Set for a comeback?

The disturbing images seem so distant now: the pop star-turned-cautionary tabloid tale — head shorn, face twisted, umbrella gripped like a police baton as she bashed a paparazzi SUV window. More than 8 years after her meltdown, Britney Spears, at 34, appears to be thriving.

In September, she announced a 2-year, $35 million deal to extend her residency at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. Forbes named her the 5th-highest-earning female musician of 2015, ahead of powerhouses like Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. And she’s been hard at work on her 9th studio album, expected this year.

With her television guest spots and a wildly popular, often eccentric Instagram feed featuring her toned abs and adorable sons, Spears looks like that rare celebrity who has vanquished deep travails to snatch a second chance.“I’m in a real good place in my life,” Spears told People magazine last year, in an interview about her personal life. “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.” Spears’s team presents her onstage as fully in control, and backstage as the mastermind of her show, an artiste in top form. But that view seems at odds with the conclusions routinely drawn about her at probate court in Los Angeles, where an undisclosed mental illness and substance abuse led her family to take action in 2008.

Since then, Spears’s life has been controlled by a court-approved conservatorship, known in other states as a guardianship, designed for people who cannot take care of themselves.

According to the arrangement, which is typically used to protect the old, the mentally disabled or the extremely ill, Spears cannot make key decisions, personal or financial, without the approval of her conservators: her father, Jamie Spears, and a lawyer, Andrew M Wallet. Her most mundane purchases, from a drink at Starbucks to a song on iTunes, are tracked in court documents as part of the plan to safeguard the great fortune she has earned but does not ultimately control.There are recent signs, in fact, that the conservators are acknowledging the great progress she has made.

While it is not possible to get an accurate sense of someone’s mental state from afar, Spears’s friends and former associates said in interviews that, for her, the conservatorship has become an accepted fact of life — not a cage but a protective bubble that allows her to worry about her true passions: music and her children.

“If anyone knew the real Britney, they would know that she would rather be remembered for being the great mother she is rather than the artiste she is,” said David Lucado, a former boyfriend whose relationship with Spears foundered in 2014 amid charges of infidelity that Lucado denies.

Should Spears ask to be released, her cause would probably be led by the man the court appointed to be her chief advocate, a lawyer, Samuel D Ingham III. Ingham’s role is, among other things, to ensure that the conservators do not loot her assets, abuse their power or inappropriately restrict her freedom.

Where it began
No one questioned whether Spears needed help in early 2008. On January 30, her psychiatrist had called for assistance, and when the ambulance left the singer’s Los Angeles home, it was led by a robust entourage of police vehicles.

For days, Spears had been behaving bizarrely, speaking in a British accent and driving at breakneck speeds. Now she was strapped to a gurney en route to UCLA Medical Center. Helicopters buzzed overhead. It was the second time in less than a month that Spears had been taken to a hospital by ambulance for an emergency psychiatric evaluation.

Anyone watching that day would not have recognised Spears as the musical phenomenon who, a decade earlier, wide-eyed and 17, had posed in hot pants and bra on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. With hits including “... Baby One More Time” she dominated the charts, and her first 4 albums sold a combined 30 million copies.

But like child stars before her, Spears encountered the pressures created by sudden fame and wealth. And a rocky personal life did not help. 

In 2002, her relationship with Justin Timberlake ended. In January 2004, she married a childhood friend from Louisiana in Las Vegas — a union that lasted 55 hours. Nine months later, she married again, this time to Kevin Federline, a local backup dancer.

Two years later, in November 2006, after the birth of their second son, she filed for divorce. Drug and alcohol issues fuelled her decline. Just what kind of mental condition afflicts Spears has never been publicly disclosed. But, whatever the ailment, by 2008 it seemed to have full possession of her. Although divorced, Spears’s worried parents decided their daughter was in crisis.

Her father, a former welder, oil worker, cook and a recovering alcoholic, had subjected his family to years of “verbal abuse, abandonment” and “erratic behaviour” as a result of his heavy drinking, Britney’s mother, Lynne Spears, wrote in her 2008 book, Through the Storm: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World.

But her parents rebuilt some kind of relationship after Jamie Spears stopped drinking, and they sought to intervene.

By the end of 2008, the conservatorship had been made permanent. By March 2009, she was back on tour.

Her charming self
The rules for meeting Britney are tight. No selfies. No autographs. No invading her personal space.

Each night before she appears in her Piece of Me show at Planet Hollywood’s Axis Theater, she poses for photos with fans backstage, maintaining her brand at a time when her public appearances and interviews are rare and tightly controlled.

The routine and consistency of her Las Vegas residency — typically 3 shows a week for 6 weeks followed by 6 weeks off — are a good fit for a mother of 2 looking to avoid the grind of a tour. During her 90 minutes onstage, Spears recycles 2 dozen hits into an act that features backup dancers, pyrotechnics and showers of confetti. She changes costumes repeatedly. During each performance, a man or woman picked from the audience is strapped into a leather bondage harness and forced to creep across the stage on all fours.

On this night, Spears, in a bustier, held the leash on a man. “Your ass is out of this world!” she screamed. To be sure, the show does not showcase the Britney of old: Once a fluid, natural dancer, Spears can appear stiff, even robotic, today, relying on flailing arms and flashy sets. Her vocals are largely prerecorded, and the lip-syncing can lapse. She seems to be doing a job, but a good job, and there is no arguing that the show is doing well: it often fills the Axis, the largest theatre on the Strip.

Spears splits her time between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, where her sons are in school, often taking the 1-hour flight back after a weekday performance. In addition to the residency, Spears’s next album, her first since 2013, is expected this summer. For months, she has teased her new music — a single, “Make Me (Oooh)”, due this month — and logged studio time with hot songwriters. Online, she has promoted herself in photos as a sexy pop star back in fighting shape.“Honestly, I’m just particular with this record,” she told V, the magazine. “It’s my baby, and so I really want it done right.”

Last week, after years of maintaining that the singer was too vulnerable to be questioned, her conservators consented to a deposition by Spears in a lawsuit filed against her and her father by Sam Lutfi, an associate from the time of her breakdown. 

Despite an attempt by the conservators to separate Spears and Lutfi during her testimony — his “physical presence in the same conference room as Ms Spears poses serious risks” to her well-being, they argued in court filings — both parties were present for her deposition, which lasted about 4 hours. Spears, in a magenta blazer and pearls, testified without incident in Lutfi’s presence, even snacking on a cookie during a down moment.

Soon after, she was back to posting on Instagram, including an image that read, ‘All energy is contagious’. Hundreds of supportive comments flooded in from fans seemingly well aware of the latest legal twist in her life. “You have gone through hell and back again but you have persevered every time,” one wrote. “You got this.”