American Idol

by Richard Rushfield

Little known to himself, Adam Lambert had been preparing for Idol for years. A theater nerd from San Diego, he had graduated to a career on the stage, winning a high-profile role in the cast of Wicked. Lambert was the first major Idol contender to bring professional theater experience to the show. He was also one of the most flamboyant singers to make it to the Idol dome, most comfortable dressed in black alligator-skin bat suits accessorized with rhinestone-studded handcuffs.

  A veteran of the Southern California rave scene who had experimented heavily in it in every possible way, Lambert was a world away from the cluster of prayer leaders who filled that season. However, with his theatrical background and alternative culture fearlessness, he was able to build on the changes Chris Daughtry had brought to Idol and push them to another level entirely. While Daughtry and then David Cook had reinvented the arrangement of songs, bending them to create an artistic persona, Lambert created something else out of them entirely. Working with the Idol crew on the arrangements, costume, makeup, and lighting, he turned every performance into a fully realized theatrical spectacle every week.

  His reinventions were audacious but also polarizing. On country night, when he took one of the most beloved songs of all time, Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” and turned into into a psychedelic dirge complete with Indian sitar, half the audience leapt to their feet elated while the other half sat on their hands outraged. Idol had never seen anything like Lambert, and the question reigned throughout the season: How far would Idol audiences be willing to go along for this ride?

  Another element put a question mark on the Lambert trajectory, the matter of sexuality. Idol had had a few openly gay contestants before, but they had not gotten far. David Hernandez, the season before, had finished in twelfth place. Vanessa Olivarez, in season 2, had likewise finished at the bottom of her season. Clay Aiken had asserted he was straight while on the show, coming out only years later. Adam Lambert entered the show refusing to speak about his sexuality, but once photos were released on the Internet showing him in heavy glitter makeup making out with another man at the Burning Man festival, his active participation in the story became a moot point. The question was whether Idol nation was ready to make this leap forward.

  Meanwhile, Idol’s recording fortunes were not what they had once been. There had been enormous success, of course: Clarkson, Underwood, Aiken, and Daughtry. Each year the winner’s album, even that of the star-crossed Taylor Hicks, had gone platinum—nothing to sneeze at in a time of implosion for the industry. But it had been a few years since one had broken out on the level of that big four, selling records by the many millions and filling stadiums with their fans. The past two winners, Jordin Sparks and David Cook, had each had hit singles and achieved a certain recognition, but neither had rocketed to the absolute A-list, and each continued to perform in clubs and smaller venues rather than moving up to arenas. Short of that there were dozens of others, for whatever reason, whose records had fizzled in the marketplace, a line stretching back to Justin Guarini and the huge disappointment of Tamyra Gray’s album, onward to Katharine McPhee and Blake Lewis. There were plenty of acts on the Idol register making plenty of money. But the Idol dream was based on the promise that it created not just moderately successful singers, but megastars; that was what only Idol could offer, what set the stakes of this competition apart by an order of magnitude from Survivor or The Bachelor. The stakes of Idol had to remain huge, life-altering, for the myth to function. And that proposition was looking more like a hit-or-miss thing.

  As the show on the big stage got rolling, however, the problems only seemed to deepen. The bickering act between the judges, always a popular runner, got so out of control that it swallowed the show whole. Just as the finalists were desperately needing oxygen to introduce themselves to the audiences, the high jinks between Paula, Simon, Ryan, Randy, and the new girl often made the contestants seem like interlopers at someone else’s dinner party. With the whole group bristling against the arrival of an awkward newcomer in their ranks, without Lythgoe on the floor to step in (Warwick guided the show, as he always had, from the control booth), the panel became uncontrollable, using their time to make inside jokes, ignoring the contestants’ performances.

  Worse still, the show ran overtime week after week, cutting off the final minutes for those who watched on TiVo or DVRs. The low moment came when Adam Lambert closed the show with what was probably his or anyone’s finest moment of the season—a haunting rendition of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” It was one of those quintessential moments when a singer leaps beyond the ranks of contestants, forges a bond with the audience, and is transformed into a star.

  But thanks to the overrun, a good share of the viewers never saw it. The number didn’t begin until after the hour had ended, causing it to be cut out on many stations and all DVR recordings. The omission was so egregious that the following night Seacrest commented on it on the air, advising viewers to look it up on YouTube. Two months later, when Lambert lost the Idol crown, some grumbled that the fact that audiences had missed his greatest performance couldn’t have helped anything.

  Backstage, the frustrated contestants strained to establish themselves on a show where it seemed they were becoming but a footnote. Despite being widely praised by critics, the group struggled to deal with the wildly conflicting advice they were receiving from the distracted judges, keeping them at a constant level of frustration about where they were supposed to go. It got so bad for singer Anoop Desai, a Indian American nerd from North Carolina reborn as an R&B star, that one night after having followed the judges’ previous weeks’ orders to a T but receiving a bawling out nonetheless, he went backstage and punched the wall so hard he was forced to hide his bleeding hand when he returned before the camera.

  From the sidelines, Lythgoe took another jab, saying, “There’s been so much talk on Idol about the judges, the judges; it’s not about the judges. It’s about the talent.”

  The talent also had another matter to deal with, a little issue of the supernatural. In another tweak to the season, the show had put the contestants back in a mansion together after years of housing them off camera in a nondescript apartment building. The hope once again was to capture some Real World–like footage to use on the show, perhaps a fight or two, but the result was disappointing: The little time the contestants spent at the house, they were too exhausted to stir up much drama.

  Off camera, however, a certain unexpected visitor came into their lives in the mansion. Alexis Grace had decided to name the presence Phyllis after her first couple sightings. Megan Joy said, “I remember the day I saw her. We were all pretty scared of certain rooms. Well, the electricity was all crazy, so lights would turn off by themselves. Things would make the electricity change. That was scary. One day I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth. I turned around and I was facing the mirror and I saw something go past the window, and it felt. . . . It was like somebody went past it but it wasn’t really clear and it was more of just like a light. I can’t really even describe it. Like maybe someone was wearing a light color or white, just real fast. I was, like, that really scared me. No one was in there.”

  “She lives in my room,” Allison Iraheta said during the season. “If you spent one night in my room, you’d see. . . . I’ve heard growls. I’m not lying.”

  Megan Joy, however, had matters of the all too earthly variety to deal with during the season. The quirky tattooed blonde from Utah noted for her refreshingly uncoordinated dance style, and her propensity for breaking into birdcalls while onstage, had a story perhaps as close to the Idol myth as any contestant ever had. Before Idol, Megan truly had not sung for any audience larger than her immediate family, having failed to even win a part in the school play. Recently divorced, with a still young child, Megan worked at home as a graphic designer when she decided to audition for Idol, and to her shock, she made it through the auditions to Hollywood Week, past the green mile, and then after getting eliminated in the semifinals was called back and put through by
the judges on the Wild Card night. It had been a wild ride, but behind it, unseen by the public, a horrible drama was playing itself out.

  In the middle of her divorce and custody negotiation before auditioning, Megan’s ex had decided to use her decision to go on Idol as evidence that she was abandoning her child and was an unfit mother. She traveled back to Utah secretly to testify in the custody hearing, spending her time on the show locked in battle with her ex, talking daily with her lawyers. She lived in terror that Idol, which she hoped would earn her enough money so she could buy a house for her and her son, might in fact cost her the child himself.

  She recalls of her child at the time, “It was pretty crazy. He felt like I didn’t care about him and I was chasing a dream. It wasn’t that, I was trying to better our lives. I’m always going to be his mom raising him every day no matter what. I don’t care, that’s number one always. So, he was hurting. He was going through a lot and confused at how I could be away from him so much. Trust me, being away from him was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I was a stay-at-home mom every single day. It tore me apart. It was really, really hard.

  “People were always confused when I say that the Idol experience was the best and worst time of my life and it truly, truly was.”

  As the season drew toward its close, Paula Abdul still wondered about her contract, still strived for respect from the production team, still fought to be taken seriously by the audience. Ironically, it was the arrival of Kara DioGuardi that provided her the only bit of reassurance she had, giving her the chance to bond with her fellow judges to all but freeze out the new girl. During the season to come, visitors to the live show were shocked when during breaks the original three judges would step outside for a cigarette (or more precisely, to watch Simon have a cigarette) and leave Kara sitting alone by herself at the judges’ table, her humiliation in full view for the audience, which she anxiously scanned for a friendly face.

  Younger and more energetic than Paula, Kara made her play to draw Simon’s attention away from his longtime sidekick, but he was having none of it. On the set, she would laugh uproariously at his asides and lean over him to muss his crew cut, to his visible annoyance. On one occasion, to the gasps of many in the room, Kara climbed into Cowell’s lap, wrapped her arms around his neck, and whispered in his ear. The normally flirtatious Cowell drew back harshly.

  Cowell says now that Kara “drove me crazy. It’s no secret, year one, we did not get on well for whatever reason. But then year two, it suddenly clicked on the live shows. She and I genuinely got on with each other and genuinely ended the season on a good friendship.”

  Looking back after they have both left the show, he says, “She did something recently where we were both chasing an artist, and she said to the artist, ‘No, if Simon’s in, then I have to wait to see what he does. I’m not going to outbid him or compete with him.’ And she didn’t know that I knew, and I said, ‘You’re a very honorable person.’ I called her on that and said, ‘Thank you.’ I liked her. I’m not saying we didn’t have our moments, but you know what? You’ve got to have those moments.”

  But before they would find that happy balance, for Kara it would get much worse.

  Part of the hazing ritual included a Hang Kara Out to Dry routine the other judges practiced on her. With the panel enlarged to four, the producers decided to mix things up by rotating the order in which they spoke, a move that inadvertently gave the original three the perfect opening to stick a knife between Kara’s ribs.

  One night, halfway through into the season, singer Lil Rounds took the stage and gave one of her more creditable performances. Up first, Kara gushed that Lil had given the performance of the night. She was followed by Paula, who, strangely for her, chimed in, “You know, I just didn’t feel it from you tonight.” Up next, Cowell played up the disagreement, saying, “I’m going to agree with . . . Paula.” Then even kindly Randy Jackson joined with his old comrade, saying, “It wasn’t good for me.” As the season wore on, Kara’s reviews were devastating. Entertainment Weekly’s Idol watcher Michael Slezak virtually declared war, calling her Kara the Terrible and demanding her removal from the show. His popular Idolatry video series regularly mocked her grating overuse of “sweetie.”

  In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Kara openly wondered about her future with the show, saying, “I could be fired at any time. Done. Axed. Probably even during this process.”

  The tension finally boiled over halfway through the season after Paula gave yet another interview saying she thought bringing Kara aboard had been a mistake. Before that night’s show, Kara confronted Paula outside her dressing room. Paula attempted to explain, “I wasn’t talking about you, just the format.” But months of residual tension came seething out, and soon, with minutes to spare before showtime, the crews’ walkie-talkies buzzed with the exclamation “Catfight!” as the two judges tore into each other in an open corridor. When they were finally wrangled into their seats, they sat side by side without exchanging a look or a word throughout the show.

  Despite the small comfort afforded by bonding with her fellow judges in hazing Kara, Paula Abdul felt only more insecure about her place on the show as the end of her contract loomed. With hints small and large, she had sent out the signal that unless she was afforded more respect under the Idol tent, she could not allow herself to return to a place that in her mind, especially in light of the world falling all over themselves to appease Cowell, treated her as a third-class citizen.

  She had begun the season by attempting to up her game. Abdul had begun privately rehearsing her critiques and had secretly hired a writer to draft some more orderly rejoinders. Slowly, as the season progressed, some of the more observant Idol watchers took notice that the panel’s resident scatterbrain was actually making sense, often sounding like the most informed, insightful person on the panel.

  However, the train wreck narrative on Paula had been too long established for it to be turned around overnight.

  With an episode in late April, Abdul planned to take her pre-negotiation campaign into high gear. Her latest album of pop songs was due out and for the first time since joining the show, she planned to step to the Idol stage and perform a live dance number to showcase the first single, “(I’m Just) Here for the Music.” To accompany the reminders that she remained a vigorous force of music and dance, Abdul’s people planned a little bombshell certain to get the attention of the Idol powers that be.

  Days before Abdul’s performance, I received a call at the Los Angeles Times. Members of Abdul’s camp suggested that it would be interesting for me to do a story on Paula’s return to the stage, offering to bring me out to the rehearsal space where she was preparing the elaborate number. They filled me in that with her contract coming up, this performance would certainly showcase the fact that she was a woman with a lot of options. And, they told me, they were willing to share one little fact that they thought would underscore why she was so serious in her demands for respect: They were willing to publicly reveal Paula’s salary.

  While it was assumed that Abdul’s salary was less, significantly less than the thirty million Cowell was known to make, no number had ever come out. A newspaper report when she had signed her last contract had put the amount, according to “sources,” in the eight million range.

  Not even close, was the word from Abdul’s camp, revealing the disparity between their takes from thirty million for Cowell to the paltry 1.8 million for which Abdul served.

  In the dressing room of the Burbank rehearsal space where Abdul ran through her number with a dozen backup dancers, complete with a plunge off a staircase fifteen feet high into their arms, she sat in her makeup chair and talked about the pending contract and her place in the Idol firmament. Paula became visibly shaken, refusing to say that she was returning to the show, only saying she was leaving everything to the “negotiation people” and trusted that it would work itself out as it was meant to.

  On the Tuesday morning, my story was r
eleased and picked up around the world with headlines aghast at the disparity between the judges’ take-homes. The revelation certainly delivered as intended, getting the attention of Idol’s producers, but behind the scenes, her plea for sympathy and demand to be taken seriously was greeted by an eye-rolling sense that this was just the latest Paula antic.

  Her week from hell was just getting started.

  On Wednesday morning, the day of her planned dance number, Ladies’ Home Journal hit the stands with an interview conducted a month earlier in which Abdul admitted that she had fought drug addiction and gone to rehab to deal with it. This was in direct contradiction to what she had told ABC in an interview at the season’s open and what she had been saying for years.

  Actually, on closer inspection, the story told less than met the eye. The revelation of addiction might have been the story’s author reading too much into Abdul’s garbled syntax as she never, it seemed, said exactly that. As for her supposed confession that she had attended rehab . . . the story cites her saying she had gone to the La Costa center for drug rehabilitation. In fact, La Costa is a resort and spa that offers no addiction treatments, a mistake that lent credence to Abdul’s frantic response that the piece misunderstood and misquoted her.

  But in the white-hot vortex of Idol news cycles, there is rarely room for explanations and reconsiderations. As Abdul took the Idol stage Wednesday night, the performance was cast in the light of her supposed drug confession. And then even the performance was torn apart as reviews the next day criticized Abdul for lip-synching her song as she leaped through the vigorous dance steps.

  The year that had begun with a death in her driveway seemed to be fulfilling all its ominous potential. As the clock ticked toward her contract’s end, the producers wondered if this person had really incontrovertibly become more trouble than she was worth.