The Strange, Twisted
Tale Of Britney Spears' Pistol-Packin' Papa
Not so long ago,
a visit to Britney Spears' childhood home in Kentwood might net you an
introduction to Britney's mom and a souvenir poster. But four fans from
New Orleans got a much darker greeting recently, as Spears' father Jamie,
exiled by force ...
Two Sundays ago, Beth
Stevens and three of her friends did what hundreds -- if not thousands
-- of Britney Spears fans do every year: They drove to her hometown of
Kentwood, La., and its surrounding environs to soak up the landscape where
the Princess of Pop was born and raised and still calls home.
They had read a story
I wrote last month about how the town is all about Britney now, how her
image and spirit dominate the local economy. And they had read a story
in The Times-Picayune a few years ago about some Britney fans who knocked
on the pop star's front door and were rewarded with signed posters.
"I don't know why,
but I thought we'd kind of be welcomed if we showed up," said Erica, one
of the four girls, three of whom requested that only their first names
be used. "I certainly didn't expect Britney Spears' father to pull a gun
on us."
The girls are all recent
high school graduates -- two from Ursulines Academy, two from Mount Carmel
Academy. Their trip Sunday afternoon was a summertime lark, something to
do other than hang out at Lakeside Shopping Center once again. But the
trip began as a disappointment and ended in sheer terror, and it's pretty
safe to say their days of stalking celebrities are done. This is what happened:
Late on the afternoon
of July 14, the four piled into a black Ford Excursion owned by Christy,
one of the four. They hit Kentwood and stopped at a local gas station to
ask for directions to the local landmarks. They left with directions to
Nyla's Burger Basket -- Britney's favorite restaurant north of town --
and to the local Britney museum, and to her multi-million dollar mansion
in the woods on the outskirts of town where she, her mother and her younger
sister live, when they're not in L.A., which is most of the time.
"Everyone you ask will
tell where she lives," Beth said. "It's not much of a secret up there."
But the trip was a
bust. Nyla's and the Britney museum were both closed, and at the mansion
the gates were locked and there were no signs of activity on the grounds.
Disappointed but undaunted, the girls wrote notes to Britney and left them
in her mailbox with their names and addresses. For good measure, they asked
her for signed pictures.
While they idled outside
the mansion gates, a fellow rode up on a four-wheeler and they got to chatting.
"Have you met Britney?" they asked, excited. He said sure, and identified
himself as Britney's mother's cousin, the girls say. The girls told him
their adventure had been a drag, that they didn't get to see anything,
and that's when the young man suggested they go check out the small house
north of town where Britney grew up.
Her daddy still lives
there, the guy said. They remembered that was the house that was pictured
in The Times-Picayune a few years ago, the house where some fans got free
posters.
They needed no more
prompting. With directions provided by the stranger at the gate, they drove
to the house north of town where Britney was raised.
It's a modest and unremarkable
spread, a low brick rambler with plenty of space and trees around it, a
white Mercedes convertible in the driveway and an LSU flag flying from
the front entry. This is where Jamie Spears, Britney's father, lives.
The girls drove past
the house and turned into a lot next door -- a gravel parking lot in front
of what appears to be an abandoned business or industrial site. A sign
on a huge Dumpster in the lot says "Rent Me" and has a phone number on
it. There are no other visible signs in the lot -- nothing there or on
the Spears' residential property that says "Keep Out" or "No Trespassing"
or anything else that might suggest to uninvited visitors that they make
themselves scarce.
Then again, it's the
country; maybe that's not necessary.
As Christy tried to
make a U-turn in the lot, the girls say, four large dogs bolted from the
carport at the Spears home -- three German shepherds and a Rottweiler.
They surrounded the car, barking and gnashing. Sufficiently freaked out
by this turn of events, the girls said they froze.
They watched as a man
cased them from the carport, then disappeared into the house. They waited,
and soon after, the man came out of the front door and approached the car.
They lowered one tinted window, on the passenger side, where Beth Stevens
was sitting, and they immediately recognized him as Britney's father, but
their hoped-for brush with fame turned nasty.
"He was really angry,"
Beth said. "He was really scary."
The girls say he leaned
in and said: "May I ask why you are parked in my driveway?"
"I'm not parked here,"
Christy protested. "I'm trying to turn around, but the dogs . . ."
That was all he said.
The girls say Spears glared at them in silence, checked them out, then
slowly turned to walk back across his driveway toward his house. After
about two steps, he reached into what were either boxer shorts or Bermuda
shorts -- the girls differ on this detail. What nobody differs on is that
he pulled out a large silver revolver and, walking very slowly back to
his house without turning around, spun it around on his finger, over and
over, like a gunslinger.
"I had never seen a
gun pulled in anger before," said Erica. "And I never thought that if it
happened to me it would be Britney Spears' dad."
"We were coming there
because we love Britney Spears," Beth says. "To have this happen was a
shock."
They had a camera with
them but were afraid to take a picture of Spears. He disappeared into his
house but they were still stuck in the lot because he had not called off
the dogs and every time they inched forward or backward, the girls say,
the dogs went nuts.
They took a picture
of one of the German shepherds.
Spears re-emerged in
the carport, the girls say. The dogs eventually withdrew to their master,
and the girls sped off, stopping at a gas station by the interstate to
call their parents.
"All of us (the parents)
knew what they were doing," said Sharon Stevens, Beth's mom. "We thought
this was very innocent. We even thought they would be welcomed. We certainly
didn't expect them to be in danger. That's what blows my mind about all
this."
The girls drove home.
They waited a day. Then they called me.
Last Sunday, I drove
up to Kentwood to see if I could find Jamie Spears and talk to him about
it. Unnerved by the girls' story -- and by a angry phone call I had received
from him last year when I was working on a different story that the newspaper
never published, I brought a friend along to observe and listen.
When we pulled up to
the Spears home, I was struck by how close it is to the street, how out
in the open Jamie Spears lives, how different it is from where his family
lives on the other side of town, fenced, gated and protected on a hilltop
in the forest with a big "Beware of Dog" sign.
Spears was in the carport
when I got there, where he had been when the girls arrived. This time,
he was not alone, but in the company of at least a half-dozen men stripped
to their waists in the summer heat, enjoying what appeared to be a shrimp
boil or some similar activity. A couple of the dogs were there, too.
I parked in the lot
next door -- where the girls said they had tried to turn around -- and
walked halfway up his driveway. After being intercepted first by a friend
and then by his brother, Jamie Spears finally approached me.
I apologized for interrupting
his party, said I realized it was a bad time, but I gave him my card and
asked if I could talk to him some time about what had happened between
him and a car full of girls the previous Sunday.
"What about it?" he
said.
"What happened?" I
asked.
He looked me in the
eyes. "They were in my driveway," he said.
"Where? Right here?"
I asked, gesturing down at the driveway where we stood. "Or over there?"
I asked, gesturing to my car, which was idling with the motor running and
the door open, my friend watching from the passenger seat.
"Over there," he said,
motioning toward my car in the vacant lot.
"They said you pulled
a gun on them," I said.
"Yes sir, I did," he
said. "I carry a gun with me. I keep it right here." He gestured to the
carport. "And I'd have pulled one on you, too, if I didn't have company.
If I'm alone and you come in my driveway, come on my property, that's what
I'm going to do."
We regarded each other.
"With the death threats we get, the thousands of people come here, yes
sir, that's what I do."
He told me it was a
big gun. And then he told me: "I don't do interviews."
As he turned to walk
back to his carport, I said: "But they were teen-age girls."
He didn't answer. He
didn't tell me to get off his property or go to hell, he just turned and
walked back to his party.
I mulled all this over
on the drive back to New Orleans. Sharon Stevens had told me: "When she
(Beth) called us after the incident, I guess I should have told her to
call the police, but I just wanted her home. I just wanted to see her."
So I called the police.
Not to report a crime but to find out if there was a record of this sort
of encounter going on with any frequency at the Spears residence, to find
out if this was an isolated incident or standard operating procedure, because
Spears left me with the distinct impression it was the latter.
Two calls to the Tangipahoa
Sheriff's Office, in which I explained exactly why I was calling, went
unreturned.
I also contacted Britney
Spears' publicist in L.A., Lisa Kasteler. I informed her that I was going
to write a story and was calling to see if Britney or anyone else wanted
to weigh in on the situation.
"He did WHAT?" she
said. Then: "She won't have any comment." She thanked me for calling and
that was that.
Twenty minutes later,
she called back. This time, she offered a completely different version
of the story. She said the girls arrived late at night, parked in the driveway
next to the house -- not in the lot next door -- and that they were honking
the horn and carrying on, that the barking dogs woke Spears up and that
the gun was visible, in plain sight, before he knew it was four teen-age
girls in the car.
I told Kasteler I would
be happy to include his side of the story, even though it conflicted in
many respects with what Spears himself had told me. Then I met Wednesday
afternoon with the girls, and they had just had their film developed from
the trip to Kentwood and the photos clearly show the car was on the lot
next door -- not in the driveway -- and that it was still light. They added
that they were way too scared to honk the horn.
I told Kasteler this.
She paused and said: "Do what you've got to do. Obviously, the family would
prefer you not write this story."
A discussion ensued
over the newsworthiness of this incident. She said there wasn't any. I
told her if Jamie Spears is greeting Britney fans with a pistol, then he
has moved himself out of his private domain and into the public eye.
"They were on his property,"
she said.
"Yes they were," I
said.
There are many takes
on this incident and one is that these nosy girls -- and everyone else
-- ought to just mind their own business and not go poking around where
people live.
The world of Britney
Spears has changed a lot since 1999, when visitors were given signed posters
in the driveway and reporters were invited in to look at the family photo
album. That innocence is long gone.
Jamie's life and his
family's lives are going in two different directions. They're in Hollywood,
eating at Le Dome. He's in the carport, behind the Greenlaw Baptist Church,
gathered with friends around the power tools, boiling shrimp.
The only thing they
seem to have in common is all the late model Mercedes you see around the
Spears clan.
There have been threats
on Britney's life and safety, and probably on her little sister's, too,
and their father has good cause for concern. When she was making her movie
"Crossroads" in south Louisiana last year, tensions were high, security
extreme and something ugly was afoot, though I never found out the exact
nature of the perceived danger to the pop star. But it won't surprise anyone
to hear that the world is full of kooks and crazies who will harm a famous
person if they get the chance.
At the same time, throngs
of Britney's fans have been coming to this house for more than three years,
so you'd think there'd be some kind of protocol to deal with it -- one
that doesn't involve guns and dogs.
A fence, maybe. Signs
that ward away strangers. Certainly not a sign that says "Rent Me" and
a phone number so that if you pulled in to write the number down you would
be exactly where the girls were when the dogs surrounded them.
Picture some possibilities.
What if, instead of calling their parents, these girls had called four
knucklehead boyfriends who took exception to Spears' actions and decided
to go up to the woods and try to open a can of whoop-ass on him?
What if there had been
a guy with the girls, a guy with a gun of his own in his waistband? Or
what if the gun went off when Spears started spinning it on is finger?
You don't need any
more what-ifs. But here's a bit of advice: If you decide to visit Kentwood
and its environs in the near future to do the Britney tour, cross her childhood
home off your list.
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