Hilary Rose
been protesting too much. Last year, I interviewed one of his closest friends, the 80s pop star Sinitta who, with her two adopted children, spends holidays with Cowell and conceded that the closeness of their friendship might not have been easy for her subsequent partners. She met Cowell when she was 14, he masterminded her career and she dated him for several years. These days, she describes their relationship as ‘‘eternal’’ and says her children call him Silly Simon.
‘‘He cares about them, he’s affectionate to them,’’ she told me. ‘‘He always remembers their birthdays, he makes them laugh, plays with them and is good fun.’’
In the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that Sinitta appears somewhat conflicted by her friend’s impending fatherhood. Last week, she tweeted: ‘‘Something has happened, half miracle, half nightmare.’’
Cowell could well be saying the same himself. His life thus far has been one of ups and downs. Brought up in Elstree, he started in the music business in 1982 as a promoter and hit the big time four years later with then-girlfriend Sinitta’s So Macho. He made a lot of money quickly, spent it by his own admission on partying and a Porsche, and lost it all when the record company folded. He ended up having to move back in with his parents.
That could have been the last the world heard of Cowell. Instead, he set about earning a new fortune via an unlikely means: he persuaded the TV actors Robson Green and Jerome Flynn to sing Unchained Melody, which became a million-selling hit. By 2001 he was managing what was then the boyband of the moment, Westlife, and was asked by Simon Fuller, creator of the Spice Girls and S Club 7, to be in a new show called Pop Idol.
Suddenly Cowell was a TV star. He left to set up his own rival show, The X Factor, and the rest is history. Now, he has a portfolio of shows on both sides of the Atlantic that are shown all over the world, including the Britain’s Got Talent, American Idol and X Factor franchises. He obsesses over every detail, down to whether the studio floor should be shiny or matt. His fortune is estimated to be worth £250 million (NZ$485.2m); his deal with Fox in America is worth US$60m, another with Pepsi is said to be US$35m to US$60m. He is responsible for the juggernaut that is One Direction, not to mention Leona Lewis and Susan Boyle. His artists have sold 200 million albums and the final of Britain’s Got Talent in June was the UK’s most-watched programme of the year so far, with an audience of 11 million.
Yet the man himself concedes that he is ‘‘very odd’’. He is said to get up at noon, watch cartoons for an hour in the bath, then work until 5am. All his suits are by Tom Ford, all his sweaters by Prada, but he is almost never seen in anything other than jeans and a T-shirt. He wants to be cryogenically frozen after death with the hope of being brought back to life when science has found a way. He has homes in LA and London decorated immaculately in black and white – and he will tolerate only black loo roll. According to Sweet Revenge, an unofficial biography by Tom Bower, he travels everywhere with two suitcases filled with beauty products from shampoo to eye drops, and has intravenous vitamin injections every Saturday.
However his biggest extravagance is probably cars: he owns the world’s most expensive, the Bugatti Veyron, as well as a convertible Bentley, a Rolls-Royce Phantom, a Ferrari 360 and an Aston Martin DB7, but reportedly sold his vintage MG after only a day because it was too draughty. Motivated by money, he nonetheless says he’s eventually going to give all of his away. Earlier this year he said being on
Simon Cowell his own ‘‘is the best thing in the world’’.
It is hard to believe that becoming a father at 53, embroiled in someone else’s divorce proceedings, was part of the carefully-controlled plan.
Predictably there is a swirl of rumour and counter-rumour. Cowell famously has a wealth of ex-girlfriends to keep him company but Sinitta is arguably No 1 Ex. Fellow ex-girlfriends include the former model and TV presenter Terri Seymour, the former glamour model Jackie St Clair and his ex-fiancee, the makeup artist Mezhgan Hussainy. He is rumoured to have been financially generous to all of them and none has a bad word to say about him.
‘‘You can’t have somebody in your life who’s become accustomed to a certain thing,’’ he said recently, ‘‘and just because you don’t want to be in the relationship any more say to them, now everything is cut off. That doesn’t make sense. It’s not alimony. It is, I believe, doing the right thing.’’
They have all holidayed together but it is Sinitta who is rumoured to be with him this week, on a yacht in St Tropez, where he has apparently gone to hole up and keep his head down on the instruction of his lawyer