I HID IN WACO FOR SEVERAL DAYS, BUT PAPARAZZI AND REPORTERS FOUND me. My mom and I were on a walk, and they took pictures and asked questions like we were friends.
“Jessica, why did you leave Nick?” they asked as I turned to walk back to the house. I refused to answer.
I told my dad I didn’t want to talk to the press at all. “I will not allow for anything to come from my mouth that is disparaging to Nick or my marriage,” I said. “They will not get me on tape talking about it. That’s it.” I wasn’t naive. I knew that I had opened my marriage up to the world as a fishbowl. People were going to be angry about me putting up a sign saying the exhibit was closed.
I returned to L.A. and stayed at my parents’ house in Encino. I was a prisoner there, with helicopters circling. My sister, Ashlee, lived behind my parents at the time, and one morning I called her. I had this idea to army crawl up and over to her house to escape without being seen.
“Is that crazy?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, laughing. “You must.”
“I wish we had walkie talkies,” I said. “Okay, meet me out back.”
Halfway across the yard, I heard a helicopter and stopped. I wondered if all this was worth it. I could have just stayed in the marriage, and at least I wouldn’t be crawling through the dirt to my little sister’s house.
“No, I’ve got this,” I said aloud. I cleared the hill and saw the glass and concrete of her home. Ashlee was waiting for me at the back door, and she hugged me when I jumped up and ran in. She laughed when I realized I got the dust of the California valley all over myself.
“Can I borrow some clothes?” I asked.
We went upstairs, and we spent the day lying on the floor, our heads touching as we listened to music and talked. She would make amazing playlists, almost like medicine. “I think this song applies to your life right now,” she’d say, my emotional deejay. It had been so long since we had hung out. I needed her strength as I mourned, and we became so much closer through my divorce. It took me losing a part of my life to appreciate a part of my life that always will be, my sister.
“You’re going to be okay,” she would say. “Just give it time.”
But I had to work. On December 5, I was scheduled to perform at a Christmas gala at Cincinnati Music Hall, right in Nick’s adopted hometown. A local billionaire named Carl Lindner was famous for his lavish holiday parties and had done a deal with my dad to pay me nearly a million dollars to sing for one night in the city where everyone loved Nick.
CaCee went with me, and I dressed all in black because I thought I needed to be somber for the crowd, who I was certain would hate me. Just before going on, I froze.
“I can’t go out there,” I said.
“Jessica—” said CaCee, starting with the big-sister tone. “Don’t you be doing this here.”
“I don’t have anything to sing about,” I said, hearing my introduction. “I can’t sing love songs.”
“Then sing about Christmas,” she said, handing me the mic.
I walked on, hit my spotlight, and waited for the boos. They didn’t come. It was just a quiet uncertainty. “I’m sorry,” I said into the mic. I started to cry, and then walked off. CaCee stepped forward and grabbed my face with that U-shape of her hand.
“You get back out there.”
“No one wants me without Nick.”
“You were singing before you met Nick, Jessica,” she said, physically turning me around to push me back onstage. “Remember that.”
I think CaCee was afraid if I didn’t get back out there and walk through the fear, I would never get on a stage again. I sang some of my songs, but then hit my stride with the Christmas songs. I wiped away tears during “What Child Is This?” thinking about all the times I sang that song in churches in Texas. When I got to “O Holy Night,” I turned a corner in the concert and in my life. It was during that line I love, when Christ appears and the weary soul feels its worth. That thrill of hope.
I felt it. I looked out and saw that people were crying with me. I could do this life without Nick, because I would never be alone.
TWO WEEKS INTO DECEMBER, NICK STILL THOUGHT WE COULD HAVE OUR whole life back. I was afraid to see him, knowing his fear of change would make me relent. I thought that if I officially moved out, just took my journals and the clothes I wanted to keep, he would understand this was real.
It was my mother’s idea that we would go to our house and move me out while he was away. Some boys’ trip or event, I can’t remember. The Simpsons were not good with conflict at that time. I admit it was rude, and CaCee told me as much. She was still close to Nick and saw him as a sort of sibling.
“I just think this is the wrong way to go about it,” she said, over and over.
My mom had an empty party rental truck brought to the house because a U-Haul would be too obvious. I got about eight of my girlfriends together, and I went over with the intention of getting only the things that were sentimental to me.
I entered my own house, and it was more like a haunted mansion than ever. I didn’t even want to turn too many lights on—I just wanted to get in and get out. Daisy came and greeted me, jumping up and down as I bent to kiss her.
“Daisy Mae,” I said, scooping her up in my arms. Once we were inside, and my mom saw how little I wanted to take, she was shocked. She knew how hard I had worked in my life to afford some of these things, and she didn’t want her baby taken advantage of.
She said, “Are you sure you don’t want—”
“Mom, we are not shopping my house.”
I didn’t want any of it. I never wanted to see that couch again or the china we picked for our wedding. But there were some things she felt I had paid for, and I saw them carrying them out the door. I shook my head, but I was too mentally exhausted to fight. Even now, I sometimes think about some object and think, Now, where did that go? And I have to remind myself it was just another thing I let go of.
But there was something—someone—who was coming with me. At the door, I just couldn’t put Daisy down. “Let’s go,” I whispered in her ear. I turned off the light, shut the door, and didn’t look back.
Divorce is messy. I know he came home and was furious. Nick felt like he’d been robbed, and I know he told someone, “She even took my damn dog.” I wish we were the kind of people who could divorce and stay friends. We weren’t, and I regret that my actions hurt him.
Despite his anger, and maybe because of it, he was still intent on not letting me go. On December 15, I called Nick to tell him I was about to file for divorce and that he needed to sign the papers. The next afternoon, he drove over to my parents’ house, where I was living. He came in, and we sat on the couch. He tried talking to my parents, getting them to rethink things, but I asked them to leave. This was my decision.
“It’s not over,” he said.
“It is over,” I said. “You have the papers in front of you.”
“I’m not signing them,” he said. He promised that he would go to counseling now and sputtered about how he had the number of the best counselor in Los Angeles.
“You didn’t go when we needed it.”
“I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll go now. I’ll change.”
“No, you won’t,” I said softly. I didn’t want to hurt him more. He didn’t like me, so I didn’t understand what it was he was trying to save. “And I don’t even want you to. Nick, I’m continuing to change, so I don’t even know who you’re gonna get. But it’s not gonna be the girl I used to be.”
He started to cry, and in that moment, I left my body for a second and just saw the scene. Nick in tears, and this girl keeping a poker face like a hostage eyeing the door. Jessica, you should cry, I told myself. I thought it would make him feel better. I couldn’t. I’d been living with sadness so long that I was used to the feeling.
“Please don’t leave me,” he said, and I was back in my body, looking into his eyes. “I love you so much.”
“Love is not enough,”
I said. “If love was enough, I would stay forever. But it isn’t enough. We have to like each other. We have to be friends.”
He walked out, and I slammed my fist against the couch. I had expected to be sad, and instead I was seized by anger. At Nick and at myself for not thinking I was worth doing this sooner. I’d thought my soul was held captive, and I had the key the whole time.
I filed that day, citing irreconcilable differences. Soon after, I moved from my parents’ house to the first place I ever thought of as mine and home. The first time I saw it, I walked into a courtyard with flagstone terracing, and the house had ivy climbing the walls. “I feel like I’m in Hansel and Gretel,” I said.
I was told by the realtor it was a “starter mansion,” which made me laugh. To me, it was a storybook house, an enchanted cottage with a secret garden and a pond with lily pads. When I walked inside, it felt like a hug, and I let the house embrace me. I bought it on the spot. I finally had my own home, not anybody else’s. I didn’t have to share it with the world or camera crews, my parents or a man. It was mine.
It was in Beverly Hills, on Coldwater in a gated community. It felt safe, and it made sense that I was surrounded by high-profile single women who were also in transition and finding themselves. Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, and Cameron Diaz. It made the gate a paparazzi resting place, but inside, we ladies of the canyon were free.
I had virtually no furniture, and in the beginning, I slept on a mattress on the floor. I was alone and wanted to keep it that way for a while. My first night there, I sat on the floor by one of the glass doors to the balcony overlooking the backyard. I looked out at the full moon while I sipped on white wine. Daisy was sleeping on the mattress, tired out from exploring our new place. Near me were a pile of my journals, and I pulled out the one I’d used to plan my wedding. I leafed through it, smiling at the hopeful twenty-one-year-old girl who was so excited to be engaged, already making notes about bridesmaid gifts.
The last pages from the journal, the beginning of my marriage, were blank. I’d stopped writing in that particular one because as soon as I got married, I was already different than the naive girl who took copious notes about cake testings and flower arrangements. I’d thought she was silly, and had blamed her for rushing to get married. Now my heart went out to her.
I grabbed a pen, and in words made swirly and flowery by wine and tears, I wrote on the very last page of that girl’s journal:
“Old journal, new life,” I wrote. “Married, divorced. Love, love lost. I’m lost, yes, but believe in this moment that I will be found. Found by me. I need to outgrow passing time pretending womanhood and actually find the woman waiting. Acknowledge that she resides deep in me, but I haven’t met her. I move only by faith, and the strength You give me to introduce us. It’s a full moon, and I forgive myself and the girl I was with this moonlight. I’m sad, but happy with the new day and the wonderful sun that will come.”
It did.
Whatever you are going through, the sun will come.
Part Three
15
Going Off-Script
February 2006
There was a time when I went out. A lot.
I was twenty-five, and I wanted to have fun. My girls and I would go to restaurants and clubs with my Ken, and I would insist on driving. I always loved having that feeling of control. At the bottom of my street, the paparazzi would be waiting, twelve cars deep, and the chase would begin. We had a new girl in the car with us once, and I wanted to get away from the pack. I knew a turn where I could gun it, then cut down another street that had a fork in the road. As I swerved, my new friend began screaming and didn’t stop until I’d made the turn and lost them.
“Don’t worry,” I said calmly, as I slowed down and checked the rearview. “I had to take a stunt driving class for Dukes.”
Photographers were not going to stop me from being free. Their mission was to catch me on a date, and I was frankly on a mission to get one. I needed to see what kind of guys I actually liked. I never gave myself much of an opportunity before, and neither Nick nor I were waiting until the divorce was final to start our new lives. He and my father were haggling over money, and I couldn’t wait forever.
I also had to give up on Johnny. I hadn’t left Nick for anybody but me, so I didn’t have the illusion that I could turn to Johnny and say, “Okay, now your turn.” He needed time, and I didn’t have time. I wanted to go have fun. But I was the same diehard romantic, reading his love letters through the whisky amber of the glass.
In one of his texts, he asked me how I did it.
“Did what?” I asked.
“Leave,” he said back.
“You just have to do it,” I said. He didn’t, at least not for another year. But by then, it was too late for us. I finally let the idea of him go.
So I was free to date and explore, like some Jane Goodall studying the mating habits of Hollywood’s celebrity bachelors. I would meet guys in clubs, or their people would call my people. Our shared fame would mean we couldn’t be seen together, or we’d fall into the sausage grinder of the tabloid fame machine. We rented cars or met on private planes, probably loaned or rented to impress me, who knows. It was intensely glamorous and all completely secret.
And easy. There was a shorthand to dating while famous. If he was a star, he was not a stranger, because we already knew everything about each other. What landmines to avoid in conversation. You knew who had a rep for never settling down, who was on a rebound like me, and who was not getting anywhere near me because I just saw them with their wife in a magazine. I had a list of guys, and I checked every box. And all my girlfriends were jealous. They still are.
I may have approached my research like a dude, but I was still that girl from Texas who thought every kiss was the start of a love story. I realized this when CaCee and I were out for drinks with two girlfriends at Chateau Marmont. One of them had been on three dates with a guy and wondered if she was accidentally dating him.
“Three?” I said. “He’s your boyfriend.”
“Whoa, whoa,” said CaCee. “Jess, no. Listen.” She asked me if I remembered when I dated someone in January, naming a high-profile actor. She said “dated” like it was a joke.
“Yeah, of course,” I said.
“Did you ever leave his house?”
“Well, no,” I said. The girls all looked at each other and smirked. “What?”
“Dating is when someone takes you on a proper date,” said one of my girls. “To, like, dinner. Or, like, outside. Where they can be seen with you.”
“Jess,” CaCee said. “You fall in love too easily.”
“I fall in love too fast,” I sang back to her, one of my favorite Chet Baker songs.
Guilty. I had no concept of what it was to date and get to know someone, no matter how casually I approached it. These cloak-and-dagger meetups were fun, but I wanted real. I dreamed of going to readings or museum trips to learn about each other through describing what you saw in the paintings. Or, you know, meeting at a bookstore, reaching for the same self-help book on codependency.
I said this to my girlfriends, and they rolled their eyes, knowing how much fun I was having with Hollywood’s most eligible. Still, I prayed that God would send me someone who longed for love like I did.
I began spending more and more time with Ken, and in some ways, I had that fantasy relationship with him. I have a hard time being alone, and he was always willing to be around. We’d sit around my house and read poetry to each other. It was to inspire me as I wrote my next album, but also because it made us feel fancy. One day, I’d successfully avoided having paparazzi follow me, so I took advantage of the peace to drive to an out-of-the-way bookstore in Los Feliz, an arty neighborhood in Los Angeles. When I went to the front with my arms loaded with Lord Byron and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the woman at the register kept looking at me. I had my glasses on, my hair pulled back with no makeup.
“Please don’t take this personally,” she
said. “But you look like the smart version of Jessica Simpson.”
I laughed out loud, and I think the poor girl realized who I was. “Thank you,” I said, and went to the car. I smiled in the rearview.
“You’re not so dumb,” I said.
I AVOIDED ALL THE PRESS ABOUT NICK AND ME AND DID AS FEW INTERVIEWS of my own as possible. I was still writing songs for my next album but was blocked every time I tried to write about my ex. I thought that maybe that was the answer: just write a fun album. It was around this time that I followed Charlie Walk, one of my early champions at Columbia, to Epic, where he was the new president.
CaCee, Ken, and I rented a house in Santa Fe while I filmed my next movie, Employee of the Month. I loved it there, and I felt like I had the space to get to know my new self. I realized that I’d wasted a lot of time avoiding acting on decisions because I feared regret. I was good enough to be my own friend, and a friend wouldn’t let me do that anymore.
Reporters followed me to New Mexico, trying to get me to say something about Nick. Take the high road, I would tell myself over and over. And then the steamroller came behind me. On April 19, he released a tell-all interview with Rolling Stone, where he pretty much talked about me the whole time and apparently cried a bunch of times, too. I don’t know, because by then I was back in L.A. and the article was kept from me. By then, we had also cut off all communication. I knew he was creating an ad campaign for his next album, What’s Left of Me, around the divorce. As much as that hurt me, I still felt responsible for him in many ways. If this would help him heal—and make a living—give it to him.
As part of the divorce album rollout, three days later, MTV did a much-hyped prime-time airing of his documentary about the making of the album. The one he had the Newlyweds crew following him around for. It was a Saturday night, and, yes, I stayed home alone to watch it in bed. I didn’t have my popcorn, but I did have my wine. I just wanted to know what he was going to reveal, and I also wanted to know what he thought of me now, because at that point I had no idea.
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