His Ex-wife had been dead less than 12 hours, her throat slashed while their young children slept nearby. He had been summoned back to Los Angeles by the police to be questioned as a possible suspect in the murder. Still, as 0.J. Simpson hurried to the Chicago airport on the morning of June 13, he paused to sign an autograph.
It was a bizarre impulse under the circumstances, but perfectly in keeping with the public persona Simpson had painstakingly constructed throughout his life. As a child in the Potrero Hill housing project of San Francisco, lie learned the importance of disguising his inner life, and it was a lesson he never forgot. "The ghetto," he wrote in his autobiography in 1970, made "you want to hide your real identity-from cops, from teachers, and even from yourself. And it forces you to build up false images."
Simpson set out to create a more pleasing self He was gracious, warm, congenial-the Hall of Famer who was also your buddy, the Superstar of Rent-a-Car at ease in corporate life, the Hollywood celebrity with an impressive array of rich and famous friends, an American hero who overtly challenged the restrictions of race. To an extraordinary degree, Simpson convinced friends, colleagues and admirers-even, at times, himself-that this was his true character. The "suicide" note he wrote before his famous ride, the highest-rated cry for help in the history of televised neuroses, was strangely moving in its banality and delusion. "Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person," he wrote, making a smiley face in the "O" of his signature.
The 0. J. Simpson case has become such a public obsession that most people can recite the location of the bloody glove, the time Nicole called her mother or the number of stab wounds inflicted on Ronald Goldman. But the man who will be tried next month on national television remains something of a mystery of his own making. In fact, Simpson lived a double life. The corporate spokesman who drank an occasional beer with Hertz executives was also a hard partyer, NEWSWEEK's reporters found, who cruised bars and indulged in drugs and random sex. His wife believed he was a cocaine addict; his friends, who saw him on the prowl at wild parties in Los Angeles, thought his real addiction was white women. The smooth talker took lessons to make his diction more "white." The family man was seldom home.
How did Simpson deal with the contradictions of his life? For all his self-delusion, he was a perfectionist who prized self-discipline. His disappointments must have been keenly felt, even if he kept them well hidden. He wanted to be a great actor, but he had to settle for being a TV personality. He was less of a businessman than a friend of businessmen. Despite his effort to rise above race, he wound up in a kind of gilded no man's land. To many whites, he was not so much enviable as safe, and to some blacks, particularly his brothers in the sports and entertainment world, he was too white.
At some point, a double life can become too much to bear. it is amazing, given the story that follows, how long Simpson kept up the facade.
To many of his fans, the nickname given Orenthal James Simpson as a pro came to connote a certain sweetness of spirit. He was "O.J.," "the juice": for a time TV ads showed him slurping down orange juice (until he had to quit because citric acid was bad for his arthritic knees). But to his teammates, the name juice "didn't have anything to do with orange juice, only with the kind of guy I am-always juiced up, always movin' around," he told Playboy in 1976. "A lot of guys probably think I'm too active and too loud, but that's the way I am, and that's the way I was as a kid."
Growing up in the projects during the 1950s, he was a member of a gang called the Persian Warriors. The Warriors stole food from warehouses near the projects; Simpson liked to hit the local pie company ("My fa-vorite was blackberry," he later said). This was an era before kids carried semiautomatic weapons to school, "but we did a pretty good amount of fighting," said Simpson. "You'd hear cats saying, "You gonna be at the Golden Gate Theater tomorrow? The Roman Gents are gonna fight the Sheiks!' "
Simpson did not win any fights with his mother. "He used to get whupped with anything she could find, a belt, a bottle . . . ," said Willie Dickens, a boyhood friend. When Simpson was 5, his father walked out; according to his brother, Truman, Jimmie Simpson was a homosexual, a potential source of shame to a black youth growing up in that more repressed time. Poor as well as abandoned, Simpson suffered from rickets, a calcium and vitamin D deficiency normally seen in underdeveloped countries. Unable to afford an operation to straighten O.J.'s warped legs, Simpson's mother created crude braces by putting the wrong shoe on each foot.
His legs were so spindly, neighborhood kids called them "pencil pins," yet he ran the 100 in 9.9 seconds as a high-school halfback. Clearly, a talent not to be wasted. After Simpson spent a weekend in custody for robbing a liquor store when he was 15, a social worker arranged for him to meet Willie Mays, the baseball star who gave young Simpson an inspirational chat about staying out of trouble. O.J. later said he was more impressed by Mays's house, a mansion in an affluent part of town. He also watched with envy and fascination as Mays signed autographs for his fans. "I thought, hey, wouldn't it be great for people to know me and love me and want to come up to me."
His choice of college is revealing. Despite poor grades, Simpson could have won a scholarship to almost any state football factory, but he chose the University of Southern California. The school had a higher television profile than most, in part because of its regular appearances in the Rose Bowl. USC also had strong connections to Hollywood. The assistant coach who recruited Simpson, Marvin Goux, was also a bit-part actor who could get O.J. a summer job as an extra at a studio.
USC was then primarily a school for rich white kids. Black athletes stood out there because they were virtually the only blacks on campus. Some African-American athletes were militant in the late 1960s, most famously the two Olympians, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who gave black-power salutes on the victory stand. Simpson, aware of rumors that any USC athlete joining the Black Student Union risked losing his scholarship, showed no solidarity. "I respect Tommie Smith," he said, "but I don't admire him."
It is remarkable, given Simpson's great career as a ballplayer and the propensity most athletes have to live in the present, how much Simpson worried about what he would do when he retired from football. He compared the end of fame to "a woman's menopause." In 1974, five years before he retired from pro ball, he told sportswriter Larry Fox that he was "frightened" by "just the thought of going into a restaurant and having to wait for a table." He told Playboy interviewer Lawrence Linderman in 1976, "When all the adulation is withdrawn, it's traumatic, Jack."
Simpson set out with relentless ambition and the savvy of a professional marketer to avoid this fate. The night he won the Heisman Trophy in 1968, he worked out a TV deal with Roone Arledge of ABC; he was still six months away from signing a pro-football contract. Simpson's model for life after football, in both a negative and a positive sense, was Jim Brown, the NFL's first truly great black running back. Simpson admired Brown for quitting while he was still an all-pro and before he lost his legs, but he disdained Brown for his surly, confrontational attitude toward whites. Unlike Brown, Simpson would refuse to act in so-called blaxploitation movies. He did not want to be a Superfly type; he turned down a lead role in "Mandingo." His goal, he said, with more hope than reason, was to be as good an actor as Dustin Hoffman.
He claimed not to understand the occasional murmurings that he was "selling out." "Being black is something I never worried about," Simpson said in 1977, after he starred with Elizabeth Montgomery in a movie called "A Killing Affair." "You know, some of the sisters -- I call all black women sisters -- got upset with me," he said, for appearing in bed with a white woman. "They missed completely that for the first time white America accepted a black man with a white woman on the screen."
Although Simpson talked about being "colorless," he was actually quite conscious of playing the race card. If it was necessary to be more "white" to get ahead, he would adapt accordingly. At the same time, he knew how to use his skin color to his advantage. "I arrived when black became vogue," he said in 1974. "Every studio in California and all the major companies in the United States were putting out those memorandums . . . I was in the right place at the right time." Simpson proceeded to cash in with, among others, Royal Crown Cola, Schick, Foster Grant, Treesweet orange juice and Wilson Sporting Goods.
His most important entree into the white corporate world was with Hertz. Simpson was glad to speak for a company that was "Number One" and catered to business executives. As he dashed through the airport in a three-piece suit, he was not just an athlete but a businessman. The ads were huge-ly successful for Hertz, which increased its profits by 50 percent in the first year, and they made Simpson "10 times more identifiable than I was before," he said. Hertz's marketing research showed that the white customer base was oblivious to Simpson's race, which was the way Simpson wanted it to be. "He wasn't trying to pass as a white person and he didn't espouse being a black person," said Jerry Burgdoerfer, then Hertz's executive vice president for worldwide marketing. "He never looked at himself as an Afro-American. He never did. He only looked at himself as O. J. Simpson. Race was a nonissue with him."
It is more likely that he saw his color and background as obstacles to overcome. An advertising executive who worked with Hertz recalled that "in the early days, O.J. had a real diction problem and was not as articulate as he is now. There were some takes that would come out with a black accent, a lower-class accent, that was not an educated way to speak." Film crews would have to reshoot the ads because of this speech "problem," said the ad executive. Simpson went to speech school and "worked at his intonation. He worked at his pronunciation of certain words," said Mark Morris, another ad man who handled the Hertz account. "You had to slow him down a bit."
Simpson was eager to learn. He wanted to get every detail right and hated to be shown up in any way. Burgdoerfer recalls meeting Simpson for drinks at the Sherry Netherland Hotel in New York in the mid-'70s. Simpson was in casual clothes; Burgdoerfer was dressed for dinner. Simpson excused himself and returned with a blazer, which he rarely shed thereafter.
Hertz put Simpson through grinding days of nonstop meet-and-greets, press conferences, golf rounds, cocktail parties. He was coached to flatter, to whisper in the ears of clients spontaneous compliments about their third-quarter earnings. "He would literally sign autographs so much that he would have to get up and walk away because his hand would just cramp," said Tom Elliott, a former Hertz public-relations man. "It was a very hectic schedule, but he never complained. He was polite through the whole thing. He never said, "This is a pain'." An ad executive recalls Simpson smiling and joking on the set as he hung all day long in a sling that would help him "fly," Superman-like, through airports.
He loved being the focus of attention. If too few people noticed him entering a reception, he would intentionally raise his voice. But he did not forget that he was an outsider. Once, while working a room full of executives at Christmastime, he noticed that the only other black person in the room was putting together toys for some of the guests' children. Simpson looked over at the man and joked, "Why are we the only two people working here?" On his Hertz tours, Simpson always made a point of giving high-fives to the garage crews and fat tips to the skycaps, just as he had given gold charm bracelets to the Buffalo Bills linemen who opened the holes for him during his record-breaking 2,003-yard season.
At times the self-imposed pressure to keep it up weighed on Simpson. "He once told me that when you are labeled a superstar you must be a superstar everyday and in everything you do," said John Fisher, the president of a sporting-goods company whose shoes O.J. endorsed. He felt he could not disappoint. Budd Thalman, the Buffalo Bills' PR man, recalled that when fans went up to him and asked him to attend their son's Little League banquet, he would respond, "Sure, just call Budd tomorrow." Simpson "couldn't say no," said Thalman. "He didn't want to upset people. Then the next morning he'd say, "Budd, you got to get me out of this.' He'd let me be the bad guy."
Simpson was still having too much fun with celebrity to be guilty for long. Beverly Hills real-estate agent Elaine Young remembers Simpson's reaction when she sold him his "dream house" -- 5,752 square feet, tennis court, swimming pool -- in the late '70s. Simpson was so elated that he ran through every room of the house, singing. He decorated the house as a shrine, with his jerseys hanging in the living room, the Heisman Trophy on the mantel.
Simpson also collected women. He had married his old girlfriend from San Francisco, Marguerite Whitley, during his first semester at Southern Cal in 1967. They had a daughter, Arnelle, the next year, and a son, Jason, two years later. Marguerite shied away from the spotlight and told reporters that O.J. was an old-fashioned guy who liked to have three square meals at home. She was being wishful. By 1973, she was privately asking for divorce. In 1975, the family stayed behind in California while O.J. played in Buffalo.
Simpson had a strict double standard on philandering. In an unguarded interview in 1968, Marguerite described her husband as "a beast" who as a high-school student had not allowed other young men to talk to her. He, however, was free to roam. Marguerite later recalled an episode on a cross-country flight with her husband. A flight attendant, infatuated, asked Simpson if the woman sitting beside him was his wife. "Naw," he replied. "She's my sister." Giggling, the attendant fell into his lap. "I have been shoved out of the way, pushed and stepped on by more than one beautiful woman," said Marguerite. By then the on-again, off-again marriage was being held together by PR men (literally: in 1975, Marguerite delayed filing for divorce because she feared the impact on Simpson's commercial appeal).
Simpson was smug about his womanizing. "Groupies would have been a problem in my youth, when I was insecure and needed to prove something," he told People magazine in 1977. "Now that I'm older, let's say I'm more selective. My wife knows I'm under control." Asked by a New York Daily News reporter the same year what he considered sexy in a woman, Simpson answered, "Health and innocence. California types. . . . I'm in love with Farrah Fawcett-Majors' looks."
Nicole Brown, a nubile teenager from Dana Point, Calif., was close enough. Simpson met the 18-year-old homecoming princess in 1977 while she was waitressing at a Rodeo Drive disco, and they started dating immediately. He separated from Marguerite a year later -- about the time he and Nicole began living together. Just as the divorce came through, O.J. and Marguerite's baby daughter, Aaren, drowned in their swimming pool. Simpson blamed Marguerite, and was quoted at the time as saying that he hadn't known his little girl very well.
He later credited Nicole with helping him get through the transition from football to show business. After living together for six years, they were married in 1985 and had their first child eight months later. Blond, well dressed, she looked impressive on his arm as they arrived at a party in Beverly Hills or Brentwood. But not everyone was fooled. A black actress who worked with Simpson on the TV docu-drama "Roots" recalled seeing him around town "so happy-go-lucky with his young white wife, pretty clothes and fancy cars, all I could remember was the black wife I met him with years ago and how sad she looked then. That was a bubble bound to burst."
Simpson's world offered plenty of opportunities to wander. This was the Los Angeles of the mid-1980s and Simpson traveled with the lotus-eaters. According to several former and current pro athletes interviewed by Newsweek, he was seen at decorous orgies where, as one source put it, "nobody stood around and watched." Two sources also witnessed Simpson snorting cocaine at parties. There are conflicting reports about the level of his drug use -- from occasional to regular. Nicole told friends that O.J.'s problem was "severe" and that his moods swung with his dosage, from "jazzed" to down. Simpson's lawyer Robert Shapiro has denied that Simpson took drugs. There is no dispute about his appetite for women, usually white blondes. "I never saw O.J. connect with a sister," said one NBA player who ran with Simpson on the party circuit. "Most womanizers I know go for any woman, but not O.J. -- it was white or nothing."
Nicole was not shy herself, and she enraged O.J. by flirting with other men. Some accounts say she was brazen, almost taunting Simpson, but Nicole's friends say that she was just fighting back in the only way she knew how. The cycle escalated and became openly confrontational. The NBA player recalled a party at a beach house in Malibu: "O.J. was on his usual prowl and Nicole seemed to be cool about it for a while. Then she just snapped and went over to him and yelled "You aren't s--t,' along with some other choice words. The party was pretty low-key so it got everyone's attention. O.J. was really burning up and led her outside, but they left moments later."
Simpson's black friends were wary of Nicole, whom they regarded as a gold digger with "an attitude." "I mean, from a black male's perspective, a woman -- any woman -- publicly yelling at you is just too much to deal with and very insulting," said a pro-basketball player who often saw the two spar with each other at parties. Nicole threatened Simpson's desire for control. "I don't believe in equality in a relationship," Simpson told an interviewer a decade ago. Someone, he said, had to have "the upper hand."
Simpson was losing control of more than his marriage by the mid-1980s. He had given up trying to be Dustin Hoffman. His new model in Hollywood was Clint Eastwood, an actor who had remade his own career by making his own movies. "To see a guy who virtually couldn't get work here become in a few years someone who can get all he can handle but has total control of what he does, now that is inspiring," Simpson said of Eastwood early in 1980. Simpson tried to follow the model. In 1978, he had set up his own company, Orenthal Productions, to sell films to NBC, but after four successful made-for-TV movies, NBC didn't renew the contract, and Simpson left to join ABC, where he had a brief and unsuccessful stint on "Monday Night Football." As a movie actor, Simpson was also beginning to fade. After an action flick called "Firepower" in 1979, it was five years before the next one -- a woofer called "Hambone and Hillie," about a man and his dog. Simpson was still a familiar face on TV, as pitchman and sports commentator, but his purchase on fame was beginning to slip.
It is not clear when the first call to the police came. Good luck and some sloppiness by police, who tend to be deferential to celebrities in Los Angeles, allowed Simpson and his PR men to keep the ugly scenes out of the press. But from reports leaked last June, it's clear that Simpson shattered the windshield of Nicole's car with a baseball bat sometime in 1985. When the police arrived, Simpson blithely waved them away. "It's my car," he reportedly said. "I'll handle this. There's no problem here."
The now infamous 911 call at 3:30 a.m. on New Year's Day 1989 was harder to cover up. Nicole ran screaming from the house in her bra, yelling, "He's going to kill me! He's going to kill me!" Clinging to a policeman, she bitterly complained that she had called the police "eight times," but "you never do anything about him, you talk to him then leave." Simpson appeared outside, yelling, "I got two women and I don't want that woman in my bed anymore!" Then he tried to talk the cops out of arresting him. "You've been out eight times before and now you're going to arrest me for this?" he scoffed. The police pointed to the bruises and cuts on his wife's face and told him to get dressed. Instead, he fled in his blue Bentley.
Simpson eventually admitted to a "mutual wrestling-type altercation" and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of spousal battery, for which he received a wrist-slap fine and a brief stint of community service. He wanted to avoid a trial; the photos of a battered Nicole would not look good in the tabloids.
Life returned to normal, if his life can be called that. Hertz kept him on as a spokesman after Nicole, who had not wanted to press charges, told Hertz executives, "This is a case of the media picking on a celebrity. We've never been more in love." Friends chose to forget. An Orange County battered-women's advocate, Sandy Condello, knew about the incident, but she still asked O.J. if he would appear at a celebrity golf tournament to raise money for the cause. "He seemed genuinely appalled" by wife abuse, said Condello, "and so cordial and so charming." It was a triumph of denial. He even offered to help, though -- significantly, perhaps -- never did.
Simpson continued to struggle with the "twoness" described by W.E.B. Du Bois in "The Souls of Black Folk" nearly a century ago -- the higher he reached for trappings of the white world, the more he distanced himself from his beginnings. Other blacks resented him for it. Simpson often appeared at tony charity events and had visited so many sick kids in the hospital that he began referring to himself as "the Angel of Death." But he did not give much back to African-American causes. He would promise to appear at community centers or youth programs in South-Central Los Angeles, then bow out at the last moment. He spent far more time at the Riviera Country Club, an almost-all-white bastion of glitz (initiation fee: $75,000), where he spent long days playing gin rummy and golf with an assortment of old USC boosters and showbiz execs. "That whole golfing country-club s--t was really tripping," said an NBA player who knows Simpson. "I mean, Barkley and Jordan do it, but when you follow them home, they still got En Vogue pumping on the stereo and ribs in the oven. O.J. really thought he was white."
At the same time, he had to put up with white condescension. Tom Kelly, a longtime Riviera member, recalled to The Washington Post how he would tease Simpson about USC's poor basketball teams. "I told O.J., "If you would just wander down into the ghetto and find a seven-foot-tall black kid who could get the benefit of a USC education! But you don't even know where blacks live anymore!' And O.J. would say, "You sonuvabitch!' "
O.J. would smile when he said that. "On the golf course, when someone makes a racial joke, if you get upset and angry it threatens your position in that world," says Dr. Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "It's a classic story in the history of our country. What's underneath the darkies' smile?"
Simpson was trying to keep smiling. By 1992, he knew that he was never going to make it as an actor. "I don't consider myself an actor. I'm a personality," he told Sports Illustrated. He clung to the fact that, as he put it, "I'm O.J., which means I'm somebody today and the highlight of my career isn't behind me." But his earning power was. Though he still earned a million dollars a year, he had made a series of bad loans and investments (the L.A. riots destroyed his profitable Pioneer Chicken franchise). Hertz was no longer featuring him in ads. Mostly, he was used to play golf with corporate clients.
He was, at that moment, losing his proudest possession, his wife. Fed up with O.J.'s abuse and his womanizing, she left Simpson in March of '92. Simpson was beside himself when she began to date another man, Keith Zlomsowitch, an executive of the Mezzaluna restaurant chain. Simpson began to follow her. According to Zlomsowitch's grand jury testimony, on one occasion, he leaned over the table at a restaurant where Nicole and Zlomsowitch were having dinner and, staring hard, announced, "I'm O. J. Simpson and she's still my wife." He followed the couple home and apparently peered through the window while they engaged in oral sex. "I watched you last night," Simpson told Nicole. "I can't believe you would do that in this house. I watched you."
His jealous ranting showed up on another 911 tape on Oct. 25, 1993. Nicole had called the police after Simpson had kicked in the french doors at the back of the house. On the tape, Simpson's careful diction is gone. He taunts Nicole for calling the "po-lice" and screams profanities at her. "He's going to beat the s--t out of me," Nicole pleads with the operator.
But she never pressed charges. A year earlier Nicole had called on psychologist Susan Forward, author of "Men Who Hate Women & the Women Who Love Them." She complained that O.J. would "show up everywhere." She would look out the window and he would be there in the bushes, sit down at a restaurant and see him staring across the room. Haltingly and tearfully, she curled up on Forward's couch as if she were "reliving" Simpson's blows. Forward advised her to cut off all contact with Simpson. But she couldn't. "It's the Stockholm syndrome," says Forward.
In december of last year, nicole stopped cynthia garvey, the ex-wife of Los Angeles Dodger first baseman Steve Garvey, at a shopping mall. "I admire how you've raised your children," Nicole said. She grabbed Garvey's sleeve and wouldn't let go. Garvey had written a book about being abused, and Nicole clearly wanted to talk. Nicole had a "deer caught in the headlights" look, Garvey says, and started to cry. Then she caught herself and her eyes darted around to see if anyone was watching her. She told Garvey that no one would believe her if she accused O.J. of beating her.
Nicole was trying to put together her own life. She danced at discos and drove a Ferrari with the license plate L84AD8 -- "Late for a date." But her friends say that she was really a homebody who took care of her own children rather than rely on nannies like other Beverly Hills matrons. She was relieved to keep a messier house after O.J., who had been fastidious.
Simpson continued to see other women, and even found a steady girlfriend in Paula Barbieri, a Victoria's Secret model, who, Simpson boasted, "looks like Julia Roberts." Accustomed to being waited on, he told a reporter, "It's the first time I had to make concessions to another schedule, which is weird for me." Barbieri surprised him with her independence. "At times she'll even direct the conversation," he said.
But he never stopped wanting Nicole back. At times over the past year, they briefly reconciled, but in May they broke off again. Nicole apparently meant it this time; she returned a sapphire-and-diamond bracelet, and vowed to stop taking gifts from Simpson.
On the afternoon of June 12, Simpson flirted with a Playboy Playmate of the Month, Traci Adell, whom he had called after seeing her in a centerfold. He told her that he was weary and needed a break. He did not have much to look forward to. The next day he was scheduled to play another round of golf with Hertz clients at the Mission Hills Country Club outside Chicago. In the afternoon he went to see one of his daughters in a dance recital, but he did not speak to Nicole, and he was not invited to their celebratory dinner at Mezzaluna. Instead, he got in his Rolls-Royce and drove to McDonald's. What he did over the next few hours will be revealed by a murder trial.
Simpson, who seemed stunned and depressed in the days after the murder, is feeling better, according to a close friend. He even cracked a joke when he called the friend from prison by telephone.
"Knock, knock," said Simpson.
"Who's there?" asked the friend.
"O.J."
"O.J. who?" asked the friend.
"You're on the jury!" said Simpson with a laugh. It was already an old joke, and a sad one from the man who spent his whole life trying to make people remember his name.