Continued from page 2

What Was She Thinking?

Thursday January 08, 2004 10:00 AM EST

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Just ask Britney's mom, Lynne, 48, who helps manage Spears's career. Says Seal: "Lynne hit the roof." Within hours of Britney's phone call to report she'd gotten hitched, Lynne had flown from Kentwood to join her daughter in the Palms' N9ne Steakhouse, where an annulment powwow was already under way involving the newlyweds, Spears's brother Bryan, 26, her manager Larry Rudolph, Palms owner and longtime friend George Maloof Jr. and the pop star's newly hired attorney David Z. Chesnoff. "There were not many happy campers," says an eyewitness.

Adults more removed from the soap opera – but connected to Spears's professional life – have a harsher take on Britney's high jinks. "She doesn't have good advisers," says a member of her management team. "The mother just wasn't prepared for (stardom). She doesn't have any control over Britney. In some ways, Britney was the parent." Another source, who formerly worked with Spears, echoes that sentiment in spades, saying that her advisers are amateurs, that she rarely listens anyway and that the whole lot "think they know the game, but they don't."

For now the trouble seems to be contained. In what Las Vegas attorneys term a remarkably fast turnaround, Spears and Alexander were granted a formal annulment Jan. 5, putting her fortune off-limits from any claims by Alexander. (However, Jason, a junior at Southeastern Louisiana University, reportedly has hired a publicist to handle media inquiries.)

But in her passage from teenybop phenom to tarty pop diva, Spears has often seemed wildly out of control, particularly since her March 2002 public split with Timberlake (who is now seriously involved with actress Cameron Diaz), followed two months later by her parents' divorce. The night she and Alexander landed in Las Vegas, after having spent much of the Christmas holiday together in Kentwood, reports circulated that she was drunk in the Palms' ghostbar nightclub. "She was just tired from a long trip," Palms owner Maloof responded. The incident echoed a series of such reports over the last year of Spears allegedly partying heavily in night spots in both the U.S. and Europe.

This is an online excerpt of PEOPLE magazine's cover package.

– By JILL SMOLOWE. MICHAEL FLEEMAN, SEAN DALY and KATE SILVER in Las Vegas, MICHAEL HAEDERLE and ELLISE PIERCE in Kentwood, PAUL GREENBERG in Hammond, ALICIA DENNIS in Austin, BRENDA RODRIGUEZ and MARISA LAUDADIO in Los Angeles, LINDA TRISCHITTA in Miami and KC BAKER, MARIA EFTIMIADES and LIZA HAMM in New York City