More juicy Idol bits from Kara Dioguardi’s new memoir Helluva High Note. She spilled some to the Beast and on theToday show yesterday, but Rolling Stone has posted more very interesting quotes from the book.
Kara feels that she was hired to serve “ulterior motives” which is why she suspects Simon did not like her. She acknowledges that she spent way too much time vying for Simon’s approval.
When the Season 9 Hollywood round came to an end, Kara suspected they didn’t have the right cast. Mostly because there were candidates the judges panel wanted to keep, but the producers didn’t. There were those who felt Simon Cowell was purposely trying to sabatoge the show, although Kara does not believe that.
Season 9 was a bigger clusterf*ck than we even imagined, and it wasn’t the contestants fault. The atmosphere behind the scenes appeared to be thick with dysfunction. Better to clean the slate and start again.
Read the quotes, after the jump.
- On getting along with Simon, “I smoked way too many cigarettes (a nasty habit I had previously kicked) outside the set in an attempt to bond with him, ” she writes. “But he wasn’t having any of it. I hated myself for seeking his approval. I have never been that person. I say what I feel and I don’t kiss ass for anything, but if I couldn’t get him to acknowledge or engage me, I was going to be in big trouble when the light turned red.”
- The producers had ulterior motives, “My sad take is that they were never interested in my for my accomplishments or how I could really help the contestants, ” she writes. “As proof of that…I don’t think I was every properly credited or introduced to the viewers. I felt more like I was there to serve ulterior motives and ones that I could never achieve for them. I’m willing to bet that in Simon Cowell’s mind, I was Simon’s Fuller’s girl, and that made me suspect no matter what I said and did. Under those circumstances, I could see why Cowell was less than kind to me at times, but it still hurt.”
- Never finding her voice on the panel, “My on-camera presence was cold, ” she writes. “But that was because I felt so uncomfortable, insecure and nervous. The woman I used to be – the one who had forged ahead in a sea of doubt and had still risen to the top of the music business despite the bumps in the road – was gone. I was in a foreign place, speaking a foreign language with no translator. I could never seem to let the real me out.”
- A Season 9 contestant the judges wanted to keep: “I saw her walking out of the auditorium crying, ” DioGurardi writes. “She was still on the judges’ list. So Randy, Ellen, Simon, and I tried to fight for her, but we weren’t permitted to change the decision. There was one other contestant some of us wanted as well, but there seemed to be an air of suspicion that Simon might be trying to sabotage the contestant pool in the wake of his leaving. I don’t know about that, but from my perspective he was definitely trying to help the show. I felt awful for these contestants…By the end of the week I didn’t have a good feeling about the mix of talent we’d ended up with, and I was right.”
- She never knew her job was in jeopardy, “”No one even gave me a heads-up that my job was in jeopardy, ” she writes. “In fact, just two weeks before I was speaking to an executive producer about the upcoming season’s schedule. Then again, who really ever knows that their bosses are considering replacing them? Lucky for me, the janitorial closet they called my dressing room had long been disassembled, so no walk down the corridors with my personal effects in hand was necessary.”
