“Sex and the City?”
“Is that like a dirty movie?” I asked.
“Jessica, it’s a huge show,” she said. “You never heard of it?”
“No.”
“Okay, we need to fix that,” she said. She said it was crazy that I was supposed to be making music and trying to be a star and I didn’t even know about the show that was landing with the very same people I was trying to reach.
CaCee sent me tapes so I could catch up, and I devoured every episode.
“Oh my God, I love it,” I told CaCee. “I’m totally a Carrie.”
She laughed. “Okay, Charlotte.”
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.