“Hi, Lauren,” I said, and I asked if I could hold her hands.
She nodded, saying, “You sound like you.”
“Well, I hope so.”
“I’ve listened to your album like a million times,” she said. “I know all the words.” She told me she loved “I Wanna Love You Forever,” but her real favorite was “Your Faith in Me.”
“I listen to it when I’m down,” she said. “You sing from the heart, I can tell.”
“Your Faith in Me” is about going through something alone but getting through it knowing that someone who isn’t even there believes in you. Her friend started to cry, I guess because she saw how happy Lauren was. It almost made me start, but I fought it because I didn’t want Lauren to think I was sad about her situation. She was a beautiful, happy girl, and I was blessed to meet her. She cared about how I made her feel, not what I looked like.
“We all get down sometimes,” I said. “Can’t appreciate the ups without the downs. Life’s like an elevator, I guess.”
I had this whole plan to bring her onstage to sing with me on “I Wanna Love You Forever,” but security wouldn’t allow it. So instead, I promised to dedicate the song to her.
“Now, when you hear me say your name, I want you to yell so I can see you, okay?” I said. “Don’t leave me up there all on my lonesome.”
During the concert, she yelled her heart out, and I asked everyone to give her a cheer.
“I don’t normally do ‘Your Faith in Me,’ but I don’t want to disappoint you, Lauren.” I said. “Thank you for reminding me why I do what I do. You can lose track sometimes. This song is for people like Lauren, and any of you who feel connected to me through my music. If you feel it, I feel it, too, and you all inspire me to keep on keepin’ on.”
I did a few verses of the song a capella, and I was touched that so many people in the audience knew it well enough to sing along. “Your faith in me, it pulls me through,” we sang into the night air. “When there’s nothing around to hold on to.”
AROUND THAT TIME, I TAPED A DISNEY SPECIAL WITH NICK, AND LOOKING back, I can see the beginning of the “roles” we would later play on our reality show. They filmed us at the beach in L.A., walking with his arm around me. “This is where I like to take Jessica on all our hot dates,” he said. “I’m a real big spender. Three dollars to park.” A wave came in and almost got our feet, so I screamed. We were just goofy and fun.
They set up a thing where some tween girls were sitting with me out on the beach, having girl talk. I remember this little cutie with a sweet face straight up asked me, “Do you think that less guys come to your concerts and stuff because they know that you have a boyfriend?”
I was a little taken aback by such a marketing-focused question from a kid. Who taught you to think that way? I wondered. Sony?
“That’s a good question,” I said, stalling. “I don’t think that every guy is coming to my concert because they think they can be my boyfriend. I think that they come because they like to watch the show and they want to have a lot of fun. You know?”
Tommy Mottola disagreed. I had to look like somebody the boys wanted to be with. In a word, hotter. In July, we started work on my next album, and Tommy wanted to go all in on making me a combo of Britney and Mariah. He said he would be even more involved this time and said I needed to be doing more dance pop over the ballads I loved. I also had to get even skinnier. I started the Atkins diet hardcore, envying and resenting anybody who could just eat. Off the diet, I obsessed over how I looked 24/7; on the diet, I was also hyperfocused on food. It made me nervous. My anxiety had something to hold on to, and instead of examining my emotions, I could just block them out by focusing on carb counts and waist sizes. If I focused on controlling my outward appearance, I could avoid thinking about my emotions and fears.
My mother sometimes, with the best of intentions, fed into it. Her aerobics-teacher past would kick in, seeing a problem to fix and giving a solution she thought would help. When she urged me to exercise or told me she was going for a long walk and maybe I should come along, I knew what she meant. We ended up doing the Atkins diet together.
I was still out there promoting the first album, and in so many interviews I ended up talking about food and my diet. I had no filter and would say whatever was on my mind or slipped out of my mouth, whether it was about my strict diet or how irritating it was to be constantly compared to Britney and Christina. The marketing department thought it was too much of a peek behind the curtain on what it was really like to be a pop star. The label finally decided I needed media training after I did an interview with the CBS Early Show at the Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day, a concert that kicks off the U.S. Open every year in August. I have to admit that I did not know who Arthur Ashe was. Now I know he was one of the greatest tennis players in the world and the first African American man to win Wimbledon. When he came out as HIV positive in 1992, he created an impact that lasted long beyond his death a year later. But back then, I just showed up and sang where people told me to. 98 Degrees was going to perform, so I was excited to sing with Nick again. I barely knew who any of the tennis players were, even Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi.
During the interview before the concert, the tennis players and us singers stood off-stage, and we were each asked what it meant to be there to celebrate Arthur Ashe’s impact. “I’m just so proud to be here and to give back,” I said, and then turned to Andre Agassi. “This is such a great event you put on.”
Andre’s eyes widened in a look of “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Everyone, including the news crew, realized I thought Andre was Arthur Ashe. The late Arthur Ashe.
That was the last straw for Columbia, and they made me do media training. It was awful. Imagine My Fair Lady, where they fire questions at you, completely random ones. I had to learn how to manipulate the conversation back to music, the reason you’re doing forty-five interviews a day in the first place. It felt false to me, but I couldn’t deny that I would lose the thread on every interview and spill my guts. An innocent question from a teen mag about Christmas plans would lead to me talking about my family missing Sarah and how we were all still grieving so the holidays were hard on us. Merry Christmas, kids! Or a journalist would point out that Britney and Christina seemed to be struggling with fame, and I would just take that bait and say that I thought Britney was the nicest girl but maybe Christina didn’t need to have her security clear an entire hallway of staff and talent just so she could walk through it alone. I was too honest to play the game.
As you know, media training never really worked on me. Thank God. Part of it was that I was just so sheltered. I was trying everything to get on MTV, a channel that was forbidden to me as a kid. Then, as I grew up, I kept my head down working, so I didn’t understand the most basic things about pop culture.
I grew closer to CaCee Cobb, the woman in Teresa’s office who’d always hounded me about the homework for my GED. Our relationship was mostly on the phone. She also had to keep calling to track us down because we’d once again moved into another staged home or because Teresa needed to send potential tracks to wherever we’d landed. I was one to procrastinate, and CaCee’s “you have to” was nonnegotiable. Still, when she called, I would always find reasons to have small talk with her, stalling whatever task she was going to give me.
“What did you do this weekend?” I asked her.
“I had some friends over to watch Sex and the City,” CaCee said.
“What’s that?”
“Sex and the City?”
“Is that like a dirty movie?” I asked.
“Jessica, it’s a huge show,” she said. “You never heard of it?”
“No.”
“Okay, we need to fix that,” she said. She said it was crazy that I was supposed to be making music and trying to be a star and I didn’t even know about the show that was landing with the very same people I was trying to reach.
CaCee sent me tapes so I could catch up, and I devoure
d every episode.
“Oh my God, I love it,” I told CaCee. “I’m totally a Carrie.”
She laughed. “Okay, Charlotte.”
9
Warning: Contents Under Pressure
October 2000
Nick and I danced to one more song before we finally sat down. I took off my shoes, placing my legs up on his. We were at his little brother Drew’s wedding reception, and it had been the most beautiful day. Drew and Lea were childhood sweethearts, friends since the fifth grade who were truly good people who belonged together. We had spent the whole week celebrating them in Cincinnati, Nick’s adopted hometown, and every single person at the wedding knew we were witnessing something that was meant to be. Being included in such an important day, I officially felt part of his family.
Nick ran his hand on my leg, humming along to “Ribbon in the Sky” by Stevie Wonder. I knew what he was thinking, because the conversation had been happening more and more. He was a month shy of twenty-seven, ready to settle down and get married—and he was stuck with this twenty-year-old. My father forbade me to even think about getting engaged until I was twenty-one.
“I’m not telling you not to marry him,” my dad would say. “I’m telling you to wait. You’re just too young. You have no idea who you will become in the next few years.” I never knew if my dad meant that I would change emotionally, or if I would be too big a star to be tied down. Nick was the one thing my dad and I fought over. He never said no to the label, as much as he groused about how they were marketing me. But my relationship with Nick, that he could control.
I knew Nick was at a crossroads, and I was terrified of losing him. His 98 album Revelation had come out the month before and sold 275,000 the first week. That put them at number two on the charts, which would have been a huge week for me, but he moped about it. His competition was not me, he would remind me, but people like ’N Sync, who had set a record as the first to sell over two million the first week.
The week in Cincinnati was one of the longest stretches of time we’d spent together, but Nick was getting ready to leave me to tour Asia. “Are you gonna call me every night?”
“I promise,” he said.
“I love you,” I said in my sad puppy voice, almost as an apology.
He looked past me and sighed, tipping back another beer. “I love you, too, Jessica.”
“That’ll be us someday,” I said, following his eye to his brother and his new sister-in-law dancing.
He got up to go to bar. “Yeah,” he said.
I watched him walk away and it felt like I was running out the clock on a promise. But I knew myself well enough that if I committed to marriage this early, there was no way I could keep a singular focus on using my voice to lift others. The very thing I felt called to do. It seemed like an impossible situation: If I didn’t marry him soon, I’d lose him. If I married him, I could lose me.
Not that I knew who that “me” was anymore. I was working hard on my album, which felt less and less like something that was mine as we headed to the summer 2001 release. I did most of the recording at the Sony Music studios in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, close enough for Tommy to drop by whenever he wanted to check in, which was often. I’d wanted to do so much with this album, but Tommy was picking the most random songs, trying to turn me into a sexpot virgin. I had been able to pull off sexy virgin, but acting like a woman who loved sex but had never actually done it was a math problem I could not quite figure out. I didn’t think it would make sense to my fans either. Teresa was completely pushed out, slowly having less and less say on what worked for me and my album. I missed her guidance. She was the only person in my life with the experience and strength to say no to the label.
In March, Don Ienner, the head of Columbia under Tommy and Sony, wanted to have a meeting with me to discuss the future. Don had a reputation for screaming, which he defended as being “passionate,” so I was scared. I sat down with him and he looked at me for an uncomfortable beat.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“What makes Jessica Simpson, Jessica Simpson?” he said. “As an artist? As a person?”
I stammered, my old stutter returning, but I had no words to sing. I didn’t know. I was mortified. I had been trying to be whichever artist everybody asked me to be like that day. Britney, Mariah, Céline. But what about Jessica?
“This album is very important for you,” Don said. “These days, if an artist doesn’t have a hit single out of the box, the album tanks. When the album sales slip, there goes ticket sales. Less tickets sold means less people coming to your concerts, which means less people buying T-shirts. Add all those losses up, and it’s a lot. The stakes are high.”
I nodded. Without confidence in myself, people couldn’t believe in me as an artist. And I had none. Everyone had been telling me who to be—“edgier,” and “more mature”—whatever the word was that day, it always seemed to mean “skinnier.”
By the time we got to the April release of the first single, “Irresistible,” I had managed to get myself down to 103 pounds. Everyone went on about how great I looked, but I couldn’t enjoy it because I was so freaking hungry. I envied people who could eat whatever they wanted, while I had to microwave slices of turkey with Velveeta cheese on top and call it a meal. But when I ate anything, I yelled at myself, asking why I was getting in my own way and why I hadn’t gone to the gym.
I taped the video for the first single, “Irresistible,” over three days in L.A. starting April 7. Each day I had a different outfit for the video, leaving more and more skin showing. In between the shots, I had a giant, baggy white bathrobe that I wrapped around me. The last day of shooting, we did a rooftop scene on a helipad at night, and I kept saying I was freezing just so I could keep a blanket over me to cover my body. When you’re doing a shoot, there’s always a hope that you can save it on the last day. I hadn’t been happy with any of it, and I blamed myself for never quite getting the shot that I envisioned. Midway through the rooftop shoot, I almost walked off the set because I messed up a dance move. My mind was destroyed from exhaustion, and those voices started in my head again, telling me I was wasting everyone’s time.
The video’s choreographer, my backup dancer Dan Karaty, called for a break and took me aside. “Stop,” he said. “Look at me. You are incredibly sexy. You have to see that yourself to make other people see it. Just feel the way you look, and it will come through.”
I stared into Dan’s calming eyes and relaxed. He had been on tour with Britney Spears and was a master at giving artists confidence. “I wish I could see what you see,” I said.
“It’s crazy you can’t,” he said. For the briefest moment, I felt something. A small flicker of what I felt with Nick, but it was there. It was the first time I ever thought there could be a man in my life besides Nick.
We were already starting to have problems. Nick and I each got condo apartments in the same building in Los Angeles. It was our way of “living together,” but we were never there anyway. We were both always on the road performing or doing press tours, so our relationship took place mostly on the phone. We would both be exhausted, and I was—surprise!—terrible at the math of figuring out time zones. It was another thing that seemed to set him off. My childishness, which seemed so cute and sweet when I was first with him, seemed to annoy him. Now everything I said seemed to annoy him. We were both concerned about our careers, and our anxieties just seemed to feed off each other. So I stopped calling him as often, even though hearing his voice had become something I came to count on to help me feel safe enough to fall asleep.
I prayed on it constantly, and I decided that he was a good man who deserved a wife. I was two months from turning twenty-one, and I still felt like a child, going from doing everything to please my dad to then doing whatever it was I thought would make Nick happy. I was too dependent on him, and I would never become the independent woman he needed if I kept turning to him for everything. Nick needed a gr
own-up woman, one who would be willing to start a family soon. That flicker of a feeling with Dan made me wonder if I should take the time to date other guys before committing to forever. Also, I wanted to see who I was, without using another person’s love for me as a measurement of my value. If I put all my attention on a guy, that meant less focus on my career.
“When someone special comes into your life at eighteen years old, your whole world changes,” I wrote in my journal. “For a while, I was so caught up in the puppy love, I could only see perfection. I wanted to take the easy way out and just get married. Thank you, God, for providing me a way to step back and reevaluate my needs. These past couple of weeks, I have found myself. I can do it. People don’t have to do it for me.”
I told him we needed to take a break from each other, just to see what would happen if we both focused solely on work. It wasn’t much of a break because we still talked constantly, which I know frustrated him, and even when interviewers brought Nick up on the press tour for my album Irresistible, I said I was single but still hopelessly in love with him.
I kept telling myself that now I could focus on my career. That seemed like a very grown-up thing to say, and there was a lot to do. On June 4, Columbia threw me a huge record release party at the Water Club in New York City. I arrived on a yacht, and there was a red carpet just for me. Don Ienner and Tommy Mottola were there, flanking me as they gave me a triple-platinum record for Sweet Kisses. There were fifteen minutes of fireworks, and I finally felt like a real star. Ten days later, my Irresistible album came out and would sell 120,000 copies the first week, nearly double what Sweet Kisses did when it debuted.
Nick sent me flowers. “I’m very proud of you and with what you’re doing in your life,” the card read. “I’m happy I can be a part of it. I love you.” I called him that week and started the conversation already angry at him for his absence when I was the one who pushed him away. Nick had this calm, paternal way of talking to me when he had to catch up on a conversation that in my mind was already in progress. He gently reminded me that I had broken up with him. “Our situation is yours to deal with,” he said. “I’m just playing off whatever you give me.”
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