Poor Nick went to my parents’ hotel room with this hangdog face. “I apologize if I disrespected you or the family,” he said. “For me, drinking a beer isn’t wrong, but I really love Jessica, and, again, I’m sorry if I disrespected the family.”
My mother told me the story and I cringed. We must have seemed so country. Still, I had to ask, “He told you he loved me?”
He did. I’d be on a tour bus leaning back on Nick, watching the world go by as he sang “You Are My Sunshine” in my ear. This is easy, I thought. This is forever. We both thought that. He had a different perspective because he was older and interested in something more real. And at eighteen, I was still such a sheltered baby that it didn’t seem far-fetched to me that I had already found that person.
He stayed patient, and how the relationship progressed physically was always up to me. He was the first guy who ever touched my breasts, and it was such a big deal to me that I made my mom take me bra shopping for the occasion. I spent an hour in a Victoria’s Secret before I settled on a purple one.
“First boob touch,” I said, handing the bra to the girl at the checkout. “Tonight’s the night.” She laughed, thinking I was kidding.
MY CAREER STARTED PICKING UP IN APRIL, WHEN THE DAWSON’S CREEK soundtrack that included my song came out. I played track thirteen over and over again, imagining people all over the world playing it, too. Nick’s 98 album went platinum, so his record company threw them a party after our show at the Beacon Theatre in New York. Someone took my picture, and the next day the photo was in the New York Post.
I screamed when I saw it, focused only on how I looked and hoping I looked skinny enough for Columbia. My mom read the caption. “Jennifer Simpson,” she said. “Hunh.” I didn’t care, it was exciting enough to be in the newspaper.
I booked teen-focused summer tour gigs like Nickelodeon concerts, and Columbia started to get excited about the album. They booked a packed summer tour of radio events—seeming to add new ones every day—to build support for a late-August launch of my first single and a Thanksgiving week release of the album. Britney and Christina had gone with dance singles, so they wanted me to come in contrasting with a power ballad, “I Wanna Love You Forever.”
It’s an amazing song—the very first time I heard it, I knew it was a hit—but it is a punishing song to sing live. It just asks a lot of you physically and emotionally. And I had to go to as many radio stations as there were in the country to sing it over and over. Back then, radio was the way to get heard. Now we stream any song we want, but back then DJs and promoters had all the power. You had to go to every single one, do a showcase, show them your talent, and make them like you. You waited to hear, “We’re going to put you in rotation.” Columbia’s vice president for promotion was Charlie Walk, a Boston guy who’d become a label wiz at thirty. It meant a lot that he believed in me. He didn’t seem to sleep, so why should anybody else? I went wherever Charlie told me to go.
The schedule was so packed it just didn’t seem manageable, but my dad and I never said no. I wasn’t looking at the schedule and saying, “That’s a lot.” It was Nick who would question how things were being set up. My dad would then get annoyed, because he wanted me out there working and meeting people.
There was so much pressure, and much of the focus was on how I looked. The label was constantly telling me, “Let’s show more skin, Jessica. Let’s get comfortable with this.” It was so strange for me, because I was still shy about my body, so used to being covered up at church. The orders that I show my stomach while singing a ballad at showcases just seemed off to me, especially since the proper technique my vocal coach had taught me meant that I actually stuck out my stomach during the big notes. And “I Wanna Love You Forever” was full of them.
But I tried to do both things. I did events for radio stations all over the country, going into clubs where I was too young to drink even if I had wanted to. Detroit, Boston, New York, back to Dallas . . . wherever they needed me. The audiences were mostly men, some obviously there for the free food and open bar. I remember they always had to announce that the open bar was closed while I sang so the guys would pay attention to me. There were usually Sony staffers in the crowd, always cheering the high notes. As I hit them, I fluttered my hand around my stomach to hide it sticking out. My dad and I would stay to shake every hand, knowing each person might have the power to make my dreams come true.
In August I started feeling pain in my abdomen. I ignored the cramps in the beginning. There was too much to do. When I was briefly back in L.A., the cramping started to become excruciating, and I couldn’t mask it with aspirin anymore. My mom took me to a hospital in Encino, where they told me I just had an enlarged bladder, a misdiagnosis. They pumped me full of fluids to flush me out and sent me home. My mom commented that I was so swollen I looked like the Michelin man.
The pain remained, but we had to fly to Boston to do a showcase for people who worked in radio. I writhed on the plane, but a deal’s a deal. Backstage, behind a black curtain, I was in such pain I started throwing up. I made it to the bathroom, and I continued throwing up, even peeing myself, delirious from the cramping.
We had been trained to go to the label with everything. Charlie Walk from Sony had a friend, a girl from Boston, who gave us the number of her OB/GYN. We called, and they said to come right over. Mom got me in some borrowed blue Adidas track pants, and we took a taxi. I had my head out the window puking the whole ride over, my dad holding me to keep me from falling out.
The doctor opened the clinic just for me, and immediately placed a catheter in me and set up an ultrasound. There was no fluid coming out of me, so he panicked.
“The bad news is that I think you are going to need surgery,” he said. “The good news is that I am probably one of the best surgeons for this in Boston. You’re going to be okay.”
Through heaves of pain, I said this: “Please don’t give me a scar.” I felt like I was going to die, but I was still worried that the label needed me to show my stomach.
He put me in his Mercedes, and we drove right to Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Right before the surgery, he explained that I had a cyst in my right fallopian tube. They would have to remove that fallopian tube.
“I want to have babies,” I said. “Please don’t take them from me.”
He gently explained that this would mean that from then on, I could likely only get pregnant every other month. Because he was so experienced, he could do the emergency surgery laparoscopically, going through my belly button. They removed the tube and the cyst, first draining it of two and a half liters of fluid. I think if I had been at any other hospital, at the stage I was at, there would have been no time, and they just would have cut me open.
I had to do a showcase the next day. But I wouldn’t trade it, because all that work paid off with this moment: a few days later I was with my parents in a cab in Times Square when I heard “I Wanna Love You Forever” on the radio for the first time. We went nuts, there is no other word for it. Even the driver was going nuts—he had no idea who I was and then, all of a sudden, he was blasting the song with all the windows down. We started screaming to people in other cars, telling them to turn on Z-100. I looked so frantic, one old guy driving by put his window up.