astrocamel

Portrait of a Living Doll

Dumb blonde or savvy businesswoman? You make the call

By Vanessa Grigoriadis

When there are five or six people crammed into your relatively small hotel room, it's common to pick up your underpants off the floor. But in the bathroom of this burgundy junior suite in midtown Manhattan, a pair of blue lace panties are crumpled almost under the heel of Jessica Simpson. Simpson, who is being tended to by fawning stylists, publicists and hair-extension experts, flicks a French-manicured nail over a fleck of mascara on her temple, the only blemish on a disturbingly perfect face. Then, in her drowsy, cat-in-the-sun-like way, she turns and looks for -- well, who she always looks for.

"Nick," she coos, training her coffee-colored eyes on her husband, Nick Lachey, who is intent on a ballgame and exhibits no sign that he has heard his name. "Nick, baby?" says Simpson. "Will you iron mah new shirt?"

"No," answers Lachey, in a typical knee-jerk bit of sarcasm, but just a minute later -- whipped mofo that he is -- he rises from the couch to retrieve the iron from a closet. As he walks to the bedroom, the cord slithers behind him and retracts with a sudden shump.

"That's a nifty little iron," says Simpson, smiling.

"All irons do that," declares Lachey. "It's not a new feature, my dear." He takes Simpson's new Gucci shirt, a black button-down, off its hanger. A price tag dangles from the collar.

"Two hundred and thirty-eight dollars!" exclaims Lachey.

"Just steam it," says Simpson.

"It's a fucking shirt!" he yells.

"I didn't buy it with your credit card!" cries Simpson. "I had budget, so why not? Record company gives you money for clothes, why not take it?"

"Mmm," grumbles Lachey. "They don't give me money."

With a relationship that is uncannily similar in real life to what you see on Newlyweds, their hit reality show on MTV, Simpson, 23, and Lachey, 29, seem alternately like a girl and her dad, a young couple working out the kinks and two people who should never have gotten married -- and probably wouldn't have, except that Simpson wouldn't have sex with Lachey until they did. Part of the reason that the show is a hit -- despite the fact that MTV did not have high expectations for it initially -- is because it's so hard to figure out whether Simpson is the most annoying person in the world and Lachey a saint for putting up with her or if Simpson is too much of a sweetheart for her own good and Lachey a hostile bastard who likes making fun of his wife. Then there's the schadenfreude of Simpson's nearly constant gaffes. Like, most famously, when she thought that Chicken of the Sea tuna is not tuna but, rather, chicken.

"My confusion there was that I hate fish," says Simpson. "But I love tuna, and there was a half of a second there where I thought maybe it could be chicken. 'Cause I liked it, and I don't like fish. Unless it's from Long John Silver's and deep-fried."

Tonight Simpson and Lachey are going on Larry King Live, the event for which the Gucci shirt was purchased. But now, though, they are late, and Simpson is no longer sure about the shirt. "Should I wear different clothes?" she asks anxiously.

"You look beautiful, baby," says Lachey.

"But should I wear different shoes?" asks Simpson, stamping a rhinestone Jimmy Choo. "I don't like my outfit!"

"C'mon, you're gorgeous," says Lachey. The publicists and stylists let loose with a flurry of accolades: "You're too beautiful for words," "What an outfit," "Who's prettier than you, Jessica?"

"I might smell bad," says Simpson.

"And this is different from other days how?" says Lachey, laughing.

"Nick!" exclaims Simpson. Then she throws her arms around his neck. "You know you think I smell scrumptious," she whispers, drawing him close. He puts a hand on her cheek, softly, and gives her a light kiss.

Before the premiere of "Newlyweds," in mid-August, Jessica Simpson was primarily known as the teen-pop star who was a virgin and wasn't Britney Spears, though she kind of looked like her. Four years ago, she sold almost a million units of her first single, "I Wanna Love You Forever," but it has been a downward slide since then. Though her first album, Sweet Kisses (1999), sold close to 2 million copies, her next efforts, Irresistible (2001) and In This Skin (2003) -- all a similar-sounding mix of passionate love ballads and junior-prom dance rock -- haven't done nearly as well.

In some ways, Simpson is as daft as she seems on the show, but she's also far savvier about her career and the nature of the record industry than one would think. "Everyone was always like, 'Who's Jessica Simpson?' 'Oh, she's like Britney and Christina,' " says Simpson. "It was so hard on me. Plus, I never had my own thing happening, so I felt like I had to do what they did, like, I had to show my stomach and dance. But that's not me. My dream is to be like Jewel, to sit on a chair in my bluejeans and sing my heart out."

What mostly differentiated Simpson from the teen-pop pack was her pledge of abstinence, made at a time when Britney Spears was saying the same thing but no one quite believed her. Simpson sold it, though. After all, she was a minister's daughter, a poor kid who moved seven times before she was eight as her father, Joe, sought work as a youth minister and therapist for abused kids in Baptist parishes around Dallas.

The Simpson home was open to any needy child in the neighborhood, so that in addition to Simpson and her younger sister Ashlee (who now plays Cecilia on the WB's 7th Heaven and recently began recording a rock album for Geffen Records), there were often other kids at the table -- an at-risk adolescent, a pregnant teen. Jessica herself, raised in this gospel of giving, says she loved nothing more than performing selfless acts of devotion -- as a child, she kept twenty-odd photos of missing children under her pillow, praying for them each night. When she was sixteen she tried to adopt a Mexican baby found in a Dumpster. (It's unclear, however, when she stopped picking up her towels from the floor.) Even today, Simpson remains involved in charity as international ambassador for Operation Smile, a reconstructive-surgery nonprofit. "With all the heartache in life, it changes a life to smile," she says. "And they don't even know it, because they don't know what we have."

At any rate, holding off from sex until marriage was just how Simpson was raised. On her twelfth birthday, her father gave her a purity ring, a silver band with a cross, to be replaced on her wedding day. "I told her that I would try my best to be the man in her life," says Joe Simpson, in a cadence eerily similar to a marriage vow. "That I would be her support and her security, that I would encourage her and worship her and fill her up until she found the man of her dreams."

What Simpson's father didn't specify was what role he would play once she found that man, namely Lachey, whom Simpson started dating when she was eighteen and married last fall. ("Nick was the first person to touch my body," says Simpson, gesturing from her neck downward, then making a swirling motion around her pelvic region. "Swear.") He was twenty-five, and she was, obviously, a very innocent eighteen, but they bonded over their third-class status in the music business: His group 98 Degrees found itself playing catch-up to the Backstreet Boys and 'NSync (the band is currently on hiatus; Lachey will release his first solo album, SoulO, in November). "So Nick and I really are a match made in heaven, because we understand each other," says Simpson.

But even after marriage, Simpson's life, which has been almost inhumanely sheltered, remains tightly interwoven with her parents'. Her father is her manager (he also has final cut on every episode of Newlyweds), and her mother, Tina, is her "best friend" and stylist. In their midforties, neither is the conventional church type -- Simpson's mom even talked her dad into getting an earring a couple of years back, and his hair is lightened to the same vibrant blond as Jessica's. One of them travels with her often, since she is afraid to get on a plane alone. When Lachey is not at home, she bunks at her parents', in Los Angeles' Studio City, forty minutes away. "We're Southern, and we're spiritual, and we're really close," says Joe, who didn't even have a problem commenting on Simpson and Lachey's sex life on Newlyweds.

"I think it's weird," says Lachey.

(Excerpted from RS 936, November 27, 2003)

Quinn

She looks ... I didn't read the article because I want to read it when I get the issue. But yeah, she looks kinda...

__________________
Kristen Bell



the meaning of life will come in a dream,
this is why we must never go to sleep

Wdnesday

Uh, dude, she's like Britney now. Posing in her underwear.

Starshine

Meh..

just.. meh..

SweetObScene

hehe what a cruel joke.

Starshine

Nice Swiffer Wet Jet ad, right on the cover too.. lol

BeBritney

LMAO

Like, oh my gawd! Can we say "hypocrite"? Teehee.

But I forgot, since she's married and can now have sex, she can BE sexual and risqué. SHE'S CELEBRATING AND HER PARENTS ARE CELEBRATING WITH HER (according to her daddy). Whoops.

Edit: OMFG JOHN MAYER <333333333

GrgotSlave

She looks pretty weird. I dunno, she looks really weird in that picture, posing in her underwear. But it is RollingStone so they had to find a way to make it look a litty sluttish.

dave_ea

what a copy cat....it looks like how britney posed for esquire

FantaOrSprite

That Picture is just horrible..her face looks..eh...The interviewer is really being sarcastic in this interview and making her out to sound like a bitch...interesting read though..can't wait for my rolling stone to come in..is it in the next one???