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"FacebookPinterest\n\n He has a favorite chair at the circular wooden table in the modest kitchen of his Tennessee mansion where he spends much of his time, and he prefers it here with the lights out. When I first arrive he makes me a cup of tea in the microwave, and we face each other as people generally do, fully illuminated, but after a while he asks me whether I'd mind. He flicks a switch behind him, and sinks into shadow.\n\n The last few months, he's been living here alone. At the end of August he left the Los Angeles house where his family moved four years ago after his daughter Miley was cast in the Disney teen drama Hannah Montana, the show that would launch her as the pop-culture sensation of her day. He returned to the hundreds of acres of prime Tennessee countryside he had bought with cash in the early '90s in the wake of \"Achy Breaky Heart,\" the song that launched him as the pop-culture sensation of his day. In late October he filed for divorce from Miley's mother, Tish. It's been a tough year, and it keeps getting tougher. This is exactly where he was sitting five days earlier when he opened a link on his Mac PowerBook and\u2014alongside millions of voyeurs with far less at stake\u2014watched footage of Miley smoking a bong and talking some kind of crazed nonsense in celebration of her eighteenth birthday.1 This is where he was when he tweeted his response:\n\n Sorry guys. I had no idea. Just saw this stuff for the first time myself. Im so sad. There is much beyond my control right now\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n \"My kids learned to color on this table. There's been a lot that's went around this table. Waylon Jennings sat right there in that chair and showed Miley the chords to 'Good Hearted Woman.' Sitting in that chair. This table's a bit like life. It's a circle. And I believe everything in life is a circle. You come into this world a little teeny wrinkled-up fetus...\"\n\n This is how Cyrus begins. The first hour I barely speak. After a long soliloquy about the table, he fetches his guitar and tells me he's written a complete new album in the last three weeks. \"Not by choice,\" he says. \"The one I wrote this morning is called 'Feels Like Goodbye.'\" It's unexpectedly stark, simple, and beautiful, its opening lines an unacknowledged, desolate, distant echo of the song that paid for this house in the first place:\n\n _Cold wind's blowing\n\n Sat here knowing\n\n My heart's about to break_\n\n When he finishes, he fetches a black-and-white photo of his father's gospel group, the Crownsmen Quartet, and tells me how his father ended up dying of mesothelioma from working in the steel mill, and about his Pentecostal-preacher grandfather and the Sunday-morning church music of his youth, and describes how shameful it felt back in Kentucky in the '60s to have parents who got divorced, to be forced to confess in school that he had a half-brother and half-sisters and stepsisters and no telephone. \"There was always that misfit-ness,\" he says. He points to the picture that sits next to his father's on the dresser, of Geronimo, and reminisces that as a child he used to spend hours running through the woods on his own, pretending he was the legendary Apache leader. Soon he is telling me his whole origin story: how he wanted, and expected, to become the catcher for the Cincinnati Reds until he won a radio competition for concert tickets while he was working in a Kentucky tobacco warehouse, and how Neil Diamond paused during the song \"Holly Holy\" to say, \"I don't care if you're white or black, rich or poor, man or woman, if you believe in your dreams and you live for the light and God's love, you can be anything you want to be in this world,\" and how at that very moment Cyrus felt as though hands were covering his entire body and he heard a voice he took to be God's telling him that he had to buy a guitar. And how he spent the next decade failing in Nashville and in Los Angeles, unable to fit in either, until on the verge of giving up he talked his way into the record contract that led to the hit single \"Achy Breaky Heart\" (a song he didn't write) and the accompanying Some Gave All, the best-selling album of 1992 (most of which he did write). I suspect it is a story that has become more mythic in retelling, with all its magical last chances and desperate down-on-one's-knees prayers, and not every minute detail of his account chimes with other, messier contemporary versions of his rise, but there seems little chance of, or point in, stemming his flow.\n\n After a while, he circles back to the subject of circles themselves: of birds' nests, and of tornadoes, and of this table between us, and of himself. \"I'm right back where I started\u2014I'm still just sitting here writing bar-band music,\" he says, and strums me another. These new works will have to wait their turn, however. First Cyrus has an album of patriotic songs, I'm American, an idea directly sparked by a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009, and for which he has also rerecorded the title track of his first album, the story of the Vietnam veteran who told him, \"All gave some, but some gave all.\"\n\n That is ostensibly why he is giving this interview\u2014though he's just been told the album won't come out until Memorial Day\u2014and for a long time I'm unsure whether the protracted near monologue that has greeted me indicates an unwillingness to engage with recent problems or is his way of getting to them in his own time. More the latter, it turns out. He is talking about money when the conversation swerves.\n\n1. The Miley Cyrus birthday bong scandal of December 2010: in which her representatives quickly let it known that she was smoking the legal high salvia, although it's tempting to suspect that they would say that, wouldn't they?__\n\n \"For the record,\" he abruptly announces, \"to set it straight, I want to tell you: I've never made a dime off of Miley. You got a lot of people have made percentages off of her. I'm proud to say to this day I've never made one commissioned dollar, or dime, off of my daughter.\" He knows that people often assume he is Miley's manager, perhaps because of the dual father-manager role he plays on Hannah Montana, but that is something he has never been. And now that he has raised the subject, it seems there are a few other things he'd like to mention. \"See,\" he begins, \"I've not been able to have a voice.\" He explains how, with each major or minor PR uproar in recent years, he has been expected to sail in and smooth everything over. He clearly has regrets.\n\n \"Every time something happened in Miley's career, every time the train went off the track, if you will\u2014Vanity Fair,2 pole-dancing,3 whatever scandal it was\u2014her people, or as they say in today's news, her handlers, every time they'd put me... 'Somebody's shooting at Miley! Put the old man up there!' Well, I took it, because I'm her daddy, and that's what daddies do. 'Okay, nail me to the cross, I'll take it....'\" As soon as he begins to talk about all this, anguish builds in his voice; the anguish, say, that any father might feel when he can no longer clearly see the right way to guide a daughter or keep her safe, but the kind that is compounded by a cauldron of celebrity and public humiliation and ambition and avarice and hysteria, so that it's hard for anyone, let alone someone at its center, to maintain any perspective, to be able to distinguish between sensible concern and panic-stricken paranoia, which may be somewhere close to how Billy Ray Cyrus feels right now. \"All those people around, they used me every time. It became so obvious that, man, no matter what happens, they're going to put you up there and let you take the bullet.\"\n\n When he heard about her upcoming eighteenth-birthday party, he decided he wasn't going to play that role anymore.\n\n \"You know why I didn't go? Because they were having it in a bar. It was wrong. It was for 21 years old and up. Once again all them people, they all wanted me to fly out so that then when all the bad press came they could say, 'Daddy endorsed this stuff....' I started realizing I'm being used. If I would have went out there I would have been right in the middle of all this stuff that's going on right now with the bong. They'd be hanging it on my ass. I had the common sense... I said, 'This whole thing's falling apart up there and they just want to blame all of this stuff on you again.' I'm staying out of it.\"\n\n Because you felt you were just expected always to say everything's okay?\n\n\"That's right. And it's not okay.\"\n\n Not long after the party, Cyrus heard that Miley's people were looking for something. That maybe his daughter's phone had been stolen. \"And that was on the heels, the week previous, of some pictures from Spain4\u2014a five- or seven-day period of just boom! There's a train wreck happening and my daughter's right in the middle of it.\" Now he was hearing \"stories of the handlers trying to make kids' computers disappear and their phones disappear.\" That's all he knew. \"I didn't know what the footage was.\"\n\n So he spoke with one of the handlers.\n\n \"They told me,\" he says, his contempt and despair still naked and fresh, \"it was none of my business.\"\n\n None of your business: a sensationally ill-judged thing to tell any father of any 18-year-old girl in any circumstance. \"I'm dealing with somebody that had only known my daughter for possibly four years,\" he says, \"and I'm her daddy. I was pretty damn insulted. And I took that as the ultimate alarm. 'It's none of your business'! None of my business that you're out running around L.A. trying to buy kids' computers and phones because there's something about my daughter...?\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n \"Were it not for David Lynch,\" Cyrus asserts, \"Miley would never have been Hannah Montana.\"\n\n The most wildly incongruent item in Billy Ray Cyrus's CV is his appearance in David Lynch's 2001 movie Mulholland Dr. Cyrus is smart enough to know that to a certain kind of audience this will count firmly in his favor, and has likewise learned that a sound bite like \"were it not for David Lynch...\" will always get quoted in an interview like this. (The slightly tenuous reasoning: If not for Lynch's leg up, Cyrus might not have spent four years in Toronto starring in the uplifting, moral TV medical drama Doc, in which his daughter Miley would get early opportunities to guest-star...and so on.)\n\n _\n\nThe Miley Cyrus \"naked\"-photo scandal of April 2008: in which a photo by Annie Leibovitz in Vanity Fair showed the 15-year-old Cyrus wrapped in a sheet, with enough of her bare back to at least connote toplessness, after which a Miley apology was issued: \"I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.\"The Miley Cyrus pole-dancing scandal of August 2009: in which she supposedly scandalized with a performance of her perky hit \"Party in the U.S.A.\" at the Teen Choice Awards, which included a minimal amount of perfunctory pole-dancing atop an ice cream cart, prefiguring a series of mini-scandals with what appeared to be calculatedly sexualized performances and videos of songs from her 2010 album, Can't be Tamed.The Miley Cyrus underage-drinking scandal of November 2010: in which the 17-year-old Miley was seen out in Spain cradling a Corona.\n\n_\n\n But although he professes pride in his Mulholland Dr. appearance and a high regard for Lynch (\"I love him\u2014he changed my life\"), he wasn't completely comfortable with the experience. His part, Gene the Pool Man, was small, but it nonetheless managed to combine adultery and violence. \"I did feel a little bit dark,\" he says. \"I remember feeling, 'This might not be what God had in mind.'\" In the many less Lynchian roles that followed\u2014the work he's most proud of being the 2009 TV movie Christmas in Canaan, a sentimental fable of early-twentieth-century interracial kindness co-written by Kenny Rogers\u2014the actor he most resembles, in both tone and demeanor, is the late Michael Landon. I'm confident Cyrus would consider that purely a compliment. One of the freedoms you can find away from the nation's coasts is freedom from the curse of trying to be cool, and Cyrus has enjoyed his greatest successes, and seemed most himself, when he has been at his least cool. (Maybe that is one more reason why Miley's recent trajectory, chasing a different kind of approval, might look foolish from here.)\n\n Still, the acting role for which he is now most famous is as a teenage pop star's father, a part he says he only took to support his daughter. \"I knew I was working for peanuts. I'm not the smartest man in the world, but I know the difference. I went from $12,000 a week to, after four years and the millions that they make, $15,000 a week. Hell, yeah.\"\n\n After the first two seasons he felt things changing. \"The business was driving a wedge between us,\" he says. He tells me that he has never been able to discipline his kids and that he now wonders whether that was a mistake. \"How many interviews did I give and say, 'You know what's important between me and Miley is I try to be a friend to my kids'? I said it a lot. And sometimes I would even read other parents might say, 'You don't need to be a friend, you need to be a parent.' Well, I'm the first guy to say to them right now: You were right. I should have been a better parent. I should have said, 'Enough is enough\u2014it's getting dangerous and somebody's going to get hurt.' I should have, but I didn't. Honestly, I didn't know the ball was out of bounds until it was way up in the stands somewhere.\"\n\n In January 2010, shooting for Hannah Montana's final episodes began. \"Season four, it was a disaster,\" he says. \"I was going to work every single day knowing that my family had fallen apart, but yet I had to sit in front of that camera. I look back and I go, How did I ever make it through that? I must be a better actor than I thought.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n On Hannah Montana, Billy Ray Cyrus sported a kind of floppy hairstyle in which symmetrical curtains of hair fell down the sides of his face. \"I swear I didn't realize it until recently,\" he says, \"when I went, 'Holy crap\u2014I've lived the last five years with Geronimo's hairdo.'\" Still, that is not the hairdo he is famous for.\n\n The mullet is now an orphan of hair history, a style almost without defenders, a crazy blip, a crime against all good taste and common sense, but Cyrus declines to see it that way. \"It started way before me,\" he points out. \"David Bowie rocked a heck of a mullet long before I did.\" Cyrus's contribution, if that is the word, was to popularize the extreme version where the hair clipped short at the front and the hair cascading past the back of the neck seem to belong to two entirely separate hairstyles. \"I read that I have the distinct honor of creating the Kentucky Waterfall,\" he notes. \"I think that's a pretty good name for it. Though I do love the Missouri Compromise.\"\n\n In 2006 Cyrus recorded a lament for the more innocent, happier times of youth called \"I Want My Mullet Back,\" a song he danced to on Dancing with the Stars (achieving one of the show's lowest-ever scores), but he nonetheless persisted with his Geronimo locks. Until now. A couple of months ago he had most of his hair cut off, in the way that men and women often do when their lives change dramatically, but left whatever hair he had at the back to slink down his neck. \"Right now I'm just letting it be whatever it is,\" he says, but he sounds like a man who has already unlocked the sluices and is ready to let that old waterfall flow free.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n He has not spoken to Miley in the week since the bong video appeared. \"You know, it seems at this point there's not a lot that I can say she doesn't already know. And of course I've sent her the texts of 'I'm here if you need me,' 'Always still love you,' those kind of things.\" She's coming to this Tennessee house for Christmas in a few days. \"I'll see when she gets here. Hopefully there's something I can do. I don't know. Who knows? Maybe she knows exactly what she's doing.\"\n\n It's difficult, I say, because to some degree every teenager should be able to do some stupid crap.\n\n \"You know what, there's no doubt I did stuff when I was a teenager that I'm sure could have turned out horribly,\" he agrees. \"I've done some stupid crap\u2014I do stupid crap. We all do. But it's different when you sit back and you see it happening to your little girl. I feel like I got to try. It's my daughter. And some of these handlers are perhaps more interested in handling Miley's money than her safety and her career.\"\n\n I ask what kind of communication he and Miley are able to have at the moment. \"Good enough to know that it could be a lot better,\" he says. \"I'm scared for her. She's got a lot of people around her that's putting her in a great deal of danger. I know she's 18, but I still feel like as her daddy I'd like to try to help. Take care of her just a little bit, to at least get her out of danger. I want to get her sheltered from the storm. Stop the insanity just for a minute. When you go through what she's been through, it takes a beating on you. And there comes a point where you just got to step back. That's how I ended up out here.\" He is talking about when he first bought this house in the early '90s. \"I stepped back. I was supposed to go and do another world tour. I said no. I canceled my tour. Kurt Cobain had just died, and that really had an impact on me. He was one of those guys that became a friend to me that I never expected. We met at a venue one night, some big coliseum somewhere\u2014his rig was pulling out and mine was pulling in\u2014and I was standing in the shadows, 1 a.m. in the morning, and he's 'Hey man, congratulations\u2014you pissed the whole world off.' We shook hands, and I said, 'Thanks, man... I love what you all do.'\" After that, Cobain congratulated him at an awards ceremony when most of his peers did not. \"We crossed paths a couple more times,\" says Cyrus, \"and then I was in St. Louis...\"\n\n He asks whether I'd like to see something, and leads me into a dark hallway. Framed on a wall, scribbled on the small pages of the St. Louis Regal Riverfront Hotel stationery, dated April 8, 1994, is the poem that he wrote upon hearing of Cobain's death. \"It was about what we do as entertainers,\" he says, and recites it to me. \"It came so fast,\" he says. The final page:\n\n _But after all was said and done\n\n And the big top now came down\n\n No one could ever doubt the fact\n\n The circus came to town_\n\n When I say they seem like unlikely friends, he points out that they'd both just had baby girls\u2014Frances Bean, Miley\u2014within three months of each other. \"That's what we talked about, that we each had a little girl....\" Cyrus shows me pictures of Miley on the same wall, when she would run onstage as an infant, collect the roses. \"One more thing about Kurt\u2014Kurt was one of those guys. That's why I'm concerned about Miley. I think that his world was just spinning so fast and he had so many people around him that didn't help him. Like Anna Nicole Smith\u2014you could see that train wreck coming. I was actually trying to reach out to Anna Nicole Smith, because I kept telling Tish and everybody around me, going, 'This is a disaster.' Michael Jackson\u2014I was trying to reach out to Michael Jackson. I knew he had kids, and I was going to invite his kids down to a taping of Hannah\u2014I just felt it would be good for Michael. I don't know why. I met Michael one time at the Grammys. He sat in front of me, in the front row, and a dime rolled out from under and hit my boot\u2014this very boot I've got on\u2014and I reached down and picked up this dime, and looked, he was going through his pockets, and I said, 'Are you looking for this?' 'Thank you.' And he took that dime and put it back in his pocket. I looked at my manager, I just said, 'Why did Michael Jackson have a dime?...' Nobody could tell me.\"\n\n I point out to him that the examples he's just given\u2014Kurt Cobain, Anna Nicole Smith, Michael Jackson\u2014are all pretty terrifying. Does he really think Miley is in that kind of situation?\n\n \"I don't know. I'm her daddy so maybe I'm a little sensitive to it, but now's a real good time to make sure everything's okay. An ounce of prevention's worth a pound of cure.\"\n\n This, I should point out, from a man with a bomb shelter on his property. (Also a man who will wryly refer to the coming End Times.) Before we leave this corridor, he recites the words to his biggest hit of recent years, an ambivalent song he wrote, inspired by the day Miley and the family first headed off from Tennessee to Hollywood, a song about a father battling with himself to release his daughter into the world. A song called \"Ready, Set, Don't Go.\" A song that begins with the words he now half-sings to me: She's got to do what she's got to do / And I've got to like it or not. \n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n It's always sobering to look back, long after it stops really mattering, at the venom that a certain kind of success can incite. Billy Ray Cyrus's was of that kind. Some criticisms came from within the Nashville establishment, epitomized by Travis Tritt's disavowal of \"all that butt-wigglin' we don't need in country music.\" There was also the ridicule from the custodians of cool\u2014the late comedian Bill Hicks would draw easy audience roars of approval when he'd share his idea for a TV show called Let's Hunt and Kill Billy Ray Cyrus. And there were the critics themselves\u2014I stumble across a 1992 live review in the Los Angeles Times that characterized Cyrus's stage patter as \"far and above the biggest bunch of egotistical drool I've ever heard on the concert stage.\"\n\nWhile acclaim and derision were racing his way, his private life was far from uncomplicated. In the spring of 1992, as \"Achy Breaky Heart\" exploded, two women were pregnant with his children. \"Oh, my gosh, it was a mess,\" he says, \"because the truth was I just really knew I loved Tish.\" The other woman bore him a son, Christopher Cody, that April. Tish bore him a daughter in November, a girl whose name had come to her father during the pregnancy. \"I had a vision, a dream. I said, 'My intuition has told me that that little girl, her name should be Destiny Hope Cyrus, because I feel like it's her destiny to bring hope to the world.' \" That was what she was christened. Fortunately for her, the name didn't stick. She was an unusually cheerful baby, and her parents instead began to refer to her as \"Smiley,\" a name that, over time, lost its initial letter.\n\nHe and Tish married the following year, when she was pregnant with their son, Braison. They would have a third child, their daughter Noah, six years later, and Cyrus would also adopt the two young children, Brandi and Trace, from Tish's previous life. (Cyrus had previously been married in his twenties, but the couple had no children.)\n\n Sometimes Cyrus talks as though he withdrew from success to raise a family, and sometimes he talks as though success withdrew from him because he concentrated on raising a family and not playing the game, and sometimes he talks as though the problem is that he made records that were too true to himself and not cookie-cutter Nashville product. (You may be surprised to hear Billy Ray Cyrus cast himself as an icon of artistic integrity, unbowed by commercial temptations, but there it is. From where he sits, it makes perfect sense.)\n\n Perhaps the important truth is that the comedown was inevitable whatever he did\u2014you rarely enjoy the kind of huge, genre-breaking, critic-baiting success he had without suffering a fairly savage subsequent reversal. Talking about these years, he says all the right things about acceptance and counting one's blessings, but there are plenty of clues\u2014the way he can recite by heart every chart position, for instance, of each new underachieving single\u2014to how much those years must have hurt. There are few things harder to understand in this world than failure to those grown accustomed to the taste of success.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n And then there's God.\n\n\"Somewhere along this journey,\" he says, \"both mine and Miley's faith has been shaken. That saddens me the most.\" When they first came to Hollywood for Hannah Montana, the two of them would drive down the freeway together to the studio each morning, and every day Miley would point out the sign that said\n\n ADOPT-A-HIGHWAY\n\n ATHEISTS UNITED\n\nJust before moving out to Los Angeles, the whole family had been baptized together by their pastor at the People's Church in Franklin, Tennessee. \"It was Tish's idea,\" he remembers. \"She said, 'We're going to be under attack, and we have to be strong in our faith and we're all going to be baptized...'\" And there, driving to work each day in the City of Angels, was this sign. \"A physical sign. It could have easily said 'You will now be attacked by Satan.' 'Entering this industry, you are now on the highway to darkness...'\"\n\n Do you really see it in such clearly spiritual terms\u2014that your family was under attack by Satan?\n\n \"I think we are right now. No doubt. There's no doubt about it.\"\n\nAnd why is that happening?\n\n \"It's the way it is. There has always been a battle between good and evil. Always will be. You think, 'This is a chance to make family entertainment, bring families together...' and look what it's turned into.\"\n\nHannah Montana probably has brought a lot of families together\u2014just not one...\n\n\"Yeah. I know. I know. I know.\"\n\n And do you see the show as a big part of what has made things not work in your family?\n\n \"Oh, it's huge\u2014it destroyed my family. I'll tell you right now\u2014the damn show destroyed my family. And I sit there and go, 'Yeah, you know what? Some gave all.' It is my motto, and guess what? I have to eat that one. I some-gave-all'd it all right. I some-gave-all'd it while everybody else was going to the bank. It's all sad.\"\n\n Do you wish Hannah Montana had never happened?\n\n \"I hate to say it, but yes, I do. Yeah. I'd take it back in a second. For my family to be here and just be everybody okay, safe and sound and happy and normal, would have been fantastic. Heck, yeah. I'd erase it all in a second if I could.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Cyrus can be confounding. He is covered in tattoos but now wishes he had none of them. One moment he'll mutter some playful comment about one of his entourage having a \"smoky wokey.\" (I don't know why I find this quite so funny. I guess it's the echo of \"achy breaky\"; for a moment I imagine there really might be an alternative reality in which Billy Ray Cyrus is cursed to communicate every thought, however deep or shallow, in pairs of rhyming adjectives.) The next he'll try to interest me in a charity for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, but in a way that seems curiously guileless (he tells me he'd never heard of the disease until recently), and then the press releases I'm later sent mention that Cyrus is \"being reimbursed\" for his \"time and expenses\" by Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals. Likewise, there's an awful childhood tale he shares about waiting outside church with his mother to see whether his father would appear with another woman: \"And he did. And it got ugly right there in the church parking lot. My mom jumped on, fought some woman, beat her. I seen it. I seen that happen more than once. 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. I seen that.\" But I'm not sure whether he's trying to show me a snapshot of a mother wronged, of a father besieged, or of a boy already accosted by dramas he can't control. And how to weigh that against the declaration Cyrus repeats to me several times about his current life changes: \"It's the first time in my life I've ever stood up for myself. I've always let people just run over me. The least likely thing anyone in my family thought I would ever do is stand up for myself.\" Or to measure it with the moment\u2014remembering the time the 6-year-old Miley helped a blind friend hear God in the sound of the wind through the grass\u2014that Billy Ray stops talking altogether, and when I look over I see that his eyes are full of tears.\n\n \"Makes me so sad,\" he says, \"just to think about it.\"\n\n Before I leave, he takes me upstairs to show me some more photographs he's mentioned. The stairs rise into a large room where nearly every inch of wall space is covered in framed magazine articles, invitations, photographs, and commemorative discs. One wall has numerous Some Gave All platinum awards\u2014the seven discs on the seven-times platinum award are arranged in the shape of the number 7. I am standing here, surrounded by all these framed memories, when I notice the room through the open doorway right next to where I am. It is perhaps the girliest room I have ever seen, all lime greens and oranges and pastel blues. I'm pretty sure Billy Ray doesn't mean to show me Miley's room, and I'm in no way looking for it\u2014I hadn't even thought about the likelihood she'd still have one in his house\u2014but his feet follow my eyes. (His publicist, who has walked upstairs with us, looks aghast at this turn of events: Cyrus still has handlers himself, though I suspect that he's allergic to too much handling these days.)\n\n I remain in the doorway as he holds up a rock Miley found by the creek and made into a face at school using pieces of felt, and points out all her cheerleader trophies high up on the shelf by the door.\n\n \"Again, it's a bit sad,\" he sighs, \"because it's just a little girl's room, ain't it?\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n With luck, Billy Ray Cyrus's biggest fears\u2014those about his most famous daughter, anyhow\u2014will turn out to be unfounded. If things work out for the best, maybe in time to come he'll just seem like an overanxious, melodramatic worrywart. I suspect he'd happily embrace a future in which that was the worst outcome.\n\nIn recent weeks, one more competing version of the Billy Ray and Miley Cyrus melodrama has emerged: Saturday Night Live's mesmerizing spoof The Miley Cyrus Show. In their universe, Miley remains so blindly and unflinchingly buoyant, and so gauchely an overconfident teenage wannabe, that nothing at all\u2014conflicting information, dramatic realism, understanding other people, drug addiction\u2014can derail her irrepressibly wholesome approach to life. Her father is her grinning floppy-haired foil, and perhaps you could just about see him as a sincere man with a trusty guitar who loves his daughter and thinks the best of her in any and all circumstances.\n\n Before I mention these SNL sketches, I can't guess what the real Billy Ray's reaction to them may be. He has plenty of ego and preciousness and oversensitivity, and I don't think his own version of who he is often corresponds with how he is portrayed by the world, but he also has an abundant sweetness of spirit, a willingness to believe in the generosity of others, and a kind of innocence, too. So when he tells me, \"I laughed so hard,\" I try to work out whether he knows this is the smartest thing to say, or whether it's genuinely how he feels.\n\n \"Everything's up for interpretation, I guess,\" he says. \"I just choose to see it as funny.\"\n\n And maybe that's not so foolish after all. For one thing, it is pretty funny. And\u2014as he learns anew week by week\u2014there are worse ways his family life can be served up as entertainment. Here, safe within these sketches, he's with his daughter, they're on grown-up TV, everyone's laughing, and everything's going to be fine. \"Actually,\" he says, \"I think it's a little more funny than real life, to be honest.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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