I’d get quiet, take another sip of alcohol, then another, and wonder why I couldn’t just sit on a couch with him without getting so anxious. I even asked one of my girlfriends who knew him for advice just based on her speaking to him. It was the start of a bad habit: asking people who were not dating John how to date John.
“You have to be a strong person to make a contribution in the conversation,” she said. “You can talk to him about anything because he just wants to learn about stuff. You don’t have to just talk about what you think he wants to talk about.”
So I spoke about what mattered most to me, and what I was most confident in: my faith. He found it fascinating but of course would challenge me on what I believed. I think he envied that steadfastness, because it was one of the few things in life he couldn’t quite figure out.
But I could only do that so much. My anxiety would soon take over, and because I am such a sensual person, my solution was just to give him love. The mix of sex and love was the easy part, because I had plenty of both to give.
We were able to see each other in secret throughout the summer and the start of my campaign to promote my album A Public Affair. As opposed to Nick, I wrote a fun album, an eighties radio throwback that was an ode to freedom. Not one single song was about him, even though people assumed the cover I did of Patty Griffin’s “Let Him Fly” was directed at him. It was my way of assuring myself that I needed to let go of Johnny Knoxville. I was proud that I had writing credits on ten out of the thirteen songs. The first single was “A Public Affair,” and when it came out June 29, Billboard called the first single “a perfect record.” It did fine numbers, but it was clear when I tried to promote the record that people weren’t ready to see me so happy after my divorce.
The album came out August 26, a month before John’s release of his album, Continuum. I got the highest first week sales of my career, but the numbers fell a lot immediately. That album was never going to do as well as In This Skin. Still, I was excited that John and I had albums coming out around the same time. We loved that we had this amazing secret we had kept.
And then we didn’t have it. The week of my release someone from my team broke the story to the tabloids. Coming just a week after my album came out, it looked like a full-on, amateur stunt orchestrated to sell both our albums. I fired the person. John was worried he seemed in on it and felt that his artistic integrity was in jeopardy.
I was in New York, and he exploded on me, breaking up with me over email. On August 31, he posted the cover of Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype” on his blog as his response to the media. I was humiliated and thought he was out of my life for good. He wasn’t.
Still, I was trapped in the middle of promoting an album. I had hired a new PR agency and clicked with Lauren Auslander, who would later become one of my best friends. She was my age and understood what I was going through. I was lucky to have her with me in that tough time. The initial conversations with reporters were already a pretense to get to their “What about Nick?” questions, and now I had to play dumb when asked about John out of respect for him, too. I didn’t lie, I just said he was a musician I truly respected and that I had known a few years. I left out that he had put me on a pedestal and kicked it over on his way out the door.
There was one bright spot: the breakup was right before the MTV Video Music Awards, and one day I was in a VMA swag suite at New York’s Bryant Park Hotel. A swag suite is where they give celebrities things they didn’t need so they will become walking advertisements for products. I won a silver 2007 Chrysler Crossfire luxury sports car, a two-seater paparazzi magnet. I wasn’t really surprised, since of all the celebrities there, I was the one most likely to have a photo with a car featured in the tabloids.
Maybe because I was so depressed, I wanted to make something good happen. I had stayed in touch with the Casa Holgar Elim orphanage, which I’d first visited nine years before. With the money I’d made, I was able to help Mama Lupita make the place a comfortable home for the kids. Not just running water and electricity, but basketball courts and vans to take the kids to school. Doing my part helped me realize that I was blessed and reminded me that God had given me this grace. I didn’t take it for granted.
It seemed ludicrous that I was getting a free car now. I also knew that the week before, Mama Lupita’s van had broken down, and now she was using a beat-up old truck. I dutifully took photos with the car outside, giving the camera a look of shock as I held the key fob. When it was done, I motioned to the Chrysler rep as I took off my sunglasses.
“Um, is it okay if I swap this for a minivan instead?” I whispered.
She looked at my stomach. “Why would you need a minivan?”
“I’m not pregnant,” I said, rolling my eyes. “It would just work better for me.”
They gave me a white seven-passenger Chrysler Town & Country, which I later drove through the gates of the orphanage to hand the keys to Mama Lupita. The kids knew I was coming and had saved up money selling bracelets and necklaces so they could have a mariachi band greet me. Everyone was in clean red T-shirts, except for a few of the tinier girls, who had brightly colored dresses on. I lifted one girl when she hugged me, and we danced around to the music.
I was truly happy, and at least for that moment, no man could take that from me.
17
Desire and Possession
September 2006
I had planned everything. The “I Belong to Me” video was going to be my way of introducing my fans to me as a grown, single woman. It’s a ballad by Diane Warren, and there was a lot of pressure to make the video about Nick, but I resisted. Instead, I chose to show people my new life. I wanted the video to open with me on a mattress on the floor, just like I had had at my new house. Then I went to the mirror and cut my own hair, taking a cuticle scissors to give myself a jagged bob. When I washed the makeup off my face, so I could look myself, and my fans, in the eye, I cried real tears on that set, surprising everyone. I said good-bye to the old me, to the hopes I had for Nick, Johnny, and John, and just embraced Jessica.
I was very proud of it, but people weren’t ready to hear “I Belong to Me.” They thought it should have been, “I Belong to Nick.” I didn’t anticipate so many people being mad at me, but my real fans stayed true, and could see my heart. I broke a blood vessel in my throat before a round of live morning shows, so I couldn’t even count on my voice, but they got me through. “I’m sorry,” I told them over and over again. I was apologizing about my voice, but so much more. I was so sorry that I had let them down.
It was bad timing for A Public Affair, an album I genuinely loved, so I relied on my girlfriends. At the end of September, my new assistant Adrienne and I planned a girls’ trip to London to see my sister Ashlee in her West End debut in Chicago. Adrienne is good company, direct and funny, and basically took the job as a lark. She grew up with family money, so she wasn’t impressed by any of the trappings of my life. We’d go shopping and she’d leave with more bags than me. Which takes doing, I’ll tell you.
We had a few days to hang out in London before seeing Ashlee’s debut, and we had the best time. When I was in L.A., even when I wasn’t photographed, I was watched. There were still lots of paparazzi in London, but less people cared about taking note of what I was eating in a restaurant. The British public just let me be. Ashlee had only been in town about two weeks, but she already had this cute apartment and whole new life in London. She seemed so grown up, and I was again struck by how she always had the life that she wanted, and on her terms.
I know I irritated Adrienne because I kept finding ways to bring the conversation back to John. I kept seeing signs and spooky-spiritual things that would make me think of him. I would see a white feather and ask Adrienne what it meant. Oh, Lord.
We were at our hotel one day and I went out on the balcony to look down at the London streets. I saw someone staring up at me, but I was too high up to make out his face. His hair was wild and curly, like I pictured
Romeo.
“Adrienne,” I yelled. “Is John in London?”
“What?” she said. I didn’t have to say Mayer. He was always John.
I turned inside to get her to look. “I swear I just saw him,” I said.
“No way. You are crazy. Bonkers.”
I looked down again and he was gone. I did feel crazy. I still hear myself now, too, and wonder if I imagined it. But John had a gift for showing up out of nowhere.
Sure enough, the next night we went to a small party with Ashlee, and John was there. I didn’t have the nerve to ask him if he was outside my hotel, because I knew how it would sound. He came over and started riffing with me, and that’s all it took. I was hooked again. That he even talked to me was a relief, and that he wanted to be with me that night felt like I was released from solitary.
It was on that trip that I felt the full intensity of his obsession with me. And it was a drug to me. He studied every inch of my body, every detail of my face. He photographed me constantly, to the point that I worried he was keeping souvenirs before dumping me again. He was only in London briefly, and when he flew out we stayed in touch. Our secret was safe again.
I was on a high from being with him when I went to see Ashlee onstage, and she was amazing. As soon as she made her entrance, I started crying with pride. Ashlee had become a pop star, but this felt like it was in her heart. I loved that little girl who sang her heart out to Phantom of the Opera and Les Miz, but now she was a woman playing London’s West End. Someone I didn’t know but wanted to get to know. I thought about all the times she had been my backup dancer, when I was too busy performing to look back and admire what a star she already was.
“You were shining even brighter than the lights on the stage,” I told her backstage. She smiled and started to look away, but I wouldn’t let her. “I always knew you were so talented, but to own that stage is such a gift. It was your stage tonight, Ash.”
We looked at each other for a long beat, and so much that was unspoken was released. She started to tear up, this girl who was always so tough. Who’d protected me all those years even though she didn’t realize she needed to. I started crying again, and then laughed at myself for being so sentimental. There’s something wonderful about rediscovering each other as sisters, when you’re in your twenties. You have more perspective. That night, I was able to let go of a lot of the guilt I had about her missing high school to join me on the road. She was living the artistic life she was destined to have.
Ashlee had to leave to do an on-camera interview with a U.K. show backstage, and they wanted me to join in. I looked at her, not wanting to steal her spotlight, but she nodded. My face was swollen from crying so much, but I didn’t care. I wanted to make sure people knew how proud I was of her.
We started waving our fingers at our faces to dry the tears. We Simpson girls, always ready to be on.
IT WAS TWO MONTHS LATER, LATE NOVEMBER, AND JOHN HAD ALREADY broken up with me again at least once. Honestly, he did it so many times I lost track. Always in an email.
Sometimes it was out of the blue, other times I knew it was coming, because my light would start to go dim. John loved me when I was shining, and he drew strength and inspiration to write from that light. He would grill me about my life, asking me questions about the men I had been with and the choices I had made. When he tapped me dry, he looked at me like I was withholding something from him. He would tell me that my true self was so much greater than the person I was settling on being. Like there was some great woman inside of me waiting to come out, and I had to hurry up and find her because he wanted to love that woman, not me.
He’d dump me, then come back saying he had discovered he loved me after all. I always saw it as him mercifully taking me in from the cold. Every time John returned, I thought it was a continuation of a love story, while my friends saw a guy coming back for sex with some foolish girl.
One of those times, I wrote him a gushing letter thanking him for realizing I was worthy of love, and it breaks my heart to see how I practiced the wording in my journal: “I promise to be myself as I search to become the woman you already see.”
I can’t even believe the acrobatics of promising to remain true to your own self while becoming the person someone wants you to be. I had gone from trying to find that woman for me, and now I had to be that woman for John. Only he could deem when I had made it. He had that kind of hold on me.
He said a lot of our breakups were about me drinking and not being present for him, which was not, I would only find out much later, the full truth. But I took him at his word about his motivations, and that’s why I always went back. It was my fault, and if he forgave me, that was all that mattered. Or at least he made me feel like everything was my fault. He has since admitted that he has abused the ability to express himself. I had always prided myself on being smarter than everyone thought I was. For a long time, he took that from me. He made me feel dumb. I stopped understanding what was real and what was in my head.
I was so afraid of disappointing him that I couldn’t even text him without having someone check my grammar and spelling. This drove my mother nuts. “That is a terrible relationship,” she said, “if you have to be scared you misspelled something.”
Because we were so often long-distance, our relationship was often over text. I treated even the most basic texts from John as make-or-break riddles to solve. If he was annoyed with me, I would invest hours decoding a basic fact, trying to find the poetry so I could respond accordingly. Did it mean we were over? Was I supposed to stand up for myself? My anxiety would spike, and I would pour another drink. It was the start of me relying on alcohol to mask my nerves. After overanalyzing his text, I would write back paragraphs of tortured words, and hand it to Adrienne to proofread.
“Jess, you don’t need to send all this,” she said to me once when we were in a car heading to an appearance. “Don’t.”
“Then what should I say?”
She deleted the paragraphs I’d written, wrote one word in two seconds and handed it back to me.
I looked down. “Just say ‘Sorry’ ”?
She nodded, and I sent it. Minutes later, I heard a ping and braced myself.
“Thank you,” he wrote.
That was all he needed to hear. So, I took responsibility for my actions. But I also got to a point where I overintellectualized everything he said, because I felt I was not intellectual enough for him. All he really wanted was me to be myself. But I didn’t know who that was for him, or for me at that point. Some of my friends say I can’t blame him because I handed him this power.
I don’t know. Did he repeatedly stab me in the heart, or did I just keep running into the knife he aimed at me?
18
They Let You Dream Just to Watch ’Em Shatter
December 2006
I was in my suite at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington, DC, out of my gown after a State Department dinner hosted by Condoleezza Rice the night before the Kennedy Center Honors. Steven Spielberg, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Smokey Robinson were among the honorees, and of course Dolly Parton. The next night, I would be onstage at the Kennedy Center, one of the lucky performers chosen to sing in tribute to Dolly.
She’s my idol. The queen of one-liners, she’s the deepest of people, but can find the light in anything to make that depth hilarious. Steel Magnolias is everything to me, and I knew her version of “I Will Always Love You” before I knew Whitney’s. But I felt closest to her as a fan during my divorce, listening to her song “Little Sparrow” over and over. It’s a song about the fragility of hope, and how it can be crushed by men. Her vocal on that is astonishing, and I bet she did it in one take.
The concert would be taped to air on CBS later in the month, and I got to sing “9 to 5.” I thought I was ready, having rehearsed many times on-set in Shreveport, Louisiana, where I was shooting Blonde Ambition, a Working Girl redo with Luke Wilson. Between scenes, I wasted time in my trailer fighting with John on the ph
one or over email. He would accuse me of making a fight out of everything, but there were times he would bring up someone from my past just to have something to be jealous about. I stopped journaling, because my self-esteem was so low that I thought anything I wrote was stupid.
I lost focus on my work, which was obvious, at least to me if not everyone else, when the director’s aunt, Penny Marshall, came to the set to do a cameo. It was a huge opportunity to impress a film legend. Penny Marshall had directed Big and A League of Their Own. Plus, her brother Garry had directed Pretty Woman and a million other romantic comedies. This was the family to impress, a chance to prove myself to someone with unbelievable connections in the industry. The old Jessica would have been right there, ready to be their Goldie Hawn or Bridget Bardot, whatever their scripts called for. Penny and I had one scene together, and I needed more than a few takes. I should have nailed it. I told everyone, including myself, that I was just intimidated, but really, I hadn’t fully prepared. Still, I got by. No one ever said a word.
And now I was in DC, out of my gown and ready to check my email. My plan that night was to get to bed early, and instead I was soon on the floor, crying.
John had broken up with me via email, again. He’d followed it up by sending me a song. Aerosmith’s “Angel,” a twenty-year-old message in a bottle that I wasted near about the entire night trying to decode. It’s about begging someone to save them with their love, which is exactly what I always wanted to do for John. It was so high school, I know, this notion that the secretly deep cheerleader was going to save the hot band geek from the path of destruction he had put himself on, but that was the kind of roles we played over and over in our relationship. It was the usual complicated word problems of dating John: If a tortured artist hurls a nasty email at 10 p.m. and then a love song at 11:20, are you up or down?
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