American Idol

by Richard Rushfield

  Cowell himself denies ever self-consciously tilting the contest for dramatic effect. He says, “Let me tell you, this audience in America, they’re not mugs. They make their own decisions. Everyone says that I can influence the audience at home. I genuinely don’t believe that. As was proved with Taylor Hicks. I couldn’t have been more negative and he won the show. That wasn’t planned so he could win the show. I just called it like I called it. If someone’s got it, the audience is going to back you. They might listen a little bit, but I can’t change their minds.”

  The audience will support his narrative, he says, “only if I’m right. I like the times when Vote for the Worst suddenly became popular, and it shows the audience that they’re in control. The idea that I can manipulate them is crazy. But you have to have a strong opinion one way or another. I’ve never been just ambivalent about anybody. If I like them I like them. If I hate them I hate them. But it’s all done with a sense of humor as well.”

  That same night, after struggling to overcome the judges’ mixed feelings, Carly finally turned in a performance that seemed to set her back in the upper echelon of the race. Simon responded with a curt, “It was good but not great. And I think you’ve got to have a word with whoever’s dressing you.” A gasp went out in the room.

  Three long weeks later, Cowell finally seemed ready to make the dramatic turn. On the top six week devoted to the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, he finally conceded a measure of praise, ready to declare her back in the race. But it was too late: In the shadow of the screaming girls, the time for a breakthrough had passed for Carly, and she found herself the victim of another shocking Idol elimination the following night.

  The Archuleta frenzy continued as he turned in flawless performances and won over ever more fans with his sweet and humble demeanor. But he was falling victim to the old Idol front-runner disease: too much praise too soon. Flawless began to be taken for granted. Meanwhile, the low-key Cook, who had been no one’s prediction to win, kept surging.

  On Mariah Carey week, David Cook broke through completely. Lurking in the background of the private young man’s story was the fact that, all the while he had been on the show, his brother in Missouri had been extremely ill with cancer that ultimately would prove terminal. that night, his brother visited the set and watched from the audience, his condition grave. Cook’s heartfelt, melancholy take on “Always Be My Baby” became one of the great star-making moments of Idol history, and as he waded into the crowd after to embrace his brother, the crowd went wild with enthusiasm.

  For the women, however, Mariah Carey night was an ordeal of another sort. As they had on Dolly Parton night, the women confronted the question of how to perform a song by one of America’s greatest female singers and not just have your version compared to hers. “It was not like we could just slow it down,” Smithson said. “Then they would just say you sounded like Mariah Carey but slow and not as good.” In the end, the judges gave them few points for effort. “I don’t think you had much choice other than to do what you did,” Cowell said to Brooke White of her stripped-down version of “Hero” sung at the piano. “Having said that, it was a bit like ordering a hamburger and only getting the bun. The vital ingredient, the bit in the middle, was missing because I don’t think your voice was strong enough to carry that song.” Later in the evening he referred to the renditions as “karaoke hell.”

  And of course, season 7 saw the inevitable Paula moments. Before the season began, Paula had made herself the centerpiece of her own reality show, Hey Paula. The VH1 production had been intended to dispel the rumors about her wacky personal life and depict her as a hardworking, serious businesswoman. But the series, rife with meltdowns and near hysteria, only fanned the flames. The what’s up with Paula question was not to be vanquished.

  Still, season 7 was refreshingly free of Paula mishaps. Until, that is, the top five week, mentored by Neil Diamond. The episode caused a particular production challenge, with each of the five contestants performing two songs squeezed into a mere hour of airtime. The crew struggled to make everything fit, but the night’s format ended in a confused jumble. To keep the show on schedule, the initial plan had been for the judges to wait until after each singer had performed their second song, and then to review both numbers. However, in the seconds before airtime, Mike Darnell had the notion that after the first round of performances ended, the judges should review all the contestants at once, in one massed group. As the studio lights darkened and Ryan Seacrest began his introduction, Executive Producer Lythgoe raced to the judges’ table to explain the new plan.

  Abdul, never one to roll with the punches, was flustered by this arrangement. When the time came for her comments, she confused the notes she had taken from the dress rehearsal with her live show notes and offered dreadlocked crooner Jason Castro a critique of a song he had not yet performed. As Castro smiled uncomfortably, Randy Jackson jumped in and ever so gently cut Abdul off, causing another historically awkward moment to go down in TV history with Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert’s half minute of confused silence on election night 2000.

  The next day, the press and the Internet were on fire, mocking the greatest example to date of Abdul’s loopiness, some wondering if she had hallucinated. For others, it was proof of Idol’s persistent conspiracy bugaboo—that the competition was “fixed.” Had Abdul nakedly revealed herself to be reading notes given her by the producers, ordering her to trash Castro? To this day, legions of Castro partisans believe the incident was the smoking gun that the fix was in to knock Jason off the show.

  For once, Idol didn’t try to make a joke out of the incident. Sensing no doubt their judge was near her limit, Seacrest opened the following night’s show with a heartfelt statement of support, denying Internet rumors that she would be replaced, saying, “She is part of our family and we love her.”

  The season 7 finale delivered the first surprise verdict in Idol history. While David Cook’s popularity had surged, the country remained convinced that David Archuleta was the season’s unstoppable phenomenon. Impressive though it had been that a low-key, scruffy rocker like Cook could make it all the way to the finale, in the end, this was a show about pop stars. The crown would not be wrested from the head of the chosen one, David Archuleta. On this the pundits were nearly unanimous.

  Cook’s surge, visitors in the Idol dome noticed, seemed to be taking a bite out of Archuleta’s core demographic. In the final weeks of the season, the shrieks for Cook grew almost as loud as the mosh pit screams for Archuleta, with a segment of the junior high set looking for something a bit scruffier in their icons. And there was another new demographic unit that was about to enter the Idol fray: cougars. For whatever reason, Cook’s appeal to women in the 35- to 55-year-old demographic was unmistakable. When that summer’s Idols Live tour came to Cook’s former home of Tulsa, I decided to visit the bar where he once played. I found the small honky-tonk room packed beyond capacity with women in their forties and fifties, camera phones extended, recording for the historical record every cranny of the room where Cook once sang.

  In the finale show, the night seemed to belong entirely to Archuleta. His voice effortlessly filling the vast six thousand-seat Nike theater, he seemed to dominate every round. “What we have witnessed is a knockout,” Cowell declared.

  The next day, however, Cowell sheepishly retracted his ruling, saying that watching it back on TV, the effect of Cook’s performances had been completely different from what he had seen in person. “I was almost horrified when I went back home and watched. It was literally like watching and listening to a whole new show. What you thought was good wasn’t very good and what you thought was bad actually was a lot better.” The admission was part of Cowell’s enduring appeal, his ability not to take his opinions too seriously, to admit mistakes, which projected the unfailing sense that this is one man who tells the truth, no matter what.

  He was right about being wrong. David Cook, to the screams of horror from a million little girls across the
nation, became the seventh American Idol, beginning a new dynasty of rocker guy champions that would stretch on for years.

  But another thing would have to change. With the break on the set now between Lythgoe and Cowell, the tension was again becoming difficult. And what was worse, for two seasons in a row, the ratings had sagged. Not horrifically—they were still the sorts of numbers any show would kill for—but in a world where every ratings point meant tens of millions of dollars, any bump in the road was like a bomb blast. It seemed that after seven years, Idol was showing the first signs of age. In the postmortems that began before the season even ended, there was a sense that things needed to be shaken up, the format tinkered with, and big attention-getting changes needed to happen to keep the audience interested. And the man who stood in the way of big changes was one Nigel Lythgoe.

  Since the dawn of Idol, one item had dominated Lythgoe’s agenda, that at all costs it must always be about the talent. He had fought many a battle, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, against any element that would take attention away from the central narrative of watching, considering, judging, and ultimately rewarding the talent. From the early Real World elements to funny twists in the rules, holding at bay nonessential funny business had been the battle.

  But with the ratings beginning to sag and with discontent on the set, that fight was becoming harder. With the thought of tweaks and changes it was clear the one thing everyone was feeling must not change, could not change, was the man who after seven years remained the subject of endless fascination, the still unshakable center of Idol, Simon Cowell.

  After season 7, two years remained on Cowell’s contract. But with the star looking increasingly bored and restless on the set, at odds with Lythgoe and once again making noises about “everything comes to an end” and “time to move on,” two years felt dangerously close. It was time to start thinking about making Cowell happy, really happy.

  A month after David Cook won the Idol crown, the announcement was made that Nigel Lythgoe, the man who had guided the production since its birth in the United Kingdom, who had invented the mean judge character, and who had served as its flamboyant ringmaster, would be moving on.

  The changes were just beginning.

  Chapter 17

  THE PASTOR

  We’re all just going where the Lord sends us. Some are sent on missions around the world. Somehow I was sent to American Idol.” Leesa Bellesi, an engaging blonde in her early fifties who resembles a young Florence Henderson, sits back at her kitchen table and begins her story. Her home, located in a hilly, semirural section of south Orange County, seems another world from the American Idol bubble. But at this table, a long line of mothers and fathers of Idol contestants have prayed for their children, watched them perform, and mourned when their Idol journeys ended.

  The unofficial host to dozens of Idol families, Leesa Bellesi has in her time penetrated the protected space of the most high-profile show in the world. She has roamed backstage, attended Idol dinners, and sat in the audience beside Idol families.

  And it all began “the day a clown fell on my head,” Leesa told me with a laugh.

  Actually, just before the clown, there had been a warning.

  “It just goes back to the book of Job being put inside our book,” Leesa said. Several years before the Idol ministry, before she had even watched the show, Leesa was sent a cryptic warning that her path was about to take a dramatic turn. At the time, her husband, Denny, was serving as a pastor at one of the congregations in Orange County, California, a church that was in the orbit of Rick Warren’s famed Saddleback, nexus of the sunny, upbeat, and outgoing brand of Fundamentalist Christianity that has reshaped evangelical America in recent years.

  As a side project, Leesa and Denny founded the Kingdom Assignment ministry, a traveling event wherein they would appear before a church, pass out one-hundred-dollar bills with the challenge to the recipients to pay it forward—that is, take the money and see how much good they could do with it, how many ripples they could start across the pond. In the years they had been doing it, the program had spawned scores of miracle-working stories and a pair of Kingdom Assignment books put out by a leading Christian publisher, and eventually the holy of holies, an appearance on Oprah to talk about the mission.

  So it came, or it should have come, as a warning when in the midst of Kingdom Assignment’s success, they were approached by a woman bearing a copy of their latest publication asking why her Kingdom Assignment book had the book of Job in it. Looking inside, they found that the biblical book detailing the suffering and trial of the Lord’s most ardent servant had indeed been misprinted inside the woman’s book.

  If you were still looking for harbingers after that, a few weeks later, the clown dropped.

  Leesa and Denny were sitting at a local performance by Cirque du Soleil. Denny had given Leesa the tickets for her birthday and had upgraded to front row seats. Just before intermission, the couple noticed “this 250-pound Darth Vader–ish guy with propane tanks on his back, fire was shooting out of his arms. And he started stumbling around the stage. I lost track of him, and all of a sudden his back was to me and I thought he was going to fly or something and he just fell right on top of me. And immediately I had pain at the top of my head and it was from my neck snapping and getting a bulging disc in my neck.”

  Leesa was in constant pain for three years; only after extensive physical therapy could she begin to get out of bed and move around. To make matters worse, the injury led to an acrimonious lawsuit against Cirque du Soleil, in which the troupe had photographers trail Leesa, snapping photos to try and prove she was not, in fact, disabled.

  In her forties, largely bedridden, in pain, often delirious from medication and financially near ruin thanks to the medical costs, Leesa found herself for the first time in her life questioning her faith, wondering where all this lay in God’s plan for her.

  It was at this moment, lying in bed, that Leesa happened upon the audition episodes for a little show called American Idol, which was just starting its fifth season. Somewhere deep inside, something told her that she was supposed to be watching this. She recalls having no idea what this notion was about or why, wracked in pain, God was steering her toward a TV talent competition, but she prayed: “Here I am, Lord. Send me where you need me.” The words backstage at American Idol popped into her head.

  Having been handed that instruction, Leesa had no clue what she was supposed to do with it. Certainly it was one of the odder pieces of direction she had received. But as the new season unfolded, she kept watch, trusting that somehow the path to backstage at American Idol would be made clear. Soon she stumbled upon the audition of a then twenty-one-year-old singer named Katharine McPhee singing “God Bless the Child.” “I started praying for her in my living room in Orange County. And I Googled her. What’s going on with this girl? I just had a real propensity toward her. I just felt like she was an amazing singer but I loved her. I thought she was just a precious girl.”

  The messages she received—backstage at American Idol, Katharine, “God Bless the Child”—hung in the air as Leesa continued her physical therapy. But within weeks, the path would become material in the first of a series of coincidences that would take Leesa not just backstage, but deeper inside the Idol beast than any viewer, any reporter, could ever dream of.

  Two weeks after watching McPhee’s audition, Leesa accompanied Denny for his Sunday services to the church in Pasadena where he was doing a stint as guest pastor. As the services ended, a couple approached the pastor and his wife. The worshipers explained that they were looking for a church to join and had been touched by Denny’s sermon. The young woman told them that she was about to start on a TV show, that she’d be living with the show in a bubble cut off from the world, and as she was newly discovering the spiritual path, would Leesa and Denny pray for her during her trials to come?

  Standing before her was Katharine McPhee.

  Leesa recited to Katharine her favorite bibli
cal passage, the one she had turned to to sustain herself through the past years of physical pain. From the book of Jeremiah (29:11) it went: “ ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ ” They exchanged numbers and as Katharine entered the Idol bubble, Leesa frequently texted her the citation, reminding her that she was on God’s path.

  A couple of weeks later, Katharine still in her mind, Leesa received a gift from a friend—a white rubber bracelet, similar to the once-ubiquitous Lance Armstrong bracelets, bearing the Jeremiah citation.

  “I woke up one morning,” she recalls of the bracelet, “and I just really heard the Lord say, ‘That’s not yours. It’s Katharine’s.’ I was like, I have no idea how I’m going to get it to her. Maybe I was going to see Nick [Katharine’s boyfriend] at church, maybe I could give it to him. But He said, ‘No, you need to give it to her today.’ ”

  It was a Wednesday, the day of the results show on the first week of the season 5 finals. The night before, Stevie Wonder had served as the guest mentor and he was scheduled to perform that night.

  Visitors in the Idol audience often wait years to get tickets to the show. With Wonder scheduled to perform, you’d have an easier time getting a private meeting with the pope. Even Nick couldn’t get an extra ticket, Leesa, heeding her marching orders and working the phone, soon learned. “My niece works for Fox, I called her. No. I have a producer friend. No. Nobody can get tickets, Leesa. Nobody can get tickets for American Idol. And I’m, like, ‘Right, right, nobody can get tickets.’

  “I went home and I remember I was lying on the floor exercising and all of a sudden I flipped back over to Fox and it said, ‘Okay, the eleventh caller will be receiving two tickets for American Idol tonight.’ . . . And so I grab the phone. I’m writing down the number. I’m dialing the number. All I know is I never heard it ring and all of a sudden I heard, ‘Hi, you’re the eleventh caller.’ ”