Open Book

by Jessica Simpson

  Near my last day of shooting Dukes of Hazzard, I started to worry about what was going to come next. The movie was a great excuse for not being with Nick, and for being with Johnny in this fantasy land. I got the courage one day to ask Willie Nelson for marriage advice while we were alone on his bus. I felt I could talk to him about anything. I told him about Nick, and how I just wasn’t sure what to do.

  “I’m not the guy to give advice, Daisy,” he said. I could tell he saw my disappointment.

  “I had a father-in-law,” he continued. “An ex-father-in-law, so, you see? But he said, ‘Take my advice, and do what you want to do.’ That may be the best advice I’ve ever heard.”

  He picked up his guitar, which was always nearby. “Uncle Jesse, can we sing together?” I asked.

  He answered by strumming his guitar. I started singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and he fell right into the rhythm. It’s a beautiful funeral hymn of losing someone and hoping for a reunion in heaven. When that chorus first kicks in, there really is that question: “Will the circle be unbroken, by and by, Lord, by and by?” Is love really eternal? I’d married forever, to spend eternity with Nick in heaven. The place where I would see my grandparents, who’d hung in there like I was supposed to, and where I would see Sarah again. I’d married forever, and now I was certain that dream was over.

  When you sing that lonely, scared song with someone, by the end, there’s a connection. Doesn’t matter if it’s two voices in a bus or two hundred in a church, you feel a little less scared. As we sang, I started to cry, and I think Willie knew to just let me.

  13

  The Gilded Cage

  Spring 2005

  We sat in the living room on a rare afternoon home together. By then, it wasn’t often that we were even in the same city. I traveled so much that I no longer had jetlag, just a permanent back and forth of restlessness and fatigue. We were on the couch, and Nick made some crack about me, I don’t know what. Probably one that I used to think was funny, and I said something mean. As usual, we launched into our long list of grievances with each other . . .

  And we stopped. At the same time, we looked over to the TV and nodded to each other. Silently, we got up from the couch, left the house, and walked to an empty lot nearby. Only then, safe from anybody hearing, did we quietly scream at each other.

  Production had stopped on our show, and the last sad episode ran in late March, but we were paranoid that we were still being taped. Looking back, I know we sound crazy, but when you live in a house with hidden cameras for years—in the TV and in the corners—it’s hard to believe that they’re all really gone. We had reason to be paranoid. Details of our conversations and troubles would show up on the news. Tabloids made up the dumbest things about us, but sometimes they would get something so right it was scary.

  So we started leaving the house whenever we had to discuss something delicate. I kept thinking of The Firm, when Tom Cruise’s character finds out his evil law firm has secretly wired his entire house with listening devices. When he tells his wife, she bolts from the house, terrified, and they go to a park where they can talk without anybody listening in. “Everything, every single thing we’ve said or done since we’ve been in that house,” she says, “nothing has been between us.”

  He suspected my friends were selling stories, I suspected his. My protective mother had a guilty until proven innocent approach to everyone around us. The one friend we agreed would never do it was CaCee, but I was already becoming isolated from her. She was afraid to even go to restaurants with me because she was convinced someone would overhear me running my mouth and sell it, and I would blame her.

  CaCee knew my biggest secret: That I was still in touch with Johnny Knoxville. We wrote these flowery love letters back and forth, often at night with Nick passed out in the bed next to me. We talked about music, and I would listen to the Johnny Cash songs he suggested just to feel like we were still together. Whenever I wanted to read CaCee some gushy letter from him, she would refuse. It was like Johnny and I were prison pen pals, two people who wanted so much to be with each other but were kept apart—by bars, by our stars, by our respective spouses.

  I would delete every email, convinced Nick would find out. I rewrote each text and email in my Mead journal, the sanctity of which my husband respected, even if neither of us were doing a good job of respecting the rest of our marriage.

  As there were more and more tabloid stories about our marriage falling apart, we became strangely more determined to make it work. Paparazzi would ask me constantly, as if we were pals, “Jess, are you leaving Nick?” Worse, Nick was asked, “Is Jess leaving you, Nick?” Our natural response was to protect each other, so whenever the press asked, we would vehemently deny that there were any problems. We didn’t want to give anybody the satisfaction of seeing us publicly humiliated with a divorce, so we continued to play our Newlyweds roles. Sometimes we did this so well that we convinced each other. I thought, Well, maybe this isn’t enough, but maybe it’s enough for me.

  In one of those moments, I deleted Johnny’s number from my phone. I did it quickly, before I—or Nick—changed my mind.

  IN APRIL, NICK MADE GOOD ON HIS PROMISE TO JOIN ME IN ENTERTAINING the troops, this time in Iraq. ABC cameras followed us for a variety show, and beforehand I’d started reading a paperback of Rick Atkinson’s In the Company of Soldiers, an account of the ground war in the country. I wanted a sense of what these men and women were living through so I could have real conversations with them.

  Before Iraq, our first stop was Ramstein Air Base in Germany, the main hub for U.S. armed forces in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The base was in Kaiserslautern, and on the plane, someone told me a good icebreaker was to ask, “How long have you been in K-Town?” I was relieved, because there was no way I was saying Kaiserslautern right. We were there for the first three days of the trip, doing a free show for six thousand people in Hangar 1 on the base. I had invited Willie to come along for the Germany portion. “Sure, Daisy,” was his answer. He traded in his usual bandana for a cute USO one, and we did a duet of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” which was going to be on the soundtrack to Dukes of Hazzard.

  Nick was so great on the trip, and it meant so much for me to see him in action, doing something meaningful to him. Not only was he perfect onstage doing most of the emceeing, but also when we visited Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a one-hundred bed hospital that they told us was nicknamed the “Emergency Room” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just as in my first USO tour in 2001, I wasn’t ready for how young these people would be. But now, nearly four years later, I was twenty-four, and looking at eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds whose lives had been changed forever by war. A few had just been in Iraq for a very short time before being maimed by a car bomb. Most of the patients had legs or arms that were severely injured by shrapnel.

  “These guys are just kids,” I whispered to Nick in the hallway, trying to keep it together. Nick took the lead when he went into rooms, not sure what we would see. He’d walk in first and say “Good to see you,” and his grace carried me and prevented me from having any appearance of pity. “This one put on lip gloss just for you,” he’d say, gesturing to me. “Darn right, I did,” I would say. He was kind, and when he struggled, trying to keep up a poker face, I stepped in. We were a real team again, and while I had no illusions that we didn’t have problems, I saw what I used to see in us for that trip.

  From Germany, Nick and I flew with my father to Kuwait, and then took a C-130 military flight into Iraq, where we would tour three bases in one day, then fly home that night. We had newly deployed combat troops on our plane, and just like the people in the hospital, they seemed so young. Praying for their safety helped me let go of some of my own fears about being in Iraq. I was only going to be there for one day. Who knows how long these troops would be there?

  As we flew in, the pilot came over the loudspeaker. “Just want to prepare you that the Iraqis shoot rock
ets at us all the time,” he said. “They are shooting from the ground, and they’re not accurate. Just hoping they’ll hit something else.”

  I looked at my dad with a “Help” face and laughed at the thought that I was going to better understand this life by reading a book about the war.

  “When we land, we’re not going to come in regular like a plane,” the pilot continued. “We’re gonna dump it and go straight in to avoid enemy fire, so prepare yourself for the sudden drop.” He wasn’t kidding, it felt like we were going to crash land on our first stop, Camp Anaconda, just north of Baghdad. Before we got out, they made us all put on bulletproof vests and helmets.

  “We take a lot of incoming mortar fire,” said the man as he casually adjusted my helmet. He said it the way my mom would say, “Bring an umbrella ’cause the skies are threatening.”

  I suddenly felt silly in my tight jeans, carrying my cowgirl hat. After a welcoming ceremony, our escorts took us to a mess hall to eat with service members. There was probably a thousand people inside, and we waited in line like everyone else, greeting anybody who came up to say hello.

  After we sat to eat, I felt the entire ground start to shake. I panicked. There were explosions somewhere nearby. I looked around and noticed none of the soldiers were even registering that we were in a war zone. This was all so normal to them.

  “I think the guns are a long way away,” my father said when it happened again. He and Nick were in a contest to be cooler under fire, but I was a wreck.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Take a look at these guys sitting at the table,” Dad said. “When they move, you move.”

  “This is Mortaritaville,” one soldier told me. “You get used to it.”

  “Well, when you’re back home, I hope you get to Margaritaville,” I said. “You can really get used to that.”

  After the meal, Nick and I sat at tables and signed autographs and shook hands for a long time, then they loaded us into a UH-60 Black-Hawk to go to the next base. They canceled our plan to go to the next base on the schedule because of the fighting that made the ground—and me—shake. We took a five-hour Black-Hawk ride straight to Camp Speicher in Tikrit to do another meet and greet, and when we were done, we got back on the Black-Hawk to take us to Kuwait. I confess I was relieved to be leaving. I was very aware of my privilege in my ability to go home. Just as we were about to fly out, we were told we couldn’t leave because of an incoming sandstorm. There was too much danger of a crash, and we would have to stay the night.

  They put us in a bunker, and I freaked out. Not gonna lie. It was a small room with two sets of bunkbeds. My Sidekick worked—yes, in a bunker in Iraq—so I called my mother and started reciting my last will and testament. She then freaked out and called my dad while I was saying my goodbyes to CaCee. “Tina, we are under attack by a sandstorm,” he said. “It’s fine.”

  I started sending long letters to my friends, telling them how much I loved them. It occurred to me that God had placed me in this bunker with my two protectors, Nick and my dad, and I still didn’t feel safe. There was a soldier guarding the bunker, and she took me aside before lights out.

  “Here,” she said, handing me a little angel figurine. “My daughter gave me this to keep me safe. You can borrow it.”

  I looked her in the eye and thanked her. It felt precious in my hand, full of power. I slept with it in my hand all night, and that angel got me through all my anxiety. In the morning, I tried to give it back to her, but she told me I could keep it.

  “No,” I said, “It’s too much.” But she insisted.

  “My daughter will love that we all have something in common,” she said. “Just think of us, okay?”

  “I promise,” I said. I have since lent it out once, to my friend Koko, when her husband was facing a long deployment. She was scared. “Here,” I said, just like I’d heard in that bunker. “Take this angel and then give it back to me when he comes home.”

  I’m very happy to tell you she was able to. I still sleep with that little angel next to my bed. I’m grateful for that protection, and I still pray for the safety of service members all over the world. When I am rushing through an airport, my assistant hopes the doors of the plane are still open and that I won’t see any service members. I always stop to find out if they’re coming or going so I can give them a friendly word.

  WE SAT IN THE OFFICE, MY NOTEBOOK ON MY LAP. NICK GLANCED AT ME and shook his head just slightly, knowing I had pens and pencils in my purse. The good student trying to impress the marriage counselor. Nick was against the idea that we needed therapy, alternating between two excuses: the therapist would probably sell us out to a tabloid, and we could get through this ourselves.

  “I don’t feel like anything needs to be fixed,” he had said.

  “Everything needs to be fixed,” I answered. “There’s not one thing that’s okay.”

  If this therapist could give me the solution to making my marriage work, I would take it. He was a psychologist and life coach from Dallas who flew back and forth from L.A. and New York, meeting with celebrities and CEOs. We met in a nondescript office building to throw off the paparazzi.

  On that sunny California day in May, the therapist, a forty-something guy with rimless glasses and thinning blond hair, patiently listened to us as we laid out our problems and received our marriage operating instructions. Nick said I was just too young and didn’t know how to communicate. I would either go quiet or say things like “All bets are off” and “This marriage ain’t gonna last.” I felt I had to say things like that to get him to understand how miserable I was in the marriage.

  “I know you hate me,” I said.

  He shook his head in disgust.

  “I feel it,” I said. “Whenever we are in the same room, it just comes off you. I feel it when you lie down next to me. I feel it when you can’t even look at me.”

  The main diagnosis: he was withholding love while I was withholding intimacy and affection. “Even a hug,” said the therapist. “Touching, of course, making love.”

  And him? I was supposed to take him at his word that he didn’t hate me. He would stop saying or doing things in anger, and I, in turn, would stop bringing things up from the past. His actions needed to be consistent with valuing our relationship.

  “You’re doing the right thing getting help,” the therapist said. “If you break your arm, you don’t sit there yelling at it for being broken. You get it fixed.” I left relieved that we had a list of things we could do to help each other. And for a few days, it was better. I tried to be more present and not be such a ghost. We stayed at home and cooked dinner.

  The next counseling session, I sat there in the office, awkwardly stalling in the hopes that Nick was just late. He wasn’t answering his phone, and I looked down at the blank page of my notebook.

  Nick never showed. He stopped coming altogether.

  Like some signal had gone up, Johnny then emailed me. I took out all my anger and drama on him, acting like he had abandoned me. I had deleted his number, and I guess he didn’t notice that I hadn’t contacted him, which only made me more upset. We had a ridiculous back and forth about who was at fault, and he accused me of attacking him for no reason. That triggered my need to please, so I smoothed it over, and convinced myself that this was just passion. I poured it into my songwriting, writing about Johnny and sending him the songs to get his take. I don’t know what I thought that would do. Get him to show up at my door and say, “Get your stuff, we’re running away together”? I began to realize contact with him was an addiction, and I would make these grand pronouncements that each time was the last time. I was grateful that he had expanded my worldview and made me appreciate so many things about culture, but I needed to walk away. This wasn’t a game.

  One of the songwriters I was working with told me he noticed that all the songs I was creating with him were about regret and a romance that was either lost or doomed from the start.

  “You really n
eed a love song,” he said.

  I smiled. “I know.”

  AFTER MONTHS OF HYPE, THE DUKES OF HAZZARD PREMIERED IN LATE July with a huge red-carpet event in Los Angeles. Johnny brought his wife and daughter, so the whole thing felt dangerous and foolish. I avoided him and kept Nick with me as I walked the rope line of interviewers. Every question was about how I got in shape to play Daisy Duke, and Nick got increasingly annoyed as we made it down the line.

  Once inside, the movie started, and the audience cheered when my name came up on the title card. I shook with a chill going through my body. Thank you, Lord, I thought. Nick took my hand and smiled at me. He was proud of me, even if he had a hard time saying the words just to me and not the media.

  Seeing myself so big up there, I found myself critiquing my body. My body was a machine, and I had given it over to the service of the character. I saw Daisy Duke on the screen, and then just the teeny tiniest stomach shadow of Jessica. While watching, my tell was that I’d pull a face with my lower lip. I was in the best shape of my life, and I didn’t appreciate it, but also, it just shows the absurdity of how we always find something to criticize about ourselves.

  Two days before the movie came out, Johnny went on the Howard Stern Show and took a lie detector test. They asked, “Have you had sex with Jessica Simpson?” and he said no. Of course he passed, but I just felt gross that he even submitted to doing that. My friends told me this was proof that he was toxic, but I still saw the good in him. How could I not, when I had made him into this fantasy man at the other end of a text or email?

  Dukes came out in theaters August 5 and did huge numbers. In one week, I had the number-one movie and the number-one video on MTV with “These Boots Are Made for Walkin.’ ” Johnny emailed me that I was a bona fide movie star.