American Idol

by Richard Rushfield

  In the end, while Clay Aiken had led the voting throughout the final season, on that last week, Kimberley Locke’s former voters turned to Ruben and granted him the crown in a nail-biter of a result, only 130,000 votes between them out of 24 million cast. The close result, however, sparked a rare flub on the part of Seacrest, a flub that would fuel conspiracy theories that have not died to this day, driven by what may be the most ardent Idol fan group in history, the Claymates.

  At the top of the show, when Seacrest first mentioned the margin between the winner and loser—then unnamed—he either misread the number or the number was misprinted on the teleprompter (accounts varied) and he read it as thirteen thousand votes. Later, he tried to correct himself, saying it was by 1.3 percent out of the 24 million cast. Not until the next day did Fox release the correct number, saying 130,000 votes had come between the pair.

  On such single-digit gaffes, a thousand conspiracies are born, and eight years later, the Web is still filled with Claymate message boards and sites claiming their champion was robbed of his rightful title.

  Worse still, with so many calls, the volume on AT&T was unprecedented, and busy signals abounded, leading partisans on both sides to claim their lines had been jammed. A Fox spokesman testily replied to the postgame avalanche of media queries, “Twenty-four million did get through. The system worked like it was supposed to.”

  Surpassing the number who watched the Academy Awards, 33.7 million people watched the finale, putting Idol second only to the Super Bowl in national viewing. American Idol was now officially, unquestionably, without reservation, here to stay.

  But its star, Simon Cowell, was already getting antsy.

  Chapter 10

  DIVAS

  The rumblings of discontent were subtle: not quite shots across the bow, more like water balloons dropped off a rooftop.

  In the race to get Idol on the air that first season, Fox had Cowell sign a one-year contract. In their haste to get the second season of Idol on the air, Fox had again extended the contract for just one year. Now it was again up. And in the interim, Idol had become not just a phenomenon but an empire.

  At the end of the second season, his renewal pending, Cowell had aired a few mixed feelings. Told during a radio interview of a rumor the show was considering Paul McCartney as a fourth judge, Cowell muttered, “Well, good luck to them.” Pressed on what he’d meant—wouldn’t he be coming back?—he let slip with seeming nonchalance, “No, not really. I may have done enough with the show.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d used this little tactic—after the end of Pop Idol’s first season, he’d made similar noises about moving on—and it wouldn’t be the last. Nevertheless, shortly after these comments were made, Cowell’s contract was hashed out, and he signed on for three more years at the astronomical sum of six million dollars a season.

  Tactic though this might have been, those first vague stirrings of dissatisfaction were unmistakable. While between seasons the Idol crew at long last got a break—a full seven months before a new series would go on the air—Cowell returned to England for the second season of Pop Idol. The British show held up in the ratings, but something of the magic spark of that first season had faded. The winner, Michelle McManus, attracted more attention for controversies about her plus-size figure and the judges’ remarks about it than she had for her singing. The excitement around her victory paled in comparison to the frenzy for Will Young and Gareth Gates. Her subsequent recording career failed to take off, and she was dropped by her label after just one album.

  What this meant for Cowell, however, was that by the end of 2003, he had shot four back-to-back seasons on either side of the Atlantic. And he had squeezed in a stint judging the onetime World Idol contest. American Idol season 3 thus became his sixth Idol show in three years. What’s more, Cowell, who had created so many stars in his time, was now himself “just talent.” He might be celebrated and very well compensated, but a man of Cowell’s ambitions wasn’t going to be comfortable in that spot for long.

  Having dived into the world of television, Cowell was here to stay. And perfect timing too, just as the music business took its first lurch toward the meltdown that would decimate its ranks over the next decade. But just sitting behind the judges’ desk wouldn’t satisfy his appetite for the new medium. He put his first foot into television mogul shoes producing a show called Cupid for CBS, a reality/game/dating show hybrid in which a single woman and her friend toured the country, hunting for the perfect match. Barred by his Idol contract from appearing on the air in any other reality show, Cowell served merely as the show’s overseer. The complex concept was inventive, perhaps too inventive, and the show failed to find an audience. For Cowell, though, having seen the impact a hit show could have, the TV mogul bug was raging.

  Once Cowell’s contract was sewn up, however, another judge took her turn at playing hardball with much different results. When Paula, whose salary was still south of one million, attempted to hold out for a major payday herself, sources behind the scenes let it slip to Variety that her price tag was out of line with her services. Variety wrote, “A sure sign talks aren’t going well: Insiders close to the production say execs from the net and production companies FremantleMedia and 19 Entertainment have met with crooner Natalie Cole and Go-Go’s front woman Belinda Carlisle in recent days. Singers have been told the network is looking to add a fourth judge—or possibly a replacement judge—to the smash skein when it returns for its third season in January.”

  Paula quickly came to terms and signed back aboard. After a few seasons of Idol and having become the biggest star on television, Simon Cowell’s options, were he ever to walk away, were limitless. Paula, on the other hand, while her Idol exposure had reopened many, many doors, was still too close to that long dry period in the 1990s to risk going back out there once again. And everyone knew it.

  For the producers themselves, the break between seasons was time for another shot at expanding the brand. In the summer months when Idol went off the air, its slot was filled by American Juniors, an underage version of the show. Starting strong in the ratings, Juniors lacked the bite of Idol; bringing that Cowell edge of viciousness to bear on ten-year-olds somehow was just one step beyond the pale. It ultimately failed to hold its audience, tumbling 40 percent by the season’s close. It would not return.

  In December, Kelly Clarkson crossed the Atlantic to compete with ten other Idol champions from around the world in World Idol. The show was judged by jurists from each of the nations now in the Idol orbit, including Simon Cowell for the United States. (Pete Waterman did the honors for the United Kingdom). Wrought by confusion over the language barrier—contestants were required to sing in English but taped with different hosts for different nations—World Idol never jelled the way the infamous Eurovision song contest did. Worse still, the one untouchable subject poked its head onto the Idol stage. Idol could handle strippers, porn stars, and assaults warrants, but when politics appeared, even the most fearless of producers went running. And on World Idol, that was exactly what happened.

  Although it was widely assumed that Kelly Clarkson would walk away with the title, with the war in Iraq still ranging, Clarkson’s down-home Texas girl demeanor didn’t ring nearly as charming to the largely European viewers as it did to the folks stateside. As the contest advanced, regional voting blocks formed and Kelly found herself behind the eight ball. Ultimately, a Norwegian country singer named Kurt Nilsen took the prize, singing U2’s “Beautiful Day” as his victory song.

  Then there was the Christmas show, a reunion featuring stars from seasons 1 and 2. The reach of Idol seemed endless.

  Continuing to amaze, season 3 debuted with an even larger audience than the year before. Twenty-nine million people tuned in to watch the January premiere. The auditions immediately produced one bona fide star, a UC Berkeley civil engineering student named William Hung.

  At each audition, as the assembled contestants waited to see the judges, producers wou
ld make an announcement reminding them that they were there because “they were really good or really bad.” There were always those who didn’t quite get what side of that equation they fell on.

  Sorting through America’s oddest freak show became a pastime in itself, and as the years went on, the audition episodes attracted their own audience—viewers who tuned in for the comedy value even if they had no interest in the competition itself. Every year, the show would soon find, ratings would fall off after the audition episodes, that particular audience moving on.

  In season 3, the stand-alone part of the auditions produced its first true star. It remains unclear to this day whether William Hung actually believed his hilariously no-tune version of Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” was a performance that could have taken him to the Idol finale. Some seven years later, he expresses little understanding that his music is beloved for any reason other than its high quality. But Hung’s case was one true instance in which a singer walked onto that stage a nobody and came back a star. Within a week of his performance, his hastily thrown together Web site had received four million visitors, and he had appeared on every talk show in the universe, from Jay Leno to Howard Stern. He was satirized on Saturday Night Live and animated in Celebrity Deathmatch. Before the first season was over, his first album was released, and William Hung had stumbled into the sort of career for which more traditionally talented singers would kill. And more important, the path to fame had been opened for a whole new class of performers that, for better or worse, the world had never seen.

  While the audition tour was under way, however, Nigel Lythgoe’s body would once again revolt. Lythgoe might have outrun the previous year’s heart attack, but his body found other ways to fight back.

  He had gone straight from American Juniors to Idol proper, and the schedule was grueling. “In October, I came back from auditioning in Hawaii and had peritonitis. My appendix exploded. . . . They kept taking bits of my intestine. I lost about sixteen feet of my intestine. I missed the Christmas show. It broke my heart. I said, ‘What’s happening now, Ken?’ ‘Don’t worry. It’s okay.’ ‘But what songs are they going to be singing?’ ‘Don’t worry,’ he told me.”

  The doctors tried to keep Lythgoe, in his words, “strapped to the bed. ” It was so bad that he thought he was going to die. But after six weeks, he was able to rejoin the season and worried Idol execs breathed a sigh of relief.

  Eighty thousand people auditioned for that third season of American Idol. Yet, somehow, many complained that this army of contestants had failed to produce even a handful with any talent. At least it seemed that way to Cowell, who, as the season began, was notably cranky—even by his standards. “This is the worst day I’ve ever seen in judging this competition. A disgrace. I didn’t want to come in today,” he spat during Hollywood Week. In the semifinal rounds, he was so indignant with the whole group that he seemed on the verge of getting up and walking out. “It’s good we didn’t charge people tonight or they’d be asking for their money back,” he told one group.

  On his sixth Idol stint, Cowell’s language of put-downs had grown richer, his metaphors ever more colorful. Joining his traditional “lounge singer” dismissal, he added “cruise ship singer,” “wedding singer,” and “rodeo singer” to his repertoire. “We were looking for spaghetti Bolognese and that was sweet-and-sour chicken,” he told one befuddled contestant.

  “In the first season, people said, ‘I can’t believe he’s saying that,’ ” recalls one crew member. “In the second season they said, ‘I can’t believe he’s saying that, but you know, I kind of agree with him.’ By the third season, he was the man who told the truth, and therefore whatever he said, however out there he got, that was what was true.”

  Cowell’s mood had become so petulant that by the end of the semifinals, Seacrest took him on in a less friendly joshing way than usual. After he had told one contestant, “You’re a beautiful girl but you’re ugly when you perform,” Ryan confronted him, pointing out that he and his fellow judges were the ones who had selected this group out of the eighty thousand possible contenders. The implication made Cowell explode with rage:

  Cowell: I’ll put it to you since you’re the expert: Do you think they all should go through?

  Seacrest: Yes.

  Cowell: That’s why you are a host and I am a judge.

  Seacrest: You’re the one who put them through.

  Cowell: Ryan, you find a competition where you can find thirty-two stars and you will be a billionaire rather than a thousandaire.

  One contestant who stood out of the otherwise condemned pack was to become one of Idol’s iconic stories. Debbie Williams recalls, “Fantasia is the only Idol who, when I saw her in Hollywood Week, when she walked off the stage, I said to her, ‘You don’t know me. But I’m going to tell you something right now, and I want you to remember it. Top two.’ ”

  All of nineteen years old when she auditioned for American Idol, Fantasia Barrino’s story already had enough tragedy and heartbreak in it to fill a Lifetime network movie, as it eventually would. Functionally illiterate, Barrino had dropped out of high school, as she would later reveal, after being raped by a classmate. Touring her native North Carolina as part of the Barrino Family gospel group, Fantasia conceived a daughter at age sixteen. By the time she tried out for Idol at age nineteen, she had freed herself from a physically abusive relationship with the child’s father.

  From the start, the highs and lows of Fantasia’s journey were right on the surface in her intense vocals and infectious spirit. Almost the only one to receive praise from Cowell in those early weeks, she had been told her after her semifinals performance, “You are destined to be a star.”

  Fantasia was not to have the spotlight instantly to herself, however, but she instead became cast as one of the “three divas,” a trio of sensationally talented African American women who dominated the season. Though grouped together, the three were extremely different outside of their shared demographics. Besides Fantasia, the group also included LaToya London, a cool, understated singer from Oakland whose style was compared with the smooth soulful melodies of Gladys Knight, and Jennifer Hudson, a fiery crooner from Chicago who was cast in the Whitney Houston/Celine Dion mold.

  Different as they were, the three did not hit it off. “Those girls fought and fought,” remembers one crew member. Most combative of the three was Hudson, who, despite some powerful performances, struggled to win over the audience. She was first eliminated in the semifinals, then resurrected as Randy’s choice in the Wild Card round. But week after week, she found herself in the bottom three.

  “She was very angry,” a crew member recalls. “One day all the girls got out of the car and into the elevator, and they’re all screaming at each other and fighting. They go up in the elevator. Jennifer was on the phone in the back of the van saying to her mom or somebody, ‘Well, clearly I’m the best. Clearly I’m far better than any of these girls.’ ”

  Hudson’s calm was not helped by the wildly shifting verdicts of Cowell, who, whether out of frustration or boredom, seemed to proclaim a new front-runner every week. On the first night of the top twelve, he tagged the pleasantly likable Hawaiian singer Jasmine Trias “the best of the night” and called John Stevens, a shy Conan O’Brien look-alike who specialized in Sinatra-like standards, “the dark horse to win this competition.”

  The following week, he laid down the glove to Hudson: “Let me sum this up for you. You are out of your depth in this competition.” Cowell may have been cranky. Or he may well have been setting Hudson up for a dramatic turn, about to declare she had come back and was now in this competition to win. Whatever the motive, the audience was now following his lead, and that was about to have a dramatic effect.

  The top seven results show was to be one of those nights replayed forever in Idol lore. When the results were read that night, Seacrest stunned the crowd by announcing that the divas were that night’s bottom three while Jasmine Trias, Diana DeGarmo, and John Ste
vens miraculously were the top vote getters.

  Minutes later, when that shock had settled in, he delivered the coup de grâce, announcing that Jennifer Hudson’s American Idol journey had come to an end.

  Randy Jackson was the first to raise an eyebrow at the verdict, suggesting something not wholesome was at work in the fall of the divas. “As a proud American, I hope that America is listening and watching. We want to be proud of whoever wins this. We’re proud that Kelly won. We’re proud that Clay came in because they were the greatest talent that you could find. That’s what this whole thing’s about.” The outrage was so palpable that even Seacrest felt compelled to lecture the audience, saying, “You have to vote for the talent, you cannot let talent like this slip through the cracks.”

  While Jackson and Seacrest were ultimately circumspect about the causes behind the vote, the press would grant the Idol electorate no such grace.

  “Theories flew fast and furious Thursday after the American Idol viewer vote went against favorite Jennifer Hudson, ranging from racism to fateful weather to teenage puppy love,” wrote the AP. “Questions of racism also came up in the first season, after talented Tamyra Gray was voted off,” they reminded readers.

  “Another group of people think there’s a racist conspiracy to keep American Idol from having a black winner two years in a row,” the Boston Globe quoted an Idol viewer.

  Watching from the sidelines, Elton John, whose music had been the subject of a theme night two weeks earlier, joined in the outrage. “The three people I was really impressed with, and they just happened to be black, young female singers, and they all seem to be landing in the bottom three. They have great voices. The fact that they’re constantly in the bottom three—and I don’t want to set myself up here—but I find it incredibly racist.”