Twisted Sister

Just as it does in Disney movies, the sun almost always shines in SimpsonWorld. But here’s something a little dark. When she was 11, Ashlee Simpson hated her sister. While she never admits this in so many words, her actions back then spoke volumes. She resented Jessica’s elder status, the way her parents fawned over their firstborn’s dreams of pop stardom — often, Ashlee was convinced, at the expense of her own dreams. She felt inferior, awkward, left out. A popular girl at school in Waco, Texas, Jessica would regularly have friends over, banishing Ashlee to her bedroom upstairs.

But Ashlee was a combative force even as a preteen, and she liked nothing better than embarrassing her sister in front of her friends. And so, wearing only a bathrobe, she would stomp down to Jessica’s gathering, disrobe before everyone and play the guitar naked, all the while grinning like a lunatic.

“And you know what the funny thing was?” Ashlee says now, eyes wide. “The more Jessica begged me to stop, the more I tried to annoy her!”

You must really have loathed her.

“No, no, not at all. I was just, you know, having fun. I’ve always been kind of flamboyant.”

And, it transpires, rather fond of nudity. Five years earlier, her father, a minister, took her to his church for the first time. The young Ashlee arrived barefoot and strode up the aisle to the pulpit, then pulled her dress up over her head before performing a slow 360-degree pirouette. “I was like, ‘Here I am, naked and a complete mess! You’d all better accept me, because this is who I am!’”

The members of the congregation weren’t impressed. They never accepted Ashlee, considering her a little too weird and wild. But Ashlee didn’t care. She laughed then, and she laughs now.

It is at this point that you would expect her mother, Tina, sitting no more than three feet away, to offer some kind of rational explanation for her daughter’s wanton behavior. But no. Tina, who likes to describe herself as an unconventional parent, is laughing right along with her.

“If she wanted to show up in church in the shortest skirt imaginable — as long as it wasn’t indecent, of course — then good for her,” says the 44-year-old Tina brightly. “I didn’t care if she wanted to go to Mass in nothing but a pair of boots and a leotard. I always encouraged self-expression.”

“See,” Ashlee explains, “Jessica’s always been the quiet, conservative one. Me, I’m the artsy one, the girl in the tutu and the Converse sneakers, the girl with knots in her hair.”

She lifts her recently bleached black mop from her white porcelain shoulder for inspection. What do we see? Knots.

“There you go!” she says. “I’m pretty consistent, huh?”


Ashlee Simpson may claim not to have been adopted, but really, she has about as much in common with her sister as she does with 50 Cent. Where Jessica has clearly been designed by frat-boy scientists in pursuit of the perfect blonde — chocolate-drop eyes, shampoo-commercial hair, teeth that go on forever and a general air of compliance — Ashlee more resembles your archetypal Blink-182 fan (female variety). She’s smaller than Jessica, more compact. She doesn’t possess the same plunging cleavage or the halo of Stepford Wives effervescence, and where Jessica appears both innocent and clueless, Ashlee is fiery and comparatively smart. Their dress sense, also, is radically different: Jessica wouldn’t be seen dead in her sister’s ripped jeans, which are so baggy in the crotch that small animals could nest there with no one the wiser.

Professionally, though, the sisters do have similarities, and for this we can look to their father — and manager. It is Joe Simpson, 46, who takes credit for reinventing Jessica from a second-division Britney Spears into America’s reigning sweetheart. And it is Joe who decided that his second daughter could also benefit from the presence of an around-the-clock camera crew to help promote her album. For the past nine months, daughter number 2 has been filming her own MTV reality program. It is called, to prevent confusion, The Ashlee Simpson Show.

“I decided that this was the best way to launch her as her own person,” says Dad, a tall, bleached-blond hunk of a man who wears tight jeans and an even tighter shirt. “It solidifies her as a person, and it also launches her as a musician and an artist.” He peels back his lips in a wide smile to reveal Jessica’s perfect teeth. “You see where I’m coming from?”

The Ashlee Simpson Show, says its star, is a straightforward documentary series, nothing at all like her sister’s glitzier domestic soap opera, Newlyweds. Running for just 10 episodes, it features the 19-year-old in the process of writing and recording her debut album, Autobiography. That’s it, she says, nothing more. It’s all about the music.

“This show will run for one season only,” Ashlee insists. “Jessica may be happy having cameras in her life 24/7, but not me. It’s not natural; it ain’t healthy. I think a second series would drive me crazy.”

She laughs.

“I’m serious! This show is simply to introduce me and my album to the public. Once I’ve done that, that’s it. See ya!”


Ashlee’s album was produced and cowritten by John Shanks, who has collaborated with Michelle Branch and Sheryl Crow, and it has a lot more edge than you would perhaps expect from the sister of Jessica Simpson. It’s the sound of a young woman who, in the quest of Finding Herself, seems to have swallowed Pink and Christina Aguilera whole. “La La” is about having sex on the kitchen floor. “Surrender” charts the death of a relationship. And the second single, “Shadow,” details just what life was like living in the footsteps of a rapaciously ambitious cheerleader type:

“I was 6 years old when my parents went away,” she sings. “I was left inside a broken life that I couldn’t wish away/She was beautiful/ She had everything and more…./Somebody listen, please/It used to be so hard being me.”

Revelatory stuff for a girl who prides herself on familial diplomacy, but ultimately Ashlee is neither Pink nor Christina, and so by the time we reach the chorus, she has sugarcoated the sentiment. “Everything’s cool now,” she sings. But you are not especially convinced, largely because lines like “Living in the shadow of someone else’s dream/Trying to find a hand to hold/But every touch felt cold to me” convince you that her adolescence was a time of anguish, jealousy and countless office visits to the local shrink.

“No! It was nothing like that!” she shrieks, laughing off the suggestion. “People always seem to think that I struggled because I was the younger sister, but I never did. Sure, I wanted attention occasionally, but we were such a close family, and Jessica and I were the best of friends. Trust me, I’ve grown up into a very well-adjusted adult.” She takes a breath. “The only thing that really bothers me these days is the voice inside my head that fucks with me.”

Voice? What voice?

“You know, the voice, the one that tells you you’re going to fail, that you’re ugly and hopeless and pathetic.” She looks up at Blender, then at Mom, suddenly anxious. “We all have that voice, right?”


Ashlee Simpson was born 19 years ago in Waco, Texas. Her mother was an aerobics instructor, her father a youth minister and adolescent therapist who specialized in cases of child abuse. Ashlee was a natural performer, and she loved to dance. By the time she hit her teenage years, she was one of Texas’s most accomplished young ballet prodigies and received an invitation from the Kirov Ballet to study the craft further in Moscow. This was an incredible opportunity, but Dad refused to let her go. Instead, the family moved en masse to Los Angeles to help Jessica pursue pop stardom. Unsurprisingly, Ashlee was devastated, but Dad encouraged her to become one of her sister’s backing dancers. That was all very well, but it was hardly Swan Lake.

“It was fun, sure,” Ashlee says, “but it was also pretty horrible. The other dancers were mean to me because I was the shitty younger sister. They gave me a tough time. Now that I have a career of my own, though, those same people are calling to congratulate me. Stupid hypocrites.…”

She quickly tired of playing second fiddle to Jessica and instead began pursuing an acting career, appearing in several commercials and sitcoms before landing a regular role on the teen drama 7th Heaven. Acting satisfied her only temporarily; her idols remained singers, most of them famous before she was born: Chrissie Hynde, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett. She wanted to sing, desperately, and eventually her father shifted his focus from one daughter to the other, with rapid results. Within months, he had secured her a deal and her own MTV show.

“I used to want to be an actor myself when I was young,” Dad says, “but my family was real poor, so that was never a realistic possibility for me. But now I’m happy living vicariously through my children. See, I’m a creative person, and this is my way of doing what I was born to do — to be creative. That’s my gift to my girls.”

Last night, the family — minus Jessica, who is on tour — gathered to watch the first episode of The Ashlee Simpson Show. Ashlee was thrilled with what she saw.

“It was great, because it portrayed me as me, a normal, ordinary American girl with a big nose and a big zit on her chin,” she says. “I think a lot of people will relate to me, because really, I’m just like everybody else.”


It is disconcerting to spend any amount of time in SimpsonWorld. Aside from the quietly ferocious ambition each family member possesses, they seem a remarkably levelheaded bunch. Fame and fortune, they claim, has altered their lives very little. The only casualty, Mom jokes, is Joe, who uses the f word more now as a manager than he ever did when he was a minister. Otherwise, they remain utterly unaffected and palpably harmonious, protective of one another and suspicious of outsiders.

For example: Ashlee recently landed a new boyfriend, but he’s no tattooed tough from Good Charlotte or Sum 41. He’s Ryan Cabrera, a longtime family friend and singer-songwriter who is not only currently supporting Jessica on tour but is also managed by Joe. This means that the relationship enjoys parental approval, which is just as well, because Ashlee adores Cabrera. When she tells Blender that she recently took him home to “make out with him all night,” it seems to suggest that unlike her sister, she’s an advocate of sex before marriage — or does it?

“Oh, I — I don’t talk about that,” she stutters. “Sorry, but that’s my business. It’s private.”

Something else that’s private is her sex appeal. It is a family stipulation that Ashlee will never willfully titillate her audience.

“I know exactly what’s under this T-shirt,” she says, pulling at the neck and peering down her top, “but I’m going to keep it under wraps. Maybe I’ll take a few pictures for myself, because I have to tell you, I do have great tits! I am 19, after all. I’ll take some pictures now to show them to my future husband. ‘See,’ I’ll tell him, ‘I did have a great rack once!’”

Ashlee laughs; her mom laughs. They look just like the Brady Bunch.

“We’re best friends,” Mom says, winking. “And if you want to know why both of my daughters are so well-adjusted, it’s because I’ve always taught them to know exactly who they are, to be happy with who they are and to stay that way. You know, all the best stars are the most grounded ones.”

“Like, like — Julia Roberts!” Ashlee says, sighing. “She is just so sweet, so nice. That’s who I want to be when I grow up. Julia Roberts. Think I’ll manage it?”

Her parents may well see to it that she does.