O.J. AUCTION: PRICES SLASHED/The 1999 Civil Trial Auction

I wrote the following piece from Los Angeles for the Financial Times. It appeared in the FT, in somewhat more restrained form, on 27 February 1999. The hardest part was getting accredited, for some reason they didn't quite believe I came from London, or wrote for the FT, or maybe both. But there I am, about four rows back; you can see me more clearly in the second photo, below left. And by the way, the FT didn't use that title for the piece.

The OJ Simpson Circus was back in action in Hollywood last week, when property from the former football star’s residence was auctioned off on behalf of a Court Receiver, one step in obtaining the $33.5 million judgement levied against Simpson by a Santa Monica jury in the civil suit brought by the families of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. This being LA, the receiver, Michael D. Myers, came complete with a four-page biographical press release, describing himself as “slim and soft-spoken”.

Sadly, the slim and soft-spoken Mr. Myers went overlooked by the local media, for whom otherwise it was Christmas in February. Hollywood auctioneers Butterfield & Butterfield on Sunset Boulevard overflowed with 17 film crews jostling, 12 reporters pouting, 8 live-vans transmitting, and 5 panicked PRs. All it was missing was Dominick Dunne as the partridge in the front row. 

The top item on offer was OJ’s 1968 Heisman Trophy, awarded by the New York Athletic Club to America’s outstanding college gridiron player, and made more valuable because the Club misspelled Athletic on the inscription. Beyond the contents of his trophy room, the sale also provided a rare look into the aesthetic sensibilities of the football star turned Hertz pitchman and Naked Gun actor. Tiffany style lamps, chocolate box tourist paintings, and a large proto-cubist head painted by Donna Summer all gathered more action than many of the sports items.

The crush of media necessitated a second room for buyers and the curious public, including those desperate for their 15 seconds of fame. Hogging the centre ring of the circus was one Bob Enyart, a right-wing radio host from Denver, who orchestrated a TV camera scrum by announcing he would destroy the three items he purchased in a ceremony on the steps of the LA courthouse the next day at high noon. Enyart claimed to be acting for “citizens frustrated with the American justice system that allowed a criminal to remain as President and a murderer to go free.” Meanwhile, he frantically plugged his web-site, which turned out to be hawking “I Helped Execute OJ Simpson” T-shirts for a mere $200 a pop. As it turned out, Enyart’s OJ exorcism was exiled to the “and finally” item on the next night’s news.

Other buyers included wealthy souvenir seekers like Marty Cohen, who dropped out of the Heisman bidding at $220,000 “when rationality took over” and, more predictably, sports collectors, like Mark Dalen. Dalen came from Michigan, wearing proudly a huge Super Bowl winners’ ring he’d bought off the bankrupt family of former Chicago Bears owner George Halas. “Financial problems are sad, but they’re good news for collectors,” he said, adding he’d bought, and resold, a second Bears’ ring he after it was pawned by the son of a team executive, in his words, 'to pay off drug dealers'. Dalen proved a less than Super Bowl quality bidder, winding up only with OJ’s commemorative NFL Alumni golf umbrella, a snip at $400. That was the only golf umbrella on auction, but six separate sets of Simpson golf clubs sold for $2000 or $2250 each. OJ must’ve insisted on one day of golfing rest.

And of course, there were the OJunkies who had queued for hours to get a place in the room. Yvonne Adler had attended the civil trial every day for six weeks, and now wanted to buy something to burn. Priced out of the early bidding, she tried to pool with three other women, familiar to each other from the trial, to buy and share a collection of four crystal awards. But one of the four refused, on the grounds crystal doesn’t burn. 

The usual absentee and telephone buyers were joined by bidders on the internet. The auction was transmitted live over Yahoo.com, and featured interactive “real time” bidding, using systems developed by the Seattle-based LiveBid. LiveBid has already run 40 internet auctions, selling, among other things, the Batmobile from the movie Batman Returns. CEO Matt Williams, 26, admitted they were doing this one for the exposure. The question was, for whom? As Williams said, 'the prospect of riding the OJ media whirl “gave me goose bumps.”

Internet buyers bought three items, and the crush of bidding threatened to overwhelm Yahoo’s Susan Carls, on the computer in the auction room. “It’s pretty scientific,” she said modestly. “The system takes only the highest bid, and automatically eliminates others. But I was really hoping we’d win the next-to-the-last item.” An internet buyer had appeared to claim The Washington Pigskin Club’s Player of the Year trophy, but a late bid from the second room coincided with auctioneer Scott Bradley’s dropping the hammer. "I felt it appropriate to allow the bid," said Bradley, who otherwise coped with the myriad sources with aplomb, to no one's surprise. "Potentially, we can add millions of bidders, but there’s weren’t really any problems."

The piece de resistence, the Heisman Trophy went by phone to a then-anonymous buyer for $230,000. Two days later, Philadelphia sheet-metal wholesaler Tom Kriessman, 47, flew to LA to ante up $255,000 (including tax and comission) for his first-ever sports collectable. "I bought it for everything it represents," he said. "You know, the tragedy that was his life." Not to mention his victims. 

The sales of OJ’s other tchatkes totaled $152,000. Nicole Simpson’s father, Lou Brown (see photo top left), watched the sale from the front row. Attorney Gary Caris announced afterwards that Brown was "very pleased with the result, but very pleased it was over." They remain aware that the $382,000 raised represents just over 1% of the judgement owed the two families, and that’s before the slim and soft-spoken Mr. Myers’ fees.OJ himself has decamped to Florida, where state law protects more assets against civil judgements.

Ending the post-sale press conference, Butterfield’s George Noceti, compared the Simpson auction to his past successes with Liberace or Elvis. And with that, the OJ media circus folded its tents, and Butterfield’s business resumed, auctioning television and movie memorabilia, starting appropriately enough with costumes from the cult TV show The Munsters.

WHEN KATE MET ROBERT: SOUTHERN COMFORT, THE DOCUMENTARY

Note: I wrote this piece ten years ago for the Financial Times, having seen Southern Comfort at the Sheffield Festival, and then interviewed Kate Davis after the film played at the NFT. It aired that spring in the BBC's Storyville series. Seek it out; it's a brilliant documentary. I came across the article as I was going through some files, and thought, since May is supposedly Movie Month here at IT, I'd run it again here....
 

WHEN KATE MET ROBERT

“It’s not what you have down there that determines your sexuality,”says Robert Eads. “It’s what’s here,” pointing to his heart, “and here,” to his head, “that determine who you are.” Kate Davis’ documentary Southern Comfort charts the last year in Eads remarkable life, but that wasn’t what she set out to do.

The director of the award-winning Girltalk, a study of runaway teenagers, had turned to producing for an American cable network. “I found more opportunity to give a voice to people who aren’t usually heard much,” she explains. But while working on a programme about the struggle for civil rights by people who’ve undergone sex change operations, Davis attended a conference of female to male transsexuals. Standing out from the crowd was Eads, a bearded, pipe-smoking man in cowboy hat and boots.

“He broke all the stereotypes, so completely." she explains, "He was a prototype Georgia 'bubba'. But this redneck had been the mother of two children."

Born into a girl’s body, Robert always felt male. He’d tried marriage, but found childbirth “both the best and worst experience of my life.” The joy of life inside him was countered by his despair at feeling it was all wrong, because he was a man. He got divorced, lived for a time as a lesbian, but finally began hormone treatments and surgery to remove his breasts, transforming his body to match his mind.

When Davis met him, Eads, only 52, was dying of ovarian cancer; betrayed, as it were, by the part of his body that remained female. When he first noticed the symptoms, some two dozen doctors made their excuses and declined to treat him, avoiding the awkwardness of a man in their OBGYN surgeries. Eades' lack of bitterness made an deep impression.

“I couldn't get him out of my mind," says Davis. "All the way back to New York, I was thinking 'I've got to make a film about Robert. This is such a bizarre story, I've got to tell it myself'.' When I got home and called him he said 'I thought you'd call'. Robert, knowing he was dying, wanted to reach out to as many people as he could."

But even as Davis began filming, the story began to change. Robert fell in love with Lola, a male-to-female transsexual. As their relationship blossomed, he became determined to stay alive long enough to attend Southern Comfort, Atlanta's annual transgender convention, one last time.

The film opens in spring, with a sense of emotional rebirth as Robert speaks of coming to terms with dying just as he finally found peace in life. As Robert shows Lola pictures of himself as a little girl, we see just how far he has come. Davis works with all the intimacy of a home movie, allowing the audience to become part of Robert's world. "Yes, you could say it's close to subjective camera work," she says. "It gets the audience into the people's heads, so you can't objectify them."

Documentaries often do objectify. Davis studied with the masters of fly-on-the-wall techniques: Frederick Wiseman, Ricky Leacock, and Ross McElwee. The unwritten law of such films was that the camera is a silent observer. Not so this time. "I found the camera disappeared." Davis says, "In a sense I crossed the line. It became totally a labour of love. Where it might have been shocking, there was just so much normality."

In fact, what is amazing is how quickly the audience accepts a new definition of normality. The film's saddest moment comes when Robert's father explains why he now tells friends Robert is his nephew. "I didn't want the neighbours realising this is something different," he says. At the same time, when one of Robert's own sons tells us, "If I were to remarry I'd want Mom to be the best man," it is uplifting, and it doesn't sound at all strange.

Using digital video enabled Davis to work unobtrusively, and to move quickly to emphasise emotional reactions that larger equipment, or crews, might miss. Having Robert's trust enabled her to gain quickly the trust of is surrogate family, a pair of younger transexual men, and their partners. These are people whose first instinct is to remain inconspicuous. They appear to have chosen backwoods Georgia specifically for the privacy it affords. And they had real fears.

"Some were scared they'd lose their jobs, if not their lives,” Davis says. “But they wanted to believe they could change people's hearts and minds.” She laughs. “Of course, no one liked the way they looked on film! But seriously, some have attended public screenings, and when they see audiences react positively, they've been amazed."

Southern Comfort won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival. Its UK premiere came at the 2001 Sheffield International Documentary Festival. I spoke to Davis after a February 2002 screening at the National Film Theatre, part of the Sheffield Festival's national tour. She too was overwhelmed by audience reaction.

"This was what he wanted. I think Robert would have approved," she says, and her eyes begin to fill. She still feels the loss. "I just couldn't break away," she tells me. "Usually after you finish a film you may stay in touch, but you re-establish your distance from your subjects. This was a real friendship. Frankly, it took me almost a year before I could begin editing. I miss him so." She stops again, distracting herself by rounding up her two children. "That year was necessary, because I was still caught up in the injustice of Robert's death. I needed distance to cool down, to see that the story was simpler, deeper than that. I'd actually interviewed two doctors for the film, but I cut them out. I didn't want an investigative report."

Instead, it is a moving portrait of one man's difficult struggle to simply be accepted as the man he wanted to be. Robert Eads brought dignity to the film himself. Kate Davis might finally bring him acceptance.