B
y Laura Brown
On the rear deck of Nicole Richie and boyfriend Joel Madden's house in Glendale, a Los Angeles suburb so un-Hollywood that it's almost Cleaver-esque, hangs a huge webbed curtain that brings to mind army training maneuvers. Nicole and Joel hung the netting when Nicole was nine months pregnant, to foil the helicopters constantly flying overhead. How Sean Penn and Madonna. "Didn't [Penn] write in rocks, like, 'Fuck you' or something?" asks Nicole admiringly, showcasing her handiwork, which, as new daughter Harlow turns two months old, is only now being taken down.
Wearing a loose top, skinny jeans, and flip-flops, Nicole apologizes for arriving late from her acting class. Joel, lead singer of the rock band Good Charlotte, left yesterday for a three-week tour of South Africa and Europe (with twin brother Benji and his unlikely new consort, Nicole's BFF Paris Hilton), so she is rattling around her dark, Gothic “hippie household” with baby and her assistant. The living room is covered with religious art, baroque mirrors, angel heads, and half-burned candles. Pride of place is a framed Good Charlotte Rolling Stone cover. Harlow can be heard gurgling upstairs in her Peter Pan-themed nursery.
Nicole retreats to the deck, munching on watermelon from a Tupperware container. What surprises her most about motherhood? "Hmm, I would say how fun it is," she says, surely sending other new mothers into spasms of resentment. "Everybody talks about how difficult it is in the first three months, but I absolutely love it."
Close friend Mary-Kate Olsen says, "Nicole is one of the most loving and nurturing mothers I have yet to come across." But father Lionel Richie knows best: "Motherhood has given her all the keys to understanding how her mother and I were trying to raise her," he says. "Now it has come full circle."
Exactly one year ago, I met a very different Nicole Richie. She trotted into an L.A. hotel in sky-high Christian Louboutins and a head scarf, checking herself out in the window. She had just finished shooting, with Paris Hilton, a notorious "caught by the fuzz" fashion session for
Bazaar. Nicole, of course, was notorious too, having hit some speed bumps on the road to Hollywood It girl, one involving a DUI arrest (for which she served precisely 82 minutes in jail). She was sanguine about her bad behavior and frank about her friendships, and she confided that she fancied a sort of rocker boy who looks "really pale ... really skinny," adding, "I like people that kind of look homeless."
She was, in fact, one month away from falling pregnant by one such boy, Joel, a rocker who is so affable that it's lucky he has tattoos and wears a lot of black. The two together just seem to fit. "Yeah, for being so opposite, we could possibly hate each other," Nicole says with a smile. Joel is a family boy ("He has a solid value system," notes Lionel) and one of four children. Nicole emphasizes that her beau is "very conservative." Secret Hollywood Republican conservative? "Oh, no, not that," she says with her tinkly laugh. She considers Joel's family a model for her own. "I want five children," she says deliberately, "twin boys and three girls. I've wanted that since I was a little girl."
Nicole describes Joel, the family's chief diaper changer, as having "a different way of thinking. But at the same time, he's never tried to change me. And if anything, we were friends first. We just have fun together. When we're apart," which occurs often, she notes, when your bloke's in a band, "we just get on iChat and don't even say anything to each other." She starts to giggle. "He likes to get girly sometimes. But he'd kill me if he knew I said that!"
Joel met the parents — Lionel and his first wife, Brenda — almost immediately. "I brought him over to my dad's house," Nicole explains. "They're both musicians, they're both from the South, and they're both very conservative, so they got along right away." What about a Lionel-Joel duet then? "Sure, why not? My dad really respects Joel as an artist, and they're both really great songwriters, so you never know."
Speaking of family outings, the couple got a rough ride in the press for heading out the night of the Grammys in February, a few weeks after Harlow's birth. "You know what," Nicole says with a furrowed brow, "I was gone for maybe three hours. I never go out. I go four or five days without leaving my house. But the press just went wild with it." These days, Nicole and Joel leave Harlow for a date night once a week. Maybe a movie "if the running time's not too long."
Joel had remarked at the previous day's shoot for Bazaar (at Lionel's Beverly Hills home) that he was wary of bringing up a child in Los Angeles because he felt it was harder for her to not become jaded. He's fantasized about buying an escape hatch in Thailand (where the couple have traveled often) or Sydney — somewhere, in short, where one doesn't have to hang paparazzi-deflecting nets in the backyard. "I personally love Los Angeles," Nicole counters. "You can say anything you want about L.A., but kids get into things." The young family will be spending more time in New York, though, since they bought an apartment downtown. "I know that I grew up on the faster side," Nicole notes, "but I don't think that a town matters if you know who you are." On marriage, she says, "One day, yeah - not tomorrow, not today. We are committed to our family. I'm 26. I've definitely had a very eventful year. So right now, it's about me enjoying my time with my daughter."
What will she try to steer Harlow away from as she gets older? "To be honest," Nicole replies, "it would completely break my heart if she got a tattoo." She laughs out loud, more than aware of the irony.
One could never call having a baby a PR move, but in Nicole's case, her new motherhood has been, among other less cynical things, just that. She told Diane Sawyer in an interview last year that "I owe the baby my life," and she seems full of new-mommy mojo. Gossip sites like Perez Hilton, which used to gleefully post her too-skinny bikini pictures and mug shot, now gush, "Nicole looks so pretty. Love her hair!" and breathlessly signpost her new projects: a jewelry line with Mouawad, a maternity collection, an upcoming style book, and a rumored role as Roxie in Chicago on Broadway.
Nicole appeared on the cover of People magazine with Harlow a couple weeks after Harlow's birth. "The day before it came out, I was nervous," she says, "because there was going to be a picture of my daughter everywhere." Then she evinces a peculiarly Hollywood logic. "But if I didn't put a picture out, it would have been 10 times worse. I wanted to stop people trying to get pictures of her. I was just being a protective mom." As Lionel characterizes the public's interest in Nicole, "It's because she is real. She is always brutally honest. What she says is what she means. Everywhere I go, they love Nicole. She would be a hit anywhere. I love her so much, and that's not speaking as her father, that's speaking as a fan."
So Nicole is growing her fan base. She is writing a follow-up to her novel, The Truth About Diamonds, and taking meetings about turning the original book into a Gossip Girl-type series. As for Chicago, not right now."Doing musical theater really does take up your entire life," she notes. "But I'm really excited to get out there and show people that I'm capable of doing something other than The Simple Life."
Last year, Nicole and Joel also launched the Richie-Madden Children's Foundation. They came up with the idea after they were inundated with gifts for Harlow. "I got like 10 cribs and 20 strollers. For one little girl! So we wanted to take the gifts we got and give them to the people who actually needed them." The couple met with people from the charity advising firm Inspired Philanthropy, and "they really opened our eyes."
Yes, much has changed for Nicole — her body, she says, as well. "Half my wardrobe is already stretched," she laments. "Not all my clothes fit the same. I don't even think it's a weight thing; I think your body just changes after you have a baby. I don't care either way, but" - she gestures to her new cleavage — "I'm not used to having a tank top or bra underneath my clothes. You always hear that people with blond hair or larger breasts get more attention, but I never really thought that was real! I like wearing shirts that are a bit see-through because before it didn't really matter. But now it's like, Uh-oh, I could get arrested."
Nicole didn't really change her style while she was pregnant. "It's not like I blew up overnight," she says. "It gradually happened, and then I wasn't pregnant anymore." She made few adjustments. "When my jeans stopped fitting," she notes casually, "I wore the Balenciaga riding pants." She is deeply in love with Balenciaga and brimming with excitement about the new boots she was recently sent. "I like to be comfortable," she explains. "Luckily for me, I'm completely comfortable in six-inch heels."
But there are no six-inch heels today in the Richie-Madden residence. "You know, I went through a stage of thinking that once you had a baby, you moved to Brentwood, had a white picket fence, and it changed your entire life," Nicole says. "But I love where I am right now. Every single thing is for Harlow. Joel took me out last week, and he was like, 'Why don't we go out and have a shopping day?' But I ended up only going to kid stores." She laughs wryly. "I didn't get to buy shoes or anything."
Finishing her watermelon and preparing to tend to Harlow, who is fussing upstairs, Nicole seems calm, as if she had the keys to the universe. "I don't necessarily think I'm more conservative," she says, "but everyone around me has told me I am." Can she guess at who among her friends will next enter mommyhood — Paris, perhaps? "Ha, nooo" is her reply. "But I don't think anyone would have bet on me."
