Rainbowland IV -- A Step Beyond The Rain
or “I’m In Love With The Girl In The Yellow Dress”

A fantasy that takes place somewhere over the rainbow,
in one of many possible realities involving Katharine McPhee,
her McPhamily, McPhriends and McPhans

I was in a bar in San Jose, feeling like hell and looking for trouble. I’d left all my good will and most of my brain back home in Sherman Oaks, and with the aid of my buddy Tommy Lowengard, who, as luck would have it, owned a Piper Cherokee, flew north to see if I could get rid of the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach by, oh, maybe killing something.

Not really. I was just in an absolutely rotten mood and it was not made any better by having Tommy kick in his new satellite radio, which immediately picked up Jackie O’Hanlon singing Waiting There For Me. “I guess it didn’t have to be a ‘boy’s year’ this year,” I said. “It was okay for a girl to win Idol. They even wrote her a better song than they did Katharine.”

“Well, it could be worse,” Tommy said. “Remember those rumors that she was going to sing Over The Rainbow because Eva Avila had done so well singing a lot of the same songs that Katharine did?”

“You’re right,” I admitted. “That would be the last straw.”

American Idol 6 had been a crap shoot toward the end and eerily reminiscent of the previous year, with strong representatives of jazz, R&B, country, pop, rock, and just about every genre you could think of. Paula had been equally dotty over Hussein Al Khoury, a New Yorker of Lebanese descent who despite his heritage had the sympathy vote because he’d just recovered from cancer; rockin’ Rocky Sales, called Leather Man by Katharine, who looked like Chris Daughtry with hair; and Travis Bettford, this year’s funky white boy. Randy had taken a strange liking to Addy Lincoln, an eerie blend of every blonde country chick who had ever made it into the top ten for the past five years.

Simon had been unable to hide his fondness for Jackie-O, as the eventual winner had been dubbed early on. She had won my suspicion early on by auditioning with Since I Fell For You and singing it note-for-note just like Katharine, after which Paula had actually done an instant replay of the previous year and kissed her right on the lips. Simon, however, totally refused, and the world was spared hundreds of fan videos, not to mention the inevitable comparisons. To make it even worse, her father, who had spent 40 years working in a car dealership in Muncie, Indiana, sat in the audience honking into a large red checked kerchief every time she sang. He had been instantly dubbed Daddy-O, but the O’Hanlons’ working-class background seemed to work in their favor, as did the fact that Jackie’s mother had died when she was ten, leaving her to help raise her two younger brothers. Having been semi-orphaned close to that age myself, I felt extremely guilty at the realization of how much sympathy her story could garner, even from me.

Jackie was a gorgeous 20-year-old redhead whose voice reminded a lot of people of Streisand’s, but her stage manner was instantly compared to Katharine’s. She loved to wear clinging low-cut gowns and knew how to make the camera a slave to her enormous blue eyes, and she sang her way into the Top Three with a jazzy rendition of Cry Me A River that nearly made me cry. I loved that song and had always wished Katharine would perform it, so my reaction made me feel almost like a traitor. Simon practically handed her the crown by assigning her Unchained Melody, which she sang in such a hauntingly beautiful fashion that America eventually squeaked her past Travis Bettford’s best effort of the year, a very well done cover of What A Fool Believes.

“If Katharine had been born in a little teeny town up on the Oregon border and worked her way through BoCo as a pizza waitress, she’d probably have won last year,” I crabbed to no one in particular. Tommy made vaguely supportive noises but generally didn’t say much for most of the trip.

As the flashing multicolor sign welcomed us into Toons, I could hear Ashton Shepard singing and my guts started tying themselves into knots. He was becoming a big enough name that he didn’t really need to play places like this, but it was his hometown and he’d gotten his start here, so he liked to come back and help them out, or just drop in and jam with whoever happened to be providing music at the moment. Nobody minded. Nobody but me. I wanted to march up to the front and smash his face in, but that was just because Katharine was sitting somewhere up front and I was pretty sure she’d be paying close attention to whatever he was doing, probably smiling at him and nursing a drink and—that was about as far as I could take it before smoke started rolling out of my ears.

“Hey, Buddy, how about we just stay out here,” Tommy said. “Get a Coke. You might want to think a little, know what I’m sayin’?”

Tommy thought I was totally nuts to have come chasing all the way up here to torment myself, but he had a wild, edgy streak in him that couldn’t resist a bit of danger now and then, so instead of trying to talk me out of it, he’d simply watched as I talked myself into it, then offered me transportation. Tommy could have been a clone of Al Lowengard, my boss, but aside from the obvious, I’d never seen a shred of similarity between the two of them. His dad would never have let me get this far, but Tommy wasn’t his dad.

“God, this place is such a hick joint,” said a voice at my elbow. A man looking very out of place in a suit pushed an orange-colored drink away from himself and made a disgusted face. “I guess they serve so much beer they haven’t a clue how to make a mixed drink. You want it?”

“No,” I said, then reached for the glass and took a huge swig. It tasted pretty good. “What’s this, a stinger?”

“You can call it that if you want to,” the guy said. “I’m gonna call it a night.”

Then he was gone, and I was left with his drink, which didn’t taste insufficient to me at all. It tasted damn good.

“You sure you want to do that?” Tommy asked.

I was wearing a cap and sunglasses, which I suppose I thought of as some kind of disguise, but I stuck the glasses in my shirt pocket. “I’m not sure of anything except that—oh hell, I suppose I’m going in there and torture myself a little bit more.”

“You know what vodka does to you,” Tommy said.

“You know what the thought of Katharine flirting with that whey-faced little pansy does to me?”

“Half a drink and you’re belligerent as a damn hornet,” Tommy said, curling up his lip. “You better think.”

“All roads lead to American Damn Idol,” I muttered, finishing the stinger. I took a deep breath and wished I hadn’t, because the cigarette smoke was bad even in the relative safety of the nearly empty bar area. “I’m goin’ in.”

“You sound like a fighter pilot getting ready to dive,” Tommy said.

“Just watch me,” I said. I pushed through the crowd and got there just as Shepard was finishing a song. I hated his music. I hated him. Months ago he’d gotten a lot of mileage out of publicly stating that he’d like to date Katharine, but it had all come to a halt when she didn’t reciprocate. He’d looked a little silly but recovered. Then somewhere along the way things had changed.

“I’d just like to say something I should have said before,” he said, smiling stupidly toward the front row of tables. “That song was for the beautiful young lady sitting right over there.” He nodded toward Katharine’s table but stopped short of naming her. She was turned sideways to me. Enough that I could see her returning his smile.

Maybe if he’d just gone backstage, or anywhere except to Katharine’s table, nothing would have happened. But he came down and sat by her. Leaned toward her and engaged her in conversation. And she was still smiling. Maybe if she just hadn’t been smiling…

I pushed past people until I was standing across the table from him. The idiot was still right in her face, trying to ingratiate himself with her. I’d fix that soon enough. “Hi,” I said. “You probably don’t know me, or maybe you do, who knows, the damn paparazzi go after everybody these days, but anyway, my name’s Chris McDonald, and if you don’t move your sorry ass away from this table, I’ll move it for you.”

“Oh my GOD,” Katharine said, standing up and deliberately placing herself between us. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I’ll bet you detoured through the bar, didn’t you?”

Shepard insinuated himself between us. “Let’s not have any trouble now,” he said.

The mere sound of his voice irritated me beyond belief. “Oh, it’s no trouble at all,” I said, and before I was aware of what I was doing, my fist started straight for his jaw.

*****************

A day late and a dollar short--that was me and current pop culture, most of the time. Sometimes I thought if it wasn’t for my son constantly telling me how behind the times I was, I wouldn’t have an inkling of what people my age, or slightly younger, were “supposed” to like. My penchant for becoming emotionally involved with older women, which I attributed to my post-collegiate need to associate with ladies whose parents couldn’t dictate their most important life choices, didn’t help much in that regard either. The few nights I’d watched American Idol 4 with Katharine were like a revelation, and even then I couldn’t get it right. I’d been convinced Bo Bice was going to take it all. Not that I wanted him to, I didn’t really care, I just thought that’s what the voters would go for. Katharine got it right, though. She called it for Carrie Underwood. Not sure why, she just had a feeling.

“She’s gonna take it and run with it,” she’d said. “Something tells me she’s got the stuff to go really big.” Eyeing a third pizza slice, she’d thought better of it and instead simply sipped her Diet Pepsi. “Sometimes I think I could do that. Do you think I could do that?”

“Well, I know you can sing,” I said. “But I’ll bet the pressure is awful. Could you take it?”

It wasn’t exactly what she’d wanted to hear, but she knew it was the truth. She set the Pepsi down, her shoulders drooped, and she suddenly looked very young and very vulnerable. “That’s what I’m not so sure about,” she said. “I’ve got some stuff to work through before I’m ready to tackle something that big.”

I knew what she meant, she knew I knew what she meant, and there was no use browbeating her about it. The last thing she needed from me was any more pressure. “Well, Sweetie, I don’t know what to tell you except that you’ve got some decisions to make, and I’ll back you up whatever you do. And I’m always here for you. You’ve got all my phone numbers.”

The rest, as they say, is history. A year later she’d nearly gone to the top of American Idol. Then came the Idol Tour, followed by a frantic attempt to put out a debut album as quickly as possible.

Our situation changed over the months as well. If I were creating a movie montage, I would cycle through endless permutations on the theme of Katharine bouncing, slamming, or sneaking through my door, frequently followed by some variation on “Do you know what they pulled on me today?” Things did not always go smoothly during the creation of that initial album, nor were they helped along by the fact that now and then, someone would, sometimes literally, jump out of the bushes with a camera, unnerving her totally. As I never kept liquor on the premises, she would have to calm herself down with a glass of chocolate milk, a big favorite with both of us. She would park on my couch and splutter it out, chewing a thumbnail or twisting the big silver Claddagh ring I’d given her or agitatedly pushing the hair back from her face, until she’d worn off the initial distress and could articulate her feelings better.

The bad thing about a studio apartment is that there are no individual rooms, so the bed is always just there, quietly making a statement in the background of any conversation, discussion, or argument. That may also be a good thing about a studio apartment. We usually wound up there, and eventually I would get a slightly more rational version of whatever she’d been spluttering about earlier.

The major problem was song choice. “Just like on Idol!” she’d exclaim. “I like this, they like that. This sounds right for me, that doesn’t. I want some input. I’ve even got ideas for songs, I just, like, need some help with getting the lyrics to sound right. And, well, if you want me to, like, sing it just like the demo girl, well, hire her!”

Sometimes I would put on a big mock frown and say something like “Yeah! I’m Katharine McPhee, by God, and it’s my album!” Then I’d beat on my chest like a gorilla, or something equally stupid, and she’d tell me to shut up and dive at me and we’d wrestle around like a couple of preschoolers. Well, almost.

Nobody ever figured out exactly what The Katharine McPhee Sound was because she could sing so many different styles and sing them all well, and everything required something different. She didn’t want to have preconceived notions of what anything “should” sound like. She wanted to hear the material, sit with it, think about it, then sing it however it came out, however it felt right to her. “I’m learning to trust my own intuition,” she’d say. “Now I just need to learn how to convince other people to trust it too. How do I do that?”

“By singing it the way you feel it,” I would always say. “You can’t talk anybody into anything. You’ve just got to show them.”

Basically all she had to do was walk in and sing. Except for that one pesky little problem:  she kept having ideas of her own. About everything.

Some producers were easy to work with. David Foster wrote her a duet and persuaded Andrea Bocelli to sing with her. Then they called it an “extra cut” so it wouldn’t seem to be contrary to the main intention of the album—an interesting phrase as I had never been able to pinpoint its exact thrust anyway.  “That wasn’t exactly like Moses parting the Red Sea,” I said. “They both love you.”

“Just administrative details to work out,” she said. “The rest was sheer heaven. The fighting was mostly over the other tracks.”

The heavy hitter turned out to be a Big Ballad called Without You, and Katharine found it amusing that the hook was the exact opposite of My Destiny. The song she and Diane Warren had collaborated on, Can’t Ever Get Enough of You--the one she called “my” song—had turned out well, and she loved the arrangement. “You know on Since I Fell For You, how it starts kind of slow and dreamy, and then just about the time you’re all like ‘Bo-ring! Pick up the pace, honey!’ all of a sudden it does, and it turns into this real swingy, jazzy kind of thing? Well, that’s how we do it. And it really works!” She’d been really enthusiastic about that one, since she’d helped write it, and had been bouncing around throwing pillows at me and being simply ecstatic when things were going well in the studio.

Then there were the other days, the “all they can think about is money!” days, and I’d say “Well, sure, Sweets, that’s what they’re about. This is your first album. You don’t think anybody cares about something as, what’s the word, obscure, maybe, as artistry? Do you? Of course this is about money!”

“It’s about my career too! This may be the first a lot of the world will ever hear from me.”

“Okay, what about other Idols’ debuts? They usually do anywhere from lousy to okay, and later they find their voice and their audience. And their Grammys. And their millions.”

“Grammys,” she said. “I want respect. R-E-S-P-E-C-T!”

“But you wouldn’t mind if they paid you too.” Before she could answer, I said, “Oh shut UP! I KNOW already! I just beat you to it.”

Then she’d say, for the hundredth time, “Stop making fun of how I talk,” and I’d put my arms around her from behind, rest my cheek against hers, and say “I’m definitely not, like, making fun of you,” and I could almost feel her face getting hot. I really shouldn’t tease her when she’s already wound up over something.

“You just want me for my money-making potential!” she’d accuse, thumping me on the forehead, and I’d promise to sign a pre-nup and that would really make her furious. “You think I’d marry somebody I didn’t trust any more than that to begin with? Christopher, you make me crazy!”

“But I’d do it if you wanted me to,” I said. “Really. I mean, if somebody ever said anything to you, I wouldn’t want you to entertain that kind of a thought for even a split second. ”

“You’re missing the point,” she said. “I would never think that about you, no matter what. I don’t need proof. If I did, I wouldn’t be here and we wouldn’t even be having this silly discussion. You dork.”

“By analogy to K-Fed, I guess they could call me C-Mac…”

“Oh, shut UP!” she’d said, laughing at me in spite of herself, and then that discussion got badly sidetracked.

And so it went, up and down, with the album production. Everybody wanted one real gasser of a love song, but for some reason that was proving the most elusive track to nail. So one night I told her to simply forget it. We were going to spend an entire evening talking about something else. Anything else. So we watched an old Harry Potter movie on TV and talked about people finding their paths in life, and the sermon we’d listened to that weekend and Reverend Cook leaning over the pulpit saying earnestly “If not now, when? If not me, then who?”

“You could be the one!” I quoted.

In the background, Selena’s voice was sliding smoothly along on I Could Fall In Love With You, and at first I thought the rather vacant look in Katharine’s eyes had to do with being immersed in the song. Then she started to smile, her eyes refocused, and she leaned over and kissed me, kind of sweet and friendly, and I knew it wasn’t going to lead to anything past itself. “I just got the greatest idea,” she said. “Or rather you did, and I’m going to steal it from you and make a song out of it. Well, I’ll probably need, like, well, I don’t know, but it’s going to be a song. And the title is going to be You Could Be The One. And I’m calling Diane right now. Thank you, Selena, and thank you, Christopher, and I have to get to work!” That shot the romantic mood, but I’d evidently helped her out of a jam, and I knew she’d make it up to me sooner or later.

Probably the most controversial cut on the album was titled Pretty Thing, and Katharine had actually written quite a bit of it herself. At least the idea originated with her. The lyrics were simple, but everyone knew what they meant.

Everyone says she’s such a pretty thing,
Got a sparkle that makes you want to sing,
Nobody knows all the things she hides,
Nobody knows how she feels inside.
When she looks in the mirror, what does she see?
Not quite the same thing as you and me.
Don’t talk about it, just let it be, just let it be.

They already had the tune but it wasn’t working with the original lyrics. Somehow Katharine had changed the words just enough, and picked up the tempo, and it had turned into something totally different. “Anything that can make me cry that hard is worth fighting for,” she’d told me. “I just broke down. Then I realized I was going to record it one way or another, no matter who I had to fight. So I made them a deal. They’d picked out this really stupid title for the album—they wanted to call it Katharine With An A, because somebody thought it would sound like Liza With A Z, and since so many people can’t spell my name anyway, it just—oh, I don’t know, but I hated it. I said I’d rather have them just call it Katharine McPhee if they couldn’t come up with anything better than that. So I crabbed and crabbed about it, and finally I just said oh, I’ll make you a deal—give me my song and I’ll shut up about the album title. Somebody took me serious and I got it! ”

It might not have been suitable to be released as a single but the Eating Disorders Clinic of California liked it and it became a sort of unofficial theme song.

From Here To Forever was carefully crafted with no whiney steel guitars or sawing fiddles but still came out very country. I’m On Your Side sounded like a cross between Aretha Franklin and Bob Seger, It’s Not What You Think rocked hard enough to surprise everybody, and a wild, sexy, synth-heavy cut called Persuade Me, which walked a razor’s edge between tease and sleaze, became the single and her first music video. It certainly made people sit up and take notice, and frequently say something like “Is that Katharine McPhee?” It was as though the girl at the Big Sexy Hair press conference, with her sweet girl-next-door smile and virginal white blouse, was morphing before your eyes into the retro-sleek Black Dahlia-like poster that had dominated the wall behind her, shedding her innocence in favor of dark eye liner, a chain-like necklace, and altogether too much leather for my taste. The first time I saw it, it reminded me of an old movie called Cat People, in which the heroine transformed into a black panther every time she had a sexual experience, after which she would invariably kill her unfortunate partner.

I had been absolutely in shock at my first viewing, watching Katharine slink around, singing “Be careful what you wish for, ‘cause it might be what you get—talk me into it, talk me into it, into it, into it… persuade me….” As the last notes faded away, I couldn’t be sure whether she was preparing to bestow upon some poor guy the best moments of his life or possibly kill and eat him. I found it profoundly disturbing. It was also arousing as hell. She knew exactly what I was thinking every moment, and when the last image had died away, she leaned toward me and said “Purr-r-r-r-r-suade me…”

“Was that really you?” I said.

“One side of me, I suppose.”

“The one that comes out when the moon’s full?”

“Don’t you like her?” she said wistfully, and I had the feeling I’d by God better say the right thing and not take too long thinking about it.

“I like everything about you,” I said. “I also like to think I’m not going to wake up dead after a wild night with Catwoman.”

That must have been close enough to the right thing, because she gave one of her funny little chuckles and pushed me back onto the couch. “I was gonna kiss you to death, but I guess I’ll have to restrain myself.”

“Oh, go ahead,” I said.

She did.

The album didn’t quite make the original release date, but they came close. Then nobody quite knew what to do with it because it was totally eclectic in style. At first there was no one huge hit, but altogether airplay time was phenomenal because she was charting everywhere. Nobody quite knew what to do with it. Then sales took off and it hit gold and kept going. And kept going. There was an official party, after which we’d had our own, dancing around my little apartment singing “Something for everyone! A comedy tonight!”

It was a year full of new experiences for Katharine. Guest starring on Lost. Talk show guesting and guest-hosting. Becoming a kind of unofficial spokeswoman for both the JCPenney Afterschool Fund and the EDCCA. A chain of boutiques wanted to present a line of trendy clothes called McTogs. Allura Cosmetics, which had been looking to renovate and update its old-school image, had discovered some Idol Tour videos of Katharine doing some very sexy moves in a long black floor-length gown and the lightbulb went on over the Marketing Director’s head. Suddenly they thought it would be great to create a new scent in her honor—and, of course, using her image--and she would get all giggly considering what their ads might sound like.

“Don’t you want to smell like Katharine McPhee?” she would gasp, clasping her arms around herself, laughing uncontrollably. “Why does that sound so darn funny?” and I would spoon myself behind her on the bed, bury my nose in her neck, and declare that I thought Allura Windswept smelled pretty good already, why did they need to make her smell like something else? And what would they name it? “Maybe they’d just call it Katharine,” she said. “I wonder if my ego can survive all this.”

American Idol 6 came and went, then came the M&M Tour, shorthand for the fact that Katharine was to do a joint tour with David Foster’s latest protégé, Raelynn Morrison, a 17-year-old blonde-haired kid who looked like she was twelve and sang like she was thirty, with a voice that could do an eerie seesaw between Leann Rimes and Charlotte Church, depending on the material. Stylistically they were light years apart, so they would appeal to somewhat different audiences, but Raelynn was amiable, curious, and willing, so they were able to work up various duets that were a stretch for both of them, but also fun. She was also limber as a monkey and a closet Bob Fosse freak. Between the two of them, they came up with some amazing dance routines, including a finale to It’s Not What You Think from Katharine’s album that closed the show with a whirlwind of flashdance-like stomping and whirling and hair tossing.

The girls were outfitted with a touring bus luxurious enough to have a private suite with double bed in the rear and a good-sized shower, an unheard of privilege in such conveyances. Their other accoutrements, as well as the band members and their instruments, made their way in a second bus and a huge truck that had been outfitted to sleep people if necessary.

So Katharine and Raelynn were off for two months, but it wasn’t push-push-push like the Idol tour had been. The tour was only planned to take in two or three dozen cities and there would actually be days off between performances.

Raelynn openly confessed to having had a mammoth case of McPheever and to voting for hours at a stretch for weeks trying to get Katharine to the Kodak Theatre. She was delighted to be touring with one of her idols, and Katharine found her personable and interesting. Her mother, however, was less than enchanted at the thought of her daughter traveling unchaperoned, which was her right at her age. Evidently the tour sponsors were not happy at the thought of having to deal with Mrs. Morrison and accepted Katharine’s assurances that she would keep an eye on Raelynn. If anything got past her, there were a couple of very large bodyguards assigned to them.

In the midst of all this prosperity and good fortune, it seemed there was only one dissonant note. Me. “Everyone” seemed to think it would be better if Katharine didn’t appear to have close ties to any one man, especially at this stage of her career. Just in case. I was becoming a little too well known in some circles. She protested at first but then started giving ground. “What am I supposed to do?” I’d protested. “Just disappear?”

“No, of course not,” Katharine reassured me. “It’s just a game. Just for show. It doesn’t mean a thing. Do you think I’d let anybody tell me something like that?”

“Like what?” I’d said irritably.

“Like that I had to give you up. I mean for real.”

“Would you?”

“Oh, for pete’s sake, Christopher. Don’t be crazy.”

Then Ashton Shepard had reappeared and I began to wonder just who was crazy and who wasn’t.