Idol Worship

If you were in London the other morning and inside Simon Cowell's bedroom, gazing down upon Cowell's noble but rather blockish head resting on pure-white sheets, cushioned there by four pure-white pillows, you might have noticed a nearly quizzical expression on his face as he departed dreams for the dawn. He could have had many things on his mind. The fifth-season bravado success of his stateside show American Idol, which trashed the 2006 Grammys and the Olympics in the ratings and has drawn more viewers this year -- usually 35 million per episode -- than ever before, a historic anomaly that television's statisticians are still struggling to comprehend. The current popularity of his pop-opera boy band Il Divo, which he manufactured over several years and whose new album recently landed on the Billboard charts -- in the first-place position, of all happy things. Alternatively, perhaps, the anger directed at him for his latest crop of nasty comments on American Idol, from groups that include the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.

But no. As he stirs, only one thing is on his mind: whether a British health beverage known as Lemsip would go well with his morning porridge. He put it to himself this way: "When I call down to the housekeeper for breakfast to be brought up, should I ask for a Lemsip as well?"

Having decided he didn't care, he got the Lemsip.

"And that," he tells me several hours later, firmly, "was my first thought of the day."

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From sea to shining sea, people harbor the suspicion that Simon Cowell, 46, can't be in life as he is on TV, so very peevishly rude not only to the kids singing their wee hearts out on his show but also to his two hapless fellow judges, kindly Paula Abdul (his dating advice for her: "Try not to talk too much") and wishy-washy Randy Jackson ("reliable as an old sheepdog"). Only the show's frosty-haired host, Ryan Seacrest, seems to get off easy, but that may only be because Cowell is too busy trading you're-queer/no-you're-queer jokes with him to get down to business. Nonetheless, it's as if the viewing public thinks Cowell's comments are scripted and it's all an act, including his constantly simmering almost-feud with Abdul, which, this season, crescendoed with Cowell storming off the set in San Francisco and hiring a jet to take him back to L.A. The proximate cause: He'd had enough of Abdul's insults. OK, maybe that was grandstanding, but those who know him best maintain that's just the way he is. "What you see on TV," says Terri Seymour, his girlfriend of three years and a correspondent on Extra, "is what you get, exactly, in real life."