My Wild Life

by Simon Cowell

  I’d had a few girlfriends before Jill but none of them were very serious. Despite the image I portrayed to the world – a young, confident, wealthy man-about-town – I was shy underneath the bravado and did not possess a great deal of self-confidence. I was still afflicted with a stutter and, consequently, I wasn’t particularly good at chatting up women. But Jill was easygoing and fun to be with. She was a country girl at heart and we had a rural background in common. I enjoyed her company and, because our parents were friends, we shared a connection.

  City life was becoming a drug. I was hooked on the money and spent all day on the phone, trading. During those first few years I never felt the pressure or stress. I liked the buzz and the adrenaline rush when I made a good trade and, unsurprisingly, I developed a taste for gambling. I couldn’t really avoid casinos because many of my clients wanted to go to them after we had dined. One night I went with an Arab client and we played blackjack. I watch dumbfounded as he put down £1,000 chips, one after the other. He had piles of them stacked up in front of him and lost hand after hand. He blew about £30,000 in five minutes and his expression didn’t change. I remember thinking, If he had given me half that money I would have been giggling for the rest of the evening. It was a different world, far removed from the one I had grown up in and, at the time, I loved it. But unlike some of my gambling acquaintances I was cautious. I went with a set amount of money in my pocket: £50. If I lost it, I walked away; if I won, I walked away. I was always controlled. It took willpower not to get sucked in. I often placed 33–1 bets on roulette and won on several occasions. My favourite casino was the Hertford, which was just off Park Lane in Mayfair. As I was a frequent visitor, I was invited to their loyalty dinners which was quite cool because I could eat and drink a free meal with guys who were spending tens of thousands and it would only cost me my £50 stake money.

  My relationship with Jill became more serious and she increasingly stayed over at my flat. Eventually I decided to ask her to marry me. We had talked about living together so marriage seemed like a natural progression. There was no big proposal: I asked and she agreed. My parents were away on holiday with friends so we waited until they came back before telling both sets of parents. They were all pleased for us but Jill’s father was a little upset because I had not asked his permission first and, being a traditional kind of bloke, he thought things like that were important.

  We married very soon after in June 1974 when I was twenty-two. Two days before the wedding I was in Paris at the annual sugar-traders evening, which was always held in the French capital and was the highlight of the calendar. It was a lavish and exotic affair with lots of glamorous women, limitless booze and plenty of bad behaviour.

  I returned to the UK with my morality intact and got married in a church in the Gloucestershire village where Jill had grown up. On the day all I could think about was how I was going to say my vows because I was terrified of having to speak in public. I managed to get through without a hitch and Jill and I settled down to married life. It was a lovely day and I even had my dog, a poodle named Rags, driven up from Surrey to be there.

  In the year we married we moved from Sutton further out in the Surrey countryside to a village called Headley, where I had bought an old house. It had been built in 1510 and was a beautiful cottage, full of character. The boy’s toys started fairly soon after that. After about three years of City life I decided to try my hand at rallying and built a car with a friend. We cut our teeth on Autocross, which is basically racing home-modified cars on fields. Racers compete against the clock on a closed, predefined circuit and, depending on the course, sometimes more than one car races at once, which increases the chances of contact. It is raw, muddy and great fun. We took turns driving. I got hooked and we soon progressed to Rallycross, which are sprint races held on closed, mixed-surface circuits with modified production or specially built road cars.

  We bought a Hartwell Hillman Imp, which was small but went like a rocket, and at weekends were regulars at Lydden Hill circuit near Canterbury. Motorsport allowed me in indulge my passion for speed without the restriction of legally enforced regulations. I went for it and had no fear. I took a very nonchalant attitude to my own safety and indeed to the safety of those around me, often much to the chagrin of the poor soul who happened to be my co-driver. If I rolled it, I rolled it. In one of my first races I sat on the start line and revved, waiting for the green light. Adrenaline coursed through me. I’d driven the circuit previously and tried to memorize each turn and bump as best as I could. As the seconds until the start ticked down, the cockpit of the car began to fill with thick white smoke. The cars were inevitably works in progress. They broke down often, were patched up and held together with equal amounts of mechanic know-how and blind faith. Consequently, the sudden blanket of smoke did not concern me and I trusted that it would start to clear when I moved. I knew I had a hundred-metre straight dash and then I had to make a ninety-degree right turn. The klaxon sounded and the race was off. I put everything into it. I floored the accelerator and the engine screamed. More smoke belched into the cockpit. Guessing I’d cleared the straight I tugged the wheel into the turn as gradually the smoke cleared, at which point I realized I was still on the starting line and everyone else had left and was already a quarter of the way around the track. The clutch had burned out!

  There were many mechanical failures and motorsport soon became an expensive hobby. The first car probably cost a couple of grand and in the end we would take a mechanic with us because we knew that on any given circuit we would go through at least four tyres and possibly some rims, and maybe something would break on the car. On plenty of occasions I would finish a stage with at least one or two tyres off and I’d be driving on the rims, sparks flying. There was no stopping to change the wheel: you got to the end in as best shape as you could and worried about the damage after. I would bend the car regularly, spinning off, hitting trees.

  As we progressed to rallying proper, which takes place on public or private roads with modified production or specially built road-legal cars, the vehicles got more expensive and more powerful. I funded the rallying from my own pocket. It was my hobby and my release after a week spent in the pressure cooker of work. We bought a Vauxhall Chevette, which was modified and turned into a beast with twin Dellorto 48 carburettors on it, a limited slip diff and a five-speed straight-cut gearbox. The thing flew and the noise it made when it was opened up was unholy because all the acoustic muffling gear had been stripped out. It was so noisy when we were racing that we needed to wear helmets with built-in headphones and microphones to communicate. On the road, however, it looked and sounded fairly unassuming, apart from the low-profile tyres, the massive exhaust and the rally paint job.

  Eventually I worked out that it was cheaper for me to invest in a garage than to fund my hobby from my own pocket. I had enough spare money and wanted to put money into a business anyway, which would have the benefit of free mechanics who could do all the work on my cars. So, along with a business partner, I bought a mechanic’s garage in Ashtead and we called it CWK Motors.

  As the years rolled on rallying wasn’t enough. I craved adrenaline so I started taking flying lessons and was hooked from the moment I clambered in a two-man single-engine starter plane. I learned quickly and I got on well with the other guys at the airport; there was the same kind of camaraderie and shared interest as there was in rallying, but with flying there was no competition against each other. We did it because we loved it. I loved the freedom of the open skies and the challenge of knowing that everything had to be done properly because the implications of getting something wrong were extremely serious. The process of learning to fly and getting a pilot’s licence was great fun because my instructor and I would fly across to the Isle of Wight for lunch, have a few drinks and fly back. Regulations were much more lax then and I wouldn’t be able to do that now. On one occasion my teacher got pissed at lunch and, as we were taking off from Bembridge Airport while I was at the cont
rols, he thought it would be a good idea to open the door as a joke. I lost concentration momentarily and only just cleared the runway.

  One summer, myself and two friends, one of whom was a pilot, hired a twin-prop plane and flew down to Le Mans in central France to watch some racing and then on to the South of France for a few days before coming back to Jersey and on to the UK. One morning we lost our pilot and eventually found him staying as a guest of the local Gendarmerie after a slight altercation during the previous night. We had to bail him out.

  Flying scared me but I got a massive thrill from it as well. The memory of my first solo flight will always stay with me. Take off was very busy – there was a lot to concentrate on, everything had to be done in order and precisely – so I didn’t have time to worry. But then when I was up there at over 300 metres I suddenly panicked because there was no one there with me.

  I got to my cruising height, did the first turn and then flew in a straight line for about five minutes. I suddenly wanted to cry because it was such a lonely feeling. All the self-doubt poured in and my mortality was brought into sharp focus. It was a huge eye opener and I struggled to keep my emotions and concentration in check. That, to me, was the biggest learning curve throughout my flight training. I wanted my first landing to be clean and as I came in after a single circuit I wasn’t confident so I did what is called a touch and go. I touched the runway and took straight off again. I went up the second time and at that point was saying to myself, Fuck! I can’t land this thing, I am going to die.

  Despite the fear/healthy respect I continued to fly regularly for many years and went from fixed wing planes to helicopters because I liked the idea of being able to land anywhere. I only had about five lessons, though, because it was much more expensive. The first time I went up the instructor took the helicopter to about 3 metres above the runway and held the thing dead steady. Then he let me take the controls and we veered from side to side as I battled to steady the chopper. Next he took us up to about 300 metres.

  ‘You’ve heard that if a helicopter engine dies you are dead, I assume?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  Then he turned off the engine. I grabbed my seat momentarily as the cockpit went silent but rather than plummet from the sky the motion of the still turning rotors gave us enough lift to feather down and land safely. He explained that the only time you die when a helicopter engine cuts out is if something called the ‘Jesus bolt’ fails and the prop jams. As long as the blades turn the helicopter comes down at a controlled rate, which ironically was a fair analogy of my life at the time. My blades were turning. Work in the day, play at weekends. Late nights, casinos, cars, racing, planes and helicopters. It didn’t even change when the children came along. I didn’t notice the wear and tear on my psychological Jesus bolt!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Answering a Call

  of Nature

  I HAVE FOND MEMORIES of the house in Headley. It was warm and cosy and smelled comfortable and familiar in that way old buildings do. It had low, oak-beamed ceilings and anyone over 1.75 metres tall couldn’t stand in the lounge without ducking between the beams. The house was set in an acre of land stocked with mature trees and we had a large lawn. After the warm, dry summer of 1975 I decided it would be a good idea to dig a swimming pool in the garden and employed a professional pool company to start work, which they did the following spring. Unfortunately, by the time they had excavated a decent-size hole in the garden, lined it properly and installed the plant that would keep the water filtered, the summer had developed into one of the hottest on record and the country was in full-scale drought. It was a nationwide emergency, which left me in a bit of a quandary. Water was being rationed, people were filling up jerry cans from standpipes and I needed almost 80,000 litres. Empty swimming pools have a habit of collapsing in on themselves – the pressure of the water keeps them rigid – which put me in the difficult position of having to make a rather embarrassing call to the water board.

  ‘Hello. Look, I have a problem. I have a pool which is empty and it needs to be commissioned,’ I explained apologetically. (Commissioning a pool means filling it up and finishing the job.)

  ‘That’s not ideal, sir,’ I was told. ‘But if it needs to be commissioned you’d better commission it. Just do it discreetly, please.’

  And so very quietly I set about filling my pool with water, which took about a day and half. I really didn’t have much choice at the time. When I think about that now, as a committed environmentalist, glugging thousands of litres of precious water into a pool in the middle of a drought seems ridiculous and, with the benefit of education, I certainly wouldn’t do such a thing today. In my defence, climate change was not a concept the general public had any awareness of back then. We were all blissfully ignorant, living in a consumption-heavy bubble with no clue about the iceberg up ahead.

  It was certainly a blessing to have the pool in the boiling summer. Jill used it regularly. I dipped in occasionally but, even though that summer broke all temperature records, the pool was never warm enough for me.

  Life was good. I continued to earn what was by most standards a large salary and to the outside world I looked wealthy. I had a warped relationship with money. I was doing deals for millions of pounds and, when you deal with figures so mind-bogglingly large, money starts to lose its value. It was like playing Monopoly.

  In all my time at ED&F Man the most I ever earned was a £50,000 basic annual salary and a quarterly bonus which was always roughly a quarter of my salary, so the total annual figure was around £100,000. That was in the nineties and was a decent wage, but other people were earning £1 million a year. I liked to think I could make money and seal deals but I never had the business acumen of some of my colleagues who earned bonuses ten or twenty times their salaries. They were the real big boys; the whizz kids who came to the office dressed in Savile Row suits and wearing Rolex watches. My brain never allowed me to be fast-tracked. You had to be very sharp to reach the same level as those people.

  I was aware that my stutter held me back. It slowed me down because I had to concentrate harder on what I said. I took longer than others to get my words out and when I had to make split-second decisions and communicate what I wanted clearly yet urgently, my speech impediment would sometimes cost me valuable seconds. I was conscious of people looking at me and sometimes I couldn’t make calls. I knew my bosses realized I had a problem but it was never mentioned. It was the elephant in the room.

  Then one day it was finally addressed and miraculously that became a cathartic moment. I had been having a bad day and struggled through an important call. I can’t remember the exact details but it would have been some sort of deal negotiation. The frustration of not being able to articulate what I needed to say fed the stutter and made it worse. It was a vicious circle: the more I tried, the worse the stutter became, and the worse it got, the more I had to try. One of my bosses was watching and after I hung up he walked over to me, put his hand on my shoulder and very quietly but firmly said: ‘That’s enough of the stuttering now, Simon.’

  He patted me and walked away. I didn’t show it but I was mortified. I didn’t know what to do and I had no idea how to make myself stop. But, amazingly, within a few days I started to notice that speaking became easier. I was intensely aware of how my speech was coming out and made a huge effort to try and be clearer and more concise. Within a couple of weeks my stutter reduced to a tenth of what it had been. I haven’t got a clue what happened but obviously some process in my brain changed, like a switch being flicked. My stutter was never mentioned again and from that day on speech was much easier. Today, sometimes the stutter comes back and I stumble, usually when I am stressed or nervous, but it has never reached the level it was when I was a young adult.

  Losing it was a huge weight off my shoulders. My performance at work improved and I enjoyed the many opportunities for socializing even more. It is fair to say that I fully availed myself of all the opportunities and free meals and
drinks that came my way.

  Jill and I had an active social life with plenty of friends. She, I assumed, was happy. I went off most weekends and indulged myself in my money-burning hobbies. She worked and looked after the home. I was happy with my lot. I didn’t have a five- or a ten-year plan. I never sat down and worked out a career path and I didn’t have career ambitions other than the desire to make money. I went with the flow.

  Soon after we got married Jill fell pregnant with our first daughter, Louisa. I had never planned parenthood either and when we did talk about family and children, I always approached the subject with the sort of attitude that you reserve for notional events that will probably happen at some point in the indeterminate future; it was an abstract concept. When Lou arrived I carried on as if nothing had happened. My life didn’t alter. I am ashamed to say I took a back seat and let Jill get on with it. I was engrossed in my own world, working increasingly long and stressful hours and going off at weekends to do my own thing. I can’t recall changing a nappy, I didn’t do the feeds; my job was to earn the wage, which is not a fashionable view today but the early eighties were less enlightened times and I was not alone in being a largely absent, working father. That is not to say that I didn’t appreciate what a very tough job child rearing was.