The new book Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly by Jeff Weiss is actually a reboot. The first time around, it was called Dante’s Inferno. As with Dante, Waiting for Britney Spears is a trip to hell. Unlike Dante’s wailing of lost souls, hypocrites walking in an endless line, and Satan stuck in a lake of ice, Weiss encounters tabloid journalists, editors with a conscience, and out-of-control celebrities.
In 1998, Weiss was unemployed. A gifted writer, he had dreams of a literary life. Desperate for work, he took what was supposed to be a temporary gig for Nova, a tabloid magazine that tracked down celebrities. His way in was that Britney Spears’s video for her 1998 smash “Baby One More Time” had been filmed at his high school, an event Weiss describes as “a cluster bomb filled with candy.”
What makes Waiting for Britney Spears so compelling is not the brilliant writing, which has elements of Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, but also its moral center. Weiss is not a perfect person — he even lies about receiving a high school journalism award to get the job. He knows tabloid journalism is scuzzy even as the adrenaline thrills him. His conscience told him that stalking people, even celebrities, and using their friends to find dirt is wrong. Yet, like Dante, he is lured in by the spectacle. “Secretly,” he writes, “I reveled in the choose-your-own-adventure possibilities of every assignment. I’d begun to subscribe to the classic bad-faith axiom: If I don’t do it, someone worse will.”
Weiss’s writing is poetic and electrifying, as when he decries driving into elite LA for his first assignment: “Glide into this bent matrix. West Hollywood on a Friday night, late in the summer of ’03. Rolling north on Robertson in the resentful. This is gilded turf. A nip-tuck netherworld on the border between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. At 9:00 p.m., paparazzi are still camped out on the sidewalk outside of the Ivy, capturing celebrities eating $30 salads. The tabloids publish these photos religiously each week, which in turn magnetizes out-of-town pilgrims to this cluster of organic cafés, Asiatic tonic pharmacies, and couture boutiques. Who needs a map to the stars anymore?”
Like Thompson, Weiss smokes and drinks but also has a conscience. He is disturbed by how the rapid tabloid press treat Spears. They don’t just hound her day and night for pictures — they often create the drama themselves, which they then use to portray the singer as “disturbed” and even “psycho.” Weiss reports on it all: Spears’s musical performances, her cocaine use, and her family drama. Spears is married, then divorced, and has to fight for custody of her children. Her father tries to send her to rehab, and Spears is placed under a conservatorship from 2008 to 2021.
The demons here, as Weiss explains, are not Spears and her hangers-on, although some of them are plenty bad. It’s the press. The paparazzi and editors at tabloids such as Nova come across as genuine sociopaths, monsters so focused on making money off of the rich and famous that they don’t care what harm it causes. Weiss describes how photos of Spears’s son buckled the wrong way in her car became a huge scandal and led to questions about Spears’s ability as a mother. Photographers would bait her, goading her into a “psychotic break” in 2007 when she lashed out in rage and struck a photographer’s car with an umbrella.
And then it all ends. The rise of the digital sea in the 2000s means photographs of celebrities are less valuable. “An aura of decline becomes unmistakable,” Weiss writes. “There is the widespread sense that this samsara will end, but no one knows when or what will come next. … The paparazzi money begins drying up too. With thousands of blogs and websites posting the same photos daily, often without permission, the picture values continue to crater. The gossip rags brawl for scraps. The tabloids still sell, but newsstand circulation begins its decline.” When Spears is taken to the hospital in an ambulance, the thrill is gone. Weiss describes the convoy of police and press following her as “a ghoulish parade.”
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At the end, Weiss emerges like Dante from hell, sadder and wiser, and a better human being.
”Until you escape it,” he observes, “you rarely understand how much it affects you. I considered myself a cool-headed skeptic, but it’s like living next to a power plant: only a Geiger counter can measure the extent of the radiation. What’s the point of following the rules when the rule book is being shredded in real time? We were entering the famous-for-being-famous era, where the only currency was public recognition. Literary romanticism seemed laughable.”