WE SAT IN THE OFFICE, MY NOTEBOOK ON MY LAP. NICK GLANCED AT ME and shook his head just slightly, knowing I had pens and pencils in my purse. The good student trying to impress the marriage counselor. Nick was against the idea that we needed therapy, alternating between two excuses: the therapist would probably sell us out to a tabloid, and we could get through this ourselves.
“I don’t feel like anything needs to be fixed,” he had said.
“Everything needs to be fixed,” I answered. “There’s not one thing that’s okay.”
If this therapist could give me the solution to making my marriage work, I would take it. He was a psychologist and life coach from Dallas who flew back and forth from L.A. and New York, meeting with celebrities and CEOs. We met in a nondescript office building to throw off the paparazzi.
On that sunny California day in May, the therapist, a forty-something guy with rimless glasses and thinning blond hair, patiently listened to us as we laid out our problems and received our marriage operating instructions. Nick said I was just too young and didn’t know how to communicate. I would either go quiet or say things like “All bets are off” and “This marriage ain’t gonna last.” I felt I had to say things like that to get him to understand how miserable I was in the marriage.
“I know you hate me,” I said.
He shook his head in disgust.
“I feel it,” I said. “Whenever we are in the same room, it just comes off you. I feel it when you lie down next to me. I feel it when you can’t even look at me.”
The main diagnosis: he was withholding love while I was withholding intimacy and affection. “Even a hug,” said the therapist. “Touching, of course, making love.”
And him? I was supposed to take him at his word that he didn’t hate me. He would stop saying or doing things in anger, and I, in turn, would stop bringing things up from the past. His actions needed to be consistent with valuing our relationship.
“You’re doing the right thing getting help,” the therapist said. “If you break your arm, you don’t sit there yelling at it for being broken. You get it fixed.” I left relieved that we had a list of things we could do to help each other. And for a few days, it was better. I tried to be more present and not be such a ghost. We stayed at home and cooked dinner.
The next counseling session, I sat there in the office, awkwardly stalling in the hopes that Nick was just late. He wasn’t answering his phone, and I looked down at the blank page of my notebook.
Nick never showed. He stopped coming altogether.
Like some signal had gone up, Johnny then emailed me. I took out all my anger and drama on him, acting like he had abandoned me. I had deleted his number, and I guess he didn’t notice that I hadn’t contacted him, which only made me more upset. We had a ridiculous back and forth about who was at fault, and he accused me of attacking him for no reason. That triggered my need to please, so I smoothed it over, and convinced myself that this was just passion. I poured it into my songwriting, writing about Johnny and sending him the songs to get his take. I don’t know what I thought that would do. Get him to show up at my door and say, “Get your stuff, we’re running away together”? I began to realize contact with him was an addiction, and I would make these grand pronouncements that each time was the last time. I was grateful that he had expanded my worldview and made me appreciate so many things about culture, but I needed to walk away. This wasn’t a game.
One of the songwriters I was working with told me he noticed that all the songs I was creating with him were about regret and a romance that was either lost or doomed from the start.
“You really need a love song,” he said.
I smiled. “I know.”
AFTER MONTHS OF HYPE, THE DUKES OF HAZZARD PREMIERED IN LATE July with a huge red-carpet event in Los Angeles. Johnny brought his wife and daughter, so the whole thing felt dangerous and foolish. I avoided him and kept Nick with me as I walked the rope line of interviewers. Every question was about how I got in shape to play Daisy Duke, and Nick got increasingly annoyed as we made it down the line.
Once inside, the movie started, and the audience cheered when my name came up on the title card. I shook with a chill going through my body. Thank you, Lord, I thought. Nick took my hand and smiled at me. He was proud of me, even if he had a hard time saying the words just to me and not the media.
Seeing myself so big up there, I found myself critiquing my body. My body was a machine, and I had given it over to the service of the character. I saw Daisy Duke on the screen, and then just the teeny tiniest stomach shadow of Jessica. While watching, my tell was that I’d pull a face with my lower lip. I was in the best shape of my life, and I didn’t appreciate it, but also, it just shows the absurdity of how we always find something to criticize about ourselves.
Two days before the movie came out, Johnny went on the Howard Stern Show and took a lie detector test. They asked, “Have you had sex with Jessica Simpson?” and he said no. Of course he passed, but I just felt gross that he even submitted to doing that. My friends told me this was proof that he was toxic, but I still saw the good in him. How could I not, when I had made him into this fantasy man at the other end of a text or email?
Dukes came out in theaters August 5 and did huge numbers. In one week, I had the number-one movie and the number-one video on MTV with “These Boots Are Made for Walkin.’ ” Johnny emailed me that I was a bona fide movie star.
My success galvanized Nick to put more effort into his solo album, and he had part of the Newlyweds crew follow him around as he worked in the studio. I didn’t want any part of that, and I was surprised that he did. He chose the crew members he could go out for beers with after they wrapped for the day. He’d built a recording studio in the house, and I tried not to be home when I knew the crew would be there. That said, I tried not to be home in general. I spent more and more time with my friends, especially my hairdresser Ken Pavés.
I drank too much on my nights out, and so did Nick. He didn’t have a problem with alcohol, he had an issue with what it allowed him to say. One day I taped a Proactiv skin product commercial all day, and afterward a bunch of us went to dinner. Nick was at a bar, and said he’d come to dinner but never showed. Late that night he came home drunk. He was swaying back and forth, angry at me for a laundry list of reasons. I knew I deserved it. I was a terrible wife, and he was a terrible husband. But I knew deep down he was a good man. I wanted that man back.
I started to speak. “My friends say—”
“Your friends don’t exist,” he spat. “You just pay them to be around you.”
It was a knife, cutting me down to the rawest marrow. My mouth dropped open. The one thing I always had was my friendships. I’d been so cold, so unresponsive to him for so long that he must have seen a flicker of something. So he twisted the knife.
“And your parents are only around because they are on the payroll.”
I closed my eyes, willed myself away. I turned to go upstairs.
“All bets are off,” I quietly said to myself. The next day, I would tell him what he said. He wouldn’t remember. But I would.
14
I’ll Fly Away
October 2005
I arrived in Nairobi a little after six in the morning. I was in Kenya for Operation Smile, a decades-old medical charity providing reconstructive surgeries for children worldwide with cleft lips, palates, and other facial deformities that were either life-threatening or socially ostracizing. They were doing a two-week mission providing surgeries at three sites in Kenya: Nairobi, Mombasa, and Nakura. I’d brought my hairdresser friend Ken, who had been the one to introduce me to the charity. When I heard Operation Smile had scheduled the mission, I wanted to go along because I had made the charity a priority for me.