Song and Dance and Derision;
Would-Be Stars Risk Humiliation on 'American Idol.' For Fox, It's Paying Off.
Sharon Waxman, Washington Post Staff Writer
The Washington Post
July 28, 2002
LOS ANGELES-"Please can I see him, please, please, can I just see him? Just one hug,
then I'll leave."
Eighteen-year-old Louise Navarro is tearfully pleading -- with a reporter -- to
get a glimpse of RJ Helton, a 21-year-old finalist on Fox's summer hit TV show
"American Idol." Six weeks ago Helton was teaching ballet to
3-year-olds in Cumming, Ga. (population 4,220).
Now he has fans.
Navarro carries a bright pink tagboard sign that reads "Marry Me RJ,"
which she brought to the taping of last week's "American Idol" at
Television City, a huge production complex in the heart of Los Angeles. The
object of her desire sang the '60s hit "Under the Boardwalk," and was
quickly castigated by judge Simon Cowell as not giving "an 'American
Idol'-winning performance."
She couldn't have cared less. "He's so cute," she actually whimpers.
"He's -- like an angel."
Recent summers have seemed to bring an unscripted TV hit that grabs the national
fancy for a moment -- the first "Survivor" in 2000 and "Who Wants
to Be a Millionaire," in 1999. This year it's a newfangled, twice-weekly
version of an old-fashioned singing talent contest, "American Idol: The
Search for a Superstar."
While it's still not a hit on the scale of "Survivor," viewers have
been flocking to "American Idol" since it started in June with open
auditions in New York, Seattle, Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas.
For the last two weeks, it has been the No. 1 show among the coveted audience of
adults 18 to 49. As the contest has progressed, the audience has eliminated
contestants by calling in to vote for their favorites; seven finalists remained
after Wednesday, when A.J. Gil got the boot.
And while the show has been drawing a disproportionate number of preteen and
teenage girl viewers -- making 23-year-old finalist Justin Guarini,
he of the drowsy brown eyes and flop-mop hair, the undisputed favorite -- a
wider audience has been growing as the show has gathered steam and the field has
narrowed.
"We've gotten addicted to it," said Pamela Stine, 54, who came to the
live program Tuesday. She and family members started watching the show while on
vacation, and now they get together to watch tapes of the earlier auditions, in
which hundreds of people made fools of themselves before the panel of three
judges. The winner will get a recording contract with Cowell's label, S Records.
"I'm addicted to Simon," says her daughter, Kristen Cassidy, 36,
referring to Cowell, the poison-tongued British music executive who is
constantly aiming jabs at contestants and at fellow judge Paula Abdul. Says
Cassidy: "He's brutal, but I love it. He weeds it out."
The show has pushed Fox up among young viewers this month, while ABC, CBS and
NBC have lost ground. What's more, the show has attracted powerhouse advertisers
(particularly the ubiquitous Coca-Cola and Ford, which are sponsors every week),
unusual for a network that has been known to reach into the gutter for ratings
with shows like "Cops," "When Animals Attack" or the widely
derided "Temptation Island."
"It's enormously profitable, which is why we're so excited about it,"
says Fox Television Chairman Sandy Grushow. "This is a show advertisers are
proud and excited to be associated with."
The fans, clearly, have a different agenda. A couple of girls are lingering
in the auditorium with a sign: "Lustin' for Justin."
"American Idol" got its start in England last year under the name
"Pop Idol" and became a ratings sensation there. What's more, it
actually did make a star of the contest's winner, 23-year-old Will Young, whose
single "Evergreen" (no, not the Barbra Streisand hit) sold 1.3 million
copies.
Even the runner-up, Gareth Gates, launched a career off the show; he, too, got a
recording contract and released a remake of the old Righteous Brothers hit
"Unchained Melody" that has sold 1.2 million copies. Both are being
handled by one of the show's producers, Simon Fuller, a music manager who has
contractually tied up the rights to all the American finalists.
Other recent attempts to revive the star-search formula have not fared as well.
"Making the Band," an ABC show about the attempt to launch a boy band
called O-Town, was not a hit and got demoted to MTV. The WB had "Pop
Stars," about the making of a girl band, which did well enough to warrant a
sequel, but it never caught fire in the ratings.
While no one can say for sure why one show works and another doesn't, a key
difference here seems to be the interactive element, with the audience getting
to choose who survives the competition. (In the last two rounds, some 8 million
calls were recorded, but you can call as many times as you like within a
two-hour window.) Obviously it doesn't hurt that all the contestants are young,
between 16 and 25, and gorgeous. At least one is a former beauty queen.
And undeniably, there is a love-hate cult that has sprung up around the
often-bitchy judge Cowell, who reduces unlucky contestants to tears, and whose
harsh style is grating on the nerves of his two fellow judges. Two weeks ago
after Cowell referred to RJ Helton and other contestants as "losers,"
fellow judge Randy Jackson, a respected American music executive, stood up and
looked like he might start a fistfight.
"I've been sitting here week after week," he warned. "You can't
call these people losers. This is crazy. This is America." He sat back
down, but Jackson -- about twice Cowell's size -- had made his point.
As the animosity has grown, particularly between Abdul and Cowell, they've
increasingly begun to trade barbs. Recently Abdul, the singer-choreographer,
muttered to the Brit: "You are so weird." Cowell, moments later,
cautioned, "Paula, please, adults are talking."
As one of the show's hosts noted during the Jackson-Cowell confrontation,
"That's good TV."
At a presentation given by the show in Pasadena last week for television
critics, the hostility did not seem to be staged. Cowell, seated on a dais next
to Abdul, stayed as far away from her as possible, while insisting that his
intention as a judge was to simply be honest with young people who hope to make
it in an industry that doesn't sugar-coat its appraisals of talent.
Talking to reporters later, Abdul disagreed. "I've run hundreds of
auditions. It's hard enough as an artist to hear, 'Thank you very much,' which
can start the tapes in your head of 'You're horrible, you sucked.' You don't
need someone telling you, 'You sucked.' "
Abdul says she feels conflicted about being on the show -- never mind that it's
the best thing to happen to her career in years. "American Idol" keeps
viewers riveted not only with song and dance but -- as has become the norm on
television -- with the spectacle of public humiliation. Rejection may be endemic
to the industry, Abdul says, but humiliation is not.
Other celebrities have approached her, Abdul says -- Don Henley of the Eagles,
Ed McMahon, Faith Ford of "Murphy Brown" -- to say they love
"American Idol," but to ask her to "tell people it's not like
that. This is sadistic. There wouldn't be an industry if it was like this.
"It is television, it is heightened, but the [claim] of
Simon is that this is how it is, but it's not. If it really were, we'd all
quit."
She adds: "If Simon were judging Simon, he'd kick his own ass."
And despite the fact that the cattiness does make for fun viewing, co-executive
producer Nigel Lythgoe thinks it can go too far, and has.
"I keep moaning at the judges, it's not about them, they've had their
careers. The moment they start slagging each other off all the time, the show
loses credibility," he says. "To threaten each other is stupid,
childish. The kids' talent has to take over. If it's going to take off, it has
to be about the kids."
So who are the kids? At this stage, there are seven, and all have some
measurable dose of singing chops, stage presence and star quality. Christina
Christian, 21, is a willowy undergrad at the University of Florida and a
favorite of the ill-tempered Cowell, even when she sang "When a Man Loves a
Woman" noticeably off-key on Tuesday. (He pronounced her "Incredible,
amazing.")
Kelly Clarkson, 20, from Fort Worth, stubbornly declines to show her navel (on
Tuesday she actually exposed her midriff, but covered the navel with a long
black necktie) but seems to improve from week to week; her rendition of the
Aretha Franklin classic "Natural Woman" brought the audience to its
feet and left the judges in awe.
Takoma Park-born Tamyra Gray, a former Miss Atlanta who seems born to the stage,
has a voice to match her looks. Nikki McKibbin is the resident loner, with her
tongue stud and bipolar hair (half-red, half-blond), but the judges like her
stubborn individuality; the Liv Tylerish hard rocker Ryan Starr, 19, seems to be
losing ground from week to week, while Helton, the 21-year-old heartthrob from
Georgia, came back from his "loser" confrontation with Cowell to hang
on to his spot in the competition.
Regardless, his mother, Sue Helton, has no doubt her boy will win. She is an
administrative assistant for an architecture firm, her husband is an executive
for Popeye's Chicken, and she and RJ were first in line at the "Idol"
auditions in Atlanta.
"I always knew he'd be discovered," she says backstage after the
Tuesday performances. "It was just a matter of being in the right place at
the right time." Despite Cowell's derision, Helton found her son's
performance "awesome." A younger brother and sister grab him around
the midsection as he comes into the greenroom after some cast photos.
But the real star in the making seems to be Guarini, who had the audience on
its feet and the girls swooning with his rendition of "Sunny" on
Tuesday. His mom, Kathy Guarini, looked positively shell-shocked after the show.
"It's surreal. We've feel like we've been taken to another planet,"
she said breathlessly. "Six weeks ago we were another family in Doylestown,
Pennsylvania, mowing the lawn, living in our nice neighborhood. I was selling
real estate."
At the time, Justin had given up on his dream of being discovered overnight,
which he's tried in New York and then in Miami, where he ended up sweeping
floors in a bar. He moved back home and was performing at bar mitzvahs and
weddings in the evenings while selling security systems door to door in the day.
"People loved him. I thought maybe he'd be a salesman," said his mom.
She was ironing one day when she happened to catch an ad on Fox for the
auditions in New York; she printed the ad off the Internet and taped it to the
bathroom mirror -- "that's where I leave all my messages for Justin"
-- and he decided to try it.
The rest may well be history, but Justin Guarini is far from
some hayseed kid with stars in his eyes. His mom, handsome and youthful-looking
at 53, spent 15 years as a broadcast journalist, anchoring as Kathy Pepino for
CNN in Atlanta and ABC affiliates for years, bringing Justin to work, where he
would hang around in the anchor chair and sleep in her office between takes.
Justin's biological father, whom he resembles, is Eldrin Bell, the former police
chief of Atlanta.
The couple divorced when Justin was 5, and Guarini moved to her home town of
Philadelphia. As a kid Justin returned to Atlanta on summer vacations, meeting
dignitaries like Nelson Mandela, and traveling on a security detail to the
Olympics in Barcelona. He was mainly raised by his mother and her new husband,
Jerry Guarini, a physicist who designed radar systems for the Navy. Not exactly
your average small-town boy.
"He's a special kid," says his mom. "He has a very even
keel."
The other day he phoned her from the mansion in the Hollywood Hills where all
the contestants are secluded during the competition. "He said, 'I'm so glad
this didn't happen to me when I was 16. I wasn't ready. Now I'm ready.' "
She smiles. "I do think he's ready."