“Aguilera,” I said, holding back a sigh. “She’s really talented.”
My mother had been right about running into those girls in the future. I didn’t expect they’d be taking my spot again this soon.
When I got to Columbia in the Sony building in midtown, Teresa told me she lined up the meeting on the strength of her ear alone. “I didn’t play them anything,” she said, leading us through an incredible lobby that made me feel tiny. “You just have to let them see you sing.”
We got there at 11:45, and I remember first meeting someone who acted very important, talking about having to leave for a label lunch. “Well, can you just sit down and listen for a minute?” I said, and I started singing. He sat down.
“Oh my God, you can’t leave,” he said. “I have to go to this thing. Um, let me sit you in the Sony Club, okay? Have lunch. Don’t leave.”
“We’re not,” said my dad. Teresa smiled. The Sony Club was in the top of the building, with executive meeting rooms, then all marble and mahogany, but the real draw was the view of Manhattan. You could see the whole city below us. He came back quickly, bringing in a bunch of people. I’d go into one office after another, until finally they led us to a secret elevator down to Tommy Mottola’s office on the thirty-second floor.
“He listened to Mariah sing in the shower, Dad,” I said, as the elevator went down. When I get nervous, most people can’t tell. On the outside, I seem very calm, but inside there’s a tornado. The doubts and fears swirl and I keep trying to grab them to compartmentalize them. In the elevator, I started to pray. God use me, I thought, I am here for Your will. If this moment is right, it will be the right one. I knew that I had prepared as much as I could. This was not the Mickey Mouse Club. Back then, I didn’t even know what preparation meant.
And there he was, Tommy Mottola, sitting at his desk in jeans and a black button-down, his hair slicked back. Don Ienner, the president of Columbia Records, was also in the office. “So, what do you want to do in life?” asked Tommy.
I knew the answer to this one, because I’d just written it in my journal the night before. “I want to be an example to girls all over the world,” I said, “that you don’t have to compromise your values to be successful.”
I don’t think it was the answer he was expecting. Don piped up. “I’ve never heard that from anybody in here before. I want to hear you sing.”
I was so scared, and I asked God and Sarah to help me. I stood in the center of the room to sing “Amazing Grace.” When I finished, I waited a beat before I was about to start “I Will Always Love You,” but Tommy put up his hand.
“That’s enough,” he said, getting up from his desk. It was over. I didn’t know what I did wrong. How had I blown it? I stood there, trying to fight back tears, and he said, in that same flat voice, “Okay, you can have a seat.”
My shoulders started to sink, but I held them up high. I sat down, and he walked over to stand in front of me. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “because I still have to talk to Donnie, I would sign you today. Your music is fantastic how it is.”
I had this tremor of relief go through me. I didn’t blow it. And before I could even get to my speech about why I wanted to make music, Tommy started in. “I believe that your voice—and who you are as a person and what you stand for—can change the world.”
I was like, Sold.
We received offers from two other labels. There was Mercury, who had Bon Jovi, and Atlantic, who was putting so much behind new artists like Tori Amos but also had an incredible history with Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones. I went back to Dallas torn.
My parents pressured me to decide, and I was afraid to commit and make the wrong choice for my future. I drove myself to a voice lesson with Linda, and on the way over, I started praying, asking God for a sign. Whenever I asked Him for guidance, He came through. Just as I did so, a black bird flew into my windshield. I screamed, and I bet it screamed, too, because it flew straight up. At the next stoplight, I lingered because I was shaken up.
“God, what did that mean?” I asked out loud, alone in the car. “There’s no Bird records.”
And I looked over to my right, and I saw the sign. COLUMBIA HOSPITAL. How many times over years of going to voice lessons had I rolled through this intersection and never noticed there was a hospital there?
“Columbia,” I said. “Okay. Columbia.”
As I moved forward, another black bird—or maybe the same determined one—swooped down at my windshield a second time. “Okay, I hear you, God,” I said, loud so He and the bird could hear me. “I get the message. Thanks, God.” I didn’t want any more birds getting hurt.
MY WHOLE FAMILY FLEW BACK TO NEW YORK TO SIGN THE COLUMBIA contract in Tommy Mottola’s office at Sony. Right after we all took a picture, Tommy looked me up and down.
“Okay, you gotta lose fifteen pounds,” Tommy told me.
“What?” I said, not really understanding. I was five-foot-three and weighed 118 pounds. And I was seventeen.
“I think you’re going to have to lose fifteen pounds,” he said. “Maybe ten. Because that’s the image you want to have. That’s what it will take to be Jessica Simpson.” He spoke clinically, the way a plastic surgeon would take a black marker to show you all the flaws that could be magically erased. I looked at my parents. They said nothing.
Neither did I. I thought I had the job, and now I had to change myself to be “Jessica Simpson.” It was as if he tied my value as an artist to my weight right there, like a rock, and then threw it out the window of the thirty-second floor of the Sony building. Maybe Tommy was being realistic about the times, and he knew what it would take for me to be successful. He believed in me, and he would be a beautiful part of my career, but it was hard to hear what was required to be a star.
I immediately went on an extremely strict diet, and started taking diet pills, which I would do for the next twenty years. It’s important that I say this now, if only for my daughter, whenever she reads this: You are perfect as you are. But at the time, this is what we thought we had to do. I say “we” because I was about to become the family business, and there was a lot of pressure to be what the label needed me to be. And my dad didn’t know when to say no. We were Podunk, coming to the big time from nowhere. Any industry room we walked into, whoever was in there had more experience. “This is how it’s done” was all we needed to hear. We didn’t know if things were being done the right way or if we were being mistreated. We were just glad to be in the room.
I only went to my senior year in high school for a month. It felt like a waste of time. We had to leave Dallas so I could start working on my album. Tom Hicks, the hockey-team-owner friend of my vocal coach, gave my dad $275,000 in exchange for a percentage on the start of my career. I think it was points on my first album, but I never asked. I don’t know if my father asked much about it either. That money was more than four times what he made in a year with church and his odd jobs, so he could retire from that career and move us out to Los Angeles. Looking back, I realize that investment money was just for me, but it was the start of the “my money is your money” mentality that seemed very natural to me.