Queen of the Boob Tube

The one aspect of Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson’s relationship not adequately conveyed by their MTV reality show, Newlyweds, is the amount of time he spends with his hands on her ass. There are the playful spanks, the little squeezes and the popular long-term resting of palm on cheek. “I mean, I’m married to her,” says Lachey in his polite, Everydude way. “I think for any newlyweds it’s all about the excitement of moving into a new house and, like, christening every room. That’s the fun of being a newlywed.”

Lachey, 30, is sitting with his missus and their entourage in the back of a 36-foot white Hummer limousine on the way to a promotional Christmas concert for KISS-FM in Dallas, Simpson’s hometown. She is wearing gray jeans with huge cuffs that stop just above her bright pink patent-leather pumps. Her lips shine with a matching pink gloss, and her blond head glows from the limo’s flashing neon interior lights, which cast little lightning bolts and waves on the vehicle’s walls. She perky, he hunky, they’re the king and queen in their prom-mobile.

Simpson, 23, answers her cellphone and chats with her father and manager, Joe Simpson, about her new single, “With You.” “He says it’s the number 1 most-played song in Los Angeles,” she tells her posse, and snaps the phone shut.

“That’s awesome, baby,” Lachey says, and pats her as close as he can get to her rump. “And you wrote it!”

“I love that the one single off my record that I didn’t write bombed,” Simpson says with a little venom in her voice, referring to the less successful “Sweetest Sin.” But then she remembers the rolling MTV camera and the scribbling Blender reporter simultaneously recording her every word and deed, and she shifts back to the sweet, infantile gal you know from Newlyweds. “It’s kind of a ‘nanny-nanny-poo-poo.’”

Lachey gives a little snort. “Yeah, I really love that my single bombed,” he says in the disgruntled, sarcastic manner fans know he reserves for commentary on the superior treatment his wife receives from the music industry.

“It did not bomb, baby,” Simpson says. Then: “I like your Nikes. They match your shirt perfectly.”

“Thanks, babe,” he says. “I put it together myself.”

“I know you did,” she says, “baby.”

As is often the case on tour, Simpson has her best friend since fifth grade, Stephanie Maguire, with her tonight. Maguire is the only one in the car who has been following the other big reality television series of the season, The Simple Life. “They’re comparing you to Paris Hilton!” Maguire reports. “They’re saying now you don’t have to worry because she’s dumber than you are! That’s what they said — they said dumb — that you were dumb.”

Simpson doesn’t much seem to care. She has her husband to her left and her MTV boom mic to her right, and her tour manager is handing her a cellphone with a call from InStyle magazine. “Always having a little bit of color makes everybody feel better about themselves,” she tells the InStyle reporter with conviction. “Oh, I think smoky eyes always make a woman feel sexy.”

“Jessica’s the first person who ever put makeup on me,” Maguire says enthusiastically. “She’s the first person who ever did my nails. When I had a school dance, I’d go over to her house and she’d dress me up and do my hair and my makeup and send me on my way. If she didn’t sing, she would have gone to cosmetology school. For sure.”

The Hummer approaches its destination, Dallas’s NextStage Arena. “Is this where Chuck Norris filmed Walker, Texas Ranger?” Simpson asks. “Wasn’t he, like, a CIA agent?”

“Um, maybe he’s, like, a Texas Ranger?” Lachey says, and everyone laughs.

“Sorry,” Simpson says in a baby voice.

“It’s not Walker, Texas CIA Agent,” Lachey says.

“I got it.”

Simpson has grown accustomed to mockery from her husband and the rest of the country. A few nights later, she and Lachey will be among the hosts — but not the performers — at the Billboard Music Awards, and he will read from the TelePrompTer, “Is Paris Hilton gonna unseat you as the princess of reality TV?” Simpson, with smoky eyes and faux oblivion, will reply, “Who’s Paris Hilton?” She is well aware that the joke is on her — and that the joke is her meal ticket. “They home in on my ditzy side, and that’s cool with me,” she says. “I’m cool with being a ditz. The thing I’ve learned is, it pays off to be myself — letting my guard down, letting them totally into my life.” She motions with her chin toward the MTV crew. “To have success while being yourself…that’s the best kind of success you can have.”


The level of celebrity both Simpson and Lachey enjoyed before Newlyweds chronicled the first year of their marriage was strictly the C-list kind. She was the blond teen singer behind Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera in the pop pecking order; he was in the boy band 98 Degrees, behind the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync. Simpson’s 1999 debut, Sweet Kisses, sold a promising 1.8 million copies, but her 2001 follow-up, Irresistible, slipped to 637,000 sold, and her latest, In This Skin, has fared similarly, selling a disappointing 335,000 copies since its release this past fall.

Record sales tell only part of the story, though. Since its premiere in August, Newlyweds has become MTV’s most talked-about show since The Osbournes. Over the course of a mere 10 episodes and five months, the Simpson-Lacheys have gone from teen-pop also-rans to legitimately famous, albeit reality-TV famous instead of musician famous: They’re the Trista and Ryan of pop.

“I never knew that just doing the show would give me that pedestal to step on,” Simpson says. She’s inside her meager dressing room in the arena. She is an extremely pretty girl: all flawless golden skin, huge white teeth and silky hair. But she is not otherworldly in the manner of many female celebrities who look as if they’re members of a different, leaner, longer-limbed species of humanoid. In stature (five-foot-four), sartorial preference (sweats) and demeanor (earnest), Simpson is more head cheerleader than rock star: pretty and perky and accessible and, yes, a bit of an airhead. It is this persona that has made her famous in a way her songs could not. “Now there’s nobody you can compare me to,” she says. “Now I’m not in the same sentence as Britney and Christina — which was a lifelong thing.”

Simpson first met — and competed against — Spears and Aguilera at auditions for The Mickey Mouse Club when all three aspiring performers were preteens. Simpson had beat out 30,000 others with her performance of “Amazing Grace” and a peppy little dance routine to “Ice Ice Baby.”

“But right before my audition, Christina went on,” Simpson remembers. “I’d never heard anybody sing like that. I mean, I’d heard Mariah Carey sing like that when I listened to her on my headset, but just living in Texas, singing in my church and hearing other people, you know, attempt singing, that’s all I heard. So all of a sudden this voice just blew me out of the water. When I didn’t land the Mouseketeer part, I thought my life was over! But my parents encouraged me to keep going. Because right then I just wanted to go be a schoolteacher!” She laughs.

Her mother, Tina, was at that time a Sunday-school teacher. Ever since she and Simpson’s father became convinced of their daughter’s talent, however, Tina has been her full-time stylist and Joe has given up his job as a Baptist minister to become her manager. “We told Jessica, ‘Baby, you’re gonna meet that girl somewhere in life,’ ” Joe Simpson says. “That girl was Christina, and obviously we did. We put Jessica in voice lessons and started going after our market — the Christian market — very aggressively.”

But despite Joe’s Southern Baptist connections, it was not to be. “In the Christian market she was considered a problem, because she was so voluptuous,” he says. “People would say, ‘Our girls are having self-esteem problems after seeing Jessica sing!’ It was painful for Jessica, because she was so beautiful and she had never done anything wrong in her whole entire life, but here she was getting rejected all the time…by my friends!”

The Simpsons moved on to pop music, where Jessica’s prematurely developed physique was not exactly a liability. By the time she turned 17, she had landed a deal with Columbia Records. “Jessica is sexy in a T-shirt or sexy in a bikini; you really can’t stop her from being sexy, because that’s who she is,” says her father, sounding more managerial than paternal.

The same year she flubbed the Mickey Mouse Club audition, Simpson received a “promise ring” from her father, which she would wear as evidence of her chastity and her symbolic marriage to Jesus until it was replaced by a ring from her husband. “We all had one,” best friend Maguire says. “Joe was our minister, and he would talk about abstinence and how beautiful your body is and how it could be a gift to someone. None of us were having sex. Our best friends were the popular people. Jessica was a cheerleader, the guys were football players — like, the top guys in our school — and we all went to church together. If everyone around you isn’t having sex, and you’re the one who is, you wouldn’t fit in. It’s like reverse peer pressure.”

Still, after Simpson left the church choir in Dallas for pop stardom in Los Angeles, maintaining her virginity required fortitude. “When Nick came into my life, it was a challenge — like, ‘I can’t go back now!’ ” Simpson says. “‘I’ve come this far; I can make it!’ ” And by all accounts — including I Do: Achieving Your Dream Wedding, the book Simpson cowrote about her nuptials — she did exactly that.

“She waited for marriage, and now she’s happily married and having sex every day,” says her father. “Now she’s going crazy. And that’s cool.”

The confusing thing is that while both the professional and sexual paths Simpson has chosen to follow require enormous discipline, she seems to lack even the most basic sense of responsibility in day-to-day life. On Newlyweds, she has proven herself incapable of doing laundry, of reading price tags before inadvertently dropping $750 on underpants, of throwing out (that’s throwing out, not even taking out) garbage, of picking up a wet towel or a dirty shirt off the floor.

“We loved ’em to death, but we spoiled ’em to death,” Joe Simpson says. “Her mom didn’t particularly make the girls do chores, and one of the results is that Jessica never learned how. For our family, it’s more important to be together than to be clean and neat. A lot of people who have clean households maybe don’t have those relationships.”

If Newlyweds were a movie, little by little Lachey would triumph in his campaign of camping trips and handy household lessons, and transform his spoiled princess into a competent, considerate, fully functional adult. But this is reality television, and viewers demand not resolution but repetition.

“Newlyweds is sort of like I Love Lucy for this generation,” says Lois Curren, executive vice president of series and movie development for MTV. “The show is all about Jessica’s hopes and dreams and disasters, and when she says she’s accidentally spent $750 on a bra and panty set and Nick yells, ‘$750?’ at her, you can almost hear Ricky Ricardo yelling, ‘$750? Lu-ceeee!’”


“I just think it’ll last forever,” Simpson says of her success. “I believe in convincing yourself it’ll last forever, because that’s how you make it happen.”

At the moment, what’s happening is a lot. In December, Simpson will take scarcely a single day off for her schedule of promotional appearances and hostess gigs. In addition to Newlyweds, which returns for its second season in January, she is slated to have a sitcom airing this fall on ABC. “It’s a twist on a reality show; I’ll be in it as Jessica Simpson,” she says. “Basically, I’m really great in my life and in my friendships, but I’m a disaster at what I do.”

Since she infamously wondered aloud on air if the Chicken of the Sea tuna in her mouth was chicken or fish, Simpson has also been pursuing a position as a tuna spokeswoman. “The whole mermaid thing is still being figured out,” she says seriously, “but I will be with a tuna company. It might not be Chicken of the Sea; it might. Either way, I’m doing tuna somehow.”

In addition, keen-eyed fans will notice that Simpson has been spending a disproportionate amount of time around Swiffers cleaning products lately. One is featured prominently in her video for “With You,” and when Simpson was asked to pose for a magazine cover holding a generic mop, she refused. “I just love the Swiffer,” she says. “I really do. Because I always thought that mops had strings! And this one was just so easy. Plus we work with [Swiffer manufacturer] Procter & Gamble a lot; they do product placement on our show. But I really enjoy the Swiffer. What?”

Lachey is shaking his head and laughing. “As if you ever mop anything.”

“I’m never home!” she howls.

“What I’m trying to do…well, not trying to do, but what I’m encouraging her to do is to start to think for herself and just basically grow up and become the woman she’s gonna be,” Lachey says. “If she never cleans the toilet or whatever, I don’t give a shit about that. As far as picking up after yourself? Yeah. Hopefully one day that will happen.”

“But bay-bee,” she coos, “there’s only so much you can change a person’s personality.”

The couple is summoned to another room, where they sit and sign photographs for fans, mostly teenagers. One girl presents Simpson with a letter that says, “Your new CD is a big deal to me right now. I am with my first love and have all sorts of crazy and emotional feelings!” Another brings a can of Chicken of the Sea for Simpson to sign. Both are treated to her enormous, glowing white grin.

On their way to the stage, Simpson and Lachey stop to exchange pleasantries with fellow reality-TV personality Bob Guiney, a.k.a. the Bachelor, and then they walk onstage, hand in hand, to face a shrieking crowd of Texas teens. The newlyweds are here to introduce the group Black Eyed Peas — tonight, like more and more nights, they are working as entertainers, not singers — and they offer the audience a little of their trademark Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus back-and-forth. Lachey will later admit that he couldn’t think of what to do next, so he lifts his wife up over his shoulder and carries her, shouting, offstage, anchoring her weight with his hand on her bottom.