Open Book

by Jessica Simpson

  I had these two babies, and I was trying to catch all these firsts and savor every second. I wanted to still be intimate with my husband as my system tried to reset itself—and once the hormones stopped fluctuating, I had no idea what that would even look like. Even with the children outside my body, we were still so strongly connected that their emotions and needs crowded out mine. Was I anxious because of something I was feeling, or was I picking up on Maxwell’s distress about not having a need met in that one second because I was trying to breastfeed her brother? Where did I end and begin? Did it even matter?

  I was able to talk about these feelings with Eric on our walks, getting in my steps as I rejoined the Weight Watchers program, working my way back to a healthy weight. The investors in the Collection gave me a grace period before I got back to the business of being famous and out there. My mother had poured all her heartbreak and creative energy into building the brand. She was phenomenal, but the brand needed its face back.

  “We need you to be relevant,” someone told me. Oh, that word. Relevant. I turned that one over in my mind. How was I irrelevant? Being relevant to them was about my going places and being photographed, whether it was appearances for the collection or being some aspirational version of Jessica Simpson. I also put pressure on myself because I was fully aware that I needed to be fully connected to my brand. It was my face that sold it. But this—being a mom—was the person I aspired to be. But “relevant” dug into an insecurity I had: Other than planning a wedding, I really didn’t know what was next.

  Eric and I didn’t need a big wedding to prove our love. We had each had our dream weddings already. And then my publicist and best friend Lauren told me a magazine wanted to buy the exclusive and said what they were willing to pay. The offer would cover a huge celebration, not so much for us, but for all our loved ones.

  “Hunh,” I said. “I guess I’m having a big wedding then.”

  We were already in the habit of hosting huge parties at our house. Two- to three-day extravaganzas where all our friends gathered to share one another’s company. Any excuse would do, and we always had a blast. We had it to share, and this wedding would be like one of those parties on steroids.

  There was one last thing I wanted to do. When I next visited my beloved Nana and Papaw, it was for the Thanksgiving after Ace, Papaw’s namesake, was born. At that point, Papaw was suffering from dementia and was unable to retain information. I watched my strong grandmother, my prayer warrior, being so protective of her husband of sixty years. We sat in the living room, and she held my hand. I shared my memories of Papaw, and him taking the snakes from the grass for us. I looked up at her wall, which still had pictures of me and Nick.

  “Nana, I love you so much,” I said. “But you have to let me help you take those pictures down. I have babies with another man. Eric is going to be my husband. He already is in my heart.”

  She nodded. She would do that for me.

  My grandfather, Acy “Ace” Drew, passed away on December 4. The Waco Tribune-Herald ran a big obituary. One of the lines read, “Coach Drew’s grandchildren were the apple of his eye.” It was so meaningful to me that he was alive when my dream of a family came true and that he and his namesake shared the same earth, if only for a short time.

  25

  Ever After

  July 2014

  Just be in the moment, I told myself the morning of the ceremony. Be here. Be present.

  I woke in our cottage at San Ysidro Ranch and looked out at a garden of roses. I had chosen this place to start our marriage because it felt like our first home: everywhere you looked there were flowers or ivy climbing a wall. As if a good witch had spun around, raising a collection of enchanted cottages from the earth. For a while I had been blocked on what I wanted my wedding to be. I didn’t want it to be opposite of my first wedding, but it had to reflect who I was. I found myself going back to the book I loved, Great Expectations, and its 1998 film adaptation. The movie captured what I loved about the book, a delicate beauty that’s been worn and softened with the passing of time.

  Eric, always moving if he was not perfectly still in meditation, was already outside welcoming the day. Carol was looking after our kids in her cottage. They adored her and called her Cici. This was the slight calm before the storm of the day, probably the last minutes I would have alone. I had spent six months planning every detail for this wedding weekend for 275 guests. I let myself get too stressed about it. It was the wrapping-paper thing I do—where I overthink how I package a gift for someone when they’re only going to tear through it to get to what matters. I overworked myself on every detail, but Eric and I did really want this wedding to be for our friends. It was a thank-you and a love letter in one, a hug back for the support they’d given us in love and in parenting. This was as much about them as it was about us.

  In many ways, this was an opportunity to have the family I grew up with back together. I asked my father to officiate the wedding, and my mother and Ashlee were both my maids of honor. My parents had trouble being in the same room, and now I was going to make them stand next to each other up there with Ashlee just so I could look at them.

  My father called me three days before we left for the wedding to tell me he was bringing his friend Jonathan, a young model he often shot for his new photography business.

  “He wasn’t on the list,” I said. There was a pause. I reminded myself that I needed to accept my father for who he was as he worked it out in real-time.

  “Okay,” I said. I wasn’t sure how to handle my father now, so I worked with the information he was ready to give me. Maybe I wasn’t ready to listen, I don’t know. My mother was bringing someone, too, her own Jon, the landscaper who’d made my Hansel and Gretel cottage so beautiful. He was kind and treated her well. People move on, even if I couldn’t.

  “Dad, whatever you do, don’t forget your Bible,” I said. “I want your Bible there, the one you preached with.”

  We set the wedding for July 5, with everyone arriving July 3 to have time to spend with close family. We booked all of San Ysidro Ranch for our guests, wanting it to be private and special for everybody. On Independence Day, we hosted a Texas-style barbecue for the guests. Eric’s grandparents were able to come, and we were able to let them stay in the Kennedy Cottage, where then Senator John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy stayed on their honeymoon. Eric idolized his grandfather and modeled his own strong, masculine presence on him and his dad, Stephen.

  I wasn’t alone long that morning. My mother led a team of fairylike bridesmaids to fetch me and start the preparation process. Carolina Herrera had made me a champagne-colored gown with gold embroidery, and I gasped when I saw it hung in a window, backlit next to the little one she made for Maxwell. She was my flower girl, and Ace would be a ring bearer along with Ashlee’s son, Bronx. I didn’t want to wear straight white, but I couldn’t help but want a princess dress that flared. A bit of Texas in San Ysidro fairyland. My stylist Nicole Chavez and I spent months picking out gowns—gauzy shades of the lightest blue, lavender, and green—for my twelve bridesmaids. We’d look on all the runways and ask nicely if we could maybe borrow a dress. It was like high school, when I would help girls get ready for a party. I worked with all of them to choose how they wanted their hair for the day. I wanted every one of my girlfriends to feel their most beautiful.

  I saw my dad right before the ceremony, holding an iPad outside the chapel we’d built for the day. He’d forgotten his Bible. His iPad was about to die, and he would just have to wing it. Jessica, it’s okay, I told myself. Maybe that’s what we all needed to learn how to do better. To wing it. I’d put a lot of pressure on my father to be the man I knew in Dallas. I wanted him to move people through his words. And yes, I wanted people to think that he was okay. That our family was okay. But there was a time when I was figuring out who I was, and now it was his turn. Wing it, Jessica.

  To begin the ceremony, I had an eighteen-piece orchestra playing selections from the score of
Great Expectations. Yes, I know that is a lot, but you should know by now I don’t do things halfway. Once the procession started, the kids received standing ovations. Ace was unsure at first, but then Eric crouched down low to stretch out his arms. He went right to Eric. When it was my moment to walk down the aisle, the orchestra began the song “The Day All My Dreams Came True.” It plays in the movie when the hero, after going through so much, is finally happy. The song couldn’t have been a more perfect choice.

  Be here in this moment, I told myself. Through the lace of my veil, I saw my family all together and my loved ones, all waiting for me, framed by gorgeous hanging greens and flowers. But Eric. There was a look of uncertainty on his face that he couldn’t hide. It was the pull of his smile. He could fool everyone else but not me. Oh gosh, does he not like my dress?

  I left it. Be here, Jess. My father did a wonderful job. People were crying, and as he talked, I glanced at Ashlee and my mom. Here we were, all grown up together. Each forming our own path. When my dad pronounced us husband and wife, a big cheer went up. I could hear Maxi and Ace’s voices among them.

  “Babe,” Eric whispered. “I split my pants completely when I grabbed Ace.”

  “I knew something was wrong!” I yelled, then whispered. “Lemme see.”

  Sure enough, his tuxedo pants were split from his crotch to the top of his butt. The whole time, he wasn’t sure if people were seeing his underwear. Once everybody was gone, we went behind a curtain, and he took his pants off. We had a seamstress come and sew them while he stood in his boxers. People were waiting for us, and I know there was a lot of “Where are they?” Someone piped up with, “Well, Jessica’s definitely had sex, so it’s not for that.”

  Once we were introduced as Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, it was like the lid was lifted off the wedding. Eric did a speech greeting everyone and spoke about his grandfather and his pledge to take care of me and the kids forever, just as his grandfather had done for his wife and family. It was so sweet and emotional. Then I could just relax. Eric and I didn’t want to do a lot of the party-stopping traditional things like a first dance or cutting of the cake. We wanted everybody to have a blast. We had a huge band with seven different singers, and there was a moment when the four of us were holding hands on the dance floor. I don’t remember the song, but I remember the weight of Ace in my arms, the twirl of Maxwell’s dress, and the sureness of Eric.

  “Hi, husband,” I said.

  “Hi, wife,” he said.

  That never got old. Four years and two babies in, we were husband and wife. I had a running joke, “I want to get married, but I keep getting pregnant.” But the truth is that it made perfect sense that we were all together to share our wedding day. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  26

  I Once Was Lost

  January 2015

  There’s a Before and an After, but I have had a hard time pinpointing when exactly things changed. As I write this book, I’ve been having heart-to-hearts with all my friends, and each has a different moment in which they began to worry about me.

  I know when I started to worry, though I kept it to myself. I was convinced I could make it work. It was after the holidays, which had been hard. Maxwell and Ace were only three and two years old, and when I hosted family gatherings, I realized that they would never know a time when their grandparents were together. Eric’s parents were wonderful and had even moved out west to be closer to us. But I wanted my mom and dad to be together for my kids, like I’d had with my grandparents. My parents were so enmeshed in my life and career, and when I needed them most, it felt like they’d abandoned me to start their lives over.

  The anxiety that had so long colored the edges of my life began to take hold of me. There had been so much happening to crowd out those feelings: trying to get pregnant, then having two babies under two, a new house, and a wedding. The Jessica Simpson Collection expanded to over thirty categories, and we were at the point where we cleared a billion dollars in sales. Even if I wanted to think about my parents’ marriage crashing and what it meant about all I’d held as the foundation of my life, there was no time.

  As life calmed down, there was time. At first, the feelings would come like a chill, the kind where you quickly rub your arms up and down and shake it off. I’d get up quickly or run my hands through my hair to pull it back tight, physically moving to push the thought away. “Somebody has just walked over my grave,” we used to say about those unexplained shivers of foreboding.

  But I knew what was buried. This feeling of being alone and scared in the dark was one I’d had since I was abused as a child. As this new loss brought me closer to the original one, when I lost my trust, I was a girl again, frozen, unable to use her voice to tell someone to stop. Thinking this darkness had sought her out because there was something wrong with her.

  First, I numbed the pain with a drink. As soon as I felt it creeping in, I filled one of my closed gold-glitter tumblers with a straw. This wasn’t to hide it—I never did—but maybe to mask from myself how much I was actually drinking. I’d forget, go to pick it up, and the emptiness would surprise me. Like it had just evaporated. But I knew. You’re drinking way too much, I would think as I took the next sip of a new one.

  Then I started drinking in advance of those feelings, like taking a seasickness pill before bumpy waters. And do you know what? For a while, it worked. I kept it up, no matter what time it was. I could be absent while in the room with my parents at gatherings, but the second my kids needed something, I would be right there, laser-focused on them. I would be hungover, braiding hair, making lunches, fighting to be present.

  We hosted more and more parties, which were still fun. I don’t regret any of them. I just wish Eric and I didn’t drink so much at them. We began to get disconnected. He would pick up on the energy of others, acting like he was Jim Morrison living out this rock-and-roll life, and I would stay in one spot while people around me passed out. I’d put blankets on them to tuck them in. I was jealous that sleep so came easily to them, but also grateful they were there.

  I was able to drink so much when others couldn’t because I had a secret. I’d found a doctor, what in L.A. you call a rock doc. “What will help me lose the most weight?” was my very first question.

  It’s awful to remember me saying those words, but my vanity had returned, despite all the work I had done to accept myself. Frankly, I liked how people treated me when I was skinny. Any extra pound would add to my vulnerability, and I was feeling fragile enough as it was because the family I’d grown up with as my rock had disintegrated. I thought if I was skinny, I was powerful.

  He prescribed a stimulant at a high dosage. The stimulant kept me alert, no matter how much I drank. Alcohol is a depressant, but the two substances didn’t balance each other out in my body. No, they competed in some terrible chemistry experiment on my liver. I should have passed out from all the alcohol, but my body kept going because of the stimulant. Then I would shut the whole system down when I went upstairs. An Ambien brought the runaway train to a screeching halt.

  I had no idea what I was doing to my body. And then I found out.

  I WAS TURNING THIRTY-FIVE IN JULY, SO I PLANNED TWO GIFTS TO MYSELF: A trip to Saint Bart’s for all my friends and a partial tummy tuck. The surgery wasn’t for weight loss—I weighed 107 pounds when I planned the surgery. I wanted to get rid of the stretch marks and loose skin left sagging from my back-to-back pregnancies. I was so ashamed of my body at this point that I wouldn’t let Eric see me without a white T-shirt on. I had sex with it on and even showered with it on. I couldn’t bear to look at myself. I need to say this: if you have stretch marks from pregnancy, I hope you can be proud that your body created life. I was not strong enough. It touched all my insecurities, and I couldn’t handle it.

  I planned the procedure for two weeks after I got back from Saint Bart’s, a trip I wanted to be an adults-only blowout. I hired a private jet to take thirty of us down for a weeklong stay at Le Sereno, wh
ich is right alongside a beautiful turquoise lagoon. I invited my mom, who had just gotten engaged to her boyfriend, Jon, so I decided not to invite my dad. Ashlee stayed home because she was pregnant and due at the end of the month. Because the trip was for my friends, I spared no expense, renting his and hers yachts, Jet Skis, the whole nine yards, and then thrown in nine more. I got my girlfriends the same glittercups I drank from, each emblazoned with her name and the number 35. I was not sober for a minute of the trip.

  On my birthday, my assistant Stephanie got a call. It was my doctor.

  “I have to talk to Jessica right now,” he said.

  Stephanie said it would have to wait. “It’s her birthday.”

  “I am her doctor,” he said. “Put her on.”

  “Okay.” She came and got me.

  He was direct. My plastic surgeon may have approved me for the surgery in two weeks, but he would not. “I am looking at your liver levels,” he said. “You could die.”

  I had a drink in my hand. I sipped. “What?”

  “Jessica, you need to stop everything for three months before you can have this surgery. Everything.”

  That seemed somehow more definitive than “you could die.” I was killing myself with all the drinking and pills. “Okay,” I said.

  I hung up and told the girlfriends around me what the doctor had said. I sipped again. Stop, a voice said. I ignored it. I would stop when I got home in a couple of days. It was my birthday after all.

  I told Eric. We were in a sort of shared spiral, both of us in denial about how much we were drinking. I’m sure we were wasted when we talked about it. I would deal with it later, I decided. Why ruin a trip? I had lived in this state of emergency for so long that it felt comfortable.