Sweet Revenge: The Intimate Life of Simon Cowell

Sweet Revenge: The Intimate Life of Simon Cowell

by Tom Bower
Sweet Revenge: The Intimate Life of Simon Cowell

Sweet Revenge: The Intimate Life of Simon Cowell

by Tom Bower

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Overview

For this definitive biography, acclaimed journalist and bestselling author Tom Bower was granted unprecedented access to Simon Cowell and those around him—and the result is a fascinating multilayered portrait of one of the world’s most intriguing television personalities ever to dominate the music industry.
 
Simon Cowell has made an international name for himself as the no-holds-barred judge on the television phenomenon American Idol. He’s been called mean, arrogant, brash, and unapologetic, but his stinging barbs and smug personality have also earned him cheers from fans, as well as millions of dollars, a string of exotic beauties, and industry clout to develop his own projects. But Cowell’s true reward is revenge.
 
Sweet Revenge is the ultimate insider’s account of Simon Cowell’s rise to fame—even as others plotted his downfall—from his cheeky exploits as a British school lad to his failures as a frustrated young music exec in London to his explosive rivalry with Simon Fuller over the genesis of the Idol franchise to the PR disaster that nearly sunk his wildly successful show The X Factor. Conducting more than 150 interviews with industry power players, Cowell’s inner circle, and Cowell himself on a private jet, chartered yacht, at his L.A. home, and on the studio lot, Tom Bower pulls back the curtain on a man who is at once insecure, ambitious, easily bored, vain, needy, and driven, a man who will go to any limit to secure his success. Cowell is also revealed as a loyal friend and loving son. His father, to whom Cowell was particularly close, became his most trusted adviser and mentor.
 
Packed with juicy details, exclusive interviews, and never-before-revealed facts, Sweet Revenge presents a complete picture of Simon Cowell that few have ever seen.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780345533951
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 04/24/2012
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 384
File size: 8 MB

About the Author

Tom Bower has a distinguished reputation as an investigative historian, broadcaster, and journalist. After earning a law degree he went on to become a producer and reporter for BBC Television for twenty-five years, where he covered war, politics, intelligence, and finance. He is the author of nineteen books, including biographies of Robert Maxwell, Mohamed Al Fayed, Gordon Brown, Richard Branson, and Conrad Black. He lives in London, England.

Read an Excerpt

1

THE CREATION

Laughter and parties were the bedrock of Simon Cowell’s childhood. Both his mother, Julie, a former Soho showgirl, and his father, Eric, a property manager, were generous hosts who promoted enjoyment rather than academic study for their children. Guests at their successive homes on the western fringes of London could not have imagined that the Cowells were concealing a tangled succession of relationships preceding their own happy union. Once the dust had settled, among those invited for long Sunday lunches were not only their two children together but four children from their previous relationships and various grandchildren. They all would later be acknowledged in Eric’s last will.

Eric Cowell, born in February 1918 in London’s East End, could trace his father’s family back to the eighteenth century. In 1770, William Cowell had been a rope manufacturer. The family business continued in the East End for more than a hundred years until it was inherited by Joseph Cowell, Simon Cowell’s great-grandfather. In 1890, Joseph, an Anglican, married Nancy Levy, a Jew, in Whitechapel. Their eldest son, also named Joseph, was born the following year and because of his mother’s religion automatically became a Jew. The family business ended in the early twentieth century.

Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, in 1914, Joseph Cowell, then twenty-three years old, volunteered to join the Middlesex Regiment of the British Army, serving as a private. The following year, Joseph married Esther Malinsky, a twenty-nine-year-old Jew who had been born in Poland. Malinsky’s father, a cap maker, had fled to England to escape the Polish government’s persecution of the Jews and set up his business in the premises of a mantle maker in the East End. The family home was two rooms at 22 Pelham Street, in a Jewish quarter in Spitalfields.

After the war, Joseph Cowell became an office clerk and moved with Esther to Ilford, an east London suburb. When the second of their three sons—Eric Selig Philip Cowell—was born, Joseph was employed as an “inspector” on London’s buses, checking passengers’ tickets. On subsequent legal documents, Eric would describe his father as a “transport manager.”

By 1939, Eric Cowell had qualified as a chartered surveyor. Soon after the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the Middlesex Regiment and was posted to Calcutta, India, as a commercial clerk. In 1943, promoted by then to captain in the 19th Hyderabad Regiment, he married Enid Proudfoot in Bombay’s Anglican cathedral. Proudfoot, the granddaughter of Emily da Costa, a native Indian, was unaware that her husband was Jewish. Misleadingly, he had described himself on the marriage certificate as Congregational.

Life for British officers in India, the jewel of the British Empire, was relatively blissful, and Eric made the last year of the war even more comfortable by serving as a magistrate in Calcutta. His leisurely life of parties, privilege, and servants ended in August 1946. He retired from the army as an honorary major and returned alone to Britain to set up business as a surveyor living near his mother, by then a widow, in Ilford. Enid, his wife, arrived in Britain some months later, but the marriage broke down and she returned to India.

Eric had already embarked on a relationship with Jeanette Sevier, a baker’s daughter eight years younger than himself who occasionally modeled in Bristol. Renting a flat in Kensington, they remained unmarried, but in 1948 they had a son called Anthony, who was later known as John. Soon after, Eric was employed as a property manager by Barratts, the shoe manufacturer and retailer, and they moved temporarily to Stafford. In 1950 their daughter June was born. Two years later, after returning to Kensington, Eric apparently obtained a divorce from Enid Proudfoot—no official British record can be found—and married Jeanette in Fulham. Within one year, their marriage was floundering.

As part of his work, Eric traveled regularly on weekends between London and Northampton. Returning on the same train to London every Monday, he spotted an attractive woman, Julie Dalglish.

Born in November 1925, Julie was the only child of Robert Dalglish, a Birmingham garage mechanic and chauffeur, whose Scottish family had for generations been lithographers. In 1937, despite her strict father’s opposition, Julie, accompanied by her mother, Winifred, had successfully auditioned to dance on the West End stage in London. Aged twelve, she left Birmingham with three other girls for six weeks of rehearsals of Goody Two Shoes before the performances began at Christmas, running until Easter 1938. Living with the group in west London, she passed the exams for the Royal Academy of Dance and continued during the war as a member of a dance troupe, touring Britain’s seaside resorts to entertain tourists and the military.

After the war, using the stage name Josie Brett, she returned to London to work twice every night as the lead dancer in Can-Can at a nightclub off Piccadilly. At age twenty, she fell in love with Bertram Scrase, an actor, dancer, and singer who was married to another dancer. Scrase’s charm, looks, and stories had seduced endless women. Performing together, Julie and Bertram toured Britain until Julie became pregnant. In 1946, while traveling with Bertram to Dublin, she gave birth to a son, Michael Scrase. To Julie’s fury, Bertram’s wife, Elaine, refused his request for a divorce.

Over the next years, troubled by Bertram’s endless affairs, Julie left Michael with her parents in Birmingham and continued dancing in London. In 1950, although their relationship had disintegrated, she had a second son with Bertram named Tony. Some said that Scrase disappeared with another woman while others suggested that Julie had met another man. Julie would later say that her relationship with Bertram Scrase was “disastrous” and to some she would add, “It didn’t work. I thought, why did I get into marriage?”

Amid the austerity of the postwar era, the task of simultaneously bringing up two children while working to become a famous dancer was exhausting, not least because Bertram Scrase was financially unreliable and, having set up a new home with a waitress in Bognor Regis, abandoned contact with his two sons.

To avoid destitution, Julie left her sons with her mother in Birmingham while she continued to dance at the Pigalle Club in Piccadilly. Every weekend, she traveled by train to the Midlands, returning to London on Monday evenings. During those regular journies, Julie spotted Eric Cowell boarding the same train at Northampton after his regular visit to Barratts’ headquarters. In 1954, after entering the dining car he approached her.

“Would you care for a drink with me?” he asked.

“It’s my birthday,” she replied, “so yes.”

It was the start, she would say, of “a long platonic relationship in London,” which developed because he was “very interesting, well read, and had a sense of humor.” Unhappy in his marriage, Eric abandoned his wife to pursue Julie.

Julie had every reason to succumb to a man offering a solid relationship. But he wanted more. Soon after they moved into a flat in Richmond, she came under pressure to have more children. “I thought we had four between us and that was enough,” she said, “but Eric delivered an ultimatum.” After successive miscarriages, a son was born in Brighton in 1958. Due to complications in the last weeks of pregnancy, the child, registered as “Stephen Cowell/Scrase,” died three weeks later. The following year, on October 7, 1959, Simon Cowell was born in south London. His parents were unmarried, because according to Julie, “I was scared.”

Soon after Simon’s birth, Eric introduced Julie Dalglish to his sixty-nine-year-old mother. Unusually, Julie and her mother were invited to stay in the Cowells’ Richmond home.

“My mother’s from Poland,” said Eric, without providing any more information.

“Eric’s family is Jewish,” Winifred told her daughter during that visit.

“Do you think you’re Jewish?” Julie challenged her partner.

“I could be. I don’t know,” Eric replied, and then added, “No, I’m certainly not.”

Julie thought no more about it but did conclude that Eric’s mother was “awkward and frightening.”

The following year, Julie was again pregnant and wanted to regularize her status. After searching for a bigger home, Eric bought a run-down three-bedroom house north of London. In March 1961, their second son, Nicholas, was born in south London although, unusually, his birth was only registered in June. That same June, Esther died and the chance of Eric’s Jewish background being revealed in his lifetime receded. Three months later, on September 26, Jeanette obtained a divorce from Eric on the grounds of his adultery with “Julie Brett.” On October 24, 1961, Eric and Julie were married at Caxton Hall in Westminster and celebrated with some friends at the Savoy. Although Julie registered her address as 28 Culross Street in central London, they had already moved to Barham Avenue, where Eric had opened a real-estate agency.

Table of Contents

Introduction xiii

1 The Creation 3

2 Rise and Fall 19

3 Endless Humiliation 46

4 A Hit-At Last 60

5 Respctabity 73

6 Double Diaster 90

7 Moment of Truth 106

8 Global Star 123

9 Sabotage 139

10 Simon V. Simon 154

11 Supremacy 169

12 Toys 190

13 Media Mogul 212

14 True Love 243

15 May 8, 2011 264

16 Crisis 305

17 Revenge is Sweet 328

Acknowledgments 339

Author's Note 341

Index 345

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