Andy DehnartWith a Village Voice reporter watching, American Idol 4‘s Constantine Maroulis “checked his MySpace page for new e-mails on his laptop,” “sprayed a coat of Axe deodorant all over his torso” after “fluffing the hairs on his chest a bit with the blow-dryer,” “complained that unauthorized shots of him taken by a Broadway photographer were being circulated,” “briefly pouted for two paparazzi,” “checked his BlackBerry,” received “another brand-new cell phone” for free, “tried to put his hair in his face on purpose … to hide the side view of his double chin” while on TRL, and smoked a joint.
About that last part, Constantine says, “I mean, whatever, if people think that’s so terrible that I like, ooo . . . took a puff off a little joint. You know, I’m a fucking artist.” Those revelations and more come in a fascinating, nearly 5,000 word deconstruction of Constantine by the Village Voice’s Angela Ashman.
Like many other former contestants, Constantine is now on Broadway, in The Wedding Singer. But as the Village Voice says, he says “I’ve paid my dues” as a way to insist “he is not a loser like the other American Idol losers. He believes the show merely helped him achieve the kind of success he deserved and would have perhaps reached on his own–if it were not so impossible to break into the entertainment industry as an unknown.”
While he takes responsibility for being voted off the show, American Idol‘s focus on contestants’ family members may have contributed to his loss, he said. “It’s fucked-up. You put Scott Savol’s poor overweight kind of white-trash family on there stirring the spaghetti and some ketchup and all of a sudden you get, like, half the country’s votes. That’s just the way it is.”
Still, the show earned him fans, and he “keeps almost every letter, trinket, teddy bear, drawing, and photo he was ever given in his parents’ basement in New Jersey, which he calls his own ‘little Graceland,” the paper notes. Constantine says he does so because “One day when I’m unemployed and miserable, I can always look at that stuff and hopefully feel a little better about myself and what I once did and my contributions to society.”