Movie Corner: Murder, He Wrote (Sort Of)

When O. J. Simpson's notorious memoir, If I Did It, was left on the cutting-room floor following a national outcry, the entire print run was carted off to the pulping machines. But at least one copy survived: Vanity Fair scored a pristine hardcover. Here are the juicy bits.

by James Wolcott VF.COM

So here it is, laid out sweet on the desk, in living color—O. J. Simpson's If I Did It. Newsweek obtained the book's most controversial chapter, but Vanity Fair landed the whole enchilada. What to make of it, that's the rub. Despite its animating anger, it's a book that projects a strange lack of affect, a suave void. It made me think of the movie Sunset Boulevard. There, the tale of murder and jealousy is narrated in one long, rueful flashback by the voice of William Holden's Joe Gillis as he floats dead in the swimming pool, face down in a watery grave of blood and chlorine, crime-scene flashbulbs exploding overhead. If I Did It, a shameless yet ingeniously opaque cock teaser of a cash-in confessional (who knew a book about a double homicide could be so flipping coy?), has none of the creeping-ivy-and-sarcophagus decay of Wilder's classic Hollywood gothic, none of its peekaboo depravity. The Hollywood B-list scene that Simpson bops around in here as a former football great and bit actor in the spoofy Naked Gun series is very suburban, very spruce—a brightly maintained semblance of normality packed with normo leisure activities. Trips to McDonald's in the Bentley. Backyard birthday parties. Benefits for worthy causes and children's recitals. Weekends at Mexican resorts. You know, just hanging out, nothing heavy. No solemn chimpanzee funerals in the backyard, that's for sure. And for cert Simpson's ex-wife Nicole bears no comparison to Gloria Swanson's taloned dragon lady, avoiding direct sunlight as if it would zap her into dust. Nicole is young (barely 18 when she and Simpson first meet in the punk summer of 1977, she a waitress, he a recently separated, recently re-united, still-married horndog), blonde, trim, flashy, and fast on the track—a sexy torpedo of tarnished gold. Yet despite these differences, Sunset Boulevard and If I Did It share the same dead man's float, the same glassy stare. The banal horror of this book—apart from the ghoulish sanctimony of Judith Regan's entrepreneurial gusto that attended it—is that O. J. Simpson professes to open up and, once open, there's nobody home, nobody there, nothing inside. It's a vanishing act in full view.

If I Did It has the smooth, just-waxed flow of a ghostwritten memoir. (According to the contract with the soon-to-be shuttered ReganBooks, the ghost was Pablo Fenjves.) It's all gliding surface and obvious behavior and psychobabbly introspection. It seems to take place in a terrarium, geography and weather and work playing no part (no anecdotes here from the Naked Gun set or the broadcasting booth); nothing that would distract from the book's studied informality, its coached candor and rehearsed intimacy. It's as if Simpson is sitting across from the reader laying out his side of the story, one-on-one, no reporters or gossip columnists or Court TV vultures sticking in their beaks. After being portrayed as a monster, a murderer, a wife abuser, a charming sociopath, he's here to show you that he's a regular guy who's been given a bum rap. Sure, he has his faults, who doesn't? Sure, he loses his temper once in a while, like that time he went after Nicole's Mercedes with a baseball bat, but he had good reasons—plenty of times he was provoked—and he never intended to hurt anybody. He's not like that. He swears that he never raised a hand in anger at Nicole, and that if she were alive she'd tell you the same thing. (How sad that she isn't alive to attest to his self-control!) If anything, she was the one with the temper, man. That sweet 18-year-old turned into one mean, major mood swinger. Bitching about this, whining about that, smacking the help, then wiggling back into his good graces with her feminine wiles until the next round of family feud. To convey this split personality, this ongoing bipolar Ping-Pong exhibition, one chapter is titled "The Two Nicoles." Two Nicoles were too much for Simpson, who never knew when he picked up the phone or entered the driveway if he was going to get the purring Nicole or the spitting hellcat. He "didn't need that shit," he grumbles in one of his frequent moments of exasperation, yet he put up with her shit past the point when many men might have thrown in the bucket.

That's the most notable aspect of Simpson's self-portrayal in If I Did It—how passive he is, or pretends to be. He may have been a Heisman Trophy winner, a Pro Football Hall of Famer, a bundle of muscles, a studly hitching post who had a Miss Hawaiian Tropic model waiting upstairs while downstairs he made woo-woo eyes at Paula Barbieri (remember her?), but he's a soft, chocolate marshmallow where Nicole's concerned. She's the instigator, the initiator, the catalyst, the live wire, the active volcano, the electric cattle prod. She was the one pushing for marriage (who can blame her?—they met in 1977, didn't get engaged until 1983, and he held out another two years); the one who admitted having an affair with his bud Marcus Allen; the one who re-started sexual relations after they had separated (as if hypnotized, he found himself "following her into the bedroom"); the one who wouldn't let up about moving back into the house on Rockingham. He's trying to keep it together and get on with his life, and she's cat-and-mousing him, mind-gaming him, tugging on the hook. As he tries to move forward, she's stuck in self-destructive reverse, acting and dressing like a teenager with her twat in a snit and, rumors reach him, hanging with a bad crowd. At one point he rues that she'll be the death of him, which could be interpreted as a self-defense ploy: It was me or her, and I "wasn't going to let her take me down with her." Some of his grievances may well be just, but since dead blondes tell no tales, her side of the story isn't available for airing.

Which brings us to the now-notorious Chapter Six, "The Night in Question," the memoir's money shot—the reconstruction of the double homicide as siphoned through Simpson's hazy recall and his ghostwriter's novelettish imagination. If I did it, this is how it was done, this chapter purports to show. It's the evening of June 12, 1994. Simpson has just returned home after his daughter Sydney's recital. Nicole was at the recital, wearing a short skirt that was completely taste- and age-inappropriate for such an occasion. Afterward, he and his sidekick-crony Kato Kaelin, a factotum whose duties were always a trifle vague (even Simpson's kids taunt Kato for being a freeloader), had gone to McDonald's, but the burger just didn't sit right. Nicole and her antics are just wearing him out. He's feeling old, whipped, arthritic, past-it, his athletic glory going gray. Then, when his morale can't funk any lower, a casual friend named Charlie pulls up at the gate, claims he just had dinner with some guys in Santa Monica, and tells O.J. that these guys were saying that Nicole had been partying hard and freaky. Some pal this guy is, driving over just to relay some trash he's heard. Except the pal apparently doesn't exist. There is no Charlie; he's a concoction, a fictional stooge, a phony accomplice, a bogus bit of poetic license on the ghostwriter's part to set the death trap in motion. One word out of this ventriloquist dummy's mouth and suddenly the mopey, moody Simpson acquires agency, finds his burning focus, and the tempo of the book picks up pace, urgency. It has an appointment with death for which it simply can't dawdle. With a squeamish "Charlie" at his side squeaking and squawking, Simpson wheels over to Nicole's, slipping on a wool cap and gloves and sliding a "limited edition" knife out from under the seat, intending only to give her a nasty scare. Oh, I'd say the odds on that stack pretty good. Ron Goldman, a waiter at the restaurant where Nicole and her mother had dined that evening, appears at the back gate to return a pair of glasses the mother had left behind, an errand that the Othello-ish Simpson thinks is a ruse, a cover for a drug drop-off or an assignation. Out the front door flies Nicole in a sexy cocktail dress, sealing her fate. A scene ensues. She sails into Simpson "like a banshee," Goldman strikes a karate stance, and Charlie magically, tragically materializes with Simpson's knife … and then—

—cut—

—the movie screen goes dark as Simpson conveniently blinks out, emerging from a partial, perfectly timed coma to find himself painted with blood, the slashed bodies of Nicole and Ron Goldman crumpled at his feet. How'd all this blood hop on the front of his clothes? Why is his knife so bloody? He stands there dumbstruck as if he had just beamed down from Star Trek transport and duhs that none of this "computed." Fans will recognize this gambit as that old film noir–pulp novel standby, the Fatal Fugue: the blood-soaked blackout where everything's a blur—a bad dream that turns out to be horribly real—a Kafka-esque hangover where one's hands seem to belong to a stranger and the pounding in one's head is echoed by the police pounding at the door. Only in film noir the blood-soaked suspect is usually innocent, the victim of a setup. Here it seems more of a tricky psychological, legalistic escape hatch. The "hypothetical" scenario allows Simpson to have it both ways, to put himself at the crime scene with motive, opportunity, and furious velocity, yet dissociate himself from the actual stabbings, as if the murders somehow committed themselves while he happened to be there holding the knife. (Shakespeare's Macbeth: "Art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?") Understandably, Simpson wanted to spare his children the gruesome particulars of how he might have done the murders that he insists he didn't commit, but this cutaway moment also serves to underscore Simpson's strange teleportation through these pages. Even as a possible killer, the O. J. Simpson of If I Did It is presented as a befuddled bystander, a puppet with broken strings, a fool in a fog. He's a bystander even with his own supposed book, disavowing "The Night in Question" as something slid into place by the publisher and ghostwriter for commercial reasons, thereby sloughing off responsibility for what would have gone out under his name had the project not been aborted pre-launch after the public and media outcry. He wanted his payday and wasn't too particular about it. "Was it tacky?" Simpson said in a recent interview. "Yes, it was tacky, but it was brought to me." He gave ReganBooks some of what they wanted, and the ghostwriter shoveled them the rest.
Which brings us to the now-notorious Chapter Six, "The Night in Question," the memoir's money shot—the reconstruction of the double homicide as siphoned through Simpson's hazy recall and his ghostwriter's novelettish imagination. If I did it, this is how it was done, this chapter purports to show. It's the evening of June 12, 1994. Simpson has just returned home after his daughter Sydney's recital. Nicole was at the recital, wearing a short skirt that was completely taste- and age-inappropriate for such an occasion. Afterward, he and his sidekick-crony Kato Kaelin, a factotum whose duties were always a trifle vague (even Simpson's kids taunt Kato for being a freeloader), had gone to McDonald's, but the burger just didn't sit right. Nicole and her antics are just wearing him out. He's feeling old, whipped, arthritic, past-it, his athletic glory going gray. Then, when his morale can't funk any lower, a casual friend named Charlie pulls up at the gate, claims he just had dinner with some guys in Santa Monica, and tells O.J. that these guys were saying that Nicole had been partying hard and freaky. Some pal this guy is, driving over just to relay some trash he's heard. Except the pal apparently doesn't exist. There is no Charlie; he's a concoction, a fictional stooge, a phony accomplice, a bogus bit of poetic license on the ghostwriter's part to set the death trap in motion. One word out of this ventriloquist dummy's mouth and suddenly the mopey, moody Simpson acquires agency, finds his burning focus, and the tempo of the book picks up pace, urgency. It has an appointment with death for which it simply can't dawdle. With a squeamish "Charlie" at his side squeaking and squawking, Simpson wheels over to Nicole's, slipping on a wool cap and gloves and sliding a "limited edition" knife out from under the seat, intending only to give her a nasty scare. Oh, I'd say the odds on that stack pretty good. Ron Goldman, a waiter at the restaurant where Nicole and her mother had dined that evening, appears at the back gate to return a pair of glasses the mother had left behind, an errand that the Othello-ish Simpson thinks is a ruse, a cover for a drug drop-off or an assignation. Out the front door flies Nicole in a sexy cocktail dress, sealing her fate. A scene ensues. She sails into Simpson "like a banshee," Goldman strikes a karate stance, and Charlie magically, tragically materializes with Simpson's knife … and then—

—cut—

—the movie screen goes dark as Simpson conveniently blinks out, emerging from a partial, perfectly timed coma to find himself painted with blood, the slashed bodies of Nicole and Ron Goldman crumpled at his feet. How'd all this blood hop on the front of his clothes? Why is his knife so bloody? He stands there dumbstruck as if he had just beamed down from Star Trek transport and duhs that none of this "computed." Fans will recognize this gambit as that old film noir–pulp novel standby, the Fatal Fugue: the blood-soaked blackout where everything's a blur—a bad dream that turns out to be horribly real—a Kafka-esque hangover where one's hands seem to belong to a stranger and the pounding in one's head is echoed by the police pounding at the door. Only in film noir the blood-soaked suspect is usually innocent, the victim of a setup. Here it seems more of a tricky psychological, legalistic escape hatch. The "hypothetical" scenario allows Simpson to have it both ways, to put himself at the crime scene with motive, opportunity, and furious velocity, yet dissociate himself from the actual stabbings, as if the murders somehow committed themselves while he happened to be there holding the knife. (Shakespeare's Macbeth: "Art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?") Understandably, Simpson wanted to spare his children the gruesome particulars of how he might have done the murders that he insists he didn't commit, but this cutaway moment also serves to underscore Simpson's strange teleportation through these pages. Even as a possible killer, the O. J. Simpson of If I Did It is presented as a befuddled bystander, a puppet with broken strings, a fool in a fog. He's a bystander even with his own supposed book, disavowing "The Night in Question" as something slid into place by the publisher and ghostwriter for commercial reasons, thereby sloughing off responsibility for what would have gone out under his name had the project not been aborted pre-launch after the public and media outcry. He wanted his payday and wasn't too particular about it. "Was it tacky?" Simpson said in a recent interview. "Yes, it was tacky, but it was brought to me." He gave ReganBooks some of what they wanted, and the ghostwriter shoveled them the rest. [source]