American Idol Read online

  FOR NICOLE

  The children sing in far Japan,

  The children sing in Spain;

  The organ with the organ man

  Is singing in the rain.

  —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  If you were to ask me what I would be when I grow up when I was little, I would’ve been, like, I want to be famous.

  —CARRIE UNDERWOOD

  Contents

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER 1: Creator

  CHAPTER 2: Lightbulbs

  CHAPTER 3: Enter the Dragon

  CHAPTER 4: Pop Goes the Idol

  CHAPTER 5: The Crossing

  CHAPTER 6: Showtime

  Photographic Insert 1

  CHAPTER 7: Once Upon a Time

  CHAPTER 8: The Exile

  CHAPTER 9: Goliath

  CHAPTER 10: Divas

  CHAPTER 11: Simon vs. Simon

  CHAPTER 12: The Anti-Christ

  Photographic Insert 2

  CHAPTER 13: Détente

  CHAPTER 14: Ponyhawk

  CHAPTER 15: The Bubble

  CHAPTER 16: Twilight of the Valkyries

  CHAPTER 17: The Pastor

  CHAPTER 18: Tweak House

  CHAPTER 19: Leaving Idol

  CHAPTER 20: The End of the Day

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  CREATOR

  In a nation where every child dreams of being a star, it was a moment millions had imagined for themselves, but few would ever come close to experiencing. Six months before, Fantasia Barrino had been a high school dropout. Functionally illiterate, she was struggling to overcome a background of abuse and raise her child alone. At seventeen, Diana DeGarmo was a high school junior, a former Miss Teen Georgia, and a popular performer in local pageants.

  On the face of it, these two young women had nothing in common. And yet, on May 24, 2004, they stood side by side while an audience of thirty-three million, second only to the Super Bowl, watched them compete to be the third champion of American Idol.

  When the little singing contest had debuted as a summer replacement on the U.S. airwaves, it was packed between reruns and low-cost filler. The promise that the show would be a game changer for the Fox network, that it would find America’s next pop star, produced a hearty round of guffaws from the country’s media critics. Three years, two stars, and millions of records later, no one was laughing.

  American Idol had completed its conquest of the American airwaves.

  With the eyes of the nation and its superstar panel of judges upon them, Fantasia and Diana competed for the biggest prize America has to offer. The currency is fame, and it’s bigger than money, more desired than power. This wasn’t Survivor handing out a cash reward to be squandered before the year was out, or The Bachelor bestowing dubious promises of romantic bliss. This was stardom, genuine, durable stardom, the coin that participants in church choirs and high school plays and beauty contests everywhere yearn for.

  Before the result was announced, Fantasia and Diana joined the previous winners in a swelling rendition of “The Impossible Dream.” The lyrics were no hyperbole, however. Not tonight. Not for the two finalists whose lives had been transformed in mere months, not for the Dallas waitress who had become Idol’s first champion and America’s biggest pop singer in years, and not for the judges who sat in review and had themselves become enormous stars, their blunt verdicts transforming our cultural tongue. If there was to be another member in this illustrious group, it would be the show itself, which, in a few short years, had achieved the truly impossible, building an empire in a tottering industry, the likes of which had not been seen for decades.

  As unlikely as the story was, even more unlikely were its origins, half a decade before, and a world away, at the bottom of the globe.

  IF AMERICAN IDOL was to be the show that changed entertainment, it seems appropriate that the road to its creation should have begun with the man who, as much as anyone in our age, changed the face of civilization: South African President Nelson Mandela. And it seems appropriate that it started on a day Mandela himself called “one of the greatest days of my life.”

  The day he met the Spice Girls.

  November 1997: The pop group had been summoned to perform a private concert at the Mandela residence to entertain thirteen-year-old Prince Harry, who had accompanied his father on his first trip abroad since his mother’s death some three months earlier. The event was a huge success. “Girl Power Engulfs a Worshipful Mandela” was the headline of the Calgary Herald. “Nelson’s Really Really Spice” proclaimed London’s Sunday Mirror. Mandela was, as reported, charmed. Prince Charles was charmed. As for Harry—charmed doesn’t even begin to cover it.

  This intersection of politics and pop occurred when the Spice Girls were all-powerful, dominating a recording industry that was at the height of its success, the fall to come not even a rumor. In their three years together, the Spice Girls had been transformed from a semi-ludicrous collection of out-of-tune Bananarama clones into the most successful female group in history. Their first album had sold an unbelievable (even for those golden days) thirty million copies, making them arguably the most explosive British band debut since the Beatles. In fact, the single “Wannabe” debuted in America at number eleven, at the time the highest-ever U.S. debut by a British act, beating the previous record held by the Beatles for “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

  Industry insiders had estimated that the Spice Girls’ empire, which included a perfume line, deals with Pepsi and Cadbury, a PlayStation video game, a collection of dolls, and an upcoming film, would earn nearly a billion dollars before the decade was out.

  But it had been a lot of work. Dashing from recording sessions, to filming endorsements, to their current yearlong world tour, the Spice Girls had been in perpetual motion since they had exploded onto the pop scene. “He’s been flogging them to death,” a source close to the group said of the workload their manager had placed on them.

  So on this magical night, flirting with a man who survived decades in prison to liberate the majority of his nation from their chains, the thought may have occurred to the young singers, why couldn’t the Spice Girls be liberated?

  And when the Spice Girls envisioned breaking their chains, they saw them held by the man the press had dubbed “Svengali Spice,” their manager, Simon Fuller.

  At that moment, Fuller was in Italy recuperating from back surgery. He had planned the Spices’ world tour with the double benefit of capitalizing on a loophole in British tax law that allows citizens a break on taxes provided they go a full year without stepping foot on British soil. He had made extensive plans to spend the year ahead traveling with the band, as well as overseeing the empire from his homes on the Mediterranean and in the Caribbean. However, just two weeks after the Mandela evening, watching from his recovery bed as his troop picked up an armful of trophies at the British MTV awards, Fuller received a phone call. His band—the band whose empire he had built from nothing, whose five monikers were known in every corner of the planet, whose success had turned into not just a recording career but a genuine multimedia empire—that band would no longer be requiring his services. The Spice Girls were sacking their Svengali, Simon Fuller.

  There must, he thought, be a better way.

  Already a legendary éminence grise in the British music world by the time he was in his early thirties, Fuller had risen by seeming force of will, shunning the traditional routes for advancement at the major labels and finding his own way up the ladder. Succeeding in a music industry that he found snobbish, cut off from its public, and obsessed with “cool” over popularity, the thirty-seven-year-old had pulled o
ff perhaps the biggest coup of any independent manager. Now, it seemed, he was right back where he started.

  The few profiles that have been written on Simon Fuller give the impression of two completely different people. On the one hand, there’s the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain, the shadowy creator of a vast international multimedia empire who lives a life divided between seven homes on four continents; the ruthless negotiator and the Spice Girls mastermind whose interests today extend from sports (managing the career of David Beckham) to fashion (a joint venture with designer Roland Mouret and a stake in a modeling agency) to films (producing a project featuring heartthrob Robert Pattinson titled Bel Ami) to the perhaps most elaborate Internet launch in history.

  Then there are the other reports from those who know him, who repeat terms such as “low key,” “soft-spoken,” “courteous,” and “down to earth.” These reports talk of a man who, while living at the epicenter of Planet Earth’s pop culture, shuns the limelight and hasn’t sat for a formal interview in the better part of a decade.

  When you step into Fuller’s world, you’re instantly transported to the sleekest edge of modern entertainment. The Sunset Boulevard offices of 19, the two hundred–plus person management and production firm Fuller built, are a study in California whites, punctuated by shards of a WWII-era jet fuselage. The receptionist sits in the circle of a jet engine. Sheets of re-buffed antique gun metal form the countertop and walls. The effect gives a playful touch to what would otherwise be clean, minimalist, high-powered showbiz chic, complete with jaw-dropping view of the city from the twentieth floor above the Sunset Strip. As if playing into legend, the offices themselves are suggestive of a certain baton passing. The suite was formerly occupied by Playboy Enterprises. Fuller now sits in the corner suite where Hef himself once kept his chambers.

  Fuller stands to greet his visitor, offering a drink and then reminding me of the one time we had previously met, an introduction that had lasted all of ninety seconds three full years earlier. He projects an impressive self-contained confidence, paired with down-to-earth diffidence. At fifty, he could easily pass for ten years younger, his face soft but without the bagginess of age. He speaks in a gentle soothing lilt, and throughout our interviews seems perpetually alert for fluctuations in his visitor’s mood and schedule. In contrast with the typical in-your-face music biz manager, Fuller is all politeness and reserve.

  The tale of Fuller’s ascent to this peak is one of those Horatio Alger–type stories of luck and perseverance that these days only seem to happen in the entertainment industry. The man who would create Idol was born the youngest of three sons to a schoolmaster on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where his father was founding the first of several schools he would create, before moving the family to Africa, where Fuller would spend much of his early life.

  Ultimately, the family settled in Hastings, a seaside town of 100,000 on the southern tip of England. While far from the main arteries of the entertainment world, the town is actually celebrated by its inhabitants as the “Birthplace of Television,” thanks to the fact that John Logie Baird, the Scottish inventor who crafted the first working prototype, spent a few critical years living there.

  Off the showbiz map though it may have been, Hastings was not immune from the revolutions that shook the music world in the years following Fuller’s birth in 1960. Among his earliest memories are his guitar-playing elder brothers infusing the house with music. “My first ten years were spent listening to some of the greatest music ever played, particularly the Beatles. . . . I’d been hearing music all the time and it was a big part of my life.” When he got a little older, young Simon picked up a guitar but found, much to his frustration, that he “probably wasn’t going to be a musician. So I kind of moved on but my love for music continued to grow.”

  As any frustrated young would-be rock star can tell you, a passion for music with no outlet can be a dangerous thing. Searching for an outlet to make his stamp through music, Fuller channeled his impulses into a form of empire building that would soon shake the world. At his high school, a formal boys’ school fairly rigid even by the standards of the day, he took the unlikely first step on a trail that would lead to Idol. “We used to have loads of after-school societies. There was the poetry society. The this society and the that society. Then there was the music society but they only played classical music. I was kind of thinking, Well, this is not cool. So I set up the record club and once a week we’d play the latest hot album.”

  The enterprising Fuller charged members fifty pence (about fifty cents) to join the record club, which he used to buy a record player.

  “From the record club we played rock records and we’d get up amidst all the other societies, the historical society, like, ‘The record club. Today we’ll be playing the Stranglers’ new album or the Clash.’ ”

  By the time Simon reached sixteen, the record club’s renown had spread to the point where he was charged with booking the talent for school dances. “This kind of got me into the world of bands. . . . So I ended up knowing all the local bands and they all wanted to play.” By seventeen, Fuller had taken his relationships with the local talent to the next level, helping them get booked not only for the school dances, but at the other clubs and venues in the area. “In essence, at seventeen I called myself the manager.”

  Once out of high school, he expanded his reach, venturing up to London to book his bands there. “This is little old me at seventeen. I was speaking to all these agents, trying to come off as being a big shot. But in the end it worked really well and I booked in all the clubs in London like the Marquee and the Palace. All of those, and a couple of them on that alternative club scene were pretty big. But to me that was management and then it was like getting into record demos because you needed a demo to get the gigs. So I used the money we earned from playing to pay for demos. So I was a proper little manager, but the difference was that I didn’t really know what a record company was particularly. I was more of a tour manager than what I now know to be a manager.”

  It was while studying at art college and working with his stable of Hastings bands that Fuller first bridled at the limitations thrust upon a manager. “It was frustrating for me because I had real drive and passion and ambition, but as a manager you really are only as good as the artists you manage.”

  In a fluke, one of his bands, a mod revival group called the Teen Beats, was signed to a tiny label, getting as its first single a cover of the 1960s Troggs song “I Can’t Control Myself.” The song got radio play in Canada, where, to Fuller’s shock, it became the first hit in his career. “To me, it was like, ‘You’re huge in Montreal.’ To me Montreal was kind of North America. It felt like it was actually more people than Montreal, than literally Quebec and Toronto.”

  Not one to take the slow road, Fuller dropped out of school to accompany his band on tour, where after a few months of playing, they promptly broke up. Chalk up an early lesson on the tenuousness of the traditional manager’s position.

  “My dreams were shattered. I was kind of thinking, Shit. . . . I didn’t really know what the real music business was, record companies. I hadn’t entered that world. But I knew that to really make it I had to move to London. That was my big decision.”

  Fuller hit the big city, taking a tiny apartment and working as a waiter, trying to hustle some sort of contracts for his Hastings roster. One day, he was talking with an executive at a music publishing company, trying to push one of his bands. “He was a great guy, very sort of interested in what I was doing. After a while he said, ‘Look, Simon, I’ve got to tell you, I think your band sucks. But I think you’re brilliant. I think the best advice I could give you is to get a proper job working for a proper music company.’

  “I swear to God this was a revelation to me. I just hadn’t thought like that. To me, I’d always been working for artists. I’d always been hustling.”

  It’s at this point that the wunderkind through lines begin to appear in Fuller’
s story. Suddenly informed of the existence of a traditional industry, with traditional ladders to climb, Fuller interviewed for most of the major U.K. labels. He was offered three separate entry-level positions, but was ultimately offered a job at Chrysalis as a sort of talent scout, bringing in performers and songwriters and servicing the company’s clients.

  Fuller’s face lights up while telling of that first job. “It was a really proper job, to work the catalogue and get covers. It wasn’t a lot of money. It wasn’t a high-paying job. But the fact that I was being paid and I had expenses. I’d go and see bands and sign people. People tell me that I’ve had a great career, and I’ve always said to myself, almost, that the happiest I’ve ever been was then because I was young, doing what I loved and being paid for it. I had no care in the world. It was not about the money. I’d have done it all for nothing.”

  In a very short time, Fuller had earned an impressive reputation as a spotter of talent and material, having brought an array of hits, including Madonna’s “Holiday,” into the company. At the age of twenty-four, Simon Fuller was being considered for the executive track, complete with expense account, company car, assistant, and the high-flying lifestyle of a music industry player in those halcyon days—not the sort of offer that many twenty-four-year-olds would lose much sleep over, particularly those who had been waiting tables just three years before. But those years of scraping by had implanted something in Simon Fuller that apparently had not vanished during his brief stint under the establishment roof. So instead of saying, “Thank you, that sounds incredible,” Fuller’s response was “Hmmmmm. . . .”