The next day, while I was struggling to make sense of this, she came by to get the kids. They were out back, in the pool. When I went to answer the door, Nicole reached up and gave me a little wifely kiss, then we walked through the house, heading for the pool. She saw the pictures of Paula again, and made a nasty remark, and it really pissed me off. I guess she thought our weekend in Cabo meant I was ready to walk down the aisle with her that very afternoon, and that by this time I should have dumped both Paula and her pictures. “That was uncalled for,” I said. “I don’t want you here.”
“Fine,” she said.
She went out back, got the kids out of the pool, and split. I thought, Great. She made it easy. If I was actually thinking about reconciling—if I was actually crazy enough to think about reconciling—I don’t have to think about it anymore.
Two days later, she called to apologize. She had discussed the incident with her therapist, she said, and her therapist had told her that she’d been completely in the wrong. “We had an amazing weekend, so I was hoping that everything would magically go back to the way it used to be,” she explained. “That was a mistake. I’m sorry.”
“Fine,” I said.
For the next couple of weeks, we kept our distance, but there was no denying I had strong feelings for her. I also had strong feelings for Paula, however, and that relationship was much less volatile, so I wasn’t about to make any big changes—my life was good.
Then one morning, a strange thing happened. Paula was in town, and she had spent the night, and we were up early because I was leaving for Cabo that morning. Just as I finished packing, the limo pulled up outside and I looked out the window. The guys I was going to Cabo with were all there. They got out to stretch their legs and looked up at the window and waved.
Paula and I went downstairs and said hello to the guys, then she kissed me goodbye, got into her truck, and drove out the Rockingham gate. Not a minute later, as I was putting my bags in the limo, Nicole pulled up on the Ashford side of the house. The two women had literally just missed each other. I looked over at my friends, and they looked at me, all big-eyed and everything: O.J. that was too close for comfort!
Nicole got out of her car and wandered over, smiling a friendly smile. She was wearing golf shoes, click-click clicking down the driveway, and it struck me as pretty funny. Golf had never been her thing, but she’d started taking lessons recently to show me that she was interested in the same things I was interested in. Nicole gave me an unexpected peck on the cheek, said hi to everyone, and noticed the limo. “It looks like you guys are going out of town,” she said.
“We are,” I said. “We’re going to Cabo to do a little golfing.”
“Sounds like fun,” she said.
Anyway, the limo was waiting, and we said goodbye and took off, and on the way to the airport the guys ribbed me about that very close call. I remember telling them a little bit about my confused romantic life. I was crazy about Paula, I said, but Nicole had been pursuing me pretty relentlessly lately. “It’s making me a little crazy,” I said.
One of the guys said, “I wish I had your problems,” and everyone laughed.
Anyway, we got to Cabo and hit the links and I forgot all my problems—golf is pretty magical that way—but that evening I got a call from Nicole. She said she was coming to Cabo, too, with her friend Faye Resnick, whom I’d never met, and she told me that she was bringing the kids. The next day, like a good ex-husband, I went to pick my family up at the airport, and I dropped them at this time-share they’d booked. For the next few days, I shuttled back and forth between my friends and my family, enjoying my time on the links, but also enjoying hanging at the beach with the kids, and taking them jet-skiing and stuff. When it was time to head back to L.A., Nicole said, “Why are you leaving? Why don’t you stay for a few more days?” And my kids piped in: “Yeah, Dad! Please don’t go! We’ve been having such a great time!” I thought about this—I didn’t have all that much to do in L.A., and Paula was away on some modeling gig and wouldn’t be back till early the following week—so I decided to hang through the weekend.
It was very nice. For the next few days, we were like a regular family—swimming and playing and eating meals together and just forgetting about the real world.
Faye hung out with us, too. She was dating this guy, Christian Reichardt, a chiropractor, but they were sort of on the outs. From what I overheard during her many phone conversations with him, some of which got pretty heated, Faye seemed to have a little issue with drugs, which she apparently didn’t consider a problem. Whenever these calls ended, usually pretty abruptly, Faye would turn to Nicole and tell her that the problem in the relationship wasn’t her—it was Christian. I thought that was kind of amusing, because that was pretty much the way Nicole had felt about our relationship. She was perfect, and I was the fuckup. I almost said something about it, but I bit my tongue. We were having a good time and I didn’t want to ruin it.
The last night we were there, Faye was back on the phone with Reichardt, crying. Apparently, he was willing to take another shot at making the relationship work, but he wasn’t sure he wanted her to move back in with him. Once again, it sounded eerily similar to my own situation. It also made me think about the fact that all relationships are messy, and that everyone suffers through their fair share of pain—and sometimes more than their fair share. The more I thought about that, especially given that talk I’d recently had with my mother, the more I began to think that maybe Nicole was right about us. We’d had something special, and if we wanted it badly enough we could have it again. She kept hammering at this during those few days in Cabo: We were a great couple, she said. The kids had never seemed happier. She’d learned a great deal in the sixteen months we’d been apart.
It finally got to me. This was in May 1993, and that Sunday was Mother’s Day. We were still in Cabo, getting ready to fly home the following day, and I finally broke down and told Nicole that I was willing to give the relationship another try. But I made myself clear on one thing. “I can’t have you moving back into the house,” I said. “That’s not going to happen. I’m not going to have the kids move in, then move out again if it doesn’t work. They’ve moved enough, and it’s too disruptive—and I’m not going to put them through that kind of trauma again.”
Nicole thought this made perfect sense, but she had concerns of her own. “I don’t want to be in a position where we have one argument and you tell me it’s over,” she said.
I thought this was a good point. “Well, okay,” I said. “What do you suggest?”
“If we’re going to commit to this, we need to commit for a full year.”
I thought about that, and it seemed reasonable. It was just one year, but a year that could alter the course of the rest of our lives—hers, mine, and the kids’. “Okay,” I said. “You’ve got a deal.”
“No matter what happens, you stick with it?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “No matter what happens, I stick with it.”
“And if it works for a whole year?”
“If it works for a whole year, you’ll move back into the house and we’ll remarry,” I said.
Nicole was so excited that she called her mother, Juditha, and told her what had happened. Juditha asked to talk to me, and I got on the phone and made light of the situation. “I’m not really sure about this little arrangement, but I guess your daughter thinks it’s going to work,” I said.
Juditha told me she was hopeful, too.
The day after we returned to L.A., Paula got back to town. I called her and told her I had made dinner plans for us, and I went and picked her up and took her to Le Dome, a fancy restaurant in West Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard. I told her what had happened in Cabo, and I broke the news to her as gently as possible. Paula was not exactly thrilled, as you can imagine. “Don’t expect me to be waiting for you,” she said.
“The last thing I want to do is hurt you,” I said. “But I honestly feel like I’ve got to give
this a try. I’m still very confused about the whole thing, and I need to know if it’s going to work. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering if I screwed up my whole family. I owe it to myself, and I owe it especially to my kids.”
Paula went kind of quiet on me. She was the opposite of Nicole. When Nicole got mad, she got hot and bothered. When Paula got mad, she went cold and quiet.
I drove her home, feeling badly, and she didn’t invite me in.
To be honest with you, I didn’t know if things were going to work out with Nicole, but in my heart I felt I had to give it an honest shot. In a way, I still loved Nicole, and I wanted the best for our kids.
At first, things went pretty easily. I was in New York for a good part of the summer, working, and when I came home it was always very pleasant, sort of like a family reunion. Sometimes I would spend the night at Nicole’s place, on Gretna Green, and sometimes she and the kids would stay with me, on Rockingham. It was a perfect arrangement. I had a family, but I lived alone. How can you beat that?
Before the end of the summer, though, Nicole began putting a little pressure on me about moving back into Rockingham, and I reminded her that we had agreed to try it for a full year before making that commitment. She knew that, of course, but her lease was running out at the end of the year, and she didn’t want to move again. It was hard to find a decent rental, she said, and the few places that were available were incredibly expensive. I told her she should consider buying a place. If she ended up moving back into Rockingham, she could treat the new place as an investment, and real estate on the west side of Los Angeles was always a solid investment. It was good advice, but it wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She’d go off, pouting, and for a few days I wouldn’t hear a word about it. But before long, it began again: “Why can’t we just move back in, O.J.? This is silly. You know we’re going to be living together soon enough.” Whenever she got too pushy about it, I’d basically avoid her until she got the message: Stop hounding me. We had a deal. Honor the deal.
It was a pain in the ass, to be honest, and I got tired of the endless bickering, but at least she had enough self-control to keep it from turning into a full-blown argument.
In the fall, we got an enforced break from each other, which was probably a good thing. It was football season, and I went off to do my TV analyst thing with Bob Costas and Mike Ditka. She stayed in L.A., taking care of the kids, and still obsessing about having to move.
She was also spending a lot of time with her friends—people she’d started hanging out with soon after we separated—and I’m not going to beat around the bush: I didn’t like them. Period. I wasn’t all that crazy about Faye Resnick, who apparently had a little drug problem, I certainly didn’t like Keith Zlomsowitch, with whom she’d had her little “accidental” fling, and I wasn’t wild about the rest of the gang, either. I had met a few of them around town, mostly recently, when Nicole and I were out and about, and most of them seemed like pretty marginal characters. I thought a few of them lived a little too close to the edge. They seemed to be mixed up in all sorts of shady stuff, and one of them—Brett Cantor, a waiter at Mezzaluna, a restaurant right there in the heart of Brentwood—had been knifed to death earlier that summer. The murder remained unresolved, but there were rumors it was drug-related.
“I don’t know what you see in those people,” I told Nicole one night.
“They’re my friends,” she said. “They’re nice.”
I didn’t think that was an accurate description. “I don’t want those people around the kids,” I said.
“Jesus, O.J.—they’re my friends. You make them sound like criminals.”
“Maybe they are criminals,” I said. “Maybe you should take a closer look.”
I kept traveling, generally on business, and when I got home my first priority was always the kids. I was still trying to make things work with Nicole, of course, but there wasn’t all that much time for romance, and—to be honest—I’d lost some of my enthusiasm for it. I don’t know what it was, exactly. I guess I didn’t think it could work, and I didn’t like her marginal friends, and I didn’t think she’d learned all that much in therapy, to be brutally frank. I was also sick and tired of arguing about our living arrangement. “Let’s please don’t talk about moving back into Rockingham until we’ve done our year,” I repeated.
“You make it sound like a prison sentence!”
“Nicole, come on. You know what I’m saying.”
“My lease is running out in a few months, O.J., and the Rockingham house is empty half the time. I don’t understand this.”
“We had a deal.”
“Can’t we change it?”
“Not until we know that things are working out.”
“I think things are working out,” she said.
“Maybe they are,” I said. “But it’s early yet.”
I was a long way from thinking that things were working out, to tell you the truth. All that talk about therapy and seeing the error of her ways and accepting responsibility was fine, but on closer inspection it seemed like it was mostly talk. I didn’t see that Nicole had really changed all that much. She was trying hard—that was obvious—but she was still the same Nicole she’d been when everything started going to hell. She still had that hot temper, and that anger, and that impatience. And she was still blaming me for all her troubles: You have that big house on Rockingham. I need a place to live. You won’t let me and the kids move in. She was making me the heavy, and I didn’t like it. But I’d committed to a full year and I was determined to honor my commitment. The year had begun on Mother’s Day 1993, and we were only halfway there.
There were good days, too, though—don’t get me wrong. Times when we’d be hanging out with the kids, having fun, or waking up at my place in the morning, just a big happy family—the family we’d always imagined for ourselves. On those days, I actually let myself believe that things were going to work out, and it colored everything. Life is good. Nicole is terrific. We’re going to make it.
During this period, Nicole’s one big beef, which she kept hammering at, mercilessly, was this business about the house: Why wasn’t I ready to let her move back in? And my big beef, which I also kept hammering, equally mercilessly, was about her so-called friends—people that definitely rubbed me the wrong way. Those were the two major problem areas, and we bickered about them, sometimes to a point of exhaustion, but we never let the bickering get out of hand. And in fact, whenever things looked like they might blow up, I’d find myself jetting off on business. I’d go to Tampa or Atlanta, say, to interview athletes for the show, or to New York, for my regular network gig, and being away from her and our problems was a real relief.
When I came home, I always appreciated her more, though, because I’d missed her, but within days I felt like I was walking on eggshells. I didn’t want to have any more arguments. I didn’t want to hear any more shit about our living arrangements. I didn’t want to listen to any more stories about her asshole friends.
Luckily, I got cast in the Naked Gun sequel, and that kept me busy. We saw less of each other and argued less as a result, and for a while it worked great. Like a lot of people, we got along a hell of a lot better when we were apart, and when we were together we never had quite enough time to get into anything too serious or damaging.
One day, though, on the set of the movie, I ran into a girl who was a stand-in for Anna Nicole Smith, and she and I got to talking. She began to tell me about some of the wild parties she’d been to recently, and how she was always running into Nicole with her little entourage—a group she described as “a pretty rough crowd.” And suddenly, I was thinking, Now that’s weird. This stand-in was basically a part-time hooker—I believe she worked with Heidi Fleiss, the so-called Hollywood Madam—and she and three of her little girlfriends had written a book about their experiences, You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again. Now here she was, a call-girl, telling me that my ex-wife was partying with a “rough crowd.�
� I was pretty upset, as you can imagine, and after the shoot I drove over to Nicole’s house and read her the riot act. “I thought I warned you about these people,” I said. “I’ve told you a million times: I don’t want them around the kids.”
“They’re not around the kids,” she said, which turned out to be a lie. “And I don’t know what you have against them. They’re nice people. They’re my friends.”
“You better open your eyes, Nicole. Nice people don’t go around getting themselves knifed to death. Nice people don’t do hard drugs. Nice people don’t turn into whores.”
“Where are you getting your information?” she snapped.
“I just know, okay?” I said. “I know about the wild parties. I know about Heidi’s girls. And I know about these fucking druggies.”
“You’re crazy.”
“This is not what’s supposed to be happening in my life, Nicole. We’ve been back together for five months and you’re fucking everything up worse than ever. Why is this shit still going on? What are you doing while I’m in New York and traveling all over the place and busting my ass working? I don’t want to hear this bad shit about you, and I don’t want to find out you’re letting these people near my kids.”
I left, still steamed as hell, with Nicole still hollering at me, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying, and at that point I didn’t really care.
When I got back to Rockingham, the phone was ringing as I came through the door. I looked at the caller I.D. and saw it was Nicole, so I didn’t pick up. But she kept calling and I finally had to answer. “What?!” I barked.
“Why did you leave like that?”
“Because I was pissed!”
“You committed to a year, O.J. It’s only been five months.”
“I know I committed to a year! Who said anything about that?”
“Nobody, but you seemed angry. I didn’t want you to be angry.”
“How can I not be angry?”
“Please come back here.”
“What for?”
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