![]() The card won’t go through, but they keep trying it. Then she ducks into the dressing room with Ghalib. Britney rifles the racks as the Cure’s “Pictures of You” blasts into the airless pink boutique, grabbing a pink lace dress, a few tight black numbers and a frilly red crop top, the kind of shirt that Britney used to wear all the time at seventeen but isn’t really appropriate for anyone over that age. Only a few kids are in the store, a young girl with her brother and two blondes checking out fake-gold charm bracelets. The opening graph paints a grim picture of that reality. I’m talking about getting an accurate portrayal of what celebrities’ worlds are like and satisfying our insatiable appetite to know what it is truly like to be famous, what life is like when all of your wildest dreams come true. ![]() ![]() The challenge of any journalist tasked with writing a celebrity profile is to tell readers something they don’t already know, and I’m not talking about revealing the little-known fact that your subject is actually a devout vegetarian who wanted to figure out a way to test pharmaceuticals without harming animals when she grew up, but got discovered in a shopping mall in Wyoming and things took off from there, and boy, wowee, isn’t life a strange and bizarro ride. She put every terrible piece of it on display for us to dissect.Īnd in “ The Tragedy of Britney Spears,” Vanessa Grigoriadis tries to understand what her demise, set against a backdrop of an unhappy country, knee-deep in an overseas war and an uncertain future, all meant. Britney turned her private life inside out. Today, in an era of Kardashians and Winehouses and “Toddlers and Tiaras,” this is the norm. It’s unsettling how satisfied she seems.Īfter that scene, in the days and weeks to come, any time Britney Spears’ name came up in conversation, whether you were a fan from the start of her meteoric fame or just someone who tuned in toward the end to watch with amusement as she married a dopey backup dancer nicknamed “meat pole,” flashed her bare derrière to the paparazzi and toddled in and out of public bathrooms barefoot, the same question arose again and again: What in the hell happened to Britney Spears? And what did it mean? That expression, in combination with her buzzed skull, gives off the distinct impression of someone unhinged, someone teetering on the verge of an unknown abyss. There is a loopy, crooked grin on her face, and her eyes, when they skip across the lens of the camera, have a feral glint to them. She’s bookended by men so large their silhouettes rival refrigerators, but enough of her is visible to see that her hair is freshly shorn, by her own hand as it turns out.īritney turns and faces the camera. ![]() She’s pacing around a tattoo parlor, where she’s just gotten a pair of bright red lips inked on her wrist and a cross etched onto her hip. And a photographer had done that.There’s a video of Britney Spears shot in 2007, not long after Valentine’s Day. And even then, as I am now, I was lost for words when I heard that an agency had actually done that. Period.” It was then sent around to publications to see if they wanted to buy the picture. And they put the picture out and the caption was, "Britney is not pregnant. ‘And then one of the photographers had got a photograph up Britney's skirt with her bloodstained underwear. ‘At that time, there was rumours that Britney could be pregnant again,’ he recalls of reports about Britney’s relationship with – ironically – paparazzi photographer Adnan Ghalib. And that was a main thing that concerned me, for her as an individual and what she was being pushed to by the pursuit.’īut it was one utterly shocking incident that finally made Nick quit. Some of the things she was getting up to, some of her actions can clearly be traced back to mental health breakdown. That wasn’t the sole reason for it, but it was certainly made way worse. ‘She was having some serious mental health crisis, which was causing this crazy behaviour. ![]() ‘I know very little about mental health and mental health crisis, but even to me as a news photographer, it was pretty obvious that's what Britney was going through,’ he recalls. ‘I felt it was just on another level, with complete disregard for photographers' health and wellbeing, Britney's health and wellbeing, and bystanders as well,’ he says. ![]()
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