by AnonYMous
It was like making a whole new show. Bibi might not have been as confident as Joey in her decisions—who could be?—but she was at least now looking in the right direction when she made them. And while she was for the most part nauseatingly positive (“You have a beautiful instrument, sweetie, and your dedication moves me”), there were times when traces of the real Bibi Vasquez leaked through. Typically, this happened when she was asked to judge a younger, better-looking female (“Honey you’re cute… but y’know, cute is a dime a dozen these days”)—or, even more noticeably, when a male contestant was unwise enough to say something like, “Man, I was totally obsessed with you when I was a kid.”
Oh, this riled Bibi like nothing else.
“When you were a kid, huh?” she spat, on the second occasion it happened. “Was that when the world was still in black and white? You sure know how to make a girl feel good.”
He blushed. “I didn’t mean it like—”
“So how did you mean it?”
“I meant—”
“That I’m older than your mom?”
“No! It’s just that… y’know… when I was growing up—”
“You need to learn some manners, douche nozzle. Get outta here. You ain’t going to Vegas. The only place you’re going is home. And don’t expect to see this on TV. Hey Len—we’re cutting this guy, okay? Where’s makeup? I’m upset now. I don’t wanna look upset. Jesus—MAKEUP! My day is ruined. Disrespectful motherfucker.”
As requested, the contestant was cut from the final edit. Nevertheless, I was fully expecting an order from Len for me to have another “quiet word” with Bibi, to make sure it never happened again. I should have known better, of course. Len had a far more evil plan. He told the staff in the waiting room to whisper in every male contestant’s ear that what Bibi really loved to hear, what really flattered her, was how much her fans used to lust after her when they were young. So, one by one, the men walked into the room, stood on the podium, and delivered this unwitting insult, causing Bibi to seethe and curse and single-handedly eliminate at least another two male singers, both of whom were actually pretty good. Eventually, however, she had little choice but to take the comments with a smile; or at least a curl of the lips that approximated a reaction of humble amusement.
I doubt she suspected for an instant that her torture was entirely manufactured, that she was just another performing animal in the Project Icon circus.
After San Diego, the remaining cities on our list were Newark, Chicago, and Los Angeles. It took us three weeks to get to them all, and with each new location, my mood improved. Some of this was no doubt relief at finally getting in touch with Brock. He hadn’t dumped me, it turned out. He’d just left his phone on the beach while surfing (as I’d first suspected) and forgotten about the tide. It was now either halfway to Papua New Guinea, or in the belly of a passing whale. And without the phone, of course, Brock didn’t have my numbers, and because he was smoking so much weed (this seriously had to stop when I got to Honolulu), it took him forty-eight hours to figure out that he could simply borrow Pete’s computer and get all the details from my Facebook page. That’s why it took him so long to call. Or at least that was his explanation, and I was happy to go along with it. It had once taken me a week to get back to him, after all.
Anyway: By the time we finally reconnected, my late-night plan to quit Project Icon and get on the next flight to Hawaii had long since been abandoned. Bonnie’s audition had changed all that. Besides, I’d come this far. Might as well get to the end of the season.
Another reason to stay at Icon: Finally, season thirteen seemed to be gaining momentum. Aside from the rising confidence of the judges (JD had actually started to use real words, in addition to variations on “booya-ka-ka,” including “Takin’ it to the Ka!”, “Yaka-yaka-yaka!”, and “Ka-booya-boom-ka!”), the contestants had gotten stronger with every city. This was no accident, of course: When we’d done our preaudition tour in August, we’d become better at our jobs with every city. More to the point, we’d started to cheat by using talent scouts, who found us promising young singers on the local club circuits and offered them VIP treatment if they came in for auditions. And by VIP treatment, I mean bribes. Phones, concert tickets, T-shirts. That kind of thing. Oh, yeah, and cash.
Thanks to all this, Bonnie wasn’t the only early standout who seemed guaranteed a place in the Final Fifteen. Another was Jimmy Nugget, an eighteen-year-old country yodeler, with the wide-legged stance and apple-cheeked complexion of a 1950s farm boy. “It’s like Roy Rogers made love to a Bee Gee!” as Len enthused. The only problem, as far as I could tell, was Jimmy’s promiscuity, which in terms of sheer turnover made Joey seem practically abstemious. Not that Jimmy was in any way competing with Joey. Oh, no. His emphatic preference wasn’t for Icon’s female contestants, but for members of his own sex: hotel waiters, judges’ assistants, his fellow contestants, even a couple of passing construction workers. You could tell when he’d just emerged from a particularly invigorating encounter by his lopsided belt buckle and the V-shaped flush of crimson under his open woodcutter shirt.
Jimmy achieved these feats in spite of the near-constant presence of his father, a gigantic Nebraskan cattle rancher who insisted on being addressed as “Big Nugg.” From what I could tell, Big Nugg wasn’t so much in a state of denial regarding his son’s sexual orientation as living in an entirely different universe. At every opportunity he spoke about Little Nugg’s love of “our Lord and savior,” his devotion to the Holy Temple Faith and Deliverance Center in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and his high-school courtship of “sweet li’l Annie, my beautiful future daughter-in-law.” Whether or not sweet li’l Annie actually existed was anyone’s guess, but Big Nugg’s commitment to the fiction was unwavering, almost as unwavering as his commitment to the advancement of his son in Project Icon. With respect to the latter, Big Nugg had brought with him a yodel coach, who took Little Nugg away for “private sessions” at every opportunity.
As for the other front-runners: Near the top of list was Mia Pelosi, former member of the children’s chorus at the Metropolitan Opera, speaker of six languages, wearer of sweeping ball gowns and diamond neckwear, and in pretty much every other respect a foul-mouthed tramp from the mean streets of Newark. Mia’s vocabulary made Bibi Vasquez sound like a mother superior at Mass on a Sunday morning—an effect heightened by her thirty-a-day cigarette habit, strict diet of fast-food cheeseburgers, and frequently deployed party trick of belching and talking at the same time. And yet by some unfathomable accident of genetics, Mia had been appointed custodian of a larynx that produced a noise as rich and nuanced as any eighteenth-century Stradivarius—a fact noted early on by her public-school music teacher. He was the one who’d sent her to the Met, causing the visiting Czech conductor Milos Dzbirichzijec to literally sob with ecstasy from the orchestra pit. A scholarship at Juilliard followed, interrupted briefly by a stint in a juvenile-detention facility for drunken brawling in public. Mia graduated with distinction in spite of this, and soon became a professional mezzo-soprano, earning tens of thousands of dollars per month, most of which she invested in a burgeoning methamphetamine habit. Fortunately, Mia was eventually able to clean herself up, largely thanks to a year-long recuperation at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in upstate New York. And when she emerged at the age of twenty-three, with renewed focus, a supportive parole officer, and a battle scene from the Book of Revelations tattooed across her buttocks, she returned to the audition circuit, only this time for Icon. Her rendition of “The Prayer” caused a studio-wide outbreak of goose bumps, and the panel’s verdict was an instant and unanimous yes.
Which left one other contestant who seemed destined to become a season thirteen finalist: Cassie Turner, the defiantly unwashed Pennsylvanian folkstress who performed her audition while sitting cross-legged on the podium, strumming on a beat-up guitar. Cassie was older than the others by at least five years, she was a single mother of three kids, and she resided in
one of Pittsburgh’s less desirable trailer parks. But her voice… oh, my Lord, her voice: a harrowing, broken sound, at times a roar of almost beast-like rage, at others a falsetto of such sweetness and vulnerability, you wanted to pick her up and cradle her like a child. More than that, she meant every word.
Like the others, however, Cassie had her issues. Chief among them: As a purveyor of songs about the struggle and dignity of the working class, it didn’t help that her father was the owner of a Boston private equity firm. Yes, Cassie’s noble life of poverty was entirely a matter of choice—and not just because of the generously endowed trust fund that had been established in her name when she was two years old. At the insistence of her parents, she had also graduated summa cum laude from Harvard Law School. If Cassie’s musical career didn’t work out, there was a job already lined up for her in the litigation department of Dammock, Hurt & Richardson (Karl Hurt being one of her father’s oldest friends).
None of this would matter during Las Vegas Week, of course: The press didn’t usually develop an interest in Icon contestants until much later in the season—and even then, it didn’t necessarily mean the details of their personal lives would become public. Two Svens was unusually protective (or just old-fashioned) in this regard. “I want my finalists alive at the end of the season, dammit!” I once overheard him screaming at Nigel Crowther through a closed office door. “How can they sell any records for us if they keep hanging themselves from your balcony?”
Crowther had laughed for a long time at this. “C’mon, Sven, old boy,” he crooned. “How many of them”—he had to cough and blow his nose—“sell any records?”
Two Svens named two ex-contestants whose albums had been certified platinum. This only made Crowther even laugh harder. “Two people!” he squealed. “Two people in the history of this show! What about the other others, eh? There are fifteen finalists every season, you daft old Swede, and we’ve been doing this for twelve years.”
“Some are very successful.”
“Yeah—in the cruise ship and wedding industries.”
“No, you fat-nippled arsehole, on Broadway.”
“They make us more money in the tabloids than on Broadway! Think, man. Reality deals. Advertweets. Doctor-sponsored cosmetic implants. Those kids could be out there getting photographed without their underwear, or spending time in celebrity rehab. They could be productive. Instead, what? Forty-second Street? Oh, please.”
That was when the office door had opened, prompting me to dive for cover as Two Svens emerged, still in a fury. Crowther was gone from the show a few weeks later—he’d signed his deal for The Talent Machine. I remember wondering if he’d actually tell any of his future contestants what he had planned for them.
Maybe they wouldn’t care.
17
Lion’s Den
January
LAS VEGAS WEEK WAS a relatively new thing for Project Icon. Until season ten, the Final Fifteen had always been selected at Greenlit Studios in Los Angeles, a week before the live shows began. And then… well, Len had bought a house in Las Vegas. Or rather, he’d bought a sixteen-bedroom mansion with its own golf course, moat, drawbridge, and private volcano, ten minutes from the Strip. I have no idea how much he paid for the place, but it hardly mattered: Four months later, the Great Recession began, and the market for dictator-grade real estate featuring simulated lava eruptions became somewhat less attractive. For a few difficult weeks, Len spent a lot of time on the phone, using phrases like “negative amortization” and “complete fucking obliteration.” And that’s when Vegas Week was born—with Len declaring his extraordinary foresight in purchasing a residence near the chosen location, large enough to accommodate both himself and “key members of the staff” (i.e., Len’s Lovelies), while also allowing him to exploit the considerable advantages of a business-use tax write-off.
I could hardly believe he’d pulled it off—until I found out that Sir Harold Killoch, Two Svens, and Ed Rossitto also owned properties in the same bankrupt development.
The cost of Las Vegas Week to Rabbit must have been immense: a hundred and twenty airfares and hotel rooms for the contestants alone, plus food and other transportation, not including those very same costs for the crew, and on top of all that the rental charge for the venue—a hangar-like conference facility at the back of the Bikini Atoll Resort & Casino (known for detonating a “replica fifteen-megaton hydrogen bomb” in its glass-domed, hyperoxygenated lobby at fortyminute intervals throughout the day, as waiters dressed as Pacific Islanders handed out Chain Reaction Martinis from the Crater Lagoon Bar & Grill).
Expenses aside, however, our annual trip to Las Vegas marked a crucial point in the season. The circus was over. The real competition had begun. Take the set, for example: The contestants performed on an actual stage, with the judges’ table placed on a dais behind the orchestra pit—just like the arrangement at Greenlit Studios (only without the studio audience). In addition, there was a separate location—known officially as The Decision Room—into which each contestant was ushered on the last day of filming and informed whether or not they’d made it through to the live shows in Hollywood. This obviously didn’t end well for most them: With only fifteen places available, the success rate was barely twelve percent—a fact Wayne Shoreline took great pleasure in repeating at every opportunity, especially when a contestant seemed close to breaking down.
The Decision Room was actually nothing of the sort: It was a giant steel cage, borrowed from the Paradise Bros. Circus—they used it for transporting lions—suspended via hooks from the ceiling. The only way to get inside was via a custom-made staircase, barely visible through the green-tinted fog that billowed from a rack of theatrical smoke machines. (Len had wanted the set to look “futuristic, like something from one of those Schwarzenegger movies,” by which I presumed he meant The Running Man, in which a sadistic game-show host presides over the hunting and killing of his contestants.) Adding to the general science-fiction theme, the cage was equipped with a white, egg-shaped sofa, several transparent blobs of plastic (of no obvious purpose) and a lonely, straight-backed chair, which appeared to have been sprayed with glue, then dipped in glitter. The latter was of course for the potential finalists, and had been modified under Len’s orders to make one leg two inches shorter than the others. The idea was to ensure as much discomfort as possible—although I suspected Len also secretly wanted the chair to break, ideally with one of the more obese contestants sitting in it. Such moments of shame were Len’s favorite kind of ad-lib.
The format of Las Vegas Week was fairly straightforward: Each contestant would perform an Elvis classic—in keeping with the location—followed by a song of their own choosing. At the end of the second song, the judges would whisper to each other and take notes, but make no official comments—these would come later in The Decision Room. Or as the crew had renamed it, The Lion’s Den.
Bonnie was one of the very first on stage. Although it had now been a month since San Diego, no one had forgotten that epic audition—or how it had transformed Joey into the de facto star of season thirteen. Bibi certainly hadn’t forgotten. That’s why she’d been trying to out-care Joey whenever possible. After Cassie Turner’s performance of “The Internationale,” for example, she’d spoken at length, in a tremulous whisper, about how she too wanted to unite the human race—the effect being only slightly undermined by her apparent belief that Bruce Springsteen had written the song. In the same vein, she had wept for a minute and a half over Mia Pelosi’s rendition of “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” and had climbed up on stage to embrace Little Nugg after his yodel-based interpretation of “Imagine,” declaring that “Isaac Hayes would be incredibly proud of how you honored his legacy.”
Bibi wasn’t done yet with Operation Sensitive, however.
Oh, no. Not even close.
I knew something was up when Bonnie’s Elvis number was switched at the last minute. She was supposed to be singing “Can’t Help Falling in Lo
ve”—another heartbreaker—but Len somehow convinced her that “Suspicious Minds” was a “better fit.” This clearly wasn’t true. Plus, Bonnie couldn’t remember the words. As a result, her performance was borderline unwatchable. She missed her cues. She improvised the verses. She searched for, but never quite located, the key. And it shook her confidence so badly, she could barely make it through her own choice of song, a reprieve of “I’ll Stand by You.” When the ordeal was finally over, you could feel relief coursing through the room like a shot of post-op morphine. As instructed, however, the judges didn’t say a word. They just made vague hmm noises and hung their heads, unable to pretend even to talk among themselves or jot in their Project Icon notepads.
Being one of the first to sing, Bonnie was also one of the first to enter The Lion’s Den at the end of the week. Now, at this point I didn’t think there was any serious doubt she would make it into the Final Fifteen. Len’s meddling with her song choice had seemed like an obvious ploy to create drama, to convince the audience that the very best contestant of the auditions round might be eliminated before the live shows began. But I wasn’t fooled: Why would Project Icon get rid of a performer almost guaranteed to bring in higher ratings (most of the supermarket tabloids had already featured her on their covers), thus allowing Rabbit to charge more for its advertising? Also—Bibi would clearly never let this happen. Her job now was to out-care Joey, a mission that wouldn’t exactly be helped if she voted to send home the beautiful and talented wife of an injured American serviceman.
