Britney Returns

A year after her very public meltdown, Britney is back to work and out of trouble. But what has the comeback cost her?

JENNY ELISCU

There’s an understanding among those who know Britney well: When she’s blond, she’s happy. When she’s brunette, she’s sad. When she’s pink, she’s crazy. Her hair was back to glowing and golden this fall, when she spent her time diligently shuttling back and forth from her Beverly Hills mansion to dance rehearsals and video shoots and recording studios, in preparation for her new album, Circus. It was a complete transformation, following a year in which she spent a month in rehab, endured a brutal custody battle with her ex-husband Kevin Federline and careened toward a massive — and very public — meltdown that culminated in two involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations in January.

“I feel like an old person now,” she says one afternoon, as a manicurist applies rhinestones and girly pink lacquer to her chewed-up nails. “I do! I go to bed at, like, 9:30 every night, and I don’t go out or anything, you know what I mean? I just feel like an old fart.”

The beauty rest has done her well: In a Hollywood recording studio in September, dressed in black jeans, platform heels and a bedazzled hoodie, Spears looks more like her former self than she has in years. She has makeup on, but it’s faded just enough that it could be yesterday’s. She says she’s considering lopping off the weave she’s worn since shaving her head in 2007, and when she counts up her tattoos — “Seven! Oh, my God, y’all!” — she falls back into the couch giggling, kicking her feet in the air.

Spears has always been like this: silly, sweet, humble. She has never been very articulate, but she always tries to be accommodating. Tonight, she’s listening to mixes and finishing work on a track called “Lace and Leather.” When I ask how she knows if a song is going to be a hit, she says, “You just hear it, and you’re like, oh, my God, if somebody else takes this song, you’re gonna kill yourself, you know what I mean? Like, this one I’m doing tonight, I think it’s good, and it’s, like, really quirky and different and girly.”

“A little naughty,” says her manager, Larry Rudolph, 45, sitting nearby in a T-shirt and jeans.

“A little naugh-tay,” Spears agrees, sounding half-embarrassed.

There are differences in Britney, too, from the last time I saw her, in 2006, when we hung out in her New York hotel room watching American Idol while her son Sean Preston crawled around on the bed nearby. She is shyer, more guarded, remote — like the old Britney but with the volume turned way down. Her last hit single, “Piece of Me,” dealt with her public image (“I’m Miss Bad Media Karma/Another day, another drama”), but she says she’s not sure she wants to include anything so revealing on Circus. “It’s scary to put yourself out there and be like, ‘Oh, God, is that cool?’ If you’re not going to really go for it, you can’t just go there halfway.” And then, as though changing her mind midthought, she adds, “But sometimes, when you go for it, you can’t lose.”

Of all the things Britney has lost in the past year, it’s the custody of her sons, Sean Preston, 3, and Jayden, 2, that has shaken her hardest. “Every time they come to visit me, I think about how they’re such special people,” says Spears, who currently sees the boys three days a week, with one overnight stay. “Like, they’re going to preschool now! I went there to pick them up on Friday, and seeing them in their little classroom and seeing Jayden being bad or not listening? It’s like, those are mine, and it’s just crazy, you know what I mean? And the things that are coming out of their mouths right now — they’re learning so much, and it’s new, and you never know what they’re going to say, and they’re so smart yet so innocent. They’re obsessed with monsters, and every night we look outside, and we have to show them that there’s no monsters out there. It’s dark outside, but there’s nothin’ out there, you know?”

Ever since she was a little girl growing up in Kentwood, Louisiana, Spears dreamed of having her own children. She considered the experience “the closest thing to God,” she said in 2004 in a note on her fan site. “To be a really good mom, I feel your child needs to be your full-time job. I want to raise my kids and share all of those precious moments with them.”

But things haven’t turned out like she imagined. “I didn’t think my husband was gonna leave me,” she says, deadpan. She laughs to break the tension. “Otherwise, I’d be with my babies 24/7. But since they’re almost like twins, they both take care of each other. I think they look like me,” she says, going from affectionate to bitter as she gets distracted by thoughts of Federline, whom she sees only when one of them is picking up the boys. “They don’t look like their father at all,” she continues. “And it’s weird ’cause they’re starting to learn words like ’stupid,’ and Preston says the f-word now sometimes. He doesn’t get it from us. He must get it from his daddy. I say it, but not around my kids.”

Of course, Britney hasn’t quite turned out to be a model parent, either, and it was her own erratic behavior that led to her losing custody. During Britney’s second trip to the psych ward, when her dad, Jamie, wanted to convince her to let him take control of her life, he told her he would help her get her babies back. He and attorney Andrew Wallet filed for a legal conservatorship that makes them responsible for overseeing her finances and her personal life — Britney today has about as many legal rights as when she was in the Mickey Mouse Club. She is watched over day and night by security guards Jamie hired (and she’s paying for); it’s also rumored that Britney’s phone calls are closely monitored and that she’s not allowed to drive her own Mercedes. Recently, says one source with ties to the Britney camp, Jamie fired a guard who let the singer use his phone. (Her rep denies the claim.)

[Read the full story in RS Issue 1067, on stands November 28, 2008.]