Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Of course, even I know that there is just one small problem with what I am saying: even I understand that the jobs available to uneducated women are considerably less remunerative than those available to men—except for stripping and whoring. Part of the reason feminism cannot hold the hard line that I wish it would is just that: better to be a wife than a hooker. People like Camille Paglia who go on about the power and glory of strippers are so stupid. This is desperate work. I don’t notice her doing it.

  However complicated women’s lives seem now, feminism did not occur out of some perverse desire to upset the happy applecart: it happened because many women were stifled by their lives. Perhaps those women were only the exceptional ones who were capable of writing a book or spearheading a movement, perhaps this has been inflicted on a generally happy sisterhood. But I don’t think so. Even Barbara Bush, who embraced her role as the other half of the sky so joyfully, seems to have fallen into a funk and rebelled against it at some point.

  But Hillary Clinton, who was supposed to be a First Lady with a difference, seems to be taking it all lying down. The last time we saw the real Hillary was probably when she shut up some annoying reporter inquiring about her career ethics, asking whether she should have just stayed home and given teas and been a nothing. She meant what she said, and her point was fair enough: women who go out and make their way in the world may or may not be morally superior to those who don’t, but they are more important and more significant people, more valued by the world. That’s the way it is: women who get manicures all day are less important than women who write legal briefs.

  But, perhaps chastened by the response to that remark, Hillary Clinton has been on good behavior ever since, and it is really disappointing. I would have at least thought—especially after taking on the formidable task of overhauling national health care—that Hillary would have been the first First Lady to demand a salary, to go through the congressional confirmation process when she decided to assume some pretty hefty jobs. But she didn’t.

  And in her embrace of the politics of virtue at the beginning of her husband’s presidency, she mistook a crusade for a job. Few remember the whole moral and righteous period in the First Lady’s tenure, before Whitewater made it impossible for her to be the administration’s itinerant preacher, selling the religion of feeling better through the embrace of community. At the time, a profile of Mrs. Clinton by Michael Kelly featured her dressed in angelic white linen on the cover of the May 23, 1993, New York Times Magazine, with bold letters bannered across the bottom of the page that said, HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON AND THE POLITICS OF VIRTUE, while inside an illustration portrayed her after the article’s title, “Saint Hillary.” In it she spoke of her philosophical journey, of the “sleeping sickness of the soul” that afflicts many Americans; she urged us to “be willing to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century.” Kelly—who is usually edgy and dubious in his approach to pols—was alarmingly reverential. This in spite of the fact that she was mostly speaking psychobabble. The reason her language in the New York Times Magazine article is so incoherent and touchy-feely and laughable is that it is all in the abstract, when the real way to make workers feel valued is by giving them more money. It would involve, effectively, an overthrow of the current economic system that pits the interest of employees against that of shareholders, that creates an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation, that means a company that is doing well and profiting might still be laying off workers to make itself leaner and meaner. It would require an economy that made people feel that they are not expendable—not a psychology or a religion to make them feel better about their irrelevance. This is a capitalist country, and the way the government empowers people is by putting more money in their hands. Whatever else is wrong with this country, it has come this far on this economic system, and it is that which we can toy with—ideas are bullshit. Even American foreign policy tends to operate on the principle that our generosity is better appreciated if our own market interests are at stake. We believe we have ideology, but we don’t; we have money. Every time we try to do good because we think we’re being big and beneficent, we end up in Vietnam. I myself don’t like this, I would like nothing more than to see love make the world go round, but just as I’ve come to understand the importance of paying a therapist—of attaching a specific monetary value to that hour, to making it a material thing—I appreciate the way we can mete out meaning with money, and only wish we were spreading it out a bit better.

  And that’s why Hillary, functioning in a salaried society, needs to demand money herself. Linda Evangelista said she doesn’t get out of bed for less than $15,000 a day. Somewhere on earth there are women who don’t get into bed for less than $15,000 a night. And I guess the rest of us have learned to settle.

  PART FIVE

  Used to Love Her but I Had to Kill Her

  Love is a grave mental illness.

  PLATO

  The blonde fox in the white Ferrari.

  That is how a screenwriter I know who lived in the same part of town as Nicole Brown Simpson—the poor man’s Brentwood, a colony of lush little bungalows and starter condos in the flats south of Sunset—described the woman he used to see tooling around in her sporty little car, driving home after a run or a cup of coffee at Starbucks, or maybe just, as her license plate suggested, L84AD8 (“late for a date”). The point he was making in describing her this way was that he had no idea she was O.J.’s wife, no idea her romantic affiliations would eventually be the death of her, or that she would ever be world-famous for any reason other than that he, like other guys he knew around Brentwood, thought she was a real hot mama. A hot tomato, I think, was the expression he used.

  And I mention this only to dispel a myth that gained some currency—in fact, rich acceptance—during the couple of years or so that constituted the O.J. trial and its prelude and aftermath. It was a dismissive belief that Nicole Brown was somehow nothing special, just another SoCal beach babe, another girl who offers to show you her tan lines, a dime a dance, a dime a dozen. To me, this was always ridiculous. As many lovely starlets and beautiful beachcombers as you may find in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, in counties like Orange and Ventura, as many women as there may be waiting for rich husbands or a lucky break in those parts, as many would-be bit players and bottle blondes as there may be lingering at the counter of Schwab’s or on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, I was certain as soon as I saw those first pictures of Ms. Brown that she was never among them. She was never among the dreamy desperate Hollywood hopefuls who eventually end up with a nom de guerre like Ashley or Ashlyn or Asia or Brittany, with a wardrobe consisting of four-inch stiletto pumps and a nipple ring, with a professional life of making pay-per-view porn in stark, refrigerator-bright motel rooms in the Valley. She was also never going to marry a dentist. She was certainly never going to be a dentist. She looks too shielded and expensive to be bothered with such mundane things: not the genie in the bottle, but the bottle itself, the colorful ceramic case whose hieroglyphic surface is so compelling, it does not really matter if beyond and beneath the surface there is only more surface. There is something offsetting and off-putting about Nicole in photographs, something eerie and otherworldly in her exceptional, heartrending beauty—beauty of the kind that one assumes, or at least hopes, expresses a spiritual truth greater than just good looks; though, of course, it probably doesn’t. Nicole’s face had grace, austerity, serenity, the snobbishness of a person rich with secrets, of one who has something to tell and isn’t telling.

  Which turned out to be the case.

  True, Nicole’s taste, at least in the public photos that we all saw over and over again—the most commonly repeated one was from the opening of the Harley-Davidson Cafe in New York in the autumn of 1993—ran to ultra-sheen stretch Lycra, to the tartiest, tawdriest, tackiest mall-girl looks that never quite seem to have gotten out of the mid-eighties—and should not have been worn by any woman out of her
mid-twenties. The skirts are too short, the necklines too long, the fit always seems to be inspired by a tourniquet. But forget that stuff. Because the woman was physically just blessed. Her features are so regular, so even and smooth, by physiognomic standards possibly even perfect, with a straight nose, high forehead, sloped cheeks and such fine, fine bones. And her hair has such shiny blondeness, while her expression is so blank, her eyes so far away: everything about this woman is so golden and frozen, stiff and perfect, just like a statue, a statuette, an Oscar, an Emmy, a trophy that O.J.’s acting was never going to win him. If you needed a woman to model for a mannequin mold or to pose as the face of a national statue the way Catherine Deneuve did for France’s Marianne, Nicole offers the even, smooth, geometrical and unobjectionable face that would suit this purpose. She is a trophy wife, and in all her tanned bronzeness, she actually looks the part.

  What I am trying to say is that it doesn’t much matter to me what real refinements this woman, who was simple, would never acquire, that she wasn’t educated, that to her a big goal achieved would have been owning a coffee bar in Brentwood. It doesn’t matter to me that her idea of “romantic” was to create a Calgon advertisement out of her bathroom and light scented candles all around the tub—or, for that matter, to arrange the same fiery display in the living room, or bedroom, wherever. Nor does it matter that this gesture, which was once romantic and not “romantic,” but has since been co-opted by the consumerist powers that be to become merely cheesy and mail-order common—in 1993, there were $569 million worth of perfumed candles sold; by 1996, it was up to $1 billion—was one Nicole bought into so completely that on the last night of her life, when the police arrived and searched her Bundy town house, they found a full tub, deflated bubbles curdling on the water’s surface, the surrounding ledge covered with burnt-out votives, tapers and cylinders. It doesn’t much matter to me that Nicole wore real fur and fake leather, that in the late eighties her hair was feathered, that almost all the women she knew had silicone breast implants, that she liked to have a good time, that sometimes she had a few too many margaritas and often she danced with men she didn’t know very well. All these issues of taste and aspiration and desperation matter to me almost not at all. Nothing matters, at this point, but still lifes and dead images of a woman who looks so fine and dignified and full of airs. Beauty like hers is greatly powerful, especially in a place like California, because far from being just another pretty face, a slice of sunshine and good cheer, Nicole is arch and strong to appearances, suggesting all kinds of dignity, all kinds of haughtiness.

  And at certain times, if she made you really mad, I am sure that you would want to punch that face and make it go away. You would just plain want to bash it in.

  “For Beauty’s nothing / but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,” wrote Rainer Maria Rilke in The Duino Elegies. “And why we adore it so is because it serenely / disdains to destroy us.”

  That is how I know that O.J. is guilty. Because pretty as Paula Barbieri and Gretchen Stockdale and the combined catalogue populations of Victoria’s Secret and Frederick’s of Hollywood and whoever else O.J. may find himself with may be, Nicole had a quality. A quality that he discovered, she was so young, all the credit is his, he is Columbus docked at America, he feels he owns this quality. She is his Stepford Wife with her faraway eyes, and he is Ira Levin and every male character in the book and movie put together. Above all, she is “angel white,” as he used to call her, and who can deny that Nicole Brown was one of the whitest—and, feature by feature, one of the most Caucasian—women he could have possibly come up with, Hellman’s mayonnaise on Wonder bread with nothing else.

  Everything about Nicole signified so much to O.J., so much he would not want anyone else to be privy to. And you know how it is with things that mean a lot to you. They get heavy. They drive you crazy. They make life worth living, they make life unlivable, you can’t stay, you can’t go, there’s not enough tequila in all of Mexico to straighten out your mind, years go by and nothing ever changes. Finally, if you’ve got half a mind and enough of a stomach to deal with it, you might need to completely destroy this heavy thing—and she starts to be a thing, not a person—in order to ensure that you will never again be haunted by it, never again have to face this woman whose beauty captured you when she was just seventeen, whose visage has held you tight with its refinement and austerity ever since, whose loveliness, in the midst of all this Hollywood trash, and so much that is so tacky, so much that is stonewashed and marbleized and highlighted and surgically enhanced and faked in this and that way, this face is one that will make you weak forever.

  Of course he killed her.

  It was the obvious thing to do.

  The day the verdict in The People v. O.J. Simpson was announced—having been delivered the day before, famously, after less than three hours of deliberation—I was preparing myself to fast for Yom Kippur. The Day of Atonement, the day of the wholly holy, would begin that evening, and like many other Jews, I found myself wondering if Robert Shapiro and Barry Scheck and Alan Dershowitz would be committing acts of contrition as well. Or would they just be talking to Larry King and Geraldo, as had been their wont until now?

  At any rate, sometime that evening, the newly respectable Geraldo Rivera (how many lives had this trial changed?), now talking justice on CNBC instead of having fat from his butt transferred to his forehead on syndicated television, did an interview with Nicole’s father and eldest sister, Denise. Before I get to the Browns, I must say that I cannot emphasize enough what a boon the Simpson trial has been for Geraldo—its effect on him was akin to what the Iran hostage crisis did for Ted Koppel, whose Nightline went from being an emergency measure during a news explosion to then become an 11:30 staple that has been on the air now for close to two decades. Of course, unlike the unknown Koppel, Geraldo was haunted by notoriety and Satan-in-suburbia documentaries. With that for a background, it made sense that Rivera Live became the show of record for anything O.J., attracting more viewers than Larry King Live did as the trial wrapped up: here was a man who liked a good media circus and was not ashamed to invoke the Dreyfus Affair at times when most people would have thought a reference to Naked Gun 33? was lofty enough. Geraldo would often remind people that he had once been an attorney himself, and he’d sometimes moralize obnoxiously or preach self-importantly, which somehow worked well for these proceedings.

  The reason it worked well was that this was a trial that lacked a moral center: with the possible exception of Fred Goldman, who played the grieving parent as if this were King Lear (and eventually became very annoying for just that reason), no one involved with the defense, the prosecution, the jury, the police, the ever-expanding pool of witnesses, or among the friends and family of the victims has emerged from this trial unsullied. Never before have so many people looked so bad for so little. Whether it’s Johnnie Cochran, who made his name as a civil rights lawyer and who so honorably defended the falsely convicted Black Panther leader Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt (and finally got him released from Pelican Bay after seventeen years), but was now race-baiting for a celebrity wife-beater; or Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who have always been good lefties, founding the Innocence Project to make use of DNA to rescue indigent men from the injustice of the death chamber, but were now selling out; or both Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, who were thought to have been incompetent with jury selection, and then with this and that thereafter; Lance Ito, who was thought to be just plain incompetent; the jurors, with their internecine squabbles over deputies and movie privileges, and who, let’s just be honest here—because the color of a person’s skin should not keep anyone from speaking the truth—were just plain stupid; all those witnesses who sold their stories to Hard Copy and thus nullified their testimony; all those producers at Hard Copy et al., who created a bull market for the stories of anyone who, say, drove past a white Ford Bronco anywhere in the Los Angeles area on the night of the murder; even the Brown family, grieving thoug
h they were, made the questionable move of selling the rights to a videotape of Nicole and O.J.’s wedding.

  In this motley mix, Kato Kaelin and his coif achieve the status of near-admirableness: at least he knows he’s a slut. Kato is one person who cannot deny, standing with his hair dryer and mousse in front of his bathroom mirror, that all his life he has just been waiting for such a moment as this to arrive—even though he really does miss Nicole. This oh-wow attitude puts Kato in striking opposition to Geraldo, who believes—or at least he believes he believes—that he is fighting the good fight, that this is all terribly significant. And it may well be: with the amount of airtime and publication space and waking hours devoted to this trial, its various spin-offs—the TV movies and quickie books and commemorative T-shirts and the like—have earned the equivalent of the annual GNP of Romania. If ever there was an elder statesman of precisely the kind of story that the Simpson trial is, it has to be Geraldo. (And however different his approach from that of Kato, it did not keep Geraldo from having the houseguest as a guest in his house in Monmouth County, New Jersey; Kato’s first words upon entering: “Do you have cable?”) And on the night of the acquittal, he does a special two-hour broadcast that attracts two million viewers—me included; I have to go to my mom’s house to watch because I don’t have a television—and is the highest-rated show CNBC has ever aired.

  Denise Brown is definitely the main event, the outspoken spokesperson for her otherwise guarded, even awkward clan, which includes parents Juditha and Lou, and two other surviving younger sisters, Dominique and Tanya. Maybe less than a week before, Denise had gone to some anti-domestic violence rally somewhere near Detroit and helped open up a battered women’s shelter, in her new role as chairman of the Nicole Brown Simpson Charitable Foundation, which was set up to grant money to projects aimed at helping victims of spousal abuse. (The first president appointed by the Browns to head the organization, Dallas businessman Jeff C. Noebel, was forced to step down when it was found that he was awaiting sentencing on charges related to a savings-and-loan scam, and that furthermore he had been named in a domestic violence restraining order for posing “clear and present danger” to his estranged wife.) On this day on Rivera Live she had a prepared statement to read, which began, “The trial is over and the verdict is in …” She never managed to get through the rest, since Geraldo kept interrupting with questions about how they would now have to cooperate with the man thought to be Nicole’s killer—after all, O.J. had the right to see his two children, who were now staying with the Browns in Dana Point, a community in Orange County, sixty miles down the coast from Los Angeles. How, Geraldo wondered, would that be? Denise, for her part, kept avoiding that question, wanting instead to talk about the lessons of Nicole’s death, how we could all grow from this, how awareness of battered women’s syndrome had gone up as a result of this tragedy, how it was important to take what we could from the trial and get on with our lives.