On the day after a burst of late-spring rain has finally blown out to the Pacific, both the exalted and the ordinary are busy reclaiming the newly lush garden of the Chateau Marmont, and most of the gossip revolves around the presence of a gray-haired Alabamian who, following the previous week's American Idol finale, is both exalted and ordinary--which is precisely the point.
It's for the best that Taylor Hicks has left the hotel by the time Justin Timberlake emerges from his black Porsche and handshakes and low-fives his way to a dim, mahogany-appointed corner of the lobby. Timberlake, in two weeks' beard, a wine-colored T-shirt, and big jeans, conspicuous only because he is so much more handsome in person, struggles to find a polite way of parsing the alternative pop-reality of the most successful show on television.
"I have a strange relationship with that show," Timberlake says. "I despise it, and yet I'm completely fascinated. The guy who won--people think he looks so normal, and he's so sweet, and he's so earnest, but he can't carry a tune in a bucket. Do you realize how much pressure it is to put on somebody all of a sudden? If he has any skeletons whatsoever; if, God forbid, he's gay, and all these people in Mississippi who voted for him are like"--he puts on his thickest Southern accent--" 'Oh, my God, I voted for a queer!' It's just too much pressure. But that's what we do in America. The American dream is still to be young, rich, and famous."
If this sounds ungrateful coming from the lips of one so young, rich, and famous himself, remember that Timberlake, 25, is already mid-career. It's been fifteen years since he became a regular on The Mickey Mouse Club; eight years since *NSync scored the first of three hair gel-sticky multiplatinum albums; and four years already since Justified, his first solo CD, turned Timberlake into an astonishing crossover star--a boy from Memphis who fitted trembling Michael Jackson-style vocals atop the heavily syncopated beats of the Neptunes and Timbaland, rescuing blue-eyed soul from the doubtful legacy of Hall & Oates.
In what he calls "the ADD era," Timberlake is lucky to have survived both audience capriciousness and the industry assembly line. "It has so much to do with timing," he says. "We live in strange days, man, and I think some people have good albums for completely the wrong reasons--because of the fact that they broke up with somebody or something."
Justified was the Britney-breakup album, of course, kindled by a winking revenge video and a notorious appearance on New York radio, during which Timberlake went into the squeamish private details of his relationship with his fellow former Mouseketeer. Though Britney finds herself in a precipitous slide into tabloid squalor while Timberlake has moved on to the more agreeable climes of Cameron Diaz, it's clear that his four-year relationship with Spears left its scars. "I dated Britney half my life," he says, "but I don't know that person anymore. I'm not sure I knew her before." (When I tell him that I once profiled Spears, he grins devilishly. "If I was writing an article about her," he says, "I would not be able to fight the urge to write every dirty thing about her.")
After Justified, Timberlake spent a year touring with Christina Aguilera, bought a big, Spanish-style house in the Hollywood Hills, and fell in love with Diaz. "I was really burned-out on the music," he says. "After that album, I just didn't have any creative juice left. It was my first solo record, and it was kind of like every idea I had about myself since I was a little boy." Timberlake laughs nervously when asked to elaborate. "I don't really know what those ideas were. I just know that we're products of what we grew up listening to--in my case, the Eagles, the Beatles, Al Green, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, the Beach Boys."
With a hit record, and on the strength of a gig hosting Saturday Night Live, Timberlake began to attract the notice of movie directors. His first film, Edison, never found its way into theaters; another, Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, got a chilly reception this May at Cannes; but Alpha Dog, Nick Cassavetes's new film about a drug dealer who kidnaps his client's fifteen-year-old brother, closed Sundance to considerable fanfare, and the buzz about Timberlake has been wholly positive, with words like "revelation" and "breakout" attending his performance.
In Alpha Dog, Timberlake plays the young man charged with looking after the kidnapped boy. "His character's a very sweet kid who gets himself into a situation he's ill equipped to handle," says Cassavetes, who believes that Timberlake is the best thing in the film. "To tell you the truth, Justin's one of those guys you hate because he does everything so well. He sings better than me, he dances better than me, he acts better than me, he golfs better, he plays basketball better...."
In fact, despite the warbling and the dance steps, Timberlake describes himself as a jock at heart. He spent much of his post-Justified time snowboarding, surfing, and playing golf, and he acknowledges that our conversation had to be scheduled around the NBA playoffs. But a few months ago, he decided it was time to return to the recording studio. "I was feeling the itch just to see what would come out," he says.
Timberlake feels little pressure to satisfy his record label--or anyone else, for that matter. "On the first album, I didn't play the label anything until it was done," he explains. "And when I did, they were like, 'My God.' They got something they didn't expect. And that process, which was probably really scary for them, was great for me because I established some trust."
The new album, tentatively titled Future Sex/Love Sounds and slated for release in September, will have a harder edge than Justified. In the words of Barry Weiss, the president of Jive, it is "very forward-sounding sonically. It's a bit more techno, a bit more dance-oriented." Timberlake has been listening to a lot of David Bowie lately, and he has enlisted, among others, Rick Rubin, the venerable rap-rock-fusion producer who has worked with artists from LL Cool J to the Dixie Chicks.
But it's the sybaritic music atmosphere of the early eighties, which he can have only heard about, that Timberlake aims to evoke. "I wanted it to look to a time when everything was really sexy," he says. "Maybe everybody was coked up, but who cares? It was hot. It was all about sex."
For the past year, Timberlake has also been working with his childhood best friend, Trace Ayala, on a clothing line called William Rast. The collection's knits, T-shirts, and jeans, for men and women, are available at Bloomingdale's and Fred Segal, and Timberlake has ambitions to build William Rast into a major brand, with its first freestanding store about to open in Tokyo. "To be honest, I wouldn't have done this if it hadn't been for Trace being so passionate about it," he says. "I wanted to do it, but I was like, I don't want to be that guy. Know what I mean?"
He means, effectively, the male J.Lo--a singer-dancer-actor turned fashion designer, not superb at one thing but decent at a few. As Jennifer Lopez struggles to keep her career afloat, Timberlake sees the clothes as a bit of a risk. "It's almost like the clothing, for a celebrity--when you're launching it, you get such a huge platform," he says. "After that it's like a cinder block tied to your ankle. If I could do this and have people not know I was doing it, it would be way better for me. Unfortunately, my life doesn't work like that. It would be like me going to a club and being upset when people take my picture."
More than his fellow alumni of The Mickey Mouse Club, Timberlake guards his privacy fiercely--in part because he just can't find a compelling reason to censor his behavior in proportion to his celebrity. "I remember the first time it was reported that I smoked pot," he says. "I was like, y'all don't? That's why I sort of respect Kate Moss. I think you lose once you start trying to analyze what people like. So I'm like, 'I hope you like how I live, but if you don't, you don't.' "
Lately, with the new album, the new movies, and the expanding clothing line, Timberlake is perhaps more exposed than ever--although there are certain kinds of public acknowledgement he still thrives on. Girls have been approaching him on the street to tell him how much they like the clothing line. "And Cameron," he says, "who's a big denim girl, thinks the jeans make her butt look perfect."