Another City Not My Own Page 10

  “Okay.”

  During a break, Gus went up to Harvey Levin’s cubicle in one of the media rooms on the eleventh floor of the courthouse.

  “Harvey, how about having dinner at Jackson’s on Beverly Boulevard tonight?” asked Gus.

  “I thought we were going to Morton’s,” said Harvey.

  “We were, but I just heard from Carmelita Durio that Jason Simpson is the sous-chef at Jackson’s on Beverly Boulevard,” said Gus. He leaned in and whispered as he spoke, so the television reporters in the cubicles around Harvey couldn’t hear his news.

  “No!”

  “I promised Carmelita I wouldn’t write about it, because it would become part of the O. J. Simpson tour of the city for all the O. J. junkies, but I didn’t say I wouldn’t go and have a look at him in his kitchen whites,” said Gus. “He’s never once spoken to me in the courtroom. Arnelle speaks. Jason doesn’t.”

  “He probably won’t come out of the kitchen if the waiters tell him we’re there,” said Harvey.

  “We can yell, ‘My compliments to the chef,’ and clap and clap until he comes out,” said Gus. “This is going to make a great scene for my novel, the overlapping of the worlds in Los Angeles. I go on Michael Jackson’s radio show several times a week. He tapes me early in the morning at the Chateau before I leave for the trial, or sometimes he tapes me at night for the next day. I never hide the fact that I think Simpson is the killer, and I wonder if Jason listens to the show in the kitchen when he’s preparing. In the novel, I’m going to have Jason in the kitchen at Jackson’s listen to his boss’s father’s radio show and hear me tell the story about the time he tried to destroy the statue of his father with a baseball bat. And later in the story, carrying the bat forward in the plot, I’m going to have O. J. use that same bat when he smashes in the windshield of Nicole’s convertible Mercedes-Benz. That scene, by the way, is going to be the introduction of Detective Mark Fuhrman into the story. How’s that?”

  “What time’s the reservation?” asked Harvey.

  10

  In his “Letter from Los Angeles,” Gus wrote:

  O. J. Simpson has taken over my life. I start thinking about O. J. before six o’clock each morning, when the room-service waiter at the Chateau Marmont brings me my o.j. and coffee. By that time, I’m usually halfway through the New York Times, where I read my friend David Margolick on the O. J. Simpson case before I read anything else; then I switch over to the Los Angeles Times, where I read Andrea Ford and Jim Newton on the O. J. Simpson case, even though I already know what they’re writing about, because I was sitting in court the day before as it was happening, and then watched it all on television on the early and late news, as well as on Larry King Live or any other show that had special coverage. Once I have showered and shaved, it’s seven o’clock, time to turn on the television set to see whom Katie Couric and Paula Zahn and Joan Lunden may be interviewing about the case. Then I hear the fax machine making sounds in the other room, and I know it’s Craig Offman from Wayne Lawson’s office at Vanity Fair magazine sending me the pertinent pages of the New York Post and the New York Daily News, as well as Liz Smith, Cindy Adams, Richard Johnson, and what they have to say about the case today. At 7:35, I’m in my rental convertible Mustang, barreling down Beverly Boulevard as I switch radio stations to hear the latest on the case, which I already know, until I arrive at the Criminal Courts Building on West Temple Street in downtown Los Angeles. Then we in the media line up to get our daily badges, which we pin to our jackets, all the time talking about the latest rumors in the O. J. case, or saying things to one another such as “You were great on Geraldo last night.” At nine o’clock, we walk into the courtroom and take our places in our assigned seats, and then the door to the holding room opens and in comes O. J. Simpson himself, usually surrounded by Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, and Carl Douglas. We all stare at O. J. to see what kind of mood he’s in or to which lawyer he’s talking, and we watch him say good morning to members of his family. When Judge Lance Ito comes in, we do not rise, but we do rise on the bailiff’s order to do so as the jury enters. Then the trial begins again, and all day long we watch it, except for our lunch break, when we talk about it, saying such things as “Did you notice the way O. J. looked up at the ceiling when they showed the picture of Nicole lying in all the blood?”

  “Well, here comes O. J.,” whispered Gus to Kim Goldman, the dead young man’s sister, as Simpson made his afternoon entrance into the courtroom. As always, it was impossible not to look at him. He played out his scene with the lawyers and the camera. Carmelita and Shirley leaned forward in their front-row seats and smiled at their brother, as they did every time he entered the courtroom. The Browns passively stared at him. The Goldmans, who hated O. J., stared at him with hostility, always hoping he would look in their direction to see the extent of their hatred. Although Simpson never looked in their direction, his face assumed a haughty arrogance when he knew they were looking at him.

  “I wish you’d stop calling him O. J., Gus,” whispered Kim, cupping her mouth with her hand. “It sounds too friendly. My father says it sounds like you like him when you refer to him as O. J.”

  “Your father’s absolutely right,” said Gus, cupping his hand over his mouth. “You know, Kim, I’ve been thinking the same thing myself. I hate calling him O. J. What does your father call him?”

  “The killer. The murderer. The monster,” said Kim.

  “Let me start over again. ‘Here comes the killer,’ ” said Gus. “How’s that?”

  “Now you’re talking,” said Kim, trying not to laugh.

  “Don’t you dare tell anyone I said that,” said Gus.

  “Except my father,” said Kim.

  “Gus, it’s Charlie Wick.”

  “Hi, Charlie.”

  “I caught you with Dan Rather last night on the news,” said Charlie. “Do you enjoy working with Dan?”

  “I do. I like him very much.”

  “I notice every week he asks you the same thing—to predict the outcome.”

  “And every week I give the same answer: hung jury. There’s no chance of a conviction.”

  “Say, Gus, speaking of the trial. As you probably know, the President’s not well,” said Charlie. “It’s a terrible disease, Alzheimer’s.”

  “Yes,” replied Gus. He understood that the president Charlie was talking about was President Reagan, not President Clinton. During the Reagan presidency, Charlie Wick had been part of the administration in Washington, when he became head of the USIS. “I thought the letter the President wrote to the country to announce he had the disease was beautiful,” said Gus. “I’m sure Nancy had a great deal to do with that. Please give her my best when you talk to her.”

  “It’s Nancy I’m calling about, Gus,” said Charlie. “Nancy is very homebound these days, taking care of Ronnie, and she spends a lot of time watching the O. J. trial on television. She’s very much caught up in it, like a lot of people are.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it, the enormous public interest in this trial?”

  “Nancy would like to know if you’d have dinner one night to talk about it.”

  “Of course. I’d be very happy to do that, Charlie,” said Gus.

  “She knows every detail of the trial, and she’s been reading you in the magazine and watching you on television, and she’d like to talk about it.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Gus.

  “How about the Bel Air Hotel next Tuesday night?”

  Somewhere along the line, Gus began to dislike F. Lee Bailey. After their early promise to remain open to each other, despite their different points of view as to the guilt of O. J. Simpson, when they had had dinner at “21” in New York many months earlier, before the start of the trial, they now no longer spoke when they passed in the corridors of the courthouse. Some of Gus’s writings about the celebrated lawyer had displeased him. “He reintroduced the word nigger into our lives,” Gus had written. The great friendship that Bailey had talked
about at dinner between himself and Robert Shapiro, who had brought him on board as a member of the defense team, had disintegrated into hate. Each thought the other was leaking stories to the tabloid papers, minimizing the accomplishments of the other’s career. He had been overshadowed in court by Marcia Clark, who caught him out in a lie, which caused a public temper tantrum. He claimed to have spoken personally to a black marine, Max Cordoba, who stated that Fuhrman had called him a nigger.

  “Your Honor, I have spoken to him on the phone personally, marine to marine,” Bailey said to the court, in order to validate his claim. In fact, Cordoba later declared on television that he had not had the conversation that Bailey had claimed.

  “Marine to marine” became a joke phrase in the media room on the eleventh floor of the courthouse whenever F. Lee Bailey’s name was mentioned.

  That night Gus sat in the dining room of the Bel Air Hotel with Charlie and Mary Jane Wick, waiting for the arrival of Nancy Reagan. He waved to the actress Candice Bergen and the film director Mike Nichols who were sitting a few tables away with John Calley, who had recently become the head of United Artists.

  “The best movie Candy ever made was directed by Mike,” said Gus.

  “Do you miss the movies?” asked Mary Jane.

  “Hell no,” replied Gus. “Covering the O. J. trial’s more exciting than any movie could ever be. I love being right there at the center of what everybody in the country’s talking about and being able to comment about it. I feel lucky.”

  “I promised Nancy we wouldn’t say a word about the trial until she gets here,” said Mary Jane. “She couldn’t stand F. Lee Bailey in court today.”

  They talked about their sons, who had known each other as children and were both in the film business. They talked about a long-ago weekend party they had all attended at Malcolm Forbes’s château in Normandy. “Did I ever tell you that Jay Leno and I went up in one of Malcolm’s hot-air balloons that weekend with this dowdy little lady who turned out to be the Queen of Romania?” asked Gus. They talked about the New York society figure Jerome Zipkin, whom Gus had portrayed as Ezzie Fenwick in his society novel People Like Us.

  “Zipkin really hated me after that book,” said Gus. “He tried to get Malcolm Forbes to disinvite me to his seventieth-birthday party in Tangier,” said Gus. “Malcolm told me that.”

  “Nancy adored Zipkin,” said Mary Jane.

  “Oh, don’t worry. I won’t say anything about him when Nancy comes,” said Gus.

  “Here comes Nancy now,” said Charlie, looking toward the entrance.

  “Do I ask about the President’s health, or is that not to be discussed?” asked Gus.

  “Let her bring it up first,” said Mary Jane.

  Gus turned to watch as the former First Lady walked into the dining room with two Secret Service agents. People who noticed her whispered to their companions that she was entering the room, and many looked around and smiled greetings at her. She smiled back as she walked across the room. She stopped briefly to say hello to Mike Nichols and Candice Bergen.

  “Give my love to your mother, Candy,” she said, moving on.

  Charlie and Gus jumped to their feet as she arrived at their table. She put out her hand to Gus in a forceful gesture and said, in an uncanny imitation of F. Lee Bailey, “Marine to marine.”

  Gus laughed. “This is called instant bonding,” he said.

  “Does he drive you as crazy as he drives me?” asked Nancy.

  “Let me count the ways,” said Gus, as they all sat down.

  Gus had known Nancy and Ronald Reagan back in the days when they were still actors, long before he became the governor of California. The late film star Dick Powell, when he was the president of Four Star Television, a highly successful production company where Gus had been a vice president, once said to Gus, “See if you can get Nancy Reagan a part on Burke’s Law next week, Gus. She called June last night and said she wanted a job, and I said I’d look into it.” Burke’s Law was a popular television series starring Gene Barry, with multiple cameo roles for name actors, that was then shooting on the Republic lot. June was the film star June Allyson, who was married to Dick Powell. She and Nancy had been under contract to MGM at the same time.

  There were pictures of the Reagans in Gus’s scrapbooks back in Prud’homme, Connecticut: “Ronnie and Nancy Reagan dancing under a marquee at Sid and Francie Brody’s Fourth of July lunch party for Rudolf Nureyev, 1964,” one caption read; “Nancy Reagan and Peach at General Frank McCarthy’s and Rupert Allen’s party for Italian film star Gina Lollobrigida, 1965,” another caption read; “Nancy and Ronnie Reagan, Janet and Freddy DeCordova, Doris and Jules Stein, New Year’s Eve at Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale’s, 1965,” still another caption read.

  In the years between then and the present, there had been almost no contact between them. As the Reagans moved up from their house in Pacific Palisades to the governor’s mansion in Sacramento to the White House in Washington, Gus’s fortunes were in reverse. He moved from the house in Beverly Hills to an apartment on Spalding Drive south of Wilshire Boulevard to a cabin in Oregon to a room in Greenwich Village. When Nancy Reagan, whom he once got a job for on Burke’s Law, was the First Lady of the United States of America, Gus was living in a room without daylight, writing The Two Mrs. Grenvilles and hoping to make a comeback.

  After he established himself in his second career as a writer, he had taken an occasional potshot at the First Lady during the White House years in articles he had written in Vanity Fair, particularly in reference to Jerome Zipkin’s presence at so many White House social events. He had used the word unseemly. Further, Gus was a Democrat who had never voted for President Reagan. So he had been unsure how Mrs. Reagan would greet him when they met again until she said, “Marine to marine,” and all anxieties vanished. Throughout the evening, Gus never stopped talking.

  “The night before the jury went through Simpson’s house on Rockingham, the defense, particularly certain lawyers from Johnnie Cochran’s office, redressed the house,” said Gus. “These are the same guys who keep saying in court each day, ‘Your Honor, this trial is a search for truth.’ Let me tell you about their idea of truth. They took down all the photographs of white people and replaced them with photographs of black people. On Simpson’s orders, fires were lit in the fireplaces and vases were filled with flowers. They were going for the cozy, homey look. Meanwhile, Nicole’s condo, where the murders took place, has been stripped bare, so the jury could get no sense of her life. Over at Rockingham, they put out a Bible that hadn’t been there before, and at the top of the stairs they hung a copy of the Norman Rockwell painting of white federal marshals holding the hands of a little black girl as they lead her into a public school, which they had brought over from Johnnie Cochran’s office. They wanted to show the jury that O. J. was proud to be a black man.”

  There was silence at the table as the four looked at each other.

  “Want more?” asked Gus.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “They removed a nude picture of Paula Barbieri from his bedside table, and they replaced it with a picture of his mother, Eunice, in her wheelchair.”

  “How do you know all this, Gus? I haven’t heard this before,” said Charlie.

  “I have a mole on the defense team who keeps me up to date on what’s going on,” replied Gus.

  “You’re going to use this, aren’t you?” asked Nancy.

  “It’ll be a great scene in my book, showing all the busy little bee lawyers taking down the white-people photographs and putting up the black-people photographs and the Norman Rockwell picture. I’m going to have them roaring with laughter as they make the changes, especially when they hang the Norman Rockwell. I’m going to call the chapter ‘The Truth Seekers.’ ”

  “It makes me sick to hear these things,” said Charlie.

  “It makes me sick, too,” said Gus. “What they say is, they’re just doing their job. From their point of view, lying is just part of their job
. Jimmy Breslin said to me once, ‘A courtroom is a place where people lie,’ which I have come to learn is very true.”

  “I don’t think that’s the way it’s supposed to be,” said Nancy.

  “The lawyers who are always proclaiming, ‘Your Honor, this trial is a search for truth,’ are the same ones who say O. J. was chipping golf balls at the time of the murders,” said Gus. “Truth has become a joke word.”

  After dinner, Gus walked Nancy out of the dining room to her car. The Secret Service agents appeared behind them. Ahead, the parking boys directed her driver to bring her car forward. As they walked over the little bridge, Nancy looked down at the swans below and the lawn beyond.

  “That’s where Patti’s wedding was,” she said. “It was such a pretty wedding. Didn’t last.”

  “Grafton’s been divorced, too,” said Gus. “I think it’s great you’ve reconciled with Patti.”

  “I needed her,” said Nancy.

  “It’s been wonderful seeing you again, Nancy,” said Gus, as he kissed her good night on the cheek. “It’s been such a long time.”

  “This has been great for me, talking about the trial,” said Nancy. “Sometimes I get so frustrated by what’s happening, so it’s good to talk about it with someone who’s actually there. Would you like to do this again?”

  “Of course. It’s my favorite subject. I never run out of stories.”

  11

  In his “Letter from Los Angeles,” Gus wrote:

  It was from Robert Kardashian’s house in the San Fernando Valley that O. J. Simpson, with a gun, a reported eight thousand dollars in cash, a passport, a fake beard, and Al Cowlings at the wheel, departed on his famous bolt for Mexico, or his bolt for Nicole Simpson’s freshly dug grave to commit suicide, depending on which version of the story you believe. Shapiro and Kardashian claimed they had been upstairs in a conference room and didn’t know Simpson and Cowlings were leaving. Also in the house at the time were Dr. Henry Lee, America’s foremost forensic scientist, Dr. Michael Baden, a former New York City medical examiner, Dr. Saul Faerstein, a psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Huizenga, an orthopedic surgeon brought aboard by Shapiro, several nurses, et cetera. All claimed to have been unaware that Simpson and Cowlings had left the house. Kardashian, with Shapiro by his side, read Simpson’s cover-every-base “suicide” note at a hastily convened press conference. “He only had sixty dollars on him,” Shapiro said on camera to offset the belief that his client was trying to escape. As for the fake beard, Shapiro’s spin on that was that Simpson had been planning on taking his children to Disneyland, an interpretation that might work for Michael Jackson but which seems improbable for Simpson, who had not been having problems being mobbed by fans for a long time, particularly kids, prior to the grisly slayings in June. But, as they say out here, Shapiro was just doing his job.