I never thought it would end like this for O. J. Simpson, winning and losing concurrently, with the loss somehow exceeding the win. I had always thought it would be a hung jury. My jaw dropped—in case anyone didn’t notice it on television—when the verdict was read. There were hosannas to my left; there were tears to my right. Simpson was a free man. When he arrived back at the gates of his Brentwood mansion to restart his life, a party was in preparation. His mother, Eunice, arrived in a Rolls-Royce. Limousines pulled up behind her. It was all on television. Women in pink pantsuits waved champagne toasts to the media. Everyone hugged. Al Cowlings was there. Don Ohlmeyer of NBC was there. Robert Kardashian was there. Larry Schiller, Simpson’s co-author, was there. Jubilation reigned.
“After the verdict was handed down, the West L.A.P.D.—because Rockingham is in our jurisdiction—had to send police units over there to O.J.’s house for crowd control and to protect the estate while they were preparing for a party to celebrate the deaths of two people,” said Detective Paul Bishop when we met for breakfast at Dolores’s at Santa Monica Boulevard and Purdue, not far from the station house. His disgust for the assignment sounded in his voice and showed on his face. The police department, which he loves, while acknowledging that there are flaws in it, had been mocked and humiliated by Simpson’s legal team. “Forty crates of champagne were brought in. We sat there and did it. This is our job. We may not like it, but we did it.”
Like his former colleague Detective Mark Fuhrman, Bishop has TV-star looks. He spoke about Fuhrman’s arrogance and his my-way-only kind of thinking. Bishop drinks tea, talks straight, and writes books. His second novel, Twice Dead, is about to be published by Avon.
“Way back in the beginning, I said to Detective Ron Phillips, ‘Are we going to win this case?’ Ron said, ‘If we can’t convict this guy, we may as well turn in our badges and go home.’ After the verdict, I walked up to Ron and said, ‘You’re right. We may as well turn in our badges.’ The next two days you couldn’t get through on the phone lines to personnel, because there were so many police and detectives trying to get their paperwork and retire. The ripple effect is going to be unbelievable.”
The elation of the Rockingham party didn’t last long. The participants having such a swell time began to get the idea that the city and the country weren’t cheering and partying along with them. Simpson’s much-heralded pay-per-view TV deal collapsed, and along with it the $20 million he had assumed he would make. ICM, the talent agency that had represented him for 20 years, and Jack Gilardi, his personal agent, dropped him as a client. Polls showed that more than half of the country was outraged by the verdict. Simpson brought new meaning to the phrase “There goes the neighborhood.” A sign went up on Sunset Boulevard at the entrance to Brentwood saying, WELCOME TO BRENTWOOD. HOME OF THE BRENTWOOD BUTCHER. Another read, MURDERER LOOSE IN BRENTWOOD.
“Does he know?” I asked someone who did know, late one night.
“What?”
“That he is despised?”
“Yes.”
“Does he care?”
“Very much.”
Nicole was right. Everything happened just as she had predicted it would. What Nicole had not anticipated, however, was the rage of the white citizenry across the country over O.J.’s acquittal by a mostly black jury. “This is what a white riot is,” said the screenwriter and director James Brooks, meaning rage without violence.
For a while, Simpson didn’t get it. He thought it was going to be like old times. One of his buddies told me that O.J. was livid that District Attorney Gil Garcetti had announced on television that he was closing the case and wasn’t going to pursue the “real killers.” I was also told that O.J. was looking into suing the National Organization for Women (now) on the grounds that it was depriving him of his right to earn a living.
Simpson, not satisfied with a mere acquittal, wanted more from us. He wanted our adulation back. Adulation is what he craves. He is addicted to it. By now, however, he knows that he will never have it. When Robert Shapiro was booed at a Lakers game last spring, it was a foretaste of things to come. If Simpson’s golfing pals Craig Baumgarten and Don Ohlmeyer remain steadfast in their friendship, they’re going to have a hard time finding a golf club to tee off at. The Riviera Country Club, where Simpson is a member, doesn’t want him back. One member told me that the explanation it gives is that he is a security risk, which he is—a golf course being an ideal place for an assassin to pick someone off—but there is more. I have spoken with other members of that club who say they will resign in droves if he is allowed back.
Many have speculated that Simpson will flee the country rather than give a deposition in the upcoming wrongful death suits being brought by the Brown and Goldman families. I questioned a friend of his on the possibility of suicide. There was a long pause. “He has no life other than an afterlife,” his friend replied. “It’s a tougher sentence than if he’d gone to prison.”
It is hard for Kim Goldman to understand that the life Simpson faces will be painful. She remains unconsoled by the prospect that in many areas he will become a social leper, unwanted, uninvited, barred.
“What does it matter to me if people walk out of a restaurant when he walks in? I won’t be there to see it,” she said to me a few nights after the verdict. We were having dinner at Drai’s with Cynthia McFadden of ABC and Shoreen Maghame of City News in Los Angeles. Kim hates Simpson with the same passion that her father hates him. “He’s free, and my brother’s dead.” She described Simpson in the courtroom seconds after the verdict. “He leaned over and looked at me and smiled. I said, ‘Murderer.’”
Simpson had to move out of his walled estate on Rockingham. No privacy. Too much media. The day he wanted to see his children for the first time, a diversionary tactic had to be devised so that he could leave the grounds without being detected. As a ruse, a press conference was called. While it was being set up, Simpson sneaked out in a van, one of three cars in a caravan. Once he was gone, the press conference was canceled. The rendezvous with Sydney and Justin, who arrived with an au pair girl in a van reportedly driven by Al Cowlings from Lou and Juditha Brown’s home in Dana Point, 60 miles away, took place near Mulholland Drive. “Sydney was a little on edge at first,” I was told by a witness to the scene, “but Justin rushed to his father’s arms.” Later the same witness said that the children love the Browns, who have taken care of them since the murders, but that “within them they know they are Simpsons.” Finally Simpson moved into a secluded residence in a canyon near Malibu that had been lent to him. One night he was able to get out and see a film, without being seen. The film he picked was Showgirls.
Where was the joy of the defense team at the announcement of the not-guilty verdict? Cochran smiled his cat-that-ate-the-canary smile, F. Lee Bailey wore the smirk of victory on his face, and Robert Shapiro, who had already distanced himself from the winning team, made a halfhearted gesture toward Simpson, but the others, particularly Robert Kardashian, looked momentarily dazed, as if the verdict were more than they had expected. The exhilaration that is part and parcel of an acquittal for a wrongly accused person was eerily missing. Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld had already returned to New York. At the lackluster press conference in the courtroom following the verdict, there was an absence of euphoria. When Jason Simpson read a message from his about-to-be-set-free father, in which the former defendant said that a priority of his life would be to find the real “killer or killers,” he sat awkwardly, almost hiding his face from us, as if he were ashamed of the message he was reading. In the opinion of many, the lawyers who fought so hard for Simpson’s acquittal have become diminished by their association with him. As someone close to the defense team said to me, it was a victory without honor.
Ten days after the verdict, before returning to New York, I dropped by Dove Books in Beverly Hills to say good-bye to Michael Viner and Deborah Raffin. In their office, I ran into three of the Simpson jurors who are appearing in a television documentary on the case which Dove is producing. Two of them shook hands with me. One looked away. All of them had heard me say on television that they hadn’t done their jobs. To me, their verdict was a rush to judgment, just as much as Cochran had insisted throughout the trial that Simpson’s arrest had been a rush to judgment on the part of the L.A.P.D. A member of the sheriff’s department had confirmed that several jurors’ bags were packed before deliberations began. A person who works for the British tabloid News of the World played me a tape of the daughter of one of the jurors trying to make a deal for her mother and another juror. Three of the jurors left for Las Vegas after the verdict and checked into the Bally hotel, where they had established a line of credit. The lawyer for yet another member of the jury called me at my hotel and asked how much I would pay to interview his client. I said, “My magazine doesn’t pay.” He said in a shocked voice, “Vanity Fair doesn’t pay?” After having heard juror Brenda Moran say on television that domestic violence had nothing to do with the murders and should have been tried in another court, I was no longer interested in what the jurors had to say.
This case was won the day the jury was seated, thanks to the defense’s jury consultant, Jo-Ellan Dimitrius. The verdict had very little to do with reason and a great deal to do with race. Months and months ago, I was told in a private conversation that after the jury had been picked O. J. Simpson said to Johnnie Cochran, “If this jury convicts me, maybe I did kill Nicole in a blackout.”
I and many other people covering the trial believe that if Francine Florio-Bunten had not been dismissed from the jury by Judge Ito there would have been a long deliberation and perhaps a hung jury instead of an acquittal arrived at in three hours. Francine Florio-Bunten was probably the smartest person on the jury, capable of understanding the DNA evidence and explaining it to the others. There was an eagerness on the part of the defense to remove her from the jury, and there is something very smelly about her dismissal. Judge Ito, who seemed to be in the thrall of Johnnie Cochran for much of the trial, received an anonymous letter from a young woman who described herself as a receptionist for a literary agency, paid Ito an unctuous compliment, and reported that Florio-Bunten was in negotiations for a book on the trial:
I was brought up to believe that anonymous letters should be flushed down the toilet, but such thinking did not prevail here. The anonymous letter was taken seriously. Florio-Bunten’s lawyer, Rex T. Reeves, has publicly stated, “That letter is as phony as a three-dollar bill.” Francine Florio-Bunten insists that the information in the letter was false; she had no book deal then, has none now, and does not intend to have one. The reason given for her dismissal at the time was that she had lied about receiving a note from another juror. Even if that were true, how mild a misdemeanor it seems for the punishment Judge Ito gave her. I know a couple of reporters who think they are onto whose handwriting it is in the anonymous letter.
Voices heard at parties in Los Angeles: “I think they should release the autopsy pictures—let everybody see what he did.” “This is what Nicole always said was going to happen.” “All Nicole’s photo albums were up-to-date.” “They ought to unseal those papers about what the jailhouse guard overheard O.J. say to Rosie Grier.” “Of course I would get up and walk out if he came into this restaurant.” “It was tacky of them to have a party after the verdict.” “If he married Paula Barbieri now, it would be like giving the finger to all the blacks who helped him.” “I bet he skips the country rather than give the deposition.” “How do we send money to the Goldmans?” “Ron Goldman and Nicole are the payment of the racial debt.” “Any girl he hits on now can make herself famous when she sells her story.” “He’s got to look in the mirror every day when he shaves.”
I wasn’t surprised when, at the last minute, Simpson’s NBC interview with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric didn’t take place. I had heard the day before that Simpson’s friends and advisers were trying to talk him out of it. Then I heard that Johnnie Cochran had arrived at the house and was left alone with him. That did it.
From the beginning, one of the most interesting characters in the many subplots of the Simpson saga has been Don Ohlmeyer, the West Coast president of NBC. A golfing buddy and old-time associate of Simpson’s who produced one of Simpson’s films, The Golden Moment: An Olympic Love Story, Ohlmeyer has been from the time of the murders an outspoken advocate for the innocence of his friend. He was a frequent visitor at the L.A. County Jail and one of the celebrants at the victory party at the Rockingham house following the verdict. After the pay-per-view deal collapsed, Simpson agreed to have Ohlmeyer set up the interview on NBC. Simpson has only his image to sell. Without it he’s nothing, and he knows it; an hour of prime time for him to give his side of the story to Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric was irresistible. It provoked the same urge that had made Simpson want to take the stand during the trial; he is a man who has talked his way out of jams for years, and he thought he could do it again. But along came Johnnie. You had only to look at Cochran’s face on the Larry King show the night O.J. phoned in unexpectedly to see just how nervous O.J. makes him when he speaks out extemporaneously. The last-minute cancellation caused embarrassment to Brokaw, Couric, and NBC.
Then came Simpson’s subsequent call to Bill Carter, who covers television for The New York Times. According to a source, it was Ohlmeyer’s idea to call Carter. Ohlmeyer and Carter were known to each other professionally. In fact, it is being told around town that Ohlmeyer dialed the number for Simpson. David Margolick, who had covered the trial from the start for The New York Times, was the logical person to call, but he was passed over. “O.J.’s a coward,” said Loyola law professor and television commentator Laurie Levenson when we met up on a television show that day. “He only wants to speak in a controlled atmosphere—which he controls. He doesn’t want to be confronted.”
In his nonconfrontational interview with Carter, Simpson said some curious things, which indicate how near to the surface of his psyche the particulars of the trial reside. In one instance, speaking about prosecutor Marcia Clark, he said that he’d “like to be able to knock that chip off Marcia’s shoulder”—a curious turn of phrase for an acknowledged wife beater. In another, speaking about the NBC interview he had backed out of, he said, “I heard accounts of things like Tom Brokaw was sharpening knives for the interview”—again, a curious turn of phrase for a man just acquitted of slashing the throats of two people with a sharp knife which has never been recovered.
Simpson needed that $20 million he expected from the pay-per-view deal. The house on Rockingham had been used as collateral for a $3 million line of credit to cover legal fees for the murder trial, some of which have not been paid. There are also the costly civil suits that face him in the near future. Yet he asserted his solvency in The New York Times. “I still have my Ferrari,” he told Carter. “I still have my Bentley, I still have my home in Brentwood and my apartment in New York.” However, he had already put the apartment up for sale and taken out a $700,000 mortgage on it. Elaine Young, a Beverly Hills real-estate agent, has had an offer in excess of $4 million for the house on Rockingham, but Simpson doesn’t want to sell it, even though his neighbors don’t want him there anymore.
“How much money is there?” I asked a source.
“I figure he can live in the style in which he is living for another year.”
Meanwhile, people from all over the country are calling in to the Goldman family to offer them money to hire the finest lawyer in the land for their civil suit against Simpson. The Goldmans have chosen Daniel Petrocelli, a partner in the distinguished Los Angeles firm of Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp.
I said to Robert Shapiro on the next-to-last day of the trial, “This experience is going to change us all.” He replied, “You don’t know how much.” Now it’s time to pack up and leave. What a fascinating and bewildering city Los Angeles is. Heidi Fleiss faces up to eight years in prison, and O. J. Simpson is reportedly cavorting in Beverly Hills with Frederick’s of Hollywood model Gretchen Stockdale and openly playing golf in Florida with Paula Barbieri beside him while his daughter Sydney celebrates her 10th birthday with the Brown family. Judge Ito’s stepson, Dennis York, 35, the son of Ito’s wife, Captain Margaret York, the highest-ranking woman in the L.A.P.D., was arrested on charges of grand theft and operating as a contractor without a license, and the sister-in-law of Johnnie Cochran, Robin Cochran, 39, was arrested in a crack den and is under investigation for child endangerment for leaving her six-year-old daughter in a car outside.
When I stopped living here in 1979 and moved to New York, I left hating this city. I no longer do. L.A. is a part of me just as much as New York is. I reunited with old friends here and made many new ones, all of whom I shall miss. I leave with admiration and love for Marcia Clark and Chris Darden, for my friends in the media who have covered the trial every day, and for the Brown and Goldman families. I will never forget Nicole and Ron. The autopsy photographs of their slit throats and open eyes will haunt me forever.
