Every now and then you reach a sort of fissure or fracture in time. It’s like a scenic overlook as imagined by Einstein or Kepler, from which you can actually witness two possible futures: Off the left side, you see a world of orderly streets and squares, where fans crowd theaters showing the new blockbuster by Jessica Simpson, who looks down from a marquee, slender and blonde and shaped like a barbell, booming on top and in the middle, skinny as a pencil between, and radios blast an endless stream of Jessica Simpson hits, her voice syrupy and love-filled. Off the right, a different world entirely, a place fallen into chaos and ruin, where a tremendous pop energy has leaked away and our beloved galaxy of reliable stars has been replaced by shabby novelties, and Jessica Simpson, living in a house amid a strip of identical houses in the fifth settlement ring beyond Dallas, with her third husband, a kicker in the Arena Football League, has been utterly forgotten.
[#image: /photos/54cbf4b81ca1cf0a23ac5101]|||View Mario Testino’s sizzling photographs of Jessica Simpson, including a few extras from the shoot. Plus: A Mario Testino retrospective, and more Jessica.|||
Simpson, 28, who flashed like a jet through the pop-star sky, with her first Top 10 hit coming at age 19 (“I Wanna Love You Forever”), followed by other hit records, the MTV reality show that made her a household name (Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica), and several films, is currently surrounded by handlers—publicist, father and mother, pop-star sister (Ashlee), quarterback boyfriend (Tony Romo, of the Dallas Cowboys)—who together, like a high-altitude rescue team, try to get her down the sunny side of the slope.
“I think she absolutely needs to re-invent herself,” said Tommy Mottola, who, as the head of Sony Music, signed Simpson to her first major-label record deal in 1997.
There have been danger signs. First, the sudden weight gain, as evidenced by pictures that turned up in the tabloids earlier this year showing the starlet, onstage, looking less than slender, holding the microphone like a turkey leg, and wearing what were described everywhere as “mom jeans.”
But as surprising as her appearance—how she seemed to be turning, before our eyes, into just another performer on the never-ending Opry circuit (she was, in fact, promoting her first country album, Do You Know, the genre being a tempting refuge for struggling Top 40 stars)—was the venue: a strawberry festival in Plant City, Florida. Plant City Florida for God’s sake! Even if the pounds were shed quickly, even if, as Simpson’s camp insists, they were never there in the first place, the dissemination of the photos was a blow for Simpson, who, like all starlets, has been careful to be pictured in just one way: as the skinny, forever-24-year-old sex bomb. What’s more, in April she was spoofed in an Eminem video as a gone-to-seed pop tart spilling out of her Daisy Dukes, hiking a cheeseburger to Tony Romo, played by Eminem.
All this came amid a cascade of career setbacks. Her record sales, for example, which peaked in 2003, when her show was in its prime, have fallen ever since. (The country album sold fewer than 200,000 copies.) Her movies: Blonde Ambition, a bastard child of Working Girl and Legally Blonde, which opened in December 2007 in just eight theaters in Texas, where it grossed $1,771 on its opening weekend; followed by Major Movie Star, which went straight to DVD last spring, where it sank without a trace, like a wounded ocean liner that goes down quietly, sending up no more than a storm of bubbles.
In short, it’s been a bad time for Jessica Simpson: flop, flop, country flop, fat picture. And yet, despite it all, she does radiate a special quality. She brings an unmistakable energy to everything she does, can carry a song, and can even make a commercial worth TiVo-ing. (She’s done excellent work for Pizza Hut.) She can hold your attention, in other words, make your eyes follow her, which is a classic definition of stardom.
But Jessica Simpson—who just a few years ago was No. 44 on *Forbes’*s list of the hundred most powerful celebrities; who has had seven singles hit Top 10 and has gone platinum three times; whose first movie, The Dukes of Hazzard, a tour de force of lowbrow, car-chase shenanigans, opened at No. 1—has reached one of those critical junctures, beyond which every possibility, both glorious and obscure, is open.
We met in the Polo Lounge, the restaurant off the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, in Los Angeles. She was wearing a dark, fedora-like hat pulled low. She told me it’s part of her fashion line, which is on racks in Macy’s, Nordstrom, and Dillard’s, and which, she said, is the most lucrative part of her career. “The Jessica Simpson Collection is a $400 million business,” she said. “My mom and I are creative directors. We have hundreds of people working, but nothing gets by us. It’s adorable and it’s affordable. What’s amazing right now, during this recession, is that, somehow, the business keeps growing.”
Jessica seemed nervous. Her hands trembled. She ordered a glass of Pinot Grigio. It seemed to calm her. She didn’t want to talk about her weight, so, of course, that’s all I could think of—it gilded each question in my mind: What are you working on now [that you’re fat]? Do you see yourself as part of a class, with Christina and Britney [or are you too fat]? Do you feel that your relationship with Tony Romo has affected his performance as a quarterback [because you are fat]?
But there was really no reason to ask about her weight. Her extra pounds had gone back to wherever they came from, existing only in a few dated pictures on the Internet. Jessica was skinny again, in dark pants, velvety coat, and high heels. Now and then a wispy strand of blond hair, as if making a break for it, swung across her face, only to be caught and tucked back. She talked about the tour that had just ended, on which she opened for the country band Rascal Flatts.
During that tour, on more than one occasion, Jessica forgot the words to her songs, gaffes that turned up immediately on YouTube, where they were taken as part of a pattern. (These snafus echoed an earlier incident in which Simpson, during a tribute to Dolly Parton at the Kennedy Center, with President Bush and other heavies in attendance, forgot the words to “9 to 5.”) “When it comes to media criticism, that’s just something I have had to train myself—literally train myself—to ignore,” she said. “Because I’m the one up there onstage, and I can feel the energy of the crowd. And I know when I did good. And I know when I did great. And there wasn’t one time on this tour when I felt like I butchered it. I mean, the way people make it sound, I should have never been singing in the first place.”
She finished her wine, ordered another. She spoke in a laid-back, twangy way about Tony Romo, her parents, her career. When I asked about her ex-husband and reality-show co-star, Nick Lachey, she said, “I have not spoken to him in years.” When I asked if Tony Romo had watched Newlyweds, she said, “A couple episodes. He thought I was cute.”
I didn’t want to ask about her weight directly, so I hinted at it, asking instead about body image in general, physical changes, perception—from my questions, you might have thought I was interviewing the Wolf Man. “It comes with what I do,” she said, “and I know that every day the media’s going to challenge me, is going to want to bring me down. But I feel like I’m at such a place that I own myself, and it’s authentic. I own that authentic part of myself, and none of those words are harsh enough to make me believe them.”
She then said, “I can’t imagine saying some of the things people have said about me about anybody else.”
In the end, sitting with Jessica Simpson, you felt that here was a talented, decent, beautiful person who had reached a dead end in the trail she had been following since she was a girl in Texas, too young, really, to decide much of anything. To understand her current condition you must therefore understand the trail, the path she has followed—her story, her biography—for everything she has done and been led to this moment.
Simpson’s father (Joe) and mother (Tina) married young—20, 18. He was a Baptist minister, one of those regular Elmer Gantry types. Some of Jessica’s first memories are of sitting in the pews, listening to Joe Simpson preach. “He was amazing,” she told me. “If I’m going for advice for anything in my life, I go straight to my father because he has the answers.” Jessica was born in 1980 in Abilene, Texas. Her sister was born four years later. By the time Jessica was 10, the family had moved at least a half-dozen times, the minister forever in search of a ministry. It’s a righteous calling, but a hard life.
Jessica began singing on the altar, sunlight beaming through high windows, her first songs dedicated to the only Father that matters. Joe Simpson used to bring unwed mothers home to live, to counsel and feed, but also as a kind of visual warning to his daughters: Here is what comes from yielding to temptation! When Jessica was 12, Joe gave her a purity ring, on which she pledged to keep her virginity until its taking could be ordained by God (and aired on MTV).
How did Jessica decide that she wanted to be something more than a church singer, that she wanted to share her gift with the world?
By holy epiphany.
One weekend when she was 11 years old, on a church retreat, the pastor spoke of special callings, of being alert enough to hear, courageous enough to answer. After that, as the congregants were singing “Amazing Grace,” Jessica recognized the beauty of her own voice, as if for the first time, and the pastor seemed to hear it too, saying, There’s somebody in this room who’s going to use their voice to affect the world. Whoever you are, come to the front. After pushing through her fellow believers, Jessica stood beside the preacher, smiling because she knew.
Soon after, she went with her school dance class to open auditions being held in Dallas for the new Mickey Mouse Club, a nationwide, once-in-a-lifetime, get-famous-just-like-that search that began with 50,000 entrants. She sang “Amazing Grace” without accompaniment and danced to “Ice Ice Baby,” which should tell you something about the era and about Simpson. It was 1992. She made the cut, made the next cut and the cut after that, progressing as you progress from level to level in a video game, until she found herself in a studio in Orlando, Florida, with a dozen other finalists, what remained when the grade schools of America had been sifted and panned for gold. If you wanted to change the course of history, you could send Schwarzenegger back to 1992 to destroy that studio, as on its stages were the next 20 years of tabloid culture: Timberlake, Spears, Aguilera, and Simpson in shrunken, Muppet-baby form.
Here’s the thing: Jessica did not make the final cut. She was a shoo-in, that’s what she was told, but, as she sat in the greenroom preparing for the last audition, she made the fatal mistake of watching Christina Aguilera on a closed-circuit television. The tremendous competence of Aguilera—“She sounded like Mariah Carey”—turned Simpson’s blood to ice. When Jessica’s name was called, she went out as if to her own funeral. She was supposed to sing an Amy Grant song—remember Amy Grant?—but when the music started and the lights went on, she froze. “I ended up drawing a blank, and obviously you can’t do that on TV,” she told me. “But I was coming from the church choir with a Polaroid. I didn’t come with headshots. I didn’t do Off Broadway. I wasn’t on Star Search. I wasn’t doing all the things these other kids were doing. I was a preacher’s daughter with a Polaroid.
“When I got the letter that said I didn’t make it, I just remember that I was giving up and I thought that I was going to die.”
Within a few weeks, Jessica got a second chance—it came as a mysterious stranger right out of Mark Twain. A guest speaker appeared in church, sat transfixed as Jessica did a solo, lingered after. I’m starting a gospel label, he told Joe. I have to hear her again. “I went in and sang Whitney Houston’s [version of] ‘I Will Always Love You,’” Jessica said. “I got that record deal right then and there.”
But it was the trip to Orlando that was the turning point: “I always knew she was a singer,” Joe told me. “But there’s a difference between thinking your kid’s got a great voice and having it verified. The Mickey Mouse Club audition is what knocked it into us, because they listened to thousands and she was one of the final six. That was the moment we finally realized: This girl can really sing.”
I have never met Joe but have spoken to him on the phone, studied pictures of him, and parsed his sayings as you might parse the sayings of Dear Leader. He’s the spiky-haired Texan who seems responsible, in one way or another, for everything Jessica has done. Her records, movies, marriage, boyfriend—his signature is on all of them. He is a fascinating man, a minister who quit the church for showbiz, or, to be precise, quit one kind of showbiz for another.
The big difference is meaning: the story of Jesus means everything; the story of Jessica means nothing. Its meaninglessness is its point and its pleasure. In the case of Jesus, every day and every meal is saturated with significance, whereas the days and meals of Jessica, which have been chronicled with precision, have no meaning whatsoever. All to say, Joe Simpson—a uniquely American figure, who has made a place for himself beside the great Colonel Tom Parker, another manager of exclusive clientele; whose words and actions have long been criticized by music executives, journalists, and aficionados of showbiz weirdness, especially for the way in which he seems a bit too aware of his daughter’s sexuality (notorious is a quote he gave to GQ in 2004, when, speaking of Jessica, he said, “She’s got double Ds! You can’t cover those suckers up”)—has stayed true to his first calling: the minting and selling of images.
When I asked Jessica about her father’s role in her career, she said, “I can talk to my dad like he’s my manager, and put ‘Dad’ on the back burner. We’ve been doing it since I was 13. So, at this point, we’re in a good rhythm. A lot of people find it strange, but it’s the only way I know. And I don’t care to know another way, because it suits me. And we’ve done a pretty dang good job.”
When I asked Ashlee Simpson, who, for most of our conversation, said the types of things pre-loaded in the memory chip of a Chatty Cathy—“Jessica is a fighter”; “Jessica is a wonderful girl”; “We’re the best in our pajamas together”—the same question, she came to life. “My dad gets such a bad rap,” she said, “and it’s all bullshit.”
As Jessica’s gospel record was being produced, she toured on the Christian-rock circuit. This interlude is interesting mostly for why and how it ended, which, according to Joe Simpson, was because of those determining factors—her breasts—that made her too sexy for the circuit, causing the male parishioners to lust, distracting them from the divine. It’s part of the story the family (including Jessica) tells about Jessica. Too sexy for church, thus forced from the world of Hallelujah to the world of Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.
A few years later, before Jessica’s gospel record was released, the label went bust. Jessica’s grandmother fronted cash to make a test pressing, which, sent here and there, brought Jessica to the attention of a New York entertainment lawyer, who, with a few calls, was able to schedule nine auditions over two days. It was in this way that, one afternoon in July 1997, Jessica found herself sitting with Tommy Mottola, who, more than just being the president of Sony Music, was Mariah Carey’s husband. “I knew he married Mariah and had probably listened to her sing in the shower,” Jessica said. “That was very nerve-racking, because Mariah was a voice I always did look up to and I would always try and emulate.”
“She had a great little look and a great attitude, a fresh new face, and something a bit different than Britney and all of them,” Mottola told me. “She could actually sing.”
[#image: /photos/54cbf4b81ca1cf0a23ac5101]|||View Mario Testino’s sizzling photographs of Jessica Simpson, including a few extras from the shoot. Plus: A Mario Testino retrospective, and more Jessica.|||
Mottola signed her because she was beautiful and talented, yes, but it was more than that. Mottola was looking for his own Britney, or Christina, to ensnare the fans filling the lower and middle schools. In this way, Jessica, in a sense, found herself back in Orlando, where Christina was singing on the closed circuit. “It’s funny to look at my journals and see all the fears I had to face,” she said. “[Those girls] all remembered me. I didn’t feel competitive. I was more intimidated.”
Jessica’s first record, Sweet Kisses, which came out in 1999, followed hit albums by Spears and Aguilera, which meant, from a press point of view, Simpson was a tag-on, another version of the same thing. You have McDonald’s, you have Burger King, then you have Hardee’s. “My album was different [from the others],” she said. “I released a ballad first. I wasn’t dancing and doing that whole thing. I wanted to set myself apart. But I was always third runner-up.” Her record sold two million copies in the U.S., and the single “I Wanna Love You Forever” went Top 10.
Jessica’s second album, Irresistible, was released in June of 2001. Following 9/11, Sony refused to promote a third single, which Joe Simpson believed critical for his daughter’s prospects—she needed a hit. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2004, he said, “When those planes crashed into those buildings, it nearly demolished our career.” I quote this not only because it’s nuts, but because of the chilling use of the first-person plural: “our career.”
Jessica Simpson met Nick Lachey at a Christmas parade in 1998. She was 18; he was 24. They met again a month later at a party thrown by Teen People. Jessica’s debut was yet to be released. Lachey was the front man of the boy band 98 Degrees. He had already made records, had hits, experienced the life Jessica was on the cusp of. They fell in love. I guess. (I don’t believe anything I see on TV.) After the party, Lachey told his mother, “I’ve met the woman I’m going to marry.” If he were smarter, he might have said, “I’ve met the woman I’m going to marry, star in a TV show with, grow estranged from, and never talk to again.”
Jessica was still wearing the purity ring, so Nick, presumably, was a frustrated man. They broke up and would have stayed so if not for … “After 9/11, I knew that I never, ever wanted to be away from Nick for the rest of my life,” Simpson told a reporter. They hugged through the aftermath like survivors in a disaster movie and were married in October 2002. In the wedding video (the ceremony was photographed and filmed by InStyle), Joe Simpson looks pained. This was not the plan. First, there was the matter of control. As it says in the Bible in re marriage and parents: leave and cleave. Then there was Jessica as a pop commodity, with no small value as an object of sexual fantasy, a value, as any manager of talent can tell you, that diminishes if said commodity is married. This is not how Joe Simpson phrased it. He spoke instead of his own early marriage and of not wanting his daughter to make the same mistake, but I think he scowls in the pictures—in part, anyway—for the same reason Brian Epstein told the Beatles to date around and be free.
According to Jessica, Texas girls are hardwired for marriage. “It was what we all wanted,” she said. “Go to college, get married, and have babies. It was my way of thinking. At 16, every boyfriend I had I was going to marry.”
Joe Simpson must have known there was no wisdom in standing in the way of young love, so he seemingly fell on a solution that, while leaving him blameless, both kept him close and got his daughter’s career on track. I’m not sure when Newlyweds was green-lighted, but the cameras came into Nick and Jessica’s house in Calabasas, California, six months after the wedding. The show was pitched by Joe Simpson. He was a producer and had final cut. A hit when it premiered in 2003, Newlyweds finally distinguished Jessica from Britney and Christina. Said to document a couple learning to live as newlyweds, it remains a fascinating, multi-layered document.
First, there is the text: the show itself is a postmodern parody of I Love Lucy with each episode organized around a classic comedic situation—a pampered girl goes camping, for example. To make it work, Jessica was cast in a simple role, stereotypical 50s-sitcom ditz, which she is not. If you sit with her and talk, you see that she is smart, reads, thinks, cares, wants to know, but viewers came away with just a few images, the way, if you think of Lucy Ricardo, you come away with just a few images: Lucy in the candy factory, say, overwhelmed by the speed of the conveyor belt.
Then there is the subtext, which is Joe Simpson sending a camera crew into the house where his chaste daughter is losing her chastity. “They were there all the time,” Jessica said. “But they could never go upstairs. That was our space.”
It’s the same when you visit Graceland, I told her.
Though Newlyweds linked Jessica and Nick Lachey forever in the minds of a certain demographic, it seemed to deflate the marriage. (Isn’t Joe Simpson a genius?) Whereas the show ran for three seasons, the marriage ran for just over three years. It’s unclear if it ended in divorce or was simply canceled.
“In all honesty, I believe it did not affect our marriage,” Simpson said. “Because we enjoyed watching those episodes, and that will always be a time I cherish. It made me understand what marriage is, what love is, what commitment is.”
Interestingly, Newlyweds, while allowing her to break out—her third record, In This Skin, its release timed to the premiere of the show, was her biggest hit—may also be responsible for her current impasse.
“Those things are dangerous,” Mottola told me. “That kind of exposure—it’s very revealing—is not necessarily the kind of thing audiences, though they want to see it in the beginning, want for their singer in the end. It’s a shot of adrenaline, but you can come down just as quickly.”
Following her divorce, the tabloids connected Simpson with just about every male artist who crossed her path: John Mayer, Dane Cook (her co-star in 2006’s Employee of the Month), Johnny Knoxville (the Luke to her Daisy in The Dukes of Hazzard). And even if the tabloids were factually wrong, they were getting at a poetic truth. Jessica did seem to be searching, looking for a new role or identity. Her fifth album, A Public Affair, was released after her marriage dissolved. This is when the trouble with remembering lyrics began (most famously during a live broadcast of Good Morning America last year), coinciding with a decline in her record sales. It was while filming The Dukes of Hazzard that she first considered country music—it came at the suggestion of co-star Willie Nelson.
“It’s not necessarily a bad move,” Mottola explained. “She’s a country girl—it’s close to her heart. But if she tries to go back to pop, that might be too much ping-ponging. When you confuse your audience, you’re done.”
ne problem with Simpson’s movies, especially those she’s been asked to carry, is her acting, which is not very good. As an actress, she’s slightly less skillful than the actress who replaced Suzanne Somers on Three’s Company. To many, her greatest performance has always been playing Jessica Simpson—on records, on TV, and now, in the role that gets the most attention, as, depending on whom you ask, either the glamorous star dating the quarterback of America’s team or the succubus who has destroyed the Dallas Cowboys: Yoko Romo.
The couple met through Joe Simpson. “My dad is a super Cowboys fan,” Jessica said.
O.K., to get this part, you have to know about Romo and the Cowboys. The Cowboys are a religion in Texas. The quarterback of the Cowboys is the Pope. By dating the Pope, Jessica has put herself in a uniquely high-profile position. Romo is big, easy, handsome. He began seeing Jessica in November of 2007. Then they were everywhere: Dallas, L.A., Wisconsin, where Romo is from. “She has a very small-town side to her,” Romo told me. “We’re very similar in that we both appreciate the hometown feel to a lot of things, and live our life like that.”
So Romo and Simpson are just a normal couple, like you and your girl, only faster (in his case) and better-looking (in hers), tossing the pigskin around the Cowboys practice facility, going to the movies, etc.
At games, Jessica sits in a skybox, hands over her eyes, a girl at a monster movie, too scared to watch. “She comes to a ton of games,” Romo said. “She’s a supportive girlfriend.” Her country album includes the song “You’re My Sunday,” which is about … well, you know. “I was always a fan,” she told me. “In Texas, it’s a sin not to be. But I’ve never been as passionate as I am now. Before a game, I’m crazed, sending mass e-mails: ‘Please pray for Tony’s protection.’”
I asked if she hung out with the players’ wives during games—they have a special section, like the wives of astronauts—but she said she doesn’t. “It’s a nurturing place to be, around people who love their husbands,” she told me, “but it gives me anxiety to watch with them.”
[#image: /photos/54cbf4b81ca1cf0a23ac5101]|||View Mario Testino’s sizzling photographs of Jessica Simpson, including a few extras from the shoot. Plus: A Mario Testino retrospective, and more Jessica.|||
Trouble began a week before the Cowboys were to play the Giants in January 2008. Romo went with Simpson and others to Mexico, was photographed relaxing and taking it easy, then came back and lost a playoff game to New York, who went on to win the Super Bowl. This was the crossing-of-the-Rubicon moment for many Dallas fans, after which Simpson went from being interesting trivia to being a grave threat.
“A lot of people head to Vegas, go back to their hometowns, colleges, and stuff [between games],” Romo explained. “I was just like, ‘Let’s rent a house and sit around and watch football.’ It seemed like a good decision. But when you’re in the public eye, things can be perceived differently.” Locals now speak of a Jessica Jinx, and her presence at games is noted and figured into the odds made by bookmakers in Vegas. Even George Bush, a Cowboys fan, blamed Simpson, though she had publicly endorsed his presidency. During a post–Super Bowl visit the Giants made to the White House last April, Bush suggested the Republican Party find a way to get Jessica Simpson to the Democratic convention. (Simpson has since taken a political U-turn: “I think it’s definitely time for change,” she said. “And I am very supportive of our president, and I believe that he’s going to do remarkable things.”)
“Jessica Simpson has hovered over this city like a dark cloud,” Gary Cartwright, a writer at Texas Monthly, told me. “The great quarterbacks are 100 percent dedicated to the game. But Romo seems happy-go-lucky. If they win, he seems happy. If they lose, he seems happy. And all this is tied up with Jessica Simpson.”
“You know, it’s very hard when you lose,” Romo said, “because games are important, and so many people put so much time and effort in. It’s nice to have someone to come home to and try and make you feel better.”
When I asked Jessica about the controversy—her place in the psyche of certain fans—she said, “That’s how the story goes. Can’t help it. But we don’t let it affect our relationship. If we did, we wouldn’t be together, because it happened at the very beginning. Dating the Cowboys quarterback comes with hype, the fans, the bloggers, but I’ve never dated a guy that was more simple. I’m always there for him after a game, and he knows he has me to come home to.”
It’s late afternoon. The sun is going down. She talks about her inner life: “I’m spiritual. I live off the faith that has been instilled in me, that has never left. I’ve never let a stumbling block actually make me fall.” She talks about her beliefs: “We all go through trials, but not one thing has ever made me question God. I have a great relationship with God. I can talk to him, get mad at him, frustrated with him. But, ultimately, my faith is what defines me.” Whatever she says, she seems to be thinking of her future, the up-for-grabs state of her place in the world: famous, less famous, used to be famous. (Like Robert Johnson, Jessica Simpson stands at the crossroads.) “There will always be another opportunity,” she says, “another door to walk through.” She stands, tugs down her hat, incognito again. I follow her to the front of the restaurant, where her assistant is waiting. She hands Jessica a leather bracelet from her collection, the kind worn by the kids who played Hacky Sack behind the school. Jessica ties it on my wrist with terrific solemnity, as if I were being knighted. I walk out of there feeling good. Spring will come early this year.
Rich Cohen is a regular contributor to Rolling Stone and is the author of Sweet and Low: A Family Story and Tough Jews, among other books.
