“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?’”
