Tag: David Foster

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David Foster is so afraid of elevators that he’ll walk up 65 flights of stairs

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When last we checked in with David Foster, the Grammy-winning producer was caught on camera calling his 34-years-younger wife Katharine McPhee “fat” when she first appeared as a contestant on American Idol (where he was a behind-the-scenes mentor). I wonder what he’d call Betty Boop’s figure, the voluptuous Fleischer Studios cartoon character from the 1930s. Foster has written the music for a new Broadway show based on the foxy vixen, Boop! The Musical, that’s playing now. So Foster is doing some press for Boop!, including a new interview with the Wall Street Journal. When WSJ asked about Foster’s exercise habits, Foster revealed that a good chunk of his fitness comes down to his taking the stairs everywhere — he’s afraid of elevators! To the point where he’ll walk up 65 flights to a hotel pool. For the sake of the other swimmers, I hope Foster was able to shower post-climb and pre-dip. He shared even more about his elevator phobia:

David Foster is so afraid of elevators that he can only remember being in five of them as an adult.

The 75-year-old music producer, who is a 16-time Grammy winner, opened up about his fear of elevators after being asked about his workout routine.

“I try to go to the gym three times a week. Also, I literally never take an elevator. It’s claustrophobia. I’ve been in an elevator five times in my adult life. Three of those were for surgeries in the hospital. I was drugged so it was OK,” David told the Wall Street Journal.

David revealed one incredible story about why he went in an elevator.

He said, “The other two times were extraordinary circumstances. One was with Pavarotti and his 20th floor place in New York. I was working with him and Celine [Dion] on a duet and then the wine’s flowing, everybody’s drinking and I said, ‘I’m leaving now,’ and I started to go for the stairs. And he goes, ‘No. Today you don’t, today you take the elevator.’”

“He gets in this little elevator with a little seat in it. He sits down, he grabs me, he pulls me onto his lap, and he sings ‘Ave Maria’ in my f—ing ears so loud. I mean, Pavarotti’s singing to me all the way down. Anyway, to answer the question about exercise, I’ve taken millions of stairs in my life,” David said.

David also talked about walking up 65 flights of stairs so he could use the swimming pool at Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands.

“There’s this place in Singapore called the Marina Bay Sands. We were staying there while shooting Asia’s Got Talent [in 2015]. From time to time I wanted to go to the pool, so I would walk up the 65 flights to get to the pool,” he said.

[From Just Jared]

I may not be a big fan of the man, but that is a great story Foster tells about being serenaded by Pavarotti as a distraction/sedative for a 20-flight elevator ride. He should write a song about it! At age 75, I’m assuming Foster has already tried all the therapy he wishes to in terms of tackling this particular phobia, and they either didn’t work or he’s decided, “Hey, it’s good for my heart.” 65 flights, though, is just crazy. My only frame of reference is when I was living on the 15th floor of a building in Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. (Technically it was the 14th floor, because it was a superstitious building that had no floor 13. Seriously.) So Sandy cut our power and I had to haul my ass up those stairs, guided by the super with a flashlight, whereupon I packed a bag of essentials and immediately hot-footed it to my aunt uptown who still had electricity. Those 14 flights were plenty for me, thankyouverymuch, and that was when I was in better shape. And, not for nothing, isn’t Foster rich enough that he could’ve helicoptered his way up the building? I mean, what are those song royalties for anyway?!

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Photos credit: IMAGO/Jennifer Bloc/Avalon and Faye’s Vision/Cover Images

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David Foster tells wife Katharine McPhee ‘you were fat’ at 21

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David Foster and Katharine McPhee have been married for five years now, and have a son, Rennie, who is three. David also has five adult daughters from previous marriages. David and Katharine have always been, how shall I say, a curious couple. They have a 34-year age difference, and he was a mentor to her when she was on American Idol as a 21-year-old newbie. Now a video has resurfaced that harkens back to those American Idol days. The happy couple are at some public function, and a photo of Katharine on Idol is projected on the back of the stage. Katharine refers to herself as “chubby.” Then David — the man who bemoaned being known for RHOBH instead of his Grammys — chimes in with, “Oh yeah, you were fat.” What. An. A**hole.

In the video, McPhee — who has struggled with bulimia — is speaking on stage while Foster sits at a piano.

The background screen shows a photo of McPhee when she was a contestant on American Idol. As the singer explains, “[People] may not know, we met 17, almost 18 years ago, when I was a little chubby, and cheerful, contestant on American Idol.”

Gesturing to the older photo of herself, McPhee, now 40, says, “Look at me smiling.”

“Oh yeah,” Foster, now 74, says. “You were fat.”

In the clip, McPhee’s hands drop to her sides and her shoulders slump while the audience laughs.

“I was a little chubby, okay?” she says.

“It’s true,” he replies.

“I was just young,” says McPhee, who was 21 when she was on American Idol.

The Masked Singer alum has told PEOPLE that at one point during her struggle with bulimia, she was forcing herself to vomit as many as seven times a day, which she likened to “putting a sledgehammer to your vocal cords.”

McPhee sought treatment at Los Angeles’s Eating Disorder Center of California, where she spent three months undergoing both group and individual therapy, six days a week.

It’s her experience with disordered eating that prompted her fans to sound off on the video, with one saying, “It’s very hard to watch.”

“It really just goes to show the way he views women,” said The Pop Apologists.

“If he can say that in front of a crowd, imagine the insensitive comments in private,” said another fan.

This isn’t the first time Foster’s remarks on McPhee’s body have come under fire. In 2021 the Smash alum defended him after he wrote “What baby!” on an Instagram photo she shared of herself in a bikini, following the birth of son Rennie, now 3.

“I lost this baby weight without dieting. Zero. Diets are the worst and I’ve had zero pressure from anyone. I’ve let my body do its thing and found a great workout. That’s it. And guess what? I’ll probably gain weight again at some point too. Who cares? BUT people freaking out about what my husband captioned seriously get a life,” McPhee wrote.

Even so, the singer has shared that relapsing is always a concern — especially after she became pregnant in 2020.

“I was suddenly so obsessed with food, starting from this first trimester, and I had such a distortion of the way that I looked,” she said on the podcast Dr. Berlin’s Informed Pregnancy Podcast, where she added that she gained about 40 lbs. during her pregnancy.

She said she sought treatment from a psychiatrist and learned “that it’s really common for women who have struggled with eating disorders in the past to have almost a relapse, in some sense, when they enter pregnancy.”

Since then, she’s said, “What I didn’t expect was to have the baby and then be so at peace with my body.”

McPhee continued: “I had this, wow, like this huge appreciation of what my body had just done and given me that I wish that I’d given myself a little bit more of that grace through the pregnancy.”

[From People]

First of all, I’m glad that pregnancy connected Katharine to a newfound love and appreciation of her body. That must be a very healing experience. As for her husband, here’s what I have to say: I don’t have any objections to age-gap relationships on principle. Each couple is different and brings a unique set of life circumstances to the table. Is it cringey in some cases? Absolutely. Was David’s argument a couple years ago that they’re “like Celine and René” more creepy than comforting? I think so. What leaps out to me is that David made that heinous comment of his beautiful, younger wife when he’s the father of five daughters. A man who thinks it’s ok to say to any woman, let alone his wife, “you were fat,” is not a man I want to know.

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Photos credit: Jeffrey Mayer / Avalon, Xavier Collin / Image Press Agency / Avalon, Getty and via Instagram

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David Foster admits parenting an infant is a lot different now in his 70s

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Katharine McPhee and David Foster have always been an odd couple. Foster is 72 and McPhee is 38, meaning she’s younger than four of his five daughters (Allison, 52, Amy, 49, Sara, 41, Erin, 40, and Jordan, 36). Katharine and David welcomed their son Rennie last year, and everything still seems to be going smoothly. So smoothly that David and Katherine have now recorded a Christmas album/EP called, obviously enough, Christmas Songs. To promote the EP, they chatted with People magazine and they sort of admitted that, yeah, they’re a weird couple but it works for them. David also talks about being a father to this tiny baby after raising all of his daughters forty years ago. Some highlights:

Katharine on their musical taste: “People will always ask us at a dinner, ‘What music are you listening to right now?’ And he and I both just smile and look at each other and say, ‘We don’t really listen to music.’ We don’t listen to music in the car, though I do love putting on some jazzy stuff for dinner parties and stuff.” Adds Foster: “It’s not our thing to come home and put on music. We have a full life outside of music.”

Rennie travels with them: “He’s so much fun,” McPhee says. “We’re having such a great time, and we’re incredibly busy. We wish we weren’t traveling quite as much, but we get to take our little guy with us for most of this stuff.” So far, Rennie has traveled internationally to Mexico, Tokyo and Europe and domestically to Hawaii, Omaha, South Dakota, North Dakota and Las Vegas with his parents on their An Intimate Evening with David Foster & Katharine McPhee tour — and McPhee jokes “he won’t remember any of it.”

Foster’s dreams for his son: Still, Foster says “every day” with Rennie “is an adventure” — and he’s already showing his musical talents on the piano and his electronic drum pad. “We think [he’ll be musical], but we don’t know,” he says. “Kids, strangely, will do something for a while and then it’ll amaze you and then they just drop it and they don’t do it anymore. So we don’t know if the drumming thing is here to stay — I’d rather he have a tennis racket in his hand than a drumstick to tell you the truth. But anyway, if he ends up being a drummer, that would be great too. He loves watching our drummer, JR Robinson.”

Foster on welcoming another child in his 70s: For Foster, having a new baby was “not something” he thought was going to happen in his 70s, but “I haven’t regretted a single day of it. I’ve loved every single day. It’s the standard thing of like, ‘Oh, well you were so young when you had your children and you were working day and night, you never saw them.’ And there is some truth to that, sadly, for my [older] kids. I was just working a lot. Even though I’m working a lot now, I’ll cancel anything just to hang with him. It’s just different.”

Foster on his age difference with Katharine: Though Foster says he and McPhee “know we’re an unconventional couple,” they are certain they are the right fit for each other. “With Céline and [late husband] René Angélil, there was a big age difference, and after I was working with them for a long time it just became Céline and René. It just looked and felt normal. But it was, of course, kind of odd in the beginning. But I think we’re over that hump now with five years of being together, and hopefully people just start looking like we belong together because we feel like we do.” Adds McPhee: “Even if they don’t, we don’t care. We just love our history, how we met and where we are now. Sometimes we look at each other like, ‘This is so wild that we’re together.’”

[From People]

Yeah, the age and experience difference is a lot, but it’s not like they got together when Katharine was fresh out of high school. She was in her 30s, she already had one marriage and divorce under her belt, and I think she probably just wanted the peace and security Foster could provide her. As for Foster becoming a father in his 70s… like, I couldn’t do that, but whatever. It is what it is and while I have plenty of thoughts, I’ll mind my business. I imagine he does have more time to be a hands-on father these days, as opposed to when his daughters were young. That being said, comparing himself and Katharine to Celine and Rene?? LMAO!!!

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Xavier Collin / Image Press Agency / Avalon.