American Idol

by Richard Rushfield

  (SEASON 2, 2003) Two years after being disqualified from the show, Corey Clark’s allegations of a romantic relationship with Paula would cause her lowest moment. (JUSTIN KAHN)

  (SEASON 3, 2004) In the bubble. While on the show, Idol stars are kept so busy they rarely get more than a fleeting glance at the hysteria outside the show. A rare moment of quiet during season 3 for Jennifer Hudson, John Stevens, and Diana DeGarmo. (DAVID STRICK)

  (SEASON 3, 2004) Part of the Idol experience for the contestants is a boot camp on stardom. LaToya London receives vocal instruction from singing coach Debra Byrd. (DAVID STRICK)

  (SEASON 4, 2005) Simon Cowell was dumbstruck by the first appearance of Idol’s Golden Girl, Carrie Underwood. Her fellow contestants, however, often found her remote and aloof. (KEVIN WINTER)

  (SEASON 5, 2006) “I really was there looking for fans. Not friends.” Taylor Hicks was Idol’s most unlikely champion, but his down-home demeanor masked a razor-sharp sense of how to succeed in modern reality, and a ruthlessness that rubbed many the wrong way. (VINCE BUCCI)

  (SEASON 5, 2006) Chris Daughtry brought a contemporary rock sound onto the Idol stage and changed the face of the competition forever. (VINCE BUCCI)

  (SEASON 6, 2007) With his ponyhawk aloft, Sanjaya Malakar became American Idol’s greatest anti-hero. (FRANK MICELOTTA/AMERICAN IDOL)

  Chapter 7

  ONCE UPON A TIME

  Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you. Newspaper stories don’t begin this way. But Kelly Clarkson’s made-for-TV trip toward a glass slipper so far is a feel-good fable in the making,” the Dallas Morning News summed it up. The girl next door, the waitress turned superstar, the diamond in the rough finally breaking through and winning over the mean goblin to become the greatest star of them all—this version of the Kelly Clarkson story has been so often repeated that it’s hard to recall that she was never meant to win.

  Kelly Clarkson’s journey invented the mythos that has guided the stories of almost every Idol champion from the Velvet Teddy Bear (Ruben Studdard) to abuse survivor Fantasia to paint salesman Lee DeWyze. In fact, Kelly Clarkson shaped the image of American Idol as much as Idol shaped her. And if the story about how it all went down wasn’t exactly true, well, it was close enough. Kelly Clarkson’s voice, her exuberance, her story, gave America something to believe in during those post-9/11 days.

  Clarkson was the quintessential Texas tomboy, youngest of three, growing up in the Fort Worth suburb of Burleson. Young Kelly found her voice singing in high school musicals, where she won starring roles in Brigadoon and Annie Get Your Gun. Whether consciously or unconsciously, playing Annie Oakley seems to have rubbed off on her. By the time she auditioned for Idol, the down-home, “anything you can do I can do better,” rootin’-tootin’ spirit of the Old West legend inhabited the small-town girl with the infectious spirit that could bring a smile even to the face of Simon Cowell.

  The official legend told during her Idol rise had it that Clarkson came out to Hollywood straight from high school, but after having door after door slammed in her face, a fire burned down her apartment, leaving her homeless and on the streets. Alone and shut out of show business, the country girl decided to pack it all in and go home. She crawled back to the bosom of Burleson, and was just beginning to take stock when she heard about the local auditions for this new show called American Idol.

  The tale is true in spirit even if many of its particulars have been fudged . . . just a little. Kelly’s Hollywood roommate would later recant a piece of it, claiming the fire was elsewhere in the building, that Kelly was not homeless, and that her return to Texas was unconnected with the fire. It would also come out that, far from having doors slammed in her face, Kelly had made some impressive headway in Hollywood, recording demos and working toward an album with respected producers.

  A few laps around the Hollywood track though she might have had, when Kelly Clarkson stepped into the Idol auditions, the expectations for her couldn’t have been lower. While the more polished, professional, poised duo of Justin and Tamyra were lapping up the attention, little Kelly from Texas didn’t even make it on-screen. The only shots the audience sees of her during Hollywood Week are of her standing in groups, her voice unheard.

  “We just did not see her coming,” Debbie Williams recalls. “I mean, Justin was so fabulous he knew where every camera was. When Bruce [Gowers] would cut to a camera, this kid was looking at it. It was like, what does he have? Sonar in his head. So we thought he had it locked up, and we didn’t notice Kelly because Kelly, think about it, was a very unassuming little thing.”

  When Kelly sang to America in the semifinal rounds, she stepped out with no fanfare and zero expectations from either the Idol team or the television audience. The semifinals’ little stage that was the way station between Hollywood Week and the top twelve big stage was, at that point, a tiny postage stamp with no live audience. It was a setting that mimicked the hostile environment of a music industry audition. There was no applause or theme music to welcome them, no band. The other contestants and their families were banished to the Coca-Cola–themed Red Room off to the side. The contestants walked out to a cold, quiet room, said an uncomfortable “Hi” to the judges, and broke into song to the accompaniment of a lone piano. The early episodes were pretaped rather than live so the contestants felt a little bit of comfort knowing that if disaster struck, in theory there was a net. They had had a bit of guidance beforehand, with voice coach Debra Byrd coming on board right before the semifinal episodes as the sole coach for thirty contestants, giving them some basic exercises and trying to remedy a problem that had been running riot with the contestants during Hollywood Week—forgetting the lyrics.

  The semifinals marked the first time America met Kelly. The 5'3" singer stepped onto the stage clad in a black shoulderless Liza suit and her soon-to-be-trademark pigtails teased out, and busted out a showstopping powerful rendition of “Respect.” The judges, expecting nothing, struggled for words. “I don’t know what to say,” babbled Simon. “You have a good voice but I honestly couldn’t remember you from the previous rounds.”

  Cowell recalls of the night, “Genuinely, I had no idea. I didn’t remember that first audition. Looking back on it you could tell that all of us had gotten to that point in the day we were bored. She did enough to get through but nobody commented on her. There was no buzz on her. It was the first live show when she really made her mark. The first live show I turned around to Paula and said, ‘Where did this come from? This girl is incredible.’ And that’s when it all changed.”

  As the semifinals began, Cowell’s verbal assaults ratcheted up to a new level. Those viewers who had invested in the dream narrative of the show’s first few weeks now saw their favorites stand before the judges on that cold, empty stage. If the audience expected Cowell to offer the singers a pat on the back for having come so far, they were about to receive the shock of a lifetime.

  In many ways, Cowell’s put-downs came as straight talk to a frivolous national culture that was itself ready for a reality check. “We were moving into the age of the celebrity,” Lythgoe says of the context for Cowell’s lash. “The 1960s going into the 1970s showed that ordinary people could become stars like the Beatles. You got to understand their foibles. You got to know where they came from, the mistakes that they made. ‘If that lad from round the corner in Liverpool can be a star so can you, my son.’ That came through. The star system of Hollywood was breaking down. We were starting to create celebrities and not stars. Consequently, that led into ‘I don’t have to have talent.’

  “We also had technological inventions that harmonized your voice . . . you didn’t have to be a great singer. Everyone thought that you just go in, sing into a microphone, and you could be pitch perfect. And as this whole thing grew, as reality shows grew, so did this feeling of young people, that they were owed something and that they could achieve it through television, through technology. ‘I’m willing to work hard.’ ‘Well, yes. Good. But yo
u need a modicum of talent and you haven’t got it,’ was sort of my reply. There was a real sense of ‘the world owes me.’ ”

  To that indulged and indulgent culture, Simon Cowell would be the first to say, “No.”

  That first semifinals episode began on a high note. Tamyra Gray rocketed to the front of the pack with her rendition of “You’re Gonna Love Me.” On the next number, nineteen-year-old Jim Verraros, the son of two deaf parents and the subject of perhaps the most heartwarming of the heartwarming audition clips, took the stage. Still high from Tamyra’s performance, the other contestants and their families gave enthusiastic whoops for the sentimental favorite. So it fell like a ton of bricks when Cowell weighed in: “I don’t think it was good enough because you have just followed a star. I thought you looked ordinary up there and I think if you win this competition, we will have failed.”

  The tiny stage was filled with gasps; shots flashed of the other contestants, their reactions ranging from disbelief to outrage. Verraros walked back to the Red Room and was greeted by stunned silence, his comrades looking like they had just realized that the kindly old man who had invited them into his castle was in fact an ogre who planned to eat them for dinner.

  As the night wore on and more and more fell to Cowell’s sword, the shock turned to outrage, with screams of “NO!” and shrieks of disgust coming from the Red Room.

  The wounds were still raw the following night when seven of the ten were due to be eliminated on the first results show. Given the chance to put questions to the judges, seventeen-year-old contestant Natalie Burge asked Cowell directly, “Do you feel bad? Did you sleep last night?”

  There were indications, however, that the public, at this early date, was not quite ready to fall in line behind its new cultural arbiter. As the results were announced, Cowell’s first victim, the grievously wounded Verraros, advanced to the finals, earning a seat on the big stage along with Tamyra Gray and the midriff-baring Ryan Starr.

  But this was not, in fact, the night’s original verdict. When the Idol team shot that first results episode, doubts still lingered about turning the wheels of this thing entirely over to the audience. Execs decided that to goose the tension, a twist was needed. So at the end of the episode, after the results had been revealed, the show had thrown in a judges’ cut, allowing the jurists to send one more person packing. That one more person? Audience favorite Jim Verraros. After the show ended, Cowell walked up to the Red Room, where those who had made it through sat celebrating their victories, and abruptly told Verraros that audience verdict be damned, he was cut anyway. A stunned Verraros and his fellow contestants burst into tears.

  Cowell, however, was very happy. “I loved it,” he said. “Soon as he [Darnell] came in and said the word ‘twist’ I thought, ‘You and I are going to get on great because you’re breaking the rules here.’ Because I hate rules, I absolutely despise them. And that’s what I loved about Mike, that he could feel that things were getting a little too safe and boring and he dropped a bomb on everything.”

  With that feel-bad ending waiting to be aired, however, Lythgoe had second thoughts. He called Frot-Coutaz and told her he thought this was taking the power out of the hands of the people, that it was contrary to the show’s whole premise. Frot-Coutaz agreed and brought all parties on board. The episode was recut and the news was broken to Verraros that he was suddenly uneliminated.

  Elsewhere, the episode struggled with half an hour to fill and not much to fill it with. The unveiling of the results, which in later years would become Lythgoe’s artfully choreographed masterpiece, was a bit of a three-footed square dance, with the news given out almost offhandedly. Seacrest wasn’t yet skilled at the pregnant pauses that would become his signature, and the half hour was fluffed out with outtakes, awkward banter between Seacrest and Dunkleman, and perhaps the strangest Ford ad they would ever record, featuring the contestants driving around Los Angeles while talking aloud to themselves about their dreams.

  Whatever the production values, the media swarmed to take notice. “Fox’s Reality Show Search for a Superstar Is the Talk of the Summer Season,” declared the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “America’s Newest Guilty Pleasure” was the headline on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The Today Show and Good Morning America both ran segments about a show on a competitor network. On GMA, Cowell defended his barbs, saying of his trashing of one overweight contestant, “It was brutal but . . . I don’t make the rules up. The record-buying audience tends to make the rules up. And I don’t think if Aretha Franklin, looking as she looks now, if she walked into this competition, would have got through, no, because I don’t think she would have been voted through by the people who were going to vote for the winner.”

  The following week marked the debut of Kelly Clarkson, who, despite her surprising version of “Respect,” remained in the shadow of Justin Guarini riding high from his much-lauded version of Stevie Wonder’s “Ribbon in the Sky.” Guarini recalls the following night’s results show, when he, Kelly, and a young singer named AJ Gil—who had also been trashed by Cowell—made it through. “I’ll never forget the three of us being backstage after the show was done. That’s when it truly hit me. I was like, ‘I’m in the top ten. All the pressure, all the stress, everything that had built up and led me to that point all came out. I was just hugging people, so thankful. It’s funny because I’m not usually one for that kind of emotional outburst. AJ and I were bawling it up and Kelly, who is an emotional person, as well in that moment was just like, ‘Okay. This is cool.’ She’d had some experience in the industry before. She was like, ‘I’m not going to count my chickens.’ ”

  The ratings held up.

  The Hollywood Reporter noted, “Idol helped Fox become the only major network to post a year-to-year hike in the demo last week, with a glamorous 18 percent increase,” while Variety pointed out, “It’s the first time since August 1990 that Fox series have held down a week’s top two spots in adults 18 – 49.” Still, while the reviewers continued to sneer (“Think of American Idol as Star Search goes to hell,” wrote Time), an emerging class of Idol pundits noticed another trend. “Are voters defying Simon’s will?” the Chicago Sun-Times wondered. “Superstar fans seem set on softening the blow for the most abused of these competitors. Twice in two weeks now, they have advanced sensitive, slightly nerdy, nice-guy teenage men to the next level of the contest after Cowell has roughed them up.”

  As the public dove ever more deeply into Cowell-watching, feelings on the set remained unsettled, with Paula struggling to maintain her composure next to the toxic import. But nobody could have guessed that when the eruption finally came, it would not be Paula who bubbled over but the affable anchor at the other end of the table, Randy Jackson.

  On week three of the semifinals, after RJ Helton led off the night with a rendition of the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There,” Cowell lit into him with a more annoyed than usual slam, throwing a temper tantrum at the performance. He ranted, “In the last two weeks, two losers went through because of sympathy votes. I’m fed up with it because I don’t believe that’s good enough.” From the end of the table, Jackson, who had praised Helton’s performance, argued back.

  Jackson: You know what I disagree with: Week after week you’ve been insulting people. You can’t call people losers.

  Cowell: I can call people whatever I like.

  Jackson: I have a problem. We need to talk about this later. This is America. You don’t do that to people. You don’t insult them like that.

  Cowell: Can we discuss this later?

  Jackson: But you don’t have to call them losers.

  Abdul: America is about celebrating effort.

  Cowell: Can we drop it, Paula! I’m here to give an opinion.

  Onstage, Helton shifted nervously, fighting back tears as the argument raged past the bounds of vigorous debate into territory that had become very personal. The spat was capped off when Jackson rose to his feet and extended his arms to call out Cowell, demanding, �
�You want to take this outside! Come on!”

  It made for fantastic television and Idol would of course make the most of it. But the truth behind the fight was not exactly what the viewers saw. Helton himself explains: “What Simon’s comment was originally—we had to retape because of what he said. He called me a monkey. I guess that some people thought that could’ve been a racist type of comment. So they went back and retaped it and he called me a loser instead. It ended up that it wasn’t about me so much as it was about the two of them and whatever their beef was with each other. It was just uncomfortable. I didn’t know what was going on and I just stood there making very odd facial expressions.”

  The original fight had been very real, sparked as Helton said by Cowell’s use of the m word. Even though Helton himself is white, the racially charged term pushed an already annoyed Jackson over the edge, sparking the altercation. Once they cooled down, however, and the misunderstanding over the term—a benign pejorative in the United Kingdom, where it has none of the racial overtones—was explained, the producers were left with a quandary. The fight had been great drama and to let a dramatic moment like that go to waste would have torn the heart right out of the chest of a showman like Nigel Lythgoe. However, as suggested by Jackson’s reaction, the use of the word monkey was unthinkable. There were taboos you could break and taboos you couldn’t, and using a racially loaded term fell into the latter category. It was an overreach that could have turned Cowell from a lovable villain to a national disgrace, never able to show his face on American airwaves again.

  So they regrouped. They filmed the scene again, restaging the fight with loser subbed for monkey and taking the best shots from the two takes. Indeed, at one moment in the tape you can almost make out the word monkey even though loser was dubbed in over the original tape. The overlay doesn’t quite fit.