I’m still thinking about the nail polish. Of all the details from Britney Spears’ explosive statement last month protesting the conservatorship that has controlled her life for the past 13 years, that’s the one I keep coming back to.
“I saw the maids in my home each week with their nails done different each time,” she told the judge. The 39-year-old singer had been told she couldn’t get acupuncture, massages, or hairstyling because of COVID-19 restrictions, and yet she could see that the people who came to clean her home were getting their nails done.
This level of vigilance—clocking the smallest changes in the behavior and appearance of those around you, scouring for clues to the world outside—shows how profound Spears’ isolation has been. As the public learned last month, a declaration of incompetence is a chillingly effective form of confinement.
Some in Hollywood have long weaponized these systems to seize control of the wealthy and vulnerable. I know, because I’ve spent the past decade retracing the dark saga of Harrison Post, a vulnerable, wealthy gay man who was taken captive and defrauded by his own family under the guise of “protection.” This was in the 1930s, and back then it was called a “guardianship,” but Spears’ testimony—an anguished plea delivered so fast that the judge kept asking her to slow down—was eerily familiar.
Harrison Post was a Hollywood socialite and the secret lover of my wealthy great-granduncle, William Andrews Clark Jr., or Will Clark. To say that Will was “wealthy” is a bit of an understatement: He was the son of Sen. W.A. Clark, who was one of the “Copper Kings” of Montana and who, at the dawn of the electrical age, owned nearly half the red ductile metal in the country. He’s the Clark in Clark County, Nevada, and the Clark who helped give us the 17th Amendment, because the mining tycoon so flagrantly bribed state legislators to appoint him to the Senate that the electoral system was changed to give the vote to the people instead of politicians.