The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (12 page)

When the prosecutors heard the tape, they knew immediately how dreadfully the detectives had botched this opportunity. They seethed with frustration—in private. To berate Vannatter and Lange would have been futile, and might also have damaged a partnership that faced a long and difficult investigation. But among themselves the prosecutors had a nickname for the police interview of the defendant on June 13: “the fiasco.”

4. “I CANNOT PROMISE JUSTICE”

B
y noon on Monday, June 13, the media frenzy surrounding the case had begun in earnest. At about 10:00
A.M.
, just ten hours after the bodies were discovered—and before the coroner had removed them—the first local news satellite trucks showed up at the Bundy crime scene. By noon, several stations were transmitting live pictures of Nicole Brown Simpson’s bloodstained walkway. Shortly after the cameras appeared at Bundy, several more were set up outside O.J.’s home. Even though nothing conspicuous was going on there, the growing corps of police officers at the Simpson house suggested that something was up, and soon there were twice as many cameras at Rockingham as at Bundy. Media people and cops gathered, watching each other. The two journalists whose actions that week would have the longest-term implications for the case never came to either scene, but Dennis Schatzman and James Gaines nevertheless studied with care the events unfolding in Brentwood.

A forty-five-year-old black man with a salt-and-pepper beard, oversize tortoiseshell glasses, and a predilection for brightly colored African robes, Dennis Schatzman covered the Simpson case for the Los Angeles
Sentinel
, a paid-circulation weekly devoted to the city’s African-American community. His reports were syndicated to many other black papers around the country, and Schatzman was interviewed frequently on black-owned radio stations. More than anyone else, he set the black conversational agenda on the Simpson case.

The
Sentinel
, which was founded in 1934, is a broadsheet, with a red, white, and blue logo framed by the slogans “The Largest Black-Owned Newspaper in the West” and “Education Will Lead to the Truth.” In 1994, its circulation was just short of twenty thousand, and falling; it lost many readers when, in the post–Rodney King riots of 1992, many of the small stores that sold the paper were looted and closed. The
Sentinel
is fairly typical of the bigger black papers around the country. Generally, the political views reflected in its pages are conventionally liberal; the paper’s dominant theme, not surprisingly, is pride in African-American accomplishments, but it is expressed without the ideological excesses of, say, Louis Farrakhan. In many respects, the
Sentinel
is old-fashioned, with extensive reporting about the cotillions and awards banquets of black society; the paper aims its coverage at a settled and reasonably prosperous middle-class audience—the kind of people who, among other things, tend to answer a summons for jury duty.

A single moment from the events of June 13 stood out for Schatzman: the televised image of Simpson being handcuffed, then released. After first broadcasting Ron Edwards’s scoop exclusively, KCOP, an independent local station, later allowed its competitors to use it, and the scene was rebroadcast frequently. The handcuffing was probably not the most famous videotaped moment to come out of the case, but for one audience in particular, African-Americans in Los Angeles, it immediately linked the Simpson case to their long and tortured relationship with the LAPD. From the beginning, while the mainstream press was using the Simpson case mainly to focus on the issue of domestic violence, the
Sentinel
was presenting the story of a black man searching for justice in a white system.

Schatzman’s first article on the case, in the issue dated June 16, 1994, set the tone. It began: “Los Angeles police officers first handcuffed, then unhandcuffed, football Hall of Famer O.J. Simpson before whisking him from his Brentwood mansion to police headquarters for questioning.” On June 13, of course, Simpson was never actually arrested. Of all the issues raised by the murders on Bundy Drive, the
Sentinel
’s coverage focused on how and why Simpson had been handcuffed. The headline on a front-page sidebar, also by Schatzman, asked,
WERE THE HANDCUFFS
REALLY NECESSARY
? In the breezy style that characterized many of Schatzman’s stories, the sidebar started thus: “Think hard. How many times did you see convicted cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer handcuffed during his well-publicized arrest and subsequent trial? If you say ‘none’ then you get the prize.” Schatzman went on to note that a police spokesman never directly answered his questions about why Simpson was cuffed. “So why was he handcuffed?” Schatzman wrote. “Still no satisfactory answer. The black/white double standard just won’t go away.”

From the outset, Schatzman viewed the case not as an anomaly but rather as an especially important moment in Los Angeles black history. To him, it never mattered that Simpson had previously made a conscious choice to play a negligible role in that history. Schatzman wrote in his initial story, about the handcuffing, “And, it just didn’t happen to O.J.; this is not an isolated incident with prominent black men and local law enforcement.” It was true that in the years leading up to the Simpson case, taxpayers in Los Angeles had had to pay substantial amounts to settle lawsuits alleging that the LAPD had illegally detained, in separate incidents, the former baseball star Joe Morgan and the track-and-field Olympian Al Joyner. “When O.J. got handcuffed without being charged, that was the thing,” Schatzman explained later. “With the brothers on the corner, the attitude was ‘There they go again.’ You see, these things happen to us every day.”

At just about the same time Schatzman was deciding to lead the
Sentinel
with the handcuffing angle to the Simpson story, Jim Gaines also had a choice to make. At the end of the first week after the murder, the managing editor of
Time
magazine contemplated what he later would call the “decision that is in a way the culmination of every week: the choice of a cover.” From the moment the bodies were discovered in the early morning of Monday, June 13, there was never any doubt that the Simpson story would lead the magazine, which sells about 4 million copies of each issue. Early that week,
Time
had commissioned a painting of Simpson, and as the days passed, the magazine’s New York headquarters was inundated with a multitude of photographs as well. Then, at 2:00
A.M.
on Saturday—just hours before
Time
’s deadline—the LAPD released Simpson’s mug shot. As a final option, Gaines later wrote in
the magazine, “we decided to commission another artist’s portrait, using the mug shot as a starting point. For this assignment we turned to Matt Mahurin, a master of photo-illustration (using photography as the basis for work in another medium, in this case a computerized image). Mahurin had done numerous other
Time
cover portraits in the same genre, including the one of Kim Il Sung two weeks earlier. He had only a few hours, but I found what he did in that time quite impressive.

“The harshness of the mug shot—the merciless bright light, the stubble on Simpson’s face, the cold specificity of the picture—had been subtly smoothed and shaped into an icon of tragedy,” Gaines elaborated in the self-dramatizing idiom of
Time
. “The expression on his face was not merely blank now; it was bottomless. This cover, with the simple, non-judgmental headline, ‘An American Tragedy,’ seemed the obvious, right choice.” A simpler way of describing the cover is this:
Time
darkened the mug shot.

And the roof fell in. As
USA Today
put it in a prominently played story just a day after
Time
hit the newsstands, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Time’s ‘photo-illustration’ cover this week of a darker O.J. Simpson is speaking volumes—and raising charges of racism. ‘The way he’s pictured, it’s like he’s some kind of animal,’ says NAACP Director Benjamin Chavis Jr.… ‘The photo plays into the stereotype of the African-American male as dangerous and violence prone,’ Chavis said.” The civil rights community rose up as one in outrage. “The cover appeared to be a conscious effort to make Simpson look evil and macabre, to sway the opinion of the reader to becoming fixated on his guilt,” said Dorothy Butler Gilliam, president of the National Association of Black Journalists. And on CNN, Jesse Jackson ascribed the
Time
cover to “the devastating dimension of something called institutional racism.”

Today, at some remove from the controversy, it is not clear that
Time
should have been judged so harshly. (It is also interesting to ponder whether anyone would even have commented on
Time
’s cover had
Newsweek
not used an unaltered version of the same mug shot on its cover that week.) Magazines have used doctored photographs for years; as long as they are properly labeled (as
Time
’s was) they have prompted little, if any, debate. Journalists make implicitly political choices every time they run a photograph—should
President Clinton be smiling or frowning this week?—and these decisions generally pass unnoticed. The cry of racism about the
Time
cover is especially perplexing. Were Chavis et al. suggesting that darker-skinned blacks are more threatening, more evil, than their lighter-skinned brethren? If so, that seems far more racist than anything conveyed by the editors at
Time
. In any event,
Time
’s transgression does seem to have prompted a disproportionate response. Still, the magazine did what the mainstream press always does when faced with the charge of racism: It denied any malign intent, offered a tepid justification for its actions, and then fell on its sword. “It should be said (I wish it went without saying) that no racial implication was intended by
Time
or by the artist,” Gaines wrote in a full-page apologia the following week.

The fallout from both the
Time
cover and the
Sentinel
’s coverage lasted the entire duration of the case. Regardless of Simpson’s feelings for the black community—on CNN, Jesse Jackson had referred to him as “a kind of de-ethnicized Negro”—the first week saw his case immediately move to the top of the civil rights movement’s agenda. For Dennis Schatzman and the black press generally, Simpson’s cause became their own. For the mainstream press, fearful of enduring a
Time
-like ordeal, the priority became how to avoid giving offense to that black leadership. No one recognized these developments faster, or exploited them more, than O.J. Simpson’s lawyers.

Marcia Clark received Vannatter’s call on the morning of June 13, and she learned a great deal about O.J. Simpson over the course of that day. Vannatter asked her to come out to the Rockingham house and monitor the situation while detectives executed the search warrant. The magnitude of the case dawned on Clark gradually. She had helped plan a bridal shower in honor of her closest friend, fellow deputy district attorney Lynn Reed Baragona, for lunch on that Monday. Clark called at the last moment to say she couldn’t make it.

“How can you cancel?” Baragona asked. “You’re throwing this thing.”

“I have to do this search warrant,” Clark answered. “It could end up being kind of big. I’ll tell you about it later.”

It didn’t take long for Clark to size up the situation to her satisfaction. The following morning, back in her office downtown, a friend stopped Clark and asked whether she thought O.J. had committed the murders.

Of course, Clark snapped. She was confident the tests on the blood at Bundy and at his home would come back to implicate Simpson. “He’s evil,” Clark said. “He beat his wife. He’s evil.”

It was a characteristic reaction—atypical only in that Clark did not describe Simpson as “fuckin’ evil.” Quick-witted and quick to judge, cheerfully and relentlessly profane, Clark was the paradigmatic “lifer”—the term prosecutors use to describe those among them who cannot conceive of switching sides to criminal defense work. She saw her cases—and the Simpson case in particular—as struggles between good and evil, Us versus Them. O.J. had killed Ron and Nicole; that was all that mattered to her. But for better or worse, trials, especially this trial, are about something more than whodunnit. The Simpson case blurred the lines between the good guys and the bad in a way that Clark had never before encountered.