Britney Returns

Capitalizing on the public's fascination with Britney's wiggy personal ordeals may be a lucrative strategy for the celebrity magazines, but the Britney Spears brand always does better when she's, well, blond. The vast majority of her millions of young fans around the world just want their Brit to be happy — a sentiment they express with all-caps and lots of exclamation points on message boards and fan sites. Those who stand to prosper if Circus is a hit — the singer included — have a lot to gain from presenting an image of the Britney we once loved. As lawyers for the conservatorship argued in court that the singer is gravely disabled, she showed signs of being highly functional: She filmed two videos, shot the MTV documentary and joined Madonna to perform for 50,000 at Dodger Stadium. In the spring, she's expected to embark on an arena tour planned to look like an actual three-ring circus, complete with contortionists and live animals.

When I meet Jamie Spears backstage at the VMAs, he shakes my hand and says, "Take care of my baby." The "or else" is implied. A bear of a man with piercing blue eyes, Jamie — and the conservatorship lawyers — make it difficult to talk in-depth to his baby, and interviewing Britney was a rigorously micromanaged process. We were never left alone together, and my questions had to be submitted ahead of time for approval. Acceptable topics included her new album, her boys and that's about it. Her team said she wouldn't answer anything about the past year and vetoed a question as straightforward as "Do you have an opinion on the presidential election?"

Jamie declined to be interviewed, and when I sat with Lynne briefly in October, she stuck to platitudes. Asked how it felt to watch her daughter's downward spiral from a distance, when the two were barely speaking, she said, "Needless to say, I was heartbroken and hurting for my child. But that's a chapter that's closed. Dwelling and thinking about that kind of thing too much isn't healthy." With her True Religion jeans and frosted, layered bob, she could have been Sarah Palin on casual Friday, as she spoke in the slow, patronizing tone of a kindergarten teacher: "We're looking forward, and we've got nothing but good and wonderful things ahead."

"I was concerned when I saw a lot of the things she was going through," adds Rudolph, who was also on the sidelines during Britney's downfall. "But I think it's about the journey for Britney, and the journey has taken her to this place now, which is a much, much better place. I mean, she's not there yet, but she's in an infinitely better place, as you can clearly see. She's really getting it together. She's being productive, and she's got an amazing relationship with her boys. She's very happy now."

When the conservatorship was first put in place, in February, Jamie and Lynne issued a statement describing Britney as "an adult child in the throes of a mental-health crisis." The original plan was that it would be a temporary measure until the singer could get back on her feet. But Jamie's lawyers repeatedly returned to court to have the scope and duration of the arrangement extended to grant him greater authority over her legal and personal decisions. (It's very rare for a young adult who is not extremely ill to have their rights assigned to a conservator. But the conservatorship system doesn't conform to the same evidentiary standards as the criminal courts require, and many conservatees in California and elsewhere complain that the law unfairly deprives them of their civil liberties.) On October 28th, the lawyers won their bid to have the conservatorship made permanent — meaning that, uncontested, it could remain in effect until Jamie dies.

Under the conservatorship, Britney lost her right to hire her own attorney, instead being paired with court-appointed lawyer Samuel Ingham III, who gets paid up to $10,000 a week of Britney's money to represent her. To date, she has not appeared in court to raise objections, though she initially balked at the arrangement. On February 6th — the same day UCLA released her early because the doctors said she had stabilized enough that they could not continue to hold her against her will — she hopped in a paparazzi's car and headed to the Beverly Hills Hotel for a meeting with her then-business-manager, Howard Grossman, and afterward to the office of lawyer Adam Streisand, whom she had asked to fight the fledgling conservatorship proceedings. In a strongly worded e-mail dated February 2nd, Streisand had written to Jamie's conservatorship attorneys, saying, "I am told that you called [Spears' former custody lawyer] Ron Rale and told him that Britney has been adjudged incompetent. That is false, and you know it. You further stated that Mr. Rale has no right to see his client without approval from the temporary conservators. That is also false." He then accused the conservatorship of orchestrating "nothing more than a hostile takeover of our client for improper purposes." A few days later, in court, Streisand said Britney "has expressed a very strong desire that her father not be appointed conservator. He has been estranged from her, and this is causing her even more stress." The court, however, agreed with Jamie's lawyers, who argued that Britney was not competent to retain her own counsel; they threw out Streisand's petition to have co-conservatorship shifted to Grossman, and Streisand stepped away from the case.

On February 14th, Britney's brother, Bryan, 31, won his motion asking to be put in charge of the trust Britney had set up in 2004 as the primary repository for her earnings. Britney and Bryan were fairly close at the time, and she had named him a successor co-trustee. Bryan argued that the appointment of conservators over his sister proved that she was not able to control the trust. Around the same time, the singer had a friend conference-call attorney Jon Eardley to discuss contesting the conservatorship once more.

"I basically just want my life back," Britney can be heard saying in a tape of the call. (In her world, people sometimes tape each other's phone calls.) "I want to be able to drive my car. I want to be able to live in my house by myself. I want to be able to say who's going to be my security guard."