Audition (87 page)

The Goldman family was talking almost exclusively to me. Nicole’s family had become close to Diane Sawyer. We respected each other’s territory. Everybody else was up for grabs, and it was a matter of phone calls, letters, contacts, the usual procedure. The trial made stars of many lawyers who flooded the airwaves, among them Cynthia McFadden, who did a superb job reporting for ABC, and a very smart ex-prosecutor named Star Jones, who would later come into my life on
The View.

I managed to secure interviews with many of the people who became household names and faces during the course of the trial—the most important being Brian “Kato” Kaelin, the flaky blond would-be actor who lived in Simpson’s guesthouse and saw him the night of the murder. I interviewed Simpson’s devoted assistant as well as his ex-wife, who swore that, during their twelve-year marriage, Simpson never raised a hand to her. “O.J. is a big talker,” she said. “He likes to shoot off his mouth but with little action. I’m here. I’m living evidence.” I talked to Simpson’s friend, a chiropractor, who spoke to Simpson the night of the murder and said he sounded fine and was a good guy.

But then I talked to close friends of Nicole who claimed Simpson stalked her after their divorce. “‘I’m so scared of O.J.,’” one friend claimed Nicole told her. “‘I’m so scared of O.J.’”

For months, like the other reporters, I was caught in the whirlwind. The interviews everyone also wanted were with the legal teams in the courtroom—Marcia Clark, the dark-haired (now blond) prosecutor who dressed in short skirts; Chris Darden, the young African American assistant prosecutor; the members of Simpson’s legal defense “Dream Team,” headed by Robert Shapiro and the now-deceased Johnnie Cochran Jr., a brilliant and theatrical African American lawyer. No reporter, and I include myself, went away on vacation.

Finally, on October 3, 1995, after deliberating only four hours, the jury, composed of nine African Americans, one Hispanic, and two Caucasians, reached a verdict. I was in LA and rushed to the hotel suite that we were using as a makeshift studio. I had arranged for Kato Kaelin to be with me, and he almost fell off his chair in astonishment when the jury found Simpson innocent. (Although he has never directly accused Simpson of lying, most of us feel that Kaelin knew a lot more than he has ever expressed.) If Kato was astounded by the verdict, so were millions of others. The verdict divided much of black and white America. In any event O. J. Simpson left the courtroom that day a jubilant, free man.

If Simpson was jubilant, one of O.J.’s leading lawyers, Robert Shapiro, was anything but. I got to him right after the trial and talked to him live for a headline-making interview. Rather than rejoice over the not-guilty verdict for his client, Shapiro was bitter at the way his colleague, Johnnie Cochran, had used Simpson’s race as a defense strategy. “My position was always the same, that race would not and could not be a part of this case,” Shapiro told me. “I was wrong. Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.”

Shapiro was “deeply offended,” he said, by Cochran’s summation to the jury comparing racism to the Holocaust. “To me the Holocaust stands alone as the most horrible human event,” said Shapiro. The race issue had become so divisive among the Dream Team that Shapiro said he would not work again on a case with Cochran. “He believes that everything in America is related to race. I do not.”

An aside: Shapiro had, for the duration of the trial, basked in the fame that came with his being appointed one of Simpson’s lawyers. At sporting events he was often introduced and cheered by the fans. But the night of the Simpson verdict was also the first night of the most holy Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur. After talking with me, Shapiro, who is Jewish, went to his synagogue. He later told me that this was one of the most painful nights of his life. He was booed.

The verdict continued to be a divisive issue between blacks and whites. No one illustrated that racial divide more than Chris Darden, who had been shunned and even threatened by blacks for prosecuting Simpson. When Darden sat down with me for his first interview five months after the trial, he told me he agreed with Shapiro that it was Cochran who had enflamed the race issue. He’d already been marginalized in his old neighborhood for taking on the case. “Some people walk up to me and express pride in what I’ve done and others, shock and outrage,” he told me. The bar had been raised during the trial when Darden objected to Cochran using the
n
word to illustrate the racism of one of the prosecution’s witnesses.

“It is the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language,” Darden had protested. “It has no place in this case or in this courtroom…. It will blind the jury to the truth.” That gave Cochran the opportunity to discredit Darden to his own race. “His remarks are demeaning to African Americans as a group, and so I want to apologize to African Americans across the country,” Cochran said.

I asked Darden what he felt when he heard Cochran’s apology on his behalf. “What he was really saying to African Americans was that I was a sellout. I was a race traitor. I was an Uncle Tom.” Darden was devastated. “People wanted to kill me. People spit at me. Life changed for me drastically.”

When the jury found Simpson innocent, Darden told me he felt like he’d been “struck in the stomach with a baseball bat.” But he wasn’t surprised. He said that his father, a retired welder, had warned him of the outcome at the start of the trial: “‘Black folks will never convict O. J. Simpson.’” Darden said he knew his father was right the moment he saw the jury. “From the first day I didn’t believe we had a snowball’s chance in hell of convicting O. J. Simpson,” he told me. “I sensed it was payback time and that we had no chance.”

A year or so after the trial, I also interviewed Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the case. Her agents were predicting a big career for her, possibly on television. She, like Darden, had written a book that I found pedestrian, with no real insight. After reading it and interviewing her, I felt that she didn’t have the brilliance of mind to have been the prosecutor at so dynamite a trial. Her future career has borne that out.

Simpson may have beaten the murder charges, but he didn’t beat the civil case brought against him by the Goldmans. In 1997 the jury found Simpson guilty of causing Ron’s “wrongful death” and ordered him to pay some $8.5 million in compensatory damages. He hasn’t.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2000. O.J. had come up with a moneymaking scheme. He was launching a Web site that would charge Internet visitors for him to answer their questions. He was looking for publicity for this new venture and wanted to come on
The View.
“What ratings!” I momentarily thought. But when I mentioned on the show that Simpson might possibly be on the program, the viewers and even our production staff protested. What was I thinking? We canceled O.J.

Fast-forward again to the summer of 2006. I was working on this book when I got a call from a representative of the ABC branch that produces special programs. My own
Specials
are under the umbrella of ABC News, but rather than confuse you with the different departments, let me just tell you that the phone call was about another book, a sort of nonfiction piece of fiction, called
If I Did It.
The book was purportedly by O. J. Simpson. Would I be interested in a two-hour interview with him? If so, ABC would produce it. I was told I would shortly receive a chapter or two from the book, which was under a strict embargo. I read what was sent to me. O.J. described everything up to the actual stabbing. He said he had a friend who gave him a knife. It was chilling and filled with details I thought only the killer could know. But it was fiction, remember? And with the title
If I Did It
, I felt there was no way Simpson was going to confess to the crime on television. ABC was not so sure. They wanted me to do the interview because they felt that only I could get Simpson to break down and confess. If I managed to do that, it would be sensational television. There would be huge ratings, and the case would finally reach closure.

I was tempted, but it didn’t take me long to make up my mind. Challenge or no challenge, confession or no confession, I couldn’t have lived with myself if I were to give Simpson airtime to sell his book. I turned down the interview, and ABC decided to drop the proposal.

Fox later scheduled an interview with Simpson to be done by Judith Regan, the book’s publisher. (Rupert Murdoch owns both Fox and HarperCollins, where Regan had her imprint.) A spate of angry editorials followed, decrying the deal. Fox withdrew its offer. Judith Regan was later fired. The saga continued in 2007, when a federal judge awarded the rights to the book to Ron Goldman’s family to do whatever they wanted with. They published it under a new title,
If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer
, and it became an instant best seller.

As I write this chapter, O.J. has been arrested yet again, this time for his involvement in an armed robbery in Las Vegas. I don’t know what will happen to him, but I’m sure this will not be the last time we will hear from O. J. Simpson. As far as I’m concerned, however, it’s the end of any interest I have in him or will have in the future—unless he wants to sit down and really confess to murdering Nicole and Ron. In which case I am ready.

Over Again, Never Again

E
VERYONE SHOULD HAVE
a chance to be an interviewer. You get the opportunity to ask all the questions you would never have the nerve to ask in real life. It’s a chance to get to know the most interesting, accomplished, and famous people in the world. I, of course, have had that blessed opportunity, although, believe me, not all of my interviews have been a success. There are a small number of people I have had great trouble interviewing over the years. There are others whom I have talked to again and again and never felt I could run out of questions, for they always had something new to say. I also think of the people I wish I’d interviewed, but either couldn’t or didn’t.

First the difficult ones. This doesn’t mean I don’t like or admire them, it just means that it’s difficult to sit down with them in front of a camera. When conducting an extensive interview, it is necessary to talk on a personal level, at least to some degree. Otherwise you are just plugging a movie or TV show. That’s fine for a brief conversation but not if you are trying to do something special. My problem in these interviews is that I wanted the person to reveal him- or herself, if only a little bit, and my subject wanted to reveal little or nothing. So here are three of my bigger frustrations.

Warren Beatty. Although he has much to say and is informed, with very strong opinions, he is so obsessed with answering questions exactly the way he wants or thinks they should be answered, that he is tongue-tied. And while I am talking about his mouth, it is like pulling teeth to get him to talk.

The first time I interviewed Warren was my ghastly experience way back on the
Today
show. Later, when I knew him better, he explained that he had just flown to New York from Los Angeles and had never done a television interview before. He said he must have fallen asleep during the interview, which was live. Well, thanks a lot. What I remember and have already written about is that I stopped asking him questions and went to a commercial. I have noted many times that it was the worst interview I ever did. Not long after, Warren more or less swore off doing any television, not just because of our interview but because he didn’t think his appearances particularly helped sell his movies. I remember when he made the film
Reds
, about an American communist buried in the Kremlin, I was told that he considered for a moment or two sitting down with me but then decided not to. Then in 1990 he directed and starred in the film
Dick Tracy
, about the popular cartoon detective. There was a great deal of hoopla about the film. It had been fifteen years since Warren had done a TV interview, but by this time we had been at several dinner parties and he was warm and forthcoming, so I asked if he would finally like to sit down with me again. “Well,” he said very slowly, then drew out the one word “y-e-s.” Bill Geddie, who would produce the interview for a
Special
, was thrilled. “Not so fast,” I warned him. And our troubles began.

It took weeks before we could get a date out of Warren, more weeks until he could decide where he wanted to meet, and days and days before he decided if and where he would like to place the police car that supposedly belonged to the fictional Dick Tracy. By the time we sat down to do the interview I hated the damn police car. I hated the interview even more. Warren hemmed and hawed before answering any question. At that time, he had not yet married the divine Annette Bening and settled down to being a devoted husband and father. He was still known as a great ladies’ man and, in particular, a man who often had, shall we say, “relationships” with his leading ladies. In this case Warren’s leading lady was none other than Madonna. How could anyone do an interview with him without dealing with this? So I tried.

M
E:
You have a history of falling in love with your leading ladies. Is it part of the excitement and the creativity of working, or do you work with someone to whom you are already attracted?

I thought my question was broad enough so that Warren could answer it in any number of ways. Here is what he said:

W
ARREN:
Well, as you know, I’m not going to answer that kind of question. I think as a journalist, you should ask the question, and as a human being, I should decide what I talk about and what I don’t, because I don’t want to say the wrong thing.

M
E:
What could you do to yourself that’s the wrong thing?

W
ARREN:
Well, I don’t know. I just think you have to be prudent.

M
E:
What could you do to yourself that would be so terrible if you opened up a little bit?