The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (30 page)

Hattie was in frail health much of her life, and when the draft was reinstated, she feared having to care for her children alone. Johnnie Senior was rated 1-A by the draft board, which made him a prime candidate for service overseas. So the family realized that the only way to keep the patriarch out of harm’s way was for him to find civilian war work, which was scarce in Louisiana. But Johnnie had an aunt who lived in San Francisco, and she said employers there needed an endless supply of able bodies to staff all the factories that were gearing up around the Bay Area. So Johnnie hopped the fabled Sunset Limited train and made for the coast.

It became a well-worn path. The Cochran family joined one of the greatest internal migrations any country has ever seen: the black
flight from the South during and after the war. Kinship and custom dictated the destinations: Mississippians went to Chicago; North Carolinians headed to New York; and Texans and Louisianans, like the Cochrans, went to California. Johnnie quickly found work as a shipfitter for Bethlehem Steel, building vast troop ships in Alameda, next door to Oakland. He rented a three-bedroom apartment and sent word for Hattie and the kids to join him.

The war may have put welding tools in his hands, but Johnnie Cochran, Sr., was still determined to keep in touch with the white-collar world. After long days at the docks, he took correspondence courses to hone the sales techniques that would serve him in peacetime. Within weeks of V-J day, the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, the biggest of the black-owned companies on the West Coast, tracked down Cochran in Alameda and offered him a job on the spot. Johnnie quit the shipyard that day. He thrived. Promoted to manager in 1947, he was appointed to open a San Diego office in 1948 and then went on to a bigger job in Los Angeles the following year.

Having lived in subsidized housing during the war, Johnnie senior had accumulated a considerable nest egg by this point, and he had a notion of buying an apartment building as an investment in the booming Los Angeles real estate market. He told Hattie the family could live in one of the flats. She wouldn’t hear of it. She wanted a house for her family—a big one. And Johnnie, as was his custom, deferred to her wishes and bought her a house on a pleasant street in an integrated neighborhood called West Adams. Johnnie junior, his mother’s favorite, was about to start high school, and Hattie Cochran was determined that he would have nothing but the best.

Easy Rawlins, the private eye in Walter Mosley’s novels, once described the Los Angeles of the early fifties this way: “California was like heaven for the southern Negro. People told stories of how you could eat fruit right off the trees and get enough work to retire one day. The stories were true for the most part but the truth wasn’t like the dream. Life was still hard in L.A. and if you worked every day you still found yourself on the bottom.” Such was—and in
many respects still is—the paradox of black life in the city. After World War II, thousands of African-Americans bought real estate in Southern California, worked in factories for good pay, and shared in the American dream to a degree that would be difficult to fathom in, say, Caspiana, Louisiana. But no one (and especially not black Angelenos) confused their hometown with paradise. The realities of racism, most visible in the blue uniforms of the Los Angeles Police Department, lingered like the smog.

Hattie Cochran was determined that no son of hers was going to wind up on the bottom. She and her husband had already escaped from the ghetto, so her hopes for Johnnie junior called for success on a wider stage, a life of accomplishment and prominence. For all the pluck it took to bring his family into the middle class, the elder Cochran had a diffidence about him, finding contentment in the small things, like family, home, and church. Hattie Cochran hungered for greater success, and she fastened those ambitions onto her firstborn son. The life of the lawyer Johnnie Cochran, Jr., stands as confirmation of a famous observation of Freud’s: “If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success with it.” Johnnie’s mother determined that education would be his route, and she had a simple formula for the kind of place that would push students in the right direction: a school with white children. So Hattie pushed and pulled and made sure that young Johnnie came to be one of about thirty black students out of the two thousand or so at Los Angeles High School, even though he didn’t live in the district. For Hattie’s son, the experience among the children of doctors and lawyers would prove, as she had predicted, transforming. “If you were a person who integrated well, as I was, you got to go to people’s houses and envision another life,” Cochran has said of those years. “I knew kids who had things I could only
dream
of. I remember going to someone’s house and seeing a swimming pool. I was like, ‘That’s great!’ Another guy had an
archery range
in his loft. An archery range. I could not believe it. I had never thought about archery! But it made me get off my butt and say, ‘Hey, I can do this!’ ” These slices of life among his largely Jewish peers were every bit as important to Cochran as an afternoon
with Willie Mays had been to O.J. Simpson. For Simpson it meant that sports was the route out; for Cochran it meant that education was the way up.

Cochran went to the city’s great public university, UCLA, which was then in the midst of its own postwar boom, admitting sons and daughters of the striving middle class and vaulting past its crosstown rival, the private USC. (Indeed, the Simpson case illustrated rather starkly the changing fortunes of the two schools. In earlier decades the private USC traditionally supplied Los Angeles with its leaders, but the public UCLA could count among its alumni not only Cochran but also Robert Shapiro, Marcia Clark, and Lance Ito—who were all smart kids of modest means when they arrived at the Westwood campus. Only one former USC student figured prominently in the Simpson trial: the defendant.) Cochran thrived at UCLA, where he joined the elite black fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi and made a lasting bond with an older Kappa by the name of Tom Bradley. While still in college, Cochran also polished his considerable verbal skills selling insurance for Golden State Mutual, but he recognized quickly that the most profitable outlet for his talents lay in the law.

Cochran graduated from Loyola Law School in 1962 (six years before Shapiro did) and faced the classic dilemma of the newly minted lawyer: to do good or to do well. He thought he could do both. The first stirrings of the civil rights movement were beginning in Los Angeles, and Cochran and his new wife, Barbara, a schoolteacher who had attended UCLA with him, had heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he visited the pulpit of their Second Baptist Church. His message had moved them both. But so, too, did the lessons of his father’s business. Serving the black community, he decided, could also serve Johnnie Cochran. He spent his first three years in practice as a prosecutor with the city attorney, trying misdemeanor cases and building a reputation as a trial lawyer. When he left the government, he set up shop as a defense lawyer, with one office near downtown and another in largely black Compton. When Watts exploded in the riots of 1965, Cochran basically sat out the controversy. And when the NAACP and other civil rights organizations launched efforts to integrate the fire department and local schools, Cochran left no mark on these struggles.
Notwithstanding these absences, young Johnnie Cochran did find his way into the public eye in a case that reflected the city’s painful racial dilemmas.

In May 1966, Leonard Deadwyler, who was stopped for speeding while rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital, was shot and killed by an LAPD officer. Self-defense, said the police. The Deadwyler family hired Cochran to represent them, and the resulting coroner’s inquest was televised to a rapt citywide audience. According to the peculiar procedure of the inquest, Cochran had no right to address witnesses himself but instead had to ask the deputy district attorney on the case to pose questions for him. The twenty-nine-year-old lawyer scarcely said anything at the inquest, but the government lawyer’s words as he relayed the questions—“Mr. Cochran wants to know”—became something of a mantra heard around the city. After the inquest, the district attorney brought no charges against the officer, and Cochran lost the family’s civil suit against the city. But Cochran’s career—and his issue—were launched. Many years later, shortly before the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, Cochran summed up the impact of the Deadwyler case in an interview with Gay Jervey of
American Lawyer
. “What
Deadwyler
confirmed for me was that the issue of police abuse really galvanized the minority community,” Cochran said. “It taught me these cases could really get attention.”

Cochran’s public relations triumph in the Deadwyler case contributed to a feeling of invincibility on his part, and this attitude extended to his personal life. In 1967, Cochran began living an extraordinary double life—one that required, among other things, astonishing bravado.

Over the course of that year, Barbara Cochran began to suspect that her husband was having an affair. Night after night, he worked late, and he took what she regarded as suspicious trips on weekends. Barbara hired a private detective, who reported that Johnnie was in fact spending those evenings at the home of Patty Sikora, a blond legal secretary. When Barbara confronted Johnnie, she later wrote in a book, he turned violent, and he beat her on several occasions. Pounding his hands on her head above the hairline,
Cochran yelled, “I’m going to hit you where there won’t be any bruises!” (Cochran has denied hitting Barbara.) Not long after these incidents, Barbara threw him out of the house they shared with their young daughter. Cochran, however, vowed to mend his ways, and Barbara took him back after a brief separation.

The beatings stopped, but Cochran kept seeing Patty Sikora, telling her that he was in the midst of a drawn-out divorce battle with Barbara. Patty believed him, and their relationship continued. Awaiting the formal end of Johnnie’s marriage to Barbara, Patty went so far as to change her legal name to Cochran. Indeed, while he was still living with Barbara, Cochran entered into a quasi-marriage with Patty; they traveled together, bought property together, and had their own group of friends. As Barbara pieced it together years later (with Patty’s help), Johnnie would “stop over at Patty’s after he left the office. He’d read, help April [Patty’s daughter from a previous marriage] with her homework, or watch TV while Patty made dinner for the family. After April was in bed, they might have some intimate time together. Then John would leave and come home to our house.” Barbara simply thought her husband still worked late.

Incredibly, Cochran managed to juggle these two lives for ten years. Over the course of this period, Patty had a son with Johnnie, and Barbara had another daughter with him. Both women had their suspicions—Patty, that no divorce would ever happen, and Barbara, that there was another woman—but neither made a final move to put Cochran out of her life. At last, in 1977, Barbara ceased playing the fool and moved out of the elegant home they had purchased five years earlier in the tony Los Feliz district of the city. The 1970s had been prosperous years for Cochran, and he had purchased what he later called “my first Rolls” to go with the fancy new house. Facing a potentially expensive divorce settlement, however, Johnnie Cochran decided to make a change. A crusading young liberal named John Van de Kamp had been elected the new district attorney that year, and Johnnie agreed to join him as the number three prosecutor in the office.