Britney: Inside the Dream

The honey-coated pedestal was already being prepared. Around the same time, Lynne’s sister, Sandra Covington, also gave birth to Laura Lynn. Though cousins, she and Britney grew up side by side as if they were twins, sharing the same crib by day, wearing matching outfits, and attending dance recitals together. The family photo albums are filled with pictures of Britney and Laura, always hand in hand, wearing identical dresses, nightgowns, tutus, shoes and hairstyles. The girls played dress-up, and often did so with garish make-up and adult attire, all dolled-up to the mutual delight of their mothers. They even had the same toys and gifts to open at Christmas, so that they wouldn’t feel as if they were being treated differently. But Britney was different.

The family recognised her precocious talent and, within their community, friends and neighbours commented on the little girl’s gifted voice and rare agility. At friends’ houses or the farm of Lynne’s brother Sonny, a three-year-old Britney often showed off a dance routine acquired through watching a toothpaste commercial on television.

‘Go on, Brit-Brit, show ’em what y’all can do!’ encouraged her mother, uncles and aunties.

‘I’m convinced that baby was born with a microphone in her hand!’ said museum curator Hazel Morris, who has known Britney since she was born, ‘she really was the sweetest of children, who shone from day one.’

From an early age, Lynne was both curious and perplexed by the bundle of energy that she sometimes struggled to contain. Britney was ‘the doll’ that wouldn’t sit still—jigging, singing, dancing or cartwheeling around the house, on the trampoline in the backyard, in the back-seat of the car or across the front lawn. She only ever seemed to stop to watch favourite TV shows, Growing Pains and The Wonder Years, or to continue the adventures of Ramona Quimby.

Lynne’s best way of harnessing that irrepressible energy was to find suitable outlets: the Renee Donewar School of Dance in Kentwood, and gymnastics lessons in Covington, 55 miles away. Her daughter attended classes three nights a week and every Saturday.

Britney’s first dance class was at the age of two and her first solo on-stage recital came at four. Dance teacher Renee Donewar described her as: ‘unusually driven, focussed and a perfectionist.’ Here was a girl, who for some inexplicable reason, was determined to perform and throw her heart and soul into being the best by turning in foot-perfect recitals. If there was a new technique to master, Britney mastered it; if there was a new dance routine, she owned it. She was clearly one of those potentially annoying, but gifted children who wanted to outshine everyone, with a poise, intent and concentration that belied her years. It therefore surprised no one when she often earned the Best Attendee in Class awards. As she grew older, Britney would write out scorecards and judge her own performances with marks out often. Then, as now, she was her own worst critic.

In gymnastics, she walked away with trophies and medals for impressive floor shows, and went on to win her junior level at the State Louisiana Gymnastics competition, performing a triple back-flip followed by a somersault in her lucky, all-white leotard. From the age of six to nine, Britney excelled, and different coaches suggested she had what it took to go all the way; a budding Shawn Johnson of her time. But when such high hopes led to more gruelling practice, and when the fun of performing became secondary to the need to work, her enthusiasm popped.

‘Mama, I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s too hard,’ she said one day. Gymnastics never provided the same buzz as performing, she later admitted.

For Jamie and Lynne, this represented a dilemma because they had witnessed the excellence of their daughter’s talent and agility and felt she was abandoning great potential. But they saw how fed-up it made her, compared to how her face lit up when she danced or sang. Even though it went against their better judgement at the time, they backed her decision. They didn’t wish to push her down a particular road, regardless of pleadings from coaches.

Nor were the Spears keen to push their daughter down the road of that showy American culture: the beauty pageant. Ever since the 1850s, these competitions have provided a somewhat cosmetic approval-bar. It is a culture which encourages dressing six-year-olds up as adults, with full make-up, building up an emphasis on image and beauty. One sour experience was enough for Lynne to realise the ‘horror’ of the system when Britney, who was painfully shy when not engaged in performance mode, lost out and finished almost bottom in a local ‘Little Miss Something’ contest.

Lynne was adamant her daughter would never again be made to feel ugly or rejected by the values of image and image alone. She always wanted Britney to know that it is someone’s qualities and attitudes that make them beautiful, not their looks. If there was one person in the world who could wipe away Britney’s tears and put her back together again, it was her mama. The irony, bearing in mind what she would ultimately be marketed as, was that the Spears family had vehemently railed against a pageant system primarily built on beauty as a commodity. Yet that’s exactly what their daughter would become: a marketable, image-led commodity; dressed up like a doll for the pop industry. Then again, Britney wouldn’t finish near the bottom of the table in the music industry as she did at the pageant. The Spears would argue that her success as a pop star was based on talent, not looks alone; that she is a performer, not a walkabout prop.

In recent years, a lot of emphasis has been placed on the fact that Britney was more performer and dancer than strong vocal talent. That suggestion seems hard to accept based on people’s recollections and what is evident in archive footage. It seems more like a well-embroidered argument promoted to mitigate the fact that the modern-day Britney lip-syncs when singing live; that she is more entertainer than great singer. But anyone who witnessed her sing as a child—and during 1999-2001—can feel rightly perplexed because she literally blew audiences away with her voice. On-lookers couldn’t help but get the chills when she sang as a child, with a mature quality and depth. She might not have come near the natural ability of a Christina Aguilera but she was nevertheless impressive. Let no one say Britney cannot sing live. She can. Or, more pertinently, she could…back in the early days.

She first stepped up to the plate in public at the First Baptist Church, aged four, holding a microphone bigger than her own forearm and immaculately turned out in a floral, conservative-church dress. It was Christmas 1985 and she sang the carol ‘What Child Is This?’ to the melody of ‘Greensleeves’. The congregation was stunned by the voice that emerged from the youngster. Lynne was told that her daughter was ‘Broadway-bound’.

Of course, she was as proud as punch but no one actually believed the toddler would get anywhere. No matter how talented, no matter how powerful, this voice would always be lost within the vastness of Middle America. Lynne simply did what any proud mother would do: she encouraged Britney to keep on singing.

Mum scoured local newspapers for talent competitions. If everyone was telling her that her daughter had a talent, then Lynne felt an urge to show it off. After all, Britney had given up on a natural flair for gymnastics and her mama didn’t want another talent to go begging.

One year later, Britney ended up winning a singing and dancing competition at the Kentwood Dairy Day Festival. She went on to win another competition in Lafayette, a two-hour drive away, singing ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’, and soon added first prize at the Miss Talent Central States contest in Baton Rouge. Soon enough, talent-contest rosettes, certificates and trophies vied for space on the mantlepiece with gymnastic medals and golden statuettes. Britney’s sense of self-worth was being pampered with much attention, admiration and acclaim, albeit on a local scale.

Aunty Chanda—who was in Britney’s life from 1991-8 through dating and then marrying her uncle, John Mark Spears—fondly recalls her niece’s voice: ‘Oh Lord, she was better back then than she is today. She needs to recapture her natural voice because that child could sing, let me tell you. She had a gorgeous voice, one that sent chills through everyone who heard her. She was breathtaking, and don’t let people tell you no different.’

Britney was the star turn at Chanda’s wedding to John Mark in 1993, at the Nazarene Church in Magnolia, Mississippi. Wearing a floral frock, she took centre stage to sing the Naomi Judd hit ‘Love Can Build A Bridge’. Chanda said: Actually she sang it better than Judd. It was a special day to have my niece singing to me, and there were tears rolling down people’s faces. Guests who didn’t know her were in awe, saying, “That young one’s going somewhere.’”

Even Britney was recognising her abilities. She recalls that she deliberately chose songs that ‘highlighted my range and how powerful my voice was.’

Steve Hood, a dance instructor in Baton Rouge who worked with eight-year-old Britney, remembers: ‘I didn’t exactly meet her the first time she came to our dance studio, but I certainly heard her. I was coaching one of her friends in a group class when we suddenly heard this powerful voice echoing through the building. When I went to check, there was Britney in the middle of the corridor outside our class, singing her heart out. Why? Because she felt like it, I guess.’

The more her daughter’s voice was heard, the more Lynne was impelled to do something about her talent. She has always sworn that Britney’s ‘…real…astonishing…powerful sound’ could blow the roof off a house in the days before she was given a ‘super-produced pop voice’.

As Lynne scoured the south for fresh opportunities, Britney simply kept plugging away, almost nonchalant to ambition. Despite numerous talent show triumphs, she wasn’t transformed into a petulant brat demanding success. Quite the opposite, she remained humble, impeccably well mannered and always responded to elders with a respectful ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, sir’. Oddly enough, when she wasn’t performing, Britney acted more like a shrinking violet; she seemed only comfortable in groups of people she already knew.

She was a diligent and well-behaved kid who was ‘a fine example to her folks,’ according to local consensus. ‘She was raised right by her mama, and knew right from wrong,’ said Aunty Chanda, who has since divorced John Mark, ‘Britney was a kind-hearted, down-to-earth country girl who liked to kick around in her bare feet and play. I can still see her wrestling with the other kids, giggling and laughing on the grass. I’ll tell you, she was as good as gold and respected her elders—she was the model child.’

What becomes clear is that Britney placed as much faith in adults as she did in God. What her elders did, she watched and learned; what they told her to do, she did. She was someone who always seemed eager to please.

This trust-all-elders mentality was imbibed at her private school, Park Lane Academy further down Highway 55 into Mississippi where Britney, dressed in a red-and-blue uniform with a ‘P’ as its embossed emblem, would take the yellow school bus or jump in a neighbour’s car, for the 25-minute drive. It was some drive to take each morning but Jamie and Lynne were determined their children would receive a good education. Jamie, a former pupil of Kent-wood High, wanted better for his kids.

Park Lane is a one-storey building of corrugated iron with an impressive football pitch and bleachers, and it has a strong reputation in the area. It cost around $200-a-month to enrol Britney as well as Bryan. Rules were aplenty in the wood-panelled classrooms, where teachers stood at pulpitlike wooden lecterns adorned with a crucifix at the front.

Red rulebooks were issued each term, instilling Christian values and beliefs, and teachers issued guidance such as: ‘Thank God for all your many blessings. He gave you a brain and expects you to use it!’ or ‘Give God your best and he will help with the rest’. For Britney, such teachings merely mirrored her mama’s beliefs. Already she had learned the power of the Lord at home and so it wasn’t surprising for her when each school day started with a Bible reading and prayer.

There was nothing particularly extraordinary about the young Britney. She happily joined in with others and had a healthy number of friends. Always diligent with her homework, she kept her textbooks immaculate and non-creased. Her recreations outside school—aside from singing, dancing and gymnastics—revolved around go-karting and basketball.

The dirt tracks and sprawling plains is where Britney, like every other child in the area, could be found bombing about in her own motorised go-kart buggy. Where most people grew up riding bicycles, most kids in Kentwood had go-karts or ATV quad-bikes, zipping around the community in little packs.

‘She’d join all the kids out in their go-karts, seeing how fast she could go and how much mud she could get on her!’ recalls Aunty Chanda.

The family would often convene at Jamie and Lynne’s for two reasons: first, Jamie was known for cooking up a mean crawfish boil party and second, whenever bad storms knocked out the electricity, they were the only ones with a generator. But on Sundays after church service, it became a family tradition in Britney’s early years for everyone to visit the home of Jamie’s dad, Papa June, who built his all-wood property with his own hands. He had a reputation in the area for tearing down old houses and ‘making ’em beautiful’.

It resembled an afternoon at the Waltons when the Spears and the Bridges, and all their children, gathered around a wooden, oval table for early Sunday dinner. When the meal was finished and the plates cleaned, everyone knew the routine: Papa June would make little Britney climb onto the table and sing his favourite song, ‘Amazing Grace’.

‘I can see her now,’ recalls Aunty Chanda, ‘stood in the middle of that table, singing just beautifully, and everyone was woo-hooing. Then she’d climb down and run outside to play’

Another place to find Britney was the local basketball court on summer evenings. She played point guard for her school team, wearing the No. 25 shirt: ‘I loved it,’ she said, ‘I could play basketball all night long, but would have to be up in the morning to help out at Granny’s Deli.’

Lexie Pierce, Britney’s great-grandmother, ran the deli. The place is now a lawyer’s office and she has since passed away but Britney turned up at 9am on weekends, eager to work, shelling crawfish and crabs before manning the cash register and cleaning tables. Locals can still visualise her to this day: expert at shelling, singing while she worked, and her hands in a bucket of crawfish, pulling off the legs and heads, preparing them. There was great demand for Granny’s crawfish and Britney was the eager assistant.

She was meticulous in everything she did, not just preparing crawfish and performing. Within the home, she strived for perfection, too. She made her own bed and kept her little bedroom pristine by folding and stacking clothes into neat piles. Her school uniform was laid out on her day bed for the next day and she organised her doll collection into well-ordered groups. These twelve collectibles were a prized and well-groomed gathering of pale-faced porcelain dolls, vintage looking with blonde, Annie-style ringlets and sparkling glass eyes. Lynne bought her one each birthday for twelve years. She had one Cabbage Patch doll but no Barbies, and there were six teddy bears, brown or white.

Dolls and bears filled a table and chair plus all shelves of a white wooden bureau, where she sat to pen her prayer journal. It was a small, box-sized bedroom, all white with a single yellow rose on each top drawer to her bureau, dressing table and chest of drawers.

Britney herself was immaculately dressed, pristine as any one of her dolls. Family photographs from the early years are quite telling, depicting a girl who couldn’t relax for the camera, but instead felt a natural compunction to pose with the grace of a ballerina and a smile that seemed more exaggerated than natural; a child on her toes, being perfect. Praised when she danced; praised when she sang; praised when she back-flipped; praised when she posed; praised for being such a good girl. Britney grew up to the sound of applause—and no one applauded louder or prouder than her mama.

‘Lynne always knew there was a big wide world out there beyond Kentwood. It was the English blood in her! She wanted to be like her mama and Britney’s grandma—a true lady’ said a life-long friend of the Spears and Bridges.

This man doesn’t only know Jamie and Lynne but has a fond history stretching back to a friendship with Lynne’s parents, Barney and Lillian. During three different meetings, he talked of a family pedigree and its influences that offers intriguing insights into Britney’s make-up.

The matrimony of dairyman Barney Bridges and his English war bride Lillian Portell means that Lynne Spears and her two siblings were half-Louisiana, half-London. Among the locals, there was a sneaking suspicion that such extraction left Lynne with a natural air of being ‘slightly better than the rest of us’ and that opinion wasn’t expressed in a bad way.

‘It’s in her genes!’ laughs the family friend.

In deepest Louisiana, the sound of a British accent bestows on any such visitor the automatic assumption that one is classy and sophisticated; quintessentially proper. Unlike New Orleans, New York, LA or Orlando, Kentwood is no tourist hot spot. The sight or sound of someone from England remains alien to locals, as if they’ve just wandered in from the set of a romantic movie. Talk, and they break out in a smile. English people are viewed as a mesmerising delicacy from a faraway land. If that is the case today, imagine the reaction that Lillian Portell received when she stepped off the boat on Barney Bridges’ arm in 1946, with papers stamped in Tottenham.

The lifelong friend recalls: ‘We thought British royalty had arrived. She was like Princess Margaret. She dressed and talked proper, and always called tea at four o’clock. She was a novelty but a wonderful lady’

Lillian had been a typist at the Law Stationery Office when she met US soldier Barney at a dance in London. As he swept her round the floor in full uniform, he wooed her and projected a new life away from blitzed London, where he owned land in a little place called Kentwood. No one could have blamed Lillian for equating mass acreage with wealth back then; Louisiana’s equivalent of the landed gentry. But all romantic visions of Gone with the Wind must have died the moment she arrived at the farm, where everyone toiled and sweated in the intense heat of the Deep South.

The family friend remembers her arrival: ‘If she hated it, then she said nothing. She might have seen land but it was worth nothing. It was dirt land, and the house was no more than a big shack. This was the great new life she’d left home for. That girl pined for home, but she stuck with it and worked damn hard.’

Lillian’s sister Joan Woolmore views the situation somewhat differently, sensing that Barney was a ‘domineering’ man who wouldn’t allow his wife to return to Britain because of the fear she might never return.

‘Mr Barney didn’t encourage visits, let’s put it like that,’ says the friend, ‘but they had a dairy to run and there was no time. Lillian didn’t whine. She loved Barney, and she stuck around to raise a family and raise her calves.’

There is no one in Kentwood who would deign to say a bad word about Lillian. Her Englishness and warm heart are fondly remembered. One lady, who often visited the dairy to share afternoon tea, remembers Lillian causing whispered disdain at Sunday church service when it was discovered that she breastfed Lynne: ‘Back then, breastfeeding was a no-no. It was not thought appropriate and was frowned on, but Lillian’s attitude was, “If it’s good enough for England, it’s good enough for Kentwood!” and she just carried on.’