THE PEOPLE VS OJ SIMPSON: JEFFREY TOOBIN'S THE RUN OF HIS LIFE

The language that divides us. The People V. O.J. Simpson: The Run Of His Life, was released to coincide with the TV series, which in America was called American Crime Story: The Run Of His Life: The People vs O.J. Simpson. Similiarly, in America the book's primary title was The Run Of Life. Because OJ's career as a running back (and Hertz airport hurdler) was probably not something a British audience would recall, that title was played down. And the vs. was changed to v. because a British audience wouldn't be able to make that narrative leap either.

You can listen to or read my essay 'OJ and Our America' which I did for Cultural Frontline, on the BBC World Service, in my previous posts on this blog. I did that after seeing the first two episodes of the TV series, which prompted me to read Jeffrey Toobin's book. In fact, if you're playing catch-up with the series, I'd suggest you read the book early on too, because it will give you another picture of the case and the trial, and put things into context. It's also a great read. Toobin was writing from the standpoint of a legal observer, and he takes on the legal issues with the same sort of dramatic drive the series does, but with much more depth and context. And without actors to make characters more sympathetic.

The title is a little misleading. The Run Of His Life is really better applied to the famous Bronco chase, a run where he eventually turned and went the wrong way before being brought down in his own driveway. The trial was really the run of their lives for many of the other people involved: in a bigger sense, OJ might have been better served had he followed either of his original plans, of suicide or escape. That was the moment the trial leapt into the netherworld of celebrity: as Toobin says 'the world waited to see if O.J. Simpson would blow his brains out on national TV'. Irony is a major player in the Simpson case. As Toobin writes, 'only O.J. didn't understand the preeminent place of race in his own defense'. 'I'm not black. I'm O.J.'

Really the title might have been 'The Indifference To Truth'. Toobin talks of the shamelessness of Alan Dershowitz, but points out 'shamelessness is a moral, rather than a legal, concept.' He then quotes Yale Law School Dean Anthony Kronman on 'the indifference to truth that all advocacy entails'. He doesn't note the irony of a law school dean assuming the law's rules apply; outside the world of attorneys (and who knows, perhaps even inside occasionally) advocacy may pursued via the truth. Call me naïve and put me on the OJ jury. It's chilling to actually read OJ's 'suicide' note, which begins 'First everyone understand nothing to do with Nicole's murder'. That could be the title of a book too.

Toobin is absolutely brilliant on the way the defense's case was built on lies, and the lies built into performance, helped by the inertness of Lance Ito and the prosecution intent on playing Judy to the defense's Punch. His was the first piece on the 'race card' in the OJ trial, the strategy which proved effective, but he doesn't miss the smaller things. Barry Scheck's fragmentation of the prosecution's overwhelming DNA evidence was filled with explanations that ere 'fanciful, and some were silly'. They posited an LAPD that was both 'totally inept and brilliantly sinister' (this is in Marcia Clark's closing argument in the TV show. Maybe the glove was enough, but without Scheck's dumping of a ton of mud in the recombinent waters, it might not have been.

Although the TV series is based on Toobin's book, much material seems to have been gleaned from other sources, most notably Larry Schiller's 'as told to' inside story, which is where, for example, the brilliant scenes of Johnny Cochran redecorating OJ's house before the jury can see it is drawn. That he was able to do that speakes volumes about the ineptitude of Ito's court. Toobin is good on many of the sleazy tactics, such as deliberately withholding witnesses, but I can recall others, like swamping the discovery process, that I might have read in his columns but which aren't in the book. No matter: Toobin's book is full of the sort of astounding bits of absurdity that became the daily fodder for the OJ audience. LA DA Gil Garcetti's press officer, Suzanne Child's, would wind up 'dating' talk show vampire Larry King. And at times, like many magazine writers, he has to give the best lines to his colleagues on the daily beat. Mike McAlary's take down of Robert Shapiro presenting himself as the hero of the trial was deflated by Mike McAlary of the New York Daily News, who explained Shapiro was 'a typical Hollywood invention--a character tan-deep in make-up and significance'. Toobin also explains elsewhere that Shapiro drove a Bentley, but it 'was a used Bentley'. Years ago, when I reviewed Chris Darden's OJ book (you can link to that here) I pointed out where Darden said proudly he drove a Mercedes, but that it was 'only a used Mercedes'. In LA, I said, that passes for asceticism.

It's also brilliant on the internal battles within the defense team, particularly Shapiro's exclusion from it as the trial went along.The best thing about reading Toobin is to get the small bits that form the basis of the series' legal argument in more detail, and in tracking the personalities in more depth. F. Lee Bailey in particular comes off far worse than Nathan Lane's portrayal, but almost all the TV show's characters lack the desperate edge that Toobin gives them. And Toobin ends with a postscript on the civil trial, which took place in Santa Monica, not downtown, and of course went against OJ. It's a somewhat better, if less dramatic, but more ironic ending. This is a book to read regardless of whether you've seen the show or not. Because even if you don't intend to watch, after you read this, you will.

The People V O.J. Simpson: The Run Of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

Arrow Books, £7.99, ISBN 9781784758867

OJ REDUX: REVISITING CHRIS DARDEN IN CONTEMPT

With OJ Simpson beginning the Obama era in a Nevada prison, it seemed like a good moment to revisit what was one of the many 'trials of the century' in America. One of the low moments of the millennium past for me had to be being asked to review Christopher Darden's memoir of the trial. Darden has gone on to 'write' other books, including at least one with the LA crime writer and critic Dick Lochte. Without prejudging those, here, with a few updates, is what I wrote then.....

The morning after OJ Simpson's police "chase" mesmerized America, ADA Christopher Darden says his regular aerobics class was empty. Watching the white Bronco on TV had left the would-be exercisers "too drained to come to class." Darden sees no irony in this, but then, Darden is a lawyer in Los Angeles.

The failure of British viewers to succumb to the hypnotic allure of the Simpson trial may be the result of perceiving it as an exercise in jurisprudence, when in American reality it was a daily soap opera called LOS ANGELES, directed by Judge Lance Ito. If it were not as successful as DALLAS, it may be because OJ is no JR, while Darden and Marcia Clark will never be mistaken for Bobby and Pammie. The Simpson trial was a portrait of lifestyle as culture so far removed from ours as to be unrecognisable, images from a satellite probe to another galaxy where creatures like Kato Kaelin exist in almost-human form.

This book was Darden's last and only chance to win the case. OJ's "Dream Team" may have made Chris and Marcia look like Richard and Judy, but as an author Chris, like OJ the defendant, cannot be cross-examined. Darden provides few new revelations, just a lot of the hearsay which fueled the tabloids and talk shows. But the simplicity of the factual presentation here makes one wonder why the same approach wouldn't have worked on the jury. The bottom line is, it might've (though Vincent Bugliosi made the convincing case the that the trial was already lost in jury selection) except Darden and Clark failed totally as prosecutors. Instead of examining that failure, Darden blames sloppy police work, hints that OJ's cop friends may have deliberately helped him, and cites bungling testimony by police forensics experts. He dumps considerable and deserved blame on Ito, who turned the role of judge into game-show host. But Darden sees nothing wrong in that; he blames Itoh only for letting the other side be the featured contestants.

Despite his years in LA, at heart Darden remains a product of San Jose State, and he still misses the point of LaLa Land. He not only accepted, but reveled, in the Hollywood ground rules Itoh set, then somehow expected the case should be decided as if Itoh and his jury had just found the way to San Jose after all. "I didn't screw around," says Darden as he prepares to deal with the issue of Mark Fuhrman and the "N-word". If euphemism isn't screwing around (and "screwing around" not euphemism) then what is? Johnnie Cochrane played the race card, and it was the Ace of Spades. He got away with it because Darden didn't trust his own case enough to see beyond appearances. By trying to bleep out the word "nigger", he accepted Cochrane's exegesis,and helped give the word the power, and Fuhrman’s use of it the overtones, which Cochrane needed it to have. Johnnie understood instinctively this would cement race as the case's only issue. Darden, mired in Hollywood fantasies, thought like a network VP of standards and practices, trying to decide how many times you can say ’crap’ in prime time.

When the Fuhrman tapes revealed Ito's wife,an LA police captain, to be a liar, Darden could have pressed for Ito's recusal, but he chickened out. Instead, he satisfied justice by accepting Ito's statement that his feelings were "hurt". When Darden received an award from a local black leaders, he could have used the platform to denounce Cochrane face to face. He didn't. He wouldn’t risk tarnishing his award, as you'd expect from any self-absorbed Angelino, picking up his self-congratulatory version of the Oscar, and flushing justice into the Pacific.

Darden wants to have it all ways. Mixing autobiography into the Simpson trial merely leaves us wondering how this hot-headed and short-sided guy could win any argument. "Asshole" is his and Marcia's private name for Simpson. Bet that bothered OJ as he walked free. Darden talks about wanting to beat Simpson up. Wimp to the end, he settled for hurting his feelings. Oddly, every time Darden tries to point out the differences between himself and OJ, he makes the two of them seem more similar. Chris doesn't beat women, but he did abandon the mother of his child. He abhors celebrity but wants you to know he thinks he looks like the actor Louis Gosset. OJ "dated" (another LA euphemism Darden revels in) only white women, and lucky for Darden he did, since, until Paula Barbieri's The Other Woman came out, Darden's was by far the dumbest of OJ 'literature'. Elevating himself over Simpson, Darden takes pain to explain he will "date" anyone. And best of all, he doesn't "date" and tell. He may have the gracelessness to compare Marcia Clark metaphorically to a hamster on a treadmill, but he's too much of a gentleman to "compromise" her any further, nudge nudge, wink wink.

The closing acknowledgements are the strangest part of this strange book. "The last thing I wanted to do is write a book," Chris tells his ghostwriter to write, after thanking his agents at William Morris; agents he hired, presumably, to stop him from ‘writing‘. Think about it: he didn’t want to write the book he hired someone else to write for him—so in that sense I suppose he was telling the truth about not wanting to write. Now all he needs to do is stop reading and he could become a movie producer.

"We did it our way--with dignity and class," he says, posing for a photo beside his Mercedes, while pointing out it was bought second-hand. A used Mercedes is what passes for asceticism in LA. Then come the thank-yous. 'He' writes: "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia! Keep running. You deserve the best life has to offer." (Keep running? Remember the hamster in the cage?) Others get similar bon mots: "You are the best". "We were meant to be together.""You've given me a wonderful gift". These bulletins, sentiments stolen from heart-shaped Valentine sweets, bear an eerie resemblance in tone and content to the bleatings in the "suicide" note written by OJ Simpson, before he began his famous "chase". Call it Chris's career-suicide note, and wait for the car chase in his second-hand Merc.

IN CONTEMPT, Christopher Darden with Jess Walter,
Regan Books/HarperCollins, £16.99