Book review: Sweet Revenge

GERTRUDE Stein said that the problem of her hometown, Oakland, was that “there is no there there”. I’ve always felt the same applies to Simon Cowell.

The 53-year-old has built a $700 million entertainment empire by manipulating cheap music and cheaper sentiment on Pop Idol, The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and their global spin-offs. He’s got sports cars and bimbos in abundance. But I’ve never felt his arrogance or his greed or his horniness or even his rampant 1980s vulgarity rang true.

Cowell is like some neutral alien replicant who learned human emotion by watching soaps on a TV set with bad reception. Even the Mr Nasty act he unleashes on contestants and fellow judges on his shows is a hollow, tinny travesty. He’s a glassily polished public veneer, with nothing behind it.

This is clearly a problem for a biographer, even one as diligent and meticulous as Tom Bower, who has previously gone after such colourful rogues as Maxwell, Fayed and Conrad Black. The second big problem for Bower – whose book is unauthorised but produced with Cowell’s co-operation – is that there are no dark revelations.

No drugs, although Cowell works in an industry awash with them. No criminal activity – not even a hint that there’s truth in the regular allegation that his shows are fixed. No suggestion that his definitely-not-gay lifestyle means that, actually, he’s gay. The secrets Bower has unveiled – an affair with Dannii Minogue, an unrequited pash for Cheryl Cole – have been hinted at in the long, mutually massaging relationship between Cowell and the tabloids.

What we get, therefore, are endless reiterations of the arch-rivalry between Cowell and the other, faceless Midas of the pop/TV interface, Simon Fuller, plus lots of lesser skirmishes where Cowell comes off smugly better or angrily worse to a competitor or colleague. There’s lots of detailed stuff about contracts and fees, and the way Cowell constantly tinkers with the formats of his shows, as he does with the décor of his houses.

Bower notes that many of his subject’s ex-girlfriends become his peculiarly close, platonic friends but can’t say why. He is perhaps best on Cowell’s family background – the adored disciplinarian mother and soft-touch father, and the brother with whom he competed for girls.

There’s a strong sense, never fully stated, that Cowell is somehow trapped in a cycle of arrested development and self-gratification, choffing down fish fingers, shepherd’s pie and beer and Kool cigarettes, chasing girls, worshipping money and not really enjoying any of it. Of course, that may be wishful thinking on my part. What’s certainly clear is that, after many feckless years, Cowell is now as hard-nosed and gimlet-eyed as all the other unlovely music-industry creeps in Bower’s book.

Sweet Revenge: The Intimate Life of Simon Cowell

By Tom Bower

Faber, 432pp, £18.99