I excused myself to call Judith in New York. I told her what was happening and suggested we pull out, but the attorney asked if he might have a word with her. I handed him my cell phone and left the room, rejoining O.J. He gave me a look and shook his head. “I always thought this was going to be fiction,” he said.
“Fiction? I don’t know where you got that idea. This isn’t fiction. I only write non-fiction books. I save the fiction for my screenplays.”
The attorney reappeared and told O.J. they should take a little walk. They returned two hours later with O.J. back on board. He had misunderstood—it was as simple as that. But he didn’t want to talk about the murders until later, so he wondered if we might start with the “easy stuff.” That had been my intention all along, so the attorney left us alone and we plunged in. We began with the day O.J. met Nicole. We talked about his crumbling marriage to Marguerite, his first wife. We talked about his childhood and about his late father, with whom he had a falling out that lasted for the better part of a decade.
He was smiling by the end of the afternoon. It hadn’t been that tough, he said. He liked it. Yeah, I told him. Ghostwriters are unlicensed therapists. “Don’t be afraid to cry,” I said, only half joking. “Everybody cries.”
“I’m not crying for you, motherfucker!” he said, but he was laughing.
The next day was a little tougher. He told me that he had only struck Nicole once in all the years they were together, once, and the press had turned him into the poster-boy for wife abuse. And none of the problems were his fault. It was all her. Everything.
The term “malignant narcissism” popped into my head.
By the end of the day, we had made it all the way to the night of Sydney’s recital, the night of the murders. Sydney had looked adorable on stage, he said, but Nicole was dressed like a teenager. “What did she see when she looked at herself in the mirror?” he wondered.
After the recital, Nicole and the family went to Mezzaluna for dinner, and the press made a big deal about the fact that O.J. hadn’t been invited. That was bullshit, he said. He had an open invitation. He just hadn’t wanted to go. Instead he went home, called his on-again off-again girlfriend, Paula Barbieri, didn’t reach her, and found himself going for a burger with Kato Kaelin, the houseguest.
At that point, O.J. was beginning to look a little uneasy, though it’s possible he was just tired, so we called it a day. I walked him down the corridor and we got into the elevator. There was a guy inside on his cell phone, and his eyes went wide with surprise. “Holy shit!” he said. “I’m in an elevator with O.J. Simpson. I’ll have to call you back.” He reached for O.J.’s hand, grinning ear to ear, and O.J. took it. When we got to the lobby, there was more of the same. People turned to stare, but there was no horror in their looks, no disgust, no judgment. A young couple came over and asked O.J. if he’d pose for a picture, then handed me a camera and had me do the honors. It wasn’t the only time this happened.
The next morning, O.J. didn’t show. I called his handler, who couldn’t find him. He called several hours later to say he’d finally managed to track him down. O.J. was a little nervous about the day ahead, he explained, because he knew we were going to be talking about the night of the murders. “But don’t worry,” he said. “He’ll be there.”
O.J. showed up two hours later and had trouble focusing. He was restless and angry. At one point, he said, “You know what kills me? All the goddamn people who assumed I was guilty before they’d even heard my side.” He looked dead at me, waiting for a comment. We were alone in the hotel suite, and I looked at his hands. They were bigger than my head. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were guilty then, and I still think you’re guilty.”
“I know you do, motherfucker!” he bellowed, but a moment later he was laughing. “Thank you for being honest with me,” he added.
He scooped up a handful of nuts and reached for a bottle of water, and I turned on the recorder. “We ought to get started,” I said.
He took a long time to respond, as if weighing his words. “You know I couldn’t have done this alone,” he said finally.
“Okay,” I said, my voice flat. “Who was with you?”
“I’m not saying I did it,” he said.
“Well, hypothetically, then. You couldn’t have done this alone. Someone was with you. Who would that be?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ve got to give him a name,” I said. “You want to call him ‘Charlie’?”
He shrugged. Call him whatever the fuck you want.
For the next few hours it was like pulling teeth. From what I could tell, Charlie might have said something about Nicole that set O.J. off, and O.J. might have jumped into the Bronco, taking Charlie along for the short drive to the Bundy condo. And yes, O.J. said, he parked in the alley, maybe, and maybe he grabbed the knit cap and the gloves before stepping through the broken rear security gate into the courtyard of Nicole’s condo. That was a small detail, admittedly, this business about the gate being broken, but it was new to me.
In short order, I heard other details with which I was unfamiliar. That Ron Goldman arrived on the scene a few moments later, for example, and that he subsequently found himself trapped between O.J. and Charlie. And that Ron was into martial arts—that “karate shit,” as O.J. put it.
I heard that Nicole, alerted by O.J.’s raised voice, had come to the front door, and that her large Akita had trotted into the courtyard and wagged its tail when it saw Ron. That’s what they call a telling detail. It meant the dog knew Ron. Maybe.
O.J. looked suddenly upset. “I don’t know what the hell you want from me,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you that I sliced my ex-wife’s neck and watched her eyes roll up into her head.”
I tried to keep things moving, but he refused to talk about the actual murders, so we talked about the immediate aftermath. What happened to the bloody clothes? What role did Charlie play, if any? Who else knew about the hidden path that led through the neighbor’s property to O.J.’s tennis court? What was that banging noise at Kato Kaelin’s window, and what might have caused it?
Now that we were done with the worst of it, or as done as we were going to be, O.J. became suddenly more voluble. He provided details about the drive home, for example, and actually corrected me when I said I thought he’d driven through the red light at Bundy and Montana. “I didn’t go to the light at Montana. Why would I have gone there? I took a left at the end of the alley and went up Gretna Green to San Vicente, and from there to Sunset.”
He must have seen the look on my face. “Or that’s the way I woulda gone.”
I asked more questions. No, he said, he couldn’t have parked the Bronco there, because the limo driver would have seen him, so he had to go around the corner. And yes, several of his friends knew about the path through the neighbor’s property because they used his tennis court when he was out of town.
He even provided details from inside the house. When he was in the shower, for example, he said he knew the limo driver was at the front gate because the bottom light lit up on the phone system when he rang.
I’m sure the bottom light always lit up when someone rang at the front gate, but I wondered why O.J. had decided to share that.
I kept going. What did he tell Kato about the banging noise? How did the Bronco get back into the driveway? And where was Charlie at this point?
Charlie. I didn’t believe there was a Charlie, and I still don’t.
By late afternoon, we were done with the dreaded chapter, and O.J. looked very relieved. It would be easy to say that a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders, that he felt cleansed, but I can’t go there, because I honestly don’t know what he was thinking. If he had fallen to his knees with tears in his eyes, praising Jesus, I might have had something, but that didn’t happen. It’s possible he was just relieved because we’d gotten through the toughest part.
We went across the street and had a quick drink. I said goodbye
and shook his hand, then went back to the suite, packed up, and flew home. The next day I was back in Los Angeles, parked in front of my computer and fashioning a narrative out of a dozen hours of conversation.
For the next two weeks, we talked on the phone every few days. There were details missing. Holes to fill. Unanswered questions. A final chapter to write. He seemed to enjoy talking to me, and once or twice, when he picked up the phone, he’d be singing.
A few weeks later I sent him a first rough draft, but he was preparing for knee surgery, so it took him a while to get to it. After he left the hospital, he was in pain, and he said he found it hard to focus, but eventually the fog lifted and he got to work. He called every two or three days with changes, but most of them were minor, and he said he was very happy with the book. “It’s real good. It sounds just like me.” Then he got to the chapter on the murders and everything changed. “I hate that fucking chapter,” he said. “I wish we didn’t have to do that fucking chapter.”
He didn’t say it was wrong, and he didn’t say it was bullshit. He just said he hated it, and he kept saying it.
Meanwhile, Judith Regan had been calling, eager to see pages. She had spoken to Barbara Walters about the project, she told me in confidence, and said Barbara might want to interview O.J. during sweeps week in November to coincide with the publication of the book. I had not known that a television interview was part of the deal between O.J. and HarperCollins, but the idea of having Barbara Walters on board certainly appealed to me. She was huge. She would sell books. I didn’t think I’d created a lasting work of art—this was O.J. Simpson’s book, after all, and we didn’t want him sounding like third-rate Dostoevsky—but I certainly thought it was a compelling read.
I called O.J. to say that Judith wanted to see some pages, but I didn’t mention Barbara Walters. At the beginning of the process I had told him, as I tell everyone I work with, that no one would see the manuscript until he had signed off on it, but I asked if we might make an exception. “I know you have more changes coming,” I said. “And we’ll make them. It’s just that Judith needs to see something now.”
“I hate that fucking chapter,” he repeated. “Ask her if we can take it out.”
“O.J., that’s the chapter that sold the book. It’s the only reason there is a book.”
“I like the other stuff,” he said. “About me and Nicole and all that.”
“So do I,” I said. “And people will read that, too. But they want to hear about the murders.”
“This whole thing is bullshit,” he said.
I spoke to Judith. I told her that O.J. had been going through the manuscript with great care, taking the changes very seriously, but that he seemed to be getting increasingly nervous. I think he was finally becoming aware of the enormity of what he had done, the lunacy, even, and it was starting to freak him out.
Judith got the pages and read the much-despised chapter, then asked Barbara Walters for a non-disclosure agreement and sent it over. She called me the next day to tell me that Barbara had read it, and that she had described it as “absolutely chilling.”
“She wants to talk to you,” Judith said.
Not long after, I flew back to Miami to help speed things along, and to try to finish editing the manuscript face to face. At one point, O.J. told me to take out the line about the dog seeing Ron Goldman and wagging its tail. “Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s bullshit,” he said.
“Well, I didn’t put it in there,” I said.
“Neither did I,” he said. “If you want to say he wagged his tail, then say he wagged his tail at both of us. That dog loved everybody. He was always wagging his fucking tail.”
I did what he told me, but I wasn’t thrilled. I had loved that detail, and it’s not the type of detail one makes up. Dramatic license doesn’t let you invent things. You might recreate a conversation that took place ten years ago to the best of your ability; or you might compress a period of time to speed things along; or you might even change some minor details to make a character harder to identify. But that’s about it. I knew the business about the wagging tail had come from him, but I had no choice. It was his book. I took it out.
Barbara Walters called the next day to introduce herself and to repeat what Judith had told me: “It is just absolutely one of the most chilling things I have ever read,” she said. She let me know that she was seriously tempted to do the interview, but remained on the fence, and I can’t say I blamed her.
The next morning, very early, she called again. “Honey, it’s Barbara. Let me ask you this: Do you think it’s a confession?”
I told her I couldn’t answer that—that she was putting me on the spot. She had read the pages, and that’s all I had. I didn’t have O.J. saying, “Yeah, man. I killed them.”
She still sounded like she wanted to do the interview, but she was concerned. She had her reputation to think about. What’s more, the network brass couldn’t figure out whether the interview should be handled by the news division or the entertainment division. Now that’s what I call a telling detail. I myself had wondered how the bookstores were going to treat this strange hybrid—was it fiction, or non-fiction?—but nobody seemed to know.
“I’m still not sure if I want to do the interview,” Barbara said on her next call. “But if I do, do you think Judith would hold the book until February?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I have a very crowded schedule,” she said.
“I’ll talk to her.”
When I called Judith, she wanted to know what I had told Barbara, and she seemed to think I’d done us a disservice by not describing the book as a confession. As far as she was concerned, it was unequivocally a confession—because that’s what had been sold to her. “I’ve been telling you: When they brought me the book, I was told it was a confession. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s exactly what it is.”
When I got off the phone, I began to wonder how the television interview was going to work. O.J. was going to hem and haw, and he would interrupt every few minutes to remind people that this exercise was hypothetical, and that of course he’d had nothing to do with the murders. But then someone explained it to me: “That’s what editing rooms are for.”
I also remember thinking that only a guilty man would have agreed to do such a crazy book, but of course that was just my opinion—and it was the opinion of a man who had never doubted O.J.’s guilt.
Finally, O.J. signed off on the book and I sent it in. My editor breezed through it, but he and Judith both had an issue with a line in the middle of Chapter Six, where O.J. felt compelled to remind his readers, as he’d been doing with me, ad nauseam, that the description of the murders was strictly hypothetical. I had already discussed this with O.J., noting that the title itself suggested as much, but he was adamant, and the line stayed. It was his book, after all.
That settled, I called the attorney and had him come by my house to pick up the interview tapes. My contract with O.J. stipulated that the tapes belonged to him, which is unusual, but not unheard of. The attorney came over and we stood in my kitchen and shredded them.
A few days later, The National Enquirer called to say they had heard I was working with O.J. Simpson on a confession. I actually knew the reporter because back in 1978, for a brief period, I had abandoned legitimate journalism and gone to work for the tabloid. That, by the way, is where I first met Judith Regan. “I think you should check your sources,” I told the reporter.
He checked his sources, confirmed what he’d been told, and the paper broke the story the following week. From the amount of detail they had, it was clear someone had slipped them an early draft of the manuscript.
At that point, there’d be no waiting for Barbara Walters, who still hadn’t committed—not even to February. I told Judith that we should scrap the interview, saying we didn’t need it, and suggesting it might do more harm than good, but that train had already left the station: Judith herself was going to
do it. She said it would air on Fox in two parts during the last week of November, and that the book would be released two days later, on the 30th of the month.
When word got out, the shit hit the fan. People were upset about a lot of things, especially about the fact that O.J.—or his kids, anyway—were going to be making money off this whole sordid enterprise. (At that point, the fact that the shell corporation was controlled by O.J. hadn’t come out.) But they were also seriously upset with News Corp., which owned Fox, HarperCollins, and ReganBooks, and seemed to have taken synergy to a new low.
The noisiest critics kept going on about the victims, though—how we should all be thinking about victims—and I wondered where they’d been when the networks capitalized on JonBenet Ramsey, the Menendez Brothers, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Albert DeSalvo, and dozens of others sweeps-week winners. I’m aware that there was a difference in this case, and it was a big one: money. But still: Didn’t people want to hear O.J. say, even obliquely, that he had done it—or might have done it?
On Monday, November 20th, Rupert Murdoch apologized for the “ill-considered project” and pulled the plug. A number of affiliates had sworn not to air the interviews, and more were jumping on the bandwagon, so I sort of understood. But I couldn’t understand why he was killing the book. As a middle-aged man who makes his own decisions, I didn’t like the idea of having a handful of self-appointed moral arbiters telling me what I could read or watch. Still, if you owned a bookstore, you didn’t have to sell a book that made you uncomfortable, like, say, Mein Kampf, even if you hadn’t read it yourself. And if you owned a television station, you had the right to refuse to air anything at all, I guess, especially an objectionable interview that you’d never seen.
I was reminded of a long-ago issue of National Lampoon that featured a photograph of a wary, wide-eyed dog on the cover—with a gun to its head. The caption read, “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.”
The next day, O.J. called. “Can you believe this shit?” he said. “Fucking Geraldo Rivera can interview Charles Manson, and what does that do for society? It’s about ratings and money. That’s all it is.”
If I Did It Page 5