So I finally got around to reading the JS Vanity Fair article:
"Simpson’s father (Joe) and mother (Tina) married young—20, 18. He was a Baptist minister, one of those regular Elmer Gantry types. Some of Jessica’s first memories are of sitting in the pews, listening to Joe Simpson preach. “He was amazing,” she told me. “If I’m going for advice for anything in my life, I go straight to my father because he has the answers.” Jessica was born in 1980 in Abilene, Texas. Her sister was born four years later.
By the time Jessica was 10, the family had moved at least a half-dozen times, the minister forever in search of a ministry. It’s a righteous calling, but a hard life.
Jessica began singing on the altar, sunlight beaming through high windows, her first songs dedicated to the only Father that matters.
Joe Simpson used to bring unwed mothers home to live, to counsel and feed, but also as a kind of visual warning to his daughters: Here is what comes from yielding to temptation!
When Jessica was 12, Joe gave her a purity ring, on which she pledged to keep her virginity until its taking could be ordained by God (and aired on MTV)."
Is it that hard to find a ministry to lead? Or was he asked to leave? And bringing in unwed mothers to live?
"As Jessica’s gospel record was being produced, she toured on the Christian-rock circuit. This interlude is interesting mostly for why and how it ended, which, according to Joe Simpson, was because of those determining factors—
her breasts—that made her too sexy for the circuit, causing the male parishioners to lust, distracting them from the divine.
It’s part of the story the family (including Jessica) tells about Jessica. Too sexy for church, thus forced from the world of Hallelujah to the world of Yeah, Yeah, Yeah."
"Jessica’s second album,
Irresistible, was released in June of 2001. Following 9/11, Sony refused to promote a third single, which Joe Simpson believed critical for his daughter’s prospects—she needed a hit. Speaking to
Rolling Stone in 2004, he said, “
When those planes crashed into those buildings, it nearly demolished our career.” I quote this not only because it’s nuts, but because of the chilling use of the first-person plural: “our career.”"
"In the wedding video (the ceremony was photographed and filmed by
InStyle),
Joe Simpson looks pained. This was not the plan. First, there was the matter of control. As it says in the Bible in re marriage and parents: leave and cleave. Then there was Jessica as a pop commodity, with no small value as an object of sexual fantasy, a value, as any manager of talent can tell you, that diminishes if said commodity is married. This is not how Joe Simpson phrased it.
He spoke instead of his own early marriage and of not wanting his daughter to make the same mistake, but I think he scowls in the pictures—in part, anyway—for the same reason Brian Epstein told the Beatles to date around and be free."
"Locals now speak of a Jessica Jinx, and her presence at games is noted and figured into the odds made by bookmakers in Vegas. Even George Bush, a Cowboys fan, blamed Simpson, though she had publicly endorsed his presidency. During a post–Super Bowl visit the Giants made to the White House last April, Bush suggested the Republican Party find a way to get Jessica Simpson to the Democratic convention. (Simpson has since taken a political U-turn: “I think it’s definitely time for change,” she said. “And I am very supportive of our president, and I believe that he’s going to do remarkable things.”)"
The Jessica Simpson Question | vanityfair.com