After she shaved her head at the peak of her 2007 mental health crisis, Britney Spears took to wearing an assortment of multi-coloured wigs in public. Today, one of them lives in Selma Blair’s closet. How the star of Legally Blonde, Cruel Intentions and Hellboy came to possess that platinum bob is one of those strange Hollywood coincidences, reflecting an industry far smaller than it first appears, and linked by its routine eagerness to chew up its young and spit them into rehab clinics.
Blair and Spears met in one of those, the former seeking treatment for alcoholism and depression, the latter in the midst of Being Britney in the late Noughties. Blair suggested her new friend ditch the wig, and eventually it ended up in her possession. They only hung out for a few weeks, Spears’s phone number changing within days of her release. “She was so gamine and young, but in a horrible situation,” Blair writes in her open-hearted and empathetic new memoir Mean Baby. “I had no real idea of the extent of her suffering.”
