by Sady Doyle
It never occurred to me to wonder whether Britney herself liked the attention. I never stopped to think that she might have been frightened, too: that being asked to pose in your underwear, by a group of adults, might be just as strange as being asked to kiss some grown man’s girlfriend, or that having your breasts lovingly described for an audience of thousands might be far more invasive than hearing a few words thrown from a moving car. I didn’t read the interview she gave Rolling Stone in 2000, in which she worried about the number of grown men in her audience, and described being attacked by one of them: “This guy jumps up on the stage, takes his shirt off and comes running. I think the crowd thought it was supposed to happen, but security jumped on the stage and got him off.” Later, in the same interview, she told the reporter that “I don’t want to be part of someone’s Lolita thing. It kind of freaks me out.” For that matter, despite the fact that I hate-read the first Rolling Stone profile at least three or four times, I somehow managed to miss the part where Daly mentioned that Britney was being routinely assaulted: “Alone in the house one night, she hid from a prowler lurking at the window; her mother surprised another as he was hailing to her through a locked bedroom window.” I was so unhappy, and so afraid, that I never thought about whether Britney Spears was safe or happy, nor did I consider any of the plentiful evidence that she was not.
Worrying about Britney would have required seeing her as a real girl my own age, capable of experiencing the same trauma, subject to the same pressures. And I couldn’t do that: In my mind, she was an icon, a symbol, a teenager-shaped screen onto which I could project all my own frustration with how I was expected to behave, or how men saw me. And, moreover, I managed to convince myself that seeing her in that light—as an object, a problem rather than a person—was an act of feminism. I didn’t hate Britney Spears. I hated being a seventeen-year-old girl. But, because she was a seventeen-year-old girl herself, and visible, she was an ideal scapegoat; she was someone I could punish for the crime of being female.
Which is to say: We rarely love or hate public figures for who they are. We can’t; we don’t know them. At a certain point, the media narrative surrounding celebrities stops being about the specifics of their lives or personalities and enters the realm of myth. Stars are only stars because they represent something larger than themselves, some archetype, or a story we enjoy telling. From the moment Britney became a pop star, “Britney Spears” rather than “Britney from The Mickey Mouse Club” or “that cute little girl on Star Search,” she was burdened with the weight of representation, made to mean something more or other than herself. She was the “Queen of Teen,” the face of what we expected from young girls in America, and she reflected back those expectations faithfully, with all their inherent problems and contradictions kept intact. Britney was only, ever, what all girls should be, even if it didn’t make sense for one girl to be all those things, and even if asking girls to be all those things would hurt them.
Trainwrecks, as public figures, are necessarily also myths. But they’re the villains of the story; they’re our monsters and demons, images of what we fear, and who we fear becoming. I hated Britney early on, because I hated being forced into the role she seemingly enjoyed playing; I wanted to reject the feminine ideal she supposedly embodied, and I wound up rejecting her. But every wreck is a potential role that women need or want to reject; the magnitude of our hatred for them is determined by how powerfully we fear what they represent. In Britney’s case, she represented the end of youth, and the corruption of purity: She was the pretty, good little girl who became ugly and bad when she grew up, the “Queen of Teen” who was used-up and over-the-hill by age twenty-five. She was the Wages of Feminism, the working mother who tried to have it all and wound up nearly dropping her baby onto the sidewalk. She was the cost of public life, for women. (A common moral: Kylie Jenner is the latest to be DESTROYED BY FAME, according to my supermarket check-out counter. Apparently, this entails COCAINE, MORE SECRET SURGERY, & SEX WITH HER BOYFRIEND’S ENEMY, though some time later it also entailed a clip of Jenner running into the magazine cover at a drug store, and collapsing into mortified laughter). Or, she was the price of thinking for oneself, as a woman whose attempts at adult independence had (supposedly) driven her insane.
But the tale of the Virgin Queen dethroned is a story with tremendous resonance, in a culture that loves youth and hates women. It’s powerful, especially, for women, who are taught to fear and delay their own aging process from the moment they hit puberty. Just as I was able to project all of my own fears and insecurities onto the image of the virginal-but-hot teenage girl, adult women had a tremendous amount of culturally instilled self-loathing to bestow upon grown-up, washed-out Britney: Whether as a too-perfect girl or an imperfect woman, a vehicle for the anxieties of adolescence or the self-loathing of adulthood, she got it from both ends, a target for every age-based insecurity any given woman could summon up.
In fact, that particular story of virgin sacrifice is so salable that we’ve kept finding new people about whom to tell it, changing very few details in the retelling. In the late 2000s, just as Britney’s “meltdown” was reaching its peak, we created a new teenage dream, a kid named Miley. She, too was a Disney Channel alum, who made her name playing the wildly popular Hannah Montana. (All-American girl by day, pop star by night!) She, too, was Southern, conservative, possessed of plentiful aw-shucks charm, a self-declared virgin—in fact, she upped the ante by wearing a purity ring, signifying that she’d sworn before God not to have premarital sex—but still, maddeningly, sexual. She had a course to run. And she ran it, in Britney’s footsteps.
Miley’s “downfall”—her transformation into the tongue-wagging, joint-toking, Robin-Thicke-“molesting” outrage factory we covered in the first chapter—was practically planned from the start of her career. After years of rehearsing the narrative (not just Britney, but Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes, Winona Ryder, Drew Barrymore; one early iteration featured Judy Garland) it can now be executed with the relentless professionalism of a Broadway musical. For example, in order to accomplish the 2013 image reboot that saved her flagging album sales—the image reboot that resulted in her album Bangerz and the birth of the Miley we know—Cyrus hired a new manager, Larry Rudolph. He’s best known as the man who launched the career of Britney Spears. Miley Cyrus still doesn’t have any drug convictions, DUIs, institutionalizations, high-profile firings, or, really, any of the misfortunes we associate with the story; in a way, her train never wrecked at all. She might as well have hired Michael Bay and Industrial Light & Magic to create an incredibly realistic scene of a train derailing, so that she could walk away in slow motion, coolly donning sunglasses, as it exploded.
Celebrities’ lives are their own, and individual, but their stories are not: They’re manufactured by entertainment and media professionals who know how to hone a narrative for maximum impact, people who are hired specifically for their skill at creating marketable personas out of mere people, or transforming data and detail into character and plot. Stars and publicists can and do cooperate in the construction of plot points, by providing stories under cover of anonymity—if you see “a friend” cited, it may well be the celebrity’s PR wing, trying to keep their client visible between projects; when Kim Kardashian worked for Paris Hilton, one of her jobs was providing stories to InTouch Magazine—or permitting the publication of a less embarrassing story to avoid the publication of a more embarrassing one. (Harvey Levin of TMZ reportedly keeps a “vault” of damaging information; if the target wants to keep something in “the vault,” and unseen by the public, he or she needs to provide Levin with a better story.) Once the raw data has been obtained, it is then finessed by people with an eye for drama; the editor in chief of InTouch came to the magazine from Soap Opera Update, and, according to a profile by Anne Helen Petersen, “former employees remember [him] laying out a four-act cover drama for what would happen between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the beginning of each month—a pregnancy, f
or example, followed by a breakup scare, a reconciliation, and then marriage rumors.”
Trainwrecks are a business. Specifically, an entertainment business. They come to you through people who live and die by how many eyeballs and mouse-clicks they (we) can collect, and who therefore learn to shape even the most gnarled and unruly of biographies into something with the clean, salable power of a familiar story. The trainwrecks, like everyone else, are written in the way that will best connect with the widest number of people at any given time. So they are not only a chance to see our familiar female monsters embodied and serialized—the Slut, the Clingy Ex, the Aging Beauty—but a peephole into the dark undercurrents of the culture at large, the secret fears and lurking menaces of their moment.
For example, in April 1999, at the precise moment that Britney Spears arrived in the public consciousness, the country was tearing itself apart over the question of women, and age, and sex. And this particular wreck wasn’t confined to pop radio and magazine covers; it was happening in the halls of Congress, and concerned the highest office in the world.
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Anatomy of a Trainwreck
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON & MONICA LEWINSKY
It was not surprising, in 1998, to suggest that President Bill Clinton probably had affairs. Most people assumed he did; if they were smart, they assumed that men in politics, generally, had them. Kennedy had Marilyn; Earl Long had Blaze Starr; the speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, had left his first wife in the middle of her cancer treatment so that he could marry his mistress. Nelson Rockefeller had served as the vice president of the United States, and had gone on from there to be the governor of New York, and had gone on from there to die while having sex with his twenty-five-year-old assistant. When it came to Clinton, there was too much in the way of precedent, and far too many rumors, for the possibility to be entirely disregarded.
And besides, there was his wife. That year, it seemed there was no one—liberal or conservative, male or female—who entirely liked or trusted Hillary Clinton. She was a practicing lawyer, where no other first lady had pursued a postgraduate degree. She kept an office in the West Wing, helped make staffing decisions, and pushed for universal healthcare, where other first ladies had been decorative and far removed from the center of power. When people suggested Hillary might take a more traditional wifely role, she was openly disgusted: In her first 60 Minutes interview, she rolled her eyes imagining herself as “some little woman, standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette,” and scoffed at the idea that she could have “stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” rather than litigating cases. The New York Post called her “a buffoon, an insult to most women”; there was an episode of Nightline devoted to parsing the “cookies” comment. (OMINOUS VOICE-OVER: “The damage had been done. She’d been tagged an elitist and an ultra-feminist.”) Conservative men loathed her for being a man-hating feminazi, women loathed her for calling them “little,” and both groups loathed her degree of influence over the administration, an attitude that could be neatly summed up by one oddly prescient joke during the ’92 campaign:
“Then, there’s Clinton,” incumbent George Bush Sr. said. “A very formidable candidate. But would Mario Cuomo run as Hillary’s vice president?”
The jokes kept coming. Throughout the early ’90s, novelty shops sold “Billary” T-shirts and mugs, decorated with cartoons of Bill and Hillary merged into a freakish conjoined president. Hillary’s lust for power, the joke went, was so overwhelming that she’d actually inserted herself into her husband’s skin—erasing the distinction between their different bodies, their different jobs, their different genders—in order to more effectively control him.
But that, according to the common wisdom, was about the only kind of lustful insertion you were likely to see in the Clinton marriage. They did not, reportedly, love each other, or even like each other; they were co-workers who’d made a marriage of convenience, or else a contemporary version of Lady Macbeth and her weak-willed husband, an unsexed and dangerous woman pushing her man onto the national stage for the sake of her own ambitions. In private, Hillary was said to be a shrew, a violent and unlovable nightmare. Shortly after Bill Clinton’s inauguration, the Chicago Sun-Times alleged that she had broken a lamp during an argument, a story that quickly ballooned out—without verification or sourcing—into a tale about how she had thrown the lamp at him, which then turned into a story about how she’d thrown multiple objects, including a Bible, which, before long, was a story about the president and first lady punching each other. (In one particularly delightful variant, after the five-foot-five Hillary started a fistfight with her six-foot-two husband and desecrated the Holy Bible by using it as a weapon, she then “lit up a cigarette to punish her smoke-allergic husband.” So … I guess she won?) Despite the fact that they had a daughter, no one really believed they had sex; Hillary, at least, was usually presumed not to want or enjoy it. When the rumor mill did allow her some kind of desire, it was always perverse or annihilating. One popular rumor was that Hillary was a closeted lesbian, who tolerated Bill’s girlfriends because she was busy with her own; according to another, she’d had an affair with Vince Foster, and had him killed to cover it up.
So—the thinking went—of course Bill Clinton had affairs. What else was the man going to do? Have sex with Hillary? Still, when the details of one such affair were revealed to the public, they were enough to send the news media, and the public, spinning out into a year-long paroxysm of horror, disillusionment, and disgust. They also mandated the creation of a new villain in the narrative: Rather than sticking Hillary with the blame for every real or perceived problem with the Clinton administration, we began assigning it to the Other Woman.
You know. That Woman.
Monica Lewinsky had been twenty-one years old, and a White House intern, when she first met the president. What they did, when they met, was covered in exhaustive and pornographic detail by The Starr Report, prosecutor Ken Starr’s investigation of their relationship, supposedly undertaken because the president had denied that relationship under oath. Clinton defended himself by claiming that he’d been asked about “sexual relations,” which had been legally defined as touching the genitals of another person for sexual gratification, and that—as the recipient of oral sex—he hadn’t, strictly speaking, touched Lewinsky’s. In the immortal words of The Starr Report, he argued that “she engaged in sexual relations but he did not.” (Think about that the next time your partner won’t return the favor.) But this maneuver only made things worse: Lewinsky was seized, threatened with twenty-seven years in prison, and interrogated until she gave up specific, humiliating details on each and every way Bill Clinton had ever come into contact with her body. Who touched what, with what, who came, when they came, what they said about it, or felt about it, and how often phone sex came into the equation. Soon enough, it was all out there, a matter of public record, reprinted in The Washington Post and as a hard-cover book available in Wal-Mart.
But when people read The Starr Report, it wasn’t merely the salacious details—the thong-flashing, the blow-job-giving, the cigar going where no cigar had gone before—that sparked their outrage. It was her: Monica, the girl whose voice permeated every page. The Starr Report was, among other things, an excruciatingly detailed first-person account of how Monica Lewinsky had endured a bad breakup. And her worst crime was not lying, or even having sex with a powerful man; it was that she fell in love with him, and refused to let go of the relationship when he wanted it to end.
The affair hit the rocks when Monica was dismissed from the White House and moved to the Pentagon. Her superiors had noticed how much time she spent alone with the president, and thought (not unreasonably, as it turned out) that rumors of an affair could create trouble for the administration. Monica was “devastated,” not only because sexual harassment laws had been created to prevent women from losing their jobs if they were thought to pose a sexual temptation to their bosses, but because she thought, “I was never going to se
e the president again.” In the months after her transfer, Clinton did in fact phase her out of his life, and eventually dumped her outright, something she dealt with by trying—over and over again—to see him in person, to get close again, to change his mind.
Though it was the Clinton camp’s decision to spread the tale that Monica was a “stalker,” a delusional and predatory woman who’d fantasized a relationship with the president, it was the work of Starr and his allies to turn Monica’s lovesick humiliation into news. The report made sure to note that Clinton’s secretary, Betty Currie, called her a “pain in the neck” and complained about the “many phone calls” in which Monica was “distraught and sometimes in tears over her inability to get in touch with the president.” Vernon Jordan, who’d been tasked with finding her another job, was quoted calling Monica a “highly emotional lady.” We got to read copious snippets from Monica’s unsent letters, which ran the full range of embarrassing post-breakup emotions, from irate to abject and back again: “Any normal person would have walked away from this and said, ‘He doesn’t call me, he doesn’t want to see me—screw it. It doesn’t matter.’ I can’t let go of you,” ran one such note. By the time the year was up, we would hear a tape of Monica sobbing to Linda Tripp, who was, unbeknownst to her, taping their phone calls on the advice of her literary agent. Monica’s voice was so mangled with snot and pain that you could hardly make out the words: I can’t take it, I can’t take it any more.