These days, Taylor Swift is as wholesome a figure as you'll find in the American music industry.
But it's not easy getting to the top, and just about anyone who's experience Swift's level of success has a few skeletons in the closet.
So perhaps it's not surprising that the Myth of Taylor Swift is coming into question a bit now that 1989 is the best-selling album of the year and the 25-year-old from Reading, PA is the undisputed queen of pop music.
The latest revelations about Taylor's somewhat mysterious past come from an unlikely source:
Yes, the woman who's as famous for her dating life as for her music says that when she looks back on her relationships, she realizes none of them were "real love."
Ronald Cremer is a computer technician from Taylor's hometown. A reporter from the New York Daily hunted Cremer down recently to find out just how much of the official story of Swift's early career is accurate.
Taylor herself has referred to the moment she met Cremer as a "magical twist of fate." He was reportedly fixing her family's PC in 2002, when he spotted 12-year-old Taylor's guitar and offered to teach her a few chords.
The rest, as they say, is history. Or it would be, if that were really what happened:
"I did do computer work for them," Cremer says "But the computer work came after I started doing guitar work."
So the story of a chance encounter between a computer expert and a young girl with a guitar and a dream (that Taylor has told several times in interviews) is apparently BS.
Cremer says he was already a well-known local musician and producer at the time, and that he first met Taylor when her parents brought the young girl to his studio to record a demo.
We're guessing she prefers singing.
Cremer believes Swift's PR team concocted the "twist of fate" story because the truth of Taylor's obsessive stage mom paying him handsomely to work with her daughter several days a week just isn't as appealing to the masses.
"A 36-year-old bald guy taught her," Cremer says. "That ain't gonna sell...The first couple months, I thought it was a joke. I thought, here's a bunch of rich people..."
Cremer says he not only taught Taylor how to play guitar, but how to write songs and promote herself as well.
As you'd expect from any 12-year-old, Swift often acted as though she'd rather be doing something else. But her mother, Andrea Swift wouldn't allow any sort of slacking.
Cremer recounts a time when Taylor's dad opened up to him about the dysfunctional nature of the Swift family:
"'I got a wife who doesn't love me,'" Scott Swift allegedly said to Cremer one night. '"I'm trying to help my daughter out and do the right things, but my wife couldn't care less.'"
Cremer recalls another episode in which Taylor and her brother were both clamoring for their mother to let them have Taco Bell for lunch:
"Her brother Austin, who was a little chubby at the time - he's not that now - he wanted Taco Bell," Creme recalls. "Taylor says, 'I want Taco Bell too. Her mother went out and got Taco Bell, but only gave it to Austin, because she said, 'Nobody wants to see a fat pop star.'"
Taylor looked better than ever as she stepped out in Manhattan today. NYC seems to agree with her!
As for the rumor that Taylor grew up on a Christmas tree farm, Cremer says she was actually the daughter of a wealthy investor for Merrill Lynch.
"Nobody buys a Christmas tree there," Cremer says, referring to the Swifts' expansive property.
He compares the efforts to craft a fairy tale-like backstory for Taylor to the 1980 Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner's Daughter.
He's also quick to point out, however, that a young singer with a rural background named Robert Zimmerman famously left behind his rural past for a new start in NYC and completely reinvented himself on arrival. You might know him better as Bob Dylan.
