“A black ex-athlete growing older ungracefully, tenuously
living a white life on the limited visa of his contract as a television
pitchman; his beautiful battered ex-wife trying at age thirty-five to start
over after half a lifetime on someone else’s tab; a waiter and unsuccessful
male model uncertain whether to become a restaurateur or a paramedic,
collecting business cards from the men on whose tables he waited in case one
might decide to invest in his dream restaurant: these were characters of
considerable and ambiguous particularity. With the events of June 12, however,
when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were found slashed and
stabbed to death, and with the arrest of Orenthal James Simpson for killing
them, all three lost whatever identity they had in the frantic search to find
some larger meaning that would explain the crime. The story demanded a moral:
youth wasted, promise denied, spousal abuse, domestic violence, the race card.
Show me a hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald once jotted in his notebook, and I will
write you a tragedy.”— John Gregory Dunne, “The Simpsons,” in Regards:The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (2005)
In the summer of 1994, while up at the Stratford
Festival in Canada, I chatted with a fellow playgoer during a performance of
Othello. I couldn’t help noticing some similarities between the title character
and O.J. Simpson, I told him. “Yes,” he answered. “The trouble is, everybody
else is noticing it, too. It’s become a cliché.”
I understood perfectly what he meant. Still, with so
many people following the events, the number of cultural comparisons already
being drawn to what was shaping up as the Crime of the Nineties was already
staggering.
In a prior post, I drew parallels to the 17th century Italian murder case
immortalized in Robert Browning’s narrative poem The Ring and the Book and the Simpson case. But today, on the 20th
anniversary of the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, other aspects of
this cause celebre remain to be explored.
Older brother Dominick was the one who wrote more,
in essays and fiction (Another City, Not My Own), about the
Brentwood tragedy, largely fueled by his never-ending rage as a father whose
own daughter had been murdered.
But John Gregory Dunne also wrote incisively about this, whether including elements of it in
his final novel, Nothing Lost, or in the piece quoted above, which appeared
originally in The New York Review of
Books three months after the killings and the infamous Bronco chase watched
by 95 million Americans at one point or another.
Dunne had a particular vantage point on the
principals in the case: he lived in Brentwood, just like the defendant, Los
Angeles DA Gil Garcetti, Mayor Richard Riordan, and Hollywood superagent
Michael Ovitz. Thus, he knew about the aspirations and environment of the
community examined with so little insight by the rest of the media.
Before the case had even come to trial, Dunne was
already jaundiced about certain aspects, notably the racial angle that Simpson’s
defense team would exploit. (“So assiduously had he [Simpson] pursued racial
neutrality that he had become estranged from prominent elements of Los Angeles’
black leadership.”)
And, as the “Bonus Quote
of the Day” indicates, he was especially attuned to the quiet desperation, the
grasp for the last chance, that animated O.J., Nicole and Ron alike.
Twenty years later, Dunne’s essay still stands up
well. He noticed, even then, how some commentators were striving “to find some
larger meaning that would explain the crime.”
Last month, in the same
magazine where John Gregory Dunne’s brother vented his moral outrage about what
was happening before his eyes, Lili Anolik sought for a similar overarching
theme. Terming the case “TV’s first reality show,” Anolik accused Simpson, “regardless
of whether the jury got it right or the jury got it wrong,” of murdering
popular culture.
This is a way too cute formulation. Above all else
is this: two people were murdered in the most brutal fashion that night. O.J.’s
defense team, unable to find a plausible explanation for who might have
murdered them besides the defendant, simply threw fairy dust in the eyes of the
jury.
Most outrageously, after the not guilty verdict, Simpson announced that
he would immediately start searching for her killer—as if the answer couldn’t
be found in his home mirror. In Doonesbury,
Garry Trudeau properly mocked this pretense,
devoting an entire week’s worth of the strip to “O.J. Simpson, Detective.”
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