Читать книгу Simon Cowell - The Man Who Changed the World - David Nolan - Страница 7

Tiptoeing through the shrubs and bushes, the little boy felt drawn to the buzz of light and noise that seemed to glow from his neighbour’s house. The young Simon Cowell loved nothing better than to peer over the garden fence of his childhood home in the village of Elstree, north of London. It would take him a little longer than most kids to get to the garden fence, as the detached property he and his family lived in was set on five acres of land. But it was worth the trek, because of what he saw on the other side.

By any standards to be expected in the early 1960s, the Cowells were comfortably off. Their home Abbots Mead was an eight-bedroomed affair with a separate lodge house. It was tended by a gardener and a cleaner, and the family had a live-in nanny. They took several holidays abroad each year – one would be in Bermuda – so they knew luxury when they saw it. But the view little Simon got of his neighbours’ homes from over that fence was something altogether different. It was like spying on another, even more glamorous, planet.

On one side of the Cowell sprawl their neighbour was Gerry Blatner, the UK boss of Warner Brothers. If a star was in town, plying their trade at the nearby film studios at Elstree and Borehamwood, they were sure to find themselves being entertained in some style at Blatner’s house. In later years Simon Cowell would recall stars such as Richard Burton, Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and, particularly, Roger Moore – who was filming the hit sixties TV show The Saint – descending on the upmarket village.

But there was more. On the other side of Abbots Mead was British movie star Joan Collins and her then husband, the singer and actor Anthony Newley. The pair had settled into the adjoining property, Friars Mead, in 1964 after Joan gave birth to her first child. The noise, laughter and glamour that wafted over the Cowell fence from both sides during those evening spying missions would have a profound effect on the boy. ‘As a kid, I would look over the fence at this great house and see everyone – Robert Mitchum, Elizabeth Taylor, all these great actors – having the time of their lives,’ Cowell later recalled in an interview with journalist Stephen Armstrong. ‘I remember thinking from a very, very early age, “God, I hope I grow up and have a nice house so I can have parties like that.”’

It was at those moments, peering at these creatures from another planet, that Simon Cowell decided that he wanted to get into show business.

The extended, slightly convoluted family that Simon Cowell was born into already had a fair few touches of showbiz of its own. His mother – known to all as Julie – was born Josie Dalglish in 1925 and had been an actress and dancer from an early age, performing under the name Julie Brett. Her first marriage was to a fellow performer – an actor named Bertram. The marriage wasn’t to last long but did produce two children, Michael and Tony. The boys were very young when the split came.

Simon’s father, Eric Cowell, was some seven years older than Julie. He was a raffish estate agent who also already had two children – John and June. Eric’s marriage faltered when the children were aged five and four. June was a stage school girl, a contemporary of Francesca Annis, Susan George and Judy Geeson. She recalls being taken to film sets in a Bentley as a child. She appeared in the 1957 prisoner-of-war drama Seven Thunders, but her most memorable performance was in the cult science-fiction chiller Village of the Damned, playing one of a group of blonde-haired alien children taking over a sleepy English village. The film was released in 1960 to great critical acclaim and commercial success, but June was to lose her taste for performing in her teens, finding the attention she received from men in the industry distasteful.

Mum Julie was outgoing, the life and soul of the party. According to Simon, interviewed in The Times in 2007, she was, ‘A creature of the 1960s. She absolutely typified that whole Jackie Onassis glamorous look. Very energetic, very vivacious, very camp. During that time, she was in her element.’

Julie would love to tell the story of her silent, elongated courtship with Eric. Each week, Julie would travel by train to visit her mother. Always accompanied by a female friend, she would often notice a dark-haired, well-dressed man who took the same train. This continued for a full two years until, on one occasion, Julie’s friend couldn’t make it, and she made the trip alone. Eric saw his chance and took it, asking the young mum out for a drink. They became a couple soon afterwards but didn’t marry until 1961.

Eric and Julie already had three boys and a girl between them, but wanted children together to complete their family. It would prove to be a long, difficult process. Although she became pregnant quickly, complications arose and at eight months she had a baby boy by Caesarean section. The poorly child, named Stephen, would, sadly, survive for only one week. Julie and Eric continued with their attempts to add to their family and, after two more miscarriages and ongoing hormone treatment, Julie became pregnant once more – again there were complications and she was hospitalised, convinced that things were set to go badly wrong once again.

When Simon was born on 7 October 1959, Julie still feared her baby wouldn’t survive. When it became clear the youngster would pull through, Eric Cowell insisted that his wife put aside her dreams of a show-business career and concentrate on being a full-time mum. ‘He wanted me to stop and, by then, I wanted to as well,’ Julie later told journalist Jenny Johnston. ‘I had a happy home life for the first time, and I wanted to be a full-time mother. It was just a wonderful, happy environment.’

The British musical landscape that existed when Simon Cowell was born was very different from the one he would seismically shift in years to come. Shirley Bassey, Adam Faith and new kid on the block Cliff Richard were the order of the day. The Number 1 song on everyone’s lips in October 1959 was Bobby Darin’s ‘Mack the Knife’ – the very song that Simon would later name as his favourite of all time on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs programme.

Elvis Presley had exploded onto the worldwide stage three years earlier, but was by now cooling his heels in the US Army. Cowell would later recall being impressed how Presley – and particularly his manager Colonel Tom Parker – harnessed the power of television to boost record sales.

This was a pre-Beatles world waiting for the 1960s to happen – indeed John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison were still playing in a band called Johnny and the Moondogs in 1959. When they became The Beatles, they too would have an enormous hold on Simon Cowell, not just for their songs or clothes but for what they represented: that there was no limit to how famous you could become or how celebrated your work could be. ‘The Beatles were the first band to be photographed living it up in what we now perceive as a traditional rock star fashion,’ Cowell would later write in his book about show business I Don’t Mean To Be Rude, But … ‘For the first time young people looked at them and thought wistfully: that could be me.’

Television was still limited at the end of the fifties, with just two channels on offer. One of the most popular shows of the period was the BBC’s Top Town. It had an interesting format: a panel, made up of a singer (Vera Lynn), a band leader (Eric Robinson) and a showbiz entrepreneur (Leslie MacDonnell), went on the road judging the undiscovered talent on offer in various parts of the country. How quaint – it could never work today …

Simon had been born in Brighton – Julie Cowell still lives there today – but the family, with its complex series of step-relationships to accommodate, settled in Elstree after Eric came across the dilapidated Abbots Mead mansion house and decided to renovate it. With a high wall and heavy gates at the front of the property and woodland and views across a valley to the rear, this was an impressive Georgian home by anyone’s standards.

‘My earliest memory of Simon is me pushing him in a big pram along Elstree High Street,’ Simon’s half brother Tony told the Daily Mail in 2007. ‘I adored him, but I hated taking him out because of the pram. It was the 1960s and everything was a sort of pink then. I found that, if I pushed him really fast, swerving in and out along the pavement, he laughed. The faster I went, the more he laughed. He was about two. Simon’s very into speed and fast cars now, and we reckon that was his introduction to it.’

By then Julie had given birth again – another boy named Nicholas. He was just 18 months younger than Simon, and the boys were so close in age and looks that they were mistaken for twins. They were even dressed alike to complete the illusion. ‘We were brought up practically like twins,’ Nicholas later told the Mail on Sunday. ‘Simon is 18 months older than me but I was always bigger for my age, and, once we hit three or four, we were pretty much the same size. We were seriously competitive and both of us were also pretty obsessed with money. From a really young age, we had to work for our pocket money from Mum. We’d do anything – washing cars, carol singing, mowing lawns, whatever. Neither of us was remotely into saving money in those days – that was boring. We’d spend it on cigarettes and sweets. We were always together, always taking the mick out of each other.’

The pair were as thick as thieves, be it by entertaining the rest of the family by putting on plays and shows, or driving them mad with their bad behaviour – and it would always be Simon leading the charge when it came to wrongdoing. ‘Simon was completely out of control as a kid – a real prankster’ was how half-brother Michael described Simon in an interview with the Mirror. ‘He first caused problems as a baby and wouldn’t sleep. From then on he completely ruled the roost. He had a gilded childhood and was completely fearless. Nothing has really changed in that respect.’ Michael himself moved out of the Cowell household by the age of 15.

‘I used to babysit Simon and Nicholas when Dad and Julie went out, and it was a nightmare,’ Simon’s half-sister June later recalled in an interview with journalist Alison Smith-Squire. ‘They were terribly naughty. They would pretend they were asleep, then creep out of bed and open the front door, leaving it ajar. I would run around the house frantically searching, thinking they were wandering around outside. Then I’d hear muffled giggling and discover the pair of them would be hiding in a linen basket.’

Nicholas would be press-ganged into whatever crackpot scheme his brother would conjure up. In fact he would be involved in Simon’s first venture into music – and his first experience of music criticism. ‘He formed a band with his brother and two friends,’ mum Julie later revealed to New! magazine. ‘We were on holiday in the Caribbean once and he convinced the hotel to let them play. They were awful!’

As they got older, Simon’s and Nicholas’s behaviour would become more and more cavalier. ‘There was a disused chicken run [in the grounds] and Nicholas and I took it over as our camp,’ Simon later recalled in an interview with the Sunday Times. ‘We pinched booze from our parents, put optics on the bottles, and hung them from strings. It was our own pub; we’d take in girls, and smoke and drink. But Mum looked inside one day. I came back to find our den demolished and our goodies gone. I was furious.’

You could perhaps forgive Simon for wanting a taste of the high life.

At home Simon would see his Cuban-cigar-chomping dad Eric jump into his E-type Jag every day and zoom into London like a Home Counties Austin Powers, returning home from work in the mid-evening to hear about the day’s adventures. In his absence, Julie – with the help of nanny Heather – ruled the household the best she could, but, with up to six kids in and out of the house at any one time, it was a tall order. Older half-brother Tony would be upstairs in his top-floor room, door firmly shut in true sulky-teen mode, the smell of cigarettes and the sound of Bob Dylan and the Beach Boys wafting temptingly from inside. His other half-brothers, John and Michael, would be doing their own thing. Sister June was a regular visitor from her natural mum’s house. All the children were treated equally and fairly – June in particular would regard Julie as her second mum.

Simon would later describe life at the rambling house off Barnet Lane in Elstree as ‘privileged and artistically rich’ and say that, despite the complex relationships within his extended family, they were a tight-knit bunch: ‘Incredibly close, yes, really close,’ he told CNN in 2006. ‘My brothers, my sister, my mum and dad … I mean we were more like an Italian family I would say.’

At the head of this ‘Italian’ family were of course Eric and Julie – outgoing, lively and living the dream. ‘I used to call them the chipmunks, those two,’ Simon later told The Times. ‘Because from the second they opened their eyes they would talk. It made me laugh because I would wake up and I’d hear them talking.’

Gradually, the local movie-star glamour began to waft over the Cowells’ fence and the family became part of the smart Elstree set. That other world Simon had seen being inhabited by his neighbours became his world. The crackle of laughter and the pop of champagne corks could now be heard in the Cowell household – and young Simon Cowell loved it.

Julie Cowell: ‘We met lots and lots of famous people – Liz Taylor, Richard Burton and all the rest of them. We were all included in these parties. Of course Simon didn’t realise how famous they were. Bette Davis used to ask him to sit on her knee.’

‘Growing up in Elstree was amazing,’ Simon later told his local paper, the Borehamwood and Elstree Times. ‘It was like having a slice of Hollywood on your doorstep. If there’s one thing I was taught, it was you have to work hard to get where you want to be, and that’s exactly what I did.’

Indeed, so happy were those childhood days at Abbots Mead that there seem to be aspects of Cowell’s personality today that appear to cling desperately to them – particularly his ongoing love affair with kids’ food and pastimes. He loves to watch sixties’ cartoons such as The Flintstones and The Jetsons rather than the news. Not for him the posh nosh available at the kinds of top-end restaurants he could so easily afford: Simon Cowell loves the food of his youth, the comfort-food staple that is beans on toast and the sticky, sweet simplicity of Angel Delight.

Despite these idyllic surroundings, in later life Simon would take great pleasure in pointing out what a brat he was as a child. ‘A very strong character, believe you me’ is how Julie Cowell described her son as a child to US talk-show host Larry King. ‘I think he was about four years of age before I began to realise he had this great sort of strength in him. He wanted to do what he wanted to do and I’d have to pitch myself against him.’

He would be replacing his dad’s handkerchief with a pair of frilly knickers, scratching his mum’s Shirley Bassey records, taking up smoking courtesy of stolen cigarettes (Cowell is still an enthusiastic smoker), feeding red wine to half-brother Michael’s dog or cutting brother Nicholas’s hair down to the scalp. ‘When Simon was five, I bought a new hat and asked him if I looked nice in it,’ Julie Cowell told Yours magazine some 45 years later. ‘He replied, “You look like a poodle …”’

‘Manners maketh the man’ was the answer Cowell gave when asked by America’s TV Guide asked what the best advice his mother had ever given him was. ‘I obviously didn’t follow that.’

‘Aged 16, I recall a boyfriend ringing the house for me,’ half-sister June remembered in 2007. ‘Simon was only seven and yet he answered the phone and said, “Oh, June’s waiting in her double bed for you!” He had the ability to say what others were thinking. He was always intuitive, even if it was embarrassing.’

By 1965, the Cowells were on the move again. Eric Cowell sold Abbots Mead to American-born film director Stanley Kubrick for a hefty profit. Film fans obsessed by his work treat it as something of a shrine. Many of his most notable movies – 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon – were all created while Kubrick lived at Abbots Mead. Kubrick’s daughter Vivian would later use the name Mead as a pseudonym when she wrote the music for her father’s film Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick sold Abbots Mead in 1981 – the purchasers still live there to this day.

The Cowells, meanwhile, relocated to the even more upmarket village of Radlett, living in an early example of an American-style ‘gated community’. It was here that Simon met the girl later identified as delivering his first real kiss when he was aged just nine. Now grown up and living in California, Tara McDonald-Smith contacted American Idol producers after spotting Simon on US TV and her call was put through to the pop entrepreneur on air. ‘This is really you, Tara?’ Cowell asked as Tara was put through during a telephone question-and-answer session that formed part of the American show in 2008. ‘This literally was my first kiss – this was my first crush.’

‘He’d taken me to the bottom of his garden,’ Tara later told the People newspaper. At the time she was known as Tara Miller and lived in a property called Tudor House. ‘It was very cute and it was very memorable. We were just kids. We didn’t know what we were doing! We used to play spin the bottle … and I got him a lot of the time. It was all good.’

Radlett was also where Cowell’s moneymaking abilities first kicked in. If there were two things that Radlett wasn’t short of, it was big cars and long lawns, so the young Simon set about knocking on doors to get work, offering to cut grass and wash cars for cash. ‘The principle from my parents was that you live in the house rent-free, we pay for the holidays but, when we go on holiday, you should earn your own spending money,’ Cowell told the Observer newspaper in 2007. ‘I loved having my own money. In school holidays I would always apply for jobs, in warehouses, petrol stations or on a farm – I was always happier working than just mucking around.’

One aspect of his childhood that clearly didn’t make him happy was school. Radlett Prep School – a good, old-fashioned, independent day school founded in 1935 – was where the young Simon found himself. Traditional and proud of it, the school was strong on discipline, maths and sport. ‘I was terrible,’ he would remember with a shudder, talking to the Guardian newspaper in 2009. ‘I was always pretending to be ill and my favourite trick was getting a cup of tea in the morning and I used to put the tea on my head for about 30 seconds, and then I’d call my mum and dad and say, “I’m not feeling very well, Mum, can you feel my head?” And it would always be hot. And that’s how I used to get off school, because I hated school.’

Much had been made of Cowell’s dislike of the education system – he’s something of a hero to those who believe that true entrepreneurs don’t fit into rigid systems like schools. But Simon’s distaste for education seems to go beyond the usual boyish search for ways to play truant, and seems to have genuinely distressed him. ‘Sunday nights when I was at school were the most miserable evenings of my life,’ he later explained in an interview with Piers Morgan in 2010. ‘Seven o’clock, this ghastly religious programme would come on and the theme tune would mean that I’ve got to get ready now for tomorrow and Mum would say, “Do your homework.” I used to have this sickening feeling in my stomach because I dreaded Monday so much.’

Eventually, Radlett began issuing ultimatums to Simon’s parents: the boy either shapes up or ships out. He shipped out and was sent to Dover College in Kent as a boarder. Non Recuso Laborem is the school motto – meaning ‘I Can’t Refuse the Task’. The motto may well have dated back to the school’s foundation in 1871, but it was studiously ignored by Simon Cowell. ‘I couldn’t bear the discipline and the boredom,’ he later told writer Lyn Barber. ‘Every time I sat in a chemistry lesson I thought, “What am I doing this for?” I don’t ever want to be in a job that involves a Bunsen burner.’

Cowell would pen dramatic, heart-wrenching letters to his parents, making sure they were in no doubt about his dislike of the school and whom he blamed for his misery. ‘When he was at boarding school, he used to write a letter every week,’ Julie Cowell later told US TV host Oprah Winfrey. ‘“Dear Mum and Dad, I hope you’re very happy in your warm centrally heated home. I am freezing. I have nothing to eat here.” You’d weep if you’d read the letters.’

Simon’s younger brother Nicholas was already at Dover and the pair were able to continue the troublemaking double act they’d perfected back at Abbots Mead. Nicholas’s company was the only positive part of going to Dover as far as Cowell was concerned, and he made sure his parents were fully aware of how miserable he was and how much he resented being sent away in his letters home. In fact, Cowell found school so oppressive it made him feel like ‘jumping off a bridge’.

‘I used to get very anxious about going back to school after the holidays,’ he told writer Rebecca Hardy in 2009. ‘I can still remember that feeling in the pit of my stomach. I used to think, “Get me out of this prison as quickly as possible. I know how to read. I know how to add up. I know where America is. I just want to start work.”’

During his trips home, Simon would have seen the new TV show that had caught the public’s imagination. The concept behind the BBC’s Top Town had come on since the 1960s: the brash, ITV, 1970s way of finding talent via the telly was New Faces, which hit our screens in 1973. A panel of experts would pass judgement on amateur talent with the aim of discovering a new star. Lenny Henry, Les Dennis and Michael Barrymore were among those who found fame by appearing on the show. But the real stars were often the panellists and their judgements. Most notorious was songwriter and producer Tony Hatch. Audiences were shocked at Hatch’s blunt appraisals of the acts, making him a national hate figure. He was ‘TV’s Mr Nasty’. Hatch recently told the Retro Sellers website that Simon Cowell acknowledged the debt that shows like Pop Idol and Britain’s Got Talent owed to New Faces. ‘He said that to me – he said, “You started it all and we’re all very grateful to you.”’

Hatch would recall how the show dominated the schedules and that, if the acts weren’t right for such a big show, it was his job to tell them: ‘On New Faces in the seventies, there were only three terrestrial TV channels then and so we would get 16 to 17 million viewers at 7.30 on a Saturday evening. And I would say to these people, “You’ve just been given the greatest opportunity you ever could have had and you’ve just thrown it away. You’re not ready and you’re not right.”’

Back at boarding school, Simon was busy refusing the task; he refused to knuckle down to either work or authority. At one stage he was handed a five-week suspension after being caught drinking in a local pub. The severity of the school ban wasn’t just because of the boozing: he was chiefly being punished because of his point-blank refusal to name the boys who were with him. Eventually, Simon was put back a year for his rebellious ways. This had the unfortunate effect of putting him in the same class as brother Nicholas, doubling the trouble for their unfortunate teachers. Simon was, according to his Dover housemaster George Matthews, ‘A miserable little devil. Simon refused to do anything that he didn’t want to do himself – he was quite successful at that.’

Two Cowells in one class proved too much, with Simon describing the result as ‘chaotic’. ‘It got to the stage where the headmaster basically said, “Either one of them leaves this school or we’re going to kick the two of them out,”’ Simon later confessed to the Sun.

Simon would leave Dover with two GCE O levels – the precursor to today’s GCSEs – and delight at finally being free of school. His jubilation was slightly confused by the fact that he had no idea what to do next – so he went back into education, attending technical college in Windsor, grinding out one more O level. His only other achievement at Windsor appears to have been losing his virginity in a drunken session with another student. Simon Cowell, the man who would later put so many other inexperienced young people under intense pressure, later described this first foray into sex as ‘the most nerve-racking experience of my life’. He later detailed the experience in grim detail to GQ magazine: ‘I lied and said I’d already lost my virginity to try to sound big. She hadn’t lost hers either but admitted it. On the day we planned to have sex it was like going to the gallows. I hadn’t a clue what I was doing. We went to the pub beforehand for a drink and I was forcing beer down my neck. I couldn’t get enough of it to numb what I thought would be the most humiliating moment of my life. We went back and had a bath and she jumped out and said, “Simon, I’m ready.” I remember lying there contemplating just ending it all there and then. I somehow got through it. I just wanted to get her out as quickly as possible so I could tell all my mates I had done it.’

On leaving college, Simon needed a job – for no other reason than to appease his workaholic dad Eric. What followed was Cowell’s short-lived, somewhat half-hearted stab at operating in the real world. Sadly, none of his valiant attempts to live like the rest of us worked out too successfully, probably because he went out of his way to make sure they didn’t.

First, there was an attempt to induct him into the family trade by teaching about the building industry on a training course. He lasted about an hour before demanding that his dad Eric drive him back home. Then there was his application for a position as a trainee manager at Tesco – the interview was terminated when the prospective boss objected to Cowell’s jeans and showed him the door. Finally, there was the civil service – Cowell was informed he was the most unsuitable candidate the interview panel had ever seen, which he took as a compliment. It seems clear that Simon was sabotaging any effort at getting him to do a ‘proper’ job. ‘I vowed that I’d find a job where I didn’t have to wear a suit and play by the rules,’ Simon later told the Daily Mail. ‘So I did.’

As well as a disrespect for authority and a desire to do things the way he wanted to, there was one other aspect of Simon’s character that seems to have been fairly well formed by this relatively early stage in his life: ‘He said at 19 that he wouldn’t get married,’ his mum Julie told Yours magazine in 2009. ‘I thought he might change his mind, but it doesn’t look likely to happen.’

Determined to start making his own luck, Simon contacted a cousin who worked at Elstree studios. He managed to get him work as a runner – the lowest rung of the showbiz ladder. ‘Runner is another term for slave,’ he later told Fox News. ‘But I loved it; I had a great time. I’d get on set at five in the morning, work till about ten at night – no money, but it was just a blast.’

For £15 a week, Simon did whatever he was asked on the set of the TV series Return of the Saint, starring Ian Ogilvy. There’s even a plaque now at Elstree to mark this moment in showbiz history. It reads, ‘Simon Cowell – music mogul and creator of television’s The X Factor who began his career as a runner at Elstree film studios.’ You’d think he’d have been grateful to the place where it all started. Not a bit of it: he managed to crash a car into a wall at Elstree in a teenage joyriding incident.

Legend has it that Simon also worked briefly on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s psychological horror film The Shining. Kubrick – who, as we’ve seen, earlier lived in the former Cowell home Abbots Mead – bought another hefty property in 1977, Childwickbury Manor near St Albans, not far from Radlett. The Shining is probably best known for the sequence where a crazed Jack Nicholson smashes down a door with an axe to get at screen wife Shelley Duvall. ‘I remember him [Simon] saying he used to clean Jack Nicholson’s axe between takes for the most famous scenes,’ half-brother Tony later told the Sun. ‘He took it very seriously and was very proud. It was so shiny you could see your face in it. It’s a far cry from where he is now. I think the only thing he shines these days are his teeth.’

Cowell’s dad Eric was by now quite the showbiz estate agent, thanks to the friends he’d made in and around Elstree. Entertainment company EMI had bought into the studios in 1969 and Eric did their property deals and was on the company’s board of directors. It’s often thought that it was thanks to his dad’s connections with EMI that Simon first entered the record industry. It was, in fact, down to mum Julie.

Seeing how her son was enthused by working in the entertainment industry, she wrote to EMI Music Publishing to ask if there were any jobs available in their post room. Failed labourer, unsuitable civil servant and part-time film-set axe polisher did not, perhaps, add up to the greatest CV ever assembled, but it was enough to get him an interview. In the music world, Cowell’s flip, laid-back attitude found more of a welcome than at Tesco, and he got the job.

His delight at getting a full-time position in showbiz was slightly curtailed when he realised it wasn’t quite the direct route to fame and riches he’d imagined. The post room was not the most inspiring of places to work. ‘I remember him being horrified that there were two men there who had been doing the job for 20 years,’ Julie later told the Daily Mail. ‘He said to me, “This is just a stepping stone, Mum. I want more.”’