At
16, two years before she released her first album and began dating her
soon-to-be ex-husband, Nick Lachey, Jessica Simpson got her own checkbook.
"She bounced all the checks, so we thought it best to wait a while,"
says her mother, Tina Simpson, who swiftly confiscated it. "She has not
ever had one since. Funny, huh?" Now, almost a decade later—having made
millions and become a household name based largely on that ditzy blond
persona—Simpson is finally ready to try again.
"She asked the other day for a checkbook, and I looked at her like she was
kidding," says her assistant and friend CaCee Cobb. "When I met Jess
she didn't know how to do anything for herself, because her parents and then
Nick always did everything for her." The two proceeded to spend an
afternoon debating color schemes and background patterns, and soon Simpson, like
most 25-year-old women, will be able to sign checks for herself. It might seem
like a small step, but for Simpson it's a symbol of her new desire for
independence.
"I just feel alive. I feel free. I feel like I can do anything and there's
nobody to answer to but myself," says Simpson. "It's been hard, but
I've finally come to the realization that it's okay to not be perfect. I really
am in a comfortable place."
Anyone who has picked up a tabloid in the last six months would be surprised to
hear that. Simpson is in the midst of a messy divorce, and, week after week, her
distraught face has appeared on the cover of the gossips under headlines
exclaiming SPLIT! DETAILS ON JESSICA AND NICK'S LAST DAYS—AND HOW HER EGO,
PARTYING, AND DAD DROVE THEM APART and NEW CHEATING BOMBSHELL! SCANDAL! SHE WAS
WITH ANOTHER MAN WHILE MARRIED.
Though the two repeatedly denied the claims, the public's interest was piqued.
After all, Simpson and Lachey had become stars by allowing fans into their
lives. Both had enjoyed successful enough singing careers previously, but it was
their MTV reality show, Newlyweds, that catapulted them to fame. At its
height, more than four million viewers tuned in each week to watch their fights
over laundry, cuddle sessions on the couch and unintentionally hilarious
conversations ("Is this chicken, what I have here? Or is it fish?").
Many fans came to feel they actually knew the Lacheys on a personal level,
following the ups and downs of the marriage as if it were their own. And so in
Hollywood, where celebrity divorces are not exactly uncommon, this breakup has
attracted more than its fair share of attention. In less than three months, for
example, Us Weekly has featured the split as its lead cover story seven
times, beating out both Brad and Angelina's pregnancy and Jennifer Aniston's
rocky relationship with Vince Vaughn.
"It's totally out of control," says Simpson, who recently rented a
dozen different vehicles in a single day to evade the cameras. She's even taken
to hiding in car trunks. "I almost peed in my pants," she says of one
such incident. "We were laughing so hard because [my mom] was trying to
talk to me and I'm in the trunk."
Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that Simpson, now single for the first time
in her adult life, wants to have a little fun. She's made even more headlines by
hanging out at the notoriously rowdy Chateau Marmont with the likes of Maroon 5
frontman Adam Levine and serial cad Jude Law. "I feel like everybody's
always out to get me, and that's a weird feeling," she says of the press,
which seems to link her to a new man every week. "But you can let the chaos
consume you or you can stand next to the chaos and just walk along with
it." And so today, hoping to avoid what she refers to as "that spiral
thing" that happens when a celebrity can no longer handle the spotlight,
Simpson has temporarily relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she has rented
a gated house high up in the hills.
While she is technically here to shoot Employee of the Month, an indie
film starring the hot young comedians Dane Cook and Dax Shepard and produced by
Andrew Panay of Wedding Crashers fame, the change of venue will also
serve as a six-week hiatus from her life. "It's, like, girl time—a
healing within in a lot of ways," says Simpson, who is sharing the house
with Cobb, hairstylist Jessie Holiday and makeup artist Mary Phillips, all of
whom she considers her "best friends."
Simpson says she craves the organized routine of a film and can't wait to spend
her days laughing again. She'll play an otherwise hot Costco
cashier—"She's, like, a nine or a 10"—whose beauty is marred by
just one feature. In the grand tradition of Nicole Kidman's prosthetic nose in The
Hours, Simpson will sport gigantic rubber Dumbo ears.
Today, dwarfed by a masculine leather couch in her new living room and dressed
in faded jeans with holes and a red turtleneck sweater with deer embroidered
across her chest, Simpson looks less like a Barbie pinup than a sugary down-home
girl, all smiles, "you knows" and hugs. Her four-carat engagement ring
has been replaced with simple silver bands on her index fingers and thumb, and
the only remnants of her vampy Jessica Rabbit persona of old are the high-heeled
Miu Miu boots on her feet.
In Santa Fe, Simpson plans to regroup and, she says, "cleanse." For
the most part, this seems to involve giving up alcohol and caffeine and going
for a lot of hikes. She's also prying her fingers away from her Sidekick,
primarily because she's sick of seeing herself clutching it in photographs.
It's not surprising that the girl needs a rest; she's been striving for stardom
since the age of 12, when she made a failed bid to join Britney Spears and
Christina Aguilera on The All New Mickey Mouse Club. Five years later,
Simpson signed a record deal with Sony and has released five albums to date.
After the success of Newlyweds, she made the transition to the big
screen, starring as Daisy Duke in the widely panned film version of The Dukes
of Hazzard. It was during filming that sources began to whisper about an
affair between Simpson and her costar Johnny Knoxville. "I can't save
anything from being talked about," she says, when asked if there's any
truth to that rumor, "because then it becomes this game, and it's not a fun
game. It's so cruel and I just try not to let it affect me, whatever everybody
was thinking about me. If I did, I don't think I'd be here right now."
Simpson's father, Joe—who always seems altogether too comfortable discussing
his daughter's sex life and ample bust size—continues to orchestrate her
career, including serving as a producer on Employee of the Month, but for
most of her stay in Santa Fe, he and Jessica's mother, Tina, will be nowhere in
sight. "Now that they're busy with managing Ashlee too," Cobb says,
referring to Simpson's younger sister, "Jess isn't the focus of
everything." Though Simpson insists that "my family is my life and
I'll never lose that," she says she wants to spend more time alone,
concentrating on "the stuff that I never really got a chance to focus
on." Still, her conversations continually drift to her relationship with
Lachey. She claims she talks to him every few days and that he's
"absolutely" one of her best friends. One week later, however, when
asked about news reports that Lachey plans to seek spousal support from Simpson,
who far outearns him, she decides she doesn't want to talk about the divorce
anymore.
Even in Santa Fe, before the latest round of rumors, she is vague about why, if
the two are on such good terms, she walked away from the marriage. She makes her
decision sound like the first step toward growing up and taking charge of her
own life. "I don't know what happened to me," she says. "It's so
strange. I'm just proud of allowing myself to think and to act and to be.
"I never wanted to let anybody down," she continues, hugging a pillow.
"I didn't want to let my fans down, my family down. But then you just have
to realize that if you're not happy, you can't make anybody else happy. When you
walk away from something and there's no gravitational pull, then you know you're
doing the right thing."
Her mother, a devout Christian who has often extolled the sanctity of marriage,
actually seems proud of her daughter for leaving the relationship. "It took
a lot of strength to know what she wanted to do and divorce Nick," says
Tina. "For any person, it's a difficult thing to do. But I always tell my
girls to trust their instincts because women have an innate sense of
things."
On her own, Simpson is learning to take care of herself, which has many of her
intimates breathing a sigh of relief. "It worried me because she was this
naive little wife who never went to college and didn't have any friends and only
knew her parents," says Cobb. (Despite stories of the two being childhood
friends, Cobb only got to know Simpson two years ago when she was working at
Sony.) "But she's growing up. Now she's a woman."
And a one-woman empire, at that. Simpson made a reported $35 million last year.
This spring she will continue to expand her Jessica Simpson Collection clothing
and accessories line as well as her beauty brand, Dessert. But those require
minimal involvement on her part, and she sounds less ambitious than she used to
when discussing other areas of her career. She may do another film, but she's
not interested in being the lead. "I'm not ready to carry the weight of a
movie," she says. "That's like going out on a huge tour when you're a
new artist and having the pressure to sell the tickets. That's why we all start
out as opening acts."
And, though contractually she owes Sony at least three more records, she's even
less committed to recording another album. In fact, she sounds ready to walk
away from the industry altogether. "Music will always be my No. 1 passion,
but I don't have to be doing it professionally," she says. "It's not
really about that for me anymore. I feel like I don't have to look at it as a
career. I can just rest in it and just be."
According to Cobb, this laid-back attitude is what has allowed Simpson to
withstand the pressures of stardom. "She never gets overwhelmed," Cobb
says. "The house could be burning down and Jess would just say, 'Well,
where do we go now?'"
What interests Simpson most these days is, believe it or not, writing poetry.
"I know that I'm good at it," she says. Since age 11, she's been
keeping a diary and feels that the time is right to publish her innermost
thoughts, favorite quotes and musings on life. "It's a piece of my heart
that I want to share with my fans," she says. The fact that revealing her
private diary is precisely the sort of public intrusion that Simpson says she
disliked most about doing Newlyweds—"I always felt like I had to
share everything with everybody"—seems to be lost on her.
At least for the time being, her new home is her focus. Just weeks after filing
for divorce, Simpson signed the contract on a $3 million estate in Beverly
Hills. She refers to it as her "Hansel and Gretel house" because of
its gingerbread style. "I love this house so much, and I think it loves me
too," she says. "I used to be a scaredy-cat. If Nick was out of town,
I'd always go stay at a friend's house or my parents'. I never wanted to be
alone. But now I crave being alone. No matter how much money I make, I want to
be in this house for the rest of my life."
She's left most of her furniture behind at the house she shared with Lachey in
Calabasas, California, which was featured on Newlyweds and has since been
sold. As opposed to the Simpson of a year ago, who would have called a decorator
and said she needed the place done in four weeks—sight unseen—the new,
self-possessed Jessica is determined to decorate her home herself. So far, she's
got a rocking chair and a flower box made out of a white picket fence, both of
which she found in January when she rented a bus and spent eight days antiquing
on the Northern California coast. Simpson brought along a few friends, including
hairdresser Ken Paves and her sweater-wearing Maltipoo, Daisy. "I've
realized," she says, "that if it doesn't have heart, it's not worth
having."
"The Simpson" by Whitney McNally has been edited for Style.com; the
complete story appears in the April 2006 issue of W.
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