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      Takeaways from Britney Spears’s Memoir ‘The Woman in Me’

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      The pop star’s new book, “The Woman in Me,” recounts her rise to fame, struggles that became tabloid fodder and her efforts to escape a conservatorship that long governed her life.There came a point during the 13 years that a conservatorship strictly governed Britney Spears’s life and career that she gave up fighting it, the singer recalls in her memoir, “The Woman in Me,” which is being released on Tuesday.Her father, James P. Spears, had been put in charge of her affairs in 2008 after she was twice hospitalized for involuntary psychological assessments. At times over the years that followed, she pushed back privately, but ultimately her exhaustion and fear of losing access to her two young sons won out, she recalls in the book.“After being held down on a gurney,” the memoir reads, “I knew they could restrain my body any time they wanted to. And so I went along with it.” Spears adds, “My freedom in exchange for naps with my children — it was a trade I was willing to make.”In the much-awaited 275-page memoir, which The New York Times obtained from a retail store in advance of its authorized release, Spears writes about her career as a teen idol, her struggles that became tabloid fodder, her time under the conservatorship and her eventual push for its termination in 2021, when she regained the right to make her own decisions.Throughout, she describes the feeling of being too much in the public eye, too scrutinized, whether by her parents or the paparazzi, or even by the doctors who she says “took me away from my kids and my dogs and my house.” But the story is, by nature, incomplete, referring cheerily to Spears’s post-conservatorship marriage to Hesam Asghari, known as Sam, who filed for divorce in August after a little more than a year.Below are other notable moments from the book.Rise to fameFrom performing her first solo — the Christmas carol “What Child Is This?” — at her mother’s local day care to auditioning with Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing” in rooms full of record executives, Spears tracks her rapid ascent to fame as a child and teenager.When she was 10 years old, she recalls, she was on the show “Star Search,” where the host, Ed McMahon, asked her if she had a boyfriend. After she replied that she didn’t, because they were “mean,” McMahon responded, “I’m not mean! How about me?” She “kept it together” until she left the stage, Spears writes, “But then I burst into tears.”After appearing on “The Mickey Mouse Club,” Spears writes, she decided that she wanted to live a “normal life” back in Kentwood, La., until Larry Rudolph, a lawyer whom her mother met on the audition circuit, suggested that she record a demo. She won a record deal at 15, and Rudolph became her longtime manager.Spears performing in 1999 during her … Baby One More Time Tour.Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMounting fame, and attentionSpears quickly rose from a teenager performing at malls to a 16-year-old pop princess with a hit single: “ … Baby One More Time.” She went on tour with the boy band ’N Sync, and had a high-profile romance with Justin Timberlake.She writes that she “couldn’t help but notice” that talk show hosts asked Timberlake different kinds of questions from the ones that she was asked: “Everyone kept making strange comments about my breasts,” the book says, “wanting to know whether or not I’d had plastic surgery.” The pressure only grew as she became a fixture on MTV, and the public criticism ultimately led her to start taking Prozac, she recalls.Spears describes a loving relationship with Justin Timberlake but says she was pained by what she describes as his unwillingness to have a child together when she became pregnant. She had an abortion, she writes.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressBreaking up with TimberlakeSpears recounts her connection with Timberlake as magnetic and describes their breakup — which she said he initiated over text message — as leaving her “devastated” and fantasizing about quitting show business.She recalls her reaction to the release of Timberlake’s music video “Cry Me a River,” in which, as she describes it, “a woman who looks like me cheats on him and he wanders around sad in the rain.” She viewed the media as portraying her as a “harlot who’d broken the heart of America’s golden boy,” she writes, when in reality: “I was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood.”As first revealed in excerpts released by People magazine earlier this week, Spears recounts in detail the decision to get an abortion after she became pregnant while in the relationship with Timberlake. She said she didn’t view the pregnancy as “a tragedy,” but that he thought they were too young, leading her to agree “not to have the baby.”After the breakup, Spears says, she felt forced by her father and her management team to participate in an interview with Diane Sawyer, during which Sawyer pressed her on what she did to Timberlake that caused him “so much pain.” (In the book, Spears confirms a longtime rumor when she says she kissed the choreographer Wade Robson during her relationship with Timberlake, but she suggests that her behavior was related to rumors of Timberlake’s unfaithfulness.) Spears recalls that interview as a “breaking point” for her. “I felt like I had been exploited,” she writes, “set up in front of the whole world.”Relationship to drugs and alcoholTackling the peak years of her notorious stint as a paparazzi and tabloid fixture, Spears writes about her early adulthood forays into partying and nightlife with a sense of disbelief about how they were portrayed in the media.Of her time being photographed alongside celebrity peers like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, Spears writes, “It was never as wild as the press made it out to be,” saying that she had no interest in hard drugs and “never had a drinking problem.” Instead, Spears describes her “drug of choice” as the ADHD medication Adderall, which “made me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed.”Spears writes that during some of her most widely known public episodes — shaving her head and attacking a paparazzo’s car — she was “out of my mind with grief” following the death of her aunt and a custody fight with her ex-husband, Kevin Federline. “With my head shaved, everyone was scared of me, even my mom,” she writes. “Flailing those weeks without my children, I lost it, over and over again. I didn’t even really know how to take care of myself.”Spears adds: “I am willing to admit that in the throes of severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the torture of being separated from my two babies, the death of my adored aunt Sandra, and the constant drumbeat of pressure from paparazzi, I’d begin to think in some ways like a child.”Spears with her parents. She says in her book that her father, Jamie, became so controlling of her career while running her conservatorship that at one point he declared, “I’m Britney Spears now.”Denise Truscello/WireImage, via Getty ImagesThe conservatorshipIn early 2008, amid her public struggles, the singer’s father, known as Jamie, was appointed conservator of her finances and personal life by the state of California, an arrangement that lasted in various forms until 2021. Even as she returned to work as an entertainer, Spears writes that her every action was monitored, including who she could date or spend time with.“I know I had been acting wild, but there was nothing I’d done that justified their treating me like I was a bank robber,” Spears writes in her memoir. “Nothing that justified upending my entire life.” She describes the decision as being made by her father along with support from her mother and a business manager, Louise Taylor, known as Lou, who has denied being an architect of the conservatorship. (Jamie Spears has long defended his involvement as an effort to protect his daughter from financial exploitation.)“Too sick to choose my own boyfriend and yet somehow healthy enough to appear on sitcoms and morning shows, and to perform for thousands of people in a different part of the world every week,” Spears writes, adding of her father: “From that point on, I began to think that he saw me as put on the earth for no other reason than to help their cash flow.” Elsewhere, Spears recalls her father saying, “I’m Britney Spears now.”“I went from partying a lot to being a total monk,” Spears writes. “Security guards handed me prepackaged envelopes of meds and watched me take them. They put parental controls on my iPhone. Everything was scrutinized and controlled. Everything.”Any pushback by Spears was frowned upon, ignored or minimized, she writes: “I even mentioned the conservatorship on a talk show in 2016, but somehow that part of the interview didn’t make it to the air. Huh. How interesting.”Fans in the #FreeBritney movement often showed up outside court proceedings where they urged that she be released from the conservatorship. Spears writes of how much that lifted her spirits. Chloe Pang for The New York TimesFighting back and #FreeBritneyWhile Spears had intermittently pushed back against the conservatorship behind closed doors to no avail, she traces the beginning of the end of the arrangement to disputes with her father near the end of 2018, when she was made to undergo further mental health evaluations and then spend more than three months in rehab.“My father said that if I didn’t go, then I’d have to go to court, and I’d be embarrassed,” Spears writes, adding that he threatened to make her look like an “idiot.”In addition to being prescribed lithium at the facility, Spears says, she was allowed only an hour of television before a 9 p.m. bedtime. “They kept me locked up against my will for months,” she writes. “I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t drive a car. I had to give blood weekly. I couldn’t take a bath in private. I couldn’t shut the door to my room.”It was there, in a $60,000-per-month Beverly Hills rehab, that Spears says a nurse showed her clips of fans representing the viral #FreeBritney movement that was questioning the need for the singer’s conservatorship. “That was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life,” Spears writes. “I don’t think people knew how much the #FreeBritney movement meant to me, especially in the beginning.”She writes that “it felt like every day there was another documentary about me on yet another streaming service” (including one, “Framing Britney Spears,” by The New York Times). “Seeing the documentaries about me was rough,” she writes. “I understand that everyone’s heart was in the right place, but I was hurt that some old friend spoke to filmmakers without consulting me first.” She adds, “There was so much guessing about what I must have thought or felt.”When her father was removed as her conservator, not long before the arrangement was ended entirely, “I felt relief sweep over me,” Spears writes. “The man who had scared me as a child and ruled over me as an adult, who had done more than anyone to undermine my self-confidence, was no longer in control of my life.” When she received the call from her new lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, that the conservatorship was officially over, Spears writes, she was at a resort in Tahiti.But Spears remains raw about the aftermath of the conservatorship, writing of her continued estrangement from much of her family. “Migraines are just one part of the physical and emotional damage I have now that I’m out of the conservatorship,” she writes. “I don’t think my family understands the real damage that they did.”The memoir is scheduled to be released on Tuesday.Gallery Books, via Associated PressA return to music?While some say the conservatorship saved Spears’s life, she writes, “No, not really. My music was my life, and the conservatorship was deadly for that; it crushed my soul.”Throughout her time performing a revue in Las Vegas, Spears writes, she was not allowed to update the show. “When I wanted to perform my favorite songs, like ‘Change Your Mind’ or ‘Get Naked,’ they wouldn’t let me,” she writes. “It felt like they wanted to embarrass me rather than let me give my fans the best possible performance.”Now that she has the opportunity to create freely again, the singer writes, she does not feel motivated to do so, although she mentions a one-off collaboration with one of her musical heroes, Elton John, released last year. “Pushing forward in my music career is not my focus at the moment,” Spears says. “It’s time for me not to be someone who other people want; it’s time to actually find myself.”Sarah Maslin Nir and Chris Kuo contributed reporting. More

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      Book Review: ‘Madonna: A Rebel Life,’ by Mary Gabriel

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      Mary Gabriel’s biography is as thorough as its subject is disciplined. But in relentlessly defending the superstar, where’s the party?MADONNA: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel“I want to be alone,” Greta Garbo’s dancer character famously said in “Grand Hotel,” a quote permanently and only semi-accurately attached to the actress after she retreated from public life. Garbo was first on the list of Golden Agers in one of Madonna’s biggest hits, “Vogue,” but the pop star has long seemed to embody this maxim’s very opposite. She wants to be surrounded, as if with Dolby sound.“Before Madonna even had a manager, she had a court of valets and minstrels following her everywhere,” the record executive Seymour Stein observed.Though technically a solo vocalist, Madonna has been backed by dancers from the beginning of her career in the early 1980s. She has six children: two biological, four adopted from Malawi. Many more consider themselves her spiritual offspring: gay men to whom she’s been den mother; younger female performers she’s inspired.And she’s trooped around the world with an elastic entourage of friends, writers, producers, directors, handlers, photographers, publicists, reporters and fans, all of whom helpfully populate Mary Gabriel’s big, indignant new biography of her: a dogged, brick-by-brick bulwark against any detractors bobbing in the moat of her castle.“Madonna: A Rebel Life” is one of those books you measure in pounds, not pages: almost three, which would have been more if the publisher hadn’t decided to post the endnotes and bibliography online rather than printing them. It’s not going to fit on the little shelf of the StairMaster at the gym — a classically Madonna piece of exercise equipment — though you might hoist it afterward for wrist curls.If you wander into an aerobics class instead, not only are chances high that the instructor will play a song from Madonna’s catalog, but she’ll probably be wearing a hands-free headset microphone — and that is muy Madonna as well. As Gabriel notes, though the technology was used before by pilots and Kate Bush, it was her subject who popularized it on her 1989 “Blond Ambition” tour.For this book, though, the woman born Madonna Louise Ciccone in 1958, the same year as Prince and Michael Jackson, stayed quiet. Her voice is piped through from plentiful previous interviews, recorded performances and the occasional post on Instagram, where early in the pandemic she outcringed the Gal Gadot “Imagine” video with one of herself naked in a bath amid floating rose petals, declaring Covid-19 “the great equalizer.”The closest Gabriel gets to Madonna in the actual flesh is half a dozen conversations with her brother, Christopher Ciccone, whose best-selling 2008 memoir, “Life With My Sister Madonna,” caused at least temporary estrangement between the siblings, longtime professional collaborators. (Madonna’s sense of betrayal is hard to jibe with her ardent defense of free personal expression.)Gabriel also talks to 30-odd other sources, surprisingly few for the scope of the work, and turns up a few interesting archived nuggets, such as Norman Mailer, in an early draft of the more than 200 he wrote for a 1994 Esquire profile, describing Madonna as a “pint‐size” Italian American (he used an ethnic slur instead) “with a heart built out of the cast‐iron balls of a hundred peasant ancestors.”Previous Madonnagraphers have either been breathily unauthorized — Andrew Morton, J. Randy Taraborrelli — or taken a more “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” approach; universities have offered entire courses on her. Gabriel brings extra intellectual cred to the task. “Love and Capital,” her book about Karl Marx and his wife, Jenny, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award; her group portrait of five female painters, “Ninth Street Women,” was rhapsodically received. But she doesn’t describe her own connection to this project, as she did the others, and this reader was left wondering if it might be less love than capital.Not that Gabriel doesn’t make a diligent case for Madonna’s cultural importance: inviting us to consider, for example, her Mylar-encased coffee-table book “Sex,” pummeled with judgment when it was published in 1992, in the same light as James Baldwin’s novel “Giovanni’s Room.” She airs at length the praise of the curator Jeffrey Deitch, who worked with Madonna on a 2013 multimedia installation called “X‐STaTIC PRo=CeSS.”Maybe we’ve all miscast Madonna as the Queen of Pop — a dubious analogue to Aretha Franklin’s Queen of Soul — and she’s closer, on a mass scale, to Karen Finley, the performance artist who used to smear her nude body in chocolate or honey? Indeed, describing the period Madonna lived in Miami, Gabriel writes of her “daily ritual of covering herself in honey and jumping into Biscayne Bay, where she floated until the honey melted away,” with no apparent concern for sharks.“Madonna: A Rebel Life” is organized as a busy, seven-decade, mostly urban travel itinerary. Like Franklin, Madonna lost her mother early and was raised in Detroit, where her father, who also had half a dozen children, “thought we should always be productive,” she said. Her Barbie would tell Ken: “I’m not gonna stay home and do the dishes. You stay home! I’m going out tonight. I’m going bowling, OK, so forget it!” Among her formative influences were J.D. Salinger and Anne Sexton (literary); the Shangri-Las and David Bowie (musical); Martha Graham and Frida Kahlo (visual). “The sight of her mustache consoled me,” she said of the latter.I might be biased as a native who craved rubber bracelets and lace socks and waited to hear if FM radio played “Borderline” through the “la-la-la-la,” but the section when Madonna arrives in New York City, though well trafficked, is one of the most compelling in this book. She eats French fries out of garbage cans; learns guitar at an abandoned synagogue in Flushing Meadows nicknamed “the Gog”; brings a demo tape to the DJ booth at Danceteria; and, signed by Stein from his hospital bed, hangs with a “coterie” of artists that included Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She was also raped at knife point on a rooftop, an ordeal not publicly aired until the punishing Abel Ferrara film “Dangerous Game” in 1993.Having segued to Hollywood (and later Broadway and the West End), she gave the middle finger to its male establishment: walking away from an early marriage to Sean Penn, cursing out David Letterman on the air and roundly shushing Harvey Weinstein when he offers feedback on “Truth or Dare,” her 1991 documentary. (“I don’t care what your point of view is,” she tells him. “I never want to hear it. Who the hell are you to tell me what kind of film I should be doing?”) Her onetime paramour Warren Beatty, who directed her in “Dick Tracy,” mocked how she wanted to live on-camera all the time; who with an iPhone now does otherwise?Madonna is rightly celebrated here as a pioneer of AIDS education — she lost countless friends to the disease — and a genuine philanthropist. But as she grows more practiced with the press and isolated by her fame, the book softens and suffers. The muchness of Madonna, her cross-disciplinarity — from MTV to “Evita” — seems impossible to corral.Madonna’s drug is work — she makes a discipline of even decadence — and “A Rebel Life” increasingly becomes a litany of remote description and tabulation: boundaries crossed, records broken, shows staged, money made, countries visited, foreign cultures sampled. “All artists appropriate,” is how Gabriel defends her against a frequent charge. “It is called inspiration.”Clichés sneak into her prose. Madonna is burning the candle at both ends, igniting a firestorm and is a lightning rod for controversy. She has never taken the road most traveled, but does take a long hard look in the mirror.Speaking of mirrors: Gabriel acknowledges Madonna’s talent for self-reinvention, but oddly ignores her transformation after cosmetic procedures and the resultant backlash — a sensitive matter to parse, but hardly irrelevant for someone whose oeuvre has been so entwined with image. “I’m going to make it easier for all those girls behind me when they turn 60,” the star said when promoting her 2019 album, “Madame X.” Well, some of those girls want to know why she can’t shake her skull-topped cane at the anti-aging industrial complex.“A Rebel Life” hits its marks but rarely soars, as Madonna did suspended by cables during her Drowned World tour. (Rather, the book is submerged in names, places and dates and historical exposition.) Then again, assessing Madonna’s legacy before she has a chance to recover from recent health setbacks may be an impossibly premature endeavor.“The verdict time and again would be that she had gone too far, that her career was over,” Gabriel writes. “Time and again, the jury was wrong.”MADONNA: A Rebel Life | By Mary Gabriel | Illustrated | 858 pp. | Little, Brown & Company | $38 More

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      in Music

      Brooke Shields Does Cabaret

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      In story and song at the Café Carlyle in Manhattan, the star makes sense of a career that has included chaste nights with George Michael and drama with her mother.“Most of the time, I’m halfway content.”Those words are Bob Dylan’s, and they were delivered one night last week by Brooke Shields during her sold-out debut show at the Café Carlyle, the intimate Manhattan supper club where Bobby Short, Elaine Stritch and Debbie Harry have performed.It was five months after Ms. Shields had returned to the spotlight with “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields,” an acclaimed documentary that chronicled the ups and downs of a career that got its start in the 1970s, when she was a child model and actress marketed as a sex symbol.A number of celebrities came out to see her at the venue, which is blocks away from the Upper East Side apartment where she grew up. At a table close to the stage were the actors Naomi Watts, Billy Crudup and Laura Dern. Nearby sat Mariska Hargitay, with whom Ms. Shields has worked with on “Law & Order: SVU.” The crowd also included two men who had done cabaret at the Carlyle: Isaac Mizrahi, who designed the loosefitting orange dress Ms. Shields was wearing, and Alan Cumming.Whether by design or chance, Ms. Shields, 58, has reflected the mood of the times across her nearly five-decade career. In the louche, druggie ’70s, she starred (at age 11) in “Pretty Baby,” the Louis Malle film about a romantic relationship between an adult man and a child prostitute. In the striving, just-say-no ’80s, she graduated from Princeton and wrote a self-help book for teenagers in which she discussed her decision to remain a virgin.The celebrity guests at the show included, from left, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup and Naomi Watts.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIn the next decade she starred on Broadway (in a revival of “Grease”), displayed a talent for pratfalls in a hit sitcom (“Suddenly Susan”), and married and divorced a tennis star (Andre Agassi). In 2001, she married the comedy writer and filmmaker Chris Henchy, with whom she has had two children, and returned to the Broadway stage in “Chicago.” She has also found time to write memoirs and host a podcast, “Now What.”And Ms. Shields pointed out during the show that somewhere along the course of her varied career: “I performed at Sea World. With Lucille Ball.”Her Café Carlyle residency is scheduled to run through Sept. 23. Every night is sold out. On Tuesday, she opened with “I Think We’re Alone Now,” making it into an ironic lament about how she has rarely felt alone since her mother decided she would be a star.“I practically came out of the womb famous,” she said, during a spoken-word interlude. “They tell me the doctor asked for a selfie.”She also went through periods when career seemed to be over: “The other day,” she said from the stage, “I was in the airport and the flight attendant came up to me and said, ‘Oh my God, you’re Caitlyn Jenner!’”In “Fame Is Weird,” a song written for the show by Matthew Sklar and Amanda Green, she moved from her encounters with the public to her experiences with fellow celebrities. In the intro, she said she had turned down Donald J. Trump when he asked her out on a date, but soon conceded that she had consented to Elizabeth Taylor’s request that she pre-chew her gum.“I chewed it first,” Ms. Shields said, “so I got the better end of the deal.”Mariska Hargitay, seen here speaking with the actor Beth Ostrosky Stern, worked with Ms. Shields on the show “Law & Order: SVU.” Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesShe also recounted being mean girl-ed by some of he world’s best-known women. When she met Bette Davis at the Oscars, she said, “Hi, I’m Brooke Shields,” to which the star replied, “Yes, you are.” A similar encounter occurred when Ben Stiller brought her to Madonna’s house, Ms. Shields said. The greeting she received from Madonna was curt: “Oh, you.”In many ways, the show seemed like an effort by Ms. Shields to work through her ambivalence about having fallen closer to earth after the years of childhood and teenage stardom. In the second half, she roasted and paid tribute to her mother, Teri Shields, who in the ’70s and ’80s became a focal point for the culture’s misgivings about stage parenting and the sexualization of children in Hollywood.“She has been in the press almost more than I have,” Ms. Shields said, “and, probably, you all have your opinions of her.”She went on to note that life with her mother, who died in 2012, wasn’t all bad.“There was a lot of laughter and so much fun,” she said. “She would do really crazy things. She would see a dog tied outside of a store, waiting for their owner to come back, and she would get right down in front of the dog to say, ‘They’re never coming back.’ It was just so sick. It’s dark. But really funny.”She also acknowledged her mother’s alcoholism. “We named a cocktail at the bar for her. Actually, we named several for her,” Ms. Shields said, before getting serious about how much she missed her. She added that one reason she wanted to play the Carlyle was that it was a place her mother had taken her when she was young. “She would be really proud,” she said.With that, she launched into Mr. Dylan’s melancholy “Most of the Time.”Ms. Shields donned a cowboy hat to sing the Dolly Parton hit “9 to 5.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMs. Shields, who appeared to have a cold, sounded a bit like Bob Dylan as her throat began to give out. She then moved into material about the trials and tribulations of being a wife tot Mr. Henchy, who was seated in the audience, and the mother of two teenage daughters, Rowan and Grier. While delivering Tina Dico’s “Count to Ten,” she apologized to a man seated close to the stage, who was catching much of her spit.Toward the end, she sang “Faith,” a 1987 hit by someone she knew, George Michael. She delivered the lyrics with conviction while also using the song to make a cheeky reference to the nights when she stepped out before the paparazzi in the role of the public girlfriend to Mr. Michael and Michael Jackson.After the applause, the fashion designer Christian Siriano offered a quick review: “She was great, even though she clearly has Covid.”Moments later, Ms. Shields emerged from her dressing room and went through some quick hellos with friends and well-wishers. A waiter asked her what she would like to drink. “Tequila,” she said, before moving to a corner table for a chat with a reporter.Told of Mr. Siriano’s thoughts, she said, “I don’t have Covid!” But she said she did have a respiratory ailment that had landed her in the hospital a few days before the show.Her vocal coach brought her cough drops. Publicists hovered. Ms. Shields explained that her cabaret show began taking shape in the spring. Working with the writer and director Nate Patten, as well as with the musical director Charlie Alterman, she said she wanted to put together an evening that would involve telling her own story truthfully while making it a source of comedy.Alan Cumming in the company of Ms. Dern.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesShe was aware that this was a difficult moment to humanize the people who decided it was appropriate for her to appear in a movie at age 11 as someone whose virginity was auctioned off. Yet her mother was still her mother, and she loved her.“Ambivalence is where real life happens,” she said. “I mean, the point of it all is that we’re not one thing or the other. We’re human beings, and we’re fraught.”Ms. Shields was asked about her experience with Mr. Trump.“I was making some movie in the late-90s,” she said. “My phone rang and it was him. He said, ‘You and I should date. You’re America’s sweetheart, and I’m the world’s richest man. People will love it.’ At which point I stifled laughter and said, ‘Thank you, I’m very flattered, but I have a boyfriend and I don’t think he would appreciate me stepping out on him.’ And he said, ‘Well, I think you’re making a big mistake.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m going to have to take my chances.’”Did she not know that George Michael was gay? And did they really go on a date?“A few,” she said. “He was very respectful of my virginity.”“Read the book!” a publicist yelled, referring to “There Was a Little Girl,” the 2014 memoir in which she tells the tale.Ms. Shields added that, despite the appearance that her relationships with Mr. Michael and Mr. Jackson seemed merely for show, she had real bonds with both of them.“We had so much fun,” she said. “I wasn’t just a purpose, as a beard. It actually was more than that. The conversations, the fears, the discussions.”The talk turned to her podcast — in which she has spoken with Stacey Abrams, Rosie O’Donnell, Chelsea Handler and Kris Jenner — and the one person she has been itching to get: Britney Spears, who hasn’t given in an interview in years.“I tried very hard to find a way to be the first actual interview,” Ms. Shields said. “And I haven’t gotten it. But I am the only person who could do justice to the reality of the story. Whatever it is.” More

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      in Television

      Aubrey Plaza Has Found Her Scene Partner

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      “Oh, put it down. Down the hatch,” Aubrey Plaza said while eating pizza for breakfast, in a downtown Los Angeles restaurant that was otherwise deserted on a late-August Friday morning.Her colleague, Christopher Abbott, was assessing the spread of carbs, dairy, prosciutto and espresso on the table, declaring it a “nightmare for the gut.”“You have your fiber pills in the car. Why don’t you go get them?” Plaza said, teasingly, unleashing objections from Abbott before she hastily backpedaled. “They’re mine, they’re mine. I take them.”Four years after meeting on the set of the comedic thriller “Black Bear,” the actors are working together again, this time on an Off Broadway revival of John Patrick Shanley’s play “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” in which they will portray strangers who become lovers after meeting at a dive bar in the Bronx.Plaza is making her theatrical debut in the two-person play, which begins performances on Oct. 30 at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village, and the only person she could see herself sharing it with was Abbott, an experienced stage actor with whom she shares both an artistic symmetry and a knowing, playful rapport.After years spent proving that she could be much more than versions of April Ludgate, the comically unaffected, scowl-prone intern in “Parks and Recreation,” Plaza, 39, has become one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood. Her performance as a jaded lawyer in Season 2 of the HBO series “The White Lotus” was an audience favorite, and her role as a budding scammer in the big-screen thriller “Emily the Criminal” was praised by critics for its ferocity and nuance.“I like to just throw things out the window also and laugh and mess around and not take it so seriously,” Plaza said. Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAt the same time, she has reached a level of celebrity where, to some, she has become less known for her association with any particular character than for just being herself: an internet darling known for impassively delivering outlandish, sometimes sinister commentary that can leave late-night hosts unsure if she is joking.In Abbott, 37, who played a lovelorn boyfriend with a dark turn in the HBO comedy “Girls,” Plaza has found a co-star who seems to know exactly when she’s joking, gamely joining in on the weirdness with which she has become associated.While mulling the menu, Abbott responded with an exaggerated Italian accent when Plaza assumed one, later testing aloud his gruff Bronx brogue for the play. (“Do you wanna hee-yuh what I’m wuh-kin on?” Abbott blurted. “I’m going for an Andrew Dice Clay kind of thing.”)“He cares but he also doesn’t care; it’s the best recipe for me for a scene partner,” Plaza said, resembling a mid-20th-century movie star with her shoulder-length hair loosely curled and dark-rimmed sunglasses propped atop her head. “It’s fun and it’s also good and it’s also safe. I like to just throw things out the window also and laugh and mess around and not take it so seriously. It’s a hard combo to come by.”The feeling is mutual. “We’re both unafraid to be ugly and weird and strange,” said Abbott, who started his professional acting career 15 years ago in an Off Broadway production of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s “Good Boys and True,” about a scandal at a prep school.Plaza’s first play as a professional actress is not a tame one. Her character, Roberta, is a lonely divorcée who is both desperate for love and confident that all she deserves is punishment; Abbott’s character, Danny, is a lonely brute who will start a fight over the most minor of slights. Together, they fall into a cycle of screaming, crying, slapping, choking and expletive-laced bickering. There is also kissing, cuddling, tender touching and musings on fairy-tale love.PLANS FOR THE PLAY were solidified well before Hollywood writers and actors went on strike, resulting in the industrywide shutdown. Over a year ago, Jeff Ward, an actor (“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) who is directing “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” pitched the idea to Abbott, a friend and former roommate. Abbott immediately agreed, and in reading the short description of Roberta in Shanley’s script, he thought of Aubrey.“I don’t want to paraphrase it,” Abbott began, “but it was something like — —”“Sexy…,” Plaza suggested. “Beautiful … broken?” (In fact, it was Roberta’s “nervous bright eyes” that made him think of Plaza for the role.)If not for the strike, Plaza would have spent much of the summer filming a movie, “Animal Friends,” alongside Ryan Reynolds and Jason Momoa. Abbott would have been traveling to the Venice Film Festival for the premiere of the surreal comedy “Poor Things” (where it would go on to win the Golden Lion) and Ward would have been in Japan promoting the live-action manga series “One Piece.” It just so happened that amid the strike, the actors and their director had time to simply talk about the play and what they might do with it.“It feels like the secret ingredient to this whole thing might be time,” Ward said. “A little extra time.”Abbott “cares but he also doesn’t care,” Plaza said. “It’s the best recipe for me for a scene partner.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesPart of what they are working through is an idea that Ward said came to him years ago, when he and Abbott were living in Bushwick. They met about 14 years ago at an audition for a play: Abbott got the job, while Ward was hired as his understudy. At parties, Ward, an experimental dance enthusiast, noticed that Abbott was a good dancer, and thought they might one day collaborate on something involving movement.Then last year, while thinking about ways to incorporate choreography into a production of “Danny,” Ward picked up a copy of the script with the work’s full title: “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea: An Apache Dance.”The subtitle is a reference to a French dance style, developed into a popular cabaret act in the early 1900s, that mixes a seductive kind of tango with a violent domestic battle in which the dancers fling each other around in between loving détentes.It was a common pop cultural reference in the 1950s and ’60s, when Shanley was growing up in the east Bronx. The dance appears in old movies like “Can-Can,” with Shirley MacLaine; cartoons like “Louvre Come Back to Me!,” featuring Pepé Le Pew; and sitcoms like “I Love Lucy.” In that show’s first season, Ethel Mertz describes it as the dance “where the tough Frenchman grabs the girl by the hair and throws her over his shoulder and slams her down on the floor and steps on her.”A reader of the script will quickly see what Shanley meant with the subtitle. After Danny and Roberta meet, their encounter swings between desperate affection and uncontrollable, instinctual aggression. (Shanley based Danny’s proclivity for fistfights on his own teenage tendencies.)“I put that in there to give some guidance as to how the play might be done,” Shanley said of the subtitle in a phone interview. “It’s really about the interior life of these two people and how they meet and explode by touching each other.”Shanley, who has won an Oscar (for “Moonstruck”) and a Tony (for “Doubt: A Parable,” which is receiving its own starry revival on Broadway in February), gave Ward, a first-time director, his blessing to revive “Danny.” It premiered in 1984 at the Humana Festival in Louisville, Ky., with John Turturro and June Stein, before transferring to New York. (In his New York Times review, Mel Gussow wrote that the play “is the equivalent of sitting at ringside watching a prize fight that concludes in a loving embrace.”) Shanley is also allowing Ward to develop movement beyond the script’s stage direction, though he said he would make his feelings known if he disliked the additions.Those additions will be choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, whose gestural, sometimes pedestrian movements have depicted the inner lives of a couple, with an intimacy that almost makes observers feel as if they’re witnessing something they shouldn’t.For Abbott and Plaza, whose dance background consists of Irish step dancing as a child, a sense of voyeurism is exactly what they want the audience to feel as Danny and Roberta fall into mad, improbable love.“We’re doing this play every night for an audience, but I think you also have to do it for each other,” said Abbott, who looked character-appropriate in a white T-shirt and chain necklace, a fishing hook tattoo visible on his forearm. “We want to entertain the audience, but I personally want to entertain Aubrey.”“I guess I like to entertain him as well,” Plaza said, adopting a voice like a hostage reading from a script before breaking into a smile.“We’re doing this play every night for an audience, but I think you also have to do it for each other,” Abbott said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesPLAZA AND ABBOTT both grew up far outside the Hollywood machine: she in Delaware, he in Connecticut. Both developed their love for movies working in video stores, and after deciding that she wanted to become an actor as a child, Plaza started out in entertainment as a “Saturday Night Live” set design intern and an NBC page. Abbott discovered acting later, in a drama class at a local community college, which led him to drop out and move to New York to study it more seriously.More than 15 years later, both actors have become recognizable faces onscreen and have gradually broken free from the association of the roles that made them famous.Since “Girls,” Abbott has taken on complex, often tortured parts in films like “James White,” about an unemployed man facing the weight of his mother’s terminal illness, and “Sanctuary,” about a hotel scion determined to break up with his longtime dominatrix. In one of his most prominent roles, he starred as the spiraling Air Force bombardier John Yossarian in the 2019 television adaptation of the novel “Catch-22.”“He has an explosive side to him,” Shanley said of Abbott. “There’s always a feeling of instability and danger.”Since “Parks and Recreation,” Plaza has hosted “S.N.L.,” received her first Emmy nomination for her performance in “White Lotus,” and taken on producing roles to gain more control over scripts she feels particularly drawn to, including “Emily the Criminal” and “Ingrid Goes West,” in which she plays an Instagram-obsessed stalker. She has stepped away from the comfort of dark indie comedy to take on a glamorous, gun-wielding action film role in this year’s “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre,” and she recently fulfilled a dream of working with Francis Ford Coppola on his long-awaited epic “Megalopolis.”“Black Bear,” a movie within a movie set in the Adirondack Mountains, was one of those scripts that Plaza leaped at, becoming both a producer and lead actress opposite Abbott.“Unfortunately we can’t really talk about that movie,” Plaza said, citing the continuing strike by SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, that prohibits actors from promoting films and TV shows that have already been completed. (Plaza picketed last month alongside a miniature horse named Li’l Sebastian, a local celebrity in the Indiana town where “Parks and Recreation” is set.)But contained in that psychological thriller are hints of what could take place onstage in “Danny,” including Abbott’s wrestling, sometimes messily, with his character’s masculinity, Plaza’s talent for portraying the unhinged, and moments of crackling intimacy between them.Their characters’ relationship in “Black Bear” is shape-shifting: At first, Abbott, a soon-to-be father, can’t suppress his attraction to a houseguest (Plaza) despite the presence of his pregnant girlfriend. In the movie’s second half, the women’s roles are flipped, and Plaza is a wife tortured by jealousy, eventually descending into a drunken fit of rage and hopelessness.“From ‘Black Bear,’ it was clear that it was going to be electric. There was no ‘getting to know you’ section,” Ward said. “There’s just something about the way they match up.”“There are all different kinds of love stories, and this is just one of them,” Plaza said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesTHE TWO ACTORS encountered “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” in acting school — not uncommon since the play, with a surplus of opportunities to emote, is a favorite of theater classes and auditions. The actor Sam Rockwell, one of the revival’s producers, recalled doing snippets in auditions for “Last Exit to Brooklyn” (he got the part) and “The Godfather Part III” (he didn’t).Abbott approached Plaza about the role unsure if she would be open to it. Although she had acted in community theater as a child — “Miracle on 34th Street” and “Cinderella,” in which she played a stepsister — and trained in improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade, this would be something new altogether.But after Plaza read “Danny,” she knew they had to do it.“I cried. I laughed. I loved it,” she said.Despite its ubiquity, the play has had only one other Off Broadway production since its premiere — in 2004, starring Adam Rothenberg and Rosemarie DeWitt — and there has never been a Broadway production.In a phone interview, Rockwell said he suggested the production keep it that way, at least for now, even though Abbott and Plaza’s name recognition could potentially rake in ticket sales on Broadway. “I think a lot of plays have failed on Broadway because they were really meant to be Off Broadway,” said Rockwell, who is working on the show with his producing partner Mark Berger. “They had that funky quality.”After all, “Danny” is not the kind of inspirational, affirming fare that is likely to prompt theatergoers to buy T-shirts or bring their children. It’s about two damaged, shame-ridden people trying to find a way out of their own misery.“There are all different kinds of love stories, and this is just one of them,” Plaza said. “And I don’t like the idea that every piece of art that’s out there has to have some kind of social commentary or political message. It’s a play. They’re characters.”Over the remaining slice of pizza, Abbott agreed — “the ‘why now’ question is always like, ‘why not?’” — and explained that like Plaza, he had learned over the years to care about the work without caring how that work was going to benefit his career.“I don’t know — I just want to do it,” Abbott said. “I’ve let go of the question of what is it going to do for me.”Plaza squinted down at the crumb-covered pizza peel. It had hearts and the phrase “Happy Galentine’s Day” carved into it, a reference to a bit from “Parks and Recreation” that has caught on to the point of becoming a full-fledged holiday.“Is this a joke?” she asked, turning around to see if anyone might have been behind this. “It’s like I can’t escape. I’m trying to do a play. Can’t I just do a play without somebody reminding me that I was on network television?” More

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      Lynn Lynn’s Journey From Rocker to Dissecting Myanmar’s Coup in Film

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      Lynn Lynn was a musical idol when he volunteered in 2015 to protect the life of Myanmar’s new civilian leader. Forced to flee after 2021’s coup, he has reinvented himself as a film director.Long before he became an award-winning filmmaker, Lynn Lynn was already a star.His voice was ubiquitous on the radio, belting out rock songs, and he played sold-out shows in stadiums across the country. Everywhere he went, fans hounded him for selfies and autographs.But all that fame was confined to Myanmar, a country he had to flee after a February 2021 military coup.It wasn’t only his lyrics about the suffering of people under military rule that had made him a target of the country’s generals. He was also close to the country’s now-imprisoned civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, having once served as her bodyguard.Now living in the Thai city of Mae Sot, bordering Myanmar, the 39-year-old rocker has taken on a new identity: refugee.Despite the drastic changes in his circumstances, he has not given up on art, but he has changed his focus: to film.His first short movie, “The Beginning,” whose main characters are a fictional group of people from Myanmar, focuses on the importance of good will in building a democratic nation. Five months later, he followed with “The Way,” which captures the trauma and despair of a family suffering from a nation’s conflict; despite the dark themes, the movie is a musical — the first by a director from Myanmar.Both films have won multiple honors at international film festivals, with “The Way” also earning multiple accolades for its soundtrack.“I want to give the message that the military junta can oppress an artist physically, but the spirit and art cannot be oppressed,” Mr. Lynn Lynn said, speaking from his spartan music studio, a bedroom in a rented house in Mae Sot.Mr. Lynn Lynn walking behind Daw Aung San Suu Kyi when he was one of the bodyguards of Myanmar’s civilian leader.Lauren DeCicca/Getty ImagesMr. Lynn Lynn’s life story has been shaped by his country’s convulsive recent history, shifting from dictatorship to democracy to the present-day resistance.The youngest of four boys, he was born in the city of Mandalay to a railway worker father and a mother who stayed at home.When he was 5, he saw close at hand the brutality of the army whose leaders ruled the nation: soldiers pulling passengers from a boat and commanding everyone — regardless of age — to kneel. That scene of dominance and humiliation, he says, has stayed with him throughout his adult life.As a 9-year-old, he taught himself how to play guitar. After high school, he moved to Yangon, the capital at the time, where he cycled through a series of jobs, including bus conductor and security guard, while trying to start a musical career.His big break came in 2001, after he walked into a recording studio to drop off his demo tape and was soon hired to compose songs for some of Myanmar’s most famous singers. He established a reputation for composing original songs, a rarity in a country where nearly all the songs were copied from abroad.In 2007, he marched daily with the country’s monks during the Saffron Revolution protests. He read over and over again “Freedom From Fear,” a book of essays by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, at the time the leader of the country’s opposition, who was under house arrest.He learned how to navigate the country’s censors. Out of every five songs submitted, he was instructed to change the lyrics of three. Sometimes, he submitted different lyrics and then later swapped back in the original words, without anyone seeming to notice.“He is a rebel,” said his wife, Chit Thu Wai, a well-known actress and singer.Mr. Lynn Lynn with his wife, Chit Thu Wai, a well-known actress, in his music studio in Mae Sot.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesIn 2008, Mr. Lynn Lynn released “Think,” an album with love songs that he had written initially for other singers. It was an instant hit and catapulted him to stardom.In 2011, the military initiated a range of sweeping political changes, including releasing Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who convened a gathering of the country’s artists at her house.There, Mr. Lynn Lynn told the Nobel Peace Prize winner he would be willing to do anything for her. He became one of her bodyguards during the 2012 by-election and the 2015 general election.After she won in 2015, becoming the country’s civilian leader, Mr. Lynn Lynn returned to music. Able to sing openly about the generals, he released an album called “The Fourth Revolution.”Then, in February 2021, two months after Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi won the 2020 election in a landslide, the military detained her and announced it had taken power in a coup.The junta charged dozens of actors and musicians, including Mr. Lynn Lynn and his wife, with “incitement.” After months in hiding, the family decided reluctantly to leave Myanmar.Mr. Lynn Lynn went first in August 2021, trekking across a jungle and then swimming to Mae Sot. Ms. Chit Thu Wai and their twin daughters, now 6, followed a week later.Mae Sot, the Thai border city where Mr. Lynn Lynn fled with his family.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesMr. Lynn Lynn had never wanted to make movies in Myanmar. While he dabbled in script writing and supported independent filmmakers through a production company he owned with his wife, he considered most of the movies made in Myanmar to be too lowbrow to much interest him.He says he turned to film in part to “challenge” his artistic peers back home, many of whom allow the generals to use them for propaganda.Myanmar’s Directorate of Public Relations and Psychological Warfare has always exploited actors and actresses, using them in films to portray soldiers as honorable heroes. In return for staying silent, these celebrities enjoy perks, like being paid to attend galas such as the Myanmar Academy Awards.Mr. Lynn Lynn says he has noticed that the timing of these celebrity events often coincides with reports about more military atrocities. Nearly every week brings horrific news: 100 dead in an airstrike. Bombs dropped at an outdoor concert. Eleven children killed at a school.Midway through an interview in Mae Sot, Mr. Lynn Lynn lifted up his T-shirt to reveal his back. In neat, cursive script, there were 700 tattooed names and ages of some of those killed in the coup’s aftermath.Aung Myint, 32. Tun Win Han, 25. Khin Myo Chit, 7.“There are so many more to come,” Ms. Chit Thu Wai said.Mr. Lynn Lynn’s back is tattooed with the names and ages of 700 of those killed after the coup.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesMr. Lynn Lynn says he looks at the names in the mirror to “compel a sense of urgency upon my consciousness.” The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a rights group, said more than 4,000 people had been killed in Myanmar since the coup.Mr. Lynn Lynn knew that shooting movies in Mae Sot, so close to Myanmar, was dangerous. Seventeen of 20 cast members of “The Way” stood accused of “incitement,” and they feared Myanmar military’s spies were everywhere, raising concerns they could be abducted or killed. In the movie, members of the central family sing about their suffering from conflict and their quest for peace and justice. Myanmar is never explicitly mentioned because, Mr. Lynn Lynn says, he wants the story to be universal.Two weeks before the shoot, he was still not sure how he would pull it off without the sophisticated equipment typically needed to make a film. He decided to borrow a friend’s iPhone 13 Pro to use as the camera. For the music, he gave himself a crash course in sound mixing.Mr. Lynn Lynn with a wooden ship that was used as a prop in his film “The Way.”Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesMr. Lynn Lynn’s cast members had never acted before, but some had backgrounds similar to the stories that he wanted to depict. His directorial advice was to read the script and “feel it in your heart,” recalled Aung Lun, one of the actors, who had left his 5-year-old son and wife behind in Myanmar when he fled in 2021.Mr. Aung Lun’s character in “The Way” leaves his baby daughter at a school as soldiers set fire to their village. Years later, his character confesses that secret to his family.During that scene, Mr. Aung Lun cried so hard the crew had to pause the shoot for an hour.As Mr. Lynn Lynn waits to hear whether he and his family can be resettled in the United States, he has more film projects in the works, including a satire set in Myanmar before the coup.Wherever he finds himself, he intends to keep making films.“I want to use a language understood by the entire universe,” he said. ”I want to show that even while we are on the run, our art will continue to live powerfully.” More

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      Morgan Wade Was Looking for the Spotlight. It Found Her.

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      The day before Morgan Wade was set to perform at Lollapalooza for the first time, the country singer-songwriter was in a Chicago hotel gym at around 10:30 a.m. It was arm day: regular curls, hammer curls, triceps pushdowns, lateral raises, dumbbell presses, face pulls and shoulder presses. She stopped after around 45 minutes, but only because it was actually her second session of the morning — she’d been up for hours, and had already done another 90-minute workout, and also ran three miles.“It’s just been something healthy for me to be addicted to,” Wade, 28 and slathered in tattoos, said of her fitness routine, sipping a chocolate Muscle Milk she’d grabbed from a vending machine for a quick boost of protein.For the last couple of years, Wade’s music career has been ascendant. Her 2021 album, “Reckless,” was a critical favorite in progressive country music circles, and “Wilder Days,” its stoutly aching breakout single, became an unlikely mainstream country crossover success. “Psychopath,” Wade’s second album and first on a major label, will be released on Aug. 25.In almost every other way, though, the last couple of years have been destabilizing: the erratic schedule, the increasing obligations to the music business, a slate of health struggles, the full-scale immersion into the public spotlight. And Wade, who has been sober for six years, has been finding ways to cope: therapy, fitness, clean eating, reading, journaling.In recent weeks, those tools have been stress-tested at a profound level, as Wade has found herself the subject of prurient tabloid interest regarding her seemingly unlikely connection with Kyle Richards, one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Online chatter that the women might share a romance has taken Wade from CMT to TMZ in record time.“Trust me, I’ve Googled it, man,” Wade said the prior night, backstage before a midnight gig at Reggie’s Rock Club. “I’ve Googled how to deal with the beginning stages of fame. The Wikipedia articles on that aren’t very helpful.”“I’m just a private person,” Wade said. “I’ve always been just kind of quiet. And so when all this kind of came out, I was just, it felt like everything had been stripped from me.”Lyndon French for The New York TimesWhen Wade was performing acoustic gigs at FloydFest, the roots music festival in her Floyd, Va., hometown, in the late 2010s, that she might someday be simultaneously navigating the rollout of her major label debut and the public dissection of her personal life might have seemed unfathomable.But even then, Wade was deeply disciplined. She took music seriously, writing and performing her own songs long before meeting Sadler Vaden, who plays guitar for Jason Isbell and has become her go-to producer.“She already had taken on the challenge of addiction when I met her. And she was in sobriety,” said Mary Sparr, Wade’s manager. “I saw in her that she had already had this huge challenge and chose to go ham, you know?”Vaden, who first saw Wade in a video performing her track “Mend” on a flatbed truck, described her as something akin to “a country Melissa Etheridge,” noting how the specificity of her gritty and reedy voice locates her in a country lineage, which frees her to make music that’s more eclectic and less hidebound.“Reckless,” which contained songs that Wade had written over several years, had the lightly bumpy texture of a scar that’s never quite healed. Wade’s voice is rich and sinewy, and it can sound like a scold and a plaint all at once. “Wilder Days,” which made it into the Top 40 on the Billboard country chart and was certified gold, got her signed to a Nashville major label, but she is in no way a country centrist. She has opened for Luke Combs, Chris Stapleton and Ashley McBryde, all on the genre’s more stylistically earthy side.Wade onstage at the Stagecoach Festival in Indio, Calif., in April. In August, she made her Lollapalooza debut.Monica Schipper/Getty Images for StagecoachWhen it came to beginning work on “Psychopath,” Wade was feeling pressure, self-imposed, to follow the success of “Wilder Days.” The first batch of songs was recorded last summer, but Vaden sensed she needed some more breathing space. “We have to just make an album that we are proud of,” he said he told her.Her manager was concerned, too. “She was burning herself out really bad,” Sparr said. “She’s the type that will say yes till the end of the world and work herself to the death until she hits that boiling point. We’ve had to mitigate her drive in those cases to give herself some more balance.”The songs from a second batch, recorded in January, are both heftier and more assured, playing with emotion, or genre, or both. The chirpy “Fall in Love With Me” is in this set, as is “Alanis,” which directly takes on the difficulties of a female performer enacting her whole self in public. “Losers Like Me” is an agitation about small-town life that recalls Kacey Musgraves’s debut single, “Merry Go ’Round.” And “27 Club” is a cutting song about dodging the worst fate, and still being unsure of what comes next.During that stretch of time, Wade and Richards were forming a friendship. Richards discovered Wade on the radio and followed her on Instagram. Wade, ever the skeptic (and who had never previously watched “Housewives”), messaged her to ask why. They got close quickly. Soon, they had a Wordle group chat, including fellow Housewife Teddi Mellencamp Arroyave and Richards’s friend Jenn Leipart. Richards began filming content for a documentary about Wade’s life, both onstage and off. The two posted photos together working out in the gym, and one of Wade sitting in Richards’s lap. Wade performed at a charity concert Richards had organized to benefit the National Alliance on Mental Illness. (Wade will also appear in the upcoming season of “Real Housewives.”)Wade, left, and Kyle Richards on a red carpet in late April. The two struck up a friendship after Richards followed the musician on Instagram.Ella Hovsepian/Getty ImagesThe public adjustments have not all come smoothly. “She told me at the NAMI event she almost wanted to leave at one point — she was like, This is so stressful,” Richards said in an interview. “I realized and appreciated later her hanging in there for me.”In the first week of July, news of Richards’s separation from her husband, Mauricio Umansky, hit the internet. Suddenly, Wade was being floated as a possible factor in the split. Strangers began dissecting her music, her lyrics, her past struggles with addiction and depression.Wade was at her family’s home in Virginia at the time. For three days, she didn’t get out of bed, she said. Sparr checked in like clockwork. “She was calling me like once an hour or every two hours and being like, What am I going to do? What are we going to do?” Sparr said. “She’s programmed to want to take an action. She wants to fix things. And, you know, sometimes there’s not anything to do but let time do the work.”Wade even skipped going to the gym. “For her to not go to the gym, I was like, OK, this is not good,” Richards said. “I’ve never seen her in two years not do that.”She continued, “I carried some guilt for having her be a victim of this because of me. I felt like it was collateral damage and I felt guilt about that, you know?”The gossip even traveled to Wade’s family; her grandfather suggested that land prices in their small town might go up. (“He has a damn flip phone!” Wade cackled.) Her 5-year-old half sister asked her why she was crying so much.“I seriously thought I was going to have to go to a rehab just preventively, to keep me from doing something stupid,” Wade said.Slowly, she got back on her feet. She returned to the gym, and set up twice-weekly therapy sessions. Getting a taste of public scrutiny, she said, made her regretful of the judgment she used to hold about celebrities. She tried to encourage her family and friends to see that she had now become the object of the kind of dismissiveness with which they had once regarded the famous. “You have to give people a little bit of grace,” Wade said.Wade said she’s going to go “Back to basics,” to articulate her post-fame version of herself on her next album.Lyndon French for The New York Times“I’m just a private person. I’ve always been just kind of quiet. And so when all this kind of came out, I was just, it felt like everything had been stripped from me,” Wade said anxiously, but with a touch of resentment. “And then too, your orientation, your sexuality, all that is just being discussed online by random people that don’t even know. It’s heartbreaking.”Sparr encouraged Wade to get offline, and to treat her relationship with social media “with a similar urgency and with a similar seriousness that she did with sobriety.”But Wade also had, depending on your perspective, either an ace up her sleeve, or a liter of gasoline about to spill onto the fire. In June, she had filmed a video for “Fall in Love With Me,” the cheeriest and poppiest song on “Psychopath.” The video features a slowly unfolding romantic rapport in a shiny “Desperate Housewives”-ish exurb between Wade, depicted in tight workout gear, and an infatuated neighbor, who watches longingly from a window in the house next door.The neighbor is played by Richards.It was inspired, in part, by avid Housewives fans who had already been speculating about their friendship online. “There was already a little bit of Reddit fodder — I call it fan fiction — about Kyle and Morgan,” before any of the “TMZ stuff happened,” Sparr said.The clip is playful, cheeky, a welcome blast of good mischief. “I’ve actually, my entire life, weaseled my way out of kissing someone on camera,” Richards said. Even though there’s a strategic millimeter between their mouths in the video’s most steamy moments, “This is the closest I’ve ever gotten, and it’s, spicy enough, I guess, that I would consider that breaking that streak.”The power of the video, far beyond the tabloid tease, is the conventional frankness with which it depicts same-sex attraction. Coming from an artist signed to a Nashville major label, it is deeply striking.“There was never any pushback from the label,” Sparr said. “But the greater feeling of everyone I talked to was like, I can’t believe you guys are going to pull this off.”There, again, is Wade’s discipline at work, steadily walking a path few before her have tried, emphasizing the representational value of the video while also toying with the story, real or imaginary, of her and Richards’s bond. And having been on the receiving end of scrutiny for the last several weeks, Wade has finally emerged on the other side, emboldened.“I don’t know why we’re in this day and time where we have to speculate about people’s sexuality,” she said, emphatically. “That is not appropriate at all. Like, let anybody be what they want to be — it’s none of your damn business.”She has more pressing things in front of her — an ultramarathon in November, just a couple of weeks before she is scheduled to undergo a double mastectomy (following a positive test for a BRCA mutation, a genetic risk for breast cancer). And she has already written a dozen songs for her next album.“Back to basics,” she said of the challenge of articulating the new, post-spotlight version of herself. “Taking elements of who I used to be and those core fundamental things and finding out like, Hmm. What I believed then and thought then, that part of me doesn’t exist anymore.” But, she added, there are some things “that I’m going to keep that didn’t die.” More

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      Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Vampire’ Takes a Note From Taylor Swift

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      The pop singer’s new single dismantles a former paramour who was entranced by fame, borrowing a tactic from Swift’s career-shifting “Dear John.”On “Drivers License,” one of the great singles of the 2020s, Olivia Rodrigo has been played for a fool by an ex, but the song — pulsing, parched, destitute — remains centered in her pathos. She may have been abandoned, but the person who did the damage is still an object of, if not exactly affection, then obsession: “I still hear your voice in the traffic/We’re laughing/Over all the noise.” At the song’s conclusion, she is alone, and lonely.That was the Rodrigo from two and a half years ago, when she was reintroducing herself to the world as a human after a stretch as a Disney actress automaton. The Olivia Rodrigo who appears on “Vampire,” the first single from her forthcoming second album, has now lived through some things. Her sweetness has curdled.“Vampire” is nervy and anxious, a tripartite study in defiance that begins with Elton John-esque piano balladry à la “Drivers License” — a head fake in the direction of naïveté.But Rodrigo knows better now, or at least knows more: Rapid stardom has both bolstered and cloistered her. “I loved you truly,” she sings, deadpan, then almost cackles the next line, “You gotta laugh at the stupidity.” The song continues in this vein, through a boisterous up-tempo midsection and a rowdy, theatrical conclusion. Her subject matter — romantic disappointment, being left in the lurch — is the same, but the stakes are much greater now.“I used to think I was smart/But you made me look so naïve,” she sings. It is the sort of insider-outsider awareness that can only come from being both the object and the subject at once — powerful enough to author your own story, vulnerable enough to fall prey to someone else’s wiles.It is, in short, Rodrigo’s “Dear John.”Over a decade after its release, “Dear John” remains one of the most powerful songs in Taylor Swift’s catalog, and also among the most idiosyncratic. Purportedly about a dismal romantic engagement with John Mayer, it is produced in the style of Mayer, dressed liberally with blues guitar noodling.Lyrically, it’s not only astute, it’s vicious. Swift begins with a similar unjaundiced shrug — “Well, maybe it’s me/And my blind optimism to blame” — then goes on to surgically, savagely disassemble her foe: “You are an expert at sorry and keeping lines blurry/Never impressed by me acing your tests.”“Dear John” appeared on “Speak Now,” Swift’s third album, released when she was 20. It wasn’t a single, but it was one of a pair of songs on the album — the other was “Mean,” about a fierce critic of her artistry — in which Swift began creatively and publicly reckoning with the public version of herself. Her earlier songwriting felt winningly insular, almost provocatively emotionally intimate. But “Dear John” announced Swift as a bolder and riskier performer and songwriter, one unafraid of using stardom as her ink, and who understood that the celebrity most people knew provided as much fodder as her inner life.Rodrigo is 20 now, and “Guts,” due in September, will be her second album. And while “Drivers License” and its fallout became tabloid fodder, the public narrative wasn’t encoded into the song itself.“Vampire” changes that. Rodrigo’s target here is someone attempting to be glamorous, or perhaps glamour itself: “Look at you, cool guy, you got it/I see the parties and the diamonds sometimes when I close my eyes/Six months of torture you sold as some forbidden paradise.”Perhaps the song is about the Los Angeles nightlife fixture Zack Bia, one of Rodrigo’s rumored partners — if so, the structural shift from the first to second part might be pointed — that’s when the music becomes coffeehouse EDM, possibly a veiled allusion to Bia’s emergent career as a producer and D.J., and an echo of the Mayer-ian blues-pop Swift channeled on “Dear John.”The relationship itself, Rodrigo learns, is a transaction, too. “The way you sold me for parts/As you sunk your teeth into me,” she yowls, before anointing her ex with the coldest moniker imaginable: “fame [expletive].” That insult usually begins with “star” rather than “fame,” but Rodrigo knows that the condition of fame is far more toxic than any one person, and that someone who craves it is perhaps uninterested in personhood at all.On “Drivers License,” Rodrigo still saw the other woman as an enemy, or source of tension, but now on “Vampire,” she understands what the lines of allegiance truly are, marking an emergent feminist streak. Here, she finds kinship with her ex’s other partners, and lambastes herself for thinking she ever was the exception: “Every girl I ever talked to told me you were bad, bad news/You called them crazy, God, I hate the way I called ’em crazy too.”There’s an echo here of Swift’s realization on “Dear John” that she, too, is closer kin to the other aggrieved women than to her ex: “You’ll add my name to your long list of traitors who don’t understand/And I look back in regret how I ignored when they said/‘Run as fast as you can.’”After sweeping past it for most of her career, Swift has just begun revisiting this moment — last month, she played “Dear John” live for the first time in over 11 years, at one of the Minneapolis stops of her Eras Tour. That’s likely because Swift’s rerecording of “Speak Now,” part of her ongoing early album reclamation project, is being released this week.But she also used the moment to both reflect on her maturation, and to urge her devoted, sometimes ferocious fans not to live in, or dwell on, her past.“I’m 33 years old. I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19 except the songs I wrote and the memories we made together,” she said from the stage. “So what I’m trying to tell you is, I’m not putting this album out so you should feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I might have written a song about 14 billion years ago.”When Swift began reporting on her own fame on “Dear John,” it had the secondary effect of activating phalanxes of fans who went to war on her behalf, too. But over the course of the past decade, something interesting happened: The battle became theirs more than hers. They hold on to her wrongs with pitbull-like grip, ensuring, in a way, that Swift can’t fully grow up.So if “Dear John” is a creative guidepost for “Vampire,” this cautionary note offers a suggestion of what might come from it: a call to arms, a hardening of your outer shell, a conflagration that burns long after you light the match and walk away. More

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      in Movies

      Book Review: ‘Pageboy: A Memoir,’ by Elliot Page

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      In the “brutally honest” memoir “Pageboy,” the actor recounts the fears and obstacles to gender transition, and the hard-won happiness that’s followed.PAGEBOY: A Memoir, by Elliot PageThere’s a scene in the third season of Netflix’s hugely popular “The Umbrella Academy” where Elliot Page’s character, sporting a new, short haircut, walks up to the other members of the titular superhero team to suggest a plan.There’s a derisive response from one of them: “Who elected you, Vanya?”Page glances around, slightly tentative. “It’s, uh, Viktor.”“Who’s Viktor?”The subtitles describe “dramatic music playing” as members of the group eye one another. Page hesitates for a second. “I am. It’s who I’ve always been.” Another beat. “Uh, is that an issue for anyone?”There’s little hesitation: “Nah, I’m good with it.” “Yeah, me too.” “Cool.”And thus plays out what might be the most mundane — and yet quietly empowering — depiction of gender transition in popular culture I’ve ever seen. Were Page’s real-life journey to transition only as simple, straightforward or well received.Instead, as he details in a brutally honest memoir, “Pageboy,” his life story was marked by fear, self-doubt, U-turns, guilt and shame, before he ultimately seized control of his own narrative.A child actor from Canada who burst onto the scene at the age of 20 with a breakout performance in the title role of “Juno” in 2007, Page went on to take roles in films that ranged from indie (“Whip It,” “Freeheld”) to blockbusters (“Inception,” “X-Men: Days of Future Past”).But fame didn’t free him to explore his identity; instead it trapped him into a role studios wanted him to play, offscreen as well as on, as an attractive young starlet.Much of the memoir — told in non-sequential flashbacks and flash-forwards — centers on Page’s path to understand who he really was, against a backdrop of bullying, eating disorders, stalking, sexual harassment and assault. Page grew up in Nova Scotia, the child of divorced parents — a less than loving father and a mother hoping against hope for a more conventional child than the gender outlaw she seemed to be raising.“Can I be a boy?” Page asked his mother at the age of 6. He found escape in solitary play and a rich fantasy life that ultimately blossomed into a career as an actor.The nonlinear structure makes following a clear narrative difficult, but that’s less important than seeing, through his eyes, how Page slowly pieces together a clear sense of himself. In that, it follows a tradition of trans memoirs, from Jennifer Finney Boylan’s “She’s Not There” to Janet Mock’s “Redefining Realness” to Thomas Page McBee’s “Man Alive,” among others, that explore how we explore our identities.From furtive, closeted relationships — he relates how he held hands under a blanket with his then-partner as they were bused from location to location while working on a film together — to coming out as gay in 2014 (“more a necessity than a decision,” he writes), Page flirted with, but backed away several times from, the notion that he might be trans.“My shoulders opened, my heart was bare, I could be in the world in ways that felt impossible before,” he writes of coming out as gay. “But deep down an emptiness lurked. That undertone. Its whisper still ripe and in my ear.”It’s in that tortured, contradictory internal monologue — familiar to other trans people as we contemplate what seems to be an extraordinary, unimaginable truth — that “Pageboy” is most powerful. Page doesn’t really delve into questions of masculinity, or what it means to be a man, but he brings to life the visceral sense of gender dysphoria, or at least one type of dysphoria: the sense that your body is betraying you. It’s an utterly alien sensation for those who haven’t experienced it:Imagine the most uncomfortable, mortifying thing you could wear. You squirm in your skin. It’s tight, you want to peel it from your body, tear it off, but you can’t. Day in and day out. And if people are to learn what is underneath, who you are without all that pain, the shame would come flooding out, too much to hold. The voice was right, you deserve the humiliation. You are an abomination. You are too emotional. You are not real.Moments of joy pierce “Pageboy” as well: his first real queer kiss; scenes of passionate sex; the blossoming of his relationship with his mother after he came out; the reflection of his flat chest in the mirror.Page disclosed his transition in December 2020, a few weeks before I did the same. I suspect he, like me, had been prepared for a future where trans lives would be broadly accepted, or at least tolerated, albeit with sporadic incidents of hate. Both of us inhabit left-leaning spaces (media, movies) where the appearance of support is de rigueur.How could we have expected instead the tidal wave of anti-trans animus that is surging across the right, with hundreds of bills proposed — and some passed — in state legislatures that would in some cases bar adults from accessing trans care; undermine private insurance; allow medical personnel to discriminate against transgender patients; and restrict performances by drag performers and trans people, including possibly Page.Trans men and women are attacked in very different ways. Trans women are demonized as sexual predators; trans men, when people think of them at all, are portrayed as misguided and misled girls and women, confused and unable to understand their own identity. “When I came out in 2014, the vast majority of people believed me, they did not ask for proof,” Page writes. “But the hate and backlash I received were nothing compared to now.”It was an unwelcome regression to a time studios controlled his public persona: “I am sick of the creepy focus on my body and compulsion to infantilize (which I have always experienced, but nothing like this). And it isn’t just people online, or on the street, or strangers at a party, but good acquaintances and friends.”Still, Page has no shortage of fans as well, vociferous defenders of possibly the most famous trans man in the world, and one whose onscreen portrayal of a superhero offers an alternative conception of masculinity rooted in inner strength and sensitivity rather than brawn and muscles.His character’s arc from Vanya to Viktor offers hope, too, of a world where transition is matter-of-fact, accepted — and incidental. “Truly happy for you, Viktor,” another “Umbrella Academy” member concludes.Page and the showrunner Steven Blackman were at pains to ensure his character’s journey reflected the nuances of real trans lives, not least that being trans was a character trait, not the defining one. They brought in McBee to weave an authentic narrative into what was then an already tightly packed and carefully scripted season.In the memoir, Page reflects on his complex relationship with store windows, and his image in them — a reminder, pre-transition, of a body and identity he saw but did not want to inhabit. McBee crafted that memory into another telling “Umbrella Academy” scene, where Page’s Viktor pauses in front of a storefront and is asked what he sees.“Me.” A smile and a shrug. “Just me.”Truly happy for you, Elliot.Gina Chua is the executive editor at Semafor.PAGEBOY: A Memoir | By Elliot Page | 271 pp. | Flatiron Books | $29.99 More