The attention, however, brought Idol a new problem: hordes and hordes of people wanting to get on the show. People were camping out overnight for the tryouts. There were the good, the bad, and the just plain crazy, which included a subset of people in clown suits and Uncle Sam costumes. To the shock of all involved, the auditions for American Idol had become regional carnivals for dreamers of every sort.
Thousands of people showed up at each location, the lines stretching off into the far distance: Miami, 6,000. Atlanta, 6,500. Fewer than ten thousand people had turned out to audition for the entire first season. By the time the season 2 tour was over, seventy thousand hopefuls had passed in review.
The avalanche had caught the Idol crew unprepared. There had never been anything like it in the history of television. Frot-Coutaz recalls, “I remember Cowell saying to me before we went on the road for the second season, ‘Cecile, you know you’re going to have a lot of people who are going to show up. Are you prepared for it?’ I remember thinking, ‘Of course we’re prepared for it.’ We sort of knew. But then we didn’t expect it to the degree that it actually happened, and we weren’t prepared for it. He was right.”
The advance teams at the stadiums scrambled to find Porta-Potties, water supplies, and enough support workers to manage the swollen crowds, which came close to rioting at several stops. The crew was also surprised to find that not only the number but the type of people who showed up had completely changed. In that first season, whatever mythology might have developed, the people who turned out were largely those who had some sort of professional music experience and who were accustomed to going on auditions—people like Guarini, Clarkson, McKibbin, and Helton. This year, as if the myth suddenly became self-fulfilling, everyone who had been the star of their church choir or high school musical showed up to try their luck at the Idol dream. “We were getting good amateurs rather than bad professionals” is how Cowell described the change in his memoir.
In Nashville, Belmont University senior Kimberley Locke had just finished up her law school applications when she heard about the auditions. Locke was the quintessential candidate for the Idol dream. Throughout high school and college, she had become something of a local star, singing with a church choir, a girls’ a cappella group, and a jazz combo comprised of some local music professors. Yet, despite constantly feeling drawn to music, Locke couldn’t see how she might turn this local acclaim into a sustainable life. So she set herself on a career in the law, spending her senior year preparing for the LSATs and filling out applications.
She had watched a couple of Idol’s first-season episodes but hadn’t given it much thought. Then, in October, “A friend of mine who had moved off and gone to college in another town calls me and says, ‘I heard that American Idol is coming to Nashville. Have you seen it?’ I said yeah, that I’d seen it. ‘They’re coming to Nashville and if I have to go with you to make you audition, then you’re going to audition.’ I thought, Whatever.” The notion stayed with her, however, and after the urging of her boss at her day job—“What do you have to lose?” he asked her—she made her way down to Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium.
Locke recalls, “I woke about five thirty, six o’clock, laying in bed. It was like a movie, staring at the ceiling, and I remember having this long dialogue in my head with God. ‘Do I go? Am I going to go? What are you going to do?’ I was really procrastinating in getting out of bed to do this. Finally I said, ‘Okay, you’re going to go.’ I had seen it on the news the night before, kids were camped out. I thought, Who does that? I said, ‘I’m not camping out.’ That was my whole thing. I said, ‘I’m not camping out. God, if you want me to go, I’m not camping out.’ ”
With not enough judges on hand, the production was forced to cut off the line. Locke was one of the last ten people given a number to audition. “I was there all day, only to have them tell me to come back the next day. I didn’t even get to sing that day. I missed three or four days of work doing this whole audition process.
“Maybe it’s because it was the second season and there were so many people that they were just winging it, I don’t know, but it was a long time. By the time that we got ready to go they had broken us down into groups of maybe eight or ten. We all filed into this tiny little room together standing boom, boom, boom. They didn’t even call us by name. They were like, ‘Number so and so, sing. Sing. Sing.’ Then at the end they literally said, ‘Everybody leave except for—’ whatever number. In my group, I was the only one that got to stay.”
Locke was advanced to another room, where she remembers Lythgoe watching her audition and giving the nod that she should be permitted to advance. Finally, on the fourth day, she stood before Randy, Paula, and Simon. “I was the last one to audition. I remember walking in and I was so nervous I thought I was going to pass out and that’s all I could think about. ‘Just keep it together. If you’re going to pass out, pass out after your audition.’ ”
She received the now famed ticket to Hollywood. Unfortunately, the date she was due to begin was also the first day of law school. After gently inquiring if it was possible to miss a week and being told there was no possibility of a deferral, she’d have to apply all over again, Kimberly faced a major choice. “I wore my poor mother out. I was calling her every day, every hour. I was at her house every day on the couch. I was crying.” Finally, she packed her bags for Hollywood.
The audition tour was followed by, in contrast to the previous season’s below-the-radar launch, a full-court press build-up to rival TV’s Golden Age. Magazine covers offered American Idol beauty tips, “How to Look Like an Idol,” and ran “Where Are They Now?” features on the season 1 cast. Twist magazine featured love advice for girls from Justin Guarini. The Advocate’s cover story talked with Jim Verraros about coming out as gay. A fifty-year-old sued Idol for age discrimination and the entire media covered the case.
In a joint interview alongside Randy Jackson for national TV writers, Cowell played up the tension between himself and Abdul.
Question: Simon, how do you get along with Paula these days?
Cowell: Well, you have your good days and your bad days, don’t you? I mean, we’re not having dinner tonight.
Question: How many good days vs. bad days?
Cowell: Well, there weren’t any good days.
Jackson: Ah, come on, Simon, come on.
Cowell: I’m not going to lie. We don’t get on particularly well. But you have to take it a day at a time. You do your job, which is to judge talent. And if she irritates me, which she probably will, I’ll tell her to shut up.
Looking back on the first season, Cowell also regretted going too easy on the contestants. He promised no such free passes this time around. “One of the things I may have said is that I would have told Nikki McKibbin to go back to the strip club. You should say what’s in your mind, and as I watched her, I thought, You are a better stripper than you are a singer. I know that sounds rude, but that’s what I felt.” Such was the state of Cowell’s still-rising star that every word was lapped up as truth-telling, the antidote to all that had been squishy and dishonest in our culture.
When the auditions were done and another Hollywood Week had been shot, the team knuckled down to edit the episodes for air—a tricky process that would forever plague the show. The early episodes, with their video packages showcasing sob stories and hometown origins, are the best chance the producers have to introduce that year’s contestants to the public. During these weeks, the producers make their best bets of who is going to go the distance and highlight their stories with footage shot at their homes, establishing the rags part of the rags-to-riches narrative to come, and letting the viewers develop attachments to individual singers. However, as Kelly Clarkson demonstrated, the underdog phenomenon had a perverse side effect in that the serious contenders would come out of nowhere, emerge even under the producers’ radar: Every year, the Idol team attempts to cut these episodes together as late in the season as possible, preferably after Hol
lywood Week has been filmed, in order to have the best sense of who is in it to stay, but every year some are missed.
As they prepped for season 2, the crew had been working more or less nonstop since the previous spring, and they began to feel the strain. Nigel Lythgoe in particular was about to fall victim to his obsessive attention. As he describes it, one day while overseeing the cutting of the audition episodes, “I had a heart attack during the editing of Clay Aiken.” Literally, that is.
“I’m lying there on the couch, going, ‘I do feel terrible. I’ll have a little lie down.’ I lay down and then was looking up at the tapes, yelling, ‘No! Don’t do it like that.’ Bill, the editor, said that I kept popping up now and again, going, ‘No! That’s terrible. Change that.’ Two days, and on the third day my wife said, ‘You’ve got to go see a doctor.’ He told me, ‘You’re having a heart attack.’ ”
He agreed to stay in bed for all of eight days. “I took a week off and didn’t miss any of the shows.”
Season 2 debuted on January 21, 2003, with an episode featuring the auditions in New York, Austin, and Miami. “I remember none of us slept that night,” says Beckman. At 5:00 A.M., when the first numbers came in, Beckman, Darnell, and Berman were in the office, poised and waiting to learn their fate.
The ratings were beyond their wildest dreams.
Twenty-six million viewers tuned in for Idol’s first night, making it the highest-rated night of programming in the Fox network’s history.
“I think we were stunned,” Beckman said. “This was a game changer. I think a lot of people would be surprised about how low key we have been about the ratings of this show. With big ratings come big responsibility so we never spent a lot of time celebrating the success of Idol.”
Sandy Grushow assembled the Fox staff that day for a champagne toast. Variety quoted him, “After all the hand-wringing in the press about reality TV, the simple fact is that when an aspirational show like American Idol can galvanize an audience of this size, it’s good for broadcast television.”
In season 2, a new word entered the Idol lexicon: disqualification. When the contestants enter the Hollywood Week bubble, they are put through a battery of questionnaires and examinations to learn what might be lurking in their past, hopefully to find and defuse any bombs that could detonate during the season. Kimberley Locke: “I remember getting a questionnaire of five hundred questions to answer. ‘Have you ever told a lie?’ Basic stuff, and you’re like, ‘Well, yeah, I’ve told a lie. What kind of lie? Is there a severity, like a white lie?’ All these questions, and it was pretty scary. It was very intense for a minute because they wanted to make sure.”
The show then conducts basic background checks. The problem, however, is, as it is impossible to search through the pasts of all seventy thousand who line up at the stadiums, the show is forced to wait until the field is winnowed down. But even researching the past of the fifty or so who emerge from Hollywood Week is a major undertaking, with just a few weeks to do it. Every year, every manner of nefarious past or questionable moment is unearthed in these checks. The episode that follows Hollywood Week, the “chair episode,” or green mile as it’s known, where one by one the contestants sit before the judges and learn their fates, is in fact most years filmed weeks after Hollywood Week has ended, time enough for preliminary checks to have been completed. In those episodes, the audience sees the judges studying Polaroid snapshots of the contestants and debating their choices. What the audience does not see, however, is the show receiving the results of the checks. When the singers take their seats before the judges and are told that they will not be advancing, little explanation is offered. But each year a few contestants have in fact been dismissed due to something that has turned up on the check.
As much as is discovered, however, it seems each season there is a salacious tidbit or two that slips by, particularly in the early seasons and particularly in season 2. Says Frot-Coutaz, “Generally speaking, as the years went by, we became more and more protective in terms of the brand. In the beginning we were doing just very minimal background checks . . . just what you would expect on a standard reality show. Then over the years, they became a lot more extensive.”
She describes the discussions about what emerges from these checks: “I find it personally very, very challenging because you want to protect your brand. But by the same token, you want to be able to give kids a chance to turn their life around.”
The first public disqualification in Idol history was a singer from Youngstown, Ohio, named Jaered Andrews. After Andrews had advanced from Hollywood Week to the semifinals, the show quietly announced it was dismissing him, saying it had learned he was under contract with a boy band back home. After he left the show, it was revealed that he was in fact under indictment regarding his involvement in a bar fight in which a man had died “as a result of blunt force trauma to the head,” the police complaint read. Andrews would eventually be tried and acquitted.
The arrest, as it turned out, was revealed on The Smoking Gun Web site, which would come to play an ongoing role in Idol history, the very beginning of the Internet’s colonization of the Idol story.
Another unearthed tidbit would fall just on the safe side of the line a couple of weeks later, when The Smoking Gun revealed that singer Trenyce also had been arrested for theft, but the record had been expunged for good behavior. In this case, the show ruled that her past did not endanger the show and she was allowed to continue.
While the loss of Andrews was hardly felt, the next disqualification was a bigger hit. From her first appearance, Frenchie Davis had been marked as one of the season’s front-runners. A large, boisterous African American woman with closely cropped hair and an exuberant manner, Frenchie’s personality and powerhouse vocals had immediately been the buzz of the set. However, something came up in her background check that was hard to brush aside. As Nikki McKibbin showed, a bit of stripping could be excused. Even a dip into the X-rated realm could be forgiven. But Frenchie had not only posed for an adult Web site, but an adult Web site of a very specific nature.
Frenchie Davis, it turned out, had been filmed performing a sexual act with a beverage container for a site called Daddy’s Little Girl. For a family show, this, it was feared, was more than the brand could withstand. After some agonized deliberation, with many arguing that she deserved a chance to turn her life around, Fox decided this was a step over the line that they were not ready to take and informed Frenchie that she was being disqualified from the competition.
Predictably, the media went bonkers. The salacious tale ran in every publication, with national Save Frenchie groups springing up online and sending petitions to the show. In the end, the exposure and notoriety did not get Frenchie reinstated, but it won her a ticket to Broadway, where she was offered a part in the cast of Rent shortly after her dismissal. For Idol, once again, a controversy kept the show on the front page.
While the Cowell barbs were no longer the complete shock they had been, their sting had not been reduced. Somehow the semifinals stage was the scene for some of the harshest moments between the judge and the contestants. In the tiny room, with no mediating audiences between them, contestants seemed to well over. On the second night of the season 2 semifinals Kimberley Locke took the stage. At the conclusion of her rendition of “Over the Rainbow,” Cowell told the performer, whose fashion sense still projected the somewhat nerdy look of a law-student-to-be, that while he enjoyed her singing, on personality he gave her a four.
Looking as though she had been slapped in the face with a battering ram, Locke spat back, “Well, I’d give you a zero.”
A broad grin swept over Cowell’s face. Enjoying the fight, he answered back that he’d raise her to a 5 ½.
At that moment, Kimberley seemed to lose it. She charged over to the judge’s desk, leaned across, and shouted in his face, “I was going to tell you you’re sexy but YOU SUCK!”
Locke recalls, “That night my phone was blowing up. All the women in my chu
rch were calling me, saying, ‘You should not have said that. Why did you say that? Don’t be disrespectful.’ But I think that particular night Simon pushed my buttons on purpose. I had been really reserved up to that point. They didn’t really have a good idea about what my personality was or even if I had it in me. . . . That night I was afraid that my comments were going to backlash on me because the viewing audience is looking at your personality as well. They fall in love with the personality just as much as the performer. The last thing I wanted to do was upset my fans.”
The brouhaha did neither Locke nor Idol any harm. The following night, Idol played up the fight, asking viewers to call in and vote on the following question: Is Cowell sexy or does he suck? Suck won 58 to 42. And Kimberley was put through to the finals, beating out another deceptively nerdy young singer who had just captured the public’s eye.
When he first appeared on Idol, Clay Aiken was the very image of the twenty-first-century nerd. The twenty-four-year-old special education instructor from Raleigh, North Carolina, also represented Idol’s new breed: a young man who loved singing but had never been able to take it any further than singing the national anthem at local hockey games. In his first appearances on the show, Clay was all but written off. And even though something about his earnest quality and surprising voice made him stand out from the crowd, it wasn’t enough to get through his first round, even with the judges’ praise.
Backstage after that show, Kimberley, Ruben, and Clay, who had become friends among the semifinalists, gathered. Kimberley recalls, “That night before we performed, Clay and I and Ruben said a prayer in the Coke room. We held hands and we prayed for Clay to come back in the Wild Card group. We’d all bonded and I think it was because we were from the South. Clay is from North Carolina, Ruben from Alabama, and I was from Tennessee. So we felt this connection, this bond. We not only said a prayer that Clay would come back but we prayed that we’d be in the top three.”
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