Anything Goes

by Larry King

  The greatest deliberative body, as it’s called, deliberated another five months before the Whitewater hearings began in the Senate. The president and first lady testified in separate sessions in the Treaty Room at the White House during the summer. And the special prosecutor was thrown out by an appeals court because he was appointed by Attorney General Reno and that was considered a conflict of interest. He was replaced by some guy, a former judge named Ken Starr.

  ———

  I left the radio show in May 1994 after thirty-seven years in the business. There were two reasons: For the first time in my life, I didn’t need the money and, second, because television is so demanding on not only one’s time but one’s soul. CNN wanted me to travel to Asia for interviews relating to Hong Kong no longer being controlled by British rule. They also wanted me in Normandy to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the landing at Omaha Beach. Now, radio can originate just as easily from all of these places but it would mean competition for guests in one place on one topic and I’d be working all night long or all morning long or parts of both because of time zone differences and I just didn’t want to complicate a life that was already too complicated.

  We did a show from the American Cemetery at Colevillesur-Mer in Normandy and had, among the guests, a German tank commander along with an American who had been in the third wave to come ashore on D-Day. They were in separate segments of the show, but it was clear the American wasn’t pleased to be in the same place with the German. And he told me so on the air. But we did have a good conversation about where he was fifty years earlier and he told me this was a topic he didn’t get into very often. I always thought it was good psychology to talk about experiences, but that was a day when I learned it’s not that people don’t want to talk about this, it’s that they can’t. And then there was a call we took from Duluth, Minnesota, which taught me something about what I’ve been doing for the past thirty-seven years:

  I’ve been taping since three yesterday afternoon, and I have cried so many times. I have never heard most of what I’ve seen, you know? You read in history books, but it doesn’t even compare to seeing these men cry and retell their stories.

  When we were driving back to the hotel after doing that show, someone in the car said, “You know, this is the way I wish I could have taken high school history. Forget the books and just let me watch people who were there tell the story.” I didn’t say anything. I was trying to remember the name of my history teacher.

  On the first day back to work from the trip to France the big story was threats made by North Korea about banning weapons inspections. Adding to the heat, North Korea made it clear that any sanctions imposed by the United States (or anyone else, but we all know who was going to get involved) would be considered an act of war. This was, as George Bush’s national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, told me on the air that evening, “a prime-time crisis.” Former President Carter was in Seoul trying to mediate the dispute and I was feeling pretty pessimistic about how this was going to turn out.

  There was another story from that day. O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife had been found murdered on the sidewalk in front of her home. Next to her body was that of a waiter named Ronald Goldman. O.J. had been in Chicago and returned to Los Angeles after being contacted by police. Before going on the air with the Korea story I had been briefed by the producers that we may have to pitch to a news conference with an update on the O.J. story. I wasn’t going to argue because I knew if a story involves someone well known, it becomes an even larger story. But I kept saying to myself, “Holy shit, not O.J.” Three months earlier I had been in Miami as master of ceremonies for a Don Shula golf tournament dinner and presented O.J. with the first-place trophy. And now this. Within a few minutes of taking air, we went live to Commander David Gascon of the L.A. Police Department, who proceeded to outline how the investigation into the two murders was going to be handled. I knew one other thing: While it was a major homicide case, it was going to be a two-, maybe three-day story and then it would be over with.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Mirror on the Screen

  June 1994. I knew I was wrong about O.J. exactly two minutes after the North Korea show came to a close. I had done the hour with Brent Scowcroft thinking it was a news-maker and that we had brought the viewer close to the story through the words of people who are on the front lines. North Korea was making noise in an area already unstable and South Korea’s most populous center was just twenty-five miles from the border. It had the potential of being a real mess.

  As I left the studio, though, I looked at the monitor as the anchor in Atlanta did the lead story. The story was O.J. I stood and watched and listened. So did the rest of the crew. I knew now what the topic was going to be on the next show.

  It was also the topic at lunch the next day. In fact, I’ll lay odds it was the topic at every lunch taking place in America. “It’s a miniseries,” my boyhood buddy from Brooklyn Herb Cohen announced. “You got the money, you got the hero, you got the horrible murder. We see this on TV every night and in every movie.” He was right. As we spoke, helicopters were hovered over O.J.’s Rockingham Drive home and hundreds of reporters were on the street. I had driven to lunch at Duke’s that day listening to the all-news station instead of “How High the Moon” on the big-band station. I wanted to hear O.J. come out and say “I didn’t do it” or hear the Los Angeles police call a last-minute news conference to announce an apprehension had been made. Like all of us, I wanted the good guy to win and the bad guy to be led away and the whole story buttoned up within a set amount of time. It made me wonder if the way it works on TV or in the movies is how we start to expect the chaos of every day to operate. On one level I knew it to be ridiculous. On another, I kept listening to the radio expecting to hear the bulletin that it was over.

  It didn’t happen. By Friday, though, something else happened. O.J. had made arrangements to surrender to L.A. police. He didn’t; at least not right away. Instead, he left a suicide note and disappeared. And by the time I went on the air at 9:00 P.M. that night, O.J. was still missing. The suicide note had been read by his close friend Robert Kardashian. The words made all of us in the studio shiver when they were played as a “bump,” the video insert going into and coming out of commercials that we used every evening.

  I can’t go on. No matter what the outcome, people will look and point. I can’t take that. I can’t subject my children to that. This way they can move on and go on with their lives. Please, if I have done anything worthwhile, let my kids live in peace from you, the press.

  I had watched movies and TV shows with suicide notes. They were usually one page because the audience gets bored if it goes on too long. I sat there in the Washington studio watching the commercial bump, realizing this was very very real. And very uncomfortable. My guests were jury consultant Jo-Ellan Dimitrius and criminal defense attorney Barry Tarlow.

  KING: Jo-Ellan, has the press overdone it?

  DIMITRIUS: Well it would certainly seem that way with the consumption of information that’s been out there. Generally, people believe that, you know 80 percent if there’s an arrest, where there’s smoke there’s fire. And I think that the isolation of this one incident, in terms of world news, has just been so overwhelming and I think, obviously, has affected O.J. to the point where certainly, as a result of that letter, it sounds as though he’s considering taking his own life, if he hasn’t already.

  Her last line got me. I knew I had to ask a question to Barry Tarlow but the idea that O.J. might be dead as we sat in the studio was something I just hadn’t considered. But then there were probably movies or TV shows where the suicide note was actually a confession. I didn’t know what category it belonged in because (1) this was something that probably required some reflection rather than an instant analysis and (2) I was too busy doing my job, which had as a base, many times, instant analysis. Today, with a few years to reflect and have lunch over it, those words were a sad confession of sorts. Do I have proof? Nope.
Just a gut feeling and it took this long to even have a gut feeling.

  KING: Barry, too much?

  TARLOW: Absolutely. I understand that the public has a right to know and journalists have a right to do something. But there must be something more important in the world going on. You have 200 people from the press camped out on Rockingham Drive in Brentwood watching his house. I mean, they’re accomplishing nothing.

  During the hour the police were looking for O.J., the reporters were looking at them as they searched. Then it changed. The air monitor changed to a highway scene just as a voice in my ear from the control room said, “They have O.J in the white Bronco and that’s a live feed.” I started talking as I looked at the shot from a helicopter over a Los Angeles freeway. We brought up the audio feed of the KCAL reporter who was saying the police chase was taking place right now on Highway 5. In 1994 I hadn’t spent a lot of time in Los Angeles other than going from LAX (the airport) to the Beverly Wilshire and then to the CNN Sunset Boulevard studio, so I was flying with the story not knowing where or when or if it would land. CNN producer Rick Davis was watching all of this from the control room and had the fore-sight to know Larry was live in front of millions of people without a clue of Los Angeles streets and handed me a road map while the air monitor showed the police chase. I found I-5 and put a finger on the area. I kept thinking how quickly my needs were changing during this show: First I was hoping O.J to be alive and not follow through with the words in the letter, and now I was wishing I knew which way on I-5 he was headed.

  The chase went into the next hour and I stayed with it. And then it went into another hour. All the networks were carrying the chase. But NBC had a real dilemma because it had the New York Knicks–Houston Rockets NBA championship game. On one hand you have the rabid basketball fans camped in front of their sets and then you have this major story complete with great video. The network chose to jump from one story to the next, which, I can only guess, was an attempt to avoid another Heidi (In 1968, NBC pulled out of the Jets–Raiders game at the top of the hour because it had scheduled the classic Heidi to run at that moment. Football fans weren’t happy. Many are still ticked. Of course, as this was going on I wasn’t really watching NBC, although I was rooting for the Knicks), but one wonders why they couldn’t have just done a split screen so both camps could be kept happy. I have a feeling the clickers that were aimed at NBC started being put to work along with the required four-letter words.

  The white Bronco, with O.J.’s longtime friend Al Cowlings at the wheel, ended up at Simpson’s house and, after O.J. made a call to his mother and talked to his attorney, he went to the Los Angeles County jail. This was unlike any other show I’d done because at no time was I ever in control of events. I hadn’t a clue what route the white Bronco was going to take, I didn’t know (for a while anyway) if O.J. was even in the white Bronco, and it was a story happening right in front of everyone. It was a miniseries and nobody knew the ending, not even O.J., I would venture to guess.

  When I got off the air three hours later, I was absolutely whipped. I didn’t stick around to talk about it other than to ask if the Knicks won. Nobody knew. Nobody cared. Everyone else was tired too. We all just walked to our cars in silence thinking through what we had just seen rather than what we had all just done. Driving home I turned on all-news WTOP to hear the Knicks score but they were talking about, well, you know what they were talking about. By the time I got in my door, I didn’t care who had won (for the record, Houston took the series in seven games, so it doesn’t really matter who won this one).

  The next morning my ex-wife Sharon called me to say she had been on the last flight from Atlanta to Washington and the gate crew was having trouble boarding passengers because so many wanted to see as much of the chase as possible on the airport television monitors before getting on the plane. Normally 50 million people watch television on a Friday night in America. “The chase,” as it came to be called, brought the number to 75 million. CNN hadn’t had a night this good since NAFTA. But the big news to me was the fact that for the first time since we had learned about this late Sunday night, the New York Times had put the O.J. story on the front page instead of burying it inside somewhere. Yeah, the media, whatever the media is, was playing a role not only in what we saw and read and heard, but it was a subject we now automatically talked about. And I’m still not sure if that’s good or bad or just plain moot.

  I took the Metroliner to New York that morning and ended up in a brief conversation with a beautiful lady who refused, despite my efforts, to give me her name. She was making a weekly trip to Manhattan to have nails and hair done and do some shopping. Our conversation started with the New York Times. Well, okay, I started the conversation. For the record, folks, I was single.

  “They have admitted it’s a story,” I said to her while pointing to the below-the-fold placement.

  “I’m surprised you were able to get this early a train,” she said. “You were busy last night.”

  “Thank you for watching,” I answered, getting ready to move across the aisle to where she was sitting. That was exactly the moment she pulled her carryon bag off the floor and into the seat I was headed for. I’ve been around and I pick up on these things real quick. So I went back to the newspaper that prints “all the news (and sometimes on the front page).”

  “The thing I don’t get is why I have to be told what an attorney should be doing or whether reporters are doing too much.”

  She was talking to me. But the damn bag hadn’t moved.

  “Just tell me the story,” she went on. “I don’t want all the inside stuff. I don’t care.” She had blue eyes. And her blond hair was pulled back. There was potential here.

  “Everything is too much,” I said, “but what is just enough?”

  She looked at me. It wasn’t one of those eyes-into-the-sky things when a person is looking for an answer. She was looking right at me. “I don’t know the answer.”

  I looked at her and I wasn’t thinking the way I usually think in this kind of a situation. “You know something,” I said, “I don’t know the answer either.” For the rest of the train ride we were both absorbed in our books and newspapers. When you don’t have answers, there’s not much to say unless, of course, you’re on a TV program.

  Over the next few weeks the owner of a Los Angeles knife shop told the court he had sold a knife to O.J. And then he sold the story to the National Enquirer for $12,000. Meanwhile Kato Kaelin, O.J.’s famous house guest, had been offered a quarter of a million dollars to talk to the Enquirer and turned it down. So the topic the beautiful woman had complained to me about was now something into which we were going to go full blast. And it was fueled by the fact that The New Yorker had run an article by Jeffrey Toobin called “Cash for Trash.” We brought Toobin into the studio along with the always lively national editor of the Enquirer, Mike Walker. His paper had a $1 million offer on the table to Al Cowlings, who had driven O.J. in the white Bronco. It was a show people still talk to me about because one had the feeling the guests were going to go after each other during each commercial break, if not while we were on the air.

  WALKER: We’re unabashed about it. But we wouldn’t let Al Cowlings say anything he wanted. We would check everything he said against known sources$#8230;we don’t want to be wrong.

  KING: What do you make of that, Jeffrey?

  TOOBIN: It’s more phony baloney nonsense.

  When we were done, I thanked them all on camera and, one more time, off camera. Both Toobin and Walker were quiet now and I remember saying to the floor director they were probably going out for a beer together. And there’s one other thing I remember from that interview. The beautiful lady on the train had better face the fact that everything once considered “inside” is now open for general discussion. We were going to talk about strategies by both the defense and prosecuting attorneys as well as how the police are doing their investigation and, of course, how it is all being covered by those with media crede
ntials. I say this only because now I believed it too.

  One thing O.J. had done was to keep problems Bill Clinton was having on health care and relations with Congress off the front page and the television and radio lead story and out of the lunch conversations (the only exception to this glittering generality was Washington, where the conversation still began with O.J., but the next sentence was something like “I hear Dole is gonna hold up anyone from talking to the White House about issues until the November election”). And nobody was talking about North Korea.