Disney executives were understandably upset that one of their precious franchises—Miley Cyrus—may have alienated parents of their tween consumer base with her racy Vanity Fair photographs.

But those same executives, and I met most of them while I was reporting a story on Disney's tween machine for the May issue of Condé Nast Portfolio, also imagined this scenario coming to pass.

"You can't control the maturing and growing up of individuals, especially girls 12 to 18," Abbey Konowitch, general manager of Disney's Hollywood Records, told me. What they hoped to control was the public awareness of that maturing.

The fact was, little Miley was growing up. Her facial physiognomy was already looking more adult than childlike, and, as her appearances on red carpets have shown, she is becoming womanly. Yet Disney would do everything in its power—short of prescribing her Lupron—to ward off public awareness of it.

What Disney had hoped to do was milk another year or two out of Cyrus' tween fan base before repositioning her, like her merchandising predecessor Hilary Duff, for a slightly older audience.

That would have meant winding up or drastically reengineering the Hannah Montana sitcom and possibly launching her in a new vehicle—a new TV show, a Disney Channel original movie, or, more likely, trying to make her a good-girl version of Britney or Christina, both of whom started out in the Disney family but took much of their earning potential with them outside the company as they grew into teen idols.

Hannah already outsells those three young stars, yet the challenge for Disney would be to transition to an older audience of, say, teens as opposed to tweens—all while keeping the resulting revenue inside Disney.

The teen is a more fickle customer, less inclined to fall for the cross-platform Disney marketing machine and more willing to venture away from sitcom-driven hits like Hannah Montana or Raven-Symoné's That's So Raven. (One forgets that Britney Spears is still one of the biggest acts for girls in their early teens—and she basically doesn't do any promotion of her new releases.)

A little sexiness on the part of Hannah Montana, at the right time, would have been a shrewd Disney marketing move. But Disney Channel president of entertainment Gary Marsh, president of Disney Channel Rich Ross, and president of Disney-ABC Television Anne Sweeney—the Disney brain trust that found Cyrus and produced Hannah—would have had a much different timetable.

A little sexy might have been welcome after they had the next incarnation of Hannah Montana ready to launch. As it is, they have been caught unprepared for this next step in Hannah's career.

David Siegel, author of The Great Tween Buying Machine, told me back in March when we were discussing Nickelodeon's 16-year old Jamie-Lynn Spears' announcement that she was pregnant, "I would hate to see the faces over at Disney if Miley Cyrus got pregnant. You have to think they have contingency plans ready to go, doomsday plans in case something happened to Hannah."

Marsh admitted to me that the possibility of an unscripted Hannah Montana meltdown was what kept him up at night. He counted on Miley's, and her parent's, awareness of how much money was at stake to keep her from, say, posing in racy photos.

But as the Disney-approved Chinese billboards of a lingerie-clad teenager proves, these are business decisions. A Disney character can appear one way in China, where the brand is built less on a tween fan base and more on her being a celebrity; in the U.S., where there is still a great deal of money to be made from her younger fans, Hannah must stay carefully clad.

But in another year or two, when they were ready to move Miley into a different demographic, Disney execs might have come up with the idea and pitched it to Vanity Fair themselves.