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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."
* * * *
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."
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And that very well may be. I'd hung out on the American Idol set several years ago and had seen Abdul in Cowell-induced tears even when the cameras weren't rolling. Plus, there's a long, sordid history to Cowell's verbal high jinks, starting from the age of three when he told his mom, all gussied up for a party, that she reminded him of a poodle. But this time around, in London, I see nothing of the sort. The Cowell I see is many things -- among them charming, boorish, polite, concerned, obscene, honest, open and evil, maybe -- but rude, not once.
* * * *
His early years were privileged ones: his mother a dancer; his late father a successful real estate man; the family, which also includes one younger brother, three half brothers and one half sister, all living north of London, in blissful ease, on a leafy baronial estate named Abbots Meade. By age five he had almost burned down the house twice; on one of those occasions he lit on fire a Father Christmas costume to prove to his younger brother, Nicholas, that Father Christmas couldn't exist and soon surely wouldn't exist. Four years later, when he was nine, Cowell succumbed to an urge to start smoking and drinking. The cigarettes he filched from ashtrays; the drinks he walked off with during family parties when no one was looking. He consumed his contraband mainly in the ten-acre garden out back, often in an igloo hand-built from a collection of twigs and finished off with a long, dark entrance tunnel designed to intimidate and frighten off nosy elders. The structure lasted until the day Cowell left a lit cigarette behind and "the whole thing went whoosh."
One time, while on a bus, he pointed a toy gun at the driver and told him to keep the bus moving, which the driver did for ten terrorized miles. Cowell had been joking, of course, but how was the driver to know?
At their wits' end, his parents sent him away to boarding school. He dropped out two years later, at sixteen, shortly after distinguishing his academic career with a four-month suspension for drinking.
A bit later, he landed a mailroom job in the publishing division of EMI Records.
* * * *
Cowell's current office, located up five flights inside the Sony BMG building on Fulham High Street, in London, is austere. The only personal touches I can see are a number of award plaques on one wall, a small framed picture of him with his girlfriend, another of him and his mom.
Pulling close to his meticulously organized desk, Cowell removes a cigarette from a pack of Kools and lights up, in violation of company policy. "What are they going to do, fire me?" he says. "Ha!" I tell him I recently quit, whereupon he picks up his Kools and offers me one. The only thing he says about this offer is, "I'm looking after you."
Cigarette refused, we begin with a few preliminaries.
ME: Were you ever humiliated as a child?
COWELL: Nothing in particular stands out.
ME: Have any recurring nightmares?
COWELL: No.
ME: Any recurring dreams at all?
COWELL: No.
ME: Were you ever caught masturbating by your mother or
father?
COWELL: No!
ME: Your two longest relationships have been with Terri and a
woman named Sinitta?
COWELL: Look, there've been a lot of quick ones in between.
ME: How long was the shortest?
COWELL: A day? An hour? A minute?
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ME: Is "monogamy" in your vocabulary?
COWELL: I don't know.
ME: How do you show affection?
COWELL: I don't really know. In a way, I think the more sort of cold you are, the more they try. I find displays of emotion and affection a little awkward and embarrassing.
ME: Kissing in public?
COWELL: Oh, God, no. No, no, no, no.
ME: Have you ever told a girl you love her?
COWELL: Probably when I was around seventeen. I lost my virginity to her. Actually, I can't remember telling her. But I'm sure I did.
ME: So when you sign off on the phone with Terri, how does that go? "Bye"?
COWELL: Yeah.
ME: No "Love you"?
COWELL: I can't remember, to be honest with you. Probably not. This tastes very good, by the way.
ME: I'll have one.
COWELL: I'm happy. I'm happy.
And so there we sit with our cigarettes. Already I know this about Cowell: When he wants to, he can clip his sentences to the nub and still keep a charmingly humorous twinkle in his voice. Also: Fairly intrusive questions don't throw him, and it may be impossible to pry secrets of a Freudian nature out of him, should they exist. Also: His girlfriend, perhaps, is more to be pitied than envied. Finally: He could well be a very, very bad man and not even know it. I think this while exhaling smoke and wondering what's behind some of the things he says and does.
* * * *
While delivering mail at EMI, the seventeen-year-old Cowell began pestering one higher-up after another for a better job. He drove his bosses crazy until he got his way. Eventually, he joined forces with a friend at EMI to start an in-house label called Fanfare. Suddenly, he was a bona fide record producer -- albeit one without an artist to produce. One night, however, out at a club in Mayfair, he was introduced to a smoking-hot disco-and-dance singer named Sinitta. Sinitta wanted to make a record, Cowell wanted to make Sinitta, and both got their way: In 1988, on the Fanfare label, Cowell's new girlfriend released a record called So Macho, which turned into a million-copy-selling hit and earned Cowell a $1.5 million bundle. Alas, in 1989, he sold his company and, in a financial snafu, lost everything he had, including his house and his fancy Porsche 911 Cabriolet. He went back to Abbots Meade to live with his folks and contemplate his future.
* * * *
ME: What's the most difficult emotion for you to express to
another person?
COWELL: Baby talk, that ghastly sort of baby talk boyfriends and
girlfriends do.
ME: Does Terri have a pet name for you?
COWELL: She does, actually. She's started to call me Pumpkin. What
am I supposed to call her in return? Bubbles?
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ME: If you were to lie about something personal, what would you lie about?
COWELL: I lie about whatever is appropriate at the time.
ME: You don't have a problem with lying?
COWELL: No! If it gets me out of trouble or makes a situation easier. Absolutely! And it's a fairly continuous thing, I would say.
ME: Can I have a cigarette?
COWELL: Here. Good.
ME: Why is it good?
COWELL: Oh, I don't know. It amuses me.
The way he says this, with grace notes of liltingly mellifluous Anthony Hopkins-like smoothness, is unnerving and seductive. He takes you in like that, before you know it.
Actually, has any British import in recent history rooted any deeper into the national psyche than Cowell? His words and manners have been debated constantly for the past five years: Is he a good thing or a bad thing? He is bad, one side says, because he says mean, hurtful things and sets a bad example for young people who would otherwise turn out A-OK. He is good, the other side says, because he alone is not afraid to tell today's young people -- spoiled-rotten brats, presumably, with a self-righteous sense of entitlement instilled by namby-pamby parents -- that their achievements suck, that their dreams suck, that maybe they should get different dreams altogether, and while they're at it, how about shedding a few pounds and wearing clothes that don't suggest massive gender confusion?
The way things are going, we may never be rid of Cowell and his truths. Earlier this year -- after settling a lawsuit brought by British Idol creator Simon Fuller, who claimed that Cowell's new top-rated series on British TV, The X Factor, was basically just an Idol rip-off -- Fox signed him to five more American Idol seasons. This came after weeks of negotiations that were widely reported as hardball but that Cowell describes "as gentlemanly as these negotiations can be," after which his paycheck rose from a reported $8 million annually to some number Cowell can't bring himself to reveal. The figure must be astronomical, though, because other networks have offered Cowell in excess of $25 million a year to leave Idol and thereby wreck its future prospects, after a 2005 season in which the show earned Fox more than $900 million in revenue and led commentators to say things like "American Idol is the most powerful show in TV history . . . No other program has come close."
"American Idol is like a juggernaut," Cowell says. "It demolishes everything in its path, and our competitors go, 'What do we do to get it off the market?' Their hatred of the show is such that they would do anything."
(Excerpted from RS 997, April 6,2006)