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
‘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
