Quite an interesting interview with Miley's dad from 2011, where he talks about her handlers
It is a long interview and it is difficult to know how for real Billy actually is, because as the reporter says, Billy has handlers too
"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.
"Every time something happened in Miley's career, every time the train went off the track, if you will—Vanity Fair,2 pole-dancing,3 whatever scandal it was—her 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."
When he heard about her upcoming eighteenth-birthday party, he decided he wasn't going to play that role anymore.
"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."
Because you felt you were just expected always to say everything's okay?
"That's right. And it's not okay."
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—a 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."
So he spoke with one of the handlers.
"They told me," he says, his contempt and despair still naked and fresh, "it was none of my business."
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...?"
......
Do you wish Hannah Montana had never happened?
"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."
www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201103/billy-ray-cyrus-mr-hannah-montana-miley?currentPage=1