The following italicized article is taken from www.blender.com:1. The Paps
Christmas lights dangle from tree branches in front of the Raffles L’Ermitage, the Beverly Hills hotel where Britney Spears slept last night—and where the paparazzi who keep watch over her now sit waiting. Although she owns a mansion in L.A., she often crashes in hotels because, the press speculate, her cupboards at home are bare: She likes to order room service. Spears is the only celebrity in the world under photographers’ 24-hour watch, a surveillance mode usually reserved for prisoners and suicides. Some of the core group of 15 or so lensmen who call themselves “her paps” pass the stakeout hours online, chatting with women via wireless laptop connections. Some smoke pot. Felix, the team captain for X17, the paparazzi agency with the closest ties to Britney, occasionally looks down at his phone to find a text message from Sam Lutfi, Spears’s confidant and de facto manager since last summer. Felix reads aloud: “She is inside.”
“Britney is money,” says another X17 photographer, standing next to the BMW that pictures of Britney have bought him. Someone tells the story of the day they followed her halfway to Las Vegas. She got takeout from Taco Bell at a rest stop in the desert. Then she turned the car around and drove home. “Britney is crazy,” says another, bemused.
We have been waiting since about 10 A.M., and the thrill, at 8:39 P.M., as two hotel security guards appear at the entrance to the garage, is libidinal: When Britney’s 612-horsepower Mercedes SL65 AMG shoots out of the driveway, rips west on Burton Way and up Foothill Road, it’s sweet release.
Britney drives like a rabbit being chased across a field. Trailed by 15 cars, she signals right, then turns left. Glides into a left-turn lane, makes a right. On Wilshire Boulevard, slows from 50 miles per hour down to 15, then bangs an illegal U-turn into brake-screeching traffic. The driver in the lead mutters, “Bitch.”
Then he’s cut off by a Mercedes SL500 steered by Adnan Ghalib, a daredevil-fearless paparazzo who usually rides at the front of the pack.
If Britney has been in hiding all day and her paps have gotten no pictures, they hope for a red light at the top of Coldwater Canyon, the last intersection before her house. Tonight they’re lucky. Britney stops; Ghalib pulls his Benz into the oncoming traffic lane, slams into park and the gang crowds around her car for just less than a minute.
Thus surrounded, Britney, wearing the same outfit she wore last night, doesn’t look at the photographers but focuses on a point in the air a few inches in front of her nose, slowly pivoting her head on the axis of her neck, clicks and flashes dicing her movement like a strobe. She seems to be basking, and she seems to be trapped. Even her vehicle looks resigned: A smashed headlight has been out for weeks, and she’s still driving on a spare tire from a flat she had in October. (Her paps changed it for her.)
When the light turns, the paps scramble back to their cars, Britney turns right, guns it and they let her go. The white car shrinks into the darkness, wriggling up Mulholland toward the gated community where she lives.
The Britney chase feels like a video game where, every moment, you’re sure you’re going to die; yet against all odds, despite all carelessness, nothing kills you. Even the photographers who do this every day admit that they’re scared by it. One X17 videographer warns, “Someone is going to get hurt, man.”
Without prompting, he mimes holding up a camera with one hand and dialing his phone with the other—explaining that the video of an accidental death cannot legally be sold, unless the cameraman can prove he was calling 911 at the same time. Clearly, he’s given this endgame some thought. There’s no way not to ask: Would a video of Britney’s death be the ultimate prize?
“That would be horrible,” he says. “No, no. Nobody wants that.”
2. The pop Star
Aside from Starbucks Frappuccinos, Britney’s primary nourishment nowadays is the attention of paparazzi, who slake the public’s unquenchable thirst for details of her travails. Britney has been a figure of fascination since her solo debut in 1999, back when she was everything a girl was, and wasn’t, supposed to be. The 17-year-old small-town Southern Christian Mouseketeer virgin-sexpot became a superstar—Lolita, Cinderella and Elvis Presley all in one—by tarting up a schoolgirl’s uniform and shimmying down the halls of a high school in the video for “ … Baby One More Time,” her first single. Britney’s image was a pop masterpiece, fashioned in her songs’ and videos’ provocative blend of innocence and experience. She grew into a Grammy-winning artist who, alone among female singers, debuted four consecutive albums (which, together, sold 75 million copies) at No. 1. Today, however, she’s become the undiluted essence of celebrity, and almost no one—not even Britney—seems much interested in her music. To promote her 2007 album Blackout, Britney did exactly one telephone interview, which lasted seven minutes. Disasters, not music, have become her product.
Steve Lunt, the A&R executive who steered her for most of her career, is baffled by the implosion. “It’s very upsetting to see what’s going on in her life,” he says. “She was always driven and focused. The most quietly, deceptively ambitious person you could meet. But when you lose your focus, it’s very hard to refocus.” Haltingly, Lunt adds, “You don’t know where this thing is going to go.”
For now, it’s off the rails. In the past 18 months, her transgressions, proven and alleged, have escalated beyond almost any in pop history. Next to Britney Spears, Courtney Love is Miss Manners. Since leaving her husband Kevin Federline in late 2006, she has flashed her vagina, shaved her head, physically attacked paparazzi and gone to rehab (twice). She has been charged with hit-and-run, effectively declared an unfit mother by the state of California and been fired by her lawyers (again, twice). She turned in the most disastrous performance of her career at MTV’s Video Music Awards show, got dumped by her management firm and has cleaned her hands of almost everyone who played any significant role in her first 25 years of life. She passes many days on what Ben Evansted, the paparazzo who took the most famous images of her genitals, calls “long drives to nowhere,” punctuated by stops at gas stations, tanning salons, drug stores, pet stores and fast-food restaurants. In December, OK! magazine reportedly paid $1 million for an interview with Britney’s mother, Lynne, and her sister, Jamie Lynn, in which the 16-year-old announced she was pregnant. When paps asked Britney what she thought of the news, she inadvertently revealed the degree of her estrangement from her family; with a scowl and a giggle, she said, “My sister’s not pregnant!”
If there was any remaining boundary between her public and private lives, it vanished just before Christmas, when she spent the night in a hotel with Adnan Ghalib, the alpha pap who works for a small agency called Finalpixx. Britney’s self-created Stockholm syndrome, it seemed, was consummated. Then, when it looked like things could not possibly get worse, police were called to Britney’s home when she refused to relinquish her two children after their scheduled visit on January 3. After a three-hour standoff, she was strapped to a gurney and taken by ambulance to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The next day, she lost all visitation and custody rights to her kids.
Lindsay is a lightweight, Paris is a shoe-in for Junior League, compared to Britney. Her mess has become tragedy. Where did things go wrong? Many outsiders blame her problems on drug abuse, a theory given some weight when the judge in her custody battle wrote of her “habitual, frequent and continuous use of controlled substances and alcohol.”
But in scores of interviews with her former friends and associates, a more complex account of her agonies takes shape. A business associate who helped her prepare for September’s VMAs performance says, “There’s obviously some substance-abuse issues going on … But even if, hypothetically, she was out the night before the VMAs doing blow and then took a Xanax to come down and then got drunk right before the show—even if she did that—even that wouldn’t explain the performance. She wouldn’t have done that if there weren’t some self-sabotage going on.” (Spears did not respond to interview requests from Blender.)
Britney once had an A-list team of publicists, managers, lawyers and handlers that rivaled any superstar’s. Now she’s essentially reduced that staff to one person: Sam Lutfi, a 33-year-old Hollywood gadabout with a questionable past, a couple of low-budget film credits as a producer and no apparent qualifications for his current position. A prominent former Spears adviser says that Lutfi “has the potential to cause enormous problems, to sink her deeper in the hole and exploit her in a lasting way.”
Like all child stars, Britney Spears has been exploited, with varying degrees of calculation, since her career began—so much so that it may be the kind of relationship in which she now feels most at home. “She got chewed up by this new celebrity culture and spat out, so it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for her,” says VH1 Executive Vice President Michael Hirschorn. “She really was turned into a lab rat.” While her troubles include substance abuse, pressure from public scrutiny and a failure to understand that actions have consequences, many who’ve been close to her over the years agree that her most basic problem is something else. “This goes deeper,” says Melinda Bell, a former member of her management team. “It has to do with something about love.”
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Source: Blender
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