Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  Then came Hannah Montana, a show about a girl named Miley Stewart (played by Miley Cyrus, who also took on the role at age thirteen) with a secret: an ordinary teen by day, at night she becomes—a pop star! Lizzie and Raven were big, but nothing like this: by 2008 Hannah had two hundred million viewers globally, and Cyrus was on her way to becoming a billionaire. The show was an ideal fit for a generation whose increasing access to celebrities—through Web sites, Facebook, Twitter—changed the nature of their dreams: stardom was no longer confined to the distant climes of Hollywood or New York. It was available to anyone with access to a smartphone and YouTube.

  iCarly, which made its debut in 2007, trades on that notion as well. In it, Cosgrove plays Carly Shay, a spunky yet relatable teenager who, when she’s not attending high school, hosts a wacky yet wholesome Web show—let’s make chicken soup in a toilet!—with her two best friends. On the program’s online counterpart, fans can watch webisodes of those shows-within-a-show. They’re also encouraged to post their own videos (a kid squirting milk out of his eyes) for the entertainment of the cast and one another, further blurring the distinction between performer and fan. Such contrived intimacy fuels brand loyalty and also the belief that iCarly truly is the young viewer’s friend. All the more crucial, then, that the actress who plays her behave in an exemplary way. “The first time someone called me a role model,” Cosgrove recalled, “I remember thinking, What does that mean? But I feel aware of it when I’m reading scripts. I want to be able to make things that the people who watch my show can see and that they would enjoy.”

  Cosgrove likes to say she’s “doing home-school,” though that is normalizing what is a very unusual situation. Child actors are required by law to spend fifteen hours a week being tutored until they complete high school or (a popular choice) test out at sixteen. Cosgrove used to do her studying in public libraries, but since the success of iCarly, that’s become impossible. Kids recognize her, word spreads, and soon she’s beset by crowds begging for autographs. “We’ve been told to leave about half the libraries in Los Angeles for being distracting,” she said.

  I joined her and her tutor, Patti Foy, one morning in a conference room on the Nickelodeon lot in Los Angeles. Cosgrove was busily composing an essay on Macbeth. Chris Cosgrove was there, too, getting ready to run some errands. Foy, who has been tutoring Miranda for nine years, gushed over what a model pupil her charge is: Cosgrove completed precalculus over the summer and was now taking Shakespeare, French III, economics, and government. Her progress is evaluated by a college prep “distance learning” school called Laurel Springs, from which she has always gotten straight As. While I didn’t doubt her intelligence or diligence, it almost seemed too much: Could this girl be more perfect? A more glittering ideal? “There are lots of easy ways to get by,” Foy added proudly. “Miranda has always chosen the hard path.”

  Cosgrove’s acting career seems to have proceeded along an easier road, or at least a charmed one, beginning with a random Lana Turner moment at age three: an agent spied Miranda clowning around with her parents at a Los Angeles food festival and handed Chris a card. Perhaps the girl could model. Chris wasn’t especially keen to put her only child in front of the camera, but after checking out the agency, her parents thought they would give it a go. “Our big plan when we decided to do this was to get money for college,” she said. Within a few weeks, Cosgrove landed a commercial for the soft drink Mello Yello. More ads and a few small TV roles followed; then, at age nine, she was cast as an elementary school prig turned band manager in the movie School of Rock. Shortly before that film was released, she landed another role, as Megan, the diabolical younger sister on the Nickelodeon show Drake and Josh. The reaction of her fourth-grade classmates to that news marked the moment, Cosgrove recalled, “when I really understood I was acting. Since I did it from the time I was so little, I never thought of it as ‘a job.’ And I didn’t realize that everybody didn’t do it.”

  Her mother, Chris, and her father, Tom, were wary of the impact that fame could have on their daughter. They’ve tried, as much as they can with a superstar child, to maintain a normal life—the one they might have had if all this had not happened. They live in a middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, in the same house they have owned since Miranda was born. Tom Cosgrove still works every day at the dry-cleaning business he owns. “We don’t feel like we’re a part of her world,” Chris explained. “Like what are we going to do later? And, you know, it’s not our money. So we’re doing our own thing.”

  For as long as they could, they also kept Miranda in public school, but by sixth grade, coordinating multiple teachers and a more complex schedule proved impossible. “It took a lot for my mom to give in,” Cosgrove said. “I remember her asking: ‘Are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to stay in acting?’

  “At first I was kind of happy to be homeschooled,” she continued, “because all my friends were afraid of that first day of middle school. But actually it’s harder. You’re all alone.” For a short time, her costars, Drake Bell and Josh Peck, shared her classroom, but they were several years older than she and quickly obtained their GEDs. “I cried when they left,” Cosgrove admitted. “It’s cool in a way, but I miss being in a regular school.”

  Child stars tend to be isolated from other kids. The perpetual scrutiny of adults—even those they love—can feel at least as intense as that of fans and the media, and it’s that spotlight that seems to make Cosgrove squirm. Whenever one of her “team” praised her talent or intellect, which happened regularly, she ducked her head in the typical adolescent combination of mortification and pride. When Foy pulled out a homework essay for me to read, Cosgrove put her book over her face and moaned, “Oh, my God!”

  A child performer must always be accompanied by a parent or guardian while working. A publicist shadowed Cosgrove during our interviews. Her manager is often with her, too, as is Foy. And of course, Chris (who won’t appear in photos and refuses to be interviewed) is almost always near her daughter, a protective and often corrective presence. After a concert one night, she noticed that Miranda, engrossed in conversation, unintentionally ignored someone who was leaving her dressing room. It was a small thing, and completely accidental, but Chris called her on it.

  “Miranda,” she said sharply. “Someone said goodbye to you!”

  Cosgrove stopped short and turned around. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said earnestly. “Goodbye, it was nice to meet you.”

  To give Miranda a break, Chris tries to carve out time at the end of each day for her daughter to hang out with old pals from elementary school (Miranda’s best friend, whom she has known since second grade, still lives next door). Yet even they are conscious of Cosgrove’s image. When a young man she didn’t know asked to take a picture with her during a party, her former classmates stopped him and insisted he first put down the bottle he was holding. “That could go up on the Internet,” one of them cautioned. “We don’t want anyone thinking Miranda is drinking a beer.” She couldn’t risk being perceived as doing something inappropriate—something realistic—like the rest of them.

  With her millions of dollars, concert tours, and celebrity chums, Cosgrove would seem the enviable one, the girl with all the opportunity. Yet in some ways she is more constrained than the friends she left behind: at least they are free to explore their identities, mess up, hook up, test their limits, taste a beer. At one point, Miranda regaled me with the story of how, on one of her rare dates, she looked into the rearview mirror of the boy’s car to find her mother tailing them. I glanced over at Chris, waiting for an explanation. “Well,” she said slowly, “it’s not the way it sounds.” Then, to her daughter’s amusement, she retold the story—exactly the same way, adding only, “I was going to have to pick her up at the restaurant anyway, so I figured I might as well go then and wait.”

  It isn’t easy to watch a daughter’s incipient forays into romance and sexuality. If Miranda embodies the wish that girls could engage in the fo
rmer without the latter, Chris was acting out a parent’s desire to ensure it. Most of us don’t (and can’t) chaperone our daughters at school, at concerts, at public appearances. Most of us accept, if with some ambivalence, that our daughters have to navigate the turbulence of romantic life on their own. Most of us have no choice but to let our daughters go.

  Neither Disney nor Nickelodeon wants its lucrative teenage properties to become tabloid staples. When Disney retitled the last season of Cyrus’s show Hannah Montana Forever, the studio probably wished it could be true. But little girls grow bigger every day. And often the largest threat to the tween-girl franchises are the stars themselves, whose adolescent growing pains leave them vulnerable to empire-gutting scandal. Gary Marsh, president of entertainment for Disney Channel, sounded like a fretful father when he moaned to a reporter that concern over his stars’ behavior “keeps me up at night.”

  Yet what is a good girl to do? By sixteen, playing the G-rated role no longer feels so sweet. After all, no one wants to be a role model to nine-year-olds forever. As a performer and a person, you have to grow up. And what is the fastest way for a young woman to shed the mantle of wholesomeness? Easy: take it off with the rest of her clothes.

  A lingerie-clad Hilary Duff appeared on the cover of Maxim magazine. So did Melissa Joan Hart from Clarissa. Jamie Lynn Spears, Britney’s younger sister and star of Nickelodeon’s Zoey 101, announced at age sixteen that she was pregnant out of wedlock. As for Cyrus, she, more than anyone, was sold as the girl whom parents could trust. Much was made of her “true love waits” ring that symbolized her vow of premarital chastity. She told Oprah in 2007 that “I look way young, and that’s the way that’s more comfortable for me.” In 2008, Barbara Walters called her “any parent’s antidote to the current crop of teen train wrecks.” Two months later, Vanity Fair published several photos of Cyrus, including one of the fifteen-year-old seemingly nude, hair and makeup mussed, a rumpled sheet clutched to her chest. Then came a pole dance at the Teen Choice Awards and a string of outré videos, including one of the underage star in a club grinding with a man who appeared to be in his mid-forties. Her former agent, Mitchell Gossett, advises his clients to “keep it clean till eighteen,” but she apparently couldn’t wait.

  Parents who had bought Cyrus’s virginal hype (and praised her to their daughters) were livid. How dare she break character that way? She was supposed to be a poster girl for purity! Yet it may be the very expectations foisted on girls like Cyrus—the fetishizing of their innocence, the dogged refusal to acknowledge their changing selves, the denial of libido that the stars themselves collude in—that prime them to push hard in the other direction. No wonder that Selena Gomez, star of Disney’s popular Wizards of Waverly Place, recently quietly slipped off her own chastity ring—which she had called a “promise to myself, to my family, and to God”—donned a black miniskirt and stilettos, and told a fanzine, “I don’t want to be stuck in a box anymore.”

  By last November, when eighteen-year-old Demi Lovato—star of Disney Channel’s Sonny with a Chance and one of the girls Disney pushed forward in the wake of Cyrus’s mini-scandals—landed in rehab “for emotional and physical issues,” her crash seemed almost part of the script. That same month, in an AOL poll, Cyrus sank from TV’s number-one role model to the bottom of the heap, below the Dancing with the Stars contestant and abstinence advocate Bristol Palin.

  Cosgrove, by contrast, seems, at least for now, to feel less confined by her image, willing to nudge the boundaries rather than tear them down. Before a guest appearance in an episode of The Good Wife, in which she played a dissolute tween idol, both Patti Foy and a Nickelodeon executive vetted the script for untoward language or provocative clothing. A scene with suggestive dance moves was excised. “We want to make sure her golden-girl image is still there,” Foy told me. When, in “Dancing Crazy,” Cosgrove sings about “going all night” or “hot hot,” she’s referring solely to the dance floor. In a publicity still, her hair is blown back by invisible wind, and she’s wearing a T-shirt that says I ♥ Boys. For a girl of nearly eighteen, that is indeed keeping it clean.

  The greenroom at the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show is tricked out like the ultimate man cave. During one evening’s preshow festivities, a bartender poured free drinks; a football game blared from a giant flat-screen TV. A group of guys in cowboy hats lounged on deep-cushioned couches, and some dude, maybe a friend of Kimmel’s, seemed hypnotized by a game of Pac-Man. Cosgrove, who was there to promote her Good Wife appearance as well as an hour-long iCarly special, kept her distance from all of it. She stayed in her dressing room, chatting with her manager and publicist, as Chris and a stylist fussed around her, affixing her dress’s grosgrain straps to her body with double-sided tape to avoid any possible wardrobe malfunctions. A crew member popped by with his daughter, a blond first grader with a bowl haircut. When she saw Cosgrove, she froze, shoving all the fingers of both hands into her mouth.

  “Go ahead,” the dad coaxed. “Say hi to Miranda.”

  The girl hesitated, then burst out, “I wish I was watching iCarly!,” shoved her hands back in her mouth, and ran out of the room as if she had been set on fire.

  Kimmel’s first guest that evening was Kathy Griffin. She strutted onstage and, before taking her seat, bragged about the loft of her breasts (though “breasts” wasn’t the word she used) and the tautness of her behind (again, different word), then twirled around, asking Kimmel over her shoulder, “Do you ever wish you tapped that?” She spent the rest of the segment riffing on the tabloid shenanigans of tween idols. She mocked Britney and Justin, then did a bit about feeling outclassed at a tony cocktail party until the hostess turned to her and asked, “Now, Kathy, what is going on with the Lohans?”

  “I’m on twenty-four-hour-a-day Lohan watch,” she joked. “She’s got the government LoJack, and then she has the Kathy Griffin LoJack.”

  Watching on a monitor from her dressing room, Cosgrove laughed, but Chris was becoming visibly nervous. (Later she would tell me, “I thought maybe she’d say Miranda attacked Dakota Fanning or something.”)

  I turned to Cosgrove’s manager, Mark Beaven, and asked how he thinks Cosgrove can age more gracefully than Griffin’s foils. No matter whom I asked that question, the answer was always the same—she had to evolve rather than leap to adulthood, look for good material, choose her roles carefully. That is, of course, what parents of her fans hope to hear. But while the generalities were true, the specifics were always vague. One thing’s for sure: no one imagines Cosgrove dancing on a pole. “Ultimately, it’s really up to Miranda,” Beaven said. “Miley is facing challenges because she’s stepping into other parts of her career. She can do that, but her following may not respond favorably, and that’s the reality.”

  Among the options Cosgrove discusses: walking away, at least for a while. She talked as often and enthusiastically to me about going to college in a year as she did about finding a great script or cutting a new album. During our time together, she was industriously filling out college applications, answering questions like “What is your concept of a global networked university” that would make most teenagers with a seven-figure-salary flee. But college has been the plan from the get-go, the reason she went into acting. “Yes, it could make her lose momentum,” Chris said. “I understand that. But if the talent is there, it will always be there. And in a way, maybe when you come back you won’t be stuck in the stigma of being the child star. So it could be an advantage.”

  Cosgrove’s manager was politic about the possibility that she’ll leave while still at her peak (“My mother was a college professor,” he said), but Kimmel was not. “Why do you want to go to college?” he asked with mock-incredulity when Cosgrove came on set. She started to answer, but he cut her off. “You’re already very successful and wealthy, and I see no reason to get an education.” Cosgrove laughed and answered, “Well, my dad went to USC.” When I pressed her on the subject later, she said: “It’s weird for me. My friends are goin
g through this thing of figuring out what they want to do with their lives. And I—at this point, I think I know what I want. But if I go to college, I can figure it out for sure.” Maybe for her, it’s not about finding a career path, though. Maybe college would give Cosgrove something else: four years to be a kid, or a budding adult, like any other, without everyone watching—something she’s never really gotten to be.

  Back on the set, the applause swelled, and the camera pulled back for a commercial. Kimmel leaned in toward Cosgrove and, almost as a throwaway, said, “I hope you don’t wind up in a lot of trouble like all those other stars.”

  It’s not quite the same as matriculating, but on a winter night in December, Miranda Cosgrove was attending San Jose State University. She was performing as part of a radio-sponsored holiday show called “Triple Ho.” As in ho-ho-ho. Only not. The other performers on the bill—the hip-hop artists Nelly and Jay Sean, the R&B singer Taio Cruz, and the Latin crossover sensation Enrique Iglesias—skew to a decidedly older crowd. At a parking structure near the event, I overheard a conversation between two young women, students at the University of California, Berkeley, who drove down for the show. “I can’t wait to see Enrique,” said the first one, Anisa Young, who wore cutoffs over tights, ballet flats, and a leather jacket. “And Nelly. Actually, everyone—except Miranda Cosgrove.”

  I broke in and introduced myself, asking her why Cosgrove didn’t appeal. “She’s too random in this lineup,” Young explained. “We’re looking at this cool list, and then we see her, and it’s like, What’s going on? She’s for little kids.”

  And that is the bind of the tween-girl idol: If you sell your sexuality, your young fan base (and certainly their parents) will turn on you. Yet if you stay clean, you’re dismissed by your peers as too bland. What’s more, no one—neither young women who have gone through it nor girls who will—has patience for the mistakes and pratfalls of your transition to womanhood.