But he barely looked at me anymore, period, and I had Newlyweds to remind me how much had changed. They still ran our wedding in the opener, that moment when he sees his bride for the first time. He gasps, and all the ladies at home say, “I wish my man looked at me that way.” It reminded people that there had been real love between us. Trust me, if he had still looked at me like that, all my resentment would have melted away.
We were in a place where we loved each other fine, but we just didn’t like each other. I could feel him trying to like me, but everything I did seemed to annoy him. Divorce was not an option for me, if only out of an obligation to my vows. I’d made a promise in front of God and all our loved ones. I couldn’t imagine telling people I wanted a divorce. For generations, my family passed down a marriage guide that only had one tip: “Hang in there.” I was afraid of letting everyone down. We both were. So many couples had told us we were just like them. What would it mean for them if we couldn’t make it?
We got to the gate of our neighborhood, and the paparazzi relented. Nick was still muttering at me, but I was somewhere else, withdrawing again, which I knew he hated, but I couldn’t help it. He parked in the garage, and I closed the car door softly. I withheld even the satisfaction he’d feel if I slammed the door like a child. Instead, I was just a ghost returning to her haunted little mansion.
Without looking back at Nick behind me, I entered the house that I’d never thought of as mine. I’d moved in and immediately treated it like a hotel where I never quite unpacked. Without the camera crew buzzing around, people holding up boom mics and lighting, it was like an empty soundstage. I went upstairs to bed and took a sleeping pill. I didn’t care if Nick went back out or if he came upstairs.
It was only when I went to take off my makeup that I realized I still had my sunglasses on. I took them off, and the harsh light blinded me once again. I washed my face and looked up to stare at the ghost in the mirror.
THE ONE THING THAT BROUGHT ME JOY WAS WORK. ON A SUNNY AUGUST afternoon, I drove onto the Warner Brothers lot, repeating my lines in my head. This was the make-or-break screen test for the Daisy Duke role in the Dukes of Hazzard reboot. The studio had wanted me for the film, but I knew the director, Jay Chandrasekhar, was resistant. He had a strong comedy background and had seen a couple episodes of Newlyweds. I think he thought I was too dumb to play a character as strong and smart as Daisy Duke. But I knew Daisy’s heart, and I wanted to do her justice. Jay agreed to see my chemistry on film with the Duke brothers already cast, Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville. I knew from the casting agent that Mandy Moore and Jessica Biel were going before me that day, and I tried not to let it shake me.
I walked in to do the scene and saw Johnny. I immediately felt something I didn’t understand, something literally attracting him to me.
“Jessica Simpson,” Johnny said, shaking my hand. I reflexively smiled at his voice and gentlemanly Southern manners. I didn’t expect that from someone who had created the Jackass franchise. He was magnetic, and just so charming.
The screen test was a blur, and when it was over, Jay said, “You’re it.”
“Really?”
“It was your smile,” he said.
“Welcome, Daisy,” said Johnny.
We would start a three-month film shoot in early November, which I thought would help get me out of filming Newlyweds for MTV. Nick and I just didn’t want to do it anymore. We didn’t want to lie to fans and pretend everything between us was fine. We also knew that even if we tried, we would have a hard time hiding our problems. At the end of August, we had a fight at an afterparty for the MTV VMAs, and the tabloids had a new story line: the Newlyweds under pressure.
The truth was far worse. “I’m starting to feel we can’t have cameras on us anymore,” I told Nick. “Our marriage is scary.” That was the thing: we were still enough of a team that we could talk about our marriage going downhill, as long we didn’t approach specifics. Then we would have to do something about it.
MTV held us to our contract and set filming to start on our anniversary. The production team arranged for Nick to take me to the Saddle Peak Lodge in the Malibu mountains, probably because it had wild game on the menu and they could have me mispronounce emu or something. By then, Nick and I knew exactly what they wanted the episode to be about, so we knew what to say to get them out of the house or leave us alone. We were living life for a line. It would sometimes be the one thing we agreed on. “Let’s just say this and have off time.”
Of course, it rained. It had rained on our wedding day and our anniversaries. And right before this big romantic dinner, a production assistant showed me a brand-new tabloid story.
“Did you see this?” she asked.
Two weeks before, Nick had been at a bachelor party for a sound engineer friend of ours. The bride was a stylist, and I was a bridesmaid. Whoever had organized the bachelor party had started it at a strip club and then moved to a private home. The tabloid said Nick did some vague thing with a porn star named Jessica. I stopped reading.
“Why are you showing me this?” I asked.
The production assistant looked embarrassed. I realized they wanted a reaction on camera. If we can’t get them to interact romantically, let’s have them fight. Happy anniversary. I then had to sit through this dinner, another weird, quiet meal where they shut down the whole restaurant to film so nobody could approach us. There were so many tabloid stories about Nick in strip clubs or talking to girls that I just didn’t know what to believe. Did he feel caught in this marriage? He kept putting himself into situations where he could be so easily accused of cheating. It was self-sabotage. And I was supposed to stay home and be Betty Crocker?
Nope, I was going to go be Daisy Duke.
I WAS SCARED TO DEATH FOR MY FIRST SCENE ON THE DUKES SET IN BATON Rouge, but at least Johnny and Seann were there. It was freezing, even for early November, though you would never know it by the amount of clothes I wear in my scenes. For this first scene, we all had to gather around a car, and I had to lament that the Duke brothers were going to get up to some foolishness, and I was going to have to shake my butt to distract the authorities to save the day. I was so prepared, because I wanted to prove to the whole cast and crew that I’d gotten this on my own. Not because I was Nick Lachey’s wife or because my dad had squeaked me in with some deal.
I did the scene in one take, and everybody cheered. “Yeah, you got your first line,” Seann said.
“Great job, lady,” Johnny said, giving me a hug that we let go right to the edge of going on too long. Lady would always be his nickname for me.
I smiled at him and started to worry. I felt a force drawing us together. I wondered why I was open to this. I was already living in a distrustful situation with Nick, and now I was afraid I couldn’t trust myself. Oh my God, I didn’t know my heart could do this, I thought. And then, Shoot.
At the end of the first day of shooting, I went back to the house the production company had rented for me, a simple two-story home near the Louisiana State University campus. I had brought along four friends from L.A. to the movie shoot, CaCee, two girlfriends named Jessie and Mary, and my trainer, Mike Alexander, who was a friend from high school. And my little Maltipoo, who I had named Daisy as a sort of wish that I would get the part. I went upstairs to call Nick to share how great my first day went. He seemed distracted when all I wanted was for him to be proud of me. Or to at least listen to me. Everyone else on the set was happy and proud, why not my husband? When I asked him how his album was going, he seemed relieved.
When I hung up, I heard laughter downstairs. CaCee and Jessie were whoopin’ over something. I realized that I had created a sort of dorm room of friends. My parents hadn’t tagged along for once—they were both focused on my younger sister, Ashlee, and her new pop career. My father and the label positioned her as the antithesis of me—she even dyed her blonde hair brown—and it was working because she had the talent to back it up. Her deserved success brought their
focus to my sister, so my parents went from being around me constantly to barely. So, down in Louisiana on that set, I’d decided to give myself the college experience I’d never gotten to have because I was always working, moving from living under my dad’s eye to Nick’s.
And for the first time, work was 100 percent fun. Let’s be honest, I wasn’t carrying the movie, and it’s not like I had a lot of lines. I could just be Daisy, and I felt my cousin Sarah close to me. She was that Southern cool girl, too. In the film, I even wore red boots like the ones Sarah wore. Once I became Daisy, I wanted to be her for the rest of my life. Oh, people underestimate me because of the way I look? How can I use that to my advantage? I felt powerful.
But I also had to look the part. I was living on protein, dreaming of chips. I knew I was hired for my body and treated it like an athlete would. Poor Mike had to listen to me whine every day at the little gym we went to. When I did the scenes in short shorts or the bikini—and, really, those were my scenes—I had a heavy robe to cover me the second the camera stopped rolling. “Run it over,” I’d yell. “I’m nekkid out here.” Lynda Carter was in the movie, and she understood the pressure and body scrutiny. Daisy Duke got to meet Wonder Woman and bond with her in hair and makeup.
“Get ready,” she warned me. “People are gonna want you to be in those Daisy Duke shorts the rest of your life.” Putting on the shorts on the set and having a group of people lean back to see if my butt looked good enough. Lynda had been there—fighting for our rights in her satin tights—but she also told me to embrace playing such a strong, forthright character as Daisy or, in her case, Wonder Woman.
“There were times,” she said slowly, “I think she saved me.”
I waved my hands at my eyes, afraid to ruin my makeup because I was so touched by her kindness. She hugged me. “It’s nice to be someone else for a while,” I admitted. “To not have to play me.”
If Lynda was my mentor on the set, Willie Nelson was my guardian angel. He played Uncle Jesse in the film and insisted on calling me Daisy even when the cameras were off. He invited me to hang out on his tour bus, the Honeysuckle Rose, and soon he and his beautiful wife, Annie, took me under their wings. The Honeysuckle Rose is famous, and Willie always stays in his beloved bus when he’s on the road or shooting a movie. He was just so satisfied with his life, this country Buddha who’s happy to connect with his fans. I’d hang out on the big old couch inside, and he’d play me music by country greats like his friends Waylon Jennings and Patsy Cline.
“You know I wrote Patsy’s ‘Crazy,’ right?”
“Oh, wow,” I said. I knew it by heart and began to sing it.
“Yeah, but I wanted to call it ‘Stupid.’ ” He started singing, “Stupid, stupid, for feeling so blue . . .”
When he realized I believed him, hook, line, and sinker, he let out a big laugh. “Oh, Daisy,” he said, “I’m just pullin’ your pretty little leg.”
As soon as I was settled in, I had to leave again to throw Nick his birthday party. I spent something like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for him to have a birthday weekend in Las Vegas. Note: wasting that kind of money trying to make someone like you is never really a good idea, but I wanted him to be happy because obviously I wasn’t enough. I wanted to tell him all my stories from my movie adventure, but he didn’t seem interested, so I shut down. He seemed insecure, and I thought, How do you make all these women swoon while you are the one threatened by me growing up to be the person I want to be? An adult.
I missed my friends. I missed Johnny.
Sigh, Johnny. The boy from Tennessee, as I coded him in my diary. First off, we were both married, so this wasn’t going to get physical. But to me, an emotional affair was worse than a physical one. It’s funny, I know, because I had placed such an emphasis on sex by not having it before marriage. After I actually had sex, I understood that the emotional part was what mattered. And Johnny and I had that, which seemed far more of a betrayal to my marriage than sex.
Our friends would all hang out together in the bars by LSU, which added to the college vibe. Eventually it would get down to me and Johnny talking over Macallan, the scotch whisky he introduced me to. I could talk to him for hours, and his stories brought things to life, surging with a mix of adrenaline and intelligence. Ten years older than me, he spoke of writers who inspired him, like Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, and how they brought a spirit of adventure to everything they did. It was something he emulated. Nothing was ever average with him. It had to the best night of your life, or it wasn’t worth doing.
This wasn’t a performance. He made me feel that spirit of adventure as he asked me about my life. Not just my present, but about who I wanted to be. I could share the deepest authentic thoughts with him, and he didn’t roll his eyes at me. He actually liked that I was smart and embraced my vulnerabilities. He didn’t make fun of me, he laughed with me. He believed in me and made me feel like I could do anything. And the only person who had ever made me feel that way was my dad. Certainly not my husband.
We were open about the challenges of our marriages and why we felt we had to honor those vows by sticking with the marriage. He had a daughter, and he spoke of her like his life began and ended with her. I had never seen someone’s eyes shine like his did when he talked about his child.
“I just feel like I’m going through so many changes,” I said to Johnny one night over scotch. “It’s hard.”
“Nah, change is easy,” he said. “Staying the same is a lot harder on you.”
I lifted the Macallan to toast that, and held it in the air, lifting it higher to see him through the amber of the drink.
“Don’t be looking at me through whisky-colored glasses, lady,” he said.
“Too late,” I said.
“Let’s just promise to be there for one another in our imminent and enduring times of trouble and thunder.”
“Deal,” I said. He always talked like that. I would moon over him to CaCee, using that same lofty language.
“He’s saving me,” I told CaCee.
“Jessica Simpson, you don’t need him to save you,” she said. “You can save yourself.” She paused and continued in the big-sister tone I usually listened to. “What you are doing is not right, and it’s not respectful to Nick. Either get in there and fix your marriage, really work on it, or you need to separate. If you want to leave Nick, talk to him. Johnny’s not a bad guy, but there is nothing healthy about this thing.”
“I want my marriage to work,” I said.
“Well, then, act like it,” she said.
I think CaCee felt guilty because I saw a freedom in her life that I wanted. She knew that I needed that and was going to go find it. But she didn’t want to feel that it was her fault if I left Nick. Not just because they were close, but because CaCee never wants to hurt anyone’s feelings. To this day, she still remembers the name of every person we’ve ever met together on set. She’ll tell me about being excited that some random person had a baby, and she knows because she follows them on Instagram!
We had to break for Christmas, so I went back home to Nick. We could both feel it was ending, and that reality made him angry. He kept accusing me of changing.
“Of course I have,” I yelled. “Nick, you married a baby. I’m not that person anymore.”
His anger always made things worse, but in a way, I craved it. I wanted him to be angrier with me. Yeah, give me more reason to leave, I thought. I don’t want this to be all my fault. Now I know it wasn’t my fault, but at the time, I still thought I had failed him.
When I returned to Baton Rouge, I became more brazen in flirting with Johnny. While I used to purposefully not call Nick at night so he would wonder, I now realized that I just wasn’t thinking of him at all. I was inconsiderate, hoping he would make the decision for us, because I was too afraid. The Newlyweds crew came to Baton Rouge, but I didn’t give them much. They were desperate, so they set up a camera on my computer just so they could get us in the same frame.
It hardly seemed worth it: Nick would talk about working on his album, and I would say I was tired from work.
Nick showed up in Louisiana in late January, the day after the premiere of our third season of Newlyweds. He was suspicious about what I was up to, hanging out with Johnny and his friends, so he announced he was moving his album writing and demo sessions to Sockit Studios in Baton Rouge. It was probably the worst time in our marriage. He was seething with anger, which I matched with an increasing coldness.
The Newlyweds crews came to the scene, hoping to get footage of us. I didn’t want to be around him, and I think Nick was surprised that I wouldn’t even do the bare minimum of playing along for the cameras, sitting in the studio and watching him work. The crew was there, so I felt obligated to shoot. But I was sick of lying, and I resented that it was disruptive to the film. Not that I had to do much to get into the role of being Daisy Duke, but I was still trying to work, and they were coming onto the set of this fifty-million-dollar-budget movie like it was my living room.
I also knew that the cameras would reveal that I was over the marriage. I was right. What little they got of us together would quickly devolve. We were about to have another fight, when Nick said, loudly, “Stop rolling.” That was our safe phrase—the signal that we didn’t want to be filmed—but the crew continued.
“Will you just get out of here so we can have a conversation?” he asked.
A producer stepped forward. “If we keep having to stop rolling,” he said, “there’s no show.”
We looked at each other, and said together, “Stop rolling.”
From then on, we filmed as little as possible, save for a Valentine’s Day episode where we did nothing to hide that there were problems. They had to do a clip show for the last one, where we pretended we wanted to move out of the house but changed our minds. It was bizarre, and I never watched it. We finished out the run and fulfilled the contract. Now there was a sense that we at least had to see what it was like to have a marriage without cameras. I think we both knew we couldn’t blame all our problems on the cameras, but we felt obligated to at least try. Like I said, finish out the run.
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