Update: Vanity Fair's Piece on Miley Cyrus

Last week I blogged about the controversy Miley Cyrus is facing over a Vanity Fair photo shoot (another controversial photo is shown above) but I had not actually read the article that Bruce Handy wrote on Cyrus, which by the way is entitled "Miley Knows Best". The article itself was well written and I thought it was very interesting. Handy wrote about Miley's struggle to remain grounded and frankly not go crazy like the child stars before her. Here are some interesting quotes from the article:

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.

... 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.

.... The series premiered in March 2006, was an instant hit, and what with everything else going on, Cyrus says, she hasn’t had more than a day off since Christmas 2006 and doesn’t expect to get another break until at least this Christmas. She hasn’t been in regular school since the sixth grade; she’s in 10th grade now, tutored on set or on the road for three hours a day. At least she doesn’t have homework.


The real question is: How do you grow up in public, both as a person and as a commodity? For every Jodie Foster or Brooke Shields there are a dozen Gary Colemans. Michael Jackson’s face speaks volumes. So did Judy Garland’s medicine cabinet. In Cyrus’s case, there has been a concerted effort, on the commodity side, to slowly draw her out from under Hannah’s shadow.

The full Vanity Fair article can be found at: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/06/miley200806?currentPage=1