The 16th Minute
Tom McGrath
Philadelphia Magazine February, 2003  

Doylestown's Justin Guarini lucked into fame on American Idol. Now comes the hard part: turning it into a career

It was cold outside. and he hates being cold.

Still, as Justin Guarini stood on a frigid Manhattan sidewalk one year ago this month, awaiting his first American Idol audition, something inside him decided that maybe--just maybe--freezing his ass off would be worth it.

He'd arrived early--five in the morning--and though it would take hours to get in the front door, he was actually having a good time as he waited with several hundred other would-be Idol-ites on that cold New York street. Then again, when your job is selling home security systems door to door, even the worst day at an audition is better than the best day at work.

As it turned out, the cold temperature wasn't the only trouble. Even more disturbing was the chilly reaction he saw his fellow line-mates getting from trash-talking Idol judge Simon Cowell, a man with about as much warmth as a death-camp prison guard. They were walking in the door with stars in their eyes, but--thanks to Simon--walking out in tears.

Something amazing happened, though, when it was Justin's turn to face the wrath of Cowell. He didn't get Simonized. He got saluted.

"You know," Cowell said to him, "it's rare in competitions like this to find someone with your talent."

Someone with your talent? The statement was so astonishing that when Justin repeated it to the Idol camera crew a few moments later, the cameraman poked his head out from behind the lens to make sure he'd heard correctly.

As Justin's stepfather, Jerry, remembers with a laugh, "The guy couldn't believe it."

Well, it is pretty unbelievable, isn't it? Nine months ago, Doylestown's Justin Guarini was officially a nobody--a struggling show-biz wannabe who spent his days selling home alarm systems and his nights singing karaoke, all the while hoping that somehow, some way, he'd catch his big break. Today? Thanks to his second-place finish on last summer's American Idol, the break has officially been caught. The 24-year-old Guarini is as close as you can get to an overnight sensation--a kid who somehow managed to go from zero to famous in the space of about three months.

Just how hot is Justin? Hot enough that he's been on the covers of People, Entertainment Weekly and USA Today. Hot enough that British pop Svengali Simon Fuller, the man who pushed the Spice Girls and a slew of other successful pop projects (including American Idol), is now his manager. Hot enough that he's been interviewed by Oprah and excoriated on Saturday Night Live. Hot enough that recently, on the Internet, you could buy your very own Justin Guarini wall clock.

But will the hands stop moving after 15 minutes? Certainly, the push is on to make sure Justin Time isn't just a fad. Soon, Guarini's record company, rca, will release his first single, and in April comes his debut album, to be followed this summer by his first movie, an American Idol "road picture" in which he co-stars with AI winner Kelly Clarkson.

There is, to be sure, an element of good ol' American cashing-in here--of trying to make as much dough as possible while the dough-making is good. But for Justin, more is at stake than fortune or even fame. This is about seeing a lifelong dream come true.

He has wanted to be a performer, he says, "since I can remember wanting anything, really. Because music was always part of my life. And my parents, thankfully, let me go in that direction. They didn't ever say, 'You need to be a doctor.' They realized I had a passion for it, and they were always very supportive."

It's late Saturday afternoon, and Guarini is sitting in a small office inside Atlantic City's Trump Taj Mahal, where tonight he and the nine other American Idol finalists will continue their concert tour. With stubble on his light-brown skin and a fuzzy, floppy black hat pulled down over his now well-known curls, he looks weary--and with good reason. Not only is this the fourth week of the tour (last night was Wilkes-Barre--who said fame was glamorous?), but the past several months have been a nonstop loop of rehearsals and performances and interviews and personal appearances.

Whether Justin can, in fact, turn his current 15 minutes of fame into something more substantial and enduring is certainly no sure thing. After all, the reality-show celebrities we've seen in the past several years haven't exactly had long shelf-lives in the American consciousness. (Anybody spotted Darva Conger lately? Where have you gone, Richard Hatch?)

But if Justin is worried that he's heading back to Karaokeville, he's not showing it. In fact, to paraphrase that noted pop-culture critic, Winston Churchill: Justin Guarini believes this is not the end of his time in the spotlight, nor even the beginning of the end. It is, perhaps, simply the end of the beginning.

"There's so much following-the-crowd going on [in music]. I think the fans want to see something different," he says, when the talk turns to where he and the rest of the Idol gang can go from here. "I don't think we have to fall into the same old thing everybody else is doing. Because we've been given an opportunity, I think, to kind of reshape the industry."

Reshape the industry? Isn't that pretty ambitious talk from a guy who--let's be honest here--basically came in second on a game show?

"Well," Justin Guarini says coolly, "I'm an ambitious guy."

It's impossible to overstate, really, just how dramatically Justin's Idol-ness has changed his life and the lives of those close to him.

"It's so funny to think that only a few months ago we were hanging out at an 'n sync concert together," says Justin's ex-girlfriend, Jenna Katsaros. Outgoing and attractive, with large, dark eyes, 23-year-old Katsaros was actually the first casualty in Justin's Idol journey. Last spring, when Justin learned he'd be moving to California to appear on Idol, the two put a hold on their year-and-a-half-long relationship (though Katsaros spent several weeks in California last summer "as a friend," she says).

"I remember saying to him the night we saw 'n sync that the next concert I wanted to go to was his," continues Katsaros, a graduate student at Villanova. "And you know what? It was. Because the next thing I saw was an American Idol show."

Today, in the long teen-idol tradition that stretches back to Fabian and Frankie Avalon, Guarini himself is getting the 'n sync treatment. Fifteen-year-old girls shriek when he performs. A dozen websites have popped up devoted to him. And he can hardly go anywhere without having his face (or, maybe more accurately, his hair) recognized.

He's adjusted to it, say those close to him, about as well as you can expect. "When we were back in L.A. and the competition was going on and they were having to make a lot of personal appearances, he said to me, 'Mom, I am so glad this didn't happen to me when I was 18. I could never have handled it,'" Kathy Guarini says. "So I think now he has a much firmer foot on the ground."

The first sign that fame had arrived came, fittingly, in the land of jackpots itself, Las Vegas. It was July, and Justin had just become one of AI's final 10 contestants. Jerry and Kathy Guarini had hoped to whisk their son away for a weekend of R and R--when they discovered, astonishingly, that he was now a celebrity. Justin was recognized as he sat poolside at the Bellagio. As he sat in the casino lounge. Even as he walked down the street. Indeed, at one point, a crowd along the sidewalk began chanting, "American Idol! American Idol!"

It's gone that way, more or less, ever since. When Justin sneaked home to Doylestown for a couple of days last fall, word got out, and fans besieged the Guarini homestead. One group camped in the family's backyard and took flash photos; another--three teenage girls--rang the doorbell and stood catatonic as Justin greeted them in the foyer--that is, until one of their mothers burst past them, screeched, and wrapped Justin in a huge hug.

"Fortunately for him, it's about the thousandth time it's happened, so he knows how to handle it. He just sits there quietly," Jerry Guarini says. "But you know, it's amazing as a parent to see your son receive such adulation. I mean, it's almost god-like."

It's a bright Thursday morning, and the Guarinis--married for 17 years, with eight kids between them (seven from Jerry's first marriage)--are sitting in the kitchen of their Doylestown home. They're an interesting match. Jerry, 69, a former Navy physicist who looks like the comedian Buddy Hackett, is outgoing and emotional; Kathy, 53, a blond former television anchor who now sells real estate, is more reserved and sophisticated.

If 2002 was the year that Justin went shooting skyward, for Jerry and Kathy it was a year of extraordinary highs--and even lower lows. The trouble started in early August, when Kathy, who was in California most of the summer, felt pain in her back as she picked up a suitcase. Doctors discovered a baseball-sized tumor near her pancreas and kidney, and scheduled her for surgery at ucla Medical Center. Unfortunately, the day before the operation, Blue Cross informed her that California was too expensive--she'd have to fly home to Philly to have the procedure done.

"Jesus Christ," Jerry says, exasperated. "Pardon my language, but I couldn't believe it. You cannot believe the pressures, having a child in a show like that. And now to know that you have a tumor larger than a baseball--it was just beyond belief. And my wife had a nervous collapse--I mean, she was awake for 72 consecutive hours. And she couldn't stop thinking about her circumstances, so we finally got her to the hospital, and it took five days to stabilize her."

"I just had a meltdown," Kathy says. "When I got my diagnosis, I thought I was going to die. Because on my father's side of the family, nine people have died of cancer. So when they said 'mass' and 'pancreas,' I thought, oh fine, here we go. And I did truly think I was going to be dead within the year."

The story has a happy ending. Blue Cross ultimately relented and allowed the surgery to take place in California. The tumor was benign. And though she lost one of her kidneys--and was so heavily sedated that she slept through Justin's performance in the finals--Kathy is back on her feet, recovering. Still, it's a reminder that good times hardly ever show up solo on our doorsteps.

How did Justin handle the stress? Jerry says he was "stoic." Justin himself says he relied heavily on his Idol cast-mates--and his faith that nothing could possibly go wrong, at least not right now. "There was something inside me that knew everything was going to be all right," he says. "It wasn't gonna happen in a bad way--everything was going so well with American Idol. ... I held on to that belief, and it was right."

Whether justin truly be-lieves in destiny--or has simply been a quick study in the art of the innocuous celebrity sound bite--is tough to tell. But if he does have faith in fate, it's understandable, since in a way it seems he was born to be famous. Example number one: His mother, then known as Kathy Pepino, was an anchor at an abc affiliate in Columbus, Georgia, when Justin was born, and the day she gave birth, the station announced his arrival on the air. One person who heard about the broadcast was First Lady Rosalyn Carter, whom Kathy had gotten to know when Jimmy Carter was Georgia's governor. The First Lady called the President, and Jimmy Carter phoned from Air Force One to welcome Justin into the world.

It wasn't his only exposure to the famous and powerful. Kathy and her first husband, Eldrin Bell, Justin's father, divorced when Justin was five, and Justin spent most summers after that in Atlanta, tagging along wherever his father went. Bell, who is black, is one of Atlanta's liveliest figures--a former city police chief, head of a private security consulting firm, and a singer in his own right. Through his various connections, he introduced his son to an array of famous people--Nelson Mandela, Jack Nicholson, Michael Douglas, Jermaine Jackson. Not a bad boot camp for fame.

"I was fortunate to be exposed to a lot of the entertainment industry when I was a kid," Justin says now, matter-of-factly. "And I think that really is one of the main reasons why I feel so grounded and so relaxed in this atmosphere--because I've had that third-person perspective on the whole thing, and I've seen the elements that cause people to rise and fall."

So who made an impression?

"Good grief," he says. "Hmm ... Gladys Knight was someone I got to speak with frequently as a child. But it's not just one person, because I met so many different people, from politicians to entertainers. I was six and seven and 10 years old, and I had to learn how to handle myself around these people. And I got to watch them handle their fame."

Justin is a good athlete--he co-captained the volleyball team at Central Bucks East--but music has always been his goal. He sang in choirs beginning at age four. He had the leads in practically every school play. (Pink, incidentally, was a middle-school classmate.) He was part of a vocal group, the Midnight Voices, in high school and college.

It tells us what a game of inches fame is that at the time he went for his American Idol audition, Guarini was the quintessential struggling young performer. After two years at Philly's University of the Arts and two more at a performing-arts college in New York, he'd left school and was officially trying to Make It in the Business. There were some near-misses--between 1999 and 2002, he auditioned 11 times for The Lion King on Broadway--but he spent most of his time treading the not-so-glamorous underbelly of the show-business world.

"I don't knock any of that, because it really helped," he says of his stint singing karaoke at Rosemore's Pub in Warminster and working for Cutting Edge Entertainment, a party-entertainment group in Huntingdon Valley. "I mean, karaoke kept me singing. And Cutting Edge helped keep me dancing and acting. And all that fed into my experience on American Idol."

So now comes the hard part.

Does Justin Guarini have the talent to be a lasting star in the entertainment galaxy? The short answer--it's too soon to tell. For all the hype American Idol generated, the show is the entertainment equivalent of putting a bunch of raw minor-leaguers on the field at Yankee Stadium. Most of them clearly don't belong there, while even those that might have big-league ability need more seasoning before they're really ready to play.

That said, the consensus is that Justin definitely has, well, something. Simon Cowell called it "the X factor" during a critique of one of Justin's performances--that mysterious quality that just makes us want to watch certain people when they're on a stage. "The X factor," Cowell said, "is you."

Ironically, the biggest obstacle Justin faces may be Idol itself. The more he's seen as a novelty act--as a kid who just happened to get lucky on a TV show--the less seriously he's going to be taken. It's one reason, perhaps, that he talks so passionately about his forthcoming CD. If he really want to "reshape the industry," as he puts it, he knows he's only going to get one shot at it.

"It's not something that's just thrown together," he says of the new album, on which he's collaborating with various producers. "It's gonna be my 'i have arrived' thing in the industry. It's going to be something I firmly believe in.

"I think it's gonna have some things people haven't seen or heard in a while," he continues. "There's some really old-school stuff swirling around in my head--Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye. I take that stuff, and I want to meld that with some of the newer stuff, like the Maxwells, even stuff like John Mayer. There's so many influences I have right now."

Of course, the most intriguing question of all might be this: What happens if the album isn't a hit? What happens if 15 minutes is all that Justin Guarini gets?

"Fame is fleeting," says a man who knows all about that quest for a 16th minute, Kato Kaelin. "One month the phone can be ringing off the hook, and the next, it's not. And that can be tough to handle psychologically."

Does Kaelin, who has actually done some work with American Idol producers FreMantleMedia, have any advice for Justin? "Sure," he says. "You just have to be prepared to be forgotten."

"Oh, he's definitely been working on it," says Kelly Clarkson.

It's two and a half hours before showtime in Atlantic City, and the AI cast is in the midst of an hour-long autograph session with about 75 fans. But the topic of conversation isn't a new tune or dance step. It's something much more important: the proper way to sign an autograph.

"Look at that." Clarkson giggles, pointing to the program Justin has signed. "He just dots a line. That looks like an idol's autograph."

Justin smiles and shakes his head. If he's been practicing, he's not saying.

When the session is over, the tour manager approaches Justin to tell him what's next on his schedule. He puts her off politely and strides toward the door, where Jerry and Kathy Guarini have just arrived. He hasn't seen them since the start of the tour in San Diego four weeks ago. They hug, then chat.

The Guarinis aren't the same people they were a year ago, and they know it. "We feel thankful to God that He gave us new life," Jerry Guarini says, looking back on what's happened to him and his wife during the past year. "We started a whole new life the day we found out Kathy's tumor was benign."

The same could be said, of course, for their son. The kid who was cold last February has now been deemed hot--at least for the moment.

"When he was home for those two and a half days after the show ended, and he got to hang out with his friends and they went to their regular karaoke places, he said to me, 'Wow, I finally feel normal again,'" Kathy Guarini says. The feeling can't have lasted long.

essentialjustin.com