ARTICLES

Dallas Morning News - July 2000

Jessica Simpson and I are sitting in a room alone together. We are finally getting to talk for the first time all day. The conversation is rolling along, when, suddenly, we hear a knock at the door. Standing before her is a lanky young man with his hands folded in front of him. "Is there a chance," he begins, "that we can spend some time together, maybe a few minutes, before the end of the day?" It's quite a request, even from an old friend. There are 150 people downstairs, waiting to celebrate her 20th birthday at a lavish estate on Cedar Creek Lake. Having a one-on-one visit won't exactly be easy. "You know, maybe we could talk," he says, "before the end of the day . . . before the end of this life!" She hugs him and promises she'll do what she can. Here it is her birthday, and she's promising so much. When he leaves, she sits back and sighs. "Considering that it's business and it's family and it's friends, it's like my head is all over the place," she says. "Some of these people have driven hours to be here, so I want to have at least a five-minute conversation with every single one of them. I'm definitely being pulled in all directions. But they understand. They're my bestest friends in the whole world. Goodness, I grew up with these people. How could I ever let them down?"

Old friends

It's obvious that, in a few short months, life has changed dramatically for Jessica Simpson, who grew up in Richardson and attended J.J. Pearce High School, which she left after her junior year to devote full time to the music business. (She eventually received a high school diploma through a correspondence course offered by Texas Tech University.) For her friends, knowing Jessica is a whole lot different than it used to be. Most of the people at the party have been classmates since grade school or fellow members of The Heights Baptist Church in Richardson, where for eight years her father was the youth minister. Today, she and her family live in Los Angeles. For the most part, her friends get to see her by watching MTV or cruising the racks at the record store. Her debut album, Sweet Kisses, has sold more than 2 million copies since being released last November. A new album, as yet untitled, will reach the shelves by December and is expected to do even better. Ten years from now, it's not inconceivable to think that everyone in the country will know her name. But even as she walks downstairs, it's obvious Jessica Simpson is no longer the girl next door to most of her friends. They're watching a tape of her recent appearance on The Disney Channel, and when they're finished, seven of her girlfriends go to the bathroom to help her put on makeup. The ones who miss out just rewind the tape and watch it again. Like most of the record-buying public, they're aware that her name is now inextricably linked to a new generation of hot young recording artists, some of whom she met when she was 12. It was then that she auditioned for the Mickey Mouse Club alongside Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, who, like her, are part of a trend in pop music. As Rolling Stone said recently, blond "nymphet" singing sensations are "in," if you call selling millions of records "in."

What a girl wants

Jessica has distinguished herself among critics for having a bigger voice than those two, but both have eclipsed her in record sales. Still, her profile has risen sharply in recent weeks because of her public pledge to remain a virgin until she's married. She's astonished by the international furor her declaration has caused. "They couldn't believe it in Europe," she says, shaking her head. "They kept asking if I was a lesbian." Even her steady guy, whom she's dated for a year and a half, is in the music business. Tanned, muscular and ringed with tattoos, Nick Lachey, 26, is a member of 98 Degrees, whose most recent album has sold more than 5 million copies. Another of Jessica's peers from the Mickey Mouse experience is one of Nick's rivals, Justin Timberlake, whose band, 'N Sync, is even hotter than 98 Degrees. 'N Sync recently achieved the distinction of selling more albums than any group in recording history. It's a pretty fast crowd she's running with, but her friends say they love her for living the adage that if you don't stand for something, you're apt to fall for anything, and doing so in a profession where character is constantly being challenged. Jessica is a good girl who's true to her Baptist roots, they say, no matter how famous she is. Her father and manager, 42-year-old Joe Simpson, says she stunned Tommy Mottola, the chief executive officer of Sony Music Entertainment Inc., the parent company of Columbia Records, before he signed her to a contract. "So Jessica goes into his office and he says, 'What do you want to happen in the next five years with your music?' " Mr. Simpson recalls. "And she says, 'I want to be an example to girls all over the world, that you don't have to compromise who you are to be a success in the music business.' And he said, 'I've never heard that, especially from a 17-year-old.' " The reason he heard it, Mr. Simpson contends, has a lot to do with The Heights Baptist Church. Despite her success, a part of Jessica will always be linked to Richardson. Her friends rave about her and her father, who counseled many ofthe kids before they graduated from high school. Joe Simpson is not just a dad and manager. Together, with his wife, he's a constant chaperone and moral force, whose every belief is emblazoned somewhere on his daughter's consciousness. Joe and Tina Simpson, 40, have one other daughter, Ashlee, 15, who works as a dancer in Jessica's live shows. Ashlee would like to be an actress. "My dad was a real cool, hip youth minister," Jessica says. "It wasn't like church was ever boring for us. The people in this room, we were all best friends and had a ton of fun. Dad always made it interesting and fun. We'd have church around the pool on Sunday nights."

Father knows best

Jessica acknowledges that her father's influence is nothing short of profound. He's the one who guided her through what she calls her three most devastating disappointments - missing out on the Mickey Mouse Club, cutting a gospel album at 13 only to have the label go under before the record could be released and being signed to a contract by Columbia, which promised to release Sweet Kisses in less than six months. Instead, it took 2 1/2 agonizing years, during which time Britney and Christina were off to the races, carving out a name I.D. long before anyone had ever heard of Jessica Simpson. But in the end, it may not matter. As Jessica says, "We're in it for the long run." "My dad takes care of me as a manager and as a dad," she adds. "That's his job, you know, to take care of me. He has my best interests at heart. If I'm tired, he'll respect that. He knows I'm only human. A lot of managers don't know that. You know, they think you're a machine that can just keep going and going. "I'm 20 years old, but most 20-year-olds don't work half as hard as I do. I'm in a different country every day. This past overseas shift, I was doing 16 interviews a day. Sometimes it makes you insane. But my dad, he takes care of me." She and her father pride themselves on learning from mistakes. One such moment was the Mickey Mouse experience, which Joe Simpson blames on allowing Jessica to wait in "the green room," where she watched Christina Aguilera's performance before taking the stage herself. Apparently feeling it was an act she couldn't top, she suffered one of the worst performances she's ever endured. "She got so freaked out," Mr. Simpson says. "By watching Christina, she got out there and forgot her words, forgot her dance . . . It was done, and we knew it as soon as she finished. They didn't even bother to call her back." The Mouseketeers folded a year later, but the feeling remained. Even so, Jessica regards it as a springboard that made her career possible. She began working with acclaimed voice coach Linda Septien, a former diva on the operatic stage whose clients have included 98 Degrees and Destiny's Child. "Linda's like my second mom," Jessica says. "I love her to death. Without her, I'd be nowhere." In more specific terms, Ms. Septien "helped her grow as a vocalist," Mr. Simpson says. "Jessica's early voice was a lot lower. Linda helped her expand her range to six octaves, which was very beneficial. If you listen to other teenage vocalists, they're doing Mariah Carey's licks or Whitney Houston's licks, but Linda helped Jessica craft her own voice."

For love, not money

When Joe Simpson resigned from The Heights Baptist Church in 1998, he was making $43,000 a year. Two years later, he says he's comfortable though hardly a millionaire. He says his daughter is a millionaire with a financial future in front of her that would cause even the people at E.F. Hutton to listen. But in an effort to avoid what he calls the LeAnn Rimes syndrome, he says he wants no part of his daughter's money. Ms. Rimes and her mother recently sued her father, accusing him and a former co-manager of fleecing from the singer more than $7 million over a five-year period. An ugly episode, which raises a key question: Is it worth getting involved in an offspring's career? Ah, but there's a difference, Mr. Simpson says. Ms. Rimes' father didn't just manage her money, he also produced his daughter's recordings, a role he chose to avoid. He made sure to get his daughter a business manager "who manages her money. I have nothing to do with it," Joe Simpson says. "I'm paid a percentage, as any manager would be. Jessica's money is Jessica's money. I couldn't even tell you what she has in her bank account." His role is simple, he says. He takes care of his little girl. "There's so many times when the world goes upside down for her," he says, the trace of a tear forming around his eye. "For Jessica, the fact that her mother and I are there when she walks off the stage is irreplaceable." It certainly felt that way at Madison Square Garden last year, when Jessica was opening for Ricky Martin. She hit a high note, and inexplicably, began backing up, all the way off stage. "She had these tight leather pants on, and they totally split out the back," her father says. "We're in the orchestra pit. Tina's on one side, I'm on the other. Jessica just disappeared, and the dancers were still going. I thought, 'Oh, my gosh, what happened?' In all her history, she'd never left the stage. "Well, she's sitting on the floor, just bawlin'. 'Daddy, why did this happen to me? At Madison Square Garden, of all places!' " Jessica's mother took off her own pants and handed them to her daughter, reducing Mom to panties and an overcoat. " 'Jessica, this is make it or break it time,' " her father told her. " 'This can be the worst nightmare you've ever had or the opportunity to show people what you're made of. Obstacles are not gonna kill you, they'll only make you stronger. Now, hold your head up, wipe your tears away and go back out there.' She told the crowd she had 'sung her butt off.' She got a standing ovation. And the point of all that? Mom and dad were there."

Virgin Princess

Like his daughter, Joe Simpson has blond hair and soulful eyes, and these days, the " 'do," which is wavy and well manicured, carries with it the look of L.A. He was a Baptist youth minister for 22 years and, since 1986, has been a licensed marriage and family counselor. It's a calling he takes with him in his new incarnation: manager of a pop star. His daughter got him into the business, he says, but these days, he's trying to expand his list of clients beyond the bloodline. When he was a kid, his father, a Baptist preacher who got by on $18,000 a year, carried the Lord's message up and down the length of Texas. Joe grew up in San Antonio, Lubbock, McGregor, San Angelo and Cross Plains, and here he is taking a similar path, even if the work involved is a world apart. Mr. Simpson takes being a father very seriously, even to the point of influencing his daughter's sexuality. He regrets not being a virgin on his wedding night, as his wife was. He says he deplores the obsession that sex has become in the lives of adolescents, saying he doesn't want his daughters to suffer what some of their friends have - sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancies, abortions. "Sex has become an issue because of the absence of dads in kids' lives," he contends. "Especially for a girl. She gets her self-esteem as a teenage girl from her father. When her father tells her, 'You're beautiful,' and he puts his arm around her, she becomes the most important person in the world. A father should spend time with a girl and tell her things, and if he doesn't, then she's open to anybody who will say those things. Why is there so much promiscuity among teenage kids? It's not because we're somehow hornier this year than last, it's because you have desperate kids longing for a sense of fathers in their lives." One of the reasons he loves the music business, Mr. Simpson says, is that he's never away from his family. On a recent trip through Europe and Asia, he and the family were never apart. "I'm seeing a lot more of them now than I ever did as a youth minister," he says, citing a recent statistic that, on the average, American fathers spend seven minutes a week with their children in meaningful conversation. "No wonder kids are confused," he says. For Jessica, there's no confusion about being a virgin, saying it's a promise she intends to keep for the benefit of her future husband, whom she hopes will be Mr. Lachey. (At this point, however, they're not engaged.) "It's a romantic thing with me," she says. "I want to be able to share something with my husband that I've never shared with anyone. He deserves that. And, you know, if he doesn't offer that to me, he'll offer something else that he's never offered anybody. I believe in that; I believe in one true love. But it's crazy, this business of the 'virgin pop princess.' Who would have ever thought that would be my nickname?" When asked about his girlfriend's premarital vow, Mr. Lachey merely shrugs. "That's something we discussed on the phone for hours and hours early in our relationship," he says. "That's fine. That's never been an issue for me. She's an inspiration to a lot of people, and it's something she feels strongly about." When told that Jessica's father had spoken highly of him in an earlier interview, his tone changes immediately. "Really? He said that?" he says. "Wow. That's really good to hear. You have no idea how important that is. There's no one more important to Jessica than her dad."

On the road again

In Jessica's early years, Joe Simpson moved the family from Abilene, where Jessica was born, to Round Rock to Wichita Falls to Fort Worth to Waco to Littleton, Colo., where, had they stayed, Jessica would have been a student at Columbine High School on the day it entered the headlines forever. After Littleton, they lived in Burleson, Duncanville and Richardson. At 13, Jessica sang for Buster Soaries, who heard her perform I Will Always Love You, made famous by her idol, Whitney Houston. Mr. Soaries had worked with Ms. Houston when she was a little girl and felt Jessica could generate the same response. He signed her on the spot. Thus, Jessica became the only white singer for Proclaim Records, whose all-black ensemble looked downright startled when she walked into a New Jersey church one Sunday and plopped herself in the choir with them. Shades of Buddy Holly performing at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. "There was a palpable tension in the air - until they heard her sing, and then they were knocked out," her father says.

Everything appeared to be going wonderfully until the mixing of her debut album, when Proclaim went under. Mr. Simpson borrowed $7,500 from his mother to allow the producer to finish the album, albeit without an active label. Thus, her true debut has never been released.

Musical Crossroads

It soon became obvious to Mr. Simpson that his daughter was at a crossroads: Christian music or pop music? "One of the bad things about Christian music," he says, "is that it's hard to be successful and be beautiful. Amy Grant [who became successful as a Christian artist before entering the pop world] is 'cute.' She's not beautiful. She's the girl next door. "I also heard people say about Jessica, 'She looks too sexy.' They didn't feel a Christian recording artist could or should look sexy, which was really insulting to me, because some of those guys were my friends in the ministry. I said, 'Gee, this girl has never even kissed a boy. She's more pure than I ever was or you guys are. You're going to make sexual innuendoes about her? Can she help the fact that she had breasts by the seventh grade? What am I gonna do with her? Tie her up?' " So, four years ago, the Simpsons moved from Christian music to pop music. At the time, Jessica's father was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, having rung up $30,000 in credit card debt in a desperate bid to launch her career. After a year of dead-end roads, they found an attorney who agreed to set up live auditions in New York City with eight of the country's leading record labels. In the summer of 1997, Mr. Simpson and his family were at a Baptist youth camp in Laredo on a missionary trip when his cell phone rang. The attorney had given a tape of Jessica's singing to Teresa LaBarbera Whites, a vice president of A&R (artist and repertoire) for Columbia Records. Part of her job is finding and signing new talent. Ms. Whites met Mr. Simpson in San Antonio the next day - which happened to be Jessica's 17th birthday three years ago - and urged him to prevent her from signing with any other label until executives at Columbia were given a chance to hear her. "When I first heard her tape, I thought, 'Wow, this girl can really sing,' " Ms. Whites says. "But when I heard her in person, in a San Antonio hotel room, I thought, 'She is really the real deal.' Plus, she's so warm and welcoming and has such a great heart."

So, the Simpsons paid a visit to eight different labels before sitting down with Will Botwin, the general manager of Columbia Records. Impatiently, he told them he had only 10 minutes before leaving for a luncheon, but after hearing her sing, he made them promise to remain in the building until his partners could hear the same mix of desire and talent he just had. What he didn't know was that Joe Simpson wanted his daughter to sign with Columbia all along. In his view, it was the industry's most prestigious label, having made household names of Bob Dylan and Barbra Streisand, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, James Taylor and Bruce Springsteen. "She sang," Mr. Simpson says, "and they just went nuts." By this time, word began to filter through the industry that Columbia was about to sign a hot young talent. At a third session several weeks later, she sang for Mr. Mottola, the CEO, when she confessed her desire "to be an example all over the world." But as she finished her first song, he asked her to sit down. "Her eyes were welling up," her father recalls. "She thought she'd done bad. Tommy walked around his desk and said, 'Jessica, your music is going to touch the entire world.' " A few days later, Jessica had received $100,000 to join the pantheon of artists made famous by Columbia Records, which agreed to produce four albums. For the first time in years, her father was free of debt.

Slow train

Despite the excitement of signing with Columbia, Jessica then had to endure what she considers her third major setback. From the moment she signed until Sweet Kisses was released, she was forced to wait 2 1/2 years and has no idea why. "That was a big frustration," says her father, who noted that the label screened 900 songs before agreeing to the 11 released on the album, in an effort to perfect her debut sound. "Britney's first album came out a full year ahead of Jessica's and we signed a week apart. Christina's [debut album] came out four to five months ahead of Jessica's, so it looks like she came in third," Mr. Simpson says. But as the moment nears for Jessica to blow out the candles on her birthday cake, thoughts of what might have been seem a long way away. Whether it's sex or success, only the long road matters to her. "I never thought my life would end up like this," she says. "Being in the industry at 13, you see a lot of things, you learn a lot of things. But that's the cool thing about my friends. Even though we're so different, we're still the best of friends. They might not understand what I'm going through and I might not understand their college life. But it still seems to work." For a moment, she looks tired, as though sleep is many miles away and in a bed other than her own. "Jessica was not ever normal," she says, referring to herself in the third person. "Jessica was always doing something, and you know, I bet it will be that way for the rest of my life."