American Idol

by Richard Rushfield

  Which begs the question, protection from what?

  Where the rumors began is hard to determine from this distance. Having passed the forty-year-old mark when Idol began, Cowell had had a handful of semipublic romantic relationships with singers and model types, including his first star, Sinitta, and a former Miss Nude UK named Jackie St. Clair. However, his lack of permanent commitment paired with a certain campy mise-en-scène—heavy on the famed skintight T-shirts and high-waisted pants—certainly seems to have raised the question as to Cowell’s sexuality.

  In the months after Cowell signed on with Max Clifford, British TV personality Louis Theroux profiled the publicist in an episode of his BBC series When Louis Met. . . . In the episode, Clifford attempted to demonstrate his work on Cowell’s behalf, showing the host newspaper articles in which Cowell’s alleged exes discuss their relationships with him. Theroux cut off Clifford with a direct question:

  Theroux: I had always thought Simon was gay and you’re talking about kiss and tells with women. Is he gay?

  Clifford: No.

  Theroux : Would you tell me if he were?

  Clifford: No, I wouldn’t if it was something that we were going to keep quiet.

  Among the controversial assignments Clifford has undertaken, it has been alleged that he has manufactured false relationships for clients who wished to cover up their sexuality. In the interview, Clifford discussed the practice in a theoretical way:

  Theroux: If a TV performer were gay and you wanted to defray that or put a stop to it, then what would you . . .

  Clifford: The most effective way would be for me to create a relationship.

  Theroux: (Theroux opens a newspaper to a story featuring the confessions of another alleged Cowell ex.) Like . . . for example . . . this one?

  Clifford: No, not like this one, it would have to be a long-term one.

  Theroux: Really? (reads newspaper headline): “Naughty Simon was my sex idol in bed.”

  Clifford: He’s the one who really scored.

  Later in the episode, Cowell himself strolled in as the conversation continued.

  Clifford: He’s asking me if you’re gay.

  Theroux: I asked him. It’s the word on the street

  Cowell: The word on the street, what does that mean?

  Theroux: I can’t remember where I heard it but I always assumed you were gay.

  Cowell (miffed): I love that . . . the word on the street. . . .

  Theroux: Then you deny it.

  Cowell: (looks at the camera) I deny it.

  Still later in the interview, Clifford pointed to a story that had just appeared in the Express about a fling Cowell was having with Georgina Law, an exotic dancer from the Spearmint Rhino gentlemen’s club. Theroux interrupted, pointing out that Spearmint Rhino is in fact also a client of Clifford’s—a convenient coincidence.

  The article quotes Cowell’s brazen assertion of heterosexuality. “She [Georgina] was a magnet for me—that’s why I spend a lot of time in [lap dancing club] Spearmint Rhino. But now I get my own dances in the privacy of my own home. I’m a lucky boy and we get on extremely well.”

  Whatever the truth about Cowell—Jonathan King wrote, “He’s not [gay] but he’s the campest straight person I know”—the stories and the speculation about the United Kingdom’s newest sex symbol were only serving to fuel the Pop Idol fires, which, as 2001 ended, were flaring out of control.

  By the time the show transitioned to the final rounds, the press was jumping all over the storylines offered by the final eleven who made it onto Andy Walmsley’s arena-like stage. There was still the mass appeal of Gareth Gates, which only continued to grow in these middle weeks as he remained the odds-on favorite to win, not to mention the obvious favorite of Judge Cowell himself. But there were also the continuing antics of perpetual antihero Darius Danesh, an Irish girl next door, a plus-sized singer who it was reported had dumped his fiancée due to an entanglement with another contestant, a handful of bombshells, and a coolly charismatic singer named Will Young who had quietly begun rising in the odds-makers rankings.

  Young had, in fact, leaped out of the pack, like Gareth Gates, thanks to Simon Cowell. But it wasn’t the judge’s support that propelled Young, it was his scorn. On a late November episode, Cowell dismissed Young’s rendition of “Light My Fire” as “distinctly average.” After a female contestant had been driven to tears early in the show by the judges’ put-downs, Young sensed that the time was perhaps right to fight back. Staring down Mr. Nasty, he fired, “I think it’s nice that you have given an opinion on this show. In previous shows you haven’t, you’ve just projected insults. It’s your opinion. I don’t agree with it. I don’t think it was average. I don’t think you could ever call it average.”

  Young became a folk hero overnight. “Dark horse William, seemingly a no hoper until he stood up to bullyboy judge Simon Cowell, blossomed live onstage” wrote This Is Lancashire. The tension between Young and Cowell simmered through the season. Young pledged if he won “not to wear my trousers at an unacceptable waist height,” a reference to the fashion statement that was bringing Cowell unwanted renown—his habit of wearing pants pulled up practically to his chin.

  The Cowell-centric subplots continued to grow. Offscreen, he fought with Jay Kay, the lead singer of Jamiraquai, who called the Idol judges “money-grabbing twits.” Cowell fired back: “It sickens me to hear champagne socialists like Jay Kay sitting in his big mansion patronizing people. I challenge him to take six months out from his life to help someone become a star. Then he can criticize.” He insulted the United Kingdom’s reigning rocker in chief Bono after the U2 star criticized the rise of television-driven talents. “He says ‘I think it is harming the music industry—this is all cheating.’ Fine, he’s got millions in the bank—why doesn’t he give somebody an opportunity. All these people want to do is take. It’s staggering—so hypocritical.” He fought with the manager of pop star Robbie Williams, who worried that Idol’s singers were being “humiliated” and that the show was “destroying them with really nasty comments that are, in my view, quite unnecessary.” Cowell brushed the critique aside with an offhanded, “Having a tough time for two minutes on camera—so what? If you don’t want that, go to another talent show.” He became a one-man militia against self-indulgent and spoiled celebrities who had lost touch with the public.

  As the season progressed, Cowell’s on-air battles with his former mentor Waterman became so intense that executive producer Lythgoe felt compelled to issue a tongue-in-cheek rebuke. “I reminded them that the talent was appearing in front of them and they should not hijack the show with their own petty quarrels. . . . The pair of them acted like a slightly senile bickering old couple who had never had enough courage to get divorced twenty years ago.”

  By the time Idol returned from Christmas break and entered its final months, the press, which had given the show only moderate attention when it debuted, now provided blanket coverage to every highlight and lowlight, offstage rumor and onstage controversy. The shape of this reporting, driven by the cutthroat world of British tabloids, would soon become the template to reshape coverage for American media consumers, who were still used to more genteel reporting of its television shows.

  The media covered every outbreak of Gareth’s stutter with heartwarming dispatches on his attempts to overcome the handicap. They covered the complaints of an eliminated contestant who claimed he had only lost because he had been outed as gay to Idol voters. A newspaper in Northern England wrote an editorial and began a crusade, demanding justice for an eliminated local girl, saying she had lost due to problems with the phone lines. From backstage, the press reported the contestants were “cracking up” under the strain. They covered the tension between the families of Gareth and Will, the former’s complaints that the latter didn’t applaud for singers other than their own son. They reported that from behind bars, Jonathan King was watching and had begun his own prison Idol competition with his fellow inmates. They d
utifully wrote that Will Young had thrown “sex parties” while in college. They covered rumors of romance between Gareth and a female contestant, studying their body language for signs of intimacy. It was a circus that extended far beyond the show’s on-screen episodes, spilling over to become a daily soap opera played out in the tabloids.

  And the ratings, which began on a mediocre footing three months before, took off. By the end of January, ten million people tuned in to Pop Idol, a massive 48-percent share of the TV audience. The epic that Simon Fuller had promised had actually, to the surprise of all but perhaps him, come to pass.

  As they approached the finale, a showdown between sentimental favorite Gareth Gates and the cool lion slayer Will Young, Cowell made no secret of who he thought should win, saying in interviews that he felt Gates deserved the prize. In the final week, the pair toured the nation, each in his own campaign-style “battle bus,” shaking hands with the public and spreading word of their candidacies. Preparing for the big day, Fuller announced an unprecedented move for a TV show: He had booked London’s massive 90,000-seat Wembley Stadium, the second-largest arena in all Europe, a venue typically reserved for only the most proven of musical acts.

  Tickets sold out in two days.

  The finale was seen by nineteen million viewers, a breathtaking 59 percent of the TV audience. In the end, Will Young squeaked to victory after his dazzling repeat performance of the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” earning 4.6 million votes to Gates’s 4.1 million. The volume of calls was so massive that it caused phone outages in thirty sections of Britain, with emergency services forced to fall back on CB radios to communicate.

  Immediately after the victory Will Young was whisked off to Havana to shoot the video for his victory song, to be rushed to the marketplace with all due haste. Despite the audience’s verdict, Cowell groused in postshow interviews, “The final vote has been irrelevant—Gareth Gates is the major pop star to have come out of this show.” This was, as it turned out, something of a self-serving assessment. After crossing swords with Mr. Nasty all season, Young had refused to sign on to Cowell’s BMG label, defeating what had initially been the point of the exercise for Cowell. A contract was hastily arranged for Young with RCA, where he would become one of Britain’s major solo stars of the past decade. Gates also had an enormous launch on the pop charts, his debut album going double platinum. His second album, however, failed to catch fire and he was ultimately dropped by BMG, going on to a career in musical theater on the West End.

  Reflecting on Gates’s defeat today, Cowell says, “I always took the view that if I’m going to judge the show, I’m allowed to have a favorite if I want. I can’t pretend to be neutral, because you’re not. You always prefer one person to somebody else and not like another as much. And I liked him from day one and rooted for him and was frustrated when he lost.

  “Will Young was a good singer and people liked him. It was just one of those situations where it was like a really good election battle. It was really, really close and you had two opposing sides. But in a weird way that’s what made the show so successful year one . . . people passionately cared about both contestants. They were like me, genuinely upset or thrilled when the results came through. No one was indifferent about it. But we couldn’t have designed it better if we tried. We just got lucky big-time on that first show.”

  In the hangover after the show, Cowell made a statement suggesting he was ready to move on from Idol and didn’t necessarily see himself returning. “A few years ago, I got a couple of big awards for my work, but I went home depressed. It means nothing to me when things are based on something that has happened. I am only interested in the future and what I am going to get.”

  For the moment, however, no one was taking such talk seriously. Fuller, Cowell, Lythgoe, and Thames TV had just launched the biggest thing anyone had seen since, well, since the Spice Girls, and the idea that anyone would walk away was ludicrous. There were records to put out, a book and video tie-in to get to market. The Wembley concert was expanded into a national tour.

  Then on February 18, eleven days after the finale, an announcement appeared in the papers. Idol was heading to America.

  Chapter 5

  THE CROSSING

  There’s a legend about Idol’s journey to America that has been told so often it has come to be accepted as fact. It goes something like this: Simon Fuller had pitched Pop Idol to television networks in America and every last one of them slammed the door in his face. It seemed as if the chances for a U.S. version were finished until, as Anderson Cooper told it on a 60 Minutes segment in 2007, “the daughter of Rupert Murdoch, CEO and chairman of News Corporation, Fox’s parent company, loved the English version of Idol and convinced her dad to buy the show.”

  It’s a fantastic story, a heroic tale of a pop culture phenomenon snatched from the jaws of oblivion by a visionary young woman who just happened to be a media mogul’s daughter. Truth rarely fits so neatly into a nice little package, however, and the story of American Idol’s journey is far more complicated than the myth suggests.

  When Idol crossed the Atlantic in early 2002 it chose a particularly perilous moment for the trip. In the years leading up to the new millennium, network ratings had been going in one direction, straight down. Throughout the 1990s, the major networks had been hit by a series of seemingly fatal plagues. TIVO allowed viewers to fast-forward over commercials, decimating the major networks’ financial base. Cable channels were proliferating, taking audience share away from the once untouchable three-way monopoly enjoyed by ABC, NBC, and CBS. Worse still, those cable networks, once the home of bargain basement offerings barely above public access programming, were now stealing the thunder, with shows like HBO’s The Sopranos and Sex and the City winning the critics’ praise, not to mention the Emmy Awards that were once the big three’s sole property.

  Although you can’t pay the rent with awards or critical praise, and ratings for HBO were minuscule compared to those for the major networks, the landscape was changing—fast—and it was becoming harder and harder for new shows to break through the increasingly cluttered media noise to establish themselves. Suddenly cable networks were able to deliver niche programming that could go outside the traditional lines of the networks’ broad audiences and formulas while the big three were still using playbooks that had barely been updated since the 1950s.

  By the end of the decade, the networks’ ratings were dominated largely by a handful of old-fashioned properties that were long past their prime. Shows like Friends, ER, The West Wing, and Everybody Loves Raymond still chugged along, as did the Law & Order franchises. But in the face of competition from cable, these shows felt tame and predictable. Each new season since the mid-1990s had come to resemble a World War I charge out of the trenches into a line of machine guns; the bulk of the shows were mercilessly mowed down and quickly replaced with fresh cannon fodder.

  In Desperate Networks, New York Times reporter Bill Carter’s account of the era, he writes that the industry was coming to believe that the networks’ slumping fortunes were no longer just the natural ups and downs of the programming cycle, but an irreversible slide to doom; the fate of the Soviet Union was all that lay ahead for the once powerful major networks. He wrote that one network’s struggles were taken as “the proof” that television had changed irrevocably, that a network really on the skids could no longer turn around its fortunes, that a network could simply fail again and again until it ceased to matter as a competitive entity.

  Then there was reality or, as it was known in the industry, “unscripted programming.”

  From the dawn of television, three basic formats had dominated programming: comedy, drama, and variety, the latter dating back to 1948 and Ted Mack’s amateur hour. Since the late 1970s, though, variety had all but disappeared from prime time. In television’s early years, giant variety spectacles like The Ed Sullivan Show dominated the cultural conversation and prime-time game shows were a viewing staple. In the 1970s, variety shows
remained an integral part of the network formula, with shows like Donny & Marie, The Sonny & Cher Show, and The Carol Burnett Show drawing huge audiences. By the late 1970s, however, the format had descended into camp, most infamously demonstrated by the Pink Lady and Jeff show, hosted by a comedian and a giggling language-challenged pair of Japanese pop singers. As the 1980s came around, music and variety had all but vanished from prime time.

  One major exception to the rule was Star Search, which debuted in 1983. A gaudy competition hosted by a tuxedoed Ed McMahon, the show pitted actors, singers, dancers, comedians, and “spokesmodels” against each other in a search for the world’s greatest talent. Aired in syndication, the show retained enough of a following to stay alive for twelve years, launching the careers of a handful of midlevel stars, including singers Sam Harris and Tiffany. For most, however, the cheesy Star Search remained a dubious guilty pleasure. By the time it went off the air in 1995, it seemed to have poisoned the well for one of TV’s oldest formats.

  Throughout the 1990s, as the networks’ stalwarts calcified, new forms of programming dubbed “reality” found their way into American homes. The phrase was a bit of a catchall, describing everything from game shows to competitions to documentary-style shows such as The Real World. But its increasing use showed that programming outside the traditional comedies and dramas was gaining foothold. Shows such as America’s Funniest Home Videos and COPS had found their way onto network slates. On CBS, a documentary-style battle of wits called Survivor had become a certified hit.