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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Yet even then, she says, she was not worried that her career was over as soon as it had begun. “I was just not going to let myself fail,” she tells me. Indeed, one RCA executive says that Clarkson was “a relentlessly hard worker” in the post–American Idol days. “She never once had to be told that she was going to have to keep waking up every day and proving herself,” he says. “Despite all of her sudden fame, she knew what it took to break a record and establish a career: not just one television show but constant promotion and constant performing.”
And what almost all of the critics missed was the way pop music lovers responded to Clarkson’s singing. This was a girl they got to choose to be a star, not someone a record company had chosen for them. “A Moment Like This” became the top-selling U.S. single of 2002, selling 600,000 copies, an amazing feat considering how moribund the singles market is in this era. And when her first album, Thankful, was released in April 2003—far too late to capitalize on her popularity, some music insiders said—it went to number one on the Billboard 200 within a month. A single on the album, “Miss Independent,” even garnered Clarkson a Grammy nomination.
Still, it was hard to fathom how the Burleson girl next door could remain the girl next door. How can anyone experience such a stratospheric rise without it going to her head?
“Okay, there was this one time,” she says. “After American Idol, I did nothing but live in hotel rooms in Los Angeles for a long time, and all I did at night was watch the in-room movies, over and over and over, and I said, ‘This is so horrible. I want a place for my friends to visit me.’ So this real estate agent showed me Al Pacino’s former home on South Rodeo Drive, right in the heart of Beverly Hills, within walking distance of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and all the boutiques and all that. It was completely furnished, with that kind of really expensive leather furniture. I kept thinking, ‘Not me, not me.’ I didn’t have enough clothes to fill up the master bedroom closet, and I knew my Ford Explorer would look like crap in the driveway, and I wanted a couch I could lay down on. But I just wanted to feel like I had a home. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll take it.’ Then I called Ashley and said, ‘Hey, come on out.’”
“I took one look at the place,” says Ashley, “and I asked Kelly what she was paying. When she told me, I said, ‘Uh, Kelly, for that price you could buy a car every month.’”
“And I just looked at Ashley,” says Clarkson, “and I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to get out of here.’”
In a later conversation, she offers perhaps a more meaningful explanation of why she is in that apartment and why she has no immediate plans to move: “I’m worried that if I try to become something I’m not, then I know everything else is going to get screwed up.”
Clarkson is certainly not oblivious to her financial bounty. She took all of her best Burleson friends to Hawaii, and she bought her friend Jessica a Corvette as a thank-you present for paying for her demo tape. When Jason arrived to be her personal assistant, she purchased a sporty black two-door Cadillac that cost about $75,000 so they would look good when they showed up at concerts or promotional appearances. She also bought a twelve-acre ranchette south of Fort Worth, where she hopes to live part-time.
But to understand Clarkson, says Ashley, “you have to understand that deep down, she still doesn’t care about doing the trendy stuff, and she still says ‘Cool beans,’ and she still watches Friends just like she always did.”
“Maybe this will explain her,” says her manager, Jeff Rabhan. “We went to Thailand in February for the MTV Asia awards, and every day we were there, we passed by this gigantic carnival that had roller coasters and other outdoor rides. After the MTV show, there was a huge after-party, full of the biggest names. And Kelly said, ‘Come on, guys. Instead of doing what you think you’re supposed to do, do what you want.’ And she took us to the fair, where we shot basketballs, rode the roller coasters, did the bungee jump and the bumper cars.”
As soon as he tells me that story, however, he then warns me not to underestimate Clarkson’s continuing determination to be successful. “All you have to do is listen to her new Breakaway album,” he says. “I’m sure her record company and her fans would have been satisfied with another straight-ahead pop record. But Kelly is still very aware of those criticisms that she is just a one-shot American Idol singer, and she is driven to beat that stigma. On the Breakaway album, she wanted to assert her own creative flow. She wrote half the songs. She said, ‘I want to record an album with personality, with songs that have a dark side to them, a record that is louder and harder than anything I have ever done.’”
“I am not going to be pigeonholed, I promise you that,” Clarkson says. “I’m twenty-two. I didn’t just listen to Celine and Mariah growing up. I listened to Guns n’ Roses and to the Toadies and to Aerosmith.” One of the fake names she uses at hotels to keep fans from bothering her is Tyler Stevens, a flip-flop of the name Steven Tyler, Aerosmith’s lead singer. “I love ballads, but I also want my albums to rock out. And I will always want to sing bluesy, soulful songs, like Aretha and Janis Joplin. I’ve had these meetings with record executives where there is all this deep talk about how to break me out of the ‘American Idol’ label, and I say, ‘Dudes, just let me sing. It doesn’t matter to people how you got into the business. It matters to them how you stay.’”
Breakaway has made several once-scornful critics take a second look at Clarkson; though the Morning News’ Christensen still has trouble with the emotional depth of her lyrics, he wrote in a review, “Technically, she’s a first-rate singer.” But she is hardly satisfied. She tells me she is already spending many nights sitting in the middle of her gigantic king-size bed with her silver laptop, which has a software program that allows her to sing into the laptop, then play whatever she has just recorded with background music added. “Right now, I’ve got thirty to forty new songs on that laptop,” she says. “Sometimes I wake up at four in the morning, my head spinning with ideas, and I grab the laptop, which is always beside me. I’m on my third laptop since I bought the bed. The first two fell off the side and broke.”
She pauses, as if weighing whether to tell me something else. “Oh, all right, I did have this other diva moment. I was having trouble sleeping, so my managers had me fly to Canyon Ranch, this big spa in Arizona, to consult with a doctor who specializes in sleep. But nothing helped until my mom sent me one of those nature CDs that had the sound of rain hitting tin roofs and thunder going off in the distance.”
“And now you sleep like a baby?”
“Of course not. There’s still music getting inside me, waking me up.”
“She’s even bought a BlackBerry so that she can write everywhere,” says Jason. “We’ll be sitting on an airplane, and she’s typing on it, and I figure she’s e-mailing someone. Then I’ll look over and realize she’s writing a song about love or something.”
When clarkson comes out from behind the curtain for her photo shoot, the transformation is genuinely stunning. Kelly’s glam squad knows what it’s doing. The homemade blond streaks from the American Idol days are long gone. Her hair now has a perfectly stylized, just-out-of-bed look that delicately frames her face, and the black dress accentuates her curves. “I have no breasts,” she tells me, “but I do have curves.”
The photo shoot lasts for most of the afternoon. Jason leaves early to run errands and mail off a large package of Clarkson’s autographed photos. (She has vowed to autograph any eight-by-ten photo of herself that a fan sends her along with a self-addressed stamped envelope.) At some point, Clay Aiken, the runner-up in the 2003 American Idol competition, calls Clarkson’s cell phone. Aiken, who has also had a fairly good run in the recording and concert business since his time on the show, wants Clarkson to meet him for dinner at an expensive steakhouse so they can talk about their careers.
Clarkson initially says yes. Then Ashley reminds her that a group of the girls have arranged to go bowling that night. They want to try a new place called Lucky Strike, in the heart of Hollywood.
“Oh, my gosh, Ashley, please call Clay back and tell him that I just can’t miss the bowling,” she says. “He’ll understand completely.”
Clarkson, Ashley, and a couple of their friends are at Lucky Strike by nine o’clock. Clarkson is back in her T-shirt, capri pants, and flip-flops, her Bear Bryant hat jammed on her head. The place is packed, and not a single person recognizes her. When a lane comes open, she pulls on some two-toned bowling shoes and starts bowling, crying out in mock horror when she hits only two pins.
She bowls again. It’s a gutter ball. “Owww!” she cries.
She looks at me expectantly, as if she already knows the question I’m about to ask. “I couldn’t be happier,” Clarkson says, and she turns away to throw one more ball into the gutter.
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