Cover Story: Portrait of a Living Doll

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.