And yet, when I asked Aguilera what had attracted her to Rutler, she conceded, “I could depend on him for everything. Matt was working on the movie, and he was so supportive. And he still is. We’ve been through a lot in the past year.” Rutler, who rarely leaves Aguilera’s side, is handsome, boyish, and polite, but he has also been something of a bad-luck charm—in the last year, when he’s been her date for big events, things seem to go terribly wrong. In February the couple attended the Super Bowl together in Dallas, where Aguilera was set to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the game. As a child sensation, she had performed the national anthem dozens of times for her local Pittsburgh teams—the Penguins (hockey), the Pirates (baseball), and the Steelers (football). “Everything on the field at the Super Bowl was vividly bright, and I was having a moment,” Aguilera recalled. “I got lost in the emotion of being there and I messed up the lyrics to the song.” Instead of singing, “O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming,” she belted out, “What so proudly we watched at the twilight’s last reaming.”
Her improvised line made instant headlines. “I knew the press would glom onto it,” she said. “I went to dinner after the Super Bowl with Matt and I laughed about how I’d made myself into a Trivial Pursuit question: ‘In 2011 what female singer flubbed the lyrics to the national anthem?’” The weirdness was compounded by a bizarre incident that had happened a few weeks earlier, when Rutler and Aguilera attended a birthday party at actor Jeremy Renner’s house. “Matt was the one who was invited—I went as his girlfriend,” Aguilera recalled. “It was an open party, and everyone was spread out all over the house. At one point I sat on the edge of a bed. It was a guest room. But it only takes one person to start the negativity, and then everyone wants to hop aboard and continue the story.”
The story, according to Renner, was that Aguilera climbed into his bed. He insinuated that she was intoxicated or cuckoo or both. Questions about her sobriety and Rutler’s negative influence reached a fever pitch when, in February, Aguilera tripped and nearly fell to the ground during a tribute to Aretha Franklin at the Grammys. There were too many surprising, inexplicable mishaps: People assumed she was drunk or falling apart or desperately in need of an intervention. “I know what everyone was saying,” Aguilera told me. “And during that Grammy moment, when I nearly collapsed, I was thinking, Are you kidding me? I’ve always been really good with my heels. Even pregnant, I could perform in heels. Note to self: Never wear a train onstage. My heel got caught in my train, and if it wasn’t for Jennifer Hudson, who picked me up as I went down, I would have fallen to the floor.” Aguilera paused. “When it happened,” she continued, “it was just like, What else, God?! What else?! I threw my hands up in the air and started smiling, because what else could go wrong?”
