Unbreakable: My New Autobiography Read Free

her.
    So on day one, there were four of us. Simon and me, then Dannii and Brian Friedman, an American choreographer drafted in to replace Louis. On day two Simon took me to one side.
    ‘It’s not working, is it?’
    ‘No, it’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s terrible.’
    ‘I’ll get rid of Brian,’ he said.
    ‘Bring back Louis while you’re at it.’
    And so it came to pass.
     
    If I’m honest, I’d expected Dannii to be a bit flossy and sweet. She looked like a little doll! But I quickly realised she was sharp, smart and ambitious. I respected that and thought she could bring something new to the show.
    And that was about the extent of my thoughts on Dannii during the early audition stages. She had seemed fine at that point. But then again, I hadn’t really had much to do with her. The audition stages can be quite a slog, travelling up and down the country. On top of that, I was making the journey over from LA. It was Birmingham one week, Manchester the next, Glasgow another, Cardiff another… So by the time I’d finished a long day of filming and given it my va-va-voom all, I’d invariably just retire to my room, have a bath, snuggle up in my favourite pink, fluffy dressing gown that goes everywhere with me, then call Ozzy and the kids to see how their day had been.
    More often than not, my body clock was still on LA time anyway, so hanging around the hotel bar after filming had never been my thing. I might have managed it once or twice, but most nights I could be happily curled up in bed by 9 p.m. So at this stage, I had only really seen Dannii when we were filming, we didn’t socialise. From what I could tell, she seemed needy on set, but not with me. As it was her first time on the show, I think she was just keen to get it right, which was fair enough. As I say, she never bothered me. I would just do my bit then go off and seek my own space which, believe me, when you’ve had cameras thrust in your face all day, you desperately need.
    After the audition stage had finished, I headed off back to America for the rest of the summer. The plan was to squirrel away at home and stay below the media parapet until the live shows started in October, so I didn’t do any interviews during this period and, being in the US, I wasn’t seeing any British newspapers at all.
    However, my publicist in England would send me anything that related to me, and things started appearing in the press about how I was jealous of Dannii because I’m so much older, she’s so young and pretty, she’s so talented, she’s so this, she’s so that… blah, blah, the usual bollocks. I have been in the business a long time and know only too well that the media loves a good old feud story, it’s all part of the game. If you prod someone in the chest with a finger it gets blown out of all proportion and becomes a ‘punch-up’, but at least the story usually has some tiny germ of truth in it. However, this one didn’t and I genuinely had no problem with Dannii at all.
    At first, I just mentally swatted it away, like an irritating fly. Tomorrow, I told myself, it will be chip paper. But the same theme kept on reappearing, building up a head of steam. As I hadn’t done any interviews about The X Factor , I couldn’t put the record straight. But never once in any interview that I’d read – and she seemed to have done about a million of the bloody things, and front-cover stories too – had Dannii said something along the lines of, ‘Look, that’s ridiculous, we get on just fine and there’s absolutely no problem here.’ And it irritated the hell out of me, because it was very simple: deny it and kill the myth. So I’m not saying she perpetuated it, but from what I read she certainly didn’t deflect it either.
    By the time the first live show came around, I had worked myself up into a bit of a lather, particularly as the same old shit about me being jealous had started up again . Once you’re on set, you hit the ground running.