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 AND OUR AMERICA: THE CULTURAL FRONTLINE SCRIPT

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk on the BBC World Service's programme Cultural Frontline, tracing the influence and effects of the OJ Simpson trial; you can read my introduction to that in my post of 2 April, or link direct to the programme on Iplayer here; it comes about 14 minutes in. But for the time the show is no longer available, I thought I'd post my working script (with one footnote) here.

The essay was prompted by the showing of American Crime Story: The People vs O.J. Simpson on BBC television. As the series has now concluded, and I am about to write about it, and about the re-issue of Jeffrey Toobin's book about the trial, I thought this bigger picture might be instructive...

OJ AND OUR AMERICA

Was it really two decades ago? Watching The People Vs. OJ Simpson transported me back to that summer of 1994. After a stressful day in charge of the host broadcast of the opening match of the FIFA World Cup, I'd ordered room service in my hotel to watch the NBA basketball finals, when the infamous white Bronco driven by OJ's friend AC appeared in a box in the screen's lower third. Soon, the basketball was relegated to the box, then it disappeared, as the strange freeway convoy disguised as a police chase took centre stage. It was presented just like sports coverage, because America's new national pastime was television, and OJ gave TV everything it could desire.

It was billed as the 'crime of the century', or the 'trial of the century', but almost every decade in America produces at least one of those. It actually was the television event of the past century, but re-seeing it today generates far more than nostalgia. The Simpson trial balances on two great axes: race and celebrity, and it is both history and prediction. It is America defining itself, by its unending racial schism, and re-defining itself, as Andy Warhol foresaw, by celebrity.

The mini-series sets the scene with the brutal beating of a black man, Rodney King, by white Los Angeles police four years earlier, and the massive riots which followed the cops' acquittal on criminal charges. This signals the first crucial theme: the show dissects the way Simpson's defense was based on the disconnect between black and white Los Angeles. White America believed stars like OJ transcended race; prosecutor Marcia Clark wisecracks that a jury of OJ's peers would actually consist of 'middle aged white millionaires'. Black Americans saw it differently.

The narrative of OJ being framed by cops who resented his wealth and fame, hated his having a beautiful white ex-wife, recalled the Jim Crow era when 'uppity blacks' might be lynched for 'recklessly eyeballing' a white woman. Whites saw OJ as a world apart from Rodney King, but OJ's lawyer Johnny Cochrane knew they had one crucial thing in common, their skin; actor Courtney Vance milks every nuance of racism perfectly.

Twenty-two years later, America has a black president, and something like 20 per cent of the country believes he's a foreign-born Moslem educated in terrorist cells. It's impossible not to feel the embers of prejudice smouldering, waiting to be blown into flames by the next police killing of an unarmed black man.

Race was the strategy, but the trial was defined by celebrity. OJ had always received special treatment from the police and district attorneys in LA. It was easy to see why: when I met OJ while covering the 1992 Barcelona Olympics;, his charisma was overpoweringly physical: he's big in a way Cuba Gooding, the actor playing him on TV, cannot convey, yet moved gracefully with a chiselled handsomeness and easy smile. In the face of his celebrity, the prosecution pulled on kid gloves, but the money and sheer weight of numbers of the defense team pounded every concession into a submission. Judge Lance Ito preened for the cameras even as his head sunk beneath the quicksand; Clark and her assistant prosecutor Chris Darden saw TV punditry in their futures.

The mini-series plays the celebrity card knowingly, by highlighting OJ's friend Bob Kardashian, played with his trademark insecurity by David Schwimmer. Typically, there’s no mention of the garment bag Kardashian removed from OJ’s house, with whatever crucial evidence it contained (NOTE: This comment was premature. The bag did feature later, as Kardashian and AC opened it together to discover it contained nothing incriminating. That moment signalled the show's almost total acceptance of a changed Kardashian, Schwimmer being a character far more sympathetic. But I wonder.) Because what’s more important is that OJ was godfather to Kardashian's oldest daughter, Kim, and there follows a series of knowing winks at the soon-to-be-famous-for-being-famous sisters.

The Kardashian phenomenon was, in effect, enabled by the Simpson trial. It brought together the new world of 24 hour news and multi-channel television in a perfect storm, creating a parallel universe in which the trial became a catalyst for endless argument, speculation, innuendo, and punditry, full of cliché and sophistry, all about style and process, not about substance.

This legacy haunts us today. Not just in the morass of trash television, but in the trash television that has been the two-year cycle of the American presidential elections—an endless series of so-called debates in which nothing is debated, filling countless hours of airtime. Donald Trump, most of whose supporters believe that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, steps seamlessly from awarding pretend jobs on scripted reality shows, to playing a candidate in an endless reality show. Indeed, his candidacy would not be possible were it not for the OJ trial.

The primary voters themselves are like the jurors in a series of OJ trials, distracted by the big money dream teams of consultants who make TV commercials, believing in the celebrities they know from TV, and unable to escape the inflammatory rhetoric that invokes that shadowy cloud of ever-present racial divide. The Simpson trial created the Kardashians and empowers the Trumps; it is the template for today's America, glued to its TV screens, understanding nothing.