“That’s when our first album came out,” he said.
“I’d probably seen a picture of you,” I said, “and didn’t even know you were my husband.”
His gift to me was a music box of white and gold. When I opened the box, it played Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One.” I played it alone back in my room at the Barton Creek Resort & Club, where we would have the reception the next day. I sang the song, again trying on my Nanny’s ring, my “something old” for the wedding. I stared in the bathroom mirror, certain I would look different the next night. I thought I was finally going to grow up to become someone’s wife, and I needed to say goodbye to the child looking back at me. I went to bed and prayed, thanking Sarah for helping guide me to Nick. I also prayed for another miracle: that it would stop raining.
It didn’t. I threw open the curtains as soon as I woke up, and all I could see was rain and gray. Throughout the morning, I think about ten different people burst into the “It’s like raaaaaiiiinnn on your wedding day,” from Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic.” But honestly, I stopped caring. I wore my “Soon-to-be Mrs. Lachey” sweatsuit and just let my wedding planner, Mindy Weiss, lead me around to get ready, a director and her leading lady. I was in love with my dress, a strapless ivory lace gown custom made by Vera Wang herself. The gown was encrusted with what seemed like a ton of baby pearls and crystals. We kept having to take it in as I went for my goal weight of, uh, weightless. I had borrowed an eleven-carat diamond headband from Harry Winston and pretty much anything my mother could get from Neil Lane. Hair clips, earrings, a pearl pendant, a bracelet . . . more was more. Throw in a six-foot train and you had yourself a princess bride.
Mom and Dad went with me and Ashlee—my maid of honor—to the chapel in a 1937 Cadillac limousine we rented for the day. We all waited until the last possible second to get out in the rain, and they ferried me from the limo to the chapel under two umbrellas like I would melt. Inside, someone handed me my bouquet, a ball of five hundred tiny white stephanotis stems tied together that I later found out, when I got the bill, took twelve hours to build. Worth it.
My mother went in first, then Ashlee, and the doors closed, leaving just me and my dad in the vestibule, with an usher and photographer. I put my arm in his, fumbling with the bouquet. He cleared his throat, his usual signal he was about to say something important. I thought he was going to tell me he loved me or do something to make me feel less nervous.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.
I didn’t answer, and he continued. “I’m right here. We can—”
“Dad, please.”
“You don’t have to.”
I fixed a smile, knowing the doors would swing open at any second. “Dad, I’m walking down this aisle and getting married,” I said through gritted teeth. “You’re giving me away. You have to. I’ll always be your little girl, but you have to do this for me.”
The doors opened, and I saw Nick waiting for me. He gasped at the sight of me. I waited for my father to take the first step down the aisle, a white carpet lined with white rose petals. Instead, I took a step, dragging my father into movement. He briefly got it together but cried the whole way down the aisle. It was brutal. I took step after step down the rose-petal-strewn aisle, keeping my eyes on Nick.
He was standing on a slightly raised platform next to Brian Buchek, our officiant. Brian was a church friend from Richardson, all the way back to the fifth grade. He knew my dad well and seemed to sense what was happening. He started by keeping the tone light, talking about how I’d talked about this day since we were ten. “Is it everything you ever dreamed of?” he asked.
“Yes, it is,” I said, truly meaning it.
I remembered when Brian found Christ when he was sixteen, and now here he was helping me marry Nick. I looked behind me on the bride’s side and saw the faces of friends from all my worlds. My cousins, church family like Carol Vanderslice, and my music family like Teresa and CaCee. My dad sniffed and looked down. He had to stand next to me while Nick stood facing us.
Nick and his 98 Degrees groomsmen—his brother, Drew, was his best man—sang their song “My Everything” to me, and Nick could barely get through it. What I would always love about Nick is that he was sentimental, and as much as he tried so hard to appear tough, he couldn’t help but show that he felt things deeply. I had both men in my life crying. I widened my eyes under my veil, determined not to cry and muss my makeup.
Then came the moment when Nick had to take my dad’s place. It was almost too literal for my dad, who couldn’t look at Nick but, as he turned to sit, let everyone see his face of doom. Nick lifted my veil for our vows. I know a lot of couples choose to write their own vows, but Nick and I used the traditional words, for the very reason that for hundreds of years many people had pledged their love using the very same promises.
When Brian pronounced us man and wife, I felt such a shock of happiness go through me that I almost laughed out loud. Nick kissed me, and we left to a gospel choir singing “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee.” In for a penny, in for a pound, so why not have a twenty-piece choir show up? “Melt the clouds of sin and sadness; drive the dark of doubt away.”
I had no doubts. I swear. At the reception, Nick spun me to our song, Van Morrison’s “Crazy Love,” with my friend from the USO tour, Neal McCoy, singing to us. I was twenty-two, and I had pledged my life and destiny to this man. And I don’t regret it. Nick was meant to be my husband. No one else was supposed to have my virginity. I know that because I had talked so openly, with Nick by my side, about waiting to have sex until my wedding night, that people were curious. I get it. I’m the girl who spent three years doing interviews where everyone asked me about having sex, and I literally named the date it would happen. So, once that day came, all those interviewers found a way to ask me what I thought.
I didn’t know what to tell them, but back then I felt obligated to give them an answer. I’d built up the anticipation in my mind that the first time I had sex with my husband had to be this transcendent experience where the heavens parted. What I didn’t know then is that everyone’s first time is awkward, and that is part of it. And that it’s okay, but at the time, it’s tough to understand. I had joined a long line of virgins in my family who said yes to forever for that one experience.
11
Into the Fishbowl
Spring 2003
“So, we thought it would be fun if Nick took you camping,” the woman in my living room said. This was a production assistant whose name I can’t remember. There were so many people in and out of our house that, in the beginning, we lost track of who was who.
“Nick wants to go camping?” I asked. My husband was not someone who randomly planned adventures. If we weren’t working, we were on the couch. Or trying to figure out how exactly we were going to pay the mortgage on our million-dollar house in Calabasas.
“It would be funny,” she said. “Fun.”
“Where?” I asked. “Like, where do you even go camping in L.A.? Santa Barbara?”
“Yosemite.”
I had no idea where Yosemite was, and I swear I had it confused with Jellystone. “Like with Yogi Bear?” I asked. “Are there bears there?”
“Oh, that’s good,” she said. “You should be worried about that. We can use that.”
Welcome to the filming of season one of Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica and the first year of my marriage. Places, everyone.
When I packed for the trip, I stuffed as much as I could in my spring 2003 Louis Vuitton Murakami bag. Before I had children or my dogs, that bag was my child. It went everywhere with me.
“Is this okay?” I asked the crew.
They smiled. “You be you, Jessica,”
If I was me being me, I would have said no to going camping. But I guess they had enough footage of us sitting on the couch, so a-camping we will go. The plan was for us to drive up to Yosemite National Park with Nick’s brother, Drew, and his wife, Lea, who were good wingmen on th
e show. They were family, and I could completely be myself around them. Which is to say that Lea and I could sit in the back of the car and commiserate about cramps.
My dad decided Nick and I were a twenty-first-century version of I Love Lucy, so early on, the producers were positioning Drew and Lea as our Fred and Ethel. They were there on behalf of the viewers, rolling their eyes at something I said. At least I had the physical comedy of Lucy: I wiped out twice on the hike through Yosemite, though I think that was because I wasn’t used to wearing flats. If I were in my four-inch heels, that would never have happened.
We were just a few weeks into filming the show, and in the beginning, there was this sense that you always had to be doing something so they could capture it. As Nick did stuff like load the car or cook the burgers, I asked aloud, “Am I supposed to be helping?” Not so much to fulfill my role as a new wife but to act out my role as a character.
It was one giant learning curve, figuring out how to be married and how to create content for a kind of show that had never been done before, something they were calling a “reality show.” The Osbournes had premiered the previous year and had become the highest-rated show on MTV. As much as The Osbournes showed the “real” life of a celebrity family, they would have been the first to say it was kind of a circus. My dad pitched Newlyweds to MTV right after the wedding. This would be two celebrities, who viewers were used to seeing air-brushed to perfection, eating cereal and passing gas.
Dad’s theory was that this would get me and my music on MTV—who never played my videos unless it was on TRL—while also undoing the damage of how I’d been marketed by the label. “If girls knew you, they’d like you,” he said. “Columbia’s been pushing them all away with this sexy-Barbie stuff. This show would be about your heart.”
He paused a long time, then added, “And Nick.”
He pitched it to us as a documentary, one that would chronicle our marriage and me working on my third album. If MTV was going to pay me to live my life and be on their channel, it didn’t occur to me to say no.
Nick was slightly more hesitant, but only slightly. He wanted to start a solo career beyond 98 Degrees and needed to raise his profile. He knew it was tough to be in a boy band as a married man pushing thirty. He also knew that my dad was going to be a producer in the editing room and would have my back, so Nick’s one request was that he wanted to be protected. His manager also got a producer credit so the show wouldn’t be biased against him.
Tommy Mottola hated the idea, according to my dad. “He told me, ‘You’re going to destroy her career.’ ” But after the way my second album had been handled—a Frankenstein of whatever genres Sony thought would sell that day—I didn’t put much stock in the label’s road map to success. There was so little budget for my third album because Tommy, who left Sony in January, blew through a ton of money on my previous one. Now Don Ienner was in charge, and he was not a huge fan. Teresa came back into the picture and told me this was probably the last chance we had with Sony. We made a plan to get back to the natural person that I was, the one that people could relate to. Teresa put me in songwriting camps before writing camps were a thing that even existed in the industry. She and CaCee would get a studio with a bunch of empty office rooms and set them up with tables for writers to meet with me. She paired writers who had never worked together—maybe a country writer and a pop writer—and then put me right in the middle. Some of them thought it was odd to have me there. Teresa recently told me that one guy thought she was crazy. “Does she even write?” he asked her.
“I think she can write,” she said. “She journals.” I wanted to write my own songs, having realized that since the record company folks had no clue how to position me, I should cut out the middlemen and do what felt right to me. I met with Billy Mann, and together we wrote a song called “With You,” which came from my heart. I wrote it about Nick and how he loved me and made me feel beautiful as I was, “with nothing but a T-shirt on.” On my own, I started writing lyrics in my journal, including a line about Tommy that would be in the song “In This Skin”:
I know that my talent is real,
So, don’t tell me, don’t tell me,
I have to be 102.
I don’t have nothing to prove.
I was tired of trying to look perfect—for the church elders and for Columbia—and I brought that to the television show. For five months, they filmed us in our natural habitat of Calabasas, putting a camera in the TV and corners of the house to supplement the crew walking around with cameras. The crew had to get permission from us whenever we were filmed upstairs, the bedroom and bathrooms were off-limits. We could say “stop rolling” at any time, but in the beginning, we tried hard not to. They would get to our house at about eight thirty or nine o’clock and just try to push it so they could stay as late as possible. We would have burn marks on our backs from the mics being strapped to us for so many hours.
I was used to the feeling of being watched—having grown up as the pastor’s daughter and then as Tommy’s project at the label. But now we wanted to embrace “reality” and ourselves as much as possible, even if they would put us into situations just to get a story for the episode.
We shot that entire first season that spring and summer, and MTV had us set for an August premiere. They kept having to take breaks when I traveled for work, which was a lot. Throughout that season, I did minimal makeup and let everyone know that, yes, I can burp at the same volume as my singing voice, which is very, very loud. And you try not to pass gas like crazy when you’re on a strict protein diet. A girlfriend who was filming with me came completely done up in full makeup and was surprised when I farted in front of Nick.
“Have you heard him?” I said. “Besides, the only thing worth hiding from your man is receipts.”
I was fine being me and finally finding out who exactly that “me” was in a very public way. But I did have one blind spot: I wanted my marriage to look perfect. I didn’t mind if I looked dumb, but I wanted people to see the fairy tale in Nick. In us. I had the Instagram-girlfriend syndrome before it was a thing, and I wanted the world to see my husband in the best light because I was hopelessly in love with him.
But this was a reality show. The camera caught me hanging on his every word and him doting on me, but it also caught our struggles. How I would whine and how he would get mad at me over stuff that didn’t matter. He didn’t want me to have a housekeeper come weekly, he hated that we ate out so much, and he didn’t want to hire anybody to do home projects. He was frugal, but it wasn’t about money. He always wanted to do everything on his own to prove he could. And he held me to that same standard. Nick wanted me to be a housewife making all the meals, and I admit I went into that marriage hoping to be that way, too. I was the girl who registered for everything at Williams-Sonoma thinking I’d be like my mom. But I wasn’t even home to unpack my house, let alone cook those meals. For most of my first year of marriage, I was very aware that I was a midlevel celebrity still paying off her wedding and not in a position to say no to any gigs. I would come home, go grocery shopping to try to be the normal wife Nick wanted, and then leave again. When I returned two weeks later, the crew would get us in the kitchen with Nick complaining about the bread that got moldy and the salad that went bad because I’d bought them two weeks before.
But if Nick acknowledged how much I was working, he would see that he wasn’t, and he was too much of a hard worker to face that head on. The first real fight the cameras caught was about him decorating the house while I was away. It seemed so dumb, but it was about much larger issues in our marriage. I had been away for something like two months, and I didn’t so much resent him decorating without me as I wanted to be able to focus on my career and have a nice home. But I had no time off. To have the home I wanted to give Nick, I needed to bring in professionals to help. Nick didn’t want that. I’m sure a lot of women have been caught in that bind of having it all while trying to be all to somebody.
Throughout th
at fight, the closer we got to the real issue, the more frightened I became. I was very aware that the crew was dancing around us, silently getting all the angles. When I get scared, I freeze, so they had to hustle to create a feel of action.
When Nick accused me of being a spoiled brat, I knew how to handle that one. I knew I was spoiled, and I was working on that. But then, when he said, “Go away and leave me alone,” I slipped.
“I am away,” I said. “I’m always away.”
He tipped his head back just slightly, and a realization moved across his face like a storm cloud.
“Oh, boo freaking hoo,” he spat. “You know what, sob sob sob. Like I’m not doing the same shit you are.”
Don’t say it, Jessica, I thought. Too real. Too real. But it was out of my mouth before I could stop it. I said, “You’re not doing half of what I’m doing, baby.”
“Oh, now we’re into this now,” he said, reaching for his Miller Lite. “You think you’re gettin’ it all figured out.”
“Baby, I’m not trying to act like I have it all figured out,” I said, aborting the mission. I was too afraid of wounding his ego, so I said I would hire him to do stuff and pay him with sex. Talking about our sex life was a classic way to get the crew distracted from some issue. That was always something they seemed to react to and would use to lighten up a plot.
I got up and went to the couch to sad-watch TV while Nick finished his beer outside. When he came to pick me up and carry me to bed, I distinctly remember wondering if someone had told him to. If that was true, it was just too sad. Too real.
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