The picture was irrelevant to me. What was important to me was what Miley said. I wanted to know how she was feeling about things. And Vanity Fair’s profile of Miley made her sound like she had a good head on her shoulders. They described her as earnest and sincere, noted she ate a turkey-melt sandwich for lunch, liked both Sex and the City and I Love Lucy, and laughed off the paparazzi that followed her.
The writer expressed surprise that Miley seemed so “well adjusted,” to which Miley said, “That’s just my personality.”
As for my personality, I often longed for the simpler days when I could be at home with my dogs and horses in the woods. At times, when my schedule became too much, I came right out and asked, “What am I doing?” After Doc, I’d vowed never to do another series. Maybe I should’ve listened to myself. Because then along came a script for Hannah Montana: The Movie. It was all about taking Miley back home to Tennessee.
Disney wanted to shoot in Louisiana for budgetary reasons. As a producer, though, I lobbied to make the movie in Tennessee. I had all the research and contacts from when I tried to get Doc to shoot there. I also had my daughter’s best interests in mind. Hannah Montana: The Movie was the story of not forgetting where you came from, and I said, “Miley’s performance will be out of the park if she’s really coming home, if she’s really staying in her room where she grew up.”
My dad had a saying: Be aware of where you’re at at all times. Always know where you are going. But most important, never forget where you come from. That’s what this script was all about. Tennessee came to the table with the proper incentives, and Disney approved. We were going home to make the movie.
The studio put together a great cast, and Miley’s performance was also incredible. But I got the most satisfaction when filming stopped and I saw her step back into the role of ordinary teenager. She and the other kids took the four-wheelers out on the trails. They found the old toy trucks and dolls they’d hidden in the hollowed-out trunks of trees where I took them to play when they were little. At night, they sped off for a late-night snack at the local Sonic. And we all spent time outside by the fire, roasting marshmallows and wieners under the stars.
A few months later, I unwittingly played matchmaker. I was hosting the show Nashville Star, and during the second week this young singer-songwriter named Justin Gaston was voted off. I was stunned. I said something like, “Ladies and gentlemen, keep your eyes open for this kid. They just kicked off Tom Cruise.” Backstage, I told Justin not to worry and invited him to look me up if he got out to Los Angeles.
So he did. While visiting me on the Hannah Montana set, I introduced him to Miley, and they clicked. From that day, they were inseparable. It became a big thing in the press because he was a couple of years older than her and a devout Christian. He carried a Bible with him just about everyplace he went.
Miley was happy. She didn’t have a chance to make friends at school like other kids her age. Tish and I liked him, too. He and Miley played guitar, wrote a lot of songs, and stayed at the house in Toluca Lake. In those days, we were still going to church every Sunday, and we took Justin with us, too. The church parking lot was always full of paparazzi. It was a freak show.
I was ecstatic when we celebrated Miley’s sixteenth birthday in November. Both Tish and I were gratified whenever we got to give her something that resembled normal life. Not that everything about this milestone was typical. Her first party was at Disneyland. Taped for a TV special, it included guest sightings of Tyra Banks, Steve Carell, Cindy Crawford, and Demi Lovato, plus me singing “Ready, Set, Don’t Go” and a four-song set from Miley herself.
We had a more private party at home where Tish and I gave Miley an SUV. She traded it in for a Prius, saying, “Thanks, guys, but I’d rather drive a car that’s better for the planet.” Tish and I took that as a sign our kids might be smarter and more sensible than us, and there was nothing wrong with that.
Parenting is something you do one day at a time. As we knew from raising five kids (when they weren’t raising us), some days are better than others. Miley’s sweet sixteen was a good one.
Thoughout Miley’s life, I tried so hard to walk the line between best friend and father, keeping in mind that that’s what my dad was to me. But the line was quickly becoming blurred. She was growing up and doing her own thing, and that’s a difficult phase for any parent. Back in Tennessee, when we had shot the scene on top of the hill where Miley and I dueted on “Butterfly Fly Away,” I knew she was no longer the caterpillar mentioned at the beginning of the song. Out there on Carl Road, I literally saw the butterfly fly away, and I knew at that moment things would never be the same. And they weren’t.
I ended the year in San Diego, starring in the movie Flying By. It was an indie film about a frustrated real estate developer whose twenty-fifth high school reunion turns into an opportunity to rejoin his old band and have a second chance at rock-and-roll stardom. After a cross-country concert swing, I flew there with my dog Tex, and both of us stayed on my tour bus, which came down from L.A. and parked in an alley outside the soundstage.
It seemed like a sweet setup. I was going to play a rocker, Heather Locklear had signed on to play my wife, and the producers were going to use a few of my songs in the movie. Plus, I was living right outside where I worked. But as sometimes happens when things seem perfect, it turned out to be a pretty depressing time. I missed my family, who were all out on tour with Miley, and truth be told, I missed my life, or what I wished my life could be and what it had been: trees, horses, sitting in my teepee, playing with the kids, hanging out with Tish. The reality, though, was the kids were grown up, Tish was managing the career of a superstar, and I was downright lonely.
It was a desolate time. It rained almost every day. And maybe because I had so much time by myself, or maybe because the rest of the family was so far away, or maybe because of a combination of both, it was becoming more and more obvious that our busy schedules were taking a toll on our family. I felt the strain, as if my world might be starting to unravel, like a rope beginning to fray. I knew that everything in this world comes with a price, but I asked myself: Was it worth it? I didn’t know.
What I did know was that life had somehow changed and there I was, sitting on my bus not in the happiest frame of mind, with a dull thud in my heart, confusion in my head, and a sense that there might be some problems up ahead. It was a little past midnight, and I started playing my guitar. And then, as often happens, those feelings that I couldn’t articulate began to flow out of me.
Moonlight comes callin’
On my window pane
Ain’t seen the sunlight
Lord, I’ve felt the rain on my skin
You're not here once again.
I check my cell phone
I read my mail
Cold wind keep blowin'
Right behind your cell
And you keep goin…
When will this misery end
Your picture’s in my head
I feel my heart break once again
You know I love you
Still you chose to leave that day
Lord, I’ve been broken
There’s still hope that I can mend
If I could see you once again…
CHAPTER 31
“Back to Tennessee”
IN 2009, I VISITED the troops in Germany, Iraq, and Afghanistan. One day, I was onstage in a giant hangar in Kabul when bombs went off nearby. I was in the middle of singing “Some Gave All.” I heard the explosion and felt the ground rumble. I stopped, concerned. Then, a soldier yelled, “Keep going, Mr. Cyrus. We’re used to it.”
I understood. Trusting fate was much better than acknowledging fear. In my own life, that meant moving forward no matter how lost or desolate I felt inside. In fact, there was no stopping or slowing down even if I’d wanted to. That April, within a two-week period, the Hannah Montana movie came out, Flying By premiered, and my latest album, Back to Tennessee, was released.
Before the year was up, I made two more movies, Christmas in Canaan and The Spy Next Door, starring Jackie Chan. I was exhausted, emotionally and otherwise. But take time off—why? To do what?
Tish and I had grown apart, and that chasm kept getting larger. Communication is the key to any relationship, new or long-term like ours, but we weren’t talking to each other the way we should have been.
Meanwhile, Miley made the movie The Last Song, her first dramatic role, and she fell in love with her leading man, Liam Hemsworth, a handsome young actor from Australia.
During the making of the movie, controversy erupted at the Teen Choice Awards. Some accused Miley of pole dancing on top of an ice cream cart. “If you don’t like it,” she said to those who criticized her, “change the channel. I’m not forcing you to watch me.”
She wasn’t Madonna, but she had the same mettle. “If you think dancing on top of an ice cream cart is bad,” she said, “then go check what ninety percent of high schoolers are up to.”
Soon she added a couple of tattoos, including one over her heart that said “Just Breathe” and a tiny one inside her ear that said “Love.” There was no doubt that she was grown up and ready to move beyond Hannah Montana. “As I’ve grown into it,” she told Parade magazine, “I’ve grown out of it. Does that make sense?”
Tish and I left it up to her as to whether she wanted to continue the series, though everyone knew it was time to pull the plug. She didn’t want to do another season. She was done with the wigs and the sparkle.
We supported her. The thing people may not have realized about Miley is that she wasn’t a follower. From the beginning, she had a sense of wanting to blaze her own trail. I wonder where she got that. To her, Hannah was just the start. She was eager to discover what was next.
Just as Hannah had become a chore for her, I also was ready to finish the last season. The fun was gone. Miley and I were like two roads that had run side by side for miles, then suddenly one turned left and the other right. It was hard to smile in the barrel of that camera every day knowing the truth in our real lives: things just weren’t funny anymore.
The final episode was shot on May 13, 2010, Tish’s birthday. Everyone was primed for a wrap party. It was well-deserved, too. Four seasons of good, funny, family entertainment was worthy of a celebration. But just before we finished the last scene, I got a phone call from Tish saying that Noah had been thrown from a horse at the L.A. Equestrian Center and was lying semiconscious in a hospital emergency room.
So I went there and sat till we got word our little baby was going to be fine. She’d suffered a minor concussion. I skipped the party and sat with Noah that night. That’s what daddies do.
I moved on from the Hannah Montana phase quickly. The proof was on my left arm. In early June, I spent an absolutely crazed forty-eight hours getting a sleeve of tattoos, including Chief Joseph, the Mayan calendar, and lots of words that meant something to me, including BELIEVE, HOPE AND MUSIC CHANGES EVERYTHING, LIE TO ME, and the one that said it all: a broken heart with the word LATELY written across it and an arrow running through it.
Afterward, the guy inking me noticed the word Faith was blurry. He wanted to fix it. I’d been with him for two days straight; another hour wasn’t going to make a difference. But I looked at it and said, “You know what? It’s a pretty perfect articulation of how my faith feels right now. I think you actually might’ve nailed it. My faith is blurry.”
It fit with my new music. For the past few months, I had been writing a new batch of hard-edged rock songs, and I formed a new band to play them. Brother Clyde consisted of Jamie Miller, Samantha Maloney, Dan Knight, and Dave Henning. I gave us a simple mantra: No rules. No limits. No preconceived notions. In other words, there was no asking what is Billy Ray Cyrus going to sound like? What is Billy Ray Cyrus going to look like? It didn’t matter. As always, I wanted the music to speak for itself.
And that’s exactly what Brother Clyde was about—the music. It was hard and dark, epitomized by our single, “Lately,” a dark, Sabbath-like rock anthem that came to me from Morris Joseph Tancredi and Jonathan Rivera and included a rap from King Phaze. The album also featured a country rocker called “The Right Time,” which Morris and I wrote for Dolly Parton, plus a cover of Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line,” recorded with a bunch of friends (Ed King, Mike Estes, Johnny Neil, among them) one night in a basement in 1998. My son Trace also added vocals on the song “Alive.”
We debuted in June at a Harley-Davidson store opening in Kansas City. The two-day event was dubbed Worthstock. The mostly biker crowd embraced Brother Clyde’s take-no-prisoners repertoire, which ranged from “Crawl,” a grungy rocker I’d written while watching news coverage of the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai to a cover of Mountain’s classic “Mississippi Queen.”
At the end of July, we rattled the walls at the Roxy nightclub on the Sunset Strip. It was a full-on attack that I closed with a chestnut from the old days, my cover of Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell.” I will always love singing that song. A few weeks later, we headlined the annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. During a break, a guy in the crowd yelled that he’d been at my show in Afghanistan when the bombs went off.
“You were there?” I asked. “In that little hangar?”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
We shook hands, grateful to be back on safe and sturdy ground in the United States. But it was when I left Sturgis and met up with Tish and Miley in Detroit that I realized the ground was still littered with land mines, the emotional kind. I arrived there on my tour bus. Miley was making the movie LOL, and they’d set up camp in a little house. I had my dogs, Tex and Fluke, with me, and as best as I can remember, I got there, took a look around, and realized everything I had ever thought about my marriage and what was going on in our lives—just the whole thing—was no longer the reality.
Long before Tish and I met, I had vowed that my own kids, if I had any, would never see me argue the way my mom and dad did when I was little. I didn’t want to deal with that scenario, but I knew that’s where we were headed. There was too much bullshit in the air. I tried to ignore the lies and the façade that had been woven around me because the truth just hurt too damn much.
So I called this place I knew in L.A. and had them send a Learjet to Detroit to help me make a jump. A short time later, my dogs and I were headed back to Tennessee.
It was good to be home. I retreated into the woods just as I did as a kid when something bothered me. During the day, I roamed the trails. At night, I stayed in my teepee. I built a fire and stared up at the billions of stars in the Milky Way. I searched for answers. How had this happened? Why had it happened?
Why, why, why? That word filled my head. Why?
Fittingly, a storm blew in. The temperature dropped. A tornado touched down on the property and nearly blew away my teepee. One day it snowed. The bleak weather matched my mood. Then the most astonishing thing happened. Both Miley and Braison came to me, separately I should say, and said, “Dad, we know what’s going on. We know you’ve tried everything except one thing. Now you’ve got to do it.”
I could tell they came to me out of pure love, not anger or a wish to hurt their mom. They were trying to figure out answers, too.
I had a million thoughts about what was going on… more than I could make sense of… more than I could handle… I kept going back to the word why. It wasn’t just a word… it was a question… Why? This time, though, I came up with an answer that gave me the strength my kids must have had when they approached me. It was what my dad had told me back when he and my mom were getting a divorce. Life ain’t fair.
Life. Ain’t. Fair. Well said, Dad.
It was time to stand up for myself, something that didn’t come easy to me. I called my attorney.
“Have you ever been around a powder keg after the fuse has been lit?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “What are you talking about?”
“Get ready for an explosion,
” I said.
It took him a few days to draw up the divorce papers. On October 27, he came out to the house so we could go over the documents and make sure everything was accurate before he pulled the trigger.
That evening, just before sundown, I walked with my dogs down to the gate to let him in. I was nervous as hell. I could feel another storm blowing in. Moments before he showed up, I heard tires squeal. I looked up just in time to see a beautiful deer jump out of the cornfield in front of the car. Then BAM! The deer was killed instantly. Blood was everywhere. I took it as a sign.
CHAPTER 32
“Change My Mind”
ASK ME THE DEFINITION of insanity now and I will tell you it’s me being hunkered down in a teepee on top of Spirit Mountain, with a fire going, while helicopters full of paparazzi circled in the sky above and more photographers and reporters hid their cars and vans in the cornfield in front of my gate. It was early November, less than a week after I’d filed the divorce papers, and it appeared I was under attack.
I remember leaning back and looking at my dogs, Tex and Fluke. They stared back at me with looks on their faces that seemed to say, “You really stepped in it this time.”
They were right. I had done what no one, including me, expected. The powder keg had exploded. My dad always said, “The more you stomp in shit… the more it stinks.” Right again. A dark cloud descended over the Cyrus family. We went into shock and were overwhelmed by an onslaught of pain, confusion, second thoughts, regret, anger, and sadness.
Despite all the advantages, adventures, and blessings in my life, I rediscovered a fact I knew all too well: people are just people, and heartbreak is an equal-opportunity pain. It don’t care if you’re famous, live on a big farm, or parent one of the world’s most famous kids. And that’s the way it was through November.
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