium to film the music video “…Baby One More Time” for MTV.  He snuck into the gym and wound up an extra in the video sitting in the bleachers watching her.  Her manager was nearby, and he recalls hearing him say Britney was going to be a superstar. She’d emerged out of nowhere, the daughter of an often-drunk construction worker with a gambling problem. The manager admitted she didn’t have the greatest voice, or write her own material, but she had the ‘it’ factor. When Britney starts to sing and dance, Weiss admits “Britney was the opposite of everything I’d known. A sequined mirage and airbrushed myth. It felt like a comet had been born.”

Weiss’ s narrative voice grows somber and somewhat self-conscious when he speaks about his own life. He felt angry at the world for not delivering on its promise. He felt he had done everything correctly and yet there seemed to be nothing out there for him. Rejection slips kept piling up and money was tight. He was barely scraping together enough to pay for some lousy apartment he shared with three other guys.

His tabloid boss explained to him his job was to get into the trendiest clubs and find stars or their girlfriends who were willing to talk to him. They’d pay him $200 for the night plus expenses.  He put aside any lofty dreams he might have had about being a serious writer and plunged in. He found he was often able to charm his way past security guards and traverse other obstacles.

We watch his feelings for Britney grow more complicated and see that he is both infatuated with her and feels sorry for her. In some ways, he understands her duress.  They both seem controlled by forces they can’t understand. Neither seem to be able to find true love or anyone they can trust for too long. Both are drinking too much. Neither have parents who are willing to serve as sounding boards for their heartache. They are both operating in a callous industry that eats its own.

He knows that his job is to beat out the other guys in their pursuit of Britney, but this conflicts with his growing protective feelings towards her. Britney keeps finding a new best friend only to reject her the following week for selling her out, and Weiss admits his high school buddies seem to be ignoring his calls and texts. Perhaps they are just busy in their new lives.

He tells us about his growing animosity toward Justin Timberlake and his harsh treatment towards Britney. He writes, “I knew he was a total poseur. A schmaltzy song-and-dance man with a talent for mimicry, but lacking originality, imagination, and the capacity to survive.”  He resents Timberlake’s intrusions into her already tumultuous life.

Despite Britney’s meltdowns, she still seemed unstoppable. He writes, “She was the hottest thing that any of us had ever seen. The sexuality, electricity, and control of her dance moves, the delirious cool with which she wielded the hissing snake.” But Britney’s mental state was growing more and more precarious. Weiss can see she wants to stop but doesn’t know how to get out of all of this. There is a huge commercial machine pushing her forwards. Demand for copy about her was increasing.

He writes, “There are no better ingredients for controversy that god, drugs, and sex. The chaste girl had become a bad bitch. Britney obsession is a national obsession.” She appears topless on the cover of Rolling Stone. And, later, bottomless on the cover of Esquire, where she dresses up like Marilyn Monroe. There are rumors of frequent overdoses. She appears on SN, which encourages her to kiss the host, Halle Berry. Weiss believes “her brilliance lies in the blanks unfilled, the project of something left unsaid but not unmissed.”

We feel in some ways the same way about Jeff Weiss. We don’t fully understand the forces that motivate him but see someone who wants to make his mark on the world. But he wants to do so in a way where he doesn’t feel continually debased or under the leash of other people’s instructions. We watch him traversing land mines and root for him to find the strength to pull back from what he is doing which we see is slowly poisoning him.  We know he has so much more to offer; what we will eventually see when he becomes a fine journalist, cultural critic, and esteemed music critic for the LA Weekly where he wrote about hip-hop, rap, and other music for over a decade.

What gives his book such an ongoing pulse is he is less interested in letting us know about how his story turned out for him professionally, and more obsessed with capturing the desperation, loneliness, confusion, and lack of direction that characterized his young adulthood. And he somehow manages to tie his pain to Britney’s and his to hers in a way that starts to mesh in our imagination. We see them both as victims of forces more powerful than they are.

As he watches Britney fall and break apart, he can imagine his own demise, and somehow, we sense this spurs him to find the courage to strike out on his own. His path will be turbulent but fruitful. He shows us Britney at her most vulnerable, making us realize we are all watching her break into a million pieces. His memory of seeing her up close one night at a new nightclub haunts us. He writes: “There she is, dressed down in a baby-doll tee and hi-hugging jeans, but a force field exists between us, between her and everyone. Barely old enough to drink, but worth eight figures, the most glimmering possibility that a glitching system can still produce.”

He recalls that at the time there was still a part of him that was tempted to approach her and nail down a story that would bring him national fame and perhaps open the doors that have been slamming in his face, but he stops himself, realizing the only journey that will really mean something to him will be one he carves out for himself on his own.