She stayed perfectly still as I sang, only speaking when I stopped.
“Okay, I’m going to New York,” she said. “I will get you a meeting, and you do exactly what you just did. We need to sign you.”
“We’re already meeting with Epic,” my dad said, playing it cool. Epic was also under Sony, and where Céline Dion signed when she came to America. “We have eight meetings lined up actually—”
“I can get you straight to Tommy Mottola,” Teresa said. As green as we were, I definitely knew who Tommy Mottola was. He was the head of Sony, but more important to my mind was that he had just separated from my idol Mariah Carey and had signed her to Columbia in the first place.
“I’m really blown away,” Teresa said, looking right at me, as if she were trying to convince just me. “How old are you again?”
“Seventeen,” I said, getting used to the idea. “Today.”
“Well, happy birthday,” she said.
Dad and I flew to New York that night to start the rounds of auditions. Through the two days in New York, I was fortunate to meet with the heads of many record labels, going into boardrooms and corner offices. There were so few women in the offices, and I’d never felt so Southern, standing there with my long pink nails and hair so high to be nearer my God to thee.
I would sing a capella or listen as they nodded through a song off my tape. Dad talked a lot, getting better and better with each meeting. A preacher hitting a groove. I kept saying the same thing, remembering why God had even put me in those rooms in the first place: “I will only go with you if you believe that I can change the world.”
Sometimes they would cock their heads at that, like they were weighing a sales angle. But other times I felt a real connection, particularly at the Mercury offices. It was such an innocent way of thinking, and I’m sure some of them thought it was a childlike faith. But they couldn’t say it wasn’t real.
When I sang “I Will Always Love You” at Jive, they were direct with me. “We just signed a girl who’s just like you and sang that same song,” someone in a suit said. “This girl Britney Spears.”
“Oh, I know her,” I said, my stomach flipping.
“Small world,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, defeated all over again. Then at RCA I got the same story, as if the girl had just been in the same boardroom and ink was still drying on the contract. She had apparently nailed a song on a Disney soundtrack, and they were going to sign her.
“Christina Aga-something,” said the guy, looking around the room for someone to give him the right name. “Aguilar?”
“Aguilera,” I said, holding back a sigh. “She’s really talented.”
My mother had been right about running into those girls in the future. I didn’t expect they’d be taking my spot again this soon.
When I got to Columbia in the Sony building in midtown, Teresa told me she lined up the meeting on the strength of her ear alone. “I didn’t play them anything,” she said, leading us through an incredible lobby that made me feel tiny. “You just have to let them see you sing.”
We got there at 11:45, and I remember first meeting someone who acted very important, talking about having to leave for a label lunch. “Well, can you just sit down and listen for a minute?” I said, and I started singing. He sat down.
“Oh my God, you can’t leave,” he said. “I have to go to this thing. Um, let me sit you in the Sony Club, okay? Have lunch. Don’t leave.”
“We’re not,” said my dad. Teresa smiled. The Sony Club was in the top of the building, with executive meeting rooms, then all marble and mahogany, but the real draw was the view of Manhattan. You could see the whole city below us. He came back quickly, bringing in a bunch of people. I’d go into one office after another, until finally they led us to a secret elevator down to Tommy Mottola’s office on the thirty-second floor.
“He listened to Mariah sing in the shower, Dad,” I said, as the elevator went down. When I get nervous, most people can’t tell. On the outside, I seem very calm, but inside there’s a tornado. The doubts and fears swirl and I keep trying to grab them to compartmentalize them. In the elevator, I started to pray. God use me, I thought, I am here for Your will. If this moment is right, it will be the right one. I knew that I had prepared as much as I could. This was not the Mickey Mouse Club. Back then, I didn’t even know what preparation meant.
And there he was, Tommy Mottola, sitting at his desk in jeans and a black button-down, his hair slicked back. Don Ienner, the president of Columbia Records, was also in the office. “So, what do you want to do in life?” asked Tommy.
I knew the answer to this one, because I’d just written it in my journal the night before. “I want to be an example to girls all over the world,” I said, “that you don’t have to compromise your values to be successful.”
I don’t think it was the answer he was expecting. Don piped up. “I’ve never heard that from anybody in here before. I want to hear you sing.”
I was so scared, and I asked God and Sarah to help me. I stood in the center of the room to sing “Amazing Grace.” When I finished, I waited a beat before I was about to start “I Will Always Love You,” but Tommy put up his hand.
“That’s enough,” he said, getting up from his desk. It was over. I didn’t know what I did wrong. How had I blown it? I stood there, trying to fight back tears, and he said, in that same flat voice, “Okay, you can have a seat.”
My shoulders started to sink, but I held them up high. I sat down, and he walked over to stand in front of me. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “because I still have to talk to Donnie, I would sign you today. Your music is fantastic how it is.”
I had this tremor of relief go through me. I didn’t blow it. And before I could even get to my speech about why I wanted to make music, Tommy started in. “I believe that your voice—and who you are as a person and what you stand for—can change the world.”
I was like, Sold.
We received offers from two other labels. There was Mercury, who had Bon Jovi, and Atlantic, who was putting so much behind new artists like Tori Amos but also had an incredible history with Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones. I went back to Dallas torn.
My parents pressured me to decide, and I was afraid to commit and make the wrong choice for my future. I drove myself to a voice lesson with Linda, and on the way over, I started praying, asking God for a sign. Whenever I asked Him for guidance, He came through. Just as I did so, a black bird flew into my windshield. I screamed, and I bet it screamed, too, because it flew straight up. At the next stoplight, I lingered because I was shaken up.
“God, what did that mean?” I asked out loud, alone in the car. “There’s no Bird records.”
And I looked over to my right, and I saw the sign. COLUMBIA HOSPITAL. How many times over years of going to voice lessons had I rolled through this intersection and never noticed there was a hospital there?
“Columbia,” I said. “Okay. Columbia.”
As I moved forward, another black bird—or maybe the same determined one—swooped down at my windshield a second time. “Okay, I hear you, God,” I said, loud so He and the bird could hear me. “I get the message. Thanks, God.” I didn’t want any more birds getting hurt.
MY WHOLE FAMILY FLEW BACK TO NEW YORK TO SIGN THE COLUMBIA contract in Tommy Mottola’s office at Sony. Right after we all took a picture, Tommy looked me up and down.
“Okay, you gotta lose fifteen pounds,” Tommy told me.
“What?” I said, not really understanding. I was five-foot-three and weighed 118 pounds. And I was seventeen.
“I think you’re going to have to lose fifteen pounds,” he said. “Maybe ten. Because that’s the image you want to have. That’s what it will take to be Jessica Simpson.” He spoke clinically, the way a plastic surgeon would take a black marker to show you all the flaws that could be magically erased. I looked at my parents. They said nothing.
Neither did I. I thought I had the job, and no
w I had to change myself to be “Jessica Simpson.” It was as if he tied my value as an artist to my weight right there, like a rock, and then threw it out the window of the thirty-second floor of the Sony building. Maybe Tommy was being realistic about the times, and he knew what it would take for me to be successful. He believed in me, and he would be a beautiful part of my career, but it was hard to hear what was required to be a star.
I immediately went on an extremely strict diet, and started taking diet pills, which I would do for the next twenty years. It’s important that I say this now, if only for my daughter, whenever she reads this: You are perfect as you are. But at the time, this is what we thought we had to do. I say “we” because I was about to become the family business, and there was a lot of pressure to be what the label needed me to be. And my dad didn’t know when to say no. We were Podunk, coming to the big time from nowhere. Any industry room we walked into, whoever was in there had more experience. “This is how it’s done” was all we needed to hear. We didn’t know if things were being done the right way or if we were being mistreated. We were just glad to be in the room.
I only went to my senior year in high school for a month. It felt like a waste of time. We had to leave Dallas so I could start working on my album. Tom Hicks, the hockey-team-owner friend of my vocal coach, gave my dad $275,000 in exchange for a percentage on the start of my career. I think it was points on my first album, but I never asked. I don’t know if my father asked much about it either. That money was more than four times what he made in a year with church and his odd jobs, so he could retire from that career and move us out to Los Angeles. Looking back, I realize that investment money was just for me, but it was the start of the “my money is your money” mentality that seemed very natural to me.
When my dad told everyone at church we were leaving, I felt responsible for the uncertainty I saw at the Heights. A pastor becomes a father, a shepherd to the flock, and when they leave, people can feel lost. Dad’s youth ministry was at an all-time high, with a record number of kids coming to events and church on Sunday.
My Sunday school teacher Carol, a very important person in my life by now, hosted a goodbye party for our family. Each of us had four members of the church assigned to write us a goodbye letter. I was such a crying mess that I can only remember that Beth, my dance teacher, read hers to my mom and Carol read hers to me. “I know the responsibility you feel,” Carol said, “and we are always here praying for you, Jessica.”
“I wish I could bring you to L.A. with me,” I told her after.
“I’ll visit,” she promised.
Our move to Los Angeles was set for October 2, the day before Ashlee’s thirteenth birthday. I bought a used red BMW convertible with some of my signing money, and I drove it all the way from Dallas, with my parents caravanning in another car. I have always loved driving, and loved that trip, singing along to the radio as the country-rock stations of Texas gave way to the pop DJs of the west.
We moved into a home that was for sale in Hacienda Heights, but, no, we didn’t buy it. My mom was a talented decorator, so realtors would let us live in homes and stage them until it was sold. It was the first of many places where we lived the first year because my parents were always working some angle to make money.
To say that Hacienda Heights, an hour’s drive to the Sony Music headquarters in the usual traffic, was not conveniently located would be an understatement. But we dived into L.A. life, driving around on the hunt for celebrities. The first big sighting was Garth Brooks, which was a huge deal for us. On a day off from the studio, the whole family went to visit The Bodyguard mansion in Beverly Hills so I could be Whitney for a moment, then on to Rodeo Drive so we could have our Pretty Woman moment. We didn’t have the money to buy anything, but we touched the fabrics like we were seriously giving it a thought. I doubted they would have the same friendly keep-the-tags-on return policy as back home.
One of the first things I did in Hacienda Heights was take Ashlee to the nail salon for a girls’ day. I was getting my acrylics in that late-90s French manicure when I looked up and saw a headshot of Fergie. This was before the Black Eyed Peas, so I knew her as Stacy Ferguson from her years on Kids Incorporated. “Love you guys!” she wrote in red with a big heart.
“She came here?” I asked the nail tech, pointing at the photo.
“Oh sure,” she said. “Many times.”
I sat up straighter, turning to my little sister. “Ashlee,” I said. “We’ve made it.”
TERESA HAD HER SISTER COME TO TAKE CARE OF HER NEW BABY GIRL, and three weeks after giving birth, she took me around to meet songwriters and producers. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, I’ve got a girl that can sing,’ ” she told me. “But I need people to meet you so they see you’re the real deal.” We didn’t have demos we wanted to play for people, so she would just set up meetings and I’d sing. Teresa didn’t want me to do anything that wasn’t authentic to my experience. She knew I was inexperienced, so when I recorded love songs, we had to put up pictures of boys I was fascinated with—actors and singers—just so I could emote that longing.
I worked hard on my album, but Columbia always had some reason to delay. Well, two. Jive was pushing Britney Spears’s album to press, which then made RCA really rush Christina Aguilera’s album. As the label argued over calling me Jessica Simpson or just Jessica, there was a sense that I would get lost among the invasion of the teen blondes. I could not believe these two girls were getting in front of me again. The process was also slow because Tommy Mottola had taken such a personal interest in my album. He was picky about every single song, getting involved in the mixes of each one. He would come to the studio, displaying an ear that I completely respected. There was a reason he was who he was. He liked a song I had written, called “Heart of Innocence,” pulling lyrics from my journal to sing about holding on to my virginity until marriage. I am sure he partially liked it because of the marketing angle. I recorded a strong ballad “Did You Ever Love Somebody” that Columbia was able to get on an episode of Dawson’s Creek in November. I watched it with my family, and I jumped off the couch when the show turned up the volume of my voice as Pacey leaned in to kiss Andie. (Yes, I loved Pacey Witter, too, so you diehard Creek fans understand what a big deal this was for me.)
Teresa continued to guide me, always acting as my buffer, wanting me to truly be an artist. If I mentioned worrying about sales or my look, she would remind me to just focus on the work. She sent me amazing tracks and paired me with songwriters who would showcase my voice. Her office also made sure I was working to get my GED and assigned a junior Sony staffer in her office, CaCee Cobb, to constantly call me to make sure I was doing my homework and turning it in on time. CaCee was two and a half years older than me and soon took a big-sister interest in my life. Schoolwork was definitely not a priority for my parents, but CaCee took her job seriously, and she’s the only reason I got my GED. When we finally met in person—she was my assigned minder at an event in Atlanta—her gorgeous hair reminded me of Sarah’s, and I was immediately at ease. Whoever was paying for the trip only booked one room with one bed, and CaCee’s response was like, Uh, nope. She was a real professional, and I know she thought of me as a kid. But I felt like Sarah had sent CaCee to me, so I was just excited to hang out with her. She had gone to Baylor and understood the business far more than I did. I could ask her real questions about what the label expected of me, because I was confused from mixed messages I seemed to be getting.
It had started when Britney was first out of the gate, with her “. . . Baby One More Time” single hitting in October. She premiered the video on MTV on Thanksgiving Day, and my job had gotten a lot harder. I got word there was a halt on my album and the label decided I didn’t have the right songs and needed more Britney-type songs. I had been signed for my voice, but I had to now contort myself into this mold of a dancer.
My answer was “Whatever you want.” I just wanted to have my song on the radio.
The weekend after
Britney’s Thanksgiving premiere, I was supposed to meet with someone who might co-manage with my dad. His name was Paris D’jon, pronounced like the mustard, but hold the I for reasons I never knew. He was going to be at the Hollywood Christmas Parade, looking after a boy band he managed. The band was going to be on a float, and their album was performing well. It spoke well of Paris, who was this tough bulldog of a guy who seemed like he could make things happen just on force alone.
And just behind him was the most adorable guy I’d ever laid eyes on. It was the smallest moment, two people locking eyes. At eighteen, my usual move was to be coy and look away, but I didn’t. He came over, walking in a more casual version of the onstage boy-band saunter I’d come to see him do time and again, but still purposeful.
“Hi, I’m Nick,” he said.
Hello, my life, I thought.
7
Romeo and Juliet
January 1999
The thing about falling in love with someone in a boyband is that you’re not alone. There were a lot of girls out there who had already compiled all the details on Nick Lachey. The night after I met him at the parade, I went home and researched him and his group 98 Degrees. I learned Nick was a Scorpio, loved the Bengals, home team of his adopted hometown of Cincinnati, and he liked dogs. Aww. He was twenty-five, seven years older than me, and had the look of a bad boy. He’d formed the band in 1995, and I read that he and his younger brother, Drew, who was also in the group, saw 98 Degrees as more of a tougher, working-class version of Boyz II Men than a boy band like ’N Sync or Backstreet Boys, who had been put together by talent scouts.
The next time we saw each other was at a Teen People party for a cosmetics convention in Boca Raton. This was not what I’d pictured from reading Romeo and Juliet, but it would have to do. He brought his mom, and part of the fairy tale was that he said to her, “Mom, your mission for tonight is to get me in good with this girl.”
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