Another City Not My Own

by Dominick Dunne

  “She’s very good at mockery,” said Gus, making his way through the crowd. He saw Dennis Schatzman, the African-American reporter.

  “I’m scared, Dennis,” he said.

  “Don’t answer her, Gus. Just keep walking,” said Dennis.

  “You deserve to be dead!” she screamed, walking next to him. “You deserve to be dead!”

  “Dear God,” said Gus.

  “Just keep walking.”

  “I am. Did you hear what she said? She said I deserve to be dead.”

  “She wants you to turn around and yell back at her. They want to catch you on camera,” said Dennis. “Keep moving.”

  “You must be happy, Dennis,” said Gus. “You always believed in him.”

  “You have to look at it this way, Gus: Marcia and Chris, they didn’t prove it beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Dennis, walking next to him. “The jury had no other choice but to acquit.”

  “I can’t handle that conversation now,” said Gus.

  Again the woman shouted at him. Others joined in. The woman seemed to be the leader of a group. That Gus did not react to their taunts angered them more.

  “Look at him. He’s little!” screamed the woman in his face as she kept pace with him. “He’s little.”

  The women cupped their hands around their mouths and began to shout, “Little! He’s little! Little! Little man!”

  Gus showed his press pass to the guard at the door of the courthouse and walked in.

  “Thanks, Dennis,” he said. “That was one of the worst moments I’ve ever lived through.”

  “You okay, Gus?”

  “A little hurt, Dennis. All my life I hated being little, but I never got taunted like that before.”

  Outside the district attorney’s office on the eighteenth floor of the Criminal Courts Building sat a deputy named Frances, with whom Gus had had pleasant relations during the trial. At her request, he had once autographed one of his books for her. Breathless, Gus rushed out of the elevator.

  “I’m here for the press conference,” he said.

  “The press conference has started,” said Frances.

  “I know. I had to go on CNN, and then it took a few minutes to get on an elevator to get up here,” said Gus.

  “You can’t go in,” she said.

  “What do you mean, I can’t go in?”

  “Just what I said.”

  “Frances, what’s the matter with you?” asked Gus.

  “The press conference has started. You can’t go in,” she repeated. There was a harsh tone to her voice.

  “Gil Garcetti would want me to be in there,” said Gus. “So would Marcia and Chris. Where’s Suzanne Childs? She’ll tell you it’s all right for me to go in.”

  Frances returned to her reading, ignoring Gus.

  “I thought you were different from Jex,” said Gus. “I guess not. I’m sorry I wasted a book on you.”

  “I’d be careful if I were you,” she said.

  “The trial’s over,” replied Gus. “This press conference is the last jurisdiction you will ever have over me.” Gus walked toward the elevator.

  He called the Chateau Marmont from the media room on the eleventh floor. Judy Spreckels was in his room handling messages.

  “I just saw you on CNN with Greta,” said Judy.

  “Did I make an asshole out of myself?” asked Gus.

  “I didn’t think you went far enough before you threw the microphone at her,” said Judy.

  Gus laughed. “This is my first light moment of the day,” he said.

  “I liked your saying the jury gave the middle finger to justice,” said Judy.

  “Oh, good. Then I’ll use it again on Geraldo,” said Gus.

  “Are you all right, Gus?” asked Judy. “I worry about you sometimes.”

  “I had no idea this would affect me so deeply,” said Gus. “I feel sort of the way I felt when Jack Kennedy was assassinated. A terrible evil had been done. There was this ghastly feeling of emptiness everywhere. People just stared at one another, not knowing what to do. That’s the way I feel now about this verdict. Empty. Violated even.” He paused for a moment. “Any calls?”

  “Larry King wants you on tonight. Charlie Rose wants you on. GMA wants you on tomorrow morning. Charles Grodin wants you on. So does Geraldo. Michael Jackson. More, more, more. What will I tell all these people?”

  “Tell everybody yes,” said Gus.

  Later, on television, Gus said, “This jury could have watched a videotape of Simpson, knife in hand, slitting the throats of Nicole and Ron, and the verdict would have been the same. O. J. could have saved himself a lot of money. He never needed Shapiro, or Scheck, or Neufeld, or F. Lee Bailey, or Dr. Michael Baden, or Dr. Henry Lee. He didn’t need any of them. Johnnie Cochran could have gotten this same vendict all alone with the help of Jo-Elian Dimitrius, the jury consultant. Race is Johnnie’s area of expertise. It’s what he’s good at. It’s what made him rich. It’s what got Simpson acquitted.”

  “Be careful, Gus,” warned a few of his media friends.

  “Who do you think is the most responsible on the defense for the acquittal?” asked Larry King that night on the air.

  “Jo-Ellan Dimitrius,” replied Gus.

  King, who sometimes took Jo-Ellan Dimitrius to dinner at Morton’s and Drai’s, looked surprised by Gus’s answer. “Jo-Ellan Dimitrius?”

  “She understood the brilliance of stupidity,” said Gus.

  * * *

  Katie Spikes was waiting outside the studio when Gus left the set. “There have been some call-ins,” she said. “Some people seem to be upset at what you said about the jury.”

  “I meant every word I said,” replied Gus.

  “I just wanted to warn you, Gus.”

  “Thanks, Katie,” said Gus. “At least I didn’t tell that their bags were packed before deliberation even started.”

  “Is that true?”

  “And I also didn’t tell that three of the ladies are on their way to Las Vegas, all expenses paid at the Bally Hotel,” said Gus.

  “If it’s true, why didn’t you tell it?”

  “I’m saving it for my last ‘Letter from Los Angeles,’ ” said Gus.

  At the stoplight at La Cienega and Santa Monica Boulevard, a red car with two African-American men in it pulled up in the lane next to Gus. The three men looked at one another. Gus felt uneasy. As soon as the light changed, he put his foot on the gas and sped forward. He looked through his rearview mirror and saw that the car had moved into his lane and was now following him. He remembered Marlene Schlessinger telling him not to stop if a person in another car hit him from behind. A block later, there was another stoplight. The red car pulled out from behind him and came up next to him. This time Gus looked straight ahead.

  “You still think O. J.’s guilty?” one of the men asked.

  Gus looked over at them and said good-naturedly, slipping into what he called his absentminded-professor routine, “Oh, I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me that.” Surprised, the two men looked at him for a moment and then laughed, as did Gus. As they pulled ahead of him, the driver of the car waved good-bye.

  That night, verdict night, Gus dined at Betsy Bloomingdale’s house in Holmby Hills. There were fourteen at dinner in the dining room. The conversation never veered from the subject of the day.

  “I’ll never forget the look on your face, Gus, when they announced the verdict,” said Betsy.

  “Everyone tells me my mouth was hanging open,” said Gus.

  “I had to turn off the TV,” said Natalie Robinson. “I couldn’t stand looking at that victory party over at Simpson’s house on Rockingham. Did you see those ladies in pink pantsuits waving champagne glasses at the cameras?”

  “Everybody’s forgotten there are two dead people,” said Gus.

  “What happened to that sixty-year-old white woman you told us at the Wicks’ was going to hang the jury, Gus?” asked Betsy.

  “She buckled under, I guess,” said
Gus. “She didn’t put up a fight at all. I guess I expected too much of her.”

  “Were you surprised?”

  “When I saw juror number six give the black-power salute, that told me a lot. You wait and see. Within a matter of days, weeks, or months, she’s going to say she regrets that she voted for acquittal. She’s going to say she realizes he was guilty. Too fucking late, Anise. Excuse my language, Betsy.”

  “What do you think Simpson will do now?”

  “At the moment, his victory party is being photographed by Larry Schiller and his fiancée, Kathy Amerman, for one of the tabloid papers, The Star, for which Simpson and the photographers are rumored to be splitting two hundred thousand dollars. Then O. J.’s people, like Robert Kardashian and Skip Taft, are planning a Pay-Per-View television appearance of O. J., his kids from both marriages, his mother and sisters, and the Dream Team, which they expect is going to give him something like ten or twenty million dollars.”

  For a moment, there was silence at the table.

  “It’s very simple,” said Mrs. Jerry Perenchio. “We’ll arrange to boycott it.”

  When Gus got back to the Chateau Marmont that night, he returned a call from Graydon Carter in New York.

  “Graydon, I must have woken you,” said Gus.

  “It’s all right. I said call tonight, no matter how late. You have received six death threats over the telephone at the magazine,” said Graydon. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I know I sort of flipped out on CNN today—you probably heard,” said Gus. “It was too soon after the acquittal for me to have gone on the air.”

  “Would you like a bodyguard? We’ll get Gavin de Becker to set up a bodyguard for you,” said Graydon. “One of the threats came from the L. A. Crips.”

  “That’s big time,” said Gus. “No, no, I don’t want a bodyguard, Graydon. That seems so Hollywood mogul to me.”

  “We checked the Chateau for you,” said Graydon. “They’re going to have the night guard check on your room every hour.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen, Graydon. Everyone’s a little hysterical out here, myself included. It’ll calm down in a few days.”

  “Stay off television, for God sake.”

  “I have a few more shows. Then I will.”

  “Then what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going home to Prud’homme. It’s time to leave. I want to write all this down.”

  27

  In his “Letter from Los Angeles,” Gus wrote:

  The elation of the victory party at the mansion on Rockingham didn’t last long. The participants having such a swell time began to get the idea that the city and the country weren’t cheering and partying along with them. A sign went up on Sunset Boulevard at the entrance to Brentwood saying WELCOME TO BRENTWOOD, HOME OF THE BRENTWOOD BUTCHER. Another read MURDERER LOOSE IN BRENTWOOD. A neighbor stated that Simpson gave new meaning to the phrase “There goes the neighborhood.” The exclusive Riviera Country Club, where Simpson was a member, let it be known that he was no longer welcome there. Further, his much-heralded Pay-Per-View TV deal collapsed with a resounding thud, and along with it the $20 million he had assumed he would make. ICM, the talent agency that had represented him for twenty years, and Jack Gilardi, his personal agent, dropped him as a client, after protests from some of their most powerful Hollywood star clients. Polls showed that more than half of the country was outraged by the verdict.

  Nicole was right. Everything happened just as she had predicted it would. What Nicole had not anticipated, however, was the rage of the white citizenry across the country over Simpson’s acquittal by a mostly black jury. Dream Team member Peter Neufeld was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying, “O. J. is entitled to enjoy the fruits of his liberty the way the rest of us are. I think it’s unconscionable that people are trying to deny him that.” Get real, Neufeld. I think it’s unconscionable to be a participant in the acquittal of a man who killed two people while his kids were asleep upstairs.

  “What’s it like being in Simpson’s house?” asked Gus over the telephone.

  “I can’t really talk here,” replied Schiller.

  “Is the killer sitting right there with you?”

  “I wouldn’t be on the phone with you if he was, Gus.”

  “Does he know?”

  “Know what?”

  “That he is despised?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he give a shit?”

  “Very much.”

  “Good,” said Gus. “I was just watching Johnnie Cochran doing his cock-of-the-walk act on Larry King’s show, like he thinks he’s the new Clarence Darrow. Which he’s not.”

  “I saw him.”

  “He told Larry that O. J. was angry. What the fuck does O. J. have to be angry about? He should be down on his knees thanking God that he’s not doing life without parole.”

  “He’s angry because Gil Garcetti said on television after the acquittal that the L.A.P.D. was not going to look for the real killer.”

  “What? The real killer? Tell him to look in the fucking mirror and he’ll see the real killer!” screamed Gus.

  “Stop yelling at me, Gus, or I’m not going to talk to you anymore,” said Schiller. “I know you’re unhappy about the verdict, but it’s not my fault. You asked me a question, and I gave you an answer.”

  “I’m sorry to yell, but you sound like you’re buying into his crapola about the real killer, Larry. It was bad enough when he had poor Jason read that ludicrous statement at Johnnie Cochran’s press conference, that a priority of his father’s life was going to be to find the real killer. That’s the joke of the week. Did you notice Jason’s body language when he was reading the statement? Did you think he looked embarrassed enough by the lie he was reading to the nation?”

  Schiller didn’t reply.

  “All right, I’ll calm down. Tell me this, is he freaking out with all those camera crews and reporters and crowds outside his house full-time? There’s some justice that he’s a prisoner in his own house. Not as good as a cell, mind you, but there’s some satisfaction that he can’t go anywhere to enjoy his freedom.”

  “If I tell you something, Gus, will you promise you won’t repeat it?”

  “I promise.”

  “Swear?”

  “Swear.”

  “He’s not even here at Rockingham.”

  “He’s not?”

  “We got him out of here last night. A diversionary tactic. They called a press conference to be held outside the gates. While the camera crews were setting up, he sneaked out lying on the floor of a van, one of three cars in a caravan. Once he was gone, the press conference was canceled,” said Schiller.

  “Where’s he staying if he’s not at Rockingham?” asked Gus.

  “You swear you won’t use this?”

  “I swear.”

  “At Don Ohlmeyer’s house off Doheny.”

  “The president of NBC West Coast,” said Gus. “It’s perfect.”

  “Just to make it more perfect—I know you like this sort of thing, you’re always talking about overlaps—Ohlmeyer bought the house from Kardashian three weeks before the murders,” said Schiller.

  “You couldn’t make this stuff up,” said Gus.

  “I went to the movies with him last night,” said Schiller.

  “Did I hear you say you went to the movies with O. J. Simpson last night? Larry, this is the best conversation I’ve had in a long time. Keep talkin’.”

  “O. J. wanted to see Showgirls,” said Schiller.

  “Of course, he wanted to see Showgirls,” said Gus. “I saw it at Arnie Kopelson’s the other night. Tits, tits, and more tits. A perfect choice for his first movie in a year. But wait a minute, Larry. How could he be seen at a movie theater and not cause a riot?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” said Schiller.

  “Oh, yes, you can, Larry. Come on. You’re in this deep.”

  “You swear?”

  “I swear.”

>   “They had the makeup woman who did his makeup on the pilot he made just before the murders come over to Ohlmeyer’s house and give him a disguise,” said Schiller.

  “I have this desire to laugh, Larry,” said Gus. “O. J. Simpson’s in disguise?”

  “He went to the Palm for dinner, with one of his golfing buddies from New York—whose wife, incidentally, picked out the horn-rimmed glasses at Oliver Peoples on the Sunset Strip that are part of the disguise—and no one recognized him,” said Schiller.

  “What did the makeup lady make him up as, for God sake?”

  “She gave him a Hispanic look. A little mustache, neatly trimmed, a little goatee, neatly trimmed—and she taught him how to put them on himself—and the new glasses from Oliver Peoples on the Strip. It’s amazing, Gus. He looked like he could have been a diplomat from Cuba or Haiti, or someplace like that. I’ve been looking at the guy close up every day for over a year, and even I didn’t recognize him.”

  “Wouldn’t you think a guy who’s just been acquitted of a double murder three days ago and has just been released from jail after a year and a half of incarceration would have better things to do than getting into disguise and going out to see Showgirls and have dinner at the Palm, where he fooled all the people? Like he fooled the jury. Next to football, pretense is what he’s good at. I think that’s why he doesn’t feel anything for the murders he’s committed. I think he still thinks it’s going to be like old times. But it’s not. It’s never going to be. His friends are going to drop by the wayside. You wait and see. If the guy has any sense, he’ll leave this town.”

  “You know Kathy and I took the photographs at the victory party, don’t you?” asked Schiller.

  “I saw the pictures in the Star today,” said Gus. “I read all those tabs every Monday. A reporter friend of mine at the Star told me you got two hundred thousand to split with O. J. and another unnamed person for those pictures.”

  “Shall I go on, or do you want to make cracks?” asked Schiller.

  “Go on.”

  “A lot of his golfing buddies who came to the victory party didn’t want to have their pictures taken with him,” said Schiller. “They kept moving out of the way when Kathy or I went in for a picture.”