Miley Cyrus Knows Best
Between sold-out concerts, multi-platinum records, and a hit TV series, Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus has some serious business riding on her 15-year-old shoulders—not to mention paparazzi on her tail and tabloid editors praying for her to pull a Britney. So how’d she get so (relatively) normal? Bruce Handy journeys to deepest Toluca Lake to find out.
It’s my favorite show! I love it!” says 15-year-old Miley Cyrus, speaking of Sex and the City over spinach-artichoke dip in a dingy Toluca Lake restaurant that for some reason, possibly native to the San Fernando Valley, is divided between cheerful families enjoying Saturday lunches and a glum row of barflies passing time by watching I-don’t-know-what on ESPN Classic. The restaurant was Cyrus’s choice. She loves the dip and the turkey-melt sandwich. She’s here with her mother, Tish, her eight-year-old sister, Noah, and somewhere between a dozen and two dozen paparazzi, who followed the Cyruses from their nearby home and are now waiting for Miley in the restaurant’s parking lot. Noah, curiously, looks like Dakota Fanning.
But back to Sex and the City. Miley says her Disney Channel sitcom, Hannah Montana, in which she plays a schoolgirl with a secret life as a rock star, is patterned in part after the former HBO series about women looking for love and hookups in Manhattan. “Obviously not the scenarios,” she explains quickly. “But if you watch Sex and the City, like the way the friends are, the way that it’s dry and they all have distinct characters—that’s a thing we try to do on our show.”
She’s earnest and sincere about her work—distinct characters are a good thing—and it’s always nice to see a young star give a shout-out to her forebears. (She’s also an I Love Lucy fan.) That said, I can’t imagine that her minders at the Walt Disney Company want to see Miley Cyrus’s name anywhere near the word “sex,” not in an era when every under-age actress in Hollywood is stalked by the Ghost of Britney Future. And not when so much money is riding on this one’s continued public innocence. Condé Nast Portfolio magazine recently estimated that Cyrus is “on track” to be worth $1 billion by the time she’s 18. I’m guessing that seriously overestimates her personal cut of the Hannah Montana pie. Still, she might very well be the biggest child star since Shirley Temple, give or take a couple of Macaulay Culkin movies, or an Olsen twin. Certainly she’s the biggest since Lindsay Lohan earned the right to vote and go to war.
Twelve-year-old Abigail Breslin might have an Oscar nomination, but Cyrus has stats. Hannah Montana is the Disney Channel’s current crown jewel: its ratings for its target audience, kids ages 6 to 14, are second only to American Idol’s. Cyrus also has two multi-platinum records to her name (well, one to Hannah’s name and one, a double album, co-credited to Hannah and Miley) and is the youngest performer to have two No. 1 albums within 12 months. Her recent concert tour sold out 70 dates across North America and caused an uproar when tickets started being scalped for thousands of dollars, in some cases. (Try getting that for your spare High School Musical: The Ice Tour ticket.) The subsequent cash-in film, Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert, released in 3-D, set several records, including highest-grossing release on a Super Bowl weekend ($31.1 million) and highest per-screen average ever ($45,561); those numbers are either because of or despite the fact that tickets to Cyrus’s film were sold at the inflated price of $15, on average.
Oh, and you can also buy Hannah Montana sheets and MP3 players and all kinds of junk.
Her success isn’t a fluke. Cyrus is cute, but not too cute, and she sings with more character than most pop stars her age—you could imagine her voice, with its natural husk and its twang from her native Tennessee, turning into Lucinda Williams’s someday, if she plays her cards right. (Maybe.) And thanks to her comic timing and easy rapport with her dad, the country-music star Billy Ray Cyrus, who plays her father on TV, Hannah Montana is on occasion actually kind of funny, at least in comparison with That’s So Raven or The Suite Life of Zack & Cody. Or The Brady Bunch, for that matter.
