Nick showed up in Louisiana in late January, the day after the premiere of our third season of Newlyweds. He was suspicious about what I was up to, hanging out with Johnny and his friends, so he announced he was moving his album writing and demo sessions to Sockit Studios in Baton Rouge. It was probably the worst time in our marriage. He was seething with anger, which I matched with an increasing coldness.
The Newlyweds crews came to the scene, hoping to get footage of us. I didn’t want to be around him, and I think Nick was surprised that I wouldn’t even do the bare minimum of playing along for the cameras, sitting in the studio and watching him work. The crew was there, so I felt obligated to shoot. But I was sick of lying, and I resented that it was disruptive to the film. Not that I had to do much to get into the role of being Daisy Duke, but I was still trying to work, and they were coming onto the set of this fifty-million-dollar-budget movie like it was my living room.
I also knew that the cameras would reveal that I was over the marriage. I was right. What little they got of us together would quickly devolve. We were about to have another fight, when Nick said, loudly, “Stop rolling.” That was our safe phrase—the signal that we didn’t want to be filmed—but the crew continued.
“Will you just get out of here so we can have a conversation?” he asked.
A producer stepped forward. “If we keep having to stop rolling,” he said, “there’s no show.”
We looked at each other, and said together, “Stop rolling.”
From then on, we filmed as little as possible, save for a Valentine’s Day episode where we did nothing to hide that there were problems. They had to do a clip show for the last one, where we pretended we wanted to move out of the house but changed our minds. It was bizarre, and I never watched it. We finished out the run and fulfilled the contract. Now there was a sense that we at least had to see what it was like to have a marriage without cameras. I think we both knew we couldn’t blame all our problems on the cameras, but we felt obligated to at least try. Like I said, finish out the run.
Near my last day of shooting Dukes of Hazzard, I started to worry about what was going to come next. The movie was a great excuse for not being with Nick, and for being with Johnny in this fantasy land. I got the courage one day to ask Willie Nelson for marriage advice while we were alone on his bus. I felt I could talk to him about anything. I told him about Nick, and how I just wasn’t sure what to do.
“I’m not the guy to give advice, Daisy,” he said. I could tell he saw my disappointment.
“I had a father-in-law,” he continued. “An ex-father-in-law, so, you see? But he said, ‘Take my advice, and do what you want to do.’ That may be the best advice I’ve ever heard.”
He picked up his guitar, which was always nearby. “Uncle Jesse, can we sing together?” I asked.
He answered by strumming his guitar. I started singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and he fell right into the rhythm. It’s a beautiful funeral hymn of losing someone and hoping for a reunion in heaven. When that chorus first kicks in, there really is that question: “Will the circle be unbroken, by and by, Lord, by and by?” Is love really eternal? I’d married forever, to spend eternity with Nick in heaven. The place where I would see my grandparents, who’d hung in there like I was supposed to, and where I would see Sarah again. I’d married forever, and now I was certain that dream was over.
When you sing that lonely, scared song with someone, by the end, there’s a connection. Doesn’t matter if it’s two voices in a bus or two hundred in a church, you feel a little less scared. As we sang, I started to cry, and I think Willie knew to just let me.
13
The Gilded Cage
Spring 2005
We sat in the living room on a rare afternoon home together. By then, it wasn’t often that we were even in the same city. I traveled so much that I no longer had jetlag, just a permanent back and forth of restlessness and fatigue. We were on the couch, and Nick made some crack about me, I don’t know what. Probably one that I used to think was funny, and I said something mean. As usual, we launched into our long list of grievances with each other . . .
And we stopped. At the same time, we looked over to the TV and nodded to each other. Silently, we got up from the couch, left the house, and walked to an empty lot nearby. Only then, safe from anybody hearing, did we quietly scream at each other.
Production had stopped on our show, and the last sad episode ran in late March, but we were paranoid that we were still being taped. Looking back, I know we sound crazy, but when you live in a house with hidden cameras for years—in the TV and in the corners—it’s hard to believe that they’re all really gone. We had reason to be paranoid. Details of our conversations and troubles would show up on the news. Tabloids made up the dumbest things about us, but sometimes they would get something so right it was scary.
So we started leaving the house whenever we had to discuss something delicate. I kept thinking of The Firm, when Tom Cruise’s character finds out his evil law firm has secretly wired his entire house with listening devices. When he tells his wife, she bolts from the house, terrified, and they go to a park where they can talk without anybody listening in. “Everything, every single thing we’ve said or done since we’ve been in that house,” she says, “nothing has been between us.”
He suspected my friends were selling stories, I suspected his. My protective mother had a guilty until proven innocent approach to everyone around us. The one friend we agreed would never do it was CaCee, but I was already becoming isolated from her. She was afraid to even go to restaurants with me because she was convinced someone would overhear me running my mouth and sell it, and I would blame her.
CaCee knew my biggest secret: That I was still in touch with Johnny Knoxville. We wrote these flowery love letters back and forth, often at night with Nick passed out in the bed next to me. We talked about music, and I would listen to the Johnny Cash songs he suggested just to feel like we were still together. Whenever I wanted to read CaCee some gushy letter from him, she would refuse. It was like Johnny and I were prison pen pals, two people who wanted so much to be with each other but were kept apart—by bars, by our stars, by our respective spouses.
I would delete every email, convinced Nick would find out. I rewrote each text and email in my Mead journal, the sanctity of which my husband respected, even if neither of us were doing a good job of respecting the rest of our marriage.
As there were more and more tabloid stories about our marriage falling apart, we became strangely more determined to make it work. Paparazzi would ask me constantly, as if we were pals, “Jess, are you leaving Nick?” Worse, Nick was asked, “Is Jess leaving you, Nick?” Our natural response was to protect each other, so whenever the press asked, we would vehemently deny that there were any problems. We didn’t want to give anybody the satisfaction of seeing us publicly humiliated with a divorce, so we continued to play our Newlyweds roles. Sometimes we did this so well that we convinced each other. I thought, Well, maybe this isn’t enough, but maybe it’s enough for me.
In one of those moments, I deleted Johnny’s number from my phone. I did it quickly, before I—or Nick—changed my mind.