The Wild Card round was urgently needed that year, but not to fulfill Kimberley’s prayer. To put it bluntly, the producers worried about the distinct lack of hotties in the group. Was there enough sex appeal to keep the audience interested? Three of the four recalled and put through from the Wild Card round expressly addressed that issue; two very young blondes, Kimberly Caldwell and Carmen Rasmusen, and the sultry twenty-three-year-old Trenyce.
While Cowell griped during the semifinals rounds that the talent was failing him, viewers didn’t seem to feel his pain. For the first time in its history, Fox won the February sweeps month among the 18 to 49 demographic, which determines advertising rates. Variety wrote, “Fox’s decision to plant the hourlong edition of megahit Idol in Tuesday’s leadoff hour has significantly affected the viewing habits of millions of Americans while shaking up the night’s network leader board. In fact, not since CBS moved Survivor to Thursday has the balance of a night teetered so much on one show. Net was already pretty strong on Tuesday, but since Idol hopped aboard last month, Fox has gone from a first-place tie with ABC in adults 18 to 49 (4.2/11) to a dominant number one position (5.0/13), while also leapfrogging other nets to become the leader in adults 25 to 54 (5.1/12) and teens (3.9/13), according to Nielsen.” It was the sort of success that people had said was no longer possible for network television.
As the top twelve contestants took the big stage, yet another round of controversy was unleashed. After the performance of saucy Latina hairstylist Vanessa Olivarez, she took a stool next to Ryan and he asked the singer if she would read his next cue card for him. Olivarez replied, shockingly, “Oh, Ryan . . . I’m an artist, not a performing monkey like you! Read your own script!” Her comment elicited gasps and boos. The following night, she was the first finalist eliminated.
In post-elimination interviews, Olivarez revealed that the questionable comment had actually been scripted by Idol’s writers and she had recited it at their behest. This revelation created a wave of conspiracy theories, suggesting that Olivarez had been sabotaged by the “family friendly” network because she had come out as a lesbian. These theories only grew when Olivarez was not allowed to participate in the national tour, despite the opening created when two others dropped out. Nor was she seen in that season’s finale.
It seems highly unlikely that the show, which through the years would see more than a few openly gay contestants, had actually tried to sabotage Olivarez with a dumb joke. However, her protests about being forced to read the line after her elimination clearly did not endear her to the production, a warning to contestants to come.
It was rare that the outside world infringed upon the Idol bubble, but in March 2003, it did so in a way that turned out to be a blessing—for the show. As the Idol season went into high gear, America went to war in Iraq. Debbie Williams remembers, “We were rehearsing one day onstage. So, we stop rehearsal. The president was speaking. We put it on the big screen and we all sat on the floor and we watched it.” The team anticipated that they would be preempted that night, but in the end, even war could not push aside the Idol juggernaut. The show aired as scheduled.
Wondering how to respond, someone hit upon having the finalists perform Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” The song was intended to be paired with a more Hollywoodesque message delivered in a rendition of Burt Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” However, when the finalists performed “God Bless” at the top of the show, the response from the audience was so overwhelming that Mike Darnell insisted they reprise it again at the end of the night, which they did to great effect, complete with marchlike dance steps and a final salute. The Idol contestants ultimately performed the song four times that season. They also released it as a single, with the Bacharach tune on the flip side, which inevitably went to number one on the sales charts. If the notion had been subliminal before this that American Idol was the nation’s epic voyage, it now became explicit.
As if the gods hadn’t smiled upon Idol enough, taking the Idol stage at this moment was an actual, bona fide, currently serving U.S. Marine, Lance Corporal Joshua Gracin. Having auditioned while stationed at Camp Pendleton, just outside Los Angeles, the crew-cut country singer became an immediate object of interest to the media, with accounts speculating whether he would be recalled to duty in the event of war. As it turned out, the Marines felt that Gracin was doing his patriotic duty representing the corps on American Idol far better than he would have been continuing his work as a supply officer on base. The question continued to pester, however, to the point where Cowell felt obliged to bring it up on the air, asking him what he would do if recalled to duty. Gracin responded with a crisp, unwavering, “I’m a Marine,” eliciting a round of applause and an approving nod from Cowell.
War, however, granted no holiday from Cowell’s barbs. Marine training might have taught Gracin to crawl through the desert under fire, but it did little to prepare him for the verbal body blows he received before an audience of millions. After initially looking favorably on Gracin, Cowell turned on him and turned hard. And Gracin did not like it one bit.
“Josh wanted to punch Simon out several times,” recalls one crew member. “I mean, I really thought that that was going to happen. Honest to God. Because he was like a little raging bull.”
In the end, Gracin held his fire, but the tension simmered until, driven by patriotic fervor, Lance Corporal Gracin ultimately finished in a very respectable fourth place. Sadly for him, however, once eliminated he was in fact recalled to active duty and sent on a recruiting tour for the Marines, forcing him to miss the big payday of the Idol summer tour.
Before the season could end, however, there was one more unpleasant surprise to come. Corey Clark had been cast as the season’s sultry bad boy from the very start. With a long tangle of hair, bedroom eyes, and a beyond laid-back manner, he was the picture of the indolent charmer, turning Paula to butter every time he walked over to the judges’ desk and stared deep into her eyes. During Hollywood Week, Corey’s decision to blow off rehearsal and go for a night on the town that included a ride on a mechanical bull at a western bar became the episode’s recurring joke. Despite or because of the high jinks, he made it through Hollywood Week and was voted into the top twelve. Backstage, others in the cast and crew were less than charmed by the lovable scamp routine.
“What a jerk he was,” one crew member recollects of Corey. “I didn’t like that kid from the minute he came there. Did not like that kid. He’s a punk. When he got ousted we were all like, ‘Yes!’ because he wasn’t really a nice person.”
Once again, the Internet intervened and interrupted Corey’s journey when The Smoking Gun brought out the information that Corey was due to go on trial for assaulting his teenage sister and a police officer. The matter had escaped the initial background check because the police had misspelled Clark’s name on the arrest report. This case required little debate and on the Wednesday night, April 1, results show, it was announced that Corey was being removed from the competition.
Again, however, the way that Idol dealt with the disqualification was truly different than anything viewers had ever seen before. Throughout TV history, people had been fired from shows, contestants disqualified, controversies following them. What was new, however, was the way Idol dealt with the matter. Rather than sweep it under the rug, Idol brought Corey on the air and gave him precious minutes of sponsor time to tell his side. On the controlled, monitored, regulated, corporate product of prime-time network television, this was revolutionary.
When Corey told Lythgoe that the incident did not happen as reported, Lythgoe said, “We had to let him go on. He said, ‘This did not happen in the way that it’s been reported.’ So we felt that it was only fair to let him tell his side of the story to show that on the air. For me it was very important because we are a reality program. We are happening in real time, so deal with it. If we are in real time and if someone makes an allegation, face it and deal with it. That’s the joy of being live for m
e.”
While the air might have been cleared for the moment, nobody could have imagined how Corey Clark would come back to haunt Idol. His revenge would be served very cold seasons later.
Meanwhile, the dream of filling that fourth judge’s slot just would not die. Before the contestants reached the big stage, another idea was hit upon: celebrity guest judges. Each week in the top twelve rounds, a different star joined the panel. Olivia Newton-John, Barry Gibb, Quentin Tarantino, and Gladys Knight each did single-episode stints at the table. The celebrities were to learn, however, that judging was harder than it looked. Being able to be critical and—occasionally—constructive, takes a bit of spine and creative thinking, while most celebs in our culture have long since been trained to let nothing other than inoffensive blandness emerge from their mouths. Not to mention, if you are going to be at all tough, you have to be willing to look like the bad guy. In their stints at the Idol table, the guests mostly contented themselves offering supportive pats on the back to the contestants, their presence adding little and throwing off the chemistry of the original three.
The most productive contribution they made may have been when Gladys Knight gushed that Ruben Studdard reminded her of a velvet teddy bear, giving him the nickname that would stick forever after.
“I personally find it a bit insulting having celebrity judges on the show. To me, it’s our role and nobody else’s to judge these kids, because we’ve chosen them from the beginning,” Cowell told USA Today.
The most important contribution of the guest judges may in fact have been to make clear how unique the chemistry and the contributions of the original three were. While Paula Abdul had been derided for doing nothing but mouthing senseless praise, when seated next to people actually doing nothing but mouthing senseless praise, her value became clear. While always supportive, always finding something nice to say, always putting things delicately, Paula’s gentle nudges actually were, on inspection, surprisingly on point. For Cowell, who spent his first season on Idol trashing his nemesis in the most personal possible terms, somewhere in season 2, the worm turned. By his own admission, he came to see that there was more there than the ditzy image would suggest, and the relationship changed from contempt to a more complex love/hate dynamic. With a foundation of actual grudging respect, there would always be a playful, heartwarming quality to their fights to soften the show’s hard edges.
While the judges settled more firmly into their roles, another member of the cast was very clearly growing into his. Freed from having to share the stage, Ryan Seacrest was becoming one of the sharpest hosts on television. At the center stage he grew more confident, ably moving the show forward and keeping the timing on track. Gone now were the surfer dude affects and knee-length T-shirts. Standing at the helm of the biggest show on television, the new Ryan Seacrest wore tailored suits and carefully tended hair.
For a long time, the young DJ from Atlanta had been telling any who would listen about his grandiose visions for himself. Kristin Holt recalls dining with him during the second season’s audition tour: “I remember one night at dinner, he told me, ‘I want to be the next Dick Clark.’ ” And now the pieces were falling into place. Before the season started, Fox gave Seacrest his own New Year’s Eve special, specifically to rival Clark’s.
Seacrest’s drive was also fueled by his BFF status with the most ambitious person on the set, perhaps the most ambitious person in Hollywood, Simon Cowell. Since their earliest days in the public eye, both Seacrest and Cowell had been the subject of rumors about their sexuality. Now those rumors spilled over into a ribbing routine between them that was to become a source of discomfort in the years ahead.
Idol’s first outbreak of their mock gay banter occurred in the top eight week of season 2. After Kimberley Locke had sung “It’s Raining Men,” Cowell, who the week before had spent his judging time talking about the flames on the wall behind her, delivered the following ruling this week: “I thought you did one of Ryan Seacrest’s favorite songs justice.” The remark was met with nervous titters.
The following night, the banter continued. During one segment, Ryan took questions from the audience. When one visitor asked him to respond to the comment of the night before and tell them what Simon’s favorite song was, an impish look suddenly spread over Ryan’s face and he blurted out, “I don’t know what his favorite song is, but his favorite club is called Manhole, where they are listening to ‘YMCA.’ ” The awkwardness in the studio could be served with a spatula. In the wings, Lythgoe remembers looking at the rest of the crew and asking, “What the hell was that?”
As they neared the final stretch of the season, the stakes were raised considerably by the debut of Kelly Clarkson’s album at the number one slot on the Billboard charts. While her winner’s single had been somewhat predictable schmaltz, “Miss Independent,” her first single from the new album, showed off a feisty rocking side that won over the last remaining doubters about the power of Kelly. Whatever the rumors and tabloid reports had been, all was clearly forgotten between Kelly and her fans. Kelly, Justin, and Tamyra all returned to the show to sing their new singles and play up the movie then in post-production. Justin endured one awkward moment; when chatting with Ryan about the movie, the host asked, “What’s up with you and Kelly?” The unflappable Guarini could almost be seen blushing. “We’re just friends! Nobody wants to believe it!” Indeed, the rumors of romance on the set of From Justin to Kelly persisted, fanned no doubt by the unit publicists. Meanwhile, any double meaning in Kelly and Tamrya’s duet seemed to float right over everyone’s heads.
Entering the top six, the field had at last taken shape, with two unlikely front-runners in the Velvet Teddy Bear and the made-over and spruced-up Clay Aiken. Cowell, however, was beginning to get the hang of this TV thing and started to think in terms of dramatic arc, the need to change the storyline before it gets boring. It was a task that suited his congenital fidgetiness. In season 2, the biggest benefactor of this tendency was Kimberley Locke, who, after being batted around by Cowell for the first half of the year, after suffering criticisms about both her appearance and her personality, was suddenly told that she could win the competition.
Locke recalls how she learned how to stop being scared and angry and figured out how to actually engage Cowell in the competition. “There was so much being thrown at you from hair, makeup, wardrobe, music selection, press, how to work the camera, how to give a sound bite, how to keep it together and be composed and put up with Simon and how to compartmentalize Simon because that’s part of it. If you don’t learn how to compartmentalize him it will freak you out.”
As Locke was transformed from a nerdy law student into a glamorous icon with killer vocals, the audience followed Cowell’s lead, and Locke kept dodging the bullet, outlasting even Marine hero Gracin, to make it to the top three. There she found, just as they had prayed to make it happen three months earlier, her friends Ruben and Clay joining her at the very peak of Idol. Throughout the entire season, Clay had led in first place in the voting, but Ruben was never far behind.
For the Velvet Teddy Bear, however, the competition was more of a strain than he let on. In years to come, when asked about the Idol experience, Studdard would moan in agony about the workload of an Idol champion. One crew member remembered: “The whole process was hard for Ruben. I’d let Ruben sit down whenever he could because it was too much work. ‘This is too much work,’ he’d say. When he came back on season 3 and they asked him a question . . . they asked him like, ‘What should we be ready for?’ He said, ‘It’s hard.’ I always remember I’d say, ‘Rube, come on, Rube, you’ve got to go. We’ve got to do this group number.’ That’s why when he won I thought, Oh, this is going to be tough on Ruben.”
Prepping for the final weeks, Locke remembers one particular ritual that would become an important part of the lives of the contestants: kissing the ring of the man who would take custody of many of their recording careers, music industry legend Clive Davis. “We all went i
nto a little bungalow at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Sitting in front of Clive Davis I was like, ‘Wow.’ He talked to all three of us. He said, ‘You guys are going to have to learn these songs. I’m going to have all three of you learn the songs because we don’t know who’s going to win.’ We learned the finale songs and recorded them. It’s bittersweet.”
Season 2 also saw the addition of another ritual, the homecoming. The Idols had returned home in season 1, but those trips had been hurried and impromptu: a stop on a local radio show, a swing by their old high school. Henceforth, the top three Idols would receive welcome homes befitting heroes, complete with parades, concerts, keys to the city, and proclamations from the governor.
The turnout to these events was, and remains, extraordinary. In post-2000 America, nobody gets parades anymore. Astronauts would barely be recognized outside of NASA. Sports stars have become tainted by the money machines of professional athletics. Many people think politicians are beneath contempt, and military heroes are rarely heralded by a wary media.
Only Idols, for that brief moment between their discovery and when they leave the Idol bubble, merit the sort of unalloyed affection that gets people to turn out to parades and weep for joy at their joy. Only with Idols does the public feel, “We know these people, we discovered them, we voted them through. They are people like us and their triumph is ours.”
The top three would prove the end of the road for Kimberley, while Ruben and Clay moved on to their showdown. If the previous season’s show had been huge, this one was truly on an epic scale. Held at the enormous Universal Amphitheatre (now Gibson Amphitheatre), with Clay’s moving rendition of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and Ruben’s gospel choir backing him in “Flying Without Wings,” the night had the sense of spectacle on every level, including a return visit from conquering champion Kelly Clarkson to pass on the crown.
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