9

Warning: Contents Under Pressure

October 2000

Nick and I danced to one more song before we finally sat down. I took off my shoes, placing my legs up on his. We were at his little brother Drew’s wedding reception, and it had been the most beautiful day. Drew and Lea were childhood sweethearts, friends since the fifth grade who were truly good people who belonged together. We had spent the whole week celebrating them in Cincinnati, Nick’s adopted hometown, and every single person at the wedding knew we were witnessing something that was meant to be. Being included in such an important day, I officially felt part of his family.

Nick ran his hand on my leg, humming along to “Ribbon in the Sky” by Stevie Wonder. I knew what he was thinking, because the conversation had been happening more and more. He was a month shy of twenty-seven, ready to settle down and get married—and he was stuck with this twenty-year-old. My father forbade me to even think about getting engaged until I was twenty-one.

“I’m not telling you not to marry him,” my dad would say. “I’m telling you to wait. You’re just too young. You have no idea who you will become in the next few years.” I never knew if my dad meant that I would change emotionally, or if I would be too big a star to be tied down. Nick was the one thing my dad and I fought over. He never said no to the label, as much as he groused about how they were marketing me. But my relationship with Nick, that he could control.

I knew Nick was at a crossroads, and I was terrified of losing him. His 98 album Revelation had come out the month before and sold 275,000 the first week. That put them at number two on the charts, which would have been a huge week for me, but he moped about it. His competition was not me, he would remind me, but people like ’N Sync, who had set a record as the first to sell over two million the first week.

The week in Cincinnati was one of the longest stretches of time we’d spent together, but Nick was getting ready to leave me to tour Asia. “Are you gonna call me every night?”

“I promise,” he said.

“I love you,” I said in my sad puppy voice, almost as an apology.

He looked past me and sighed, tipping back another beer. “I love you, too, Jessica.”

“That’ll be us someday,” I said, following his eye to his brother and his new sister-in-law dancing.

He got up to go to bar. “Yeah,” he said.

I watched him walk away and it felt like I was running out the clock on a promise. But I knew myself well enough that if I committed to marriage this early, there was no way I could keep a singular focus on using my voice to lift others. The very thing I felt called to do. It seemed like an impossible situation: If I didn’t marry him soon, I’d lose him. If I married him, I could lose me.

Not that I knew who that “me” was anymore. I was working hard on my album, which felt less and less like something that was mine as we headed to the summer 2001 release. I did most of the recording at the Sony Music studios in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, close enough for Tommy to drop by whenever he wanted to check in, which was often. I’d wanted to do so much with this album, but Tommy was picking the most random songs, trying to turn me into a sexpot virgin. I had been able to pull off sexy virgin, but acting like a woman who loved sex but had never actually done it was a math problem I could not quite figure out. I didn’t think it would make sense to my fans either. Teresa was completely pushed out, slowly having less and less say on what worked for me and my album. I missed her guidance. She was the only person in my life with the experience and strength to say no to the label.

In March, Don Ienner, the head of Columbia under Tommy and Sony, wanted to have a meeting with me to discuss the future. Don had a reputation for screaming, which he defended as being “passionate,” so I was scared. I sat down with him and he looked at me for an uncomfortable beat.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“What makes Jessica Simpson, Jessica Simpson?” he said. “As an artist? As a person?”

I stammered, my old stutter returning, but I had no words to sing. I didn’t know. I was mortified. I had been trying to be whichever artist everybody asked me to be like that day. Britney, Mariah, Céline. But what about Jessica?

“This album is very important for you,” Don said. “These days, if an artist doesn’t have a hit single out of the box, the album tanks. When the album sales slip, there goes ticket sales. Less tickets sold means less people coming to your concerts, which means less people buying T-shirts. Add all those losses up, and it’s a lot. The stakes are high.”

I nodded. Without confidence in myself, people couldn’t believe in me as an artist. And I had none. Everyone had been telling me who to be—“edgier,” and “more mature”—whatever the word was that day, it always seemed to mean “skinnier.”

By the time we got to the April release of the first single, “Irresistible,” I had managed to get myself down to 103 pounds. Everyone went on about how great I looked, but I couldn’t enjoy it because I was so freaking hungry. I envied people who could eat whatever they wanted, while I had to microwave slices of turkey with Velveeta cheese on top and call it a meal. But when I ate anything, I yelled at myself, asking why I was getting in my own way and why I hadn’t gone to the gym.

I taped the video for the first single, “Irresistible,” over three days in L.A. starting April 7. Each day I had a different outfit for the video, leaving more and more skin showing. In between the shots, I had a giant, baggy white bathrobe that I wrapped around me. The last day of shooting, we did a rooftop scene on a helipad at night, and I kept saying I was freezing just so I could keep a blanket over me to cover my body. When you’re doing a shoot, there’s always a hope that you can save it on the last day. I hadn’t been happy with any of it, and I blamed myself for never quite getting the shot that I envisioned. Midway through the rooftop shoot, I almost walked off the set because I messed up a dance move. My mind was destroyed from exhaustion, and those voices started in my head again, telling me I was wasting everyone’s time.

The video’s choreographer, my backup dancer Dan Karaty, called for a break and took me aside. “Stop,” he said. “Look at me. You are incredibly sexy. You have to see that yourself to make other people see it. Just feel the way you look, and it will come through.”

I stared into Dan’s calming eyes and relaxed. He had been on tour with Britney Spears and was a master at giving artists confidence. “I wish I could see what you see,” I said.

“It’s crazy you can’t,” he said. For the briefest moment, I felt something. A small flicker of what I felt with Nick, but it was there. It was the first time I ever thought there could be a man in my life besides Nick.

We were already starting to have problems. Nick and I each got condo apartments in the same building in Los Angeles. It was our way of “living together,” but we were never there anyway. We were both always on the road performing or doing press tours, so our relationship took place mostly on the phone. We would both be exhausted, and I was—surprise!—terrible at the math of figuring out time zones. It was another thing that seemed to set him off. My childishness, which seemed so cute and sweet when I was first with him, seemed to annoy him. Now everything I said seemed to annoy him. We were both concerned about our careers, and our anxieties just seemed to feed off each other. So I stopped calling him as often, even though hearing his voice had become something I came to count on to help me feel safe enough to fall asleep.

I prayed on it constantly, and I decided that he was a good man who deserved a wife. I was two months from turning twenty-one, and I still felt like a child, going from doing everything to please my dad to then doing whatever it was I thought would make Nick happy. I was too dependent on him, and I would never become the independent woman he needed if I kept turning to him for everything. Nick needed a grown-up woman, one who would be willing to start a family soon. That flicker of a feeling with Dan made me wonder if I should take the time to date other guys before committing to forever. Also, I wanted to see who I was, without using another person’s love for me as a measurement of my value. If I put all my attention on a guy, that meant less focus on my career.

“When someone special comes into your life at eighteen years old, your whole world changes,” I wrote in my journal. “For a while, I was so caught up in the puppy love, I could only see perfection. I wanted to take the easy way out and just get married. Thank you, God, for providing me a way to step back and reevaluate my needs. These past couple of weeks, I have found myself. I can do it. People don’t have to do it for me.”

I told him we needed to take a break from each other, just to see what would happen if we both focused solely on work. It wasn’t much of a break because we still talked constantly, which I know frustrated him, and even when interviewers brought Nick up on the press tour for my album Irresistible, I said I was single but still hopelessly in love with him.

I kept telling myself that now I could focus on my career. That seemed like a very grown-up thing to say, and there was a lot to do. On June 4, Columbia threw me a huge record release party at the Water Club in New York City. I arrived on a yacht, and there was a red carpet just for me. Don Ienner and Tommy Mottola were there, flanking me as they gave me a triple-platinum record for Sweet Kisses. There were fifteen minutes of fireworks, and I finally felt like a real star. Ten days later, my Irresistible album came out and would sell 120,000 copies the first week, nearly double what Sweet Kisses did when it debuted.

Nick sent me flowers. “I’m very proud of you and with what you’re doing in your life,” the card read. “I’m happy I can be a part of it. I love you.” I called him that week and started the conversation already angry at him for his absence when I was the one who pushed him away. Nick had this calm, paternal way of talking to me when he had to catch up on a conversation that in my mind was already in progress. He gently reminded me that I had broken up with him. “Our situation is yours to deal with,” he said. “I’m just playing off whatever you give me.”

“Well, what do you want from me?” I fired back.

That made him angry. “There is one thing in life I want to be, Jessica,” he told me. “A good man. A good father. I can’t help it that I fell in love with someone seven years younger than me. I just can’t.”

“I just want to make you happy.”

“Being with you makes me happy,” he said. “I loved us. I don’t have that right now, and it’s something I’m trying to deal with.”

I was certain that one way he was dealing with it was seeing a lot of women, an accusation he said he refused to dignify with a response. I started hanging out with Dan, but that quickly fizzled even though he helped my dancing and onstage confidence tremendously. I think my dad even preferred me dating Nick to Dan. I would tell myself I had no right to be jealous if Nick had a life of his own, and for the rest of that summer—as I toured with Destiny’s Child on the TRL tour, and then began my own Dreamchaser solo tour—we would go through times of calling and not calling each other. I would congratulate myself when I didn’t call him, and then he would call from some stop in Asia, and the cycle would begin again.

I knew Nick was excited about the Michael Jackson tribute concert he was doing at Madison Square Garden on September 10. It was the last night of a three-day tribute to Michael’s thirty years in show business. Nick performed “Man in the Mirror” with 98, Usher, and Luther Vandross, and I knew how much that meant to him. I thought he would call me after, and I told myself not to be jealous that he was invited to do this major event while I sat alone at home nearly three thousand miles away in Los Angeles.

I fell asleep waiting for the call, and when the phone did ring, it was early in the morning. It was Nick, and there was a fear and a rush in his voice I’d never heard. He told me to turn on the news. Planes had hit the World Trade Center, and the towers had already collapsed. I just couldn’t make any sense of the violence. I couldn’t imagine how many people were killed.

“I only want to be with you,” he said.

“Come home to me,” I said. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose him. I knew in that instant I wanted to marry him.

All planes were grounded, so the band was trying to hire a van to get them out of the city. Again and again, I told Nick I loved him, and when I hung up the phone, I got down on my knees next to my bed. It felt indecent that God had put this love in my life, and I had the audacity to take it for granted when so many people had just lost those they loved the most.

WHEN NICK AND I GOT BACK TOGETHER, IT WAS SIMPLY UNDERSTOOD that we would marry. We kept it our secret, because my father was already angry that Nick was back in my life. In October, Dad’s mother, my Nanny, got very sick. She had been fighting breast cancer, and now it had gone into her lymph nodes. She had been a nurse, and she knew her hour was near. She wanted to go on her terms, and a wonderful hospice team came to her home.

Nick came with me to see her one last time, and he was my rock. My father couldn’t bear to go into her room, but Nick came in with me. She was beautiful, so sick but still radiating the grace she brought to the demands of being a pastor’s wife. I realized that everything that was good in my life, I had because of her. Nanny had paid to press my first album. She was the reason I had a career at all and the reason I met Nick.

I smoothed her hair back as I told her I was there. She squeezed my hand.

“Nick is here, too, Nanny,” I whispered. “I want you to know we’re back together. I’m gonna marry him, Nanny. Just like you wanted.” She squeezed my hand again. “We’re going to have a beautiful wedding,” I said, “and you’ll always be with me. You’ll be right there.”

She had asked to have my version of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” the last song off my second album, on repeat as she passed. As she took her last breath, surrounded by love and her family, my voice filled the room, saying, “His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.” It’s a celebration of faith and gratitude that no matter how insignificant we may feel, God is looking out for us.

At her funeral at First Baptist Church of Leander, Nick was a pallbearer and helped to carry her home. I will always be grateful to him for that. She was reunited in heaven with my late grandfather, to whom she had been married for forty-one years. I wanted that forever love for Nick and me, too.

In the airport, the television screens showed scenes of the war in Afghanistan, which had started a couple of weeks before. There was all this talk about anthrax attacks, airstrikes, and questions about when the U.S. would be deploying more troops. They said “troops,” but I knew they were real men and women, many of them probably scared.

I asked God to help me figure out a way to be of use. And then He showed me.