I could feel my whole team leaning forward, listening as she continued. “Her mom told her about you, and she feels something akin to you. I asked her about it, and she said that because of you she knows she can get through it.”
Soon we were all tearing up. I stood up and said, “If I give you a hug, will you give it to her for me?”
This was why people wouldn’t stop their judgments and leave me alone. It was so I could stand up to them, and for that girl. When the world was trying to knock me down, to challenge who I was as a woman and the ownership I had over myself and my body, I could choose to get back up and be right in their faces. To say what I would want that girl and my daughters and all women, to say: “No, actually, I am beautiful because I believe in myself and everything God has given me.”
I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s sometimes a daily struggle. But you gotta get up. You can’t leave me up here all on my lonesome.
I COULD TELL TONY WAS RELIEVED WHEN THE FLATTS TOUR WAS OVER. HE was a traditional guy who believed in old-fashioned gender roles. He wanted me to be a Dallas Cowboys housewife, even without the ring. I spent more time at the home, which he encouraged me to think of as my own, but it was still as much of a frat house as ever. In interviews, when people got through the required questions about my weight, they turned to asking about my next project. I said I was still deciding, not letting on that my boyfriend didn’t want me on a movie set. I think he was fine with me doing the Jessica Simpson Collection—it certainly made me financially independent from him—but maybe he also saw that as women’s work. A more official version of a girlfriend who has a hobby making dresses for her friends.
I was in a bind: Tony liked dating Jessica Simpson, the star, but he wanted a wife like the other football players had. I cooked meals at home and went to the grocery store, where I saw my face looking out at me on the covers of magazines at the checkout line. I never identified with those magazine covers anyway, but now they seemed even further from who I was. One time, after I saw myself on a magazine when I was leaving the store, I went to sit in the car and had an imaginary conversation with Tony. I asked him all the questions I didn’t dare say aloud.
“Is there room in your ideals of what a relationship is supposed to be,” I asked, “to meet me halfway so I don’t give up my dreams?”
I watched a teenager round up shopping carts, leaning on one like a Jet Ski. “Can you support me and what I do as much as I support you and everything you do?” I was on a roll now. “Is my giving up all I want to do truly what you want of me?” I paused a long time. “And why?”
It didn’t occur to me then that I needed to ask myself those questions, too. Did I love Tony enough to give up my work and dreams? I didn’t dare ask, because I knew the answer was no.
I talked about it with my father, who wanted to do more film producing and would jump at the chance to do another movie with me. I was honest with him, telling him that I would marry Tony if he asked, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted him to ask me. I wanted to be what Tony needed, but I felt God had called me to use my voice and be an example for women.
“Well, the same God that called you to sing is gonna want you to do that,” he said. “Maybe you need to walk away.”
It didn’t help that my parents told me they’d been hanging out with John Mayer. It was so bizarre. In early 2009, John rented a place in Hidden Hills, near where I used to live in Calabasas. He turned the whole place into a home studio to record what would become Battle Studies. It was about fourteen miles from my parents’ house in Encino, and they told me about having him over. They would even go pick him up to spend time with them. Gated community playdates. At first, I thought they were kidding, but he had stayed friends with Pete Wentz and Ashlee. Still.
He told them he had read my Vanity Fair cover story that came out in May. My parents told me he went on and on about it. He emailed me about it, too, telling me how amazing it was and that he loved me and wanted me back. Because I was on the cover of Vanity Fair? I actually hated the story, which was mean-spirited and full of references to me not actually being fat—a word the writer used over and over again—and had one brief mention of the fact that I had created what was at that point a $400 million business. But the photographs, by Mario Testino, were beautiful. It’s telling that being in Vanity Fair made John think I was worthy of his interest again. I also said one thing in the interview that, reading it now, I know would have been irresistible to John: “I feel like I’m at such a place that I own myself, and it’s authentic.”
Challenge accepted, I imagine him saying.
My parents knew how much John had toyed with me, and even now, I marvel that he could extend that manipulation to my family. I recently asked my mom why she spent time with him. “What were you thinking?”
“We were all in love with him,” she said with a laugh. “We’d bring him over here, and we’d sit around the firepit, and he’d play his guitar. What’s not to love about a cute guy playing you love songs?”
Sigh. They were under his spell. I can’t really blame them. I know how persuasive he can be and how kind my parents can be. But I refused to let him have that real estate in my mind again and focused on figuring out how to make my life work with Tony’s. I was turning twenty-nine in July, and every magazine said he was going to propose any minute.
Maybe John read one of them and thought so, too. As we got closer and closer to July and my birthday, he ramped up his wooing of my family. He told them in no uncertain terms that he had changed, and he could tell I had changed, too. “I need her back,” he said. “I’m in love with her.”
If it were just my parents, I might have taken that with a grain of salt. But he got to Beth, my old dance teacher who became one of the heads of the Jessica Simpson Collection, and her husband, Randy, who is now my house manager. Randy is no-nonsense. If you can fool him, you are a master. And Randy believed him. His profession of love for me was so over-the-top that it made my relationship with Tony seem like I was missing out on someone who truly adored me.
“Jessica, you don’t even know,” went the chorus. “He is so sincere. You have to at least hear him out.”
Can I sigh again? Is two too many on two pages? A week before my birthday, I was in L.A. at my parents’ house. I had this idea to have a huge party, and my mom and I were going over the details. My dad drove to Hidden Hills to bring John over while I was there. By a fire in the backyard, he stood and told all of us that he loved me and that we could all trust him to be a good man. I told him I would always love him, but I was with Tony.
But I didn’t tell Tony. I broke my own rule of full disclosure about any contact, even accidental, with John.
On July 9, the night before my birthday, Tony went through my phone. He saw an email from John to me, something about not being able to get a shower door to work at my parents’ house. Tony confronted me with it immediately. I wasn’t even there, and no, I still don’t know why John showered at my parents’ house. He accused me of seeing John behind his back. I hadn’t cheated on Tony at all, but I could not lie and say I hadn’t even seen him.
“Nothing happened,” I said.
Tony didn’t believe that for a second. And within that second, he broke up with me right there. Two years, gone with an email. It was just immature that he went through my phone. If he didn’t trust me, why was he with me in the first place?
I could trust that Tony would never tell the press that John Mayer caused the breakup. It would imply that he wasn’t enough for me. Even though I canceled the party, I managed to keep the breakup secret for a few days. I think maybe I would have been able to keep it quiet longer if Tony had just gone back to Dallas. Instead, he stayed to go golfing with his friends and took his guys out to a Hollywood Boulevard club on my birthday. Kind of a red flag.
Tony soon realized I was telling the truth. Of course I didn’t cheat on him. But our breakup had been so ugly that it shocked me into realizing it had been necessary. When he said he wanted
me back, I was honest with him.
“No, you did what I needed to do,” I said. “Thank you.”
“This is really over?”
“You broke up with me, so yes,” I said. “It’s over.”
If I hadn’t already been through that cycle so many times with John, I might have reflexively gone back once someone “forgave” me. Tony’s a wonderful guy, and he was destined to have beautiful babies with someone else, a lovely woman. Not me.
John got what he wanted. I wouldn’t be with him because of Tony, and now Tony was gone. I lost my feeling of agency in my life once again and felt I should just give in and be with John. He had promised forever in my parents’ backyard. Who was I to argue?
I went to John’s house quickly. Driving over, I felt like I was in the closing scenes of a sweeping, epic love story, and the dark romantic hero had beaten out the star quarterback. Wuthering Heights in Hidden Hills, only this time Cathy chose Heathcliff. But did I? It seemed like the choice had been made for me.
Ah, but when I got to him, I found out my Heathcliff had other ideas. “Forever” could wait.
“Oh, you don’t get me yet,” he said.
It was a punch in the gut. I thought I was the one getting gotten. He had said all these things, practically asking my parents for my hand in marriage while I was in a serious relationship. Swearing to me up and down that he was a changed man. Now here I was, ready to pledge my love back, and to kiss him as the curtain came down. And it fell on my head.
He insisted on playing me songs off Battle Studies. “This one’s for you,” he said, again and again. I recognized myself sometimes. Other times I just felt the hurt again. I named a person he had dated. Weren’t these songs also about her, too? He paused, then told me he could never find material to write with her.
I almost puked. I was material. Slowly, insidiously, a realization creeped into me, a monster with claws clutching my brain with one hand, then making a fist around my heart with the other. All this time, all those years, he was breaking up with me to torture himself enough to get good material.
“Did . . . were you breaking up with me to hurt yourself?” I asked. “Just so you could get a song?”
I had thought I was crazy. There were times he left, and it was my fault, and I have taken responsibility for those moments. But other times a breakup was so out of the blue that it seemed to come just as we were finally getting somewhere.
Now I knew the truth. I was a pet bird. He would throw me into the sky and watch me catch air and soar long enough that it meant something when he pulled a gun from his back pocket to shoot me down, expertly aiming to graze a wing, never a kill shot to end the misery. To think that every single time I lay on the ground, broken and bewildered, he took his time walking over. Observing me to jot down notes and hum a new song of heartbreak.
And every time he “found me,” I looked up at him, grateful to be taken in, sorry for the trouble I must have caused him.
I wish I had walked out right then. I didn’t. He had me so messed up that inside twenty minutes I was all in on his “wait and see” terms. It felt inevitable to be in love with John, so I continued talking to him for months. I told friends I was “back with” him, and they stocked up on emotional bandages. But I knew now not to let him get close enough to shoot me down again. This bird wasn’t going back in the cage, no matter how bad he needed a song.
21
True Beauty
September 2009
In the summer I reflected on what a hard year it had been. I knew there had to be a reason that God was allowing me to go through this, and it was my job to find some sort of light in all of it. I knew He wouldn’t want me to suffer and have nothing to show for it. I’d become a punchline for weight jokes, tried to have a normal relationship, and then gone running back into the arms of a man who tortured me.
I was offered a television show, The Price of Beauty, where I would travel the world to examine what different cultures find beautiful. I knew it could be a way to show how we women try so hard to contort ourselves into these boxes of what appears ideal to men and what will make us deserve love, even from family. I said yes immediately and decided to bring CaCee and my hairdresser friend Ken along to be on the show with me.
For me, it was a very spiritual journey, and it upended a lot of my own notions of what was beautiful. In Thailand, we explored the complicated subject of colorism and discussed the lengths many people go to keep their skin light for social status. I was shocked to meet Panya Bunjan, a singer who had disfigured herself using bleaching agents. Back home I felt I had to tan to be attractive. In Uganda, we visited a village where members of the Hima people explained to us that a woman is only beautiful if she is what our society deems “overweight.” We visited a fattening hut, where a bride prepared for her wedding by adding as much weight as she could. In Brazil, we examined the notion that plastic surgery was so commonplace that you were a freak if you didn’t have it. CaCee and I were on an emotional Eat Pray Love kind of trip, whereas Ken kept trying to keep everything light.
Most heartbreaking and eye-opening for me was meeting Isabelle Caro, a French model with anorexia who was eighty-six pounds when I met her. In 2007, she became the face of the disease when she posed nude at fifty-eight pounds for a Milan Fashion Week billboard campaign to fight the pressure on models to starve themselves.
When I met her, she had worked her way back up to eighty-six pounds and still seemed so fragile. Isabelle’s disease had started near the end of high school, when she was trying to break into modeling, around the same time I signed with Sony. While I was told I needed to lose fifteen pounds to be a success, she told me a modeling scout advised her to lose twenty.
As Isabelle talked, it was hard not to cry, seeing the skeleton move beneath her tight sheath of pale skin. I kept looking away, but her beautiful eyes pulled me in. We were two women who had been told we needed to be skinny to be worthy. That shame was killing her, and I felt lucky to have escaped that. I asked her how she found the strength to be so open, showing what anorexia really looked like. She answered that she was doing it for young girls. I thought about that girl I heard about in Scottsdale. I decided I needed to do more. Not just withstand judgment but call it out.
I left her side feeling bulletproof from all the criticism I still faced about those photos from a chili cookoff, or even the praise when people thought I looked “good.” Nobody’s words—compliments or critiques—should define the value of our souls. What if, all this time, our “problem areas” were not our stomachs or thighs but our brains? I’m not saying people aren’t cruel—believe me, I know—but we can’t allow ourselves to do the work for bullies. Give a girl an insult, she’ll feel bad for a day, but teach her to hate her body, she’ll feel bad forever.
After The Price of Beauty, I knew I needed to separate what really mattered to me and what mattered to my ego. In subsequent interviews, I worked hard to say, “I like the way I look,” whether I was up or down ten pounds. All kinds of women started coming up to me, not to give me a supportive word, but to say that I made them feel good. “We look good,” I would hear. They thanked me for setting an example that we don’t need to measure our self-worth with a scale.
In November of the following year, Isabelle died at age twenty-eight. I think about her so often, and I am grateful for the experience of meeting her. She made her life matter, and wherever you are and whatever you believe, please say her name aloud so she is remembered: Isabelle Caro.
IT WAS WHILE WE WERE IN BRAZIL SHOOTING THE PRICE OF BEAUTY THAT I got the call about Daisy. On September 14, my sweet, wonderful dog was staying at my parents’ house while I traveled. She was in the backyard when she was snatched by a coyote. The coyote ran off with her, and we never saw her again.
CaCee was with me when my mom called, frantic. I lost it in a way she’d never seen before. Daisy Mae was like my child before I was a mother, and I adored her as a constant companion. She was also, in many ways, the last remi
nder of my marriage. I felt a crushing sense of deep loss and a feeling of being truly alone.
Twitter was new to me, and I went on to ask people to help find her. I paid dog trackers to look for her and robo-call the neighborhood. People made fun of me for caring so much about a dog, but if you have ever loved an animal, you cannot fathom that someone wouldn’t understand my need to find her. People contacted my family with prank leads, and some of the news stories about Daisy were grotesque in their mean-spiritedness. The journey I was on, traveling the world—and the women I met—gave me strength. I didn’t know how much I was about to need it.
While promoting his album, Battle Studies, John gave two interviews, one with Rolling Stone that was released in January, then one a month later in Playboy. He talked like he’d tied a cinderblock to the gas pedal, a man intent on destroying his image as a thoughtful singer-songwriter. The first one was just gross, with him talking about the women in Hollywood he’s slept with and essentializing women down to their private parts. “You need to have them be able to go toe-to-toe with you intellectually,” he said. “But don’t they also have to have a vagina you could pitch a tent on and just camp out on for, like, a weekend? Doesn’t that have to be there, too? The Joshua Tree of vaginas?”
I’ve only skipped through the Rolling Stone interview, but a girlfriend who cared about me wanted to make sure I knew about one sentence that actually mattered. He said lately he could only sleep with “girls” he’d already slept with, because he couldn’t fathom having to explain to a new woman that, yes, the famous John Mayer was interested in her.
Did you catch it, too? Girls. Plural.
I confronted him about it, naming another person he’d been with. “Are you sleeping with both of us?”
“I’m not ‘back with you.’ ”
“Yeah, but you got my ex to break up with me!” I yelled. “I was living in Dallas! You took me away from something. What is wrong with me that I let you get me back into this situation again with you?”
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