Open Book

by Jessica Simpson

  It was seven-thirty in the morning and I’d already had a drink. I always had a glittercup in reach at home. That’s what I called the shiny tumblers filled with vodka and flavored Perrier. At that time, the flavor was mostly strawberry, but by then I didn’t care what it tasted like. I just needed a drink every morning because I had the shakes.

  My anxiety always kicked into high gear before school functions, and there had been a few performances since Maxwell started kindergarten in September. I knew how important they were, even if they made me nervous. All these five-year-old kids in their navy-blue school uniforms, learning not to be scared to perform in front of so many people. Maxwell was going to sing at the Halloween assembly, and I’d tried to get her to practice the song in front of me at home the night before.

  “I want to surprise you,” she said.

  “No, but, I really want to know what you’re doing,” I said. “I want to know if I can help out.”

  “I got it,” she said.

  That is my daughter. Maxwell is so like my younger sister Ashlee, and I love them both for their independence. I constantly find myself calling Maxwell “Ashlee” and vice versa. Maxi is in control, and I never want to be overbearing. It was hard for me not to try to protect her when she was too young to understand nerves yet. When she would say, “Why is my tummy upset?’ before a performance, I’d feel a sympathetic flip of my own stomach remembering all the times I had nerves before going onstage or doing an interview. Eric knew what that was like, too, that feeling right before he went on the field playing football at Yale or for the 49ers. That pressure of everyone looking at you.

  I felt it then in the car headed to school. By then, I had engineered my life so the world mostly came to my house, a comfortable hangout place for my family and friends, and I had the ability to do almost all the business side of my collection there, too. I even had my own recording studio. I could be safe at home. It was almost a shock that morning to realize, God I have to put myself together. Put the pieces of the puzzle together from a memory of who people expected me to be. I knew I was falling apart, but I had to look like a good mom who was present for her children. Which I was—I am—but I was just never going to be the cupcake mom or the arts-and-crafts helper at school. Even then, when I knew I was operating at about fifteen percent, I knew I was a good mom.

  We pulled into the lot and I spotted my dad’s new Mercedes. It was hard to miss, a bright-green, custom sports car I recognized from his Instagram. I had not seen much of my father since my parents split in 2012. They were married for thirty four years, and I had a hard time being around them together since they’d stopped loving each other. My father decided to tell me his plan to leave my mother when I was at Cedars-Sinai hospital, a week before I delivered Maxwell. No spotlight is safe around a Simpson—we’ll steal it every time.

  I was blindsided by this news, which triggered his natural salesmanship. He pitched it to me as a positive thing. “You gave me the confidence,” my father added, quietly. “You gave me a way out.”

  Great, I thought to myself, I broke my own heart. When he left the room, I broke down. I gave my father a way out of his marriage to my mother.

  I didn’t want to be thanked. I wanted them to be grandparents. I wanted them to be there for me as I was about to have my first child. Eric had to hold me as I repeated over and over, “It’s not my fault.”

  Five years later, my dad was inside waiting for us in the gymnasium at Maxwell’s school. The performances are usually in the school auditorium, but for some reason they switched it that morning. I had the feeling I did when I was just starting out. There would be a sudden venue change for a showcase, or you thought the stage would be higher—it just threw me. The seating was in the bleachers and I walked in to see everyone looking down on me. Sounds were ricocheting off every surface and the place was lit up so bright I wanted to put my sunglasses back on.

  I hugged my father quickly, and we all made our way up to find spots in the bleachers. Dad sat directly behind me, and I was relieved my mother wasn’t there. Even choosing who to sit next to seemed to send a message about whose side I was on. Honestly, since the divorce, I’d chosen my mother, period. She was someone I dealt with day-to-day running the Jessica Simpson Collection. When I saw them together with Maxwell and Ace, instead of appreciating it I found myself mourning my old normal. The new normal sucked. The new normal was the role reversal of my parents coming to my house separately for the holidays like they were teenagers. This is what life is, I would say to myself. Forget what life was.

  Even if I tried to be impartial, I could see how my mom was blindsided and hurt. Tina Ann Drew was seventeen when Joe Truett Simpson started working as the youth minister at her church in McGregor, Texas. He’d only taken the job out of desperation. The youngest son of a Baptist preacher, my dad had done everything he could to avoid following in his dad’s footsteps. But his scholarship to Baylor didn’t cover room and board, so he finally asked my grandfather to get him a job. His first night on the job, he went back to Baylor, told his roommate he met the girl he was gonna marry, and broke up with the Tri Delta sorority girl he’d been seeing. He waited six months to ask my mom out, and first checked with the pastor to see if it was possible. He told my dad he had to ask the permission of the youth committee chairman. Which happened to be my mom’s mother.

  Nana said yes, which surprised everyone. My mom’s parents were strict—my Papaw was a principal and Nana was a librarian who required order in her life. Mom was the youngest of three girls and had the most drive to start a life away from home. And there was Joe, who believed that since all things were possible in Christ, why not dream big? They married right away, and along came me.

  “Well, she was a busted condom,” Dad would say in my earshot when I set out to do something big. “So, she came with purpose.” My mom always told me I was the fastest swimmer. I was an accident, but it really did just reinforce the idea that God sent me here for a reason. During Sex Ed in school, they told us all to use condoms. “They’re ninety-nine percent effective.”

  I stood up. “I’m the one percent,” I yelled, “so it can happen to you! Let’s be abstinent.” I was a witness.

  I always felt that need as a preacher’s daughter. If I thought that was a lot of responsibility, try being a preacher’s wife. Mom was the first to tell me her life was all about business. The business of the church, and then the business of their children. And then it all ended, and she hadn’t seen it coming. She spent decades putting her brilliant business mind to work for our family behind the scenes. Dad had the ideas, she would fine-tune them and pull them down a bit from the stratosphere. Then Dad would sell it. He was the pitchman who could sell anything. If my dad can make people believe in God, I always thought at the start of my career, he can surely make people believe in me.

  He did for a long time, but I had to fire him as my manager in 2012. He thought I was following my mother’s wishes, but he had made some bad deals for me. Just stupid stuff that people promised to him and he believed. Bridges were burned, and I didn’t know how many until I tried to cross them. It took about five times to really fire him before the message stuck. The first time I chickened out and did it in an email. I finally just said it to his face.

  Now, in the gym before the concert, I realized my dad was talking to me. I turned to face him and answered, something about the performance. His face changed, and I realized he smelled the vodka on my breath. His eyes widened in surprise, and then narrowed in a look of concern or pity, I wasn’t sure. I turned quickly, glancing at two cupcake moms eyeing me. They sat next to each other and chatted through smiles as they went up from my shoes to my dress to my hair. I smiled back at them and they looked away. I wished I had a girlfriend here with me. I blamed myself for not making more of an effort to get to know other moms at school, but I also knew I was barely hanging on. I just wasn’t capable of small talk with strangers.

  I leaned over Ace to whisper to Eric. “I feel like ev
eryone’s staring at me,” I said through a closed smile that matched the cupcake moms’. He gave me a look that told me that was because they were. My husband can always tell what’s on my mind.

  Finally, the kids started the performance and everyone cheered. Maxwell spotted us in the crowd, and I let out a “Whoop” when we made eye contact. I was so proud of her. It’s enough that this piece of my heart walked around outside of me, but to see her be so confident and happy was a blessing. I felt real joy. I was pulled into being present, forgetting everyone else around me. Just there. I wished it could be like that all the time.

  When I performed, I was always present, but it had been years since I was onstage. My kids had never even seen me perform. The only time Eric had seen me sing in front of an audience was when I was promoting my second Christmas album in 2010, but that had been on a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float surrounded by dancing muffins and gingerbread men. Eric couldn’t really get a sense of me as an artist in that setting. For about a year, I’d been writing and recording music in my home studio—raw and from the heart. It was music I was really proud of. But I still worried that to my family I was like a pop star in theory only.

  The assembly ended, and my anxiety returned. Stronger now. Parents descended from the bleachers to greet their kids. The gymnasium seemed brighter, and even louder. I needed to get out of there.

  Maxwell came over and we gave her huge hugs before the students needed to go back to class. Ace looked up at her, his eyes wide, and I remembered that no matter how well you know someone, seeing someone perform temporarily changes how you see them. I became very conscious of what I wanted to tell her. I’d read enough parenting books to know not to say what I’d heard as a kid from people who meant well: “You looked beautiful.” Or, “You were perfect.” Instead, I told her I loved seeing her perform. “You looked so happy up there.”

  My dad started in, praising Maxwell to the heavens. I looked away. She and her friends headed back to her classroom, and Ace started pulling Eric to the door. They were going to throw around a football, and I was happy to cheer them on. But there was something else I had to do.

  “Dad, come to the house,” I said. “I’ll ride with you.”

  He has this way of cocking his head when he is excited, a constant movement that shows all the energy inside him. “Of course,” he said.

  “I wanna play you some of my music.”

  As we made our way to the house, I could barely talk. I got Dad talking about the new car and his photography hobby and business, which he could talk about for hours. It was how I negotiated a lot of conversations with people at that time. I listened to every word, but only chimed in now and again to keep them going.

  For the past year, I’d both dreaded and dreamt of letting my dad hear this music. As my manager, my father heard every demo I ever made. He knew all my music before it was even produced. But I hadn’t told him I had been writing. And I had not just been making music about what I’d been through in life, there were songs about him.

  We got to the house at about 9:30, and Dad had to navigate his Mercedes around the party rental trucks already lining up. That night I was set to host a Halloween party. Eric and I had become famous for our extravagant parties, especially on Halloween. Every year I posted a photo on my socials of the family in costume, and in 2011 I even announced my second pregnancy in a Halloween post of me holding my bump in a tight mummy costume. I put pressure on myself to make each year bigger and better than the last. My friend Stephanie, who I’ve known since fifth grade, is an amazing event planner and I asked her to put together a Halloween party that would also celebrate our friend Koko’s birthday. In our circle of friends, I have always treated every birthday as a sacred event. I always collected the candles they’d wished on, carefully placing them in a Ziploc bag to give to them to hold until the wish came true. My friends joked that they had drawers full of ungranted wishes, but if they refused to take them, I secretly held them for them. I couldn’t give up on their wishes.

  As soon as my dad and I got into the house, I got a new glittercup going. There was comfort in the weight of a full tumbler, the slosh of the ice as I took sips. Liquid courage to go downstairs to the recording studio. Ozzy Osbourne had it built when he lived there before me. He was so sweet, but let’s just say we have a different design aesthetic. The studio was all black and scary when I moved in. I made it mine, lightening the room and overlapping pretty rugs to create a sound cocoon.

  I took a rolly chair at the console, bending my leg to put one foot up on the chair as I absently swiveled back and forth. I kept catching eyes with the idols that I’d put up to inspire me. A blown-up Polaroid self-portrait by Stevie Nicks in the 1970s, wild-haired and wild-hearted, leaning into the camera to fix her lipstick. Keith Richards smirking at me in sunglasses, sitting on a private jet in L.A. with Ron Wood in 1979. An eight-by-ten of Led Zeppelin in 1970, the four of them just on the verge of becoming rock gods. What would they all make of a pop star afraid to even press play for her daddy?

  He was quiet, as if he were afraid of changing my mind. In hindsight, I am sure I seemed petrified. I realized, within that year of writing, how much I went through without letting him know. His choice to leave my mother was like a bomb going off in my life, and I still found myself clinging to whatever I could hold on to. The feeling of displacement made my anxiety so much worse, and I drank more to quiet those thoughts. He didn’t mean to hurt all of us so badly, but I knew for a fact that he had realized his decision would have consequences. I know he knew that because that’s what he had taught me. But I had kept that from him. And now I needed him to hear that I was singing about him.

  I cued up “Practice What You Preach,” which I saw as a direct hit at him. I was standing in judgment of someone who I felt had compromised his values. As he listened, the blood drained from his face until it was ashen. What have I done? I thought. He nodded, and started crying, which got me crying.

  “Jess, it’s beautiful,” he said. I thought he was bluffing. I played another song, “Rolling with the Punches,” his story set to my music. Again, my voice filled the room as I said nothing. “I see a little kid crying in you,” I sang on the track. “I see the little kid dressed in his Sunday best.” I went right into “Party of One,” which is about how abandoned I’d felt by him and my mother choosing the very moment I needed them most, becoming a mother, to go off and start their new lives. I’d never been brave enough to tell him I was mad at him. I watched his face as he listened, eyes closed. I don’t know what I expected from him. Anger? That he would leave? He didn’t. He got up and put his arms around me until I shook with tears.

  “I am so proud of you,” he said.

  For the first time in my entire life, he was responding to something I created not as a manager, but as a father. “You’re not mad?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’m sad I’m not the one promoting it.” I waited for him to start with a business plan, some pitch to lure me back in. Instead, he just said, “I love you.”

  A weight, one I didn’t even know I was carrying, lifted. I’d gotten so used to it. The sense that my father wouldn’t love me if he wasn’t managing me. The certainty that I did something wrong. But instead of relief, I felt untethered. Who was I if I had no one to blame for my life but myself?

  The edges of my memory begin to blur here. I know I led him upstairs, and he talked about coming back for the party later. “I’ll see you tonight,” he said.

  I held it together until he was outside, then I leaned on the closed door. Slowly, I fell to a sitting position, put down my glittercup, and slumped down to lay on the cold, pale, white stone floor of my entryway. On my back, I looked up at the vaulted ceiling, focusing on the chandelier as tears fell. I lost him, I thought. Even though he loved and accepted it, I experienced the pain of him not being my manager for the first time. I had been so frustrated with him that I never mourned the loss of his guidance. How was I ever going to be successful withou
t him? And why in the world would I ever be so judgmental of my father when I wasn’t true to what I said in my life? Forget what he preached. I was a fraud. I took all the pressures in my head and blamed them on my relationships with other people. Instead of it being my relationship with myself.

  I felt nekkid. Not naked, nekkid. Truly bare, with no one else to blame anymore but me.

  I wasn’t drunk. Trust me, two was not doing it at that point. All the feelings I had been suppressing washed over me in a rush, and I was drowning in them. My world was rotating around me so fast that I didn’t have any clue as to how to control it. I tried to talk to God, because we had always worked things out together, no matter how lonely I felt in life. He would tell me, “Get up, Jessica,” and give me the strength to do it.

  Nothing. I heard nothing. I still knew He was in control, though. He was doing this to me so I understood I couldn’t live like this anymore. That I had to change. And then a voice did come.

  “Are you okay?”

  It wasn’t God, it was our house manager Randy. He was my dad’s best friend when I was a kid. His wife, Beth, was my dance teacher in fifth grade, then my choreographer on tour, and now she helps run my clothing line. When I love you, I want you to stick around.

  I didn’t answer at first. It was a real question. In my entire life, whenever someone asked me if I was okay, the answer was a reflex: “Yes.” Because, no matter what, I always wanted it to be true.

  “I am not okay,” I said, surprising myself. I said the words again, differently each time, like an actress trying to get hold of a line, seeing what it felt like to admit I needed help. “I am not okay. Randy, I am not okay.”

  He went to get other people. I don’t know who. There’s always a lot of people at my house. The entryway is a high-traffic area, and people literally had to walk over me to get the house ready for the party. I had always been the boss, always in control, so I guess they thought I just needed a minute.