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. So how’d she get so (relatively) normal? Bruce Handy journeys to deepest Toluca Lake to find out. Photographs by Annie Leibovitz.

It’s my favorite show! I love it!” says 15-year-old Miley Cyrus, speaking of Sex and the City over spinach-artichoke dip in a dingy Toluca Lake restaurant that for some reason, possibly native to the San Fernando Valley, is divided between cheerful families enjoying Saturday lunches and a glum row of barflies passing time by watching I-don’t-know-what on ESPN Classic. The restaurant was Cyrus’s choice. She loves the dip and the turkey-melt sandwich. She’s here with her mother, Tish, her eight-year-old sister, Noah, and somewhere between a dozen and two dozen paparazzi, who followed the Cyruses from their nearby home and are now waiting for Miley in the restaurant’s parking lot. Noah, curiously, looks like Dakota Fanning.

But back to Sex and the City. Miley says her Disney Channel sitcom, Hannah Montana, in which she plays a schoolgirl with a secret life as a rock star, is patterned in part after the former HBO series about women looking for love and hookups in Manhattan. “Obviously not the scenarios,” she explains quickly. “But if you watch Sex and the City, like the way the friends are, the way that it’s dry and they all have distinct characters—that’s a thing we try to do on our show.”

She’s earnest and sincere about her work—distinct characters are a good thing—and it’s always nice to see a young star give a shout-out to her forebears. (She’s also an I Love Lucy fan.) 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. Condé Nast Portfolio magazine recently estimated that Cyrus is “on track” to be worth $1 billion by the time she’s 18. I’m guessing that seriously overestimates her personal cut of the Hannah Montana pie. Still, she might very well be the biggest child star since Shirley Temple, give or take a couple of Macaulay Culkin movies, or an Olsen twin. Certainly she’s the biggest since Lindsay Lohan earned the right to vote and go to war.