In early June, Susan returned to Blackburn, where she received a hero’s welcome. The fact that she had come second in Britain’s Got Talent rather than first was clearly totally irrelevant. As newspaper columnists across the land were telling their readers, the dream hadn’t ended, it was just beginning. Susan was reunited with her family and Pebbles, before once more removing herself from the public eye in order to continue her recovery. She wasn’t staying in her own home as she clearly didn’t feel up to the constant attention she received from the media and her fans.
A record deal was now firmly on the cards, as soon as Susan felt ready. Simon Cowell was keen to sign her, but he kept telling Susan the choice was hers, for there was still a feeling in some quarters that the best thing for Susan would be to return to her old life. It didn’t seem to be what Susan wanted, of course, though what she would choose to do was still not totally clear.
‘The best cure for her is time with her cat and her family,’ he told the News of the World, and he was right, though behind the scenes Susan was raring to go. She had been assigned a doctor to care for her, Dr Sarah Lotzof, and the two of them had been seen out shopping together now that Susan was beginning to feel herself again. Describing her stay in The Priory as ‘a little holiday’, she continued, ‘I want to take on the world. I’ve got my sleeves up ready. From now on there’s nae crap.’
Susan’s brother Gerry was also adamant that she was feeling much better. ‘I have spoken to Susan and she is very excited and positive about the future,’ he told the News of the World. ‘She told me, “Don’t worry. I’m having the time of my life.” She said she felt fantastic and couldn’t wait to come back home this weekend. She was giggling away and sounding more relaxed than she has in ages. That’s the thing with Susan. She suffers from these mood swings, so I hope that now she’s out of the clinic she’s OK.’
There were still concerns, however, about whether Susan should take part in the Britain’s Got Talent tour. While she was making a strong recovery from her anxiety attack, there was no point in pretending she wasn’t still very fragile, and opinion was split as to whether she should be allowed to be part of the tour. While she was undoubtedly the biggest draw, it was made clear to Susan that she was under absolutely no obligation to take part if she didn’t feel up to it. There was no point in unearthing a massive new talent if you immediately drove it into the ground, and Susan, it was becoming apparent, was a performer who needed to be treated with care.
The Britain’s Got Talent judges continued to be quizzed about Susan’s state of mind as some sectors of the public seemed to hold them responsible for what had happened to Susan. In fairness, although Simon Cowell might have had a particular obligation towards her – which he fulfilled – the other two at times seemed quite bemused by it all. Piers had appointed himself her public defender, but Amanda’s role in the whole circus was more nebulous. She did, however, point out that Susan’s breakdown might well have enhanced her career rather than anything else.
‘You have to remember I saw Susan just three times, and can only comment on what I saw,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘She was definitely eccentric – funny, kooky even – but there was no sign of disturbing or weird behaviour. People keep saying she has mental health issues. I still don’t think she has. Yes, she struggled to cope, but anyone would. When she hit out, it was at journalists hassling her. I don’t think anyone could have handled the pressure she was under. I don’t think anyone – not even Piers, Simon or me – would have been able to hack it and we didn’t have the sheltered background she had. At the end of the day, she was admitted to The Priory for no other reason than to have a rest. She’ll be a bigger star, ironically, by coming second and by having to have a break afterwards.’
So was Susan ready for the tour? Susan herself wanted to go: she had waited so long for an opportunity that she didn’t want to miss out on her big chance now that it had finally arrived. The support of Dr Lotzof was helping enormously, as soon she had 24-hour access to Susan, and so the stay in Scotland was a brief one. It wasn’t long before Susan was ready to return to London, this time with Pebbles in tow, in order to prepare for the tour.
On the opening night, which took place at the Birmingham National Indoor Arena, Susan was a sensation. Before the concert began, she told fans, ‘I’m feeling much better now thank you and I’m really looking forward to performing.’ On stage, she was introduced by ITV2’s Britain’s Got More Talent presenter Stephen Mulhern as being ‘famous all over the world. She’s so famous even her cat Pebbles is famous’. Susan sang ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ and ‘Memory’ and the reception from the audience was ecstatic. If she had been in any doubt as to how much they loved her, she certainly wasn’t any more.
It had been touch and go whether she’d make it on the tour. ‘I honestly don’t know if she’ll last the full tour,’ said Stephen Mulhern in an interview with The People. ‘There are more than twenty-five dates left to go and we don’t know if she’ll do all of them. She arrived at the venue on time, but none of us knew whether she was going to sing. It was a case of sheer nerves for her. I was standing there with no idea what was going to happen. So I was putting together a little routine just in case. I only knew she was going to go on about twenty minutes before she did. She brought the house down. But who knows what will happen on the rest of the tour?’
There were still signs that not everything was quite right. At the second gig at the Sheffield Arena the fans loved her as much as ever, but it was noticeable that Susan was having problems. She stumbled over the lyrics of ‘Memory’ – a song she knew by heart – and while she didn’t appear to be suffering from stage fright, the stress seemed to be taking its toll again.
Susan managed a third concert, but at that point doctors stepped in and told her she needed to rest. The tour had begun just a week after Susan left The Priory, and while she was clearly much better, she was still exhausted as she’d had very little time to rest. In the end, and much to her chagrin, Susan was forced to pull out of the Manchester concerts.
Without underestimating what Susan was going through, all of this only added to the myth and mystery surrounding Susan. While she is as unlike a tempestuous diva as it’s possible to be, this was classic diva behaviour – leaving it till the last second before deciding if they’re going to show up, then cancelling their concerts at the last minute. And although the reasons for Susan’s behaviour were very different, the ‘will she, won’t she’ game not only continued to keep her in the headlines, but underlined her fragility, which in many ways was part of her appeal. Susan was, after all, the woman who had battled her demons to get to where she was today, and the fact that her battle had been such a public one was doing her no harm at all.
Now the tour was reaching Susan’s native Scotland, the big question on everyone’s lips was, would she be able to perform on the Glasgow stage? The answer was an emphatic yes, not least because this is where Susan had sung the first audition, the one that had turned her into a star. The 9,000-strong audience gave her a standing ovation before she’d even sung a note, and this time she was word perfect. These were her people and she wasn’t going to let them down.
The contrast in her appearance this time round was more marked than ever before. Sleek, coiffed and wearing a shimmery grey dress, when Susan made it on to the stage, she looked as if she was born to be there. Her evident delight in performing, and her happiness in front of the audience, towards whom she blew kisses, was there for all to see. The hip wiggling had gone, too, having been replaced by the kind of bow you’d expect from a veteran performer. It seemed hard to imagine that her first performance had gone global less than two months earlier, and that this amazing transformation had been achieved so quickly. A star had truly been born.
As the tour progressed, Simon Cowell appeared on GMTV, ostensibly to talk about another of his vehicles, The X Factor. Inevitably, though, he wasn’t able to dodge the subject of his most famous protégé. He was quite open about the pressures on Susan, and even admitted that he would have been prepared for it had she decided not to enter the final of the show.
‘Everyone is writing about her, she’s in the spotlight and she found it difficult to cope with that, and at that point even I sat down with her and said, “Look, if this is getting too much for you, you don’t have to go into the final, no one is going to force you”,’ he said. ‘You do whatever you want, no one is going to force you. And she looked me in the eye and said, “No, I want to win this competition, I want to give it a go,” and that was the decision we all made, and I thought that she wanted to do it, but it was only at the moment that she lost that it hits you and you go, “How is she going to cope with this?” And she found it very, very difficult. You can’t predict how things are going to escalate and how well that person can cope. What I don’t want to do at the beginning is go through a whole kind of psychological evaluation because I think, for me, that is almost discrimination.’
As far as the concerts were concerned, and the missed gig in Manchester, Simon had been as much in the dark about her actions as anyone else. ‘I genuinely didn’t know what she was going to do,’ he said. Our feeling was that there are ten or twelve acts on the bill, but that everyone, like me, said, “We don’t want to force her into performing but hopefully you’ll enjoy the show” – it’s a tricky one.’
Susan now had her own spokeswoman, and she explained that all that had been amiss in Manchester was that she needed a rest. There’s no doubt that ‘rest’ was a big issue: performers need stamina when they go on tour and Susan, for obvious reasons, had never done anything like it before. In order to capitalize on audience interest in the participants, the tour crams as many dates as possible into as short a space of time as possible – without wishing to sound unduly cynical, there was a good chance the ticket-buying public would have forgotten who most of the acts were had the organizers waited too long – which meant that people like Susan, who had only ever performed in a very modest way, had to adapt to the demands of a strenuous agenda. While Susan might have been tired, there was no sign at all of any form of mental collapse. For Susan, it had finally begun to sink in that her dream was coming true.
Susan was clearly determined to give the fans in her homeland a treat. After Glasgow, the tour moved on to Edinburgh, where Susan again provoked scenes of near hysteria and adulation when she appeared onstage. Meanwhile, it was confirmed that she had signed a record deal with Cowell, to be produced under his Syco label, and even then it was clear that it was going to be a massive bestseller.
The tour promoters were taking no chances with Susan, treating her as gently as they could. While the other acts were ferried round the country in a tour bus, Susan got her own limo. She was also finally getting used to dealing with her fans. Although she frequently appeared tired as she moved between gigs, she always waved at the crowds, signed autographs when she could and greeted the people who had gathered to see her. The small public backlash that had begun just before the final seemed to have completely disappeared. Now that people knew she was battling on, Susan inspired only respect and affection – and a huge amount of it – wherever she went.
Unfortunately, Susan was not able to perform at the next date in Cardiff. But while there were reports in the press that she had missed half the dates on the tour, the more realistic way of looking at it was that she had managed to appear in half of them. Life on the road is so utterly at odds with everything Susan was used to that it’s a minor miracle she had adapted as well as she had. Private limos, five-star hotels, screaming fans and euphoric audiences were not something Susan had ever experienced before, and while the same could be said of the other participants on the tour, they didn’t have Susan’s unique circumstances. All things considered, she was coping remarkably well.
All the while, Simon Cowell was keeping a very close eye on the proceedings. For starters, he had a vested financial interest in Susan, who was now signed to his record label, and if she turned out to have a long-term career, he stood to benefit quite as much as she did. Then there was the moral aspect as well. If there was one person responsible for the huge change in Susan’s circumstances, it was Cowell, and he felt a duty of care towards her, too.
In the wake of all the fuss about whether or not she would appear on stage during the tour, Cowell confessed that there had been some mistakes, particularly when it came to the hype built up around Susan and the fact that she didn’t actually win. It is difficult to see what else he could have done, however – the Boyle phenomenon was an entirely spontaneous global event and not a carefully manufactured Cowell extravaganza – but Susan could, perhaps, have been given more support.
‘During the final show, at the crucial point when the dance group Diversity won, I looked over at her face and thought, “Christ, she doesn’t know how to deal with not winning”,’ Cowell wrote in the Sunday Mirror. ‘It was a bad moment. Afterwards, I went over and gave her a hug and tried to reassure her. ‘Susan,’ I said, ‘my offer to record an album with you still stands.’ And we agreed that we would work together; that it wasn’t the end of the road for her. After that, I left the studio. I remember having a drink that night and trying to relax, but still feeling a bit strange. Something just didn’t feel right. And sure enough, it wasn’t.’ As her stay in The Priory proved.
Cowell was perfectly honest about the issues Susan’s appearance had provoked: should people who might be a little fragile be allowed to appear on the show? Fame is a very strange beast and will often savage the person it initially befriends, but the point that Simon and Piers both made was that for all the difficulties Susan endured, the positives far outweighed the negatives. She had, after all, achieved her lifelong dream.
Cowell discussed this with Susan’s family. ‘Last week, I met them in my London office and I asked them, “Tell me honestly, did we do right or did we do wrong?”’ he related. ‘What I meant was, was it right to allow Susan to carry on performing in the show once it became clear that she was finding it stressful? And they said, unanimously, that we did the right thing. They said that Susan has always wanted to sing and had sat at home for years, wishing that she had a chance. We had given her that opportunity.’
Susan was now receiving the care she needed, though it was an issue that was unlikely to go away. In an episode totally unrelated to Susan, a contestant on The X Factor, a woman in her fifties, publicly claimed she was going to commit suicide after not getting through to the final, which gave rise to more fears about what happened when you put people unused to fame in the spotlight. A lot of the time, it turns out they just can’t cope.
Whatever had happened in the past, Susan was doing well now. There was still some comment in the press to the effect that she shouldn’t be on the tour, but the fact was that Susan very much wanted to be there, and the only thing that was distressing her was when she wasn’t able to appear. She missed another show in Nottingham, but was due on stage at Wembley, where she was determined to perform.
‘Susan gets really upset because she thinks she’s letting her fans down,’ said her spokeswoman. ‘But she’s got to balance making her fans happy with looking after her health. She would have loved to have been at the shows, but she’s just really tired. She’s in London resting now, but she’s feeling really positive and can’t wait to get back on stage. She’s really excited about Sunday’s show – she loves singing… she lives for singing. If she were told she couldn’t perform at all because she had to take a break it would break her heart. And she still has a lot of support from her fans – she gets a standing ovation every time she sings and it means so much to her.’
Susan duly sang at the two Wembley dates and remained adamant that she was loving every second and simply wanted the dream to go on. Now there was more than just the tour to worry about, though: now that she had signed a record deal with Cowell, there were tracks to pick and music to record. And so the process began, with Simon professing to love what they were turning out. ‘She sounds fantastic on record,’ he said, refusing to give any more specific details about what they would be releasing. ‘It’s not all going to be show tunes. It’s not an obvious record, but so far, it’s good. She’s got a really good recording voice and I’m going to take my time. She’s happy and I think she’s enjoying the process. Luckily, things have quietened down a bit.’
They had indeed to a certain extent. The world seemed to have got over the difference in Susan’s appearance and voice – though if truth be told, she now bore no resemblance to the lady who’d first auditioned – but remained utterly fascinated by her strange and poignant story. Plans were afoot to run organized tours of Blackburn, although in truth there’s little that stands out there apart from Susan. The demand was there, though, especially from the United States, which remained transfixed by everything to do with Susan Boyle.
The Americans were not alone. In June, the French-born, Glasgow-based artist Laetitia Guilbaud, caused uproar when she painted a portrait of Susan that made her look like something out of the Folies Bergère. In the portrait, Susan’s waist is cinched in by a corset, while a very low-cut top shows off a deep décolletage (something the real Susan would never wear, having always dressed extremely modestly). She is also smoking a cigar, while one gloved hand clutches a satin purse and another strokes the pearls at her neck. There is the tattoo of an ‘S’ on her thigh, while beside her sits an ice bucket filled with champagne.
It was certainly a novel take on Susan. ‘For me, even though she is not the most attractive lady in the world, she has come into the spotlight recently with her beautiful voice and singing talent,’ Guilbaud explained. ‘I felt obliged to paint her in my style and give her a bit of “je ne sais quoi” and make her more sexy and appealing in a physical way to go with her voice and also wanted to reveal a wild side to her now that she is a celebrity.’
The pictures were pretty innocuous, all told: no one had depicted Susan as a saucepot before, and there was certainly nothing gratuitous or cruel intended by it. But some of Susan’s fans, especially those who lived in the United States, were unhappy with the portrayal of their heroine. Susan appealed to a wide variety of people, but one particular section of society who liked her were the very religious, and they were incensed by Guilbaud’s portrait to the extent that they issued threats. An email campaign was begun, orchestrated by a fundamentalist Christian group based in Texas. A typical email read, ‘This work is a mean depiction of a precious child of God. The artist should be crucified.’ While another said, ‘Susan is an angel. She would never behave in this way. Guilbaud should look to God and pray there is no retribution.’
Laetitia was extremely taken aback. ‘My artwork was never intended to insult or be hurtful,’ she said. ‘I am a fan of Susan. When I read the first few emails I was very scared. Some of them were threatening me. In one week I got thousands of blog hits and emails. About 200 were sick. They came from Texas.’ In the event, not everyone was so squeamish: the picture was displayed in Glasgow’s ArtDeCaf gallery and remains prominent on Laetitia’s website.
All of these were examples of Susan’s astonishing reach, and as well as touching people’s hearts all over the globe, she showered people with her gold dust by association. Britain’s Got Talent judge Amanda’s career continued to go from strength to strength in the United States, which she cheerfully admitted was entirely due to the Susan Boyle effect. She was interviewed so many times about Boyle that American TV companies continued to use her on other projects. And heaven help anyone who made nasty remarks about Susan: when Sharon Osbourne spewed out something unpleasant about her, she was forced into a humiliating climb-down and apology soon after. The world didn’t want to hear this sort of nastiness. Susan was a fragile creature with a huge amount of talent and people felt highly protective of her, even if, in some cases, they took it a little far.
Paul Potts continued to watch Susan’s progress with interest, too. Both artists were aware of the comparisons made between them, and it seemed to make good commercial sense for them to collaborate at some time. But even Potts blanched at the kind of attention Susan was receiving, which went well beyond anything he’d had to deal with. ‘She’s done really well and she’s coped with the sudden media attention,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how I would have coped.’ Potts said he was hoping to sing a duet with Susan at some point in the future, but said it was too early to think about that yet. ‘I wouldn’t want to add any more pressure than she has already,’ he explained. ‘It is obvious she is finding it tough and I hope that she will be left alone.’
Susan didn’t appear to mind, though. She might have found the pressure tough, but the idea of having it all taken away from her was a lot tougher.
Meanwhile, the revamp continued. In July Susan flew to the United States to appear on the Today Show, forcing Barack Obama to switch his TV health care address to the nation because it would have clashed with the interview. By now Susan looked even trimmer. Her haircut was slicker, her make-up more polished, and she appeared to have lost some weight, clad as she was in an elegant purple dress. The show’s host, Meredith Vieira, asked her if she’d had a makeover.
‘Just a slight one,’ said Susan, looking coy. ‘I brush up quite well.’
Susan also spoke about the bullying she’d endured as a child. ‘It wasn’t easy for me as a little kid, no, because I got ridiculed in school,’ she said. ‘You always get that from your peers anyway. I’m the type of person that just couldn’t stand up for herself very well, but I got over it. I’m getting over it now.’
And how did she find being so famous? Vieira asked. ‘I’m having a great time,’ said Susan firmly. ‘It’s been unbelievable. It’s indescribable. Anyone who has that kind of impact finds it hard to get their head around it. The impact [was] like a demolition ball… I’ve got to be honest here, through the guidance of a great team, and they are very good, I was able to see that in perspective and really turn that around a little. Being plucked from obscurity is like going on a long journey. You never know how it’s going to end. I don’t want it to end.’
That should have been enough to silence the doubters, but it wasn’t. They felt that Susan would have been better off returning to obscurity in Blackburn, but it was plain that Susan disagreed. Increasingly these people acted as if they knew what was best for Susan, and some people continued to fulminate that she was unable to cope. All the while Susan was jetting back and forth across the Atlantic, looking more and more polished with each journey. What the doubters didn’t realize, of course, was that they were treating Susan in exactly the same way the rest of the world had always treated her – until she showed she had a talent. Susan had spent her entire adult life being told that others knew what was best for her, and this was the first time she was having any say herself. It was a turnaround she appeared to be relishing.
At any rate, anyone who had the kind of clout that forced the President of the United States into rescheduling wasn’t going to go away in a hurry. As well as revealing the full extent of the impact Susan had made, that episode of the Today Show featured Elaine Paige, who Susan had so famously said she wanted to emulate. Susan was stunned when her idol came on, telling the audience she was ‘absolutely gobsmacked’. Then there was a specially filmed clip of Donny Osmond, pointing to a poster of himself and Marie in his Las Vegas show: Susan should come and see the show, he said, and possibly replace Marie.
Not only was Susan’s newfound fame beginning to sink in, she was also beginning to see the financial rewards of all her hard work. Her home in Blackburn belonged to the council, and now she began to make plans to buy it. She was also learning how to use a mobile phone for the first time, although her brother Gerry asserted she hadn’t quite got the hang of texting. Susan now had a credit card, a PA, a bodyguard (which she needed – those crowds could get boisterous) and most importantly of all, Simon Cowell’s secret mobile number, the one he almost never gives out.
Cowell was taking his responsibilities seriously: there had been one near breakdown and he wasn’t taking any chances of it happening again. Meanwhile, Susan, who was about to start work on her album, was being housed in a spacious, minimalist flat in Kensington, a very upmarket area of London, where Pebbles was also holding court. Was she ever going to go back to Scotland? Well, yes, of course she was, but she was certainly experiencing a very different world to the one she was used to.
Susan really hit the big time when she was asked to pose for the September cover of the US magazine Harper’s Bazaar. It was an incredibly prestigious gig as the magazine, an upmarket glossy, was associated with high-end sophistication and its covers are usually filled with extremely beautiful women. Susan was entering a different league. ‘It really made me feel like a Hollywood actress,’ she confided. ‘I had my hair done up.’ She certainly looked extremely glamorous, even more than she had previously.
The only downside as far as Susan was concerned was the fear that everything would be whipped away again. Showbusiness is a notoriously fickle industry, and no one’s career is guaranteed, but at least she was in the right hands. ‘Susan absolutely loves the life she is leading now,’ her brother Gerry said in an interview with the Sunday Mirror. ‘But it has left her fearful of going back to how things were, living on her own and waiting for her singing dream to come true. She has asked me many times what happens if this all stops?’ There was no answer to that, although at least Susan would be a lot better off than she had been previously.
Gerry also appreciated what Cowell was doing for his sister. ‘Simon called me to a meeting and was very determined to let me know, as her brother, that she will be managed delicately,’ he said. ‘I saw a different side to him. His TV persona is one thing. But he made it clear to me he has Susan’s best interests at heart. As a family we needed to hear that.’ He was certainly doing everything in his power to make her life as comfortable as it could be. But there was much more to come. Harper’s Bazaar was due out shortly – and there was a record launch to plan.