American Idol

by Richard Rushfield

  More to the point, by speaking the truth in the setting of an entertainment audition, Lythgoe did not merely cut through the clutter of smarm that had, so the sentiment went, poisoned civic life; he was, in a sense, standing up to the mediocrity of entertainment that had been foisted down the public’s throat in recent years. “After a lifetime of climbing the entertainment ladder, Nigel Lythgoe has now achieved cult status,” wrote the Guardian.

  Those who knew Nigel understood that the “Nasty” role was very much an act. In fact, having been a performer himself, he knew all too well the pain of flubbed auditions. Years later, when he took the judge’s chair in a show much closer to his heart, So You Think You Can Dance, he would eschew the put-down for constructive criticisms. But at this moment, he sensed a vacuum in the culture and stepped in to fill the void. And the public instantly responded.

  Hit though Popstars might have been, Simon Fuller watched and thought, “I could do this much much better. I saw certain similarities in what Popstars was to what I wanted to do with Fame Search. It was singing as opposed to mine, which was singing, dancing, and acting, but it was the same mechanism, if you like . . . what I always intended for Fame Search. That was to make it a real-time experience but just focus it on singing because it’s easier to make it into a TV show. That was really where Pop Idol began.”

  Pop Idol, as he now called it, would build on the audition element that made the first section of Popstars such a success, but in addition to casting off the slower training Making the Band–type documentary of the second half, it would add the element that had excited Fuller about the Internet concept in the first place: putting the decisions in the hands of the audience. Essentially, Pop Idol planned to take the power away from the record executives and let the people play label bigwig by letting them decide who got the recording contract. The revamped pitch brought that element into a TV show, adding audience voting to make the people at home the ultimate arbiters and create a very quick verdict for the tryouts.

  Within a month of Popstars’ launch, on February 7, Fuller was pitching Pop Idol again in a meeting with Richard Eyre, an executive with the British TV giant Pearson (now Thames TV, a division of the multinational FremantleMedia entertainment conglomerate). This time around, with Popstars riding high, the fish were biting. The project moved forward.

  But one other element needed to be brought in. As in Popstars, Fuller saw the need to have an immediate on-air response to the performances. “If you’re going to do it live, you need real-time feedback.”

  The first thought to anchor the panel was, in fact, Nasty Nigel himself, the man who had created the role. Soon after Popstars launched, Fuller approached him about jumping ship and coming aboard the rejiggered Pop Idol. Fuller offered Lythgoe a full partnership in the newly created 19 TV.

  Lured by the promise of ownership in Idol—on Popstars he had been a mere salaried executive—Nigel finally signed on, abandoning Popstars and the exploding notoriety it was bringing him. “Fuller is hoping that Lythgoe is the secret ingredient that will make Pop Idol a hit and thus establish 19 TV as a major entertainment player,” wrote one press report after the announcement.

  There were, however, complications. Showtime, the Australian company that owned the international license to Popstars, threatened suit against 19 for copyright infringement. In the protracted settlement, Showtime agreed not to press a case on the grounds of format, and agreed to look the other way on the matter of poaching Lythgoe the producer but not on the matter of poaching Lythgoe the star. Another British singing competition starring Nasty Nigel was just too much. So racing to move forward, wanting to strike while the iron was hot, Fuller and company began searching for a new judge to preside over the show, someone who could fill the shoes of Nasty Nigel.

  They turned to a man Fuller had known around the music business for years, a record company executive named Simon Cowell.

  Chapter 3

  ENTER THE DRAGON

  When set designer Andy Walmsley reported for his first meeting about the new project called Pop Idol, he recalls being told about the record executive who would occupy the “mean judge” chair: “His name is Simon Cowell and he has more money than anyone in this room will ever see in their lifetime.”

  It was a typical description of the man who would remake television, if only because so little was known about him. For decades, Cowell had skirted amidst celebrity, shaped it, known it, dated it, and profited from it, but he had only made rare appearances on the margins of the British tabloid culture.

  The year before Cowell stepped on the Idol stage, the freewheeling gossip column of the Sun tabloid ran a blind item reporting that an unnamed executive was spending time with a pop star named Naima from the band Honeyz. A few days after the blind item appeared, the column published a follow-up: “WASN’T going to name the RCA exec ‘tending the garden’ of NAIMA from Honeyz for the good reason nobody—including me—has heard of him. However, bloke in question has spent the past 48 hours pestering colleagues demanding to know how I rumbled him. And frankly, he’s becoming a nuisance. So step forward SIMON COWELL who, when not podgering Naima, acts as WESTLIFE’s chief backside kisser.”

  Outside the music industry, it may have looked like backside kisser was Simon Cowell’s complete job description, but those who had worked with him—and those who had tangled with him—had come to learn that belittling Cowell was a loser’s game. For over a decade prior to Idol, Cowell had stood as the United Kingdom’s record industry’s most ardent proponent of shameless commercialism, pushing a string of companies into the realm of novelty recordings and unabashed pop that gave chills to those who thought themselves the arbiters of cool. Since the beginning of his career, the raw populism of Cowell’s artistic vision had elicited jeers and catcalls from his fellows in the industry, but although he had had more than a few embarrassing flops, by the late 1990s his record of smash hits was such that no colleague would dare mock him again.

  Some ten years after signing on to the little singing contest, Simon Cowell is, by the account of one poll, the most famous British person on Earth, his renown surpassing that of the Queen. The summer after departing Idol, sitting in his grand but subdued corner office suite at the headquarters of Sony Music UK, Simon Cowell pauses somewhere between trying to sign a new recording act and cutting an episode of The X Factor for a rare moment of reflection, remembering the time just before Idol.

  “I was very happy just being behind the scenes and had absolutely zero desire to be in front of the camera. I never had that desire,” he recalls, sipping ginger tea and dragging on Kool cigarettes, lit candles flickering gently around the sitting room. While he might not have been motivated by fame, Simon Cowell, like his comrade-to-be Simon Fuller, was driven by an unquenchable desire to build. Ten years later, having exited at last from Idol, his brain clearly buzzes with ideas, and his eyes still light up with enthusiasm, even after an all-night editing session, about the challenge to keep making something bigger and better. And if enormous, unprecedented fame for an executive was to be the price of that, so be it.

  On a very surface level, the two Simons appeared to be sides of the same coin. Over time, their similarities would fuel countless profiles, magazine pieces, and brothers-in-arms comparisons. Indeed, Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell are a year apart in age, have similar rigorous flattop haircuts, and worked on the poppiest edge of the U.K. music business. Both had bold visions for success and weren’t shy about ruffling feathers to achieve them. And of course there are the names. Beyond those superficial resemblances, however, the two men who would reshape entertainment in their respective images are, in fact, as different as men can be. Where Simon Fuller is shy, gracious, soft-spoken, and wary of the limelight, the on-screen Simon Cowell is famously caustic, abrasive, and, once he got a taste for it, a creature who revels in being the center of attention. Where Fuller was the quintessential outsider who made his own way through the recording industry, Cowell was the high-achieving company man wh
o rose through the ranks of industry giants.

  The future partners began in opposite corners of the world. Fuller was raised at a remote distance from the entertainment industry, while for Cowell, the entertainment industry was the background music of his childhood, a seat at its table just a father’s phone call away. Cowell grew up in Elstree, Britain’s Hollywood-east and home to two of the nation’s major film studios, where he developed an early taste for the high life. His parents have been described as exceptionally attractive, rather dashing figures. His father, Eric, was a noted presence speeding around town behind the wheel of a white Jaguar; his mother, Julie, was a former dancer. “The stars soon became our friends and neighbors,” he wrote in his autobiography, I Don’t Mean to Be Rude, But . . . , “and whenever they were in town, I got to rub shoulders with the cream of Hollywood, as long as I could squeeze my way past my mum.” Childhood memories include sitting on the knee of Bette Davis and visiting Roger Moore on the set of The Saint.

  The adorable child on Bette Davis’s knee soon became, by his own self-described legend, the mischievous scamp talking back to adults at fancy parties, prompting roars of delight for his precocity. At four years old, Cowell recalls looking up at a furry hat his mother was wearing and telling her, “You look like a poodle.” And no doubt, getting away with it.

  Cowell’s reminiscences alternate between tales of coming of age on the sidelines of showbiz and reveling in his rascally back-talking nature, a trait that a succession of outraged schoolmasters saw as the nerve of an overprivileged brat, but that would eventually resolve itself into the “fearless truth telling” that would reshape entertainment.

  Cowell also found music. With his two older brothers, he fell in love with the Beatles and the Stones, and grew to despise what he saw as the simpering banality of his parents’ music: Perry Como, Shirley Bassey, and the like. On these artists, he let forth his first known expressions of disdain, begging his mother to “turn that rubbish off.” But whereas many others, Fuller included for a time, were to follow a path that was increasingly daring and iconoclastic—from the Beatles to the Stones to the Who to the Sex Pistols and the Clash—Cowell got off the boat when it veered away from mainstream pop. To this day, he declares that he “doesn’t get” punk.

  At age seventeen, Cowell left school with no clear plan for the future other than a vague desire to go into show business. “All I did know was that I wanted to make money,” he wrote. “Real money. I credit my parents with this. From an early age they made us earn our own pocket money. But pocket money wasn’t enough. I soon became obsessed with getting rich.”

  It was an obsession that would stay with him. After leaving school, Cowell drifted into a series of odd jobs.

  While floating from ill-suited job to ill-suited job, young Simon longed to break into the music industry. Eventually, his parents acknowledged their son’s dreams, and after his mother wrote a letter to an acquaintance at the EMI label, Simon won a job in their mailroom.

  The bloom on the rose came off quickly for Cowell. After a year delivering mail, despairing of ever moving up the ladder, he returned home and asked for a job in the real estate business. But it didn’t last, and after a few mind-numbing weeks, Cowell raced back to the music business, his father securing him a job through a contact at EMI Publishing. That job required Cowell to shop songs from the company’s catalogue to recording artists. Soon he enjoyed his first success, getting an unusually high number of songs recorded. He had, by his account, a knack for finding the right material and matching it with the right artist, and a knack for persuading artists to take a look at the songs he was bringing in. Most of all, he had a knack for getting people to take him seriously.

  Like Simon Fuller, Cowell used his first blush of success to break out on his own, setting up his own company after just a year in publishing. But whereas Fuller’s plan, at least in retrospect, seemed a sensible step built on the progress he had made after a long apprenticeship, Cowell’s move smacks more of dilettantism, flitting from one easily won slot to another, fleeing at the first signs of boredom, his ambitions getting ahead of his actual place in the industry.

  Ellis Rich, his immediate superior at EMI, suggested that he and Cowell walk away from the day job to set up their own publishing company. Cowell writes, “Within a day of moving into our new offices in Soho, London, I realized I had made a big mistake. We didn’t have the funding to do it properly: We couldn’t get the business off the ground, and many of the fundamentals of running an independent company were foreign to us.” Cowell raced back to EMI and pleaded for his old job back, but he was shown the door.

  E & S publishing weathered a year of solvency problems before Cowell finally broke it off with Rich and threw in the towel. “He wasn’t pleased but understood that I wanted to get out of music publishing,” is how Cowell describes the breakup. Believing that actually making records was the proper path to riches, Cowell joined forces with Iain Burton, a former dancer/manager who was looking to start a label. With Burton’s financial backing, the duo started Fanfare Records. The label scored a quick hit that was emblematic of Cowell’s success in the next phase of his career in the novelty end of the pop world. The record was a fitness instruction video hosted by Strictly Come Dancing star Arlene Phillips. The Keep in Shape System (KISS) featured Phillips, her overflowing brown mane held in place by a white headband, leg warmers in place, cheerfully leading a class of Lycra-suited aerobics enthusiasts through a routine guaranteed to help viewers “Get in shape in just ten minutes a day with Britain’s number one exercise and dance teacher.” The video was an instant success, selling half a million copies and putting the fledgling company on stable footing.

  Soon after, Cowell met an eighteen-year-old singer named Sinitta in a nightclub and began pursuing her, by his own telling, both as a potential recording star and as a potential date. He won her over on both counts. Sinitta’s first song, a ditty entitled “So Macho,” became Cowell’s first true hit, selling a million copies. The two became a much spotted pair around the London night scene, but Sinitta later denied the relationship was anything more than just friendly.

  In the years that followed, Cowell took the mechanics of the music business more seriously. He began appearing—uninvited—at the studios of Pete Waterman, one of the United Kingdom’s most successful songwriter/producers, and shadowed him through his days. At the same time, with the first taste of success, he raced to acquire the trappings of 1980s music biz success, complete with Porsche, house, and high-flying partying lifestyle. “I thought I was Jack the lad,” he would later tell Oprah. “I had the Porsche, the lifestyle, the credit cards, everything.” But the party was financed largely on debt and it all came crashing down, sending the thirty-year-old Cowell back home to his parents with little more than cab fare in his pocket.

  Years later, in 2010, he still seemed visibly shaken by the impact of this period. “I had to live with my mum and dad,” Cowell said in his Oprah interview. “And I had to sell the house, the Porsche. I had literally nothing. I had about a half-a-million-dollar loan I had to pay. It was a pretty awful time. Everything was based on hype, not substance. Then it became reality that I literally had to start again with nothing. It took about three or four years to pay everything off.”

  This brush with financial doom must have been particularly harrowing to a man whose goal in life had been, in his own words, to get extremely rich. Whatever the effect on his psyche, the practical effect was to send Cowell back to the shelter of big business, a refuge he would never leave.

  In the coming years, Cowell would often find himself a fish out of water, like Fuller, looking for commercial success in an industry that seemed more concerned with protecting its aura of cool than with selling records. Reacting against what he saw as preciousness, he would push his companies to the pop extremes with songs like “So Macho” and Eurosong-friendly acts such as Ultimate Kaos and a Spice Girls rip-off called Five. But Cowell’s alleged crassness also placed his finger on
something unseen by his colleagues: the value of television as the launch pad and promotional vehicle for a recording artist. Instinctively, Cowell understood the challenges of an increasingly crowded media world. Over the next years, he would meet those challenges by championing a record version of WrestleMania, a Teletubbies album, and a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers album, all massive hits. Cowell wrote of the period, “Most of my colleagues were obsessed with signing the next coolest rock or alternative band, and I was considered by many to be a laughingstock—a freak.”

  Cowell’s memoirs of this period fairly bristle with these memories; the very specific insults still are clearly alive in vivid Technicolor for him in lines like “those imbeciles at Arista, most of whom are out of the business today.” The moment when he slammed the door on the faces of the fools and their inevitable comeuppance clearly thrill even after all the success to come.

  His mega-breakthrough wouldn’t come until 1995, however, just as the Spice Girls were hitting the market. While Simon Fuller was turning his firm, 19, into an empire, Cowell was struggling to get to the top of the corporate pyramid. “I was doing well financially, but not as well as others in the business. I was making a small fortune, but not a large one. I wanted to be the top dog within RCA and wasn’t happy that other A&R men were having bigger hits than I was,” he wrote. His chance to break out came via another television tie-in. Soldier Soldier was one of the most popular shows in the United Kingdom, a drama about the lives of the members of a fictional British army regiment during the military downsizing years of the 1990s. During an episode in the show’s fifth season, its stars, Robson Green and Jerome Flynn, had broken into song, performing a version of the Righteous Brothers classic, “Unchained Melody.” When Cowell’s office was flooded the next day with calls about the song, he was determined to make an album of it, despite the stars’ reluctance. For weeks, he hounded the pair until he finally got them into the studios. The resulting single was the United Kingdom’s best seller of that year and started a run that sent two albums to the number one slot. In the years that followed, Cowell signed the boy band Westlife, which became the first group in U.K. history to have their first seven singles hit the number one slot, certifying Cowell’s position as a hitmaker on a massive scale, while his work on the extreme pop side of the table caused the BBC’s Radio One to label him “the Antichrist.”