FEB. 12, NEW YORK CITY: Partying at the nightclub ONE, Spears swapped her micro-mini red dress for a go-go dancer's bikini and fishnets. Photo by: Getty |
Her mom wasn't the only one. Over the next few days, the singer's parents, Lynne and Jamie Spears, as well as her sister Jamie Lynn, 15, and the close-knit group of friends and extended family in her hometown of Kentwood, La., watched in fear, anger and disbelief as news reports showed grainy footage of the 25-year-old mother of two – sons Sean Preston, 17 months, and Jayden James, 5 months – walking into a tattoo parlor after shaving her head, looking vacant, frightened and bewildered. One close family friend called Spears's behavior a "cry for help" in a year that has already been marked by trauma, from the death of her beloved aunt in January to the betrayal she felt in February when ex-beau Isaac Cohen gave a British tabloid an intimate account of their life together, to recent published reports of excessive drinking. "Her loneliness was palpable," says Spears's hairstylist, Corinne Asch, of Lukaro Salon in Beverly Hills. "We would be doing her hair and her nails and all of a sudden she would just start crying."
"She is obviously in a lot of pain and needs help immediately," says Doreen Seal, a longtime family friend whose son Jason Alexander, 25, was married to Spears for 55 hours in 2004. "She is a mother of two, and someday her little boys are going to be old enough to see what she's doing and be hurt by it. Whatever she is dealing with is not going away for her until she fixes it."
To the relief of everyone who knows her – including her soon-to-be-ex-husband Kevin Federline, 28, who "is concerned for Britney and his children; he loves her," says a friend – she took a first step. On Feb. 20, days after an intervention staged by her manager Larry Rudolph and several family members, Spears's camp announced she had voluntarily checked herself into a rehabilitation clinic in California. "I think she made a step in the right direction," says family friend Ginger Simmons, 43. "We all make mistakes and do things we aren't proud of – and we don't have the paparazzi in our face all the time. We have to remember that there are children involved, and that this is someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's mother."
