American Idol

by Richard Rushfield

  A casting call was put out and faces from the music industry began to troop through the production offices. Among those who came in was a former bassist currently working as a record producer—Randy Jackson. “No one knew Randy,” says Berman. The then portly figure sat with Lythgoe, Warwick, Darnell, and Berman for a get-acquainted meeting. “We talked about the music business. We didn’t have them do trial judging. It was just like ‘Could you talk to somebody, tell a young person—’ and a lot of people felt that they couldn’t do that and some people felt that they would be too harsh. Randy had a really nice way about him when he came in. He was a bass player and had done some producing and talked about Mariah and talked about Whitney and some people that he had worked with. He had a really nice way about him.”

  A consensus quickly formed that the affable Jackson would make an “unthreatening” yet knowledgeable counterweight to Cowell, and the second seat was filled. Cowell recalled meeting him over lunch shortly after arriving for shooting: “It was one of those rare occasions in life when, within seconds, you find yourself totally at ease with another human being. The first thing that struck me about him was his personality. ‘Sunny’ didn’t begin to describe him—he could light up a room—any room, no matter what the size—without being irritating.”

  Then there was Paula.

  Abdul had spent almost twenty years in the public eye before Idol. After a youth spent largely in dance studios, she auditioned to become one of the legendary Laker Girls during her freshman year at Cal State Northridge. Winning a slot on the team, she ascended to the head cheerleader role—the squad’s chief choreographer—within three months and promptly dropped out of school. A couple of years later, Abdul was spotted by members of the Jackson family entourage, cheering at a game. She was recruited to work with the family as a choreographer, an association that ultimately culminated in her arranging the dance moves on Janet Jackson’s videos for her Control album.

  By the late 1980s, Abdul took a shot in front of the camera and dipped into her savings to record a demo of herself singing. Her exuberant manner and dance prowess proved to be a potent combination in the still early days of MTV. Still, her debut album, Forever Your Girl, got off to a slow start. At sixty-two weeks, it was, in fact, the record holder for slowest climb to the top of any LP in history. Eventually, driven by Abdul’s energetic videos, the album became a massive hit. It sold twelve million copies in the U.S. and produced four number one singles, the second most of any album in history. With her even bigger follow-up, Abdul was certified as one of the strongest forces in music.

  From here, however, her tale took a stumble. For Abdul, the 1990s saw two failed marriages (one to actor Emilio Estevez, another to clothing manufacturer Brad Beckerman), a public struggle with and treatment for bulimia, struggles with prescription meds, and after four years off the charts, a comeback attempt that saw only middling sales.

  Paula was clearly “open to offers.”

  Berman tells of Paula’s appearance in the Idol world. “I knew Paula and had talked to her about projects in years past. She came in and she met with us. She represented a lot of categories. She had a lot of credibility. She had been a pop star. She was looking for other avenues for herself. She was looking to produce certain things. She had an interest in doing other things, but I will say that they just seemed like a good pairing of three people.”

  Ten years later, it’s difficult to recall that when Idol began, Abdul was the show’s real star. Paula Abdul was the only person on the screen—from the judging panel, to the hosts, to the contestants—who anyone had heard of. It was Paula Abdul who supplied the curiosity factor to the show. But for Abdul, used to the coddled, highly choreographed world of American entertainment, this leap into a very different kind of enterprise, pulling her back from the road to entertainment oblivion, was to come as a huge shock to her system.

  With three seats filled, there remained the question of the fourth judge. In the United Kingdom, that fourth seat had been filled by a DJ, Neil Fox, and the crew attempted to complete a similar mix here. They settled on a flamboyant and edgy young DJ from LA’s KROQ station, known as Stryker, to be the fourth judge. The deal was ready to go, but at the last minute, Stryker pulled out, citing what he would later term “image concerns” over appearing on what he no doubt considered a cheesy singing contest that might damage his rock creds.

  Murdoch’s edict “don’t change anything” was still in effect, but Stryker’s turnabout had left them with no time to fill that final chair. In the end, in another twist of fate, no decision was ever made not to have a fourth judge. The clock simply ran out before a suitable partner for Simon, Paula, and Randy was found.

  The final element was the hosts. Here the “change nothing” edict would be untouchable. Because Pop Idol had had two hosts, so must American Idol. But the United Kingdom’s front men, Ant and Dec, were not just two smiling faces tossed together. They were a comedy duo who had worked together, developing complementary characters and rhythms, since they were fourteen. But that point seems to have been lost under the operating edict, and with just a few weeks to go before auditions began, a broad casting call was put out to find not one, but two front men.

  Dozens came through to audition, appearing before the producers individually and in pairs, improvising hypothetical situations that might come. Producers scrambled to find two people who not only had the charm and wit to front the show, but who also had chemistry with each other. In the end, they chose Brian Dunkleman, an L.A. comic actor who was on the brink of breaking out, having a strong run of guest slots on network sitcoms. An understated, sardonic presence, Dunkleman seemed a natural counterweight to a more frenetic host. For that role, producers settled on an ambitious twenty-seven-year-old, then famed as a local radio DJ in Los Angeles and the host of such shows as Radical Outdoor Challenge and Gladiators 2000, Ryan Seacrest.

  The negotiation with Seacrest, however, came down to the wire, with Ryan’s father, acting as his representative, haggling over terms and threatening to pull him out. This went on until they were just hours away from shooting, until finally, at the last moment, Seacrest signed on the dotted line.

  The new hosting team was sent to a get-acquainted breakfast at Nate ’n Al’s deli to try and find their chemistry. From London, Simon Cowell flew in and met his fellow panelists. Symbolizing perhaps the cultural divide, as he flew over to begin shooting, Nigel Lythgoe arrived shortly thereafter, after being arrested on the plane for sneaking into the restroom to smoke.

  Five years after Simon Fuller had first dreamed of his interactive talent search empire, it was curtain time for American Idol.

  Chapter 6

  SHOWTIME

  What if they gave a talent competition and nobody came? That was the Idol team’s fear as they prepped the first audition tour. “We were freaking out,” Beckman remembers, “because we didn’t know if anybody would show up for the auditions. I remember when it was in Los Angeles I actually brought home flyers and gave them to my daughter. I think she was starting high school that year. I said, ‘Will you please pass these around the school?’ Literally, we had no idea.”

  Meanwhile, across the plains, twenty-year-old Cumming, Georgia, native RJ Helton believed he had just walked away from his singing career after having spent nine months in Nashville trying to break in with a Christian boy band. “We were all poor, working at Applebee’s and living in a small apartment, the five of us. It just wasn’t working out and I had moved back home to Atlanta with my family,” he recalls. “That’s where I saw the auditions for Idol. They were advertising it on TV and the advertisement said, ‘Do you want to be the next big superstar?’ I definitely had some apprehensions just because all of the other music reality shows had kind of failed. They weren’t very successful and people took them as a joke but I figured, ‘What the hell. I have nothing better going on. . . .’ ”

  In Philadelphia, twenty-three-year-old Justin Guarini was singing with a party band at weddings and bar
mitzvahs while commuting to New York for Broadway auditions. “My mother was upstairs and she saw this advertisement on TV. . . . She said, ‘Check this out. Go to this Web site.’ I go to the Web site and it’s just this basic Web site. Many of the links didn’t work because they had just literally thrown this thing up. I went there and I checked it out. They had a contract that you were supposed to print out and I looked over it. It was standard fare for any sort of basic production and you more or less are signing your life away, as you would with any other production. I printed it out and I saw that they were having the audition on whatever date it was at the Millennium Hotel in New York City.” Guarini was accustomed to showing up to open calls. American Idol was just one more.

  For Nikki McKibbin, in Grand Prairie, Texas, Idol was not her first encounter either with reality television or singing competitions. The straight-shootin’, orange-haired, pierced-tongue barroom rocker had won a slot on the U.S. version of Pop Stars, making it a few weeks into the competition. Once the show ended, however, she had returned home to her suburban community outside of Fort Worth, where she parlayed brief notoriety and a little money into the seeds for a karaoke company, hosting evenings at local bars. When she saw the ad for Idol, she decided to give it a try. “I got up the next morning and went to my friend Eric’s house and was like, ‘Hey, let’s go audition for this show.’ ”

  The turnout was extremely hit-and-miss. An extra stop in Miami was hastily added at the last minute to try and bring out a few more contenders. All told, just over ten thousand people showed up for the seven-city tour—about fifteen hundred per stop. It was nothing like the vast armies that would turn up in seasons to come, but enough to avoid embarrassment—enough to get the show on the air.

  For the Idol team, that first tour is still remembered with a bit of a halo hanging over it, a time of pure goodwill and fun, a road trip with little sense of how it would change the lives of those aboard for the ride.

  Brian Dunkleman remembers, a decade later, “One of my fondest memories is that in Miami we all went out to a club one night and we’re all dancing and Paula and I, I don’t know how we ended up there, but we ended up squaring off, having a dance off and I just had to take a second and think, You’re in a fucking dance off with Paula Abdul. How insane is that?”

  For those auditioning, the thrill that still stands out a decade later was singing before Paula Abdul herself, the one true star in the room.

  “I just remember being really nervous, very, very nervous,” RJ Helton recalls of his Atlanta tryout. “I think the first audition for me was just in front of a producer and then they sent me on to the second round. I guess there were about four rounds that we went through before we even saw the judges. I think there were two auditions that day and then I went back, I guess two weeks later, to audition a few more times and right before we saw the judges. So I think there was two times again and then I went and saw the judges. I had no clue who Simon was. I had no clue who Randy was. . . . I remember that I sang straight to Paula.”

  At the end of his audition, Helton was told he was “going to Hollywood.” He still didn’t know what lay ahead or what this show was, but those words were enough. “It was a pretty exciting thing, especially when you got in front of the judges and they said that you were going to Hollywood. That was a big deal and especially for a lot of the Georgia folks because we’re all kind of Southern, country-type of people.”

  On television, the contestants are seen jumping straight from the enormous lines to standing before the judges. In truth, the appearance before the judges comes only after several other levels of screening take place. After lining up, the contestants first must survive a mass culling where they stand three at a time before tables of screeners. The vast majority of contestants are dispatched instantly. Those who survive that round are called back for one or two more appearances before the show’s producers. It’s those survivors who are allowed to step before the judges. In the seasons to come, this process would be organized into a gigantic machine, but for this first season it was a relatively informal affair.

  As the competitors advanced past the first rounds, the culling process became not just about looking for the best (or the worst), but also seeking out a range of stories to showcase. That first year featured both the high temper of Tamika, “pronounced ta-ME-ka,” as she repeatedly reminded the judges, and the tale of Jim Verraros, who learned to sing for his two deaf parents, signing the songs for them. The former blazed the trail for a long line of alternately talented hopefuls right down to “General” Larry Platt, season 9’s breakout author of “Pants on the Ground.” Verraros, for his part, was the first in a long line of heartbreaking tales that would parade past the audition table, turning each year’s opening weeks into a compilation of real-life tearjerkers worthy of a dozen Lifetime network specials.

  The auditions were also America’s first introduction to Mr. Nasty. Brian Dunkleman admits to being having been extremely freaked out by the experience. “It’s one thing to watch it on television, but then you spend time with these kids and you have to look at them right in the eyes and then their mother is looking at you, like, ‘What just happened?’ That was kind of the first day. It was just off. ‘You’re telling me that I suck? That I should never sing again?’ ”

  Justin Guarini recalled waiting for his audition outside the judges’ room. “It was soundproof. You couldn’t hear anything. We’re waiting and all of a sudden the doors grind open. The camera crew rushes to meet this person who’s just coming out and it was this girl and she was bawling. She was bawling her eyes out. She was so upset. It was shocking for us because we think we’re going in to see the judges and here this girl is bawling. I felt like I was about to go in and face a firing squad or something.”

  In the diplomatic or, as our British guests would describe it, “politically correct” culture of American television, such raw honesty bordered on vicious. The United Kingdom had an entire culture of freewheeling sharp-elbowed tabloid speak. But America had nothing like that and it came as a big surprise. America had its political screamers heard on talk radio, and shock jocks like Howard Stern, but by and large they were relegated to margins of the culture, written off as cranks and clowns.

  “When Simon first spoke,” stage manager Debbie Williams remembers of her first day on the set, “suddenly it was terra firma. I still didn’t know what the hook of this show was, all these kids come out and sing, until he spoke, and then I said, ‘Okay. I get it now. That’s the hook.’ ”

  Cowell’s value was instantly clear. And as Fox prepared for launch, it became the centerpiece. “When we were getting ready to promote it on the air,” Darnell remembers, “there was a lot of debate about whether Simon should be the focus . . . literally someone was arguing with me that little girls are going to be in the audience for the show and they’re going to be scared of him. I’m like, ‘You guys are crazy . . . the only thing that’s separating this show, at the moment, from Pop Stars and Making the Band is Simon and the sort of entertainment value he brings.’ So I fought for it really hard and won. That ended up being the thing that did get people. But there was some outrage at first. I think at first even Simon was a little nervous that maybe the American public wouldn’t accept him in that persona.”

  “The footage we gave the press,” recalls Preston Beckman, “was predominantly Cowell eviscerating people. At that point, nobody knew who Simon Cowell was. And he was making them cry and making them miserable. So it was kind of like nasty . . . the way we were selling it.”

  But it occurred to some that there was another story here, perhaps not as instantly sensational but no less potent.

  Beckman continues, “Then at some point, Mike must have given me a copy of the auditions. I went home and I showed it to my wife and my son and my daughter and we loved it. It was very emotional. I called up Sandy [Grushow] and I said, ‘There’s kids here who you want to root for. I honestly don’t think we’re selling it right. We’re selling it as a Fox
show. We just sell nasty, edgy.’ So Sandy looked at it and we kind of changed the promos a bit to make them a bit more aspirational, a bit more female friendly.”

  In the end, it was the combination of these seemingly polar opposites that created Idol’s appeal: the dream of coming to Hollywood from middle America and facing the ogre that awaited. For tens of millions, American Idol would create our national hero’s journey, overcoming the most fearsome of terrors—the fear of being mocked before the eyes of a nation—in the hopes of realizing that most precious goal: fame. Ironically, it took a flock of Brits to make this come true. “We brought coals back to Newcastle. We brought the American dream back to America,” says Lythgoe.

  It didn’t seem to matter what Fox was selling. The media wasn’t buying. Despite Simon, Paula, Randy, Mike Darnell, Nigel Lythgoe, and half the Fox executive suite sitting for interviews, only a handful of newspapers and magazines covered the show’s launch, and those with the most perfunctory of articles. The pre-debut press played up the Star Search comparison and quoted some of Simon’s choice barbs from the advance clips tape. “Televised talent contests have been around nearly as long as the medium itself,” wrote the Indianapolis Star, “dating from the January 18, 1948, broadcast of Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour and continuing from the long-running Star Search into the 2002– 03 season with the Fox show 30 Seconds to Fame. For a couple of recent seasons, too, we had Pop Stars, a show that auditioned young singers and assembled them into groups, and Making the Band, which took viewers through the creation of the boy band O-Town. So Fox’s summertime series American Idol: The Search for a Superstar is nothing new.”