Miley Cyrus: Good Girl/Bad Girl

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Introduction

IT was August 2013 – the night of the MTV VMAs – and all hell was about to break loose in Brooklyn, New York. From demure Disney princess to defiantly debauched fallen angel, this was the moment when chameleonic Miley Cyrus would formally come of age.

Fittingly, she was just a few months short of her 21st birthday – although in showbiz, the trademark of reaching legal majority was less about age and more about the moment of the first onstage twerk.

Duly, performing with fellow vocalist Robin Thicke for a medley of her number one hit ‘Can’t Stop’ and his chart-topping track ‘Blurred Lines’ – she would writhe provocatively, get up, close and personal with some life-size teddy bears, simulate masturbation with a giant foam finger and finally bend over in front of Robin and deliver what would soon become her trademark twerk.

The fact that her lewdness extended even to teddies – traditionally children’s toys – made the message abundantly clear: she was ceremonially shedding the skin of her squeaky clean Hannah Montana TV persona and becoming her own woman.

However the vocal partnership was far from music to Robin’s mother, Gloria’s, eyes. Apparently oblivious to the already abundant and ever-present sexual content in his songs and videos, she would place the blame for the scandal squarely on Miley, claiming damningly, "I was not expecting her to put her butt that close to my son! The trouble is, she’d shuddered in revulsion, as though Miley had been a predatory sex pest and Robin a traumatised and unwilling victim, now I can never unsee it!"

Miley was unapologetic – controversial or not, it was called showbiz for a reason, and true to form, this young multimillionaire was going to put on a show. As it turned out, Mrs Thicke Senior was the least of her worries – when it came to condemning Miley, she was at the back of a very long queue.

During her performance, Twitter had almost crashed under a never-ending stream of outraged tweets – at the record-breaking rate of over 300,000 per minute. Not only did the scandal far surpass Mother Monster Lady Gaga’s shenanigans – which that night had included dressing as a priest – but the tweet count had been almost a third greater than the time Justin Timberlake had ‘accidentally’ ripped down Janet Jackson’s top at the 2009 Superbowl to reveal a pre-watershed bare nipple. Plus it also almost topped that of the USA’s recent presidential election night. Not only had the 2013 VMAs attracted more than triple their maximum tweet per minute rate from the previous year, but it seemed Miley was now a hotter topic than Barack Obama. Robin had surely been right when he’d delivered a conspiracy-laced wink to his onstage ally and asserted, You know, tonight, we’re going to make history.

Yet the furore that ensued was part PR genius and part beautiful nightmare. The headlines the following morning screamed that misguided Miley was incapable of computing the difference between sexy and slutty, that she was on the verge of a mental breakdown and that the performance was a cry for help from a troubled young woman. Why else, the world asked accusingly, would anyone want to get onstage, gyrate and – shock, horror – enjoy herself?

Even one of Miley’s backing dancers, Hollis Jane, reported that the experience that night had been the most degrading and dehumanising of her life. By her rather dramatic account, she had left the venue shaking and crying.

In that moment, a newcomer to Planet Earth might have been forgiven for assuming that New York was not the heartland of liberty that its iconic statue suggested, but in fact that they’d happened upon an oppressive Saudi Arabian outpost. (Damn the inadequate sat-nav on those spaceships!)

To modern mentalities, of course, the 16-year age gap between Robin and Miley was meagre, while the latter was actually doing no less than the average extroverted young woman might be seen indulging in at a nightclub. The only difference was that, as a multimillion-selling pop star with paparazzi lenses fixed firmly on her, her moments of hedonism were invariably played out in public.

Regardless, the accusations prevailed, along with the ceaseless question, "What would the parents say?!" Indeed, Miley’s father, Billy Ray, was watching at the sidelines, consumed with sadness – although not for the reasons the decency police might have thought.

In fact, this uncomfortable scenario was all too familiar for him – he’d experienced exactly the same criticism decades earlier himself when he’d become an overnight sensation with his 1992 track ‘Achy Breaky Heart’. For him too, there’d been an undeniable element of salacious sex appeal in his performances. Enthralled fans would scream hysterically and throw their bras at the stage as he shook his hips and derriere in time to the music. Rumours even ran rife that he’d previously been a Chippendales erotic dancer. While his signature dance move wasn’t quite a twerk, it was certainly sexually provocative, and soon became synonymous with his name.

Just as Miley’s dance moves would inspire national twerking championships in her honour around the world, Billy Ray’s own wiggle had achieved the same heights. However the fact that the general public regarded him as a sex symbol hadn’t made his journey much easier to navigate – if anything it had blocked his road to progress. He’d struggled to be taken seriously when breaking into the music business – in fact one record executive would admit that when he first attended her office, desperate for a window into the industry, she’d thought he’d have been better suited to modelling than music – and all before she’d heard a single note. My initial reaction to this gorgeous man, Kari Reeves would confess, was that he should have been a model for International Male instead of an aspiring country musician.

When he finally made it in music, the backlash soon began. To traditionalists, gyration and screaming groupies wasn’t a scene with which they wanted country music to be associated – they felt it gave the genre a bad name. Billy Ray’s detractors jeered that it was all about sex appeal over substance and that he was a talentless no-hoper shamelessly capitalising on his only asset – his good looks. Without those handsome features, the masses had cruelly speculated, he wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Whether it was jealousy or zealous over-judgment that drove the criticism, it was nonetheless deeply painful – and now that history was repeating itself, with Miley being condemned as a slutty, shock value-orientated gimmick, familiarity didn’t make their claims any less wounding.

Little could the Miley bashers have guessed that her father had been watching not in horrified disapproval but rather in resigned recognition – and that he hadn’t just empathised but also understood.

This showbiz story takes us back decades to Miley’s roots and to the rural Kentucky upbringing of her own father – whose against-the-odds fame would shape her own future destiny.

Chapter 1

BILLY Ray Cyrus took his first breath in Flatwoods, Kentucky, where he lived out his formative years. To cynics, the area was something of a cultural wasteland whose residents suffocated in sheer despair – and that was the muted definition. As an example, the only other Flatwoods resident of note had been Dheak Gill, a man who’d gained notoriety via the dubious fame of downing 23 bull testicles in a record-breaking 23 minutes and 13 seconds for the annual Iron Stomach competition. The region wasn’t exactly known for producing high flyers.

Billy Ray would proudly announce later that the jobs in which the ancestral Cyruses had toiled – on the rural area’s railroads, coal mines, farms and steel mills – had been the cornerstones of the industries that built and fed America – and yet for all the inflated grandeur of that statement, the reality was that the Cyruses were desperately poor. Jobs were few and far between – in fact, having one at all was regarded as an uncommon blessing – and those that did exist returned a painfully meagre wage. While they might have paid highly in terms of honour and respectability, that was a slim consolation when struggling to feed tearful children with empty bellies.

Kentucky already had one of the highest child poverty rates of the nation, while country performer Loretta Lynn’s recollections of her own upbringing in the state in the seventies song ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ reflected the harsh reality. Just like Loretta, Billy Ray had been one of eight children and had seen his mother read the Bible by coal-oil light and scrub at a cheap, abrasive washboard until her fingers bled.

His father, Ron, had endured equally humble beginnings. At the time of Billy Ray’s birth, he’d been a lowly rigger at Armco Steelworks and his first day of employment, back in 1955, had seen him sink even lower, chipping and sanding concrete bricks for the plant. The toxicity of this early lifestyle would ultimately have tragic consequences, seeing him die at the age of 70 from terminal cancer believed to have been caused by asbestos inhalation in the workplace.

Meanwhile Billy Ray’s grandfather Eldon – or Pawpa, as he called him in those early days – had been a devoutly religious Pentecostal preacher. While it might have earned him religious kudos, there was little recompense in the way of wealth. Pop songstress Katy Perry was the daughter of a preacher too and she’d recalled an upbringing so spartan she hadn’t even been able to afford dental care. By the time she finally made it to the dentist’s chair as a teenager, she’d been forced to have 13 thoroughly rotten teeth filled.

For Eldon, life was equally tough and they were forced to feed themselves via donations to the congregation pot. However, like many Southern families, their faith in God was intense and genuine – and Eldon would preach in the traditional Pentecostal style about talking in tongues, receiving messages from spirits and opening oneself to divine healing.

To demonstrate the devoutly religious nature of the family, Ron’s eldest sister – 17 years his senior – had been named Mary Magdalene. Yet their unfettered faith hadn’t made life on the poverty line any easier. To make matters worse, the region’s reputation for Southern hospitality was – according to both Billy Ray and Ron – sorely overestimated.

The occasional country singing prodigy aside, at that time Kentucky’s main achievements were farming and fried chicken. Yet it seemed the Cyruses were destined for greater things. Billy Ray’s mother, Ruth, was a keen piano player with both a brain for business and an exuberant showbiz style personality which saw her classmates admiringly vote her in one school year as Most Likely To Succeed and Run a Hollywood Studio. Although fame wouldn’t manifest itself for another generation yet, their hunches would prove uncannily correct.

Meanwhile Ron – who would rise dramatically to become a highly respected Democratic politician – was heavily involved in a band with Eldon, known as the Crownsmen Quartet. They would regularly put on performances at the steelworks or in local bars, while young Billy Ray would watch in awe, soaking up the musical styles.

Thus on Saturday, Billy Ray would find himself at his maternal grandfather’s house, falteringly playing the fiddle while his mother was the pianist and his father chimed in on guitar. They’d play bluegrass, country and Southern Gospel standards from ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Rolling In My Sweet Baby’s Arms’ to ‘(Won’t You Come Home) Bill Bailey’. They’d rest only to sleep because then, the following morning, they’d relocate to his paternal grandfather’s church where he’d be summoned to the stage and forced to sing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ with the Crownsmen Quartet.

Just a toddler and already self-conscious about his looks, to Billy Ray exhibitionism didn’t come naturally. I was so bashful, he would later confess to the LA Times of those early memories. I was horrified. I was real ugly. My ears stuck out so far, my eyes were so big and I had a butch haircut. I always had a little dirt on me too.

It was ironic that, decades later, this painfully shy and self-conscious, self-styled ‘ugly duckling’ would become an international heart-throb, prompting mass female hysteria on a scale often compared with Elvis or the Beatles. Back then, however, music was a momentary – and not always welcome – escape from the dark cloud that hung over him at home.

Furious arguments would break out between Ruth and Ron Cyrus on an almost daily basis while a helpless Billy Ray could only look on in terror, begging them to stop – and not even places of worship were safe. The fighting between his parents rose to fever pitch until, at the tender age of four, he witnessed an enraged, jealousy-fuelled assault by his mother on a love rival outside – of all places – his grandfather’s church. As it turned out, monogamy hadn’t been Ron’s strong point and, when Ruth had seen him leave the building with another woman, her fiery temper had got the better of her. It all got ugly there in the church parking lot, Billy Ray would later recall. My mom jumped on, fought some woman, beat her. He added, I seen my mom pull one woman out of my dad’s convertible by the hair of the head and stomp her ass in the ditch!

Family life was volatile to say the least and it was to no one’s surprise when Ron and Ruth announced their divorce. Little Billy Ray was just five years old. When Ruth had ominously announced, Your father and I are going to have a big fight tonight, he might cynically have wondered what was new. However the clue that this one might be particularly vicious was that this time she locked him in an upstairs bedroom with his brother Kevin. Poor as they were, this so-called bedroom was in reality just an oversized wardrobe modelled into a sanctuary for him and Kevin (affectionately named Kebo), courtesy of a few Jimi Hendrix posters on the walls. Once inside, the tiny structure echoed and almost rocked with the sounds of confrontation. Glass plates smashed to the ground, fists collided with walls and furniture was overturned – all to the soundtrack of blood-curdling angry screams.

Eventually Billy Ray would break out of the bedroom and wedge himself between the two warring parents, putting a momentary halt to the battle. After an eerie silence, his father coldly announced he was leaving. I wrapped my arms around his chest, Billy Ray would later recall, and my legs around his waist, clinging like a little monkey. Yet having already uttered the last words he would speak as a resident of the house, Ron would simply step silently over the broken furniture and leave without a backward glance.

The aftermath of the divorce was equally harrowing, not least because they lived in a conservative sixties area of America where Southern values and religious faith were paramount and where divorce was not just taboo but almost unheard of. Puerile gossip followed that the family had been disgraced in the eyes of God and could no longer be counted as Christians.

Then there were the financial implications of separation – Ruth was forced to sell her beloved piano and work all hours as a cleaner just to make ends meet, while philandering Ron’s meagre wages were mainly spent on the needs of his new wife, Joannie.

A troubled Billy Ray was belittled and taunted by the other children in school, not just because the alien concept of divorce didn’t sit well with their Southern beliefs, but because his mother was now so poor, they were the only family in the neighbourhood without a home telephone. He would come to dread standing in front of his class at the start of each school term to recite his address and number, only to be serenaded by titters as he confessed in shame that he still made calls on a makeshift outhouse payphone.

And if he was self-conscious about his protruding ears then, he would soon become even more so. One morning, a group of older boys rounded on him in the school hallway, jeering and pulling their ears outwards in mock exaggeration. Billy Ray turned and fled, before finally running home and collapsing in the arms of his mother. That night he made an impassioned prayer: Dear God, I know I’m ugly, but when I grow up, just make people think I’m funny. Amen. The plea would become a night-time ritual for years to come.

From that day forth, he was a regular target for bullying because, in this small close-knit community, he stood out as different. Music could have provided an escape for him, as it did for his elder brother, but due to his left-handedness he found strumming on his father’s guitar near impossible. The old wives’ tale that being left-handed was a sign of affiliation with the Devil – long since dismissed as nonsense in more modern locales – still prevailed in much of God-fearing Kentucky and disapproving elders strongly encouraged him to overcome his instinct and learn to use the other hand.

Unsurprisingly, this felt clumsy and unnatural to him. Defeated by music, he instead began to spend his days in the woods, first crying, contemplating and praying and then, as his mother remarried and the black cloud of his parents’ divorce began to move away, he progressed to rowdy games. Childhood friend Gregg Davidson recalled, In those days, children could still play freely in the open woods like Huckleberry Finn and Billy romped through the trees with rapturous abandon, playing hide and seek or cowboys and Indians with his brother [and] building forts and waging mock attacks on the ‘enemy’.

In middle school, he also became a roving reporter for the 25-cents-per-issue school magazine. Although he was still prohibitively shy when it came to asking girls out on dates, he took a special interest in each issue’s ‘Cute Couples’ section, where he would mischievously and fictitiously pair himself with the most beautiful girls in school.

Then in 1975 – the same year that his father broke free of his humble background to be successfully elected as a politician – 14-year-old Billy Ray entered a rebellious stage, becoming a self-described wild juvenile delinquent hoodlum. The phase was characterised by shoplifting, drug-taking, vandalism, streaking through the streets of Kentucky and, worst of all, an ill-advised penchant for matches. My papa was a Pentecostal preacher and my dad in the government, he would recall later to CNN. Yet at the same time, on any given night, if I could get the police to chase me, that was a successful night.

While Ron scaled prestigious heights, becoming a member of the Federal Reserve Board and a respected Democrat politician – it seemed Billy Ray was craving attention of his own, and acting up was proving a reliable way to get it. His stabilising influence turned out to be sport – not only did it distract him from creating mayhem and boost his confidence and focus, but it also brought to the surface the warrior in me.

That said, he was far from committed. Indecisiveness was my major, he would later groan. Every year, when I’d fill out the little card stating my major, I’d check off ‘undecided’. That’s how I knew I was heading in the wrong direction.

Nonetheless, he half-heartedly modelled himself on Johnny Bench – arguably one of the greatest catchers in baseball history – and resolved to follow in his idol’s footsteps by becoming a member of the Cincinnati Reds. He felt a glow of pride when he was awarded a local baseball scholarship at Georgetown College, a prestigious Christian-themed liberal arts establishment affiliated with Britain’s Oxford University – but his satisfaction was short-lived. As much as he loved sport, his heart wasn’t in professional competition and, shyly swatting away promises that he could be a star, the reluctant baseball prodigy spent the start of his junior year trying to find a purpose that resonated with him.

It wasn’t long before the voices began in the back of his head – strong, powerful, insistent and impossible to ignore. Buy a guitar and form a band and you’ll fulfil your purpose, they asserted. Just trade in your catcher’s mitt and buy a guitar.

To say he was dumbfounded was an understatement – he adored music but was no musician and his early attempts to master his father’s instruments had been disastrous. As a teenager, Gregg reasoned, he didn’t realise you had to re-string it if you were a leftie.

He was bashful too, shying away from crowds, but he listened to the inner voice. His more competitively driven classmates, on the other hand, thought he’d lost his mind to a foolish fantasy. Meanwhile his first girlfriend – who was quite enamoured with the idea of a WAG-lifestyle – almost dumped him over it. Yet whether the voices were messages from God, or merely his intuition, Billy Ray was convinced they were real.

He duly returned his catcher’s mitt, gave up his scholarship after just five weeks – ignoring pleas from his tutors that he was professional-league material and squandering the chance of a lifetime – and bought a left-handed guitar. As he would later recall, I just knew inside my soul it was the right thing to do.

That very night, he wrote his first song, and by the following morning he’d recruited his brother Kebo to join his band – one that until that moment had existed only in his imagination. Things began to move surreally fast – yesterday’s baseball champion was now setting a goal to be the next Elvis Presley – and all within 10 months.

That was the time limit he’d set for success and he’d resolved that Sly Dog – named after a volatile one-eyed mutt he’d owned at the time – would become a resident house band at a bar or club before his 20th birthday. Sure enough, in August 1981 – just a week before the deadline expired – he earned a daily slot at the Ohio club Changes. The next three years passed in a blur of pot-smoking and persistent groupies until, one fateful day in 1984, the entire club – and all Billy Ray’s equipment in it – burnt to the ground. He was devastated – it was a reality check that snapped him out of his pleasure-filled oblivion fast.

For Billy Ray, unknown outside of Ohio, an enormous challenge lay ahead. Then he noticed a miniature two-inch-by-two-inch Bible he’d hidden inside a guitar amp for good luck was the only thing that had survived the wreckage. To him it was a sign – a God-sent symbol of resilience proving that, as long as his faith survived and he never gave up, he would succeed.

The words of Eldon Cyrus – his now deceased preacher grandfather – flooded back into his head reminding him that with every adversity lies the seed to something better. Believing he had to be proactive about where to plant that seed, Billy Ray upped sticks and relocated to LA. The move was partly a reaction to Nashville and Kentucky record executives repeatedly slamming the door in his face for being too rock’n’roll – he hoped that in the original city of showbiz, he’d stand a better chance of fitting the mould. Yet the moment he arrived, he was rejected for exactly the opposite reason – being too country. He could have been forgiven for wondering whether he truly belonged anywhere.

Having formerly reaped the benefits of being a big fish in a small pond, his hustle was now about to become more arduous than ever. He was soon reduced to living in his car and working in a poorly paid retail role in a store called Baby Toy Town – so embarrassingly kitsch that it seemed the kiss of death for any aspiring rocker. I guess desperate stores do desperate things, he would later chuckle of the mismatch. They hired a hillbilly from Kentucky and I was terrible. I didn’t know nothing about baby beds and baby strollers!

Not to mention that it was hardly the coolest place for a musician to be hanging out – the arrangement would prove cringe-inducing. Just when the indignity of earning a living discussing nappies, prams and toddlers’ toys became almost too much to bear, he was saved by a customer who – impressed by his charisma – offered him a job on the spot at her husband’s car dealership.

Hapless Billy Ray knew even less about cars than he did about infants – in fact he didn’t even know how to perform basic maintenance on his own – and at first his new role seemed to be yet another disaster in the making. As a newcomer, he also lacked the persuasive, polished and pushy sales pitch that was hard-wired into Californian culture and his hesitation led to a two month stint without making a