Since She’s Been Gone
Three years after her we-can’t-believe-we-were-crying-too American Idol moment, Kelly Clarkson’s new reality looks a lot like her old one in Burleson.
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Reporters tend to assume that any attempt by celebrities to be modest is simply an act to mask the breadth of their ambition or their controlling natures. Yet it is hard to spend time with Clarkson without wondering if she even realizes she has moved to Los Angeles. By most accounts, she spends all of her free time with Jason, Ashley, or a small circle of other friends who she tells me are “completely outside the industry and not obsessed with discussing what Justin Timberlake is really like.” Not only does she go to very few industry parties, she has the kind of personal life that does not remotely interest the tabloids or the other celebrity-driven magazines. She says she dislikes going to trendy bars because of the way men talk to her. “Guys hit on you in L.A. like they are selling you a fully loaded car,” she says. “They always want to talk to you about all the stuff they have.” She does tell me that she had a boyfriend for a while (she wouldn’t identify him), but then she says they didn’t really date. “Well, we had one date. We went to a very good restaurant and ate something called lobster something. But almost every other night we just hung out with my friends at the apartment.”
Nor will the magazines feature Clarkson in one of their periodic stories on how celebrities stay in shape. She doesn’t have the requisite personal trainer, to help her try to reduce the size of what she describes as “my big butt.” She does some sit-ups and occasionally walks on her treadmill at home. Every now and then she goes with Jason to a public park near their apartment, where they lob tennis balls at each other on a crack-lined court with a metal net. But that’s about it. Probably the best chance you have of spotting Clarkson in an Us Weekly is in one of the wholesome “Got Milk?” advertisements she’s agreed to do, which are supposed to start running this spring.
Clarkson was raised in Burleson by her mother, a first-grade schoolteacher, and her stepfather, a contractor. (Her father, a car salesman, has lived in the Anaheim area of California since he and her mother divorced, when she was six years old.) She says she spent most of her childhood singing. She spent so much time singing, in fact, that Ashley put a karaoke machine in Kelly’s closet, stuck a sign on the door that read, “Kelly’s recording studio,” and sat in a corner of the closet while Clarkson held a little plastic microphone and wailed away to such glass-shattering tunes as Mariah Carey’s “Vision of Love.” Although she never had formal singing lessons, she definitely had talent. When she sang a solo with the junior high school choir, she received a standing ovation, and in high school she received rave reviews from the audience when she played the role of Fiona in a school production of Brigadoon. “I didn’t want to go to college,” Clarkson says. “My goal was to be a major recording artist. And when I told my mom, she never once discouraged me. She said, ‘Kelly, you can do it.’”
After Clarkson graduated, in 2000, one of her friends, Jessica Hugghins, gave her some money to cut a demo tape. Clarkson then took on extra jobs—besides working at the movie theater, she also worked at Eckerd and as a waitress at a comedy club—to afford a trip someday to Los Angeles or New York to visit music producers and launch a career. To save money, she went with her friends to Chili’s, where she would eat chips for free and nibble the leftovers on everyone else’s plates.
The problem, of course, was that there were literally hundreds—maybe thousands—of talented kids graduating from American high schools in 2000 who believed the very same thing about themselves. They too had been told by their friends and their proud mothers that they were the next big thing. They too were cutting demo tapes. And only the tiniest fraction of them were ever going to get the chance to show off their talent, which seemed to be precisely the fate that was about to befall Clarkson.
She finally made her trip to Los Angeles in late 2001 with a girl she had met when the two of them performed at a music show at Six Flags in Arlington. For a while, they rented a small bedroom in a home near Hollywood, and then they moved to a rattrap apartment off Melrose Avenue. When she was not auditioning for producers, Clarkson paid the bills by working as a waitress and appearing as an extra in such shows as Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Dharma & Greg, standing in the background for about $70 a day.
In truth, there was some interest in her as a singer. A Los Angeles songwriter who had once penned songs with Carole King said he wanted to use her as a backup singer for his next recording. But that didn’t lead anywhere. When she went to audition for other backup singing roles, some producers told her that, though they liked her voice, she was either too small or too heavy for live shows. One producer told her to lose eight pounds. Another told her her voice sounded “too black.”
When Clarkson’s apartment caught fire in the spring of 2002, destroying all her possessions—she stood on the sidewalk in red pajamas and flip-flops, watching the building burn—she tried to hang on for a couple of days. She lived in her car—she was then driving a Ford Explorer with a huge dent in the rear end—and she took showers at a gym. But she eventually went broke and headed back to Texas, driving the entire way nonstop and writing hot checks to pay for her gasoline.
And that seemed to be that. But Clarkson says she was not the least bit discouraged. “Oh, heck no. I assumed something else would come along,” she says. But even the optimistic Clarkson couldn’t have guessed how quickly the next opportunity would present itself. Within days of her return, the mother of Jessica Hugghins, the girl who had paid for Clarkson’s demo tape, told Clarkson about auditions for American Idol at Dallas’s Wyndham Anatole hotel.
It was 2002, and American Idol was still considered to be just a summer novelty show; one critic described it as “a sadistic musical bake-off.” But because Fox promised the winner a $1 million recording contract with RCA, the auditions around the country were packed. Clarkson, her auburn hair streaked with blond, arrived at the Anatole at sunrise to perform—she had to be at her Red Bull job later that afternoon—and she sang the Aretha Franklin song “Respect.” In his memoir, I Don’t Mean to be Rude, But . . ., the snippy English judge Simon Cowell wrote, “There wasn’t anything about her that jumped out at us at that point . . . She was just a girl with a good voice.” Even when she was named one of the thirty finalists out of the Dallas audition, the Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporters covering the auditions seemed more entranced with the other finalists, including a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader and a cute redheaded single mom from Grand Prairie who spent her evenings singing at a karaoke bar.
But Clarkson continued to win over the television audience. And although Cowell’s favorite performer that year was a black singer named Tamyra Gray, whom he described in his book as “as close to perfection as you could possibly get,” her performances filled with “incredible acts of showmanship and technical mastery,” he admitted that he found himself admiring what he called Clarkson’s “normality.” She had a down-to-earth charm when she bantered with the judges and the show’s hosts. And the fact was that she was also very good during those pressure-packed last shows, adding breathy verbal melisma at the ends of lines and taking her voice from a whisper to a full-throttled roar before each song was over.
To hear Clarkson tell it, she can hardly even recall the now-legendary moment when she belted out her tear-drenched rendition of “A Moment Like This” in the first season’s final episode. “I was so exhausted from the competition I didn’t know I was crying until I watched a tape of the final show a few weeks later,” she says. “Isn’t that funny? I don’t remember a bit of it.”
The music critics were predictably merciless. Thor Christensen, of the Dallas Morning News, wrote that Clarkson’s rendition of “A Moment Like This” made Mariah Carey and Celine Dion “look like twin pillars of subtlety and restraint.” When she performed the National Anthem at the Lincoln Memorial during a September 11 charity event, the Washington Post’s television critic sniped, “The terrorists have won.” Almost everyone began taking bets on when she would fall on her face.
The stumble they were waiting for seemed to happen during the spring of 2003, when Clarkson and the show’s runner-up, the fuzzy-haired Justin Guarini, starred in a movie, From Justin to Kelly: The Rise of Two American Idols. An utterly inane project, it was rushed into theaters to take advantage of the singers’ popularity before the second season of American Idol began and a new winner was crowned. And though it was designed to appeal to young teenagers—Clarkson and Guarini acted like a modern-day Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, dancing around on a beach, singing happy songs, and giving each other playful looks—it bombed at the box office. Clarkson tells me she did everything she could to get out of the movie, but the contract she signed when she joined American Idol mandated her participation in the project.
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