Ironically, for all its problems, it would be season 8 that would break Idol’s long exclusion from the Emmy race. Since the reality categories had been conceived at the beginning of the decade, they had been the sole property of CBS’s Amazing Race, which year after year took home the trophy while the far more popular Idol seethed on the sidelines. At last, however, for season 8, the technical expertise of the Idol crew having been honed to a fine point, the Television Academy acknowledged their work with awards for Bruce Gowers for Best Direction, Andy Walmsley and James Yarnell for Art Direction, and Kieran Healy, Joshua Hutchings, and George Harvey for Lighting Direction.
While Lambert continued to dominate the coverage, as the contest came down to the wire, the final weeks were ruled by the Arkansan prayer leader, Kris Allen, a highly likable and endearing soft rocker whose John Mayer–inspired performance demonstrated the diversity of musical styles emerging from America’s megachurches. In eight years of Idol, never had there been a darker horse than Allen, who even three weeks before the season’s end seemed unlikely to make the finals, let alone take the crown.
Adam Lambert remained the season’s huge phenomenon in terms of the enthusiasm of his fans. Much noted around Idol events, the Glamberts were becoming the most devoted and voracious fan collective since the Claymates, surpassing even the commitment of the previous season’s Archies. But with his polarizing performances, there was a cap on his fan base, and in the final weeks, Adam was no longer generally the top vote-getter. When Danny Gokey was eliminated and Kris went on to face Lambert in the finale, it was widely assumed that Kris would take all the votes from his fellow prayer leader and win.
At the final, as it turned out, it was Kara who stole the show. When her old nemesis Katrina “Bikini Girl” Darrell took the stage to sing before the vast Nokia crowd, Kara snuck up behind her and joined in, then opened her dress to reveal her own bikini. It was the show’s unforgettable moment and the bravery it required of Kara won her a grudging admiration she had been denied all season.
The moment actually provoked a fairly major incident of backstage drama. Not having been filled in beforehand that she was to be sharing the spotlight with Kara, Katrina had looked ahead to her performance as a veritable coronation. Her hopes had been raised even further when, during the rehearsal, guest performer Cyndi Lauper, who had not watched the show, heard Katrina practicing and became alarmed that no one was helping her sing properly. “She’s not hittin’ her notes!” Lauper exclaimed. Working these days as a vocal coach, Lauper took it upon herself to sit up with Katrina and get her in shape for the big day. Thus, when Kara intruded, it produced a highly incensed reaction. Katrina raced backstage and locked herself in the women’s dressing room. She had to be pried out by security and was taken away, cursing her fellow contestants of the season to the sky.
Ultimately, the crown went to Allen, continuing the cute rocker boys’ dynasty. Once again, however, there was an incident that would launch an armada of conspiracy theories. Days after the finale, no less than the New York Times—there were by now no holdouts in the media to blanket Idol coverage—ran a story about some parties thrown in Allen’s home state of Arkansas by Idol sponsor AT&T where special phones were passed out to allow the users to text votes in far faster than on normal phones. The world immediately cried foul, but Idol asserted that in a hundred-million-vote universe, the votes cast at a few parties could hardly swing the results. It had not been, they hinted, a close election. Privately, Idol sources were even more determined on the subject. Several have revealed that even if every vote from the state of Arkansas was disqualified, Kris Allen still would have won easily.
No information would likely satisfy the Glamberts, who remain the most ardent of Idol fan clubs, and to this day continue to post evidence on message boards, e-mail reporters, and even write books attempting to prove that the eighth Idol crown was stolen from its rightful owner.
The voraciousness of his fans would seem to get to even Adam himself. On the tour, he was forced to tweet warnings to the Glamberts that he could only give so much of himself to sign autographs and greet after the show. So dedicated did they stay that Matt Giraud remembers one night on the tour standing backstage with Kris and looking out over a sea of Lambert signs. “Who voted for me?” Kris half jokingly wondered aloud.
For his part, Lambert immediately became one of the most watched people ever to leave Idol. When he finally chose to discuss his sexuality during the interview for a Rolling Stone cover story, the issue became the magazine’s best seller of the year.
At the season’s end, Abdul had brought on a high-octane new management team led by David Sonenberg, who also managed the Black Eyed Peas. Sonenberg duly informed the powers at Fox that he was standing by and ready to begin negotiations. He heard nothing. He placed more calls and was assured that they would be in touch soon; still he heard nothing. He sat still until days before it was announced that host Ryan Seacrest had signed a new contract with the show, increasing to the neighborhood of twenty million his annual take from Idol and related Fox activities. Somehow, Idol had found time to hammer that out with Seacrest, while they still hadn’t gotten in touch about Paula’s contract.
Finally, determined to make clear that he wasn’t messing around, Sonenberg called me to let me know, for the public record, of his frustration with the process. He told how in previous years, when it came contract renewal time, the producers had called Abdul up days before the new season started and said, “If you can be in Boston for auditions Monday, we’ll take you back”—a process that led to her still receiving a relatively minuscule sum for her services.
With weeks left in Abdul’s contract, Sonenberg told me, “Very sadly, it does not appear that she’s going to be back on Idol.” He went on, further venting his frustration with the production, saying, “I find it under these circumstances particularly unusual, I think unnecessarily hurtful. I find it kind of unconscionable and certainly rude and disrespectful that they haven’t stepped up and said what they want to do.”
In eight years, no member of the show’s cast or crew had ever publicly spoken out against the show in this way. Abdul had shattered the illusion of a happy family that had been so carefully tended to. She might not have fully realized it at the time, but she had crossed a brink from which there was no going back.
But even as they shook their heads at this ongoing debacle, the producers’ minds remained intensely preoccupied with the Cowell question. During the summer, there had been a showdown meeting with all the parties involved, a summit akin to the meeting of the Five Families in The Godfather. Gathering in Hollywood were representatives of 19 Productions, FremantleMedia, and Sony (which owned not only the music contracts for Idol but most of the X Factor). Fox was represented by Rupert Murdoch himself, and Cowell was accompanied by Bryan Lourd of CAA.
Put on the table was a staggering deal: To continue his services on Idol as well as to bring X Factor to America, Simon Cowell would be paid in the neighborhood of $130 million a year. Even in this elevated company, the number took people’s breath away.
Cowell’s response: I don’t think that’s good enough.
Cowell had been taking steps toward this crossroads for a long time; nevertheless, making his decision was much harder than he ever anticipated. Asked why it was so difficult, he says, “It was my relationship with Fox. These were the guys who had given us the chance of a lifetime when nobody else would—and were incredibly loyal to me, decent to me, kind to me, supportive. You’ve got to turn around to those people and say, ‘I’m going to leave when you want me to stay.’ It was a personal issue. It wasn’t a financial issue. The money was never a problem.
“And at the same time I was also looking at a competitor who also offered me the most crazy deal I’ve ever seen in my life. . . . And I looked at it and I said, ‘We can’t even look at this deal. . . . We said we’d love to talk to you but we absolutely can’t. It’s just too tempting.’ So I had to stay on track about my relatio
nship with Fox and it was really difficult because it was like saying to a friend, I’m not going to be your friend anymore but at the same time I want to do another show with you. And that’s eventually what was agreed upon, but it was very, very difficult.”
While the issues and the feelings were sorted out, the talks dragged on.
Into this breach stepped Paula Abdul and her demands.
To renew her contract, Abdul demanded she be paid ten million dollars a season. Fox countered with three. At first it seemed they were bluffing; after all they’d been through, they couldn’t possibly expect her to accept that. But the number did not budge. While they claimed they wanted her back, Abdul and her people could not help but note that if American Idol really wanted something, they certainly wouldn’t let a little matter of a few million dollars stand in the way of them getting it.
On August 5, 2009, Paula Abdul made history by breaking the biggest story yet broken on Twitter. She tweeted, “With sadness in my heart I’ve decided not to return to Idol. I’ll miss nurturing all the new talent, but most of all being a part of a show that I helped from day 1 become an international phenomenon.”
After eight seasons of making entertainment history, the iconic panel that had guided American Idol was breaking up.
Chapter 19
LEAVING IDOL
What’s on the other side of the rainbow? When the season ends, the exiting Idols face their greatest challenge of all: how to convert their American Idol experience into a real-world career. How do they make it in an increasingly difficult marketplace, entering not just a music industry that has all but imploded, but a world where, after nine seasons, more than a hundred Idol finalists roam the landscape?
After leaving the show, the top ten finalists of each season have one last Idol duty, the national “Idols Live” fifty-plus-city tour, a stage spectacle directed by noted spectacular specialist Raj Kapoor. For most of the finalists, the tour represents their big payday, paying them over $100,000 for four months on the road. An audacious gambit when it was first rolled out in the United Kingdom, the Idol tour had stayed relatively secure against the downturn in the music industry, holding its audience through season after season. However, in 2010, the summer of doom hit America’s touring industry and acts from the Eagles to Christina Aguilera to Lilith Fair were forced to cancel shows. For once, Idol was not immune and was forced to call off seven shows.
Despite the recent troubles, for Idol the tour gives alums a chance to live out their pop star fantasies, singing to arenas night after night. That first year’s tour marked the first time in recent music history that the stars of a television show managed to transform their fame into success on the concert circuit, where they were competing directly with the biggest acts in the music business. RJ Helton recalls of that first year’s tour, “It was insane. We had people following our tour buses. We were selling out arenas across the country and that’s obviously something none of us had ever done before or were ever even prepared for. It was just crazy, the fans that we had and the money that we were making. All of those things none of us had ever dreamed about or even thought about or thought was even possible.”
Life on the buses would be another test of endurance for the Idol contestants. Season 2’s Kimberley Locke remembers, “Tour was very tough. A lot of homesick people. A lot of people missing family. Getting up in the middle of the night and getting off the bus and into a hotel, the constant nonstop, only having a day off here and there. If you don’t have the work ethic, then you can’t do life on the road. It’s very hard.”
Megan Joy recalls of the schedule, “On tour you work twelve to twelve. Twelve o’clock it’s the meet and greet with fans. Press. All this other stuff. Then you get ready. Then it’s the show. Afterward, you do another meet and greet. Then you go outside to the fans and sign. That’s a long day.”
During the season, the singers exist in the unnatural situation of living with people who are actually their competitors. Once the season ends, however, when the contest is over and the rivalries are dismantled, many Idol contestants look back on the tour as a time when they can at last let their guard down, when they can just hang out with the only people who know what they’ve gone through.
Ace Young recalls, “On the tour we’re all on the same level. It was a crazy tour because we had forty-four dates initially and they sold out in, like, ten minutes. So they added sixteen more dates. So we did sixty arenas in two and a half months and we were 93 percent sold out on the whole tour. It was the biggest tour of the summer. We beat out Madonna.”
Season 5’s buses, however, bore some rather distinct gender differences. “The female bus was pretty chill,” Ace remembers. “The one thing that caught me off guard the most was our bus was cleaner. The female bus . . . was the nastiest thing I’d seen in my life . . . the nastiest thing ever.”
One part of the tour that divides rather than unites is the question of what to do next. After the season ends, the winner and the runner-up are generally picked up for management and record contracts and are whisked off to put together their albums. Those on this track spend the off days of the tour flying back to Hollywood to work on their album, their free moments on the phone working on the songs, the album cover, and the myriad details of their careers to come. For the rest, the tour is something of a limbo period while they ponder the next step.
Carly Smithson remembers, “Everyone was thinking about what they were going to do next, but you didn’t really talk about it. Late at night, I’d be the only one up on the girls’ bus writing. We’d pull into a little truck stop at four in the morning, I’d get out, and hang out with the boys.”
With the end of the season, the tour gives the singers at last a chance to perform without the worries of competition. Free of the judges’ glares, with weeks to choose their songs and work on the sets, the Idols perform much better than they ever had on the show. And the critics notice. For many who struggled during the season, the tour is a chance to let America see them at their best. Matt Giraud recalls, “My favorite part of the tour was really redeeming myself. I felt like I really changed the minds of a lot of critics who were tough on me. Jim Cantiello from MTV and Michael Slezak from Entertainment Weekly. They weren’t fans of mine at all. They advocated against me a lot. I took it lightheartedly, but when I got the judges’ save, MTV was saying ‘Why did you save him?’ It hurt me. And they all came out, and when they saw me live they all changed their minds. They all wrote these amazing reviews. That’s a good feeling. I called it my redemption tour because I had some haters out there and when they came out for the live show they really came around.”
Alas, everything comes to an end. The last day of the tour is the deadline for Fuller’s 19 Entertainment to inform each contestant whether the option to manage them will be picked up. (This is stipulated in the contract that each signs at the beginning of the process.) Each season, 19 selects the singers they feel have the most viable commercial prospects, typically taking two to four Idols under their wing. For those picked up by 19, life becomes a whirlwind, as managers race to hook them up with a record label and get an album to market before a new Idol season begins.
For those not picked up by 19, it can be a rude awakening. A year after they first auditioned, the former Idols are now cast back upon the world. Stepping out of the Idol bubble, where their every need was taken care of, every moment scheduled, the young performers often find themselves on their own, with little experience to guide them and few advisors to turn to.
RJ Helton recalled of the experience, “They prepare you to be a huge success, but when you have to go back to reality and all of a sudden you’re going back home and there isn’t any security around you, there isn’t any manager or producer or agent, there aren’t those people who have protected you throughout this whole process, and all of a sudden you’re now a normal person going back to the public eye—it was probably the scariest time of my life.
“There was no private life. I couldn’t go o
ut to dinner. I stayed at home for the most part. I mean, we did the tour after the show but in between that time and then after the show or after the tour you’re on your own. They don’t prepare you for the aftermath. They prepare you to be a star and then once your star is gone they don’t know who you are.”
Carly Smithson remembers stepping out of the bubble: “I was standing on the curb at Burbank airport and the city felt so huge and overwhelming, like it was going to swallow me up. But I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to let it destroy me. I need to make a plan to move forward. I need to map out week by week what I have to accomplish.’ ”
Ace Young recalls facing his future. “After the Idol tour it’s complicated, because you were just on the biggest show in the world and anything you do has to be big. So most people try to put stuff together and they fall on their face because they don’t know how to compete with the people who are doing it for a living. All those people whose songs we sang are making a living right now. And they’re performing, and now we’re competition to them in the marketplace. But we don’t have their support because we haven’t had their success as an artist. So it’s very confusing at that moment because you need the support of a major label, but no major label will pull you on because you’re directly linked to American Idol, 19 Entertainment, and Sony, and they really don’t know what to do with you.”
Season 3’s Jon Peter Lewis recalled, “I figured that since I’d been on this TV show that if I released any kind of record, it would sell pretty well. I went right away into the studio. I was off the tour beginning of October, and by the end of October I’d recorded three songs. I didn’t really know what to do with them. I didn’t have great business sense, so I sat on them for a year before anything was released. I think that’s the case for a lot of people—they have big ideas but there’s no infrastructure to support them. It’s all people at the top—you don’t know any producers, label people. You also feel a little like there’s no one you can trust—you have a short amount of time to produce something, and you don’t know or feel like you’re really ready for it. You don’t want to make the wrong decision. There’s a lot of figuring out.”
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