Jeff Weiss, Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly (MCD), 400 pp. Paperback, $19.00.
The word “allegedly” is doing a lot of work in the subtitle of Jeff Weiss’s new book, Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly. Weiss, presumably, is the one alleging that this is a work of nonfiction, the genre under which the publisher is marketing it. But his narrator remains curiously unnamed throughout the text. (No one ever says, “Hey, Jeff.”) In fact, at one point, when he reprints a newspaper story about himself, he omits his own name, identifying himself as “Xxxxxxx Xxxx Xxxxx, 23, of Los Angeles.”
Nevertheless, a note on the copyright page insists that “this is a true story”—and then immediately qualifies that statement by adding that “some names and details have been changed, some characters merged, and poetic license applied to some of the author’s interactions.” (Rolling Stone calls it “semi-fictional”—or a “well-researched fantasy.”) In other words, this isn’t a book for those looking for a candid, incisive, evidence-based narrative of the life and career of one of America’s biggest celebrities. Rather—as its Beckettian title suggests—this is a story primarily about the people hanging around hoping to see her, the tabloid reporters and paparazzi who feed off scraps of publicity and, in some cases, push their subjects to the brink. The vibes are more important than the facts.
“Waiting for Britney” can appear to be an attempted account of a woman undone, ending with her notorious placement under conservatorship in 2008.
Weiss’s book begins by claiming that the music video for “…Baby One More Time” was filmed in the author’s high school gymnasium while he was a student and that he snuck onto the set appeared in it as an uncredited extra. Even more implausibly, between takes this teenaged Weiss strikes up a conversation with a balding executive, an A&R man for Jive Records, who eagerly relates the budding starlet’s story. The dialogue recalled here may or may not be accurate, but it rings false. (“In three months from now, everyone in your school will know her name.”) In that respect, it’s a fitting introduction to a book primarily fueled by hype.
Even though Waiting for Britney begins with her first smash hit, Weiss quickly skips forward. The book focuses on the period between 2003, when Britney released “Toxic,” and 2008, when she was involuntarily institutionalized and lost custody of her children. Weiss, a well-known LA music journalist, has spent time working as a tabloid reporter, and Waiting for Britney is his insider account of the sordid business of chasing down entertainers for gotcha photos and dirty laundry. As the narrator of this nonfiction-with-an-asterisk work, he writes for two different tabloid magazines, called Nova and HI!, which clearly align with the real-life Star and OK! magazines. These publications are interested in many different celebrities, but Britney is the biggest fish in the sea—“the center of the tabloid solar system.”
Along with his partner-in-not-quite-crime, a wild British paparazzo named Oliver (based on the photographer Mel Bouzad), the twenty-something-year-old Weiss gets sent out to report the hottest celebrity gossip from nightclubs, award shows, and after-parties. (His first assignment is a late-night bash at the Playboy Mansion, where he runs around with Tara Reid.) This may sound like a young man’s dream job, but Weiss is quick to point out that the work was typically depressing, stressful, shallow, and unrewarding. He initially finds his footing in the industry when he and Oliver get the scoop on Britney’s first marriage (all 55 hours of it). They’re all at the Palms in Las Vegas for New Year’s Eve in 2003; Britney performs her new song “Toxic” at Rain nightclub, and Oliver hears that she almost overdosed on ecstasy later that night. In the early morning of January 3rd, Weiss and Oliver discover that Britney has gone with childhood friend Jason Alexander (not Costanza) to the Little White Wedding Chapel. Over breakfast at an IHOP, a well-paid informant who drove the limo dishes the dirt on the sudden nuptials and provides the tip that leads to the wedding photo—a photo that, published in the next issue of Nova, sells over a million copies.
This is a high point for Weiss and Oliver; their editor at Nova, thrilled at such good fortune, dubs them “the Woodward and Bernstein of Britania.” But low points quickly follow. At a charity fundraiser, Bob Saget chews Weiss out for working for a tabloid that ruthlessly attacked Mary-Kate Olsen. Weiss is crestfallen that the dad from Full House would see him as a scumbag. Things get even worse in 2005, when Weiss gets a chance to write for the slightly more reputable People magazine, which sends him to spy on a child’s birthday party in order to confirm the relationship between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Weiss is arrested for trespassing and written up the next day in Page Six. Beset by “self-loathing and guilt,” he vows to quit this dirty work and moves back in with his mom. But eventually he finds his way back to reporting on Britney Spears, whose magnetic celebrity seems irresistible.
The biggest flaw in Waiting for Britney is the repeated declaration that the tabloid reporters and paparazzi are the bad guys here. Weiss’s tone is often confessional: What we did was wrong. The book carries a strong suggestion that Britney’s hospitalizations and psychological instability were ultimately caused by irresponsible media hounds. But what is this book but an unrepentant rehashing of the juiciest stories of Britney’s celebrity—the drugs, the hookups, the bad performances, the family drama? Weiss’s book may be mostly about himself (he only spoke with Britney once, very briefly), but all its energy, not to mention its cover and title, comes via renewed exploitation. The book doesn’t feel substantially different from the tabloid reports, and so the narrator’s confessions ring hollow. As Weiss observes in a different context, “Even villains believe that they’re antiheroes at worst.”
That doesn’t mean the book isn’t a compelling read—Eli Schoop has observed that Weiss’s West Coast voice is “equally Mike Davis and Bret Easton Ellis”—but its pleasures tend to be trashy. Weiss offers show business gossip through a splashy, waggish style. At the Playboy Mansion party, for example, “photographers preserve the Ambers in amber.” Sometimes these quips land well (Weiss’s first impression of Kevin Federline is of “some dude who looked like Justin Timberlake dressed as Eminem for Halloween”), but the tone can be hard to sustain for 400 pages. It’s overdone in the first few chapters, and then the prose settles down for most of the rest of the book. Some inconsistencies remain. Spears is initially described with far too many culinary adjectives: “butterscotch bangs,” “Coca-Cola eyes,” “apricot arms.” (When Weiss describes her “beignet smile,” a reader might wonder if this is an awkward allusion to Spears’s native Louisiana or merely a typo for “benign smile.”) Toward the end of the narrative, the book oddly attempts an experimental recreation of the events of Britney’s institutionalization from her own point of view.
However, the choice to focus on a relatively brief, five-year period is a good one. Locals may be disappointed to learn that Britney’s later Vegas residency, in the 2010s, therefore never gets a mention, but the city does loom large in the book as the site of both her farcical first wedding and her disappointing performance at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards. And Weiss captures something about that specific half-decade. A time when Usher’s “Yeah!” was ubiquitous (“The sky was balling,” writes Weiss), this was the “famous-for-being-famous era” (with a torch passing from Paris Hilton to Kim Kardashian).
It was also a moment when the tabloid industry itself was changing. The print magazines were still selling well, but the internet was changing the game. The business became less dependent on professional reporters and photographers; suddenly it seemed like anyone with a phone could capture breaking celebrity news and score a paycheck. TMZ debuted in 2005, quickly emerging as a competitor for Weiss’s employers, and they initially made their name on “24-7 Britney coverage.” This was the same year that Stephen Colbert coined the word truthiness, which describes both the tabloid ethos and the general vibe of Waiting for Britney.
Weiss, a longtime music critic, is at his best when describing Spears’s hit songs—from the “plaintive agony with which she coos, ‘My loneliness is killin’ me’” in “…Baby One More Time” to the “strip-club-on-Sirius gris-gris” of “Gimme More.” Most amusing is Weiss’s lavish praise for the 2007 Blackout, which he considers a “pop masterpiece” and “the definite Britney Spears album.” Going on at some length, Weiss claims that the album “embodied the hedonistic sleaze of the late Bush years, but anticipated our joyless mechanistic future.” It “glows with a glossy hypermodernity that sounds like the digital age becoming a disruptive reality,” he declares. Listeners might feel free to disagree, but this is a worthwhile assessment.
Waiting for Britney can appear to be an attempted account of a woman undone, ending with her notorious placement under conservatorship in 2008. But those who really want an insider perspective might consult Britney’s own bestselling autobiography, The Woman in Me (or perhaps Kevin Federline’s forthcoming memoir). Weiss ultimately offers something else—a complicit view of the insatiable grasping that is inextricable from modern celebrity culture. Why Britney? What about her made everyone lose their minds? Her terrific power and her terrible vulnerability, Weiss suggests, were part of a larger story of pop media rapacity.
Las Vegas Review of Books 